Barn Raising

Last fall we bought a cabin from a lovely couple who moved to Gilmanton, New Hampshire to raise alpacas. They bought a 1756 farm house previously owned by Grace Metalious, author of the Peyton Place books. Today we visited them at their new home to help with their barn-raising.

My husband, a civil rights attorney with a yearning to be a builder, had the time of his life. It made me happy just to see even from afar how much enjoyment and satisfaction he was deriving from the work on the barn. Watching an idea become a finished product through the work of one's hands is a blessed experience, even more so when a small community of hard-working friends comes together in trust, commitment to excellence, generosity, and good will to make the dream a reality. I think participation in a barn-raising should be required for business employees, students, and physicians!

Though some women helped with the construction and one of the men helped with the cooking, for the most part we fell into stereotypical gender roles, and LIKED it that way I might add, with the men performing most of the hard labor and the women providing food and drink, keeping an eye on the children, and engaging in some warm conversations over tea or coffee. By midday the "progress" in the work-in-progress was visible.

Today's work was a true labor of love for our friend, who was building the barn for his wife's alpacas. We had the chance to visit a neighboring alpaca farm after lunch. I have found my new favorite animal. My encounter with them was such an unexpected blend of warmth and mystery. Alpacas are cute and gentle, guardedly friendly, with an adorable "humming" vocalization that is much more pleasant than bleating, baa-ing, or mooing. What surprised me, though, was an otherworldly, almost mystical aura about them. I can't explain it, but they exude something really tranquil, an almost palpable serenity. Their presence is somehow actively calming, as if they carry some of the blessing power of Macchu Picchu in their gaze. My children and I felt an immediate affection for them.

I visited one website that defined the word "cria" as an unweaned camelid baby, from an old Spanish word for "create." I seem to recall my parents calling my cousins and me "los crios" when we were kids. Creation, creativity, childlike freshness - I like the suggestion of all these in the word cria.

We spent the rest of the afternoon back at the barn raising, thankful that the predicted thunderstorms seemed to be holding off. The cloud cover and cool temperature were ideal, in fact, for construction work. Afterward the four of us drove twenty minutes home to our beloved cabin, ate a light but yummy supper of homemade pasta puttanesca, and played a rollicking game of Ouistiti, a card game passed down in my husband's family which has some similarities to Hearts and to French Tarot (but is much simpler and faster-paced than the latter). All in all a wonderful Saturday.

***

Pasta Puttanesca for Four

(How can stirring together a bunch of ingredients I don't particularly care for individually result in a sauce we enjoy so much...?!)

Ingredients:

¼ c olive oil
6 minced garlic cloves
1 huge Vidalia onion (or 2 medium regular onions), chopped
6 oz can of tomato paste + equal volume of water
1 28-oz can peeled plum tomatoes in puree
1 can medium pitted black olives (dry wt = 6oz), drained & halved
1 tin of rolled anchovy filets w/ capers, minced finely
1 3.5oz jar of capers
2-3 tsp sugar
¼ tsp salt
sprinkling of black pepper
several shakes of dried basil, oregano, & parsley

Directions:

Heat olive oil.
Sauté garlic & onion 10 min.
Add tomato paste, water, & plum tomatoes (reserving some puree).
Stir & cook 3-4 min.
Add olives, capers, dried herbs, & seasonings; heat & stir.
Add minced anchovies & some tomato puree for volume. Stir.
Adjust seasonings.
Stir & simmer till heated through.
Cook 12 oz of your favorite pasta – tricolor rotelli, penne, linguini, etc. – & serve w/ sauce (either mixed in or on the side).

Success is a Neon-green, Glow-in-the-dark Monkey Around Your Neck and a Squishy Yellow Duck in Your Arms

What is success?

I've written elsewhere that for me, success is peace with oneself. Last night my family and I shared an evening at our town's annual carnival, and I can say without a doubt that I was at the pinnacle of what I call success.

