My most-recent choral performance was
the Vienna Boys Choir
at the Scottsdale Center of the Performing Arts
on 2022 November 15.
Twenty-one pre-pubescent male voices blended magnificently
into a heavenly, harmonious whole
for both classical and more-popular selections.
The quality of his performance suggests
he spends a lot of his non-performing time
practicing his piano playing.
If you're ever in Vienna, then they're worth a listen.
But one thing caught my attention.
Here was a group of twenty-one boys,
many of whom looked like teenagers,
maybe fourteen or fifteen years old.
All had pristine high voices,
presumably the same pristine high voices
for the entire ten-week tour.
I don't know a lot of ways to keep
twenty-one boys' voices from changing
through puberty,
in fact I can only think of one.
Back in the not-so-good old days
choral works had the beauty of a castrato section.
I'm told they don't do that anymore,
I hope not to these boys.
Maybe there's another way to preserve
the beauty of these twenty-one voices
as I heard them.
So here I open my mailbox and there's a key.
The letter A, B, or C is long worn off,
so I try the key in all three boxes with some
vigorous wiggling and more-vigorous complaining.
None of these open very well,
so no treasure for me.
At least it's not summer where I don't want my new vinyl record
melting in the afternoon Scottsdale heat,
often 45°C (115°F).
So I decide to take the key to the office.
If I'm going to complain, then at least somebody appropriate
should listen to me.
Holiday season means I had to wait for a parking space
and then in a long line with the key dangling from my fingers
as I was fuming.
Finally the quick-service fellow for faster things
like stamp purchases sees me without a package
and invites me over.
I show him the bare key without any indication of which box it's for
and describe my frustration.
When I ask for another key to the same big box
he tells me he doesn't have those keys.
"Well who does have them?" I ask
and I'm told they're in some compartment
with the mailboxes themselves
but tomorrow's delivery will resolve my problem.
I have a picture of the carrier
(who already doesn't like me very much
'cuz I grumbled when he bent one of my records
stuffing it into the small box)
grudgingly marching my package to my doorstep
where he might hope I would be the victim of porch pirates.
(I'll point out that my cul-de-sac has never
been the victm of that sort of theft,
to my knowledge).
Instead my mailbox was the short-term home of another key,
also worn beyond recognition,
but this key actually worked in one of the boxes
and I got my package.
So they managed to solve my immediate problem
without doing anything to reduce the likelihood
of such a problem recurring.
Even the infamous post office
is usually better than that.
I also keep an old 22-inch K&E slide rule,
way above my pay grade when we were still using slide rules,
more for sentiment than practicality.
I have my grandmother's dishes in one trophy case
next to her trinkets and
my great-grandmother's dishes in another trophy case.
I have my father's office calendar and my mother's napkin holder.
I love my old stuff.
Unlike one of my older friends Bill
I'm not a luddite.
I love the new technology alongside the old.
I have high-speed Internet and local network
so I can watch movies and television shows
and I use that network to play the FLAC files
(Free Lossless Audio Codec) "ripped" from my
compact disks (CDs).
There are laptop computers in every room of my house
(except bathrooms),
I work from home using Internet terminal sessions
and Microsoft Teams to communicate,
and I rely on my home network to manage
photographs
when I
travel.
I have lots of gadgets.
All of my bathrooms have motion-detector toilet lights
so I don't have to turn on the light at night
and motion-detector fans for air circulation.
Amazon Alexa controls my thermostats
so I can turn on more heat or air conditioning downstairs
while I'm getting out of bed upstairs.
It was -30°C (-20°F) and windy at night,
I was driving home and tired,
and there were two women on the side of the road
alone with a flat tire.
So I pulled over and changed their tire
with a steady patter explaining what I was doing
so maybe next time they would have a fighting chance.
Maybe I got home twenty minutes later,
but these two might not have gotten home at all,
so it's a win all around.
Maybe something good happened to me later by karma,
but I know I felt better that night.
I remember a friend whose car wouldn't start
New Year's Eve in a parking lot at Kennedy Airport
and he recalled how cheerful and upbeat the fellow was
when he came to start my friend's car.
Was he happy to be working in the cold on New Year's Eve?
Probably not, but apparently he felt he could spread
some holiday cheer in a situation not generally cheerful.
After a few hours of flight delays
I finally got to my car at The Parking Spot in Phoenix
and the van driver Roger commented that he liked my new car.
I had to ask, he sees thousands upon thousands of cars,
why would he remember mine?
He said he remembers me because I'm so upbeat.
Late and tired I wasn't feeling all that upbeat,
so I asked him about it.
He said, "Your flight was delayed,
there are no flights at one-thirty in the morning,
and you're still cheerful."
I said that six hours from Philly may have turned
into nine hours, but it still beats walking.
"Well, some people don't have that attitude."
I was at Hearing Life in Scottsdale,
my $8000 Oticon hearing aids were "on the fritz"
and I was grateful they could squeeze me in to fix them.
