Tender Impressions

Last week was a week which comes around each year in our life here in Seattle, and it's always a little different.  It happens during the UW Spring break.  It is a week of visiting master teachers, of student masterclasses, of friendly dialogue with colleagues, of days spent far from home in an inviting hall of academia.

I watched many classes, and accompanied three of my own students on the piano.  I watched and listened, fidgeted and perceived, sang along in my mind, took notes, and noticed, noticed, noticed.

Rumblings of a mind whirling, filled with new experiences, observations, realizations, directions.  Big feelings, held in check.

Many female teachers beat about the bush more than male teachers.  This does not make the men unkind.  It seems more the obvious socialization of females to be deprecatory rather than decided, supplying suggestions rather than pronouncements.  I have done my fair share of it, but I am happier hearing direct instruction,  delivered with kind and generous intention.  Where the impulse holds judgment or condescension or sarcasm, direct or indirect delivery bites like a serpent.

I rarely notice my insecurities, but thrown into a contrasting environment,  I feel my anxiety rising to the surface, pushing me into words and actions not wholly in line with my intended essence.  This was true in my ride on the commuter train - where the noise and jostle and smells were nearly overwhelming (though less disagreeable thanks to medication); moreso in the presence of musical colleagues, who would be in a position to notice and judge my potential shortcomings as a teacher and pianist.  In my daily work, I ignore those shortcomings and plough forward in my strengths, but my gaps and vulnerabilities dance before my eyes when the tribunal of my imagination is in court.

I did some thinking about my purpose as a teacher.  I used to see teaching skill in very competitive, black and white terms - good teachers' students do ABC, and poor teachers' students do XYZ.  Yet, that does not represent the complexity of all the human beings involved in the equations.  I realized, really realized, that the "star" students, the prodigies, not only are getting where they are because of innate talent and stellar teaching, those "star" teachers could never lead or push students into those skills without a willingness to be lead or pushed.  The students who have different dreams - or no dreams at all - would wither and die under such tutelage.   I am the teacher who works well with the "odd" students, the ones who can't "get with the program." The ones who can't practice with their parent, the ones who are learning for their own reasons, the ones who need a year off playing to listen to the masterworks, the ones who need to sit, not stand... 

I COULD teach the ones who want to be stars, and occasionally I have had students whose performances are objectively impressive.  But I think I exude an aura, as a teacher, of being able to give a diverse set of students the chance to reach their OWN diverse goals and the ability to prioritize in untraditional ways for the long-term benefit of many.  I really am the right teacher for many students, in the same way that I am slowly coming to recognize that I am not the right teacher for a whole other set of students... and should not even try to be.

...Words of past mentors echo through the chambers my brain: "...she has the potential to be a very good teacher, maybe even an important one..."  Am I living up to my potential?  Can I?  Have I ever done so in life?  I am not sure.  I think I have fallen short of nearly every expectation I have ever set for myself.  Have my dreams been too big?  Maybe they weren't about what was most important in the first place, and the thousand tiny misses add up to a thousand tiny educations for me.  And maybe the goal is not perfection and ascendancy,  but rather love and growth and wisdom.

I was struck this week by a quote from Fred Rogers: 

“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”

Each day when I returned home, I found it necessary to calm my nerves and mind.  This meant a long, quiet walk or lying in bed for a while, not watching a video when I might during dinner, and talking with Jared about all the things.  I am thankful to recognize I need those things, too, to care for my own weaknesses.  Doing thise things meant I was able to be more pleasant and present for my kids in the moments we had together.

One teacher I found quite fascinating to watch.  From his current store of knowlege, magical touch on the fiddle, and entrancing stories, his past as a child genius was clear.  His musical training was intensive, broad, and early. He had this wealth of acumen to draw from, but what intruiged me most was his ability to read each student - not only their strengths and weaknesses, but also their secret anxieties and desires, and he spoke to those in each their own way.  One student he whispered private instructions to, another he teased good-naturedly, another he asked many questions, another he told he would rather not say much so that they could find their own way.  He seemed to understand the inner workings of each and meet them in the most effective way, being tough and gentle in turn.  

