Category: Random Thoughts

God Laughs, or Fun with Bell’s Palsy

You make your plans, and God laughs. That’s what happened to me over the weekend. Let me go back, though, and start with discovering the Atlanta Freedom Bands, which I wrote about here in November 2014. I recollected how finding the band made me realize how much I had missed making music, marching in parades, performing in concerts. How after more than 30 years, finding the AFB was like discovering a new, yet long lost treasure. Last year, I marched my first season of parades in various Atlanta community festivals. It was wondrous. And at Christmas, I performed in my first concert playing French Horn in 35 years. Last Saturday morning, I marched mellophone with the AFB in the Atlanta St. Patrick’s Day parade. Afterwards, members of the band had lunch and drinks and fellowship at a local restaurant, which is the custom with this group.

Saturday night, kept waking up with what felt like a neck cramp. When I woke up early Sunday my speech was slurred, which I chalk up to needing a little more sleep, so I went back to bed. When I woke up again, I couldn’t blink my left eye. I ended up Sunday at the emergency room in Marietta. After they have ruled out a stroke, which was probably the best news I have ever received in my life, they told me I had a textbook case of Bell’s palsy. After a lot of googling I found out that it’s caused by virus, kind of like shingles. Likely because I had the flu, and that virus was in my system, it ended up attacking my facial nerve, causing it to be droopy and paralyzed. Like shingles, it was likely triggered by stress. In addition to facial paralysis–a word, like biopsy, fills me with terror–I have heightened ear sensitivity in my left ear, so loud noises, including my own sneezing, amplify like I’m standing in front of a Bose speaker. By all accounts, I will (should?) regain use of my facial muscles. Most well-wishers report success stories. It is totally unrelated to a stroke, and contracting it one time does not mean I will get it again. Those are the things I know. The worst part is that I can’t blink, so my eye gets dry and irritated. And that can lead to all kinds of trouble. I have to keep eye drops in it and wear a patch. Having only one eye affects depth perception and means I can’t drive. I can’t whistle or smile or buzz my lips. And buzzing one’s lips is essential to playing a horn.

Even though I realize I am very blessed in that this could’ve been so much worse, I’m still having to learn to deal with it. There are lots of adjustments I’m having to make pretty quickly. I’m learning how to have meals with straws and napkins. I’m learning how to turn my head in order to see better with an eyepatch. I’m learning to enunciate words using one side of my mouth. I’m learning how to encounter other people whose first response is to look away from me. I tried to go to the office yesterday, and by the end of the day I was exhausted from having to compensate physically in order to get from point A to point B, or participate in meetings. Talking and looking took a lot of energy that I had taken for granted. Part of the dealing with is going through my own stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Sunday and Monday I was in denial. I jokingly made a list with Sarah of one eyed characters for costume parties. We go back and forth with one-eyed jokes. In case you didn’t know, there are many one-eyed one liners. Believing the doctors that taking the meds would speed up recovery by months, I thought, Well if I can’t play horn, I’ll just break out the old flute and play that! I tried for half an hour to form the embrasure to blow air across the mouthpiece.  I waited to blink at any minute. I planned to go to choir. Tuesday night begin my descent into anger. I kept a dinner engagement with some visitors to campus, old friends from my curriculum world. When I entered the restaurant, Marlows Tavern, which I had been to so many times over the past few years, the hostess looked at me and then looked away. Same thing happened when the waitress came to take my drink order. I realize now that I do the same thing automatically–probably most of us do.  The next day, I mentioned choir to Sarah, who slowly turned and looked at me and said, Honey, you’re not going to choir. When I looked back at her in one-eyed disbelief, she started singing a little bit of the Hallelujah Chorus, which we’ve been working on for a month. I thought my left ear would blow out. No, I wasn’t going to choir. When she dropped me at the office,  just walking from one building to the next took all my energy to keep my eye covered so it would not dry out. I had two meetings where it was very important that I be able to speak, and that was extra energy. My colleagues, wonderful people, tried very hard to look at me in a normal way–and for that I will forever be appreciative. Nevertheless, I feel different, I talk different, I look different. And that was psychological and emotional energy spent that I wasn’t used to spending.

I’ll let you know when I’ve moved from anger to bargaining. Till then, in order to work through some of that anger, in order that something generative and therapeutic might come from it, I decided to pick up the blog again. It’s always been my favorite, preferred mode of writing. Academic work is important, but it isn’t accessible, and it limits my flow of thinking since I have to measure my tone and phrasing as well as the thoughts themselves. Here, I can have a conversation, if only with myself. Plus, Sarah approves of it since it will help keep me out of trouble–like trying to do home-improvement projects with one eye that doesn’t need to get dust in it. Most important, this is all helping me put my life in perspective and put the parts of my life in priority. It isn’t an overnight revelation, but I realize that stress is counterproductive and can be harmful. I reaffirm that life is always already about the people in it. That being present and being mindful is living. I am intentionally choosing hope and happiness. Hope and happiness are not default properties, and being intentional about them makes a difference. As I think about it, coming to this place is a kind of bargaining. I will trade impatience for writing, frustration for processing, sight for insight.

