Weeknotes: September 9-13, 2024
Monday, September 9
I'm about to go to bed and make an early night of it. As I’m switching off the lights in my studio I realize I haven't touched an instrument all day and it bothers me. I pick up my guitar and sit casually atop my desk, thinking I'll just strum through a quick song as a matter of principle. An hour later I'm still up and have the bones of a new song in place. Whenever this happens, I think what might have happened had I just skipped the exercise and not played. When a song is new, it's always your favorite one.
I take it as far as I can, then stay up past midnight reading Leif Enger's marvelous I Cheerfully Refuse. It seemed like it was going to be a special book when I read the flap and I was right.
Weeknotes: August 26-30, 2024
Monday, August 26
"Do you know your way around here?"
"It's my first day!"
I'm comforted to see another older student struggling to find the right building on the directory map. I've just finished my first class and offer to walk her over to where I think it is. Her name is Norma and she's probably a few years older than me, using the GI Bill to finish up a degree of some sort.
I steer her to the incorrect building and she ends up walking back to her car to drive to the other side of campus. I was trying to be helpful, but I hope I didn't make her late.
Weeknotes: April 1-5, 2024
April Fool's Day. One of those weird holidays that has never really registered with me. I love to laugh, but pranks aren’t really my brand. Instead, I'm thinking about my uncle who died on this day, four years ago. It was amid the first big wave of lockdowns and hospitals were completely shut off to all non-essentials. He'd been complaining of respiratory problems for several weeks and was admitted to his local hospital in Mississippi in late March. He never tested positive for COVID-19, but ultimately died of what the doctor claimed was double pneumonia. It was a heartbreaking, miserable mess, all dealt with from afar, like so many other deaths in 2020. I was saddest for my dad who couldn't be with his only sibling when he passed and for my cousin, locked down far away in Honolulu mourning his father. Like my dad, Uncle Dick was a woodworker. Years before when I was working at the violin shop, he gave me a brass Sweetheart block plane, a tool I used frequently and continue to treasure. The Christmas before he died, he gave my brother and me each a pair of knives he'd crafted. Thanking him over the phone that afternoon was the last time I spoke with him. After getting the dreaded call from my dad on the afternoon of April 1, I went out to the garage and spent some time sharpening all the tools Dick had given me. I couldn't even gather with my family the day he died.