Monday's Child
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace.
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go.
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living.
And the child born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, good and gay.
Happy holidays from our little tin can by the sea!
Not the best of years. I have cancer and I have been told that I will be fighting some form of cancer for the rest of my life. The statistics are grim - only 14% of those diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer survive 5 years after diagnosis. My oncologist has told me that the longest she has had someone survive after that same diagnosis is ten years, and they died from brain cancer. So, I try to mitigate that reality by waking up and celebrating it. Every wake-up is a win!
I learned that Mr. Henry Pugh, the man that played keyboard and sang at our wedding, passed away on August 15, 2020. His rendition of Louis Armstrong's "What a wonderful world" will always be in our hearts. Since he sang it on our wedding day, it has always been "our" song. We celebrated our 10th anniversary by listening to Mr. Pugh while aboard the Harriott II riverboat in Montgomery, Alabama. The Hariott II replaced the Betsy Ann at the slip in Montgomery. Mr. Pugh was 83 and he died of COVID-19.
Like a train that stops at every station,
We all deal with trials and tribulations
Fear hangs the fellow that ties up his years
Entangled in yellow and cries all his tears
Changes come before we can go
Learn to see them before we're too old
Don't just take me for tryin' to be heavy
Understand, it's time to get ready for the storm
- Stevie Ray Vaughan, "Couldn't Stand the Weather", Couldn't Stand the Weather, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, 1984
That ignorance and hate
May mourn the dead
It is believing
It is believing
- The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", Revolver, 1966
Howdy and welcome back to our little tin can by the sea. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I wish that I could be sitting at the tables of all of my friends and family, but not this year. We've been doing well as we adapt to my life with cancer. I am still optimistic that it will be eradicated from my body, but part of me knows that only 16% of people that contract stage 4 colon cancer live more than five years after being diagnosed. I still try to stay chipper and I often say, "Every wakeup is a win!"
No numbers. At this point, they are meaningless. Our governor has tailored the reported data so that Florida looks good. Meanwhile, people die. The delta variant has razed the unvaccinated and it will continue to do so. With over 90 million still unvaxxed in the US, it has a plethora of hosts. I'll do an annual post again in March, to mark year two.
The real reason that I'm blogging today is that the verdict for the death of Ahmaud Arbery came back today. This is how it was reported by Rachel Tillman of Spectrum News:
Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan each faced nine counts of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony.
Travis McMichael, 35, was found guilty of all charges against him, including malice murder and felony murder.
Greg McMichael, 65, was found not guilty of malice murder, but was found guilty on all other counts, including felony murder, assault and false imprisonment.
Bryan was found not guilty on one count each of malice murder, felony murder and aggravated assault, but was found guilty on six other charges including felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and attempt to commit a felony.
All three men will be required to stay in custody until their sentencing hearing, a date for which has not yet been announced.
The men face minimum sentences of life in prison. It is up to the judge to decide whether that comes with or without the possibility of parole.
Revenge is not Justice. Does this "right" compensate for all of the "wrongs"? No, and it was to be swept under the rug initially, if not for a video of the event authored by Bryan. The Georgia's DA office is still biased. The Georgia police are still biased. Many of the citizens of Georgia are biased. This has not changed that, but that is where the work needs to be done, one mind at a time.
To that end, the following was reported by the New York Times:
Judge Timothy R. Walmsley of Savannah was tapped to preside over the Arbery case in 2020 after all five judges in Glynn County, Ga., where the shooting occurred, recused themselves.
That needs to be fixed.
We're on a mission in the everlastin' light that shines
A revelation of the truth in chapters of our minds
- Michael Jackson, "We are here to change the world", The Ultimate Collection, from the film Captain EO, Disney, 1986
This was given to me by Mrs. Dorothy Lucot, who had it on her refrigerator for years. It is a newspaper clipping from either the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or the Pittsburgh Press back in the 1970s.
The above chart shows the air conditioner (cyan lines) giving over to the heater (orange lines) last night. That marks the beginning of the cool-down here in Florida. It was 57 degrees on the lanai this morning when we left for my chemo appointment (brrr!)
