Friday Five: First Times

A fun play from MaryBeth:

 

Firsts. With so many folks starting school, college, seminary, etc. I've been thinking of a lot of other firsts in my life.  Share with us, if you will:

Your first "place" - whether it was an apartment, dorm room, or home with a new spouse, the first place where you really felt like a grown-up:

 

My first apartment, post-college--the one I got all by myself. The one where I kept a hammer under the bed in case of intruders. The one where a forgotten head of lettuce turned to soup in the crisper. The one that was over a computer-repair shop. The one where I went downstairs one morning to discover that my my car had been squished by a truck in the night (and the trucker left a note, shoring up my faith in human nature). The one that my dad helped me to wallpaper, instilling in me one of my first Important Life Lessons:

never, ever wallpaper with anyone you ever want to speak to again.

Your first time away from home. Construe this any way you want. College? Girl Scout Camp? Study Abroad?

 Oooooo...Girl Scout Camp! Many interesting things were discovered:

• Oranges impaled on peppermint sticks, through which the juice was sucked out. Mmmmmm.
• Cliques, which left several girls in tears...and me, just mad as I watched it unfold.
• My first earworm in memory, sung repeatedly with Julie Elswick in our tent after lights-out (listen at your own risk):

Your first job in your field of endeavor (so, not babysitting, unless you are A Professional Babysitter today).

 

I had two church music jobs while in college; actually, I'd been leading since I was about 13, but these were my first steady, paid gigs. The real job was at a campus-adjacent church, where I led Saturday night Mass from behind a guitar, with a talented teenage girl singing along. That was fun.

Less fun was the situation with our college chapel services; our liturgist (who I adored) left over the summer, and she hadn't been replaced. The sister in charge of the chapel services fully expected that I'd lead the music in her place until such time as a new hire could be made...without any sort of compensation (my first experience of the "undervalued musician" dynamic). I tried to explain to her that I'd be happy to bring my gifts and years of training to bear on the dilemma, but that I'd like to call it a work/study situation (at the princely sum of $7/hour...quite a bargain was I!), as I needed to eat that summer. Otherwise, another paying job would need to take up the hours she was looking to fill with music. Let the record state that summer chapel services were music-free that year.

Your first time hosting. Again, construed broadly, this could be a dinner for the in-laws, your first time to have guests for a holiday meal, etc.

 

My best friend/roommate and I, post-college, decided to host our church "young adults" group for a sloppy joes/beer/movie gathering one New Year's Day. This was a particularly close group of people; we spent a great deal of our free time together (one couple had got rather publicly engaged at the Christmas party), and almost all of us lived within a radius of just three miles or so.

So, that morning, as I cleaned the apartment, Roommate went to the kitchen to start cooking. We had no ground beef.

No. Ground. Beef.

This made the planned menu rather difficult to prepare. So, thought I, "I'll just go over to the grocery store and pick some up." On New Year's Day. You can see where this is going...

So we got on the phone and called the guests, inviting them to bring a pound of ground beef along, if they had one.

Every party we hosted (or attended) that year, we were given ground beef.

Your first love.That can be a person or something else!!

 

I was absolutely nuts about my elementary school music class. Singing, playing instruments, talking about music...I was absolutely HOOKED. Mrs. Ewald (to whom I will always be grateful) made it so much fun! I loved "music stations" days, where we rotated around the room, trying out various instruments and music games. I loved that she got us to bring in the instruments we studied privately, to demonstrate for the rest of the class (my first performance experience!). I loved that we frequently sang this song (expressing my nascent inner hippie):

 ...and that, every Halloween, she got out crayons and drawing paper, and had us draw this music:

Besides being fun, it opened my mind to music as a vehicle for storytelling, art and other forms of expression. Well done, Mrs. Ewald!

Playing injured

So...it's May, 2007.

The choir brought to birth so patiently and lovingly by the efforts of a truly exceptional bunch of people is about to sing its first spring concert season (we're excited, because the Christmas season went well!). The Wednesday before our first concert, my phone rings. It's the wife of one of our two tenors, calling from his hospital room. He's just had an emergency appendectomy. He's doing well, but you can guess where my head went next. Our concert is three days away, and this guy represents exactly half of one voice part.

Can you believe, he SANG the concert, plus the three that followed? Medal of Valor to him.