Another customer was giving them the third degree
howcum I spent $6000 on hearing aids
and they don't work.
I looked at the beleaguered and besieged clerk
and said I'm able to hear what people are saying
and to appreciate the beauty of music at a high level
364 days a year, one day I don't get that benefit,
and that sounds like a win to me.
She said some people don't see it that way.
There is some rational reason to believe in
the platitudes about positive attitude.
First, being nice to people makes them happier
and more likely to be nice in return.
Second, our world is small enough that being overtly helpful
may be remembered by somebody in a situation where we need help.
Sometimes I ask myself what I did to deserve
having good people and good things in my life,
but maybe I did do something to make some of that happen.
You know how it is.
I dread having people ask me to pick something up at Starbucks.
Is it latte or double-latte or mocha with cream and/or sugar
and, if so, what kind of cream is it and is it
white sugar or brown sugar?
Oh, yes, don't forget, small, medium, large, or extra large?
No matter how carefully my friend specifies the order
I know I'm going to be asked at least one more question
where I have to call my friend and ask
for more information about the coffee order.
Our lives have become an ever-increasing whirlwind
of selections upon selections, more and more overchoice.
The book came in a choice of twelve colors.
I take great pleasure in listening to music in my life.
Being most human myself
I take pleasure in the sound of a human voice or,
even more wonderful,
an entire chorus of human voices.
(That I'm not a big opera fan
I attribute to my already-full concert schedule
and my even-greater appreciation of ballet.
I recently went to a product of "Carmen"
that was to die for,
the music was terrific, the singing was terrific,
and it was physically passionate to the point of pornography,
as the story is supposed to be.)
As my natural hearing is no longer what it was,
my latest-technology Oticon hearing aids are a joy to me.
They allow me to resolve audible differences
in music and hifi.
As an audiophile weenie they enable me to make sound comparisons,
for example between amplifiers and the line-cords to the mains power.
I have no trouble aligning
a (vinyl) phonograph cartridge by ear.
Up until this concert
the default Music setting on these hearing aids
has been uniformly delightful in the concert hall
and this is the first time I had trouble.
There was an overloading, distorting effect
in my hearing aids that was mitigated
by turning their volume down.
Once I lowered the sound level of the hearing aids they were fine,
but it was amusing to hear something
with so much higher frequency content
of so much complexity
that they were overwhelmed.
My house was built circa 1975
and I figure our mailboxes are from the same era.
Like our houses it appears these mailboxes
were not built to endure.
In particular, the keys to the three large boxes
don't work very well.
It takes several minutes of frustrating wiggling
to get the big box open so I can get the treasure inside,
often a vinyl phonograph record.
I love my old stuff, especially my hifi.
My recently-departed friend Mel Schilling
sold
me his old loudspeakers in 1985
and I figure he listened to them for twenty years before that.
My turntable was new in 1979,
I manufactured the tonearm in 1980,
and the cartridge is from 1969.
The electronics are early-to-mid 1980s vintage.
My records and tapes are joy to me.
We're inundated with annoying exhortations to be upbeat and happy,
you know the bit about positive outlook bringing positive results.
It's kind of like the karma bullshit,
that doing good here and now makes something good
more likely to happen somewhere else later.
The thing is I find myself believing in it
and I find it works for me.
I like living in a world where people feel
they ought to do good works,
but there are reasons why it should be that,
"what goes around comes around,"
and more good things happen to happier people.
When I was in high school in 1972 taking a course in
Sociology
we read a book by Alvin Toffler called
Future Shock.
Mr. Toffler made three assertions I recall.
First, facing the future would be as great a source of stress
as running into a more-advanced civilization,
so his analogy to culture shock was that we would
have to deal with future shock.
Second, one of the two major stress points
was not only change but the rate of change
would increase to the point of being a source of personal pain.
Third, that we would be inundated with choice,
pointless choice, gratuitous choice,
choice overload, cognitive impairment that he called
"overchoice."
Over the latter part of 2022
I began to have pain in my left knee.
My usual summer-morning workout is
a twenty-mile (32 Km) bicycle ride
with a two-kilometer (1.2-mile) run in the middle,
but the limited morning light squeezes out the run part
and my sensitive knee, therefore, isn't a problem in my mornings.
Even though I had some sore-knee mornings
I was still able to hike six or even eight miles.
The moments of pain come suddenly,
like there are two surfaces a hair's width apart
and when they touch it hurts,
so I had some concerns doing longer hikes
with the possibility of limping home in pain,
but the pain wasn't that bad when it did hurt while walking.
Besides being my doctor coming up on twenty years, Dr. Hinchman is also an athlete himself. I saw him 2022 December 28, he listened patiently to his patient's story and send me for an MRI exam. (I'm old enough to remember when the technology was called "nuclear magnetic resonance" (NMR), but people were afraid of anything "nuclear" and now it's magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instead.) I went to Scottsdale Medical Imaging Lab (SMIL) on 2023 January 7 and got a technical-sounding report that summarizes to something like, "The patient may be a whining crybaby about his sore knee but there's really stuff wrong in there." My medial meniscus has an inner margin tear of the posterior horn, so there is real damage.