The sky was overcast but not gloomy - grey overhead, but a soothing slate blue near the treetops. The air was pleasantly cool, just warm enough not to have to untie our jackets from our waists. The fairground, set up at the local high school, was not overcrowded. We saw a few people we knew, making for a nice, small-town atmosphere, the kind I loved to see romanticized in films like The Music Man. Our daughter had her fill of high-speed rides that made my stomach lurch just watching them. Our son went twice down the giant slide and happily bounced on two different moon-bounces. My husband got his turn playing Siegfried with a crossbow at one of the game galleries. Each child won a choice stuffed animal (for our son, a neon-green monkey, and for our daughter, a large, squishy, yellow duck).

As for me, I hungered for nothing. I had had some oboe time earlier in the day. We had just shared a simple dinner of seafood, salad greens, and strawberries. The aroma of fried dough was a pleasure but not a temptation thanks to our earlier meal. We were together and content, enjoying each other's company, laughing at each other's quirks and near-misses. After 11 years of marriage, my husband was still flirting with me and sneaking little glances and moments of affection here and there at the fair. His hand on my back was warm and sure. Work was faraway, and I would be able to return to it the next day and continue to help provide for this special family. We lived in a free country and were blessed with good health. Life was good.

A popular graduation-time greeting-card poem often mis-attributed to Emerson, but probably authored by a woman named Bessie Stanley in 1904, says you are successful if you have lived well, laughed often, loved much, and basically made the world a better place somehow. I agree, but I like even better the words of William Henry Channing (1810-1884):

To live content with small means;
To seek elegance rather than luxury
and refinement rather than fashion,
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly;
To listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with an open heart;
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the commonplace.
This to be my symphony.

No worries about getting tenure, publishing research, making it to the top of a pop song chart or athletic tournament, or winning a prize for beauty or talent. Instead: gratitude for the love in my life; kindness to the world; honest work; peace. Noticing the extraordinary in ordinary moments. This is the kind of success I aspire to and pray to fulfill every day.

People might think this a rationalization or lack of ambition, but I know from experience that although a Harvard degree or an award-winning article might bring a sense of accomplishment and a momentary happiness, they do not bring real joy.

***

Nostalgia moment of the day: a friend who has known me for 22 years finally found the Japanese anime characters I've been looking for, off and on, for at least that long. Richard and Erika. I bet no one outside of the Philippines, even the most diehard manga and anime fan, has heard of them.

Growing up in the 70's in the Philippines, I remember loving two TV shows. One of them was Candy Candy. Candy Candy, a cute girl with curly blonde hair in pony tails, was a Cinderella-figure in the home of a nasty girl named Eliza. They were both attracted to a boy named Anthony, and to my delight Anthony of course preferred Candy Candy and Eliza was unremittingly jealous and bitter about the whole thing. I remember I had a pink Candy Candy pencil case in school. After I moved to the U.S. in 1981 I didn't see Candy Candy again until I was on vacation in Paris during high school and found it dubbed in French over there. I was beside myself with excitement.

The other show, which I thought was called Richard and Erika in the Philippines, never turned up on my radar screen even after I started searching the internet. But my industrious friend finally clued me in: the real name of the show is Tosho Daimos. Filipinos, being entranced with starcrossed love scenarios, focused on the romance element of an otherwise robot-battle-filled series. In our dub we gave the name Richard to Kazuya Riyuzaki, the earthling hero, and the name Erika to his forbidden lady love, Miyuki Ueda, a winged princess from the planet Barm. Like many little girls back then, I wanted to be Erika, with her long black hair and gorgeous looks, and her Richard. And young as we kids were, we could sense that there was some intense feeling between those two that was not the stuff of most science fiction we were familiar with. There were schoolmates willing to play Han Solo or Luke to my Leah, but not Richard to my Erika (nor would I have welcomed the act from most of the boys at school who, if memory serves, would have been more interested in piloting imaginary giant robots and engaging in combat against rogue Barmians anyway). I've read on another site that watching the series now, in adulthood, is a very different experience, with too many characters sacrificing life and limb for the sake of the starcrossed lovers. Oh well..."when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child..."

