Red-Tailed Hawk

Yesterday morning, as I sat reading the morning news on my computer, then in the Sunday newspaper, I was overcome with anxiety about the problems in the world, the corona virus, the politics of Trump, global warming, to name a few.  News does that to me.  It is designed to raise our anxiety and make us read it.  Good news doesn’t make a good story, they say.  When I glanced out the window and spotted a red-tailed hawk just floating by in the sky.  Instantly, my brain shifted to a new place, a place of wonder and joy.  The world out there is big and beautiful beyond imagining.  It put my concerns in perspective.  I am thankful for such reminders.

47,094 Words

It was the longest play I’ll ever attend!  47,094 words, 218 pages, 6 hours, a marathon!  Before this, the longest performance I’ve ever attended was the opera “Aida” in Rome in 1959.  It lasted more than 4 hours.  Last week, Bob and I went to see “Gatz” at the Berkeley Repertory Theater.  The script of this play was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, “The Great Gatsby” read word for word.   I was apprehensive about the play’s length, not sure my body or attention span would survive intact.  When the 2 hour dinner break is added in, the elapsed time was 8 hours.  We had great seats defined by lots of leg room for Bob and no one blocking our view of the stage.  In preparation for the play, we watched the movie “The Great Gatsby” starring Leonardo DiCaprio to learn the plot.  The movie was 2 hours 23 minutes long.  I guess the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand (well maybe fewer) words is true.  The movie was true to the book except for the ending, which the movie left out.  The play was a stunning performance especially for the lead who did essentially a 6 hour monologue.  We think he had the whole thing memorized, that he play-acted reading the book. For me, the first act was very slow and much too long at 2 hours.  I was more than a little concerned about the remaining 4 hours to go.  I was already stiff and sore from sitting so long.  But it picked up and the last 3 Acts went by quickly.  As the play began, the main character Nick Carruthers, a bored office worker, fumbles around an office at the beginning of his day.  In frustration, when his computer wouldn’t turn on, he picked up a book from inside a Roladex file and began reading it outloud.  It was 30 minutes before any other character said anything.  Finally then, other characters slowly began to take on roles out of the book and spoke lines from the book.  They were true to the book, including in the ”he saids” and “she saids.”  I can’t remember anyone ever reading to me, so it took a while for me to settle into just listening.  By the 3rd Act, I was totally enjoying hearing the sound and meaning of the words which were often very beautiful.  I came away with much sympathy for Gatsby, the self-made millionaire so obsessed with his lost love Daisy and no sympathy for the rich elites who chewed up people and spit them out.  I’d say, even though he made his money selling liquor in Prohibition, he was the one with the strongest moral character in the book.  I can’t say I really enjoyed this play.  It was way too long.  But it was an experience I won’t quickly forget.  I couldn’t help think our times now seem to parallel the roaring 1920’s.  Young self-made millionaires, maybe not quite as extreme as Gatsby, are all around us here in N. California.  I don’t know if they have extravagant parties, but I suppose they do.  It is very interesting to me that Arne left me a book, “Uncanny Valley”,  about the “amoral late-capitalist tech landscape we are fatally enmeshed in (book jacket notes).”   Silicon Valley to Wall Street, 1920’s to 2020’s.  After all, maybe what sets Gatsby apart is his single minded passion to make money, then again maybe that’s what it takes to make millions, in any time.

Voting

Each day I pick up my Absentee Ballot and look at the list of candidates for Democratic Presidential Primary hoping a name will jump out at me.  There are 20 candidates listed.  Who’s heard of Rocky de la Fuente III or Mosie Boyd?  All I care about is that the candidate beat Donald Trump.  The problem is I can’t figure out who that is.  Joe Biden has slumped and seems too old and not up to the task.  Bernic Sanders has support but I don’t think a self-proclaimed socialist can win.  Even though I like Elizabeth Warren, I think her views are too progressive to win.  Plus I don’t think a female candidate can win.  Pete Buttigieg is too young, too inexperienced, plus I don’t think African-American voters would vote for a gay candidate.  That leaves Michael Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar.  Amy seems a mean girl but that could be good for fighting Trump.  I like her centrist views and think that she could win in the 4 or 5 Midwestern swing states that determine the election.  But then again, could a female win?  I have reservations about Michael Bloomberg.  I don’t like that he is a billionaire that is buying his place.  I don’t like his ads with Obama, implying that Obama supports him.  Could he beat Trump?  I guess I’ll watch tomorrow’s debates and hope someone jumps out and seems tough enough.  I don’t know why I’m worrying so much.  A vote in the California primary doesn’t count for much but then I was raised to believe and still believe, that it is my civic duty to vote carefully and conscientiously.  I have done so in every election.  It’s just so confusing and so very important this time around.

