Life of Wry

Five saxes, five trumpets, four trombones, and a six person rhythm section combined to  b-l-a-s-t, with great flare and musicianship, ten surprisingly distinct arrangements by Tito Puente last night.  It was rousing and very attention-getting. Explosively rousing!  I–who struggles a little to understand and enjoy band music–could hardly hold still.  I tracked our place in the program because I wanted to remember the names of the songs, not because I was counting songs until the end, which is what I kinda do at band concerts. The music was deeply beatful. Beatful, yes. Should be a word.

Fun, too, was seeing Peter (in the row in front of me, and many seats to the left–calculatedly far away and among his friends), so engaged.  He appeared utterly fascinated by his band teacher who was playing trumpet–fascinated and twitchy in that way kids are when they see their teachers being actual real people in the world.  He also looked to be transfixed by the moves and sounds of the phenomenal bari sax player.   He even, even, turned to catch my eye a few times with a look of “can you believe this!” and “that’s MY instrument!”   

I was gratified beyond words to hear the band leader talk of Tito Puente so admiringly and smartly, and describe his music as joyful and complex, sure that Peter was being drugged for a lifetime with this appreciation for latin jazz.

It was all just very cool.

~ ~ ~

NOTES:

– That’s Clyde Quick, Holmes’ band teacher, on trumpet, top row, left most.                            – This is the Sacramento Jazz Orchestra, and the concert was at Sac State’s music hall.

You can’t tell, but it’s raining cats/dogs here along the western-ish banks of Putah Creek.  That’s me, under the umbrella.  More interesting is the conversation; you can get a lot in over the course of a 5-mile walk plus cafe time.

Glad umbrellas don’t have ears.

Steve Jobs died today.  Looked again at his commencement address at Stanford, back in 2005.  A great presentation of three stories and a few well stated words of advice.  I liked a lot of it, especially this:

‎Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.  Stay hungry.  Stay foolish.  

-Steve Jobs 1955-2011

A sad, yet oddly inspiring day.

Remembered another quote on the subject:

When asked what surprised him most about humanity, he answered, “Man, because he is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present, the result being that he doesn’t live in the present or the future. He lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

-Dalai Lama

 

 

How many hours does it take to figure out the perfect combination of cardio, strengthening, stretching and balancing exercises to maximize performance and minimize injury and sustain a healthy body for, oh, I don’t know, say, the next 40 years?

Too many hours.  All day actually.

My current perfect formula is courtesy of the last couple physical therapists I’ve been working with.  At least it’s largely informed by the dozen or so visits in the last couple months.  So helpful these guys are!

And lest you think I’ve gone off the deep end of obsessive fitness wackadoodle mania, or am committing some kind of exercise fanaticide, well, I’m not.  I just hurt and am tired of it.

Being the former PE major type that I am, I don’t take this stuff lightly, nor do I settle for the kind of total body fitness program promoted in Cosmo or O Magazine.  I’m hard core.  But I’m also 55 and, did I already say, injured?

And it’s waaaay not the first time I’ve done this… come up with the perfect daily regimen.  In fact, I have so many such perfect daily regimens in my collection, developed over years (and years), the task today was all the harder, because I hate to let go of some of the brilliant exercises and clever sequences I’ve put together in the past.  But the sad truth is, if I held on to all of it, the damn thing would take me 3 hours a day.  And that’s not happening. So I had to let go of some of it and prioritize certain body parts.

After futzing with it all day (really), I have a doable daily cardio goal, a sensible strengthening plan that divides into body regions and distributes sanely over the course of the week,  and some awesome stretching that addresses, especially, the injured and traumatized areas.

I test drove the whole thing today and it all feels great, and best of all doesn’t take too, too long:

Cardio: an hour; Strength/stretch/balance stuff: 40 minutes.  Per day.  Six days a week.  Or at least until I’m out of the woods.

It’s pretty, too.  All in tables, with attractive colored headers identifying the day and/or category, neatly numbered so all I have to do is look at the day and follow the plan.  Takes all the randomness out of it.  You can call it anal retentiveness gone totally, insanely amok, but it works for me. Especially now that it’s done.

Chalk this up to being responsible, at least on the health front.  Because we’re supposed to, right?  It’s like one of the legs of that all important, well-balanced stool.  Right?

I’m rolling my eyes, too.  But happy.

Grey sky and lemon

cookies, tangerine tea and 

editing. How fun.

So, it was that World’s Greatest Bicycle Parade day in Davis.  Nice event, nice idea for a fundraiser, so many folks ya know.. all that feel-good-community stuff.  And chances are very good that 1) lots of money was raised, and 2) Davis broke its own Guinness world record for longest human bike parade with less than three lengths between riders over a course that was more than four miles.. or whatever the record was.. with probably somewhere around 1000 people.

News at 11.

We were very middle of the pack.  It was quite fun.

Yay us.