I found new kids' shows and cartoons in the U.S. in the early 80's. 3-2-1 Contact, Mighty Mouse, He-Man, Inspector Gadget, even The Smurfs. But none had the drama and passion of those Japanese animated series! They didn't "make 'em like that any more..."at least, until the American public got clued in to anime. Now the love triangles continue...I hear Inuyasha's quite good.

Ah, the 80's. Peanuts was still in the funnies section of the paper. Everyone's hair except mine was big. There was no internet. I typed my college applications on a typewriter. I had a record player and a Walkman. To keep in touch with faraway friends, I wrote and received letters. Real, snail-mail letters.

It's interesting how music can so powerfully conjure up a particular period in life. My high school days were replete (of course) with 80's songs - Love Bites, Waiting for a Star to Fall, Never Tear Us Apart, Don't You Know What the Night Can Do, all the Chicago hits, U2, George Michael, Red Red Wine, I've Got My Mind Set On You. Every time I hear those I think of those sheltered days, of my cozy little home on Friars Road in Bethesda, Maryland.

In the O.R. today the nurses and surgeon played a CD that was a nostalgia walk back to their high school days, or so they joked. Big Girls Don't Cry, Stay, and the like. Those were popular in the 80's too, thanks to Dirty Dancing. What gives a song staying power? I wonder - will any of the songs that are said to be "great" today be familiar to my children when they have children?

***

My son's statement of the day, to his friend; overheard from the kitchen, during their playdate: "Shaman is NOT a weird name. It's a kind of DOCTOR for tribes in the AMAZON." You tell 'em, Little Sage.

Where does It come from?

I marvel at a gift my daughter has and that I, alas, do not: composing. She took up piano a little over a year ago. I heard her playing something so evocative after only two lessons that I poked my head out of the kitchen, where I was doing something completely ordinary like chopping vegetables, and asked her, "What's that you're playing?" The music reminded me a little bit of a procession for kings in a fairy tale or a bible story. Like something out of Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, which we had recently seen and try to see every Christmas season.

"Oh, I'm just composing."

Composing! Wow, she was making that music up? How do people do that? Where does that music come from?

"It's wonderful, sweetie. Reminds me of Amahl."

"Yeah, actually, I'm calling it A Royal Appearance." That was her first composition. She was 8.

More recently she has composed a piece called At the Arcade, which sounds just like someone playing pinball or video games, and another called (at my suggestion), Stirring the Brew, a playfully spooky piece that sounds just like, guess what, someone stirring brew in a cauldron. She's also working on a musical, and the parts she has sung for me so far have blown me away.

Where does creativity come from?

One could spin an endless web of theories. In ancient Greece there were the nine Muses. Today the fashion is to attribute most things that involve human cognition to the function of little molecular messengers, the neurontransmitters. Some might add genes, spirit guides, environmental factors, God, faith, early childhood education, exposure to music, good nutrition, or any number of influences to explain people's gifts, and logically a combination of any of these factors might certainly contribute to human creativity. But it's like trying to explain how it is we hear certain combinations of sounds and call them "music," or why certain strains of music elicit tears or fears or longings. Ask my daughter where her music comes from, and she'll say, "It's been with me for months," or "I hear it in my head."

"Intuition" is similar. The day before my oral boards, at my husband's suggestion, I booked myself a massage. What better way to de-stress, right? There's a funny story about the whole spa experience that day that would take a whole other post to relate, but for purposes of what I'm thinking about right now, let me skip to the part where the massage therapist, seemingly out of nowhere, placed a hand right in the middle of a muscle in my lower back that couldn't have been more in need of a little un-kinking. I was shocked at the sure-fire accuracy of the maneuver and asked, "Wow, how did you know that?"

The laconic, Italian-accented reply: "Experience."

And I've said the same thing. At one of the hospitals my anesthesia group serves, we teach EMTs and paramedic students about intubation. When they really can't see the vocal cords or can't place the breathing tube in the trachea, I quickly step in and complete the procedure, and often I'm asked, "How did you know how to adjust that so you could get it in?" The answer truly is experience. I always tell the paramedic students it took me HUNDREDS of airways (as in, intubating 3-4 times a day for 2-3 months) to feel really comfortable with the "straightforward" ones, and hundreds more to feel I had the ability to tackle a challenging one.