Fast forward. In the next three times around the track, our group of 12-14 people has had the following maladies occur within a week of the first concert of the season:

• broken ankle
• broken wrist (on the alto with a recorder solo)
• virus resulting in complete laryngitis

Not to mention another member's discovery (and subsequent treatment) of cancer.

All of them--ALL of them--rallied. They did everything possible to sing/play the concerts; barstools, casts, pain meds, slings (and don't even get me started about the accompanying "arrows of outrageous fortune!"). And the rest of the group comes through for them by learning extra voice parts so that we have coverage.

There is much joking about the InVocation Curse, and we've been considering a traveling trophy (and maybe a supplemental insurance policy of some kind!).

I wonder how Chanticleer and Cantus manage this; they're our size or smaller, and divide into at least as many voice parts as we do. (Perhaps I'll e-mail and ask them! If any of you choral types out there have wisdom to share, please do so!) Not to mention the million smaller groups out there.

Anyway, we had two concerts last weekend. We finish this season with one more tonight and one tomorrow night, along with a church service beforehand. And now what, you ask?

Yesterday, one tenor had a fever of 101; another got HIT BY A CAR. (He's OK, but left part of his face on the street, and is referring to himself as the Phantom of the Opera.) Both are planning to sing.

As a director and fellow singer, I'm grateful to these amazing people for their willingness to tough it out. And I hope it's clear to them that I'm aware that it costs them something to do so. And I hope that they take good care of themselves, and don't push beyond what's healthy for them. And I wonder where the line is, and how to care for both "the needs of the many and the needs of the one," especially an injured one.

And I ask you, is it too much to ask that this good-hearted group of people get ONE concert season in which no one gets sick or hurt? This is not a full-contact sport; usually, pads and helmets are not required choral equipment. And there aren't that many of us--statistically and karmically, I think we've got one healthy season coming.

Right? Seriously?

I do so love my peeps, and wish them well--on SO many levels. :-)

Turn that frown upside down

I dare you not to smile. I double-dog dare you!

Come to the table

My friend Daniel is a composer. I've sung--and programmed-- several of his works, with my congregation and with three different choirs. My favorite of those works is a hymn he wrote, which is part of my personal canon of hymns; it could easily have been included in my post of a few weeks ago (in fact, several of you did just that in your response to my question!). For those of you who haven't heard it, the words are

Come to the table; come as you are.
Come as you're able; see whose child you are.
There is room at the table of the Lord.

Bring your burdens and your cares;
take them to the Lord in prayer.
In our weakness God is there; can't you see?

Come to the table; come as you are.
Come as you're able; see whose child you are.
There is room at the table of the Lord.

In the mercy that abounds,
and accepting love we've found,
by the blessed tie we're bound as family.

Won't you come to the table, come as you are,
come as you're able--see whose child you are.
There is room at the table of the Lord.

(c) Daniel L. Pederson

There's a persistence in this text--I think it does a really good job of painting God's utterly open invitation to all comers. I like that it puts that invitation in our mouths. I like that it acknowledges our burdens, our need for mercy. I like the combination of plural and singular pronouns that sets a context of "us," instead of only "me" (and yet, it feels personal to sing it). I like that it assures that mercy and grace are available for the asking. Most of all, I like that it helps us to sing our way into a love that's so much bigger than we are, it can't help but spill over the rim of any cup that tries to contain it.

Perhaps inevitably, as a member of the GLBT community, I care about that. Not for the sake of using a hymn to promote "diversity," but because it's authentically healing. Beloved and I chose it for our wedding; a lesbian friend later told us that it moved her to tears with its radical welcome at a time when her own recently-former church community had made her decidedly unwelcome. This hymn has offered the same message to many other people who have felt themselves outside the embrace of God and community, whatever their reasons.

It's robust, bountiful.

Musically, it sings with the ease of a hymn, in four parts...and yet, there's a harmonic and melodic freshness that accomplishes what so many don't--it bridges styles to the point at which style is no longer a question. It's eminently singable and, well, just appealing.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and we'll go to my sister's house, to her welcome table. Today, I woke up before the alarm (thanks to Linus's paw on my nose) with this hymn playing in my head. In the half hour or so before the beeping began, I started compiling my "I'm thankful for..." list. It's a long list. Afterward, I popped out of bed, humming "Come to the Table."

