First Monday with Characters

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Edited by Morris Dean

Siegfried at home at home
    About time we included Siegfried in our updates!

Tom Lowe on the mend

Spending the Winter battling two doses of flu and trying to recover from an injured toe has given me a perspective on Bella Abzug’s “Old age is not for sissies!” And the innocence of Pete Townsend’s, fifty years ago, “Hope I die before I get old....” Well Pete, we both got there and we just have to deal with it.
    Judging by Townsend’s memoir, Who I Am, published last year, he hasn’t enjoyed the journey as much as Keith Richards’s Life suggests Keith has. Yet we can all say, as Stephen Sondheim wrote in Company, “I’m Still Here.” And, for now, “Spring has sprung, Winters went…It was not done by accident.”

Jack Cover in good humor
    Jack experienced some more atrial fibrillation in March, but I'm relieved to be able to report that his heart, after being "up and down, converted back to proper pulse rate on March 23." However, he's still feeling great fatigue.
    Nevertheless, the humor keeps coming forth. For a long time I've enjoyed the religion jokes that Jack has regularly dispersed to his friends. Here's a snippet from our recent correspondence:

Read and enjoy. If anyone is offended at these jokes, please accept this apology. [For example: "Dear Pastor, My mother is very religious. She goes to play bingo at church every week even if she has a cold. Yours truly, Annette, age 9, Albany."]
    I believe the jokes come uniformly from believers; in my experience, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and other believers who are secure in their faith have no problem poking gentle fun at themselves.

James T. Carney out of the Grand Canyon

Tremendous trip with perfect weather—no snow or rain. Jack just didn't know how to manage the weather.
    Sorry I haven't written for a while but I had a three-day arbitration case when I got back and this week I had two and half days of babysitting and one day of plumbing repairs, so with the work that had piled up in my absence I have been extremely busy. I am almost caught up at this point and should have an easier week next week and may be able to start writing up the adventure.

Jon Swift on halting population growth and adding to the world's food supply
     Jon is one of the older characters on Moristotle & Co., although he hasn't been mentioned since I reported on him in July 2010, after my wife and I ran into him at the San Francisco International Airport. He was en route to New York to take up a staff assignment at the United Nations.

The task force I told you about in San Francisco has started to draft an accord for the General Assembly to address human overpopulation. While I of course can't speak officially for the U.N. or quote any of our working papers, I can tell you in my own words that the accord will go a long way toward halting the problems that anyone can see who looks around at the big cities and all of the land covered over with macadam and concrete and realizes how overpopulated the planet is with human beings.
    Previous planners had wearied themselves for many years in offering vain, visionary proposals for dealing with overpopulation and ultimately despaired of success. But we have fallen upon a proposal that is wholly new, solid, real, cheap, easy, and effective.
    A key concept arose early on: Focus on transforming superfluous humans from being a burden on the planet to being beneficial to the public. The members of the task force realized that whoever could find a fair, cheap, and easy method of making excess humans sound and useful members of society would deserve to have their statue set up for preservers of the health of the planet.
    Much approving feedback so far indicates that our proposals will not be liable to the least objection. I’ll take space only for a few highlights from my specialty area, the human meat program to supplement the world's food supply:

• The major provision is a lottery system to be applied globally by which countries identify individual citizens to fulfill each country's quota of volunteers to be processed for meat.
• Simple rules for regulating the lottery ensure an equitable participation of all citizens rich or poor; everyone will have at least one ticket—or one chance to win the lottery—with multiple tickets apportioned in accordance with a citizen's drag on the planet. That is, individuals who consume more of things like gasoline and other fuels, exotic plumage, hides, and furs, or spend disproportionately more time in consumption than in production will be accorded proportionally more chances to win the lottery.
• In recognition of some winners’ heroic desire to die incandescently, any winner has the option of being fed live to wild predators such as lions, tigers, bears, wolves, or sharks.

    The world-renowned chefs we checked with confirmed that a healthy human body is nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and they have no doubt that it will serve equally well in a fricassee or a ragout. A roast pig is no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat human, which roasted whole will make a considerable impression at a wedding feast or public entertainment.

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Susan C. Price at the easle

    After being interviewed by her brother on February 13, Susan had her turn to ask the questions of him on March 20. Thanks to them both for taking turns as interviewer and interviewee. [I'll be happy to entertain proposals for interviews. Let me know by comment if you have an idea, and we can get in touch by email to discuss it.]

Jonathan Price in commenting on his recent interview

I am writing or trying to write or in the process of procrastinating on my memoir of the two Fulbrights I had at the opposite ends of my academic career, one to Italy, one to Portugal. The current working title is "From La Dolce Vita to a Metro Named Mouse," and the title is almost longer than the 50+ singlespaced pages I've been able to come up with in the last two years. Writing a memoir is writing; writing anything is writing.
    I have been taking piano lessons for two years or so from a teacher, whose home is about 5 miles away in Folsom (the prison town, but also the home of Intel and many other intriguing things), where she keeps six pianos, one a baby grand, and has been teaching piano for many years, and often also does so on shipboard cruises. At present my effort is solitary for a variety of reasons: (a) right now it's just for me (b) there are laws about disturbing the peace (c) the human ear and psyche react unfavorably to unharmonious sounds (d) I can't keep time very well, and don't want to imagine Mozart, Bach, Bartok rolling over in their graves...I also try to play "The Rose" and "Edelweiss" and "Puff the Magic Dragon." It's kind of hard to write about piano music only 5 days after Bach's birthday without mentioning Bach himself, who fathered twenty children, was never particularly well compensated or celebrated during his own life, and some of whose compositions were found being used as building materials after his death.