Once in the ICU during my residency the surgeon in charge watched me do one of those God-help-me intubations, and while I was doing it he asked, "Can you see anything?" The answer was no, but I asked him to hand me the tube anyway. It went in. "Lucky," he said. Maybe, but the more I learn and the more experience I have, the luckier I seem to be. Yet never "lucky" to feel smug about intubating people. If I've learned anything in my line of work, it's respect for the airway!

Just last week at one of the other hospitals we serve, the E.R. doc had a really tough time with the airway, had tried for a while to secure it, but then sent someone to the O.R. to ask me to come and take a look (another long story that would take a separate post to relate). I looked. It was tough. Darn tough. I could easily have missed. But something told me to bend the tube a certain way, and wiggle the laryngoscope just so, and thankfully the tube went in. But no amount of success, at least for me, will make these "scary" airways less caution-worthy. Difficult airways just can't be taken lightly, ever. My heart still quickens a little every time, and I still say a split-second mental prayer over them to help focus my efforts.

But this is all stuff that involves training, learned skills, and practice. Granted, creative acts take work and practice too, but with those, there's that inexplicable element, the mysterious "place" that works of art (and life) come from. How did Ralph Vaughan Williams come up with his Concerto for Oboe and Strings? How did Harper Lee's vision of Calpurnia or Jem come to life so vividly on the page?

Sure, neurotransmitters are important. I've seen and heard of enough anecdotes about people "losing" their creativity when they take certain neurotransmitter-altering drugs. One writer I read recently also describes the opposite - a medication that seemed to give her hypergraphia, a need to write often and copiously (and no, despite what the entries in this blog might suggest, I am not taking the aforementioned medication, unless it's at all similar to any compounds found in chocolate!). So yes, the brain matters. (And just as an aside, I think people should be less critical of the use of some of the medications I've alluded to here. You wouldn't tell diabetics to just "get over" their pancreas problem if they need medication. If people with neurotransmitter issues need medication as well, and have the guidance of experts to help select those medications, they should take the meds they need, and/or practice yoga to boost their levels of GABA, etc.) Clearly, neurotransmitters are powerful agents for human ability, behavior, emotion, health. etc. But are they the whole story?

When I think of my children's faces, my daughter's pieces, places I love, stories I want to write, I have a hard time imagining how those thoughts could simply be stored and recalled, repeatedly, by neurons and their neurotransmitters. I think there's more to thought than we think.

***

Had my 5th oboe lesson today. Lots of fun. We laughed over how "I hate half holes!" Went over C, F, & G major scales as planned, and a couple of others, E flat and A major. I have my work cut out for me but I'm excited to get into some "real" music-work. Started to work on dynamics too for the first time - and again, that feeling of "where did that come from" arose when I hit a note more piano by accident after trying several times.

Kyoko asked, "What did you do just then?"

"I don't know, I don't know! What did I do? I have no idea why that worked!"

But just like intubation, playing repeatedly gives you an idea, maybe one that you can't verbalize readily, but it's certainly there. A "gut feeling" about how to move your muscles to produce an effect. I hope as I practice and play more, I'll have more of that inexplicable "instinct" about what adjustments to make. Dance was like this too. After a while, with lots of training, lots of practice, lots of work, I needed less thought to do what I wanted to do. Less thought, more...what? Very mysterious, all this brain / spirit / creativity stuff.

Oboe Poem while on-call

(Disclaimer: I know that "poem" is a presumptous label. I am well aware that most of us are a far cry from W.H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop. But poems don't always have to be good, do they...? Although then maybe they shouldn't be called poetry, but just scribbling...)

The Double Reed

The world in which I rest is vast
a passage, mysterious
sonorous and dark.

It cracks in extremes
when tensions seen and unseen
are high. I am tiny
and fragile in its grasp
wedged well into
my tiny place.

A source of breath
I cannot see
blows through, and walls
that hold me in
now resonate
and set me free.

A song unfurls
like a sail
I tremble, never
more alive; I fill
with longing and with hope
that my home for a time
will be changed
while I'm here

from a silent to a singing thing
an ordinary object all at once
made dear.

