Holstig-Mon

Holstig-Mon (HOLE-sh-tig MAHN) was a tiny monarchy which lasted only a few years.   Its cultural forebears were the ancient Hebrews,  the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the German-speaking cultures of Central Europe in the last few centuries before electricity, with a small sprinkling of North American Indigenous borrowings.  The president was young and inexperienced,  as were her subjects, yet her heyday was really its first three years.  It tapered off in the following years until her lands were sold off to a new despot who cared nothing for the culture, but following the laws of Texas, which surrounded it, took it over for their own purposes. 

Most of its edifices, laws, internal boundaries, religious festivities, and indeed language lived primarily in the imagination of its president, and indeed only small glimpses came to fruition.   Despite this, the country was the main focus of its president during its heyday, and much of her spare time was spent dreaming and diagramming and in occasional small construction projects.  The president was only eleven or twelve when the country was conceived, and the president was, of course, your truly.

Two partial homes were constructed.  Had they been as they were meant to be, they would have been heavy, rectangular wool tents, held up by wooden poles staked into the ground.   Each would have had an overhang on the front side and a vent in the top for the cooking and heating fires.  However, we (meaning my subjects and I) were not in possession of the proper materials,  so we built some of it with discarded branches and blue tarps.   The discarded branches were neither straight nor sturdy, so the loftiness of the ceilings was almost never assured.  The tarps worked fine, except we could not build fires under them.  The demolition of the Holstig-Mon housing district was ordered when our parents happened to go around that windowless side of the house and realize how trashy it would look to neighbors who would be seeing it from other spots.

The religion was monotheistic, and it required its own holy book and rituals, which were never written or fully designed.  The tent-based tabernacle was beautiful in the imagination: a two-room, colorful, hand woven wool rectangle in three dimensions, again held up by those wooden poles we did not possess.  It would have involved fire and water in its religious ceremonies, as well as beautiful smells and prayers in the local language.

That language, Holstenian, was developed enough that its creator would write a few pages here and a few pages there of its vocabulary and grammar and translated bits of a couple of children's books.  (I have found a few pages of this material, and written in a notebook during my seventh grade year; seventh grade also deserves its own post, and despite wanting to write about it for a year and a half, I have not yet gotten up the nerve.)  Holstenian was a Western Germanic dialect, somewhere halfway between broadcast German and broadcast English, putting it rather close in vicinity to Dutch and Flemish, but with a few more Teutonicized borrowings from French. 

Holstig-Mon was meant to be a constitutional monarchy with me at its head, and I roped in my two siblings, my brother's best friend, and briefly two neighbor friends of mine who lived on the cul de sac behind us.  We did hold an election for offices once, but, of course, the election could not be truly fair, as the country was mine, and mine alone....

It was also meant to be pre-Industrial, an era which still holds a special thrill for me in terms of connection to and reciprocity with our Earth and her many other life forms.  However, there was one exception.  I allowed Jeff and Noah to work on wiring up a phone system from what to outsiders appeared a playhouse in the back yard to Jeff's bedroom in the house.  Said playhouse was the capitol building in my diagrams. This was so we could call out for emergencies.   I don't think we got so far as to define what would constitute an emergency or to define policies around breaking the ban on electrical and fossil-fueled technology.

I did some study on how to build a public fountain using water pressure in ancient Roman design, but the specs of actually accomplishing this were out of reach, so sadly my civilization was less graced by a water feature than I had hoped.

I was able to learn some small bits around what native plants were found to be edible by our local Indigenous forebears,  and mainly that consisted of "pickle grass", a small member of the Oxalis genus with tiny yellow flowers.  We had native trees for the most part, but most other species of botanicals were of the foreign type, bought from the standard colonialist nurseries, which sell plants from Eurasia and Africa.

Despite presenting little beauty to the viewer's naked eye, Holstig-Mon was a gift to its creator,  in that it spurred and coalesced learning from many different fields and gave that same creator life-long loving memories. It was the perfect project for an intellectual but dreamy girl who loved books and lived in her own world, (which was mostly the real world but dialed back a few centuries.)