All morning, I kept saying to myself, “all our friends are on parado.”  This is a phrase I’ve said to myself for decades and always brings a secret inside smile.  My own little private joke.  It comes from a t-shirt I bought in Bangkok (or maybe it was Singapore) and is one of those foreign apparel products that mangles the english language and makes english speaking tourists laugh hysterically, like, “omg, look how they spelled rok and role!”

I know.  I was young.

Anyway, here’s what the shirt looks like:

And here’s the text, close up:

Don’t you think it fits today’s parade pretty perfectly (you can read it better if you click)?

I wasn’t above having a good laugh over shirts like this, insensitive, naive, apolitically correct (or is that politically incorrect?) youth that I was.  Now I might probably think they do that on purpose.  Who’s having the last laugh now?

Of all the wonderful things one can buy in Bangkok or Singapore…

Still… I just love this shirt.

Every fall in our country, health care providers from coast to coast send out cheerful emails to their clients that say, in effect, “hey kids, it’s that time of year again, time for your flu shot.”  They then put on their serious faces and let us know that through our sensible and responsible action, we will avoid most strains of whatever flues might be going around this year… which benefits us, of course, but also the greater community.  Self immunity, community immunity, all important, all good.

Getting a flu shot kinda sucks, but hey, you know, it’s what we do–for us, for our communities, for healthy America.

Anyway, we got our email last week.

So, on this lovely Saturday morning, we rode our bikes along the graceful, tree-lined east edge of campus, past the creek, on to the green belt, and… well, ok… we actually didn’t ride our bikes, we drove, but only because we had a cranky teen who complained mightily about having to get out of bed so early on a non-school morning to go get a shot.

We arrived at the clinic and got into a short line with other first-day-of-flu-shot families.  The operation was efficient and business-like, staffed and carefully organized by earnest, well-trained volunteers with name tags and clip boards.

We filled out short forms, noted our desire for either a shot or a nasal application (which thrilled Peter) and five minutes later, we were on our way out the door.  Back into the sunshine, off to enjoy our easy days.

Here are Peter and Jim, and another family that looks to have come directly from soccer, heading back to our cars (or bikes), maybe stopping for treats on the way home, maybe stopping at the Farmer’s Market.

First world all the way.

I’m not really making fun of our little experience here. I’m enormously grateful.  We have access to efficient and effective preventative health care and we are incredibly fortunate.  This is not the case for most people on the planet.

Yesterday I read a story in the Enterprise about a Davis doctor who’d just returned from a trip to drought- and famine-stricken east Africa.  Dr. Hernando Garzon spent three weeks volunteering with the humanitarian organization Relief International which deals with numerous health crises arising from food and water shortages.  People there are compelled to migrate in search of resources and as these migrants gather into camps, additional health concerns emerge including infectious diseases from poor sanitation and hygiene, and epidemic diseases like measles and TB.

And by the way, I read the story yesterday while eating lunch, and honest to god, as I read the most heartrending part of Dr. Garzon’s account, I was shoving a big gob of pasta into my mouth.  The irony struck me immediately and was painful. Felt an uneasy jolt of first world versus third world injustice.  Felt like shit.

Conditions in east Kenya are beyond comprehension, the picture of a severely malnourished infant that accompanied the story brought quick tears, followed by an overpowering sense of helplessness; the problems in impoverished third world nations are so big and unfathomably boundless.

When you’re reading about suffering on the other side of the world, it’s all so abstract. The suffering is horrifying and at the same time so utterly beyond the context of your life, your experience, and the capacity, even, of your imagination.  But…I found myself thinking about the east Kenyan story while in line for my flu shot.

It was a harsh juxtaposition.

But awareness is a good place to start.

I’m looking back on this day and feeling happy, satisfied.

Wrapped up a project. Brought something back that was veering off the rails. Learned something completely fascinating. Shaped an amorphous, ill-defined thing. Filled a hole that I didn’t realize was a hole. Started a new project. Solved a minor problem. Let go a little more. Finally saw the inside of something. Got a break. Tried something new. Maybe mended a fence.

Which offset: running out of cash, nearly running out of gas, eating too much (twice) and forgetting to call my mom.

Huge net profit on the day.

Looked at the lyrics for REM’s Nightswimming, but.. they don’t tell any story that I can tie into tonight’s swimming, or this photo, or anything.

I was there just a couple hours ago.  I’m in the 7:15-8:15pm group, in the lane two more to the right in this shot.

For now.

It was not a great night.

I have the nicest friends.  Today, G brought me 1) pickles, 2) jam, 3) honey, 4) lavender (sweetly wrapped in a purple ribbon).  All grown on their farm not three minutes out of town. Other stuff, too (you name it, they’re growing it). They’re raising two inquisitive boys, breeding the most wonderful dogs, living life fully, smartly and with great respect for humanity.

She and T do it right.

Yay them.