That teacher is Buddhist. From the train, I saw into the courtyards of several Buddhist temples for the first time.

Cameron Road

 I first visited my grandparents' house just outside of Austin when I was four months old; we were down from New Jersey for Christmas.   A year and a half later, our family of nearly four moved back to Austin just weeks before my brother was born, and we visited that house frequently,  even weekly at times, until it was sold in my later teenage years to some fellows who never got a permit to turn it into a restaurant.   After it began to fall into disrepair,  I have never been by again and in more recent times never looked it up on Google maps, because I don't want to know.  

When my grandparents moved out of town to the place in the 1950s, it was in the country, on acreage,  with a crystal clear small creek and a rushing big creek, stands of trees on hillsides, and an ancient, spreading live oak in the front that was approaching 200 years of age.  There were a couple of other adjoining houses on that quiet country road, and my grandparents became quite close with their neighbors and remained close for decades.

A few years ago I wrote about moving into familiar homes in imagination in the middle of the night when sleep eludes.   This house has been moved into many, many times.

The house was long across the west-facing front and narrow across the sides,  making a neat rectangle.  An incredibly smooth poured concrete porch slid across the whole front of the building, covered deeply by the roof overhang.  For supports along the front edge were intriguing twisted metal posts, slim, and reminiscent of the sort of mid-century things people put out for roses or other vining flowers to climb.  Partway toward the south end of the porch, steps took it  down the hill to ground level, which was a full story lower there.  The asphalt driveway sloped down the shaded hillside and ended at the two car garage under the two bedrooms on the south end of the rectangle.  The garage doors were the spring loaded kind that opened in one piece - up and over.  The garage was under the house, yes, but not directly connected from a people-moving perspective.  You either had to walk up the front porch stairs to the front room door or up the back stairs into the little white, wooden porch my grandfather had enclosed for the sewing/laundry room.  When we visited, though, we rarely parked by the garage.  Instead, we stopped in the bit of circle drive at the top of the hill, shaded from the street by smaller trees and shrubs, and shaded from the sun by the giant, sprawling live oak.  Some of the branches were, by then, so long and gangly,  my grandparents had fashioned and propped in wooden supports for them so they wouldn't break off in a storm.

My grandmother was always working in the ground, and kept myriad plants happy in an organic fashion around the yard.  By organic, I mean, nothing was showy, and it all looked like it had belonged there forever.  I particularly remember the hostas and spider grasses.   There was a beautiful rock garden by the door to the basement.  It was lovingly arranged and filled with large,  fascinating stones from family ranches and enormous crystals, whence I learned some of my first lessons of geology and chemistry.  

My grandmother also had a pair of laundry lines which stretched down hill from the house toward the small creek, which flowed parallel to the back of the house at the bottom of the hill and defined the edge of the back yard.  The lands east of that creek, still part of my grandparents' oversee, were the lands beyond and needed permission and an adult to wander.  

Underneath the porch/laundry/sewing room (filled with more carefully tended plants) was a little dugout for my grandmother to work on her pottery.  For many years, she was a potter, shaping beautiful plates, bowls, and vases with simple, sturdy modern design.  When my mother was growing up, my grandmother spent a lot of time at the sewing machine, as home-sewn clothes were more economical than store-bought clothes in the era when our part of the world did not have access to sweat shops, slave labor, and disposable fashion. (That is a rant for another day.)

The basement was in two parts.  The part with the cement floor was my grandfather's domain/tinker room/workshop.  Of the wonders it contained, there was seemingly no end.  A lathe, a workbench in front of the window to the back yard, cast off WW II electronics, tools in every shape and size, calipers beyond measure, solvents for every need - stored and carefully labeled in glass-stoppered glass jars on shelves, wood scraps, lumber and various sizes of wire stored in the rafters, an exercise bike.  From that workshop came "do-nothings", electronic toddler toys before there were such things.  We had one at home - a large, rakishly angled metal box with switches,  knobs, sounds, lights, and even a turntable, all invented and put together from detritus my grandfather had saved from the UT electronics lab where he had worked.  There was also an old, curved-front flowered fridge down there filled with sodas - particularly grape and orange, which my diabetic grandfather kept on hand for regulating his blood sugars, as well as his can of late afternoon Budweiser.  He knew what he liked and had his routine.  He had also rigged up a telephone from his workshop to the TV room above, where my grandmother was apt to spend her free time reading home and garden magazines or the newspaper, watching the news or football, or tending to another beautiful jungle of plants.  She would stomp on the floor and he'd know to pick up the basement receiver,  and she'd get on that TV room horn and tell him it was time for lunch or whatever.