ABC's for today

A.
I love the A played by the oboe when an orchestra tunes prior to playing. How a single note can be so moving to me is a mystery, but moved I am. When I know it's coming I almost hold my breath waiting for it. Then it sounds, and it's as if it emits a beam of light right into my heart, drawing me in, drawing everyone else in, so that we're all turning, tuning, to that sound. It repeats, and when it does, layers of anticipation continue to be added as the different instruments of the orchestra prepare. The oboe is like a divine messenger signalling the start of something wondrous, a voice singing out: Listen, and enter into the story we have to tell; surrender your hearing and your heart, and we will open up a whole world to you, and you will not be the same.

Never was this more true than when we waited for B.U.'s April production of La Bohème to begin, knowing our little girl was backstage, happy and excited as part of the children's chorus. That starting pitch had special meaning for me as a signal that something magical was about to begin for her. When the music for Act II started and the curtain rose on Tijana Bjelajac's exquisite sets, which elicited the anticipated "Aah!"of admiration and applause from the audience every night, our daughter was right there in the center, dressed as a child customer at the Café Momus getting ready to enjoy a meal with her "family." Her best friend, one of the nicest boys we know, played her "brother" and got to sing the solo asking for "la tromba, il cavallin'." Singing and acting in Puccini's opera, especially that second act, must have been like entering a storybook come-to-life for them, an experience of joy and wonder that they will carry with them always.

B.
B is for ballet. Today I was listening to the ballet of ballets, Swan Lake, which as it happens is centered entirely around the oboe.

But before I wax rhapsodic about the oboe parts in Swan Lake, let me first kvetch about the Romantic Period.

I remember once right before performing the Peasant Pas de Deux from Giselle for a bunch of school kids, I thought to myself, "Smile! It's the 1800's, and you're a happy rustic, and when your lover breaks your heart and you die of that, little wings will sprout off your back."

I love the Romantic Period. I hate the Romantic Period. It's like a guilty pleasure. The intellectual, rational part of me wants to disavow any attachment to it, to roll my eyes at its fairies and broken hearts, its ecstatic loves and its weepy losses. The other part of me gets sucked right in. Bring it on and let me wallow.

Take the ballet Giselle, for example. Anyone can see that Albrecht is just a rich playboy taking advantage of a frail, naïve village girl. Poor Hilarion, who actually cares about Giselle and shows her mother some respect and affection, gets the short end of it. At the end of Act I, after Giselle meets Albrecht's fiancée and realizes that she (Giselle) has just been a whimsical diversion for him, her heart gives out (hmmm...rheumatic heart disease, anyone?), she goes mad, her hair flies out of its neat little "do" all over the place, she takes Albrecht's sword and stabs herself, and she drops dead.

Puh-leeze - the cad doesn't seem worth the salt her tears are laced with. She should have just kicked him to the nearest wine keg, stepped over his body, and asked Hilarion to forgive her for not seeing what was right in front of her all along. The weird thing is, when you're watching the ballet, you usually don't root for Hilarion. You're suckered into rooting for the rakish aristocrat, just because Giselle wants it to work out.

In Act II, we learn that Giselle's spirit is condemned to join the ranks of the Wilis (of "that gives me the wilis" fame). These are the spirits of women who die before their wedding days, some say betrayed by their lovers. They wreak their cold-hearted revenge by ambushing any men, guilty or innocent, who happen to wander into their territory in the forest and dancing them to death. So guess who falls victim to their vengeance in the middle of Act II: of course, our poor, loyal Hilarion, who was just going there to pay his respects at Giselle's grave, for heaven's sake. The Wilis dance him to exhaustion, then throw his body into a conveniently located bog.

Already this is so antifeminist you just gotta give up. The village girl gets duped and dies, and the "women warrior" types are actually petty, vindictive, pale-faced murderesses who don't have the maturity and good sense to just let go and move on.

What's more, Albrecht gets away. They're gonna try and kill him, too, but Giselle intervenes, begs for mercy, saves him by the power of her love. Should we be mad at how unfair that is, or should we admire her magnanimity? No matter. In the end Albrecht shows he has a heart after all and is capable of remorse, and Giselle flits back to her grave and disappears as dawn breaks.