I have mentioned before my affinity to the picture book Weslandia, which a relative gave Anne when she was small.  Minus a few details (the mysterious seeding of a plant on which to found a civilization and the creation of a backyard country turning the creator's tormentors into friends), I felt that someone had written this book about my own childhood, and I have never felt SO seen.  I include here a link to watch it read:

On the Suddenness and Violence of Air Travel

I have never been on an airline trip which didn't cause me to tear up at some point.  I have not yet figured out exactly what causes this despite thinking about it over the decades.  Is it the racket of the jet engines and the onboard air filtration system?  Or the knowledge that airplane crashes, though rare, are almost always fatal?  Is it the motion sickness which follows me around and is worse when I am tired?  Is it the violence of revving up this unnaturally powerful machine, hurtling through the skies with strangers at altitudes for which human development has not prepared us and suddenly dumping us in a totally different physical and cultural landscape?  Is it the crowds of people, all strangers, shuttling through this giant impersonal system of computerized hubs?  Is it the worry of what might happen to the luggage and having to use strange and noisy restrooms?  Is it the mixture of boredom and panic created by timeliness and schedules?  Is it through overwhelm of changing from one routine and set of people at home to a different one somewhere else, no matter how welcome? Maybe it's all of these things together that upset the delicate equilibrium inside the human....

Ice Skating

 I have so many memories I want to write, but I have been uninspired with all of them for a week.  But the beauty of the ice storm here in the PNW put me on the right path.

I was quite enamored of the idea of ice skating as a child, but the opportunities were limited.  We had freezing weather mild enough to keep any ponds impassably dangerous, and the one indoor rink was far from us, in the middle of a mall, and spendy.  

When I was six or so, I was given my first pair of roller skates, and after a couple days crashing, I took to them.  Inspired, I tried very hard to make ice skates out of plywood in the garage, and with my dad's kind assistance, I did make a ridiculous and semi-matched pair that I tied over my shoes with string.   When a freeze came up the next day or so, my dad let the hose drip onto the back patio to make a little rink so I could try them out.  It was a rather bruising experience, but it did not slow down my adventurous nature.

In an ice storm, I went out roller skating the neighborhood, which was great fun, except for returning home rather bruised up.  My mother was not particularly sympathetic to my self-induced injuries, to which I was prone.  I was always a leap-before-you-look child (/adult???)

There was the time I thought I should rollerblade down the steepest hill in the neighborhood. At the bottom, the sidewalk turned and then crossed a lumpy, gravel dead-end, and then if I had made it across that at high speed, the sidewalk reconvened with a small turn next to a planting of cacti.  There was not way to end that impulse gracefully, and after my crash, I still had to skate the mile or more home.

At some point my dad reroofed our house, and I was invited up to "help" briefly.  Afterward the roof became the "mountain" for my complete, complex, culturaly distinct country in the backyard, Holstig-Mon (which deserves its own post.)  Afterward, I did discover a way to climb up via the fence on the side of the house, and I jumped to the grass below on more than one occasion, despite the absolute jarring impact.  I also frequently braved the high dive at the pool in the summer, back when they still let people attempt to become paraplegics all summer.

I learned to climb the large oak at the back of the yard by climbing the fence, swinging over the lowest branch with a certain technique,  and then going up, up, up.  My mother recalls seeing me 20 or 30 feet up there on many occasions. 

There were many biking accidents on the hilly cul de sac behind our house, not usually from riding the bike in transportation mode, but from doing things like obstacle courses, or riding hands-free.  When I was 19, we were visiting some younger cousins around the holidays, and they had a ramp off of which they would jump a stunt bike.  I had never done such a thing, but I was absolutely game to go without any instruction...and went over the handlebars on the first and only try.

In my 20s I took a three-week course in Munich and afterward took the train to Rome to see ancient things.  I rode a bus out to see the catacombs, took the tour in German (which I understood about every other word of), and decided I should return to Rome on foot via the Apian Way as was historically accurate.   I did not think to try to find out if anything had changed with the advent of automobiles, and I found myself, at one point, walking as flat as I could against the ten foot high stone wall next to the narrow two lanes of rush hour traffic and getting lost in an unsavory neighborhood.  I am, miraculously, still alive. 