The further back part of the basement was somewhat more crawl-space, and had been personally dug out by my grandfather and my grandmother's brothers-in-law.  It was dark, and I found it quite scary, but I remember that my grandfather kept some real valuables back there - old coins.

My grandfather's collections took up more than this basement domain, though.  Just behind the garage was the closest outbuilding, a metal shed.  At times, he had a car in there he was tinkering with. At the bottom of the driveway was a wooden building.  During my mom's childhood, it was a play house; afterward, it was filled up with more interesting saved finds.  Attached to the back of that brown painted wooden house was my grandmother's hothouse, bursting with succulents and tropical plants, and more humid than all get out.  And further back in the beyond lands were two more barns, briming with unique and specialized stuff.  If you needed something obscure for your project, Jimmy had it.

The house itself was fairly basic.  The front room spanned a good bit of the house - one end was the dining room; the other end was the living room.  Behind there was a good sized, square kitchen, a full bath, and the TV room off a short hallway, originally meant as a bedroom.  At the south end of the house was a small, square, wood-floored hall with doors to the other bathroom, my grandparents' bedroom, my mother's bedroom, and the attic, which was one of those pull-downs with folding ladder in the ceiling. Built in the era before A/C, the house had thick masonry walls, the afore-mentioned deep shaded roof on the west, and insets in the ceiling with slow-turning ceiling fans.

The inside of the house was filled with knick-knacks and sentimental objects.  This is not to say anything about it was kitschy.   It was beautifully and tastefully arranged, and more like stepping into an art gallery or museum.  There was a small electric organ and a spinnet, both of which my grandmother played, (she also sang, having taken voice lessons and having been part of the church choir for many decades) and she  had a phonograph and small collection of Classical LPs.  There was her mother's old butter churn and butter molds of all shapes in the kitchen.  There was a low sewing machine desk with foot treadle, used then as a coffee table in the TV room.  There were beautiful sets of teacups and saucers picked up here and there, displayed on the tall, dark dining room hutch.  There was a hanging glass curio cabinet of assorted, tiny crystal cups.  There was some of her own pottery on display.  There were shelves of coffee table books full of gorgeous photograpy.  There were tiny pots of ivy growing in sundry places.  There was a woven wall hanging from Persia.  There were metal and glass and wooden figurines and tiny chests from all over the world.  Antique bedstead and dressing tables appointed the bedrooms, ancient and beautiful chairs and side tables sat alongside more recent sofas in congregating areas.  No opportunity for decorating with beautiful and historic objects was left unused, yet the effect was not junky or cluttered.  This was a great introduction to history, in general, and clearly my predilection for collecting and the ancient have some sort of familiar precedent.  There were also subscriptions to Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American lying about, which I certainly looked at.

We all went to church each week at University Presbyterian,  where my dad eventually became the longest running teacher of the 2-year-old class, my mom and grandmother sang in the choir, and my grandfather nerded out running the sound board and lights from the balcony where he was mostly undisturbed by the throngs.  Afterwards, when I was young, it was common for us to eat lunch at my grandparents' house.  Chicken and dumplings was my grandmother's specialty,  though sometimes other chicken dishes were on the menu. 

I do remember having a lot of fun at that house. I also remember constant admonishments to be quiet or speak up; both my grandparents were hard of hearing and my mother had to carefully manage the sound environment so that they could participate in conversation.   We also had to be quite careful about touching things; some things could be played with and others were too fragile or easily dirtied.  The main rule I learned in life early on was to keep my radar on the emotional temperature of grown-ups around me, and if anything seemed to be heating up, to carefully be as "perfect" as possible to try to bring that temperature back down, whether I understood what was going or not.  This strategy kept me mostly out of trouble at my grandparents' house, which, I think, was full of unspoken rules I did not know.