Kindness to Susie

For the last couple of weeks, I have been experiencing “burn out” at the Garden.  I’m there nearly every day and have begun to recognize the telltale signs of negativity in my outlook and fatigue in my body.  I’ve vowed to not accept any more tasks and have started to say “no” when I’m asked if I can do this or that at the Garden or at Church.  It’s not enough though, my fatigue is deep and my darkness very unpleasant.  Today sitting at the Garden in the sunshine, waiting to meet a friend for lunch, a man approached me. He asked if he could ask something most unusual.  I was wearing my docent badge and he said his companion, an older thin white haired woman with a white blouse and gray corduroy slacks, was a docent emeritus from the Garden.  She might have been five years older than me.  He said Susie “can’t remember a single thing and lives totally in the present.”  He had forgotten their lunch and needed someone to sit with her while he walked back to the parking lot to get it.  So I volunteered and moved over to her bench to be next to her.  She was pleasant, quiet and seemed to be enjoying herself.  I spoke some pleasantries and she nodded.   At one point, she started chirping like the nearby birds in the trees.  When he returned, he was so kind and so gentle with her, it took my breath away.  And with a wave to me, off they walked into the Garden to have lunch.  What a gift of perspective they gave me.  I might forget a thing or two once in a while, but I don’t have dementia.  For that and for my good health, I am most grateful.  Gratitude for all I have and for the kindness with which he treated her filled my heart.  Kindness makes the world such a better place.  It colors the world in brightness and goodness.

Nature Images

I went to the Garden this morning to work in the Propagation Section as I usually do on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.  As of mid-December I became the head of the Salvia/Shade Perennial Section where I’ve been volunteering for the past 4 1/2 years.  I’m mostly finding the responsibility a burden. But today as I was showing a new volunteer what we do,  I found myself totally delighted with some images she gave to me.  When we were inspecting the plants for pests, Irina was brushing off tiny sucking insects from the struggling Salvia madrensis and I was hunting for slugs because I’d seen  the telltale slime path.  Irina told me about a method she had read about in an Organic Gardening magazine.  She told me to find a slug and drown it in some water.  The slug will then release slug stress hormones which will infuse into the water.  Then spray that water around the infested plants.  Supposedly slugs will be repelled.  The image of stressed slugs releasing stress hormones tickled my fancy no end.  Then she told me about a hummingbird nest she spotted off her balcony.  It had two eggs in it.   The eggs have now hatched and the little baby brown bean-sized hummingbirds occupy it.  She is watching them grow.  Irina’s from Italy and is enchanted with hummingbirds, but then so am I.  As we walked in the Garden to find a particular plant to propagate, I showed her some of my favorite places:  the Japanese pool with newts; the picnic table in the bamboo forest and the wide flat path in the out-of-the-way Mexico section.  I loved the images she gave me and hope she will choose to work with me in our section, so we can share more beautiful images from Nature.

Morning Light

The City looks bigger this morning bathed in the early Spring morning light.  The downtown skyline windows shine golden and the strings of buildings on the hills are clearly defined as they loop around and go over the steep hills of San Francisco.  The Golden Gate Bridge glows bright orangey-red in the angled light.  Even the Bay Bridge is beautiful, glowing silver and white.  It’s a spectacular gift for this early riser.  Just yesterday I noticed the pink blossoms of the plum trees lining many of the Berkeley streets, long ago gifts from Japan.  The first daffodil is blooming in our backyard, with many others not far behind.  With the 70 degree weather predicted for today and tomorrow and no rain in sight, we can look forward to many lovely days.  Spring always comes early in Berkeley.