There was the time that Jared and I went camping in the Adirondacks before our move to Alabama, and we undertook a 20-mile loop at a point in the day which forced us to run the last five miles to get out of the woods before it was absolutely pitch black.  We seem to hike and camp that way in general.  Can't say if it's his fault or mine, but I'm thinking I am not a totally innocent party...

Lots of things in my life seem to be this way, although with the responsibility of children, pets, and earning a living, I have become a little better at thinking ahead in some circumstances. 

Waltz of the Snowflakes

 I heard said item from The Nutcracker on the radio on the way home from Anne's school drop off this morning,  and I knew what my next post would be about.

As a child, I was apparently on the physically awkward side and had poor posture, so my mother eventually proposed ballet classes to combat these defects and teach me to be more graceful.

My first foray into this arena was in the fourth grade. Our next door neighbor was taking a weekly class at a little studio in a strip mall south of us.  So my sister and I were signed up.  I don't recall if Emily and Mara were in the same class or not, but I was in a different class, I presume due to age difference.  During my sister's class, we occasionally walked down the parking lot to the grocery for a treat, and I always picked the same thing: a large, soft chocolate sandwich cookie with creme filling and root beer from the soda fountain.  When we didn't do that, we sat in the lobby of the studio and I did homework or read.  The class was fine.  We did some basic ballet for a while, and then we strapped on our tap shoes for the last few minutes and made some semi-organized noise. After the year or semester or whatever it was was up, we discontinued with no particularly strong feelings on my part. (Except for sadness about missing my specific weekly junk food treat.)

When I was in sixth grade, the quest to endow me with more grace and coordination was re-embarked on, and this time I was enrolled in Grade 1 at the Ballet Austin Academy.  This was twice a week, and was a much more serious course of study.   We wore black leotards, pink tights, pink shoes, white elastic waist bands, and our hair in a bun, held in place with bobby pins, a hair net, hair spray, and often a scrunchy.  As I was starting Grade 1 at age 11, mid year, rather than the more typical age 8, I was obviously larger than the other kids in my class. I was also more determined, and I worked harder and with more focus than most (or all?) of my classmates.  My inner competitive drive payed off, and after a semester in Grade 1 and a year in Grade 2, I ended up skipping straight to Grade 4. I took Grade 4 even more seriously and was passed the following year to Senior B (which was the equivalent to Grade 6.)  I was still older than most of the class, except for one other late bloomer who also took the whole thing very seriously and is still my friend nearly 30 years later. By this time, I was in class three or four days a week, and we were starting some pointe work.

I took my study seriously, but it was more like an inescapable obsession.  I read books about young pre-professional students at the state sponsored ballet school in Moscow, the Royal Ballet School in London, and the School of American Ballet in New York City.  I became these children.   I did everything possible to perfectly memorize the combinations taught at the barre, to balance longer and stronger, to stretch further, to improve my posture and turn-out, to stay precisely with the music,  to move my arms and head more gracefully.   I pushed myself in every way, and I showed up even when miserably sick. I often spent many hours in the studio building, a rennovated historical fire station, which housed the professional ballet company, the academy, and the offices of both, as I would go directly after school in the same neighborhood and then stay until my classes and my sister's classes were over. I would sit in the back corner of the women's dressing room and half-heartedly tackle my Latin homework while observing the conversations of the professional dancers and the older teens on the pre-professional track, trying to figure out what that artist life was like.  These adults were probably struggling financially, but they were all in this because of their love of dance and absolute inability to see themselves in any other place in life.  I related to that passion with intensity.  I ate, slept, read, and dreamt ballet.  