I have been musing fondly on my grandparents' house, their collections and interests, and their considerable skills this week, as my grandmother died on Thursday.

Mountain Music Mystery

I was standing in a long line at the post office recently, and I could feel the familiar anxiety rising.  The thing is, now,  that I am finally able to recognize and name it and take informed action.  I had not found a pen anywhere in the lobby, so I was going to have to go off script to ask the postal employee for one to write the address on my package.  Plus, I did not know exactly what my shipping options were or which one to choose, and I would have to navigate all of this with a stranger whose mood and compassion and ways of speaking were unknown and with many people behind me, waiting.  So I decided to pull out my phone to start typing a blog story, instead of mentally rehearsing potential scripts with increasing frantic-ness while also noticing an increasing number of details of people and place in high speed around me.  Though I only rattled off a paragraph or so during my wait, I felt much calmer inside by the time I approached the counter and was able to connect in a human fashion with the postal worker named Ann...

There are a number of periods from earlier in my life which stick out as memorable for various reasons of intensity or atypicality.  Now I write about one summer in Colorado which was different from the others on account of some neighbors, which shall be detailed shortly.  Many summers, six to be precise, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the Aspen Musical School and Festival, a multi-month Classical music intensive, filled with incredible professional concerts, wonderful teachers, student performances at the highest level, rehearsals, and masterclasses.  ...In later years I learned that this program was seen - and treated- by many teenage and young adult participants as a party, complete with drugs, alcohol, and sex, but I was unaware of that vibe at the time, even with some roommates, I now know in retrospect, participating in said scene.  For me, it was an incredible retreat in the mountains where I learned and absorbed every morsel I could get my figurative hands on, practiced for hours a day to eagerly grow my craft, made friends with others who were on a similar path, and drank in inspiration at every turn.  My six summers on the Western Slope of the Rockies, at high altitude, spread out between high-school and college, were truly formative and wonderful, and I think on those years, the setting, and the musical outpouring, fondly.

The festival itself was spread out around the old mining town-turned wealthy ski destination, of Aspen.  They used the Country Day School up a narrower valley as the main campus for the office and space for practice rooms, lessons, masterclasses, and smaller rehearsals.  The public middle school, up the wider valley road toward Maroon Bells, offered many rooms for teaching, learning, and rehearsals. Some rehearsals and concerts happened in the historic opera house downtown.  And at the edge of the main town to the quiter north side was the Tent, a festival-owned, large, semi-outdoor concert venue, next to an accoustically gorgeous smaller concert hall, and the truly enormous and well-endowed basement sheet music library.  In addition, some teachers taught in their own lodgings or held performances in a local church.   

The school also had quite a bit of student lodging rented around the town, most notably the slightly rural Marolt Ranch, a campus of two-bedroom dormitory-style budget units, opening onto covered sidewalks, motel style - minus the parking lots.  These were rented out as affordable ski lodging in the winter season.  Marolt also housed the cafeteria, laundry machines, a pay phone, and a few practice rooms. One could travel between all these venues on foot, or by school-issued bike, or by free city busses which would circulate between all the main venues and the downtown station on a regular schedule.   It was a huge lesson in planning ahead to make sure to arrive at the appropriate venues on time for meals, rehearsals, lessons,  concerts, and curfew, and I certainly made a few errors in timing along the way.  