Ah, the Romantic Period. You hate it, but you gotta love it. And why? Because it's YOU. You've been in love. Desperately, nonsensically in love. You've been betrayed. You've used people. You've been ignored or unappreciated like Hilarion. You've been enraged like the Wilis. People from stories in the Romantic Period really fell in love and fell hard. They cried their eyes out. They dared to feel and express all the emotions we're now supposed to think are so weak, inferior, and embarrassing, no matter how true to life and vital to human experience. I for one am glad that my kids (and their father too), like these heroes and heroines of a bygone age, are the sensitive, compassionate types who get tearful when Rodolfo sobs over Mimi's lifeless body in La Bohème. People today can deny the power of feelings all they want, try to downplay them, try to squelch them and claim it's more sophisticated to be free of them...but I think they're missing something.

So then there's Swan Lake. What more classic ballet among the classics is there, than Swan Lake? It's really not my favorite ballet; among the classics, I love The Sleeping Beauty more, even though it's shallower, more fairy tale and confection than love story. And among contemporary works, William Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated totally rocks. But Swan Lake will never die. It's familiar, like a home you know well and go back to just often enough, yet lofty, too. [But also eminently mock-able - it's too easy. The Ballets de Trockadero version of Act II is hilarious.] Here again we have a cast of frustratingly obtuse characters. Siegfried has his heart in the right place. He falls in love and vows to get Odette out of her ridiculous spell wherein she has to spend her life as a swan by day and a woman by night. But he screws it up. Someone shows up to a party at his castle looking exactly like Odette, but weirdly more seductive, less delicate, flashier, not as sweet. And he falls for it, the moron! It ruins everything.

Ordinarily, one might have absolutely no sympathy for either of them. I mean, how ridiculous, for all their problems to hinge on one or two functioning neurons in Siegfried's brain! But why are we drawn in, and willingly? I may be biased, but I think part of it's...the oboe. It opens the entire ballet with strains so full of longing, sorrow, lost love, and regret that you already know it's going to tell a story that's yours, from somewhere in an aching corner of your soul. After that tense moment when you know Siegfried is about to witness Odette's transformation, she appears, and the oboe then takes over completely for a moment. Its voice is plaintive and lonely, like Odette herself. The oboe closes Act I and opens Act II with the theme that has become one of the most well-known oboe passages in classical music, and if you listen well you hear it just weeping. No holds barred. Love out in the open, vulnerable, raw. The voice of the oboe speaks directly into that place right in the middle of your chest that aches or seems to swell right before your eyes well up in tears.

I always wondered what created that sensation, the physical sensation in the body right at the heart when sorrow pierces it. No amount of cadaver dissection during anatomy class in medical school or observation during surgeries today has given me the answer. Sometimes there aren't any scientifically observable explanations for the workings of human sentiment.

C.
Call. I am on call this weekend. This means I woke up yesterday feeling mopey and had a mopey little corner in my heart all day, despite attempts to stay warm and upbeat. For this particular weekend I was in-house at the hospital for 24 hours yesterday, then on call from home all day today, then in-house again tomorrow for another 24, then off on Monday. I haven't found it less painful over the years to be separated from my family for call. But at least I got some oboe time in. My scales are a tiny bit faster and smoother. My new reeds are breaking in. I still stumble a lot at certain transitions and frequently feel like a total clod, but I also feel like I sound more like an oboe today. Must be the new reed!

Blog Scandal Hits Home

Yesterday I was listening to NPR on my way to work, and I heard a story about a doctor who had to settle a case (in fact, a wrongful death suit) because he was discovered to have been the author of a blog in which he discussed details of the case during the trial. In the blog, he disparaged the opposing side and the jury and revealed defense strategies. I thought to myself, I hope I'm never so mean or indiscreet in my blog, and that when I criticize certain things, I do so graciously. Then I went to work and thought nothing more of it.