Thankfulness is powerful. I think it's helpful that a day is set aside for it on the American calendar this week, in the midst of so much anxiety about the economy and many other, very real boogeymen of this period in history. Because thankfulness is an antidote to anxiety: it grounds us in our giftedness; it locates us in relationship to God and to one another; and on this particular day, it plunks us down at a table of comparative plenty to receive again the gifts of the land and the fruits of our (and many others') labors. We finally take a moment to notice the people and the things that make our lives meaningful...that make them possible. And while our eyes are fixed on those gifts, we turn away from the fears that cow and shrink us. We live large, inside the promise of goodness to come...of goodness that has already come.

It's a holy communion table.

And so, friends, my hope for you on this holiday is that you come as you are to the table, remembering who--and whose--you are.

Thanks be to God.

Ordinary miracles

It's Monday morning, and I'm mellow and happy. I had an actual Sabbath yesterday (after a wild-but-good, musicky Rally/Welcome Sunday) at church.

42 years old, and I may just have figured out that I need a day or two to get comparatively quiet...watch the pups romp in the yard, read a bit, eat a really nice meal, make a little music, curl up with Beloved and the pups and just enjoy the fact that we're all together, healthy, sheltered, fed. Ordinary miracles--when I get quiet enough to notice their abundance, it's impossible not to be incredibly grateful to be alive.

I hope that you're drenched in blessing today, too. :-)

The yellow line

It's snowing. The air temperature is in the high 20s, and it's rush hour here in Minneapolis...in other words, excellent conditions for wretched driving. I've never been happier to get home and hug my wife. I could easily have died about 30 minutes ago, or at least had my life changed in a Very Big Way.

I didn't. It wasn't. And I'm feeling very much like the guy in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" who, at the approach of the undertaker's wooden cart, hollers "I'm not dead yet!"

Of course, he then gets it in the back of the head with a frying pan...

I was on a busy street. I wasn't going very fast, but I hit a patch of ice. I'm a cautious, experienced driver with a healthy respect for the weather, but I'm not sure any of that mattered at all, in the moment. It was pretty much out of my hands. I have to say, it's unnerving to look directly into the grilles of oncoming cars. I turned the wheel, ever so slightly, intuiting that even being broadsided by the folks on my side of the dotted line would be preferable to running into opposing traffic face-first. There were cars behind me, but they were in the other lane, which apparently was not as icy. After swirling around a bit, I ended up perpendicular to traffic, with both of my front tires kissing the curb. There was a queue of rather surprised drivers on either side of me, waiting for me to right myself, and my mortality was giving me a gleeful raspberry from the passenger seat.

And now, I'm awed.

At how much could have changed for me and mine in the space of 10 heartbeats.
At the richness of being in this world.
At how deeply grateful I am to still be here.

We spend a lot of time defining what side of the "line" we're on...politically, theologically, in any number of ways. I could easily have been wiped out today by someone on either side of the yellow line. And everyone involved seemed to cooperate in the moment of crisis, conspiring to keep all of us as safe (!) and whole as we'd been before our almost-incident. Maybe, just maybe, at the bottom of it all, we're better at being a human family, more instinctively inclined to look out for each other, than Conventional Wisdom would have us believe.

Was self-preservation involved here, on the part of all the drivers? Undoubtedly. But tonight was also an illustration of the premise that we all do better when we all do better. And that, without more than a fraction of a second to react, we do try to look out for one another when it really matters.

Boundaries are necessary. They help us to locate ourselves and one another, keep us from most collisions, and help to point us in the right direction when we need it. But I'm sure not seeing boundaries right now; instead of what separates us, I see what we hold in common. Instead of the terror I'd have expected, considering how close that really was (and my propensity for hyperbole), I'm weirdly calm and even a bit joyful. Actually, I was sort of amazed not to have that "omigodomigodomigod" adrenaline rush that often accompanies situations like that, despite the fact that The Big Unknown got (literally) all up in my grille tonight.

I'm just grateful for the other drivers on the road (which I'll earnestly try to remember at tomorrow's rush hour when I want to swear at them again). I'm grateful to be looking out my kitchen window at the snow, smelling dinner cooking, looking forward to a mundane "snuggle on the couch and watch TV" evening with my lovely wife. I'm grateful for all the love in my life.

I'm grateful that, even though I really crossed the line in the most basic way today, I'll get to see what tomorrow has in store.

Got to go now. I'm home, and I'm so glad to be here tonight.

Peace, friends. Take care of each other.

P.S. Got to give a shout-out to my friend Milton for a particularly wonderful post today. Go & see. :-)