Outside of my nearly non-stop musical activities, I found many other things to keep me occupied.   Hiking in the hills and walking around town were wonderful, as was visiting the nearly freezing mountain creek, filled with tumbled mountain rocks of every color and texture, next to Marolt Ranch.  I got a library card at the public library each summer and in addition to signing out two or three fifteen-minute computer slots each week to email friends and family, I checked out and read lots of books.  Two memorable projects I undertook were devouring huge numbers of C.S. Lewis's volumes, including some of his academic writing on medieval literature, and reading through the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy by Douglas Adams. I also picked up and perused the weekly free local newspaper while standing at bus stops. On occasion, tracking down non-cafeteria food with friends, strictly on the principle of the thing, was an occupation.   There was plenty of hanging around and playing card games, most notably spades or hearts. Writing letters was also a good way to stay busy, as was some solo study of German. One summer, my dumpster diving predilection acquired a very small black and white TV for my roommates and me.  It had poor reception,  and as the knobs were missing,  we rigged up a way to tune the stumps using some battered first aid scissors as pliers.  I can't recall that there was anything worth watching the times we cranked it on late at night.  One or two years, I attended the small, local boom-crash-bang Baptist church with friends from Cleveland early on Sunday mornings before running out to my 10:00 am weekly dress rehearsal for the Sunday afternoon Festival Orchestra concert.

About roommates - some were friends requested ahead of time, and some were luck of the draw.

The summer of my stay at the Grand Aspen - that's my story now.  For many years, the music school had rented out the Grand Aspen Hotel for student lodging.   It was not so grand as the name implied.  It was large and well situated in the south end of town with proximity to the spendiest restaurants and the ski lifts at Aspen Mountain.  But beyond that, it was like any basic hotel.  Two queen beds, a sturdy, but ugly dresser, the standard, round motel table with two chairs, one bedside table with a Bible and a phone book, a long counter with a sink, and a small bath/toilet room were all provided.  All the rooms opened to the outdoors on covered walkways with battered industrial carpeting. The summer I stayed there was after the hotel had closed to the public for good, but before it was razed for new development.   Things were, thus, somewhat dingy and in mild disrepair.  I had a luck-of-the-draw roommate,  a percussionist,  whose main conversation (which we had very, very little of) was about cheating on her boyfriend.  I remember one other brief conversation relating to bathroom maintenance and her explaination of a visitor who never showed... 

...At a cafeteria meal, a student conductor (that he was from Latin America is a random detail burned into my memory) asked me if he could come by some time to have me play through a certain piece for him  - I think it was the 3rd Mozart Violin Concerto.  This seemed like a reasonable request.  Conductors were always studying scores trying to get a handle on the musical nuance and what spots might need more care in rehearsal.  I dutifully picked up the music from the library and added some practice time on that work for the days leading up to the designated drop in.  I mentioned this upcoming meeting to my roommate an hour or two before, and she said that guy was not coming for Mozart,  but for *something else*.  I didn't fully believe her, but I took her suggestion to keep the door propped open.  As it was, he never appeared and I never happened to have run into him again.  In retrospect,  my roommate was probably right about the fellow's motives.  Thinking through it 20+ years after the fact, I am just now theorizing that conductor had probably already decided not to appear during our initial, lunch-time conversation about the Mozart when I clearly did not read his subtext or give him any vibes beyond studious nerd.  I had always wondered how he knew that afternoon not to show up at three o'clock, and this new idea seems the best explanation.

Now, to the neighbors...(the basic story line here is accurate,  but many details may be wrong at the distance of some decades.)

A few rooms down from us there lived a woman, probably in her 30s (let's call her Cindy), and her young daughter, who was 6 or 7 (let's call her Jenny).  Cindy was unemployed, and except for her barter with the school to do some cleaning at the hotel in exchange for the room, was nearly homeless.  After September or October, her only hope for housing was their old, temperamental van and the welcome of friends and relatives.   I am not sure if Jenny was in school during the year, and their meager grocery dollars came from face painting at the park.  Cindy was rightfully proud of her daughter's resourcefulness in making free tomato soup for the two of them by asking for a Styrofoam cup of hot water at McDonalds and stirring in a couple of  ketchup packets from the condiments and utensils counter.  I knew none of these details, of course, when I first happened to see the two of them about the hotel.