When I got home I found an email from a friend requesting an urgent referral to a new pediatrician. I emailed back and said, oh, so-and-so loves her pediatrician, ask her. My friend then replied, yeah, so-and-so has the SAME one and is also looking for a new one - see sordid story on front page of Boston Globe. So I read the story, and there was that blogger scandal again. I couldn't believe it - a Law and Order type of story in my friends' lives.

My husband, who's an attorney, was fascinated by the whole Perry Mason nature of the sting. The plaintiff's lawyer was asking about textbooks, then whipped out the surprise question asking the defendant on the stand if he was Flea, author of drfleablog. Robert P. Lindeman admitted to being the masked blogger, and now his life will never be the same. Judging from my friends' responses, I imagine his entire practice scurrying to jump ship. It's scary to think that someone who had some good qualities as a clinician, judging from what my friends told me, and from some stuff he has written for his practice's website, might have his career ruined by poor judgment (or perhaps hubris? or a false sense of security behind a pseudonym?) about where and how to vent his frustrations / indignation / contempt / stress.

My husband thinks the practice of law will have to change too. The discovery process can't stay the same after this - it hasn't been the norm to request blogs, myspace pages, and such, but attorneys are now clearly going to have to take various types of records into account and adapt to the Internet age.

My question is, how did they find the blog and make the connection?

***

It's Summer Reading time!

Here's what I've read/reread in the last few years and recommend:

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt (supposed to be for kids, but adults should read this profound and beautiful novel, one of my two favorites of all time)

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - of course, my other favorite

The Monk Downstairs by Tim Farrington

Lying Awake by Mark Salzman (he also wrote The Soloist, about a cellist; True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall; and he stars in the movie based on his book Iron and Silk, about teaching English and learning martial arts in China)

The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Kadra

On Writing Well by William Zinsser


Here's what I WANT to read, but invariably, what I get done falls short of all my good intentions:

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith
Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Dakota: a Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris
The Misunderstood Jew by Amy-Jill Levine
Disappearances by Howard Frank Mosher
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

and, for oboe,
The Art of Reed Making
The Embryonic Oboist
Essays for Oboists by Jay Light
The Oboe by Burgess & Haynes

We'll see - I have a 2-week vacation coming up end of June. I can't wait!

If you don't like your D, don't go to C; or, The Gift of Imperfection

Today I had my fourth oboe lesson. I have been having trouble descending down the C scale. I'm fine till I get to E, then D, then C...I have trouble there, whether it's crooking my pinky finger just right to hit the low C, or getting the appropriate tone if I do hit it, or sometimes getting any sound at all. Kyoko gave me some pointers on where to position my finger and also how to rest my lips around the reed to make a fuller, rounder, more open sound in the low registers. "You have to have that full sound already at D," she advised. "If you don't like your D, your C will not be good either." So I worked on getting that whole, round tone before moving on. This will take some practice. She did say despite my struggles, "Don't worry, you actually have a nice, warm sound. Don't get stuck."

After she scraped at my reeds a little, things got better. "It's not you, it's your reeds!" she joked good-naturedly. We had a good laugh at my horror of blaming equipment rather than myself for bad form. As a doctor I can't ever say, "Sorry I didn't pick up that Grade III aortic MURMUR there, but it was a bad stethoscope," or, "Well, I couldn't get the airway and the patient DIED because my laryngoscope was broken."

Plus, I've heard my teacher play my "bad" reeds, and you know something - a really good oboist can get a good sound out of a "bad" reed. But I understand her point - as a student I probably need a good reed to achieve a good tone consistently, at least until all the mouth muscles and lumbricals get in better shape. "You so want to be a swan," she commiserated, noting my love of the oboe parts in Swan Lake, "but with oboe you have to be willing to be a duck first. I was a duck for years."

The great thing about all this is I can LAUGH about it. Hear me quack. We spend half my lessons in stitches over my playing. For someone who's been a perfectionist all her life, for whom patience has never been a virtue, whose psychological self-flagellating capacity rivals that of St. Augustine, this relaxed attitude to imperfection - in fact, to being really BAD at something - is a HUGE deal. It feels great. Maybe that's why I feel so comfortable blogging about all this and have the audacity to name myself an "anesthesioboist." My definition of success is true peace with oneself, and I'm so at peace with my own imperfection at the oboe that I feel I've already succeeded, in a way.