When I was there early enough, I would sneak upstairs and peer through the open back door of Studio A to watch members of the Company rehearsing for upcoming programs.  We had season tickets to the ballet, and they presented four or five sets of performances each year: one in the Fall, the Nutcracker (ten performances in December), and two or three more sets in the Spring.  One of the Spring performances was another classical full-length, such as Giselle or Coppelia or Romeo and Juliet.  The other programs were made up of shorter dances, some newly choreographed. I saved the programs and pored over the bios of the dancers, noting where they had studied,  what other companies they had danced for, and what famous choreographers they had worked with, as well as what rank they were within the current company.  When we acquired a TV and VCR, I taped one or two full-length ballets off PBS to watch when we had the rare opportunity to use the device.  My mom also ordered VCR tapes of a couple more obscure 20th century ballets.  I asked for tickets to the annual AIDS benefit performance at the Paramount where we saw all sorts of fascinating new choreography which caught my imagination.   I listened to the full Nutcracker score on CD untold numbers of times and even moreso, listened every single night (for over a year) to the Prokofiev score to Romeo and Juliet. I wrote a virtuosic arrangement of the Bon-Bon's dance for violin and piano, as well as an arrangement for the same of the Arabian dance.

In the early Autumn each year, the Company held auditions for students in Grade 3 and above to participate in the Nutcracker performances.  The first year I auditioned, I was sorely disappointed to not be given a part.  This was not a surprise, given I was so much taller than the majority of students dancing at my level, and it was a combination of ability and height that denoted who was fit for particular roles.  I later learned that Miss Martin, the ballet mistress, considered my dear friend and I for the part of Fritz in alternating casts, but didn't end up assigning us as she thought we wouldn't want a boy's part.  She was quite wrong, and I wish she would have asked rather than assumed.  

Two years I was given a role - one year as a soldier and the following year as the soldier's nemesis, a rat.  The soldiers danced with painted wooden rifles and uncomfortable hats.  The rats danced with long tails and giant gangly grey heads with red light-up eyes.  My sister was awarded parts more years than I, most especially as a bon-bon, one of the most coveted sweets.   There were five casts.  Most of the older parts were assigned to five performances each in a pair of alternating casts. Some of the other parts were on a three-cast rotation with three or four performances each, all blocked together.  Each group had its own heated-to-80 dressing room, and parent volunteers would shepherd groups to the stage and back at the appropriate times.  Each group also had its own call time back stage at Bass Concert Hall, and a stage monitor would check everyone in and out during the production.  Dippity Doo turned out to be a more or less required hair product, along with specific stage make up. ...All of this was proceeded by months of additional weekend rehearsals in Studio A at the old fire station.

In class, I liked the barre work the best.  The combinations were so logical, worked through all the steps so thoroughly and evenly, and seemed so nicely organized.  We practiced with music, either a live pianist or a pianist on LP.  The musical was almost always Chopin or Joplin.  I have recently found some old notebooks in which I created tables of my own invented notation for all the different steps.  The work in the center of the room felt harder as we had to practice jumps and turns and it was trickier to stay precisely in your spot.  I remember all the teachers - Toni, Kevin, Denise, Inga, Steven, Bill, and Miss Martin.  Some were tougher than others, but they all expected precision and focus.

At the end of my Senior B year, my evaluation came back, and I was asked to repeat Senior B (we wore desert mauve leotards), rather than moving on with my class to Pre-Elementary in the pre-professional division (where they wore forest green leotards with 3/4-length sleeves.) I was devastated but did not let up on my struggle for self-improvement in the least.  I worked and obsessed harder than ever, and was admitted to the coveted Pre-El class the following year.  By then we took a 90-minute class Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and 105-minute class Tuesdays and Thursdays, including a 45-minute segment on pointe, and on our marathon Fridays, we took an additional 90-minute class in jazz dance with our black leather jazz shoes. (If I had made it to the Intermediate/Advanced class with the burgandy uniform, I would have taken modern dance instead of jazz and had class six days a week, the Saturday class taken with the Company.)  All of this was obviously a huge time and financial outlay for my family... I honestly don't know how they managed it.

It was no surprise I had been asked to repeat Senior B despite my extremely intense efforts.   My genetics did not grant me the body of a professional dancer - my arches, ankles, knees, and hips were not flexible enough, despite extensive daily stretching on my part, and my leg-to-spine ratio was too top heavy, with too much lower back arch.  Also, my toenails do not lie flat on my toes, but are angled slightly upwards, meaning that no amount of taping and lambswool would keep me from losing them regularly due to pointe work.  Pointe work is physically demanding for everyone, but I think it was bloodier and brusier for me than for most other dancers who had flatter nails.  I knew these things and knew they would prevent me from pursuing a career as a professional ballerina, but the love was there.

