Today would have been the day that I flew to Orlando, for IRA. My thanks to those authors who are filling in for me there.
And this coming Wednesday I would have been speaking to the annual meeting of the New England Child Psychiatrists/Psychoanalysts, but I have had to cancel that appearance as well.
Instead, I am spending most of each day by Martin's hospital bed and oddly being grateful for that (mostly) uninterrupted time to sit and reminisce about some of the extraordinary adventures we have had together. I think it was at an IRA convention many years ago in Anaheim, where we found ourselves in a hotel elevator with a group of the New Orleans Saints football team...it was, we realized, like standing in a redwood forest.
It was 1985 whe we spent time in Africa, 1992 when we spent time in Antarctica, 1995 when we were in rural Japan....and when, just this week, they looked at a chest x-ray and commented on some healed rib fractures...we remembered the rafting trip down the Colorado River---who knows what year!---when he fell on some rocks, broke some ribs, and then had to continue for the remaining 3 days (of 9) thudding down the river... Ouch.
Yesterday I received these photos from rural China
These are college students; and that's their teacher, Daniel Peterson.
There is currently an Opera convention in town, and when I left the hospital late yesterday afternoon I went and had dinner with Paula Winans from the Lyric Opera of Knsas City and Jamie Andrews from Minnesota Opera Co. The opera "The GIver", by composer Susan Kander, will open in Kansas City in January, St. Paul in April.
from her website www.SusanKander.net :
Minnesota Opera and Lyric Opera of Kansas City have commissioned me to write libretto and score for a 75 minute opera adaptation of this blockbuster children's/young adult book. There is already terrific excitement in both cities for the premiers in 2012, and interest from other opera companies for further productions. The Giver, Ms. Lowry's first Newbury Medal novel, is read by nearly every middle schooler in the country and tells the story of a utopian community that turns out not to be so utopian. Ask any kid 26 or younger about The Giver and you'll get a strong response. The opera will have a chamber orchestra of 10 players and feature video projections. Both companies hope to have the funding to do workshops prior to its premier, which would be really wonderful and very unusual in the opera world.
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First, there were the bells. Three of them, cast from warped shovels, rakes, and hoes, cracked cauldrons, dulled ploughshares, one rusted stove, and, melted into each, a single golden coin. They were rough and black except along their silvery lips, where my mother's mallets had struck a million strokes. She was small enough to dance beneath them in the belfry. When she swung, her feet leapt from the polished wooden planks, so that when the mallet met the bell, it rang from the bell's crown to the tips of my mother's pointed toes….
My mother had a filthy nest of hair, knots of iron muscle in her arms, and, for me alone, a smile as warm as August's sun. by the time of my birth she had been living for some years in a small alpine hut adjacent to the church. No, that is inaccurate. My mother lived in the belfry. She came to the hut only when the belfry, exposed to the mountains' bitter weather, became too cold, or too full of snow, or when she had hunger of the cheese rinds and cold gruel the villagers left for her, or when the sumer lightning storms swept down the valley and struck our belfry--they often did, the bells ringing as if tolled by ghosts. Though she was filthy, and never washed herself her entire life, every week she scrubbed me from head to toe in the frigid water of the stream. She fed me from a wooden spoon until I was full to bursting. I did not then know of how other children played and laughed, how they pretended to be kings and soldiers, how they danced and sang song together. I wanted nothing more for my life. I wanted only to sit there, my four-year-old legs dangling over the edge of the belfry. To look at the mountains. to listen to the beauty of the bells.
--- THE BELLS, a novel by Richard Harvell.
Cheers!
Posted by: ojimenez | May 08, 2011 at 08:56 AM