On the rare occasions when my roommate or I were hanging about the room, not engaged in something important,  we would leave the door open for fresh air.  On one of these occasions, a week or two into my stay, I was there alone, door propped open, and the woman from down the hall peeked in, carrying a basket of laundry.  She started up a conversation, and pretty quickly, she got down to business and asked if I had the Holy Spirit.  I was a little bewildered by this query.  The spiritual tradition of my raising didn't get super particular about the Holy Spirit, but if I had been forced to articulate that church's understanding, I probably would have said the Spirit was mysterious and also somehow involved in efforts at making the world a better place.  The religious tradition in which I was immersed at that time had very specific doctrine around the Holy Spirit, and if pressed, I could answer that He indwelt those who were truly saved by believing in Jesus, and, to simplify, He was the voice of conscience.  So anyway, not sure what the neighbor was talking about, I mumbled: yes.  In response to this, she said she had seen me several times and could tell I was different from the other students.  This did not seem stalker-ish or inaccurate, for that matter, so I easily took her at her word, which was my habit anyway.  Then, she asked if she could pray with me. I was a little uncomfortable with this request for reasons that I cannot quite articulate - it was just sort of a sensation, but having spent a lifetime of anxiety in fawning mode (none of which I understood then), I said: sure.  She set down her basket of laundry, laid her hands on my shoulders, and after a few typical-sounding evangelical prayer words, began repeating seemingly random syllables many times in a row at high speed. Following my initial bewilderment, I quickly deduced that she was speaking in tongues after the fashion of the charismatics, and I was a little surprised to hear how non-linguistic and unvaried it sounded. The practice of speaking in invented personal tongues was something I had been specifically and theologically warned about in the Baptist circles I had found myself traveling in back in Cleveland.  After this surprise prayer encounter was over, the conversation ended pleasantly enough, though I was pumped full of adrenaline and vague unexpressed confusion (a common enough result of talking to strangers, and even sometimes friends, so that it was not notable in and of itself).

Now having been acquainted,  I began running into these neighbors more often and was invited into their room for crackers and chat.  We had pleasant and genuine interactions; Cindy had a decidedly animistic worldview under a guise of evangelicalism, and I was at a place in my life where I was deeply curious, quietly experimental, and also, in intellectual honesty, unsure of the details surrounding ultimate truth at the deepest levels.  (I suppose that description fits me now, too, although with a slightly different overlay and way more data, though that data is still only a drop in the bucket.)

Cindy and Jenny were involved in the charismatic congregation in town and had some friends there who were very supportive.... I wish for them, that our society were more egalitarian, communal, and less structured, maybe more hunter-gatherer; then they would have been surviving just fine, rather than hanging on by the toenails.  I learned from Cindy that according to the Pentacostals, there were a number of  people from the local Baptist church who had the Holy Spirit, though I never learned what the criterion for that conclusion were or how the Pentacostals were able to pinpoint these people.

The most unexpected experience of the summer happened one afternoon when I was leaning over the railing just outside my room.  Cindy stopped to chat with me, and I heard the following sentence uttered: "I don't want to scare you, but I've noticed a demon in your knees.  Have you felt any warmth or anything there?"  I mumbled something unintelligible, not thinking this could be real, but also unable to contradict anyone who had any possible power over me in any conceivable way (age, in her case.)  She started praying to cast out this demon only she had detected. All details of that prayer event are lost to memory save that someone else walked by at one point, and she temporarily stopped, stating that she didn't want to weird them out.  I don't recall really wanting to stand there for this strange ritual, but I did not know how to/that I could  leave, and I was also sort of fascinated.  It was an anthropology study moment at its finest.  I sort of wished something dramatic or noticeable would happen with this demon outcasting so I would be assured that I wasn't caught in a crazy vortex of invention.  Anyway, nothing at all happened, and it was singularly undramatic and boring, my life totally unchanged.  At some later point she gave me several tracts about various uniquely Pentacostal things, all of which I read and tried to imagine believing,  but the possibility escaped me entirely despite my application to the thought experiment.  They all met the recycle bin in a month or two, despite my long-lasting special interests in Jewish and Christian practices and theology which were unfamiliar to me.