Half-way through my Pre-El year, my parents pulled me out.  The time and money outlay was far too expensive, especially considering I would eventually have to give it up. I was absolutely shattered.  I was given a portable barre and mat for my little bedroom at home, and I tried half-heartedly to practice a few times, but I knew deep down I could not keep it up on my own.  I left my final class wailing uncharacteristic public tears, in the best physical shape of my life. In a short time I could just feel my dance muscles melt away and atrophy, and all my insides dissolved into a puddle of truly depressed goo.  The violin was there waiting for me.

Obscure Ice

 Some decades ago, when I was in ninth or tenth grade, it was well known in my small circle that I was seriously pursuing the violin as a career.  What that career might look like or how exactly I might get there was a bit of a mystery, but the general concept was inescapable; it seemed like destiny.  In an effort to knock on figurative doors, my mother arranged a trip for the two of us to a tiny town in Michigan.  This is because, on a rural campus by a lake, there was a performing arts boarding school which may possibly have been part of that journey.  There were no great expectations or hopes of this visit that I remember; it was purely exploratory.  I did not end up enrolling, and that was probably for the better.  I remember very little of the trip, with the exception of a few small incidents which stick with me still.

I remember walking across campus through the snowy landscape, the slanted northern light filtering through low-lying clouds.  It was my mom and I and some sort of adult representative of the school.  I was enamored of the northern winter and knew some day I would live in it, and it seemed really important to me to impress this stranger with how well winter and I got along.  And I did not know about the black ice which can show up after shoveling and plowing...  So I slipped mightily while walking too confidently.  It hurt, but I knew I could not acknowledge that, so I popped up and kept moving like nothing had happened.  I always "knew" it was dangerous to show any weakness or lack of knowledge...

After I played for the two violin teachers - I suppose it was a sort of audition (I think I may have played some Bach and Lalo, but can't say for sure), one commented that they had never seen a violinist turn their head on the instrument the way I did "to enjoy the music."  I absolutely was in the habit of that posture, but I don't know what led to it.  It may have started as a way to deal with the anxiety of trying not to miss a big shift. In my adult life, I have found that there were some big shifts I could not play in tune without the peculiar head turn, and I also associated it with physical tension.  I have practiced some spots in the repertoire over and over to work out a way to play them with a more natural spine arrangement, and it was a frightening transition. I did deeply enjoy the music and easily and often got lost in my own world while playing, but that seemed a separate item from the crooked neck.

Additionally, the teachers asked what I planned to do with my music, and it was true that I wasn't quite sure.  I answered: "Solos, chamber music, orchestra, I would be happy to do any of it."  But that wasn't quite true.  I did not want to play in an orchestra at that time for a career - mainly because I did not know what it might be like.  And I think I knew I would want to teach.  And I did know I wanted my individual artistic voice out there being heard.  Honestly,  I could have answered the question the same way at the end of graduate school, because I did not know what questions to ask myself in formulating a plan going forward. And I did not want to lock myself into a trajectory, because what if I did not like it after all?  I have always had many, many ideas but am not much good at long-range planning.  This has its obvious downsides in our society, but also has had the effect at keeping disappointment at bay, because I do not have a specifically imagined dream to find my life deviating from.

I remember going out to dinner with my mom, and instead of the usual bread and butter or crackers or chips and salsa while waiting, they had bread and a plate of olive oil with rosemary.  The server explained about dipping the bread in the oil, and this was a new experience to me.  There is absolutely no significance to this tidbit - only a grainy image in my mind and a taste on my tongue.

Lastly, we went to some sort of student performance one evening.   I remember one teenage girl in the audience, slightly stocky.  I don't recall if she was our guide or if she was merely another spectator.  She was up and down the aisle, greeting people in a friendly way.  Later, perhaps at the hotel, my mom asked me to tell her about this girl's social skills.  This felt like a loaded question, and I did not know what the right answer was.  I said she seemed like she had a lot of friends, because she was greeting so many people.   It turns out I was wrong.  My mom explained that she was socially awkward.  Anyway, I was, too, so I missed the cues.