Blomstedt, Beethoven and Brahms

Last night Bob and I went into San Francisco to hear Herbert Blomstedt conduct Beethoven’s 2nd Symphony and Brahms’ 4th at the San Francisco Symphony.   At 92, he is an expressive and dynamic conductor, beloved by the audience and the orchestra.  The enthusiastic audience broke into applause after each movement of both Symphonies even though Blomstedt tried to damp the inappropriately placed adoration.  He conducted without a scores which impressed the heck out of me.   Does he have no memory retrieval problems?  I think he inspired and led the orchestra to new heights of dynamic excellence.  I always wonder how it must feel to be a part of something that gives so much pleasure to so many people?  Blomstedt arranged the orchestra in a different configuration, with the basses,  cellos and first violins on the left side (facing the stage) and 2nd violins, violas and tympani on the right side.  I could hear the bass line much better this way, probably because we sat on the left side of the hall.  Also the lecturer had called our attention to the bass line in the Beethoven.  He told us the 2nd is a big break-through Symphony different from all that came before it.   Critics at the time it was premiered said the 3rd movement (the Scherzo) was like “a writhing dragon refusing to die.”  I think I heard him say there were 34 variations of the bass theme in that movement.  I stopped counting at 15.  That same critic said that “the dragon died in the 4th movement.”  I liked the Symphony’s familiar music and found it basically optimistic.  The best, though, was the Brahms, written in 1884-1885 nearly 75 years after Beethoven’s 2nd.  It called for a bigger orchestra complete with brass.  The beginning struck me as wistful, but soon the lush music surrounded and engulfed me moving as it did from intense blasts to sweet and lyrical parts.  The lecturer said Brahms was trying to portray all kinds of emotions and then unify them into a complete whole.  The 2nd movement began with an amazing horn solo, doubled by the flute, that brought chills to my body it was so beautiful.  In the 3rd movement, as the music grew loud and intense, Blomstedt was very animated.  At the end of the Symphony the grateful audience stood and loudly applauded and cheered the performance.  Blomstedt went into the orchestra to shake the hands of the various players that had solos.  As he walked off the stage, I wondered, as I have for years, will this be the last time?

This performance was for me a completion of a circle of Blomstedt and Beethoven.  Arne bought the tickets and intended to go with me, but he bowed out sick at the last minute.  Back in 1985, in what I remember as Blomstedt’s first performance as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, I bought expensive tickets for our three sons and me to see him conduct Beethoven’s 1st and 9th Symphonies.  We sat in the very last row of the top right

balcony.  The orchestra appeared as tiny figures, but the sound was fabulous.  All of us will always remember that special evening and maybe that’s why I’ve had a special place in my heart all these years for Herbert Blomstedt.  I look forward to hearing this inspiring conductor lead the San Francisco Symphony next year and who knows maybe it will be another of Beethoven’s Symphonies.

Wonderful Weekend in Sheep Ranch

Bob and I spent a wonderful weekend in Sheep Ranch.  Our friends, Nancy and Larry, have a house, really a property, up there in the tiny Sierra foothills’ town.  Saturday was a warm and beautiful day.  The guys worked, splitting wood with a machine especially made to split firewood.  It exerts megaton pressure holding the piece of log in place putting it under great pressure then it splits it with a blade that just pushes down through the wood.  I think this is how it works.  Nancy and I went for a walk with a friend then sat and talked for hours.  It is good to have time, with no pressure, to just catch up with what we’ve been experiencing and thinking.  We must be getting old, because we get great pleasure, just reminiscing over our multitudes of memories from nearly 40 years of friendship.  In the afternoon we went on an expedition into nearby Murphys to visit a woman whom I found on the Internet, who has wool roving for sale.  She has exotic mixes of wool from many different kinds of sheep that she has hand dyed using natural dyes.  Her prices were very high ($10/ounce for everything).  I felt obligated to buy some  since I’d sought her out and she’d gone to all the trouble of getting out all her many bins of wool for me to look through.  It was very hard to choose and of course, I didn’t buy one 4 ounce package that I just can’t get out of my mind.  In the evenings, we saw how the split wood is used as Larry made wonderful roaring fires for us to enjoy.  There are sheep back in Sheep Ranch and the flock is housed right next to Larry and Nancy’s place.  Most of the ewes had given birth and the baby lambs were especially wonderful to watch.  It reminded us both of times when we had our grandchildren hold baby lambs.  We found the photos and showed them to each other.  I don’t know which I found cuter, the grandkids’ expressions or the baby lambs.  Sunday was much cooler and rainy but we all managed to work together moving a big pile of mostly split wood from a neighbor’s yard to Nancy and Larry’s.

It is hard work cutting, splitting and moving wood to store up for fires.  It made me appreciate how easy it is here at home to heat our house.  The weekend was a jewel of a time, spent with dear friends in their beautiful home.