As I sat next to the Pharmacy counter in our local Publix, I decided to count the number of people that were not properly wearing a mask. This included masks worn around the chin, gators of any form, masks exposing the nose, and no mask at all. I excluded children in my count. During the wait of nearly an hour, I counted 37 unmasked patrons. They covered a wide range of ages, from teenagers to elderly and a broud swath of demographics.
I then realized the reason that they were maskless - it's inconvenient. Forget the rest of the hogwash of rights, religious exceptions, medical exceptions, and the like - these people are just too damn lazy to care about another human being other than themselves. Three of the unmasked that I counted were mothers with children in tow. I feel for those kids since they have at least one parent that doesn't care at all.
Howdy folks,
I have begun a separate blog for my cancer journey. Here is the URL: https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/everywakeupisawin . I did this to make it easier for people looking for cancer information to be able to find it on one blog site.
We WILL beat this together!
Steve
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One white flag for each death in the US from COVID-19. I have lost three friends to this pandemic.
Entire article from The Smithsonian is here. 😢
I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again
- James Taylor, "Fire and Rain", Sweet Baby James, 1970
Before drawing too many conclusions regarding this chart, note that the coloration is biased. Instead of going from 0 to 100 percent, this goes from 2.4 to 32.2 percent. With that caveat, it's interesting to see that there are definitive edges along state borders, which implies that the generation of an uninsured constituency is a matter of state policy.
Welcome address to freshman parents at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Ithaca College.
“One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture - why would anyone bother with music? And yet - from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art.
Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."
On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant?
Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic.
The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings - people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding, cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks.
Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way.
The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:
"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life.
Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."
For the unvaccinated and those dispensing lies: Ex 20:13
Exodus 20:13
by Mary Oliver
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
| Scope | Cases | Deaths |
| Worldwide | 120,094,542 | 2,660,516 |
| United States | 30,043,662 | 546,605 |
| Florida | 1,973,109 | 32,252 |
| Pinellas County | 68,912 | 1,501 |
Sometimes I feelSometimes I feelLike I've been tiedTo the whipping postTied to the whipping postTied to the whipping postGood Lord, I feel like I'm dying- Gregg Allman, "Whipping Post", The Allman Brothers Band, 1971
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
Welcome from our little tin can by the sea. This has been a rough week: I had a very good friend die on Monday, we passed 4000 COVID deaths in a single day in the US, and our president committed a seditious act by inciting a gathering of over 100,000 to ransack the Capitol. On top of that, I'm ill.
I met Ed Stephens on my first day at Honeywell Industrial Automation and Control in Phoenix AZ, after transferring from their Atlanta, GA location. Ed had just hired on the day before after working at Asea Brown Bovari (ABB) in Columbus, OH. Ed had a strong wit, and was a dynamo with knowledge. He could recite delicate intricacies in acquisitions with this person going here and that person fitting there - it was an education to hear him over lunch or during a break. Ed's wife, Elaine, was quite a treat, too. Originally a Mississippi lady, Elaine was comfortable with everyone. She passed in 2019 and a little over a year later, so has Ed. We stayed casual friends over the years, exchanging Christmas cards and an occasional phone call or email. How precious those wisps of communication are now. I miss you both, Ed and Elaine!
COVID-19 is uncontrolled in the US and the rollout of the vaccine is moving very slow. Biden, the pres-elect, has promised to improve this state. A: I wish him luck, and B: It should be an easy task, considering how terrible it is now.