Dr. Hinchman called me and chatted about the report. There is a long and laborious route of physical therapy and healing or maybe there is a surgical route to remove the torn tissue like I did last time with my right knee. He thinks we're a long way from me needing a knee replacement and I'm glad to hear that. I was more than happy with my experience six years ago with Dr. Russo and he is still in business. He is a surgeon and his first response may lean towards surgery, but that's also the way I'm feeling right now. If there's something ripped apart or torn asunder, then a local surgical repair may be the answer. I made an appointment to see Dr. Russo 2023 January 25, Wednesday.
After weeks of gentle coddling my knee doesn't hurt at all. That gives me license to do whatever I want. I could do jumping jacks or running in place. I decided I want to continue to walk gently and to use hand-support "furniture cruising" when possible, no hiking or running, and sticking to bicycling and upper-body weight lifting for exercise.
Dr. Russo looked at old x-rays and new MRI scans, poked at my knee, and said waiting for it to heal was my best option. The only part that hurts is the lower-outer "lateral" part of my knee and the only visible or repairable damage is on the inner "medial" part of my knee. So I'm going to be gentle with my knee and take a little bit of Tylenol, and not Advil with my Xarelto blood thinner.
So I try to reach my fingers around the tape on my deck,
realize it's hopeless or,
worse, I'm going to drop the reel if I try,
put down whatever I'm holding in the other hand,
and pick up the reel with both hands to put it
back in the box for another day.
Maybe, for inspiration,
I should have a picture of Wilt Chamberlain
holding a reel that looks like a drink coaster in his hand.
(He probably could palm a
ten-inch
reel or even a twelve-inch long-play (LP) vinyl record.)
When he mentioned
Artur Rubinstein
something dawned on me.
I'm a practicing mathematician,
I call myself an
"Industrial Mathematician,
my advanced degree is in a field called Operations Research,
and I've been to several conferences over the years
where people in the field gather
for professional talks and conversation.
I have met many of the famous people in my profession.
If I were an academic instead of a practitioner
I would have significantly more social intercourse
in my professional circles.
My friend
Forman Acton
knew just about every famous mathematician and physicist
in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Jeffrey Siegel was alone on the stage
and I believe not one famous classical-music pianist
was in the audience.
His concert season is busy.
A few years ago it was twenty-two venues
doing four Keyboard-Conversations concerts
for a total of eighty-eight, one for each key on the piano.
I joked that if he played a Bosendorfer piano
with ninety-two keys
he would have to do a twenty-third venue.
I doubt he has much time to attend concerts
performed by his contemporary piano performers.
He says he maintained friendships with other concert pianists
and I believe he does,
but it is an effort he would have to make
more than I have to do.
I'm glad for him that he's able
to stay in touch with his community
because it has been a blessing for me
to have a professional community
where we know each other and, occasionally,
see each other.
Lagging left:
One of the positive features of Scottsdale
is that left-turn, cross-traffic-flow, traffic-light-green arrows
come after the straight-ahead green light.
This is good for drivers because it keeps more traffic going straight.
This is good for bicycles because it clears out the right-turn lane
before the light turns green.
This is good for pedestrians because the last traffic
going across is confined to just the left-turn lanes.
Well, Scottsdale decided to do something about it.
They found something worse than switching all the intersections.
Instead they changed just some of them
so we don't know which way the lights are going to go next.
Late turn signals:
There is something more annoying than drivers
not using their blinkers, or "signaling straight" as I put it.
There is something more annoying,
waiting until the turn is already in progress
and flipping on the blinker as if to say,
"Yes, I know we're supposed to use blinkers,
but I can be more annoying this way."
A new generation of idiocy has drivers "wolfpacking,"
as one friends calls it,
going out of their way to hang with other drivers.
I've made as many as four speed changes only to have
a tag-along-in-my-blind-spot driver stay with me.
I remember how cool it was that the professional-league
National Basketball Association (NBA) players
can "palm" a basketball, pick it up with one hand and hold it.
When I want to take a reel off my tape deck
with something in my other hand,
I feel pathetic that I can't even palm a seven-inch reel of tape.
It's kind of like when I see professioal dancers
fly through the air making it look so easy
and then I go for a run and I have to plan my steps ahead
so I don't trip over a curbstone.
They
say
pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff
could reach
thirteen notes
while most of us more-mortal mortals
are happy when we can reach nine notes, one more than an octave.
I have a whirlwind of concerts,
last night, tomorrow night, and the next four nights after that.
Last night was at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts,
Jeffrey Siegel, pianist, doing his "Keyboard Conversations"
where he talks about each piece before playing it.
After five-plus decades doing this he is still on his game
and it was both educationallly and musically a wonderful evening.
Driving and drivers are long-term topics
of complaining conversation.
Here are a few items that I grumble about more recently.
14:53:06 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
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