Band friends at Sr. Patron’s
Mellophone

 

A mello-photo bomb

Finding Free: The Atlanta Freedom Bands and Coming Full Circle

When I was in fifth grade at Littleville Elementary School, something magical happened. One day, our teacher announced that the band teacher from the nearby high school would be coming to Littleville to talk to kids and their parents about joining the band. It was 1973, and resources for extra-curricular activities–heck, resources for curricular activities–were limited. I remember in previous years, our musical exposure at school had been the on the rare occasions when our teachers had brought out a box with mostly percussion instruments and let us play with them, mostly trying to keep time while a record was playing. This was different. This was band. I could hardly wait for the meeting. When the evening came, the band director, Mr. Wright, brought a variety of instruments so that we could try them out and, with his advise make our selection. I realize looking back that, of course, he wanted a well rounded group of instruments, which is probably why I became a flute player. From that point on, I was in love.

I went to high school in a football town, and a football town doesn’t scrimp on its band. When two new, shiny mellophones arrived at the bandroom, I volunteered to learn to play, and I loved the big, smooth sound of a horn–I was a woodwind no more! We were the Marching 100. I remember the day I was issued my uniform. I remember band camp and big, chartered band buses, chocolate sales and Homecoming parades. I can still remember how to play The Horse–if you have ever marched, you know The Horse. I remember our signature parade song–a marching mix of China Grove and Smoke on the Water. I still remember–and feel–lining up on the sideline for the halftime show, and I can feel again what it felt like then standing on the field, horn up, knees slightly bent, leaning back to hold the last note until the crowd stood and cheered. And they did. Every time.

I quit the band just before my senior year for a very, very bad reason. It’s a story for another time, because this one is about joy. But I must say–for the rest of it to make sense–that over the next thirty years I had recurring dreams about being back. Sometimes, they would let me join them again for just one performance. Sometimes, in my dream, it was entirely acceptable for an alum to join up years later. Whatever the scenario, I slept happy. Then woke. It was not unlike dreaming of someone who has passed then waking to sadness when you realize it was only a dream.

So  when I say how happy I am to find the Atlanta Freedom Bands and to sign up to march with them, you get some idea of how much it means to me. I’ll write more about it later no doubt, but this post was prompted by a conversation I had with my new band friend Mitchell. He  mentioned that during the recruitment drive at Pride this year, one new member was telling him that finding the AFB was like coming home again–a feeling not unlike ones I have been having. I bet I’m not the only one, either, or that new fellow. I bet a lot of band members feel like this is both a musical and community home. I bet a lot of us thought we might not ever have that kind of home again. Of course it’s also a helluva fun group that throws a mean party. Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I know the “Freedom” in Atlanta Freedom Bands has rich, multiple meanings, but certainly for me–and I bet for others–it is a home place that sets me free. I am awfully glad they have taken me in.

Music and Me, Part 1

The blessing and curse of being an academic is that whenever I come across any really interesting “thing”–whether it is an experience, a news story, situation, work of art, or take on the human condition–my first thought is, “Wow, that would make a great paper!” I wonder if my other egghead friends do that. It isn’t all bad; the blessing is that clearly there will never be a shortage of topics to write about. The curse is that everything around me becomes a potential scholarly topic. And I start planning out where to begin the search of existing literature before I finish feeling and experiencing whatever it is. A case in point is divinity school. For the first two weeks of being at Candler (School of Theology at Emory University), I felt like a researcher doing an ethnography of seminary. I still think that’s a pretty doggone good idea! It took almost a month before I began to feel the experience as something other than a research project. What’s so bad about that? Well, this world is best experienced by feeling our feelings every single minute we are going through it. I’m sure there is research to support that claim. 

It happened to me again yesterday, but luckily I caught myself. I was at the kitchen counter finishing up my annual review and listening to Elvis on the Sirius radio I had managed to hook up to my home stereo speakers, the coolest thing ever invented. Back in the fall, it had taken me a whole day to figure out how to make my old dvd player into a tuner through which to conduct music into the speakers (Is my technical language impressing you?). Because I had a home kit, the Sirius radio was easy. But figuring out how to hook up the Apple devices was less intuitive. Yesterday, though, as I looked from the kitchen to the system in the living room, the obvious solution just came to me, kind of like how I can think of things the minute or two as I am waking up in the morning that I cannot think of during the day (That happened this morning; I was able to think of the song title, Shine On Us, that the choir had sung Wednesday night. Yes, I did forget the title of a song between Wednesday night and Friday morning. That’s not the point….). So, I disconnected a wire from the radio, plugged it into my iPod, and viola: my music! 

I’m going to try here to explain what I feel when I listen to music. It’s harder than it may sound. I am inspired to do this after having countless conversations with one of my friends who loves music so much she moved across the country to be able to hear live music every night of the week–something, interestingly, one can’t necessarily do in Atlanta. I was also inspired to try to express what music feels like to me after reading my friend Alan’s book, Symphony #1 in a Minor Key: A Meditation on Time and Place. I don’t have it in front of me to quote (I’m at Starbucks) or I would share some of the beautiful imagery and language he uses to portray the importance of music to him as an embodied and emotional experience. That’s what it is like for folks like us, it picks us up and does something to us and puts us back down while something electric courses through us. Yeah, we like music. 