However, the most unexpected part of this neighborly relationship came when one weekend I became the de facto guardian for Jenny while her mother had to go down to Colorado Springs.... I don't remember what precisely her business was there - was she visiting her husband in prison?  Meeting up with a friend who was giving her some cash?  I have no recollection.   I am sure it was not any sort of illegal activity.   She asked me the week before if I could spend two nights (Friday and Saturday) with little Jenny.  I was in charge of her breakfast and dinner - their room had a mini fridge and microwave. There was putting her to bed and sleeping in her room to keep watch overnight. I was also in charge of anointing her with oil and performing a specific prayer before delivering her to a middle-aged friend (let's call her Martha) from their church each morning.  These were a big responsibility,  but manageable around my rehearsal and practice schedule. I was probably 20 years old.

Things got a little dicier on Sunday when I got a message from Cindy that she would not be back as planned.  I had it in the back of my mind that she might have up and left and would never return.  I ended up leaving a voice mail on the number she gave me that if I did not hear from her about coming back I would call the police.  Shortly thereafter,  we received a tearful call on the room phone saying that her van had broken and she was trying to get the money to fix it, and please don't call the police because she could not afford to get involved with CPS, and detailing for me specific prayers I could say that would help her get back to Aspen.  

So Monday morning came and I still had Jenny, and Martha was not able to take her as she had to work.  I also had run out of groceries for her, so after I had gotten her to bed Sunday night,  I'd run upstairs to the room for a couple of friends and asked them to keep an eye on her in case of emergency,  while I literally ran on foot to the nearest grocery to pick up the bare minimum as quickly as possible, panicking that something would happen while I was away. Thankfully, she slept and the hotel did not burn down.  Monday was the day off for the festival,  although I did have a privately scheduled rehearsal with a pianist. I was not able to find someone else to watch Jenny, so I ended up taking her with me on the bus to my rehearsal.  She had a couple of toys with her, and I asked her to play just outside the room where I was rehearsing so I could see her through the glass door.  It was on the rural day school campus and seemed quite safe as long as she did not get lost in the woods or fall into the lake.  Thankfully, neither of these things happened.   The pianist I was working with had some harsh words about the child's mother given the situation,  and while I, too, felt that things were not optimal and kind of frifhtening around the edges, I did have empathy for the challenges they faced, which I am sure were beyond the experience of the pianist I was working with.  In the end, Cindy did come back, of course.  I can't decide if I got into this for purely altruistic reasons or because  was easy to manipulate, and the truth is probably some of both.

At the end of the summer, Cindy threw a little birthday party for me in a small lounge at the hotel.  She invited three of my gracious and open-minded friends, and served chips.  Jenny gave me several small plastic toys from her collection.  I have photos from that party in one of my albums, and I still have a little framed photo of Jenny in my glass cabinet.  She will be an adult by now, and I wonder how everything is turning out for her.

One other very memorable non-musical experience is worth relating regarding the Grand Aspen Hotel summer.  I have mentioned the friends from Cleveland.  Two I went to school with - the other was at another school in Ohio.  One, the female, really was a good buddy, and we did many things together over the years, including road trips and prison performances.  The other male from my school I always thought of as a friend, but there were some dynamics around him I could not put my finger on.  I was just thinking now, that he seemed to have groupies and low grade enemies.  I suppose I was a groupie, and it was not a very reciprocal friendship.   I still have high regard for him, feeling happy when I hear of hia musical successes along the lines of what he really hoped for.  Anyway, one of the two males in question suggested a movie night in the lounge of the place where one of them was staying, and they picked a horror-mystery called The Bone Collector.  I have always been VERY sensitive to frightening content, and books or articles or videos which other kids would find amusing would keep me awake for days.  So watching this was obviously a huge mistake for me, and...I could not tear myself away.  I slept maybe two hours a night for a couple of nights, which was completely awful.  Plus I had to get to my room before dark or chaparroned by a friend.  So many times I still remember lying in my queen hotel bed the first night after the viewing, staring at the red flashing light of the smoke detector, absolutely paralyzed, almost unable to breathe, feeling that death might overtake me at any moment.  0 out of 10 - would not recommend that film.  Also would recommend giving up fawning and being a groupie and walking away from the social engagement, things that I did not have the knowledge or skills to do at that time.

I realize this all makes is sound like Aspen was a strange and slightly dangerous place for me to be, but really, it was mostly extremely wonderful, and maybe I should write more about that in another post some time.