Oboe is helping me with my spiritual homework. Here's what I mean. I think "the meaning of life" is to learn how to be more loving and more complete each day, but I also believe that under that umbrella-meaning, each person has little "homework assignments" to work on. I think some of mine are to learn about human worth - what defines it, and how to honor it; to learn patience; and to learn enough humility to accept imperfection (my own as well as others'), and also to forgive and let go when imperfection causes me pain. I have other homework assignments, but these seem to be the recurring themes, I think because I am a slow learner. I try, I fail, I try, I fail - "I'm all... 'this is hard!' " as the speech-impediment girl on Will & Grace said. Oboe helps me slow down and work on learning these lessons.

So if I'm playing badly because I haven't developed sound technique or muscle strength yet, so be it. I'll just keep working. If the reed really is at fault, ok then. We'll scrape it and try again. Patience, patience, patience. No need to fixate on blaming something.

I believe, like so many self-help books and gurus have expressed one way or the other, that assigning blame is one of the most immature and unproductive human tendencies (speaking as someone who has succumbed to it many times). People seem to NEED to point to someone who's at fault, and also NEED for themselves NOT to be found faulty, as if imperfection were the end of the world (again, guilty).

I had a very recent experience of this latter phenomenon when I pointed out an instance of unequal treatment to someone, and that person bent over backwards trying to find outside explanations for the event rather than taking responsibility for it, however unintentional it may have been, as if admitting a mistake or a failing or an imperfection were going to destroy some precious, unblemished identity. But people are intrinsically precious; if we could all really, truly believe that, no matter what, then dealing with our own imperfections and mistakes, and those of others, would be so much easier. We wouldn't be wound so tight. (This was actually what my NPR essay was about.)

I think Jesus was probably one of the most relaxed people on earth. Heal on the sabbath? Sure, why not. Hug a leper? Absolutely. Tell a person caught in adultery that she wasn't condemned? No problem. I think one of the reason's he wasn't wound so tight is because of what HIS faith was made of. He KNEW people were pearls of great price - all of them. "You are the light of the world," he said. I think this "good news," in fact the whole point of his life and the reason he was willing to enter fully into our human experience, was to help us learn this about OURSELVES.

So many of his teachings are precisely about the worth of each human being. No, don't sit in the place of honor, because EVERYONE has dignity and value. Wash each other's feet. Trust like a child, live simply, be generous. If someone asks you to walk with him a mile, go for two. Do not judge (if only people would take THAT one literally more often). Don't lord it over others. Don't just love when it's easy - love when you don't feel like it either. "Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." (Matthew 5:48)

But wait, isn't this post about imperfection? What happened to, embrace your own imperfection?

In the koine Greek of the New Testament, as I understand it, the word translated as "perfect," teleios, implies not sinlessness or faultlessness but completeness. Being whole (whole, holy, same root, I think), fully integrated, without missing parts, mature, having no need for external honors or affirmations. If you believe every person is precious, including YOU, then there's nothing to be afraid of or envious of, not a movie star's beauty, not a businessman's wealth, not an academic's accolades or publications, none of that. You're already worth the world. You can be at peace. You can also stop thinking, or needing to think, that you're "all that," more deserving than others, superior to others. I repeat: you can be at peace.

I remember recently hearing an ad on the radio for a summer program for high school students being offered by a well-known Ivy League university. It was inviting young people with talent, vision, "leadership," etc. to apply. I had to roll my eyes. If EVERY child were a leader, where would all his or her followers come from? Why is "talent" so important? If our children were "average," would I love them less than if they were prodigies? DUH, of course not. This is why I love the movie Little Miss Sunshine so much; the idea that life is a beauty contest in our society, but SHOULDN'T be, is so true and so humorously rendered in the film. I'll be thrilled if our kids grow up to be loving, kind, happy, hard-working people with good judgment and integrity. Integrated, whole, holy, teleioi. For all their imperfections, I already think they're pretty perfect.