sedition n. - incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority
Our sitting president has committed an act of sedition by sending his rally audience to ransack the Capitol. Five people died, one of them an officer. Republican members of the senate and house raised objections to the certified counts from the states, becoming accomplices. At the rally, the sitting pres continued his reckless lies of voter fraud despite losing numerous court cases on that very item. By facilitating the lie, these congressional members became complicit in sedition:
Senate: Tommy Tuberville, Ala. Roger Marshall, Kan. John Kennedy, La. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Miss. Josh Hawley, Mo. Ted Cruz, Texas
House: Robert B. Aderholt, Ala. Mo Brooks, Ala. Jerry Carl, Ala. Barry Moore, Ala. Gary Palmer, Ala. Mike Rogers, Ala. Andy Biggs, Ariz. Paul Gosar, Ariz. Debbie Lesko, Ariz. Rick Crawford, Ark. Ken Calvert, Calif. Mike Garcia, Calif. Darrell Issa, Calif. Doug LaMalfa, Calif. Kevin McCarthy, Calif. Devin Nunes, Calif. Jay Obernolte, Calif. Lauren Boebert, Colo. Doug Lamborn, Colo. Kat Cammack, Fla. Mario Diaz-Balart, Fla. Byron Donalds, Fla. Neal Dunn, Fla. Scott Franklin, Fla. Matt Gaetz, Fla. Carlos Gimenez, Fla. Brian Mast, Fla. Bill Posey, Fla. John Rutherford, Fla. Greg Steube, Fla. Daniel Webster, Fla. Rick Allen, Ga. Earl L. "Buddy" Carter, Ga. Andrew Clyde, Ga. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ga. Jody Hice, Ga. Barry Loudermilk, Ga. Russ Fulcher, Idaho Mike Bost, Ill. Mary Miller, Ill. Jim Baird, Ind. Jim Banks, Ind. Jackie Walorski, Ind. Ron Estes, Kan. Jacob LaTurner, Kan. Tracey Mann, Kan. Harold Rogers, Ky. Clay Higgins, La. Mike Johnson, La. Steve Scalise, La. Andy Harris, Md. Jack Bergman, Mich. Lisa McClain, Mich. Tim Walberg, Mich. Michelle Fischbach, Minn. Jim Hagedorn, Minn. Michael Guest, Miss. Trent Kelly, Miss. Steven Palazzo, Miss. Sam Graves, Mo. Vicky Hartzler, Mo. Billy Long, Mo. Blaine Luetkemeyer, Mo. Jason Smith, Mo. Matt Rosendale, Mont. Dan Bishop, N.C. Ted Budd, N.C. Madison Cawthorn, N.C. Richard Hudson, N.C. David Rouzer, N.C. Jeff Van Drew, N.J. Yvette Herrell, N.M. Chris Jacobs, N.Y. Nicole Malliotakis, N.Y. Lee Zeldin, N.Y. Adrian Smith, Neb. Warren Davidson, Ohio Bob Gibbs, Ohio Bill Johnson, Ohio Jim Jordan, Ohio Stephanie Bice, Okla. Tom Cole, Okla. Kevin Hern, Okla. Frank Lucas, Okla. Markwayne Mullin, Okla. John Joyce, Pa. Mike Kelly, Pa. Scott Perry, Pa. Guy Reschenthaler, Pa. Jeff Duncan, S.C. Ralph Norman, S.C. Tom Rice, S.C. William Timmons, S.C. Joe Wilson, S.C. Tim Burchett, Tenn. Scott DesJarlais, Tenn. Chuck Fleischmann, Tenn. Mark E. Green, Tenn. Diana Harshbarger, Tenn. John Rose, Tenn. Jodey Arrington, Texas Brian Babin, Texas Michael C. Burgess, Texas John R. Carter, Texas Michael Cloud, Texas Pat Fallon, Texas Louie Gohmert, Texas Lance Gooden, Texas Ronny Jackson, Texas Troy Nehls, Texas August Pfluger, Texas Pete Sessions, Texas Randy Weber, Texas Roger Williams, Texas Ron Wright, Texas Ben Cline, Va. Bob Good, Va. Morgan Griffith, Va. Carol Miller, W.Va. Scott Fitzgerald, Wis. Tom Tiffany, Wis.
Hope. Every New Years eve brings hope that this next year will be better than the last. Considering how atrocious 2020 was, it should be a low-bar for 2021. On the COVID front, my son-in-law plans to go to work today after a stint with COVID where he still has a cough. Personally, I think that's stupid, but I don't get to set the rules this year, either. My daughter has come down with the virus and is hurting. I hope that her run with it is quick and not long-lasting. I've managed to come down with something affecting my intestines. I see the doc on a televisit this coming Tuesday.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
- Emily Dickenson