I confess I am not current on music. Whenever I meet someone who is, they have to catch me up some if they want me to be able to talk about it with them. I like it, but there is something about the old songs, the old groups. New music that sounds like it was old. I do like that, but it’s kind of cheating. As I scrolled down through the almost 3,000 songs on my iPod to test out the speakers, that is the kind I chose. A new (well, fairly) new song with a 60s Phil Specter beat: Doin That Thing You Do. And I was not playing around. I turned the volume up on 35 to see what those speakers would do. Drums. I am a sucker for music that features drums. Sixties rock beat. Refrain that shifts to a slightly minor key. The Wall of Sound. Here is where I wish I had the language to describe musically what was happening. I can’t, so you should play the song to hear what I’m talking about. 

You should know I cannot dance, but I don’t think about that when I hear music that moves me. Elvis felt it; he said so when asked about his “gyrations.” He said he didn’t know anything about gyrations–he just felt the music and couldn’t help but move. That’s how it is. I was standing in the middle of my lovely little bungalow yesterday with music blaring, me singing at the top of my lungs and, yes, dancing. I played that song five times. Then I scrolled to the Stars and Stripes Forever and played that five times while I directed it. Listen to it sometime: wait till the very last stanza of it, when Souza puts all the parts together–piccolo, percussion, AND those wonderful loud, blasting TROMBONES. You know how your heart can swell till you cry like mine does when I hear the national anthem at the olympics, or Just As I Am during the altar call? The last thirty seconds of Stars and Stripes Forever goes to my core and comes out something spectacular. Then I scrolled to Martina McBride singing Hank Williams and played You Win Again three times. I don’t have to tell you what Hank’s words sung by a woman in my vocal range can do to me. 

I will confess something: I am fifty years old, and I have one of my brother’s old microphones in my closet. I cut off the cord, and on days like yesterday I take it out and have a concert. So, to recap. I felt a surge of sun-shiny happiness that made me want to move like Elvis–which I did (sort of). I danced, sang, waved my arms in the air (in my mind I looked like one of the Chiffons), conducted a concert band, and sang torch songs deep and loud. Think about anything that can make you move, any physical sensation. Heat or cold, a shock, rain, fear, joy. When we feel these things, our bodies move because we can’t help it. That is how I am when I hear music that moves me–it literally does. I feel happy and strong. Sometimes my eyes tear up, and sometimes my stomach lurches like it does when I see someone beloved to me. 

Why was it important to write this down? For one thing, it means so much to have music–loud magical music–in my life again after I had lost it for so long. More on this later. I’ll tell you one thing. I won’t lose it again because now I let myself feel it. And, it would make a great topic for a paper. 

Two and a Half Days Till Christmas

I was in a PowerPoint frenzy at Starbucks. Outside, the storm was raging, and not unexpectedly, the store began to fill. Now, if you stay any place long enough, you see many people come and go. I think of that stop-action photography in the movies. For hours there was a quiet lull, then when I had finally gotten into the work, a young child, a girl around 5 years old, asked the man working beside me in the long half-booth if she could have his chair. He said sure, and she dragged it across the floor. Then she came to me and asked me if she could have my chair. I said sure, and off she went. It was then I began looking to see who was going to sit in all these chairs. Two families were gathering to have a mini-Christmas get-together at Starbucks. Three kids were decked out in Christmas outfits–two girls with iridescent dresses and gold shoes and a boy with a christmas vest. The adults were also dressed more for a party than a rainy evening at a coffee shop. I thought it was odd. 


As soon as all the adults had their specially brewed beverage, they broke out coloring books for the kids. They were the kind of parents who make a show of making their kids be polite and say “please” to them a lot in the process. They were the kind of parents whose kids don’t bother me nearly as much as they do. The kids spent half an hour tearing all of the paper off all of the crayons and leaving it in a big pile on the floor under the table. Adults still talking, the kids got up and began running back and forth from the table to the pastry case–which amounted to the entire length of the store. Finally, one of the employees yelled–very politely, I thought–PLEASE DON”T RUN! Then, the “can-you-say-thank-you-Sally dad jumped up declaring it was time to go. 


I can tell you not one scrap of paper was picked up and not one chair was put back in its place. On the way out, I overheard one of the mom’s say, “Maybe I”ll see you tomorrow if I get tired of being cooped up in the house with kids.” I read today in the Huffington Post about a family getting kicked off an airplane from NC to Chicago for having too many young children. I bet those people on the plane were glad. I know I was, but I was really aggravated at the crayon paper.


Knowing full well how cantankerous (old) I sound here, I wish there were more kid-restricted places. Restaurants. Coffee shops. Why would you bring your kids and have a get together in a coffee shop where, if you look around you will see people reading, studying, writing (one hopes), or chatting quietly. There are no tvs on the wall. No tapes of Dora the Explorer playing in a loop. No toy boxes. No legos. 


Perhaps the AARP could take this on as a new project. 


More on this later. I had to write it down before I forgot it.
RUW