July 14, 2007 at 6:40 AM
I got an email from Susie, asking if I would please join the summer music festival at the beginning of August. Every year, it comes around, but by July, I'm so far from the music scene that I can't take my trail shoes off long enough to attend a single rehearsal. It breaks my heart--this year, Paul Rosenthal will be playing the Beethoven concerto, and I would love to see it. I want to do it. I'm thinking about it. Will this year finally be year I play in the community orchestra for the summer music festival?Meanwhile, I've been preparing to give birth to some ideas I've had simmering back there in my brain for a long while. You see, I like to draw. Yeah, I know, you don't read about it much here; that's because I took last year off completely. But I've always liked to go out and see beauty and capture it in art. However, things got busy last fall, when I'd hoped to get some color pencil ideas ready for my annual October show. The show fell through right about the same time I got into the symphony.
The Anchorage Symphony concert season begins in September. Teaching commences around Labor Day. So this summer is it. It's the only time I have to get ideas and assemble them on paper, and this time I'm gonna do it. I'm pretty excited about it, actually. It will be hard; I'll be rusty, for certain. But in October, I will have new drawings to hang on the wall once again. I can't wait.
Now for some reason, I just can't shake this uncomfortable feeling, as I sit here thinking about someone else. Whose strings lie silent. And alone. Just down the hall in that darkened room...
Lovely artwork! I can't believe you drew that, it's so gorgeous.
Josef Gingold once asked an old student:"How's your violin? Do you still take a daily promenade on the fingerboard?... or at least do you take it out of the closet and stroke it, sit with it awhile?"
Yours is not really an "affair", is it? Its the same love wearing different clothes. :-)
I used to draw with a lot of grey, back when I was depressed. This drawing was created during that period, although looking at it doesn't depress me. It calms me.
The air was particularly warm and still that morning, especially for September in Canada, and though the sun hadn't yet risen, I needed only a light jacket for warmth while I finished waking up. I walked in silence along a shore of polished stones, whose uniformity in size and shape reminded me of a well-tended rock garden. The water's smooth ripples were echoed in the texture of the worn driftwood trunk that lay just out of its reach. For a moment, the mountains, the lake, the rocks, and the wood were bathed only in blue.
And then. Go ahead build up this whole scene and leave out the whole reason for it (which is this someone else).
And what about the birth? And if there's someone else who's the father?
Who's this mysterious person who's refered to as the other? Why does he or she keep you from the one whose strings aren't taut anymore?
Has anyone offered you any money for that "someone else"? Is he going to the museum, and if so which museum? Will he meet someone else there and will their light intertwine?
What will happen if he finds out that he left a child behind?
Will the child grow up to be like his father?
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