motomynd out of character

Not much "character" this past month. Have been writing about the previous month's California trip instead of doing another trip, which is a bummer, man. On only the third try did I finally get a set of handlebars I like on the retro-ride motorcycle I am transforming from a laid-back cruiser to an 80/20 tour bike.
    For the third month in a row we had a funeral in our circle of family and very close friends. Jeff had a blood disease so rare that his was one of three known cases in the world when he was first diagnosed. It was projected to kill him by age six, even with monthly trips to Duke Children's Hospital for complete filtering of his blood. Despite projections of life as an invalid and early death, he was an avid skateboarder as a child and a BMX bicyclist and MX motorcyclist as he survived into his teens. He went on to run his own business, ride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle from Virginia to the Indy 500 several times, and live life pretty much wide open: I photographed two of his weddings and am not sure exactly how many more times he married, and there were some wild times in the Florida Keys that all of us were lucky to survive. In March the disease finally won, or he wore himself out trying to live as much as possible before it killed him: he died at age 50. Sorry if this is a downer, and not about me, but I thought one of the greatest characters in my life, especially one who beat the odds for 44 years, deserved a mention.

Allen Crowder battling
William Baptiste for KoJ
title on January 19

Allen Crowder
getting in shape for his next fight

My March 16 fight to defend the King of Jacksonville title had to be cancelled because I caught the flu then the stomach bug that was going around. But I will be fighting in the Battle in the South on May 31. My cardio training is going well and I am really getting in shape. Not sure when I'll be defending the KoJ title—maybe in July but not 100 percent sure.

The Neumanns at the dock

The Pineapple Girl and Guy haven't done much boating in the past month, other than a trip to the fuel dock for 150 gallons of diesel. We have, however, demo'ed [demolished] our old galley (kitchen) countertop and removed the old sink, stove, and microwave in preparation for our galley makeover! Hopefully we will have photos of the finished product next month (meaning hopefully we will be FINISHED next month, ahem). Plus we should have some cruising stories as we have two trips planned in April.

Geoffrey Dean on some whims of spring in Bulgaria

In Bulgaria, only when you have seen a stork can you say that spring has truly arrived, and only then can you "safely" remove your martenitsa, a kind of good-luck charm that people exchange on March 1st. This year my own stork sighting was on March 26 in the town of Rila, where a stork couple had returned to their annual nesting spot atop a local textile factory building. They appeared to have been mating just before I took this photo.
    "Whims of Spring" was the working title of my March 30 cello recital for the Sofia Chamber Stage festival. It included the local premiere of Boris Kosak's suite called "Intimate Moments." We chose the G-rated version, leaving out the movement titled "Contrapunctus 69."

Chuck Smythe
at the Boulder Bach Festival

I’ve been largely absent from Moristotle & Co. for a few weeks because of Boulder's recent Bach Festival. [To find out how it went, see yesterday's "Sunday Review."]

Celesta or celeste

André Duvall
at the keyboards

During the week of March 18, UNC-Greensboro hosted the bi-annual CBDNA (College Band Director's National Association) National Conference. A handful of some of the finest college bands in the country were selected from among over 40 applicants to perform at the convention. As hosts, our own Wind Ensemble performed one of the featured concerts, and commissioned four new works for the event, each by a different composer, which we premiered on Friday, March 22. All four of these works were recorded over the course of many long hours of recording sessions in the past weeks. The CD will be released in the fall. One of these works, "The Frozen Cathedral," by John Mackey, was released on iTunes the day after the premiere. We were excited to learn that it received the highest number of downloads in the Classical category of iTunes over last weekend! I'm playing piano and celeste (the celeste is featured prominently in this work, which sounds similar to bells and vibraphone; piano occurs infrequently).
     I passed my written comprehensive exams! Last week I also had my recital jury hearing, in which the faculty approves your recital roughly a month out from the public performance. This was the last jury for a music degree program that I will ever have to play, and I am glad to have this high-pressure milestone past me. Next hurdle: the oral exam.

William Silveira
looking months ahead

Southern France in early October; maybe some time at the beach house in Cayucos on different occasions over the summer. [Maybe he'll write about some of these times? I've read several accounts of previous trips the Silveiras have taken and well know how informative they can be.]

The Rogers almost en español

We have been living full time in Costa Rica for six months. I thought by now I would have finished a course in basic Spanish and be carrying on conversations with the locals. Despite my/our good intentions, things do not always work out as we had planned.
    Perched in my easy chair, back in the States, it seemed very simple. After all, once we unpacked we would have all kinds of time. I mean we are retired...time is no longer a problem.
    It is easy to look at things from a life you have put together over 50+ years and think things will fall into place as you envision them. But once that life is gone and you start over from scratch, you no longer have that luxury. We now needed a drivers license, health insurance, medicines, an automobile, a bank account, a place to shop for food, and a hundred other things that we left behind to start our new life. Back in the States we had acquired these things over years. In CR it had to done within months.
    It took me two weeks and three trips to San Jose to get my drivers license. Four or five trips to the bank over three weeks to prove I was not a drug dealer. This is not CR, but the USA, which pressures these small countries into doing their bidding in the drug war. Getting our medicines squared away took forever. Two doctors later we have pretty much the same medicine we had in the States, but it was a long trip getting to this point.
    Then there is CAJA, the government health insurance. It works great, no complaints there. However, getting signed up took a number of trips to San Jose and a few to the local office here in San Ramon.
    In between all this running around, trying to put our life together, we wanted to enjoy our retirement a little by going to the beach and doing other play things. We have done less of these fun things than we had hoped. Now, as we settle into an easier time, we plan to catch up on the trips we held off on.
    For those of you who are wondering, we still have plans to take Spanish classes. Soon the wet season will be here and we will have indoor time. We managed to get all these things done speaking very little Spanish, but it would have been a lot easier and nicer to have been able to speak it.
                        Pura Vida

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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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