Well, it’s been a couple of weeks and I’ve had a chance to internalize things and get the tears out of the way and get my head back into everyday things like work and brass and bills and other similarly riveting things.

After playing Mom’s memorial service a couple of Tuesdays ago, I jumped back into the banding world by returning to Atlanta in time for a rehearsal that night.

I’d planned to return a tuba that I’d been play-testing to the middleman who was trying to sell it, but he told me to hang onto it for a while, so I kept it for another week.  During the week, I offered the owner $4500 for it. He counter-offered $5000, but before I had a chance to respond, he put the thing up for sale in an eBay auction, effectively pissing off me and the guy who’d been acting as the middleman.

I immediately bid $4000 for it on eBay (not enough to meet his reserve price), and the sale ended last night with nobody else going over $2000.  I’m hoping that the seller goes back to the middleman to tell him that my offer of $4500 is now acceptable…at which point I’ll say that I saw the horn on eBay and he couldn’t get $2000 for it, so my offer is now $3000.

Jerk.

On Friday night, the band rehearsed with Dr. Joe Parisi, director of arguably the best brass band in the states – and one of the best in the world.  For about 3 hours, he put us through our paces on the two pieces that we’ll be playing at the championships next month.  Yesterday, we resumed rehearsing with Joe, this time for 7 hours.  Not sure how much we’ve improved as a result, but my chops are sore today.

That’s not a particularly good thing, because we’ve got a concert tonight.  I’m looking forward to it anyway.

Must get some shopping done (I’m completely out of food), and then figure out how to waste 5 hours before I head to the concert.

TWD

This one’s going to be tough.

Mom did exactly what I thought she’d do.  She waited for Cy to see her on Wednesday night, and then decided that she’d done all she had to do.

I got a call at work from Greg at about 3:20 Thursday afternoon, telling me that I needed to get to South Carolina quickly.

I wasn’t quite quick enough. 

At around 4:40, I got another call from Greg, this time telling me that there was no need to hurry.  She was gone.  The next twenty or thirty miles of highway were strangely blurry.  It was almost like there was water in my eyes or something.  Apparently, my phone also started to freak out a little bit, because people who called me had a very hard time understanding what I was trying to say.

Stupid cellular networks.  You’d think they could compensate for sobs.

So let’s talk a bit about my mother, who graced us with her presence for about 74 and one-quarter years before moving on to do whatever it is that we’ll all do eventually.

She was born on November 16th, 1935.  I can’t tell you a great deal about that day – or about any of the 11,004 days between that one and the one when I made my screaming, squalling, wrinkled and red entrance in 1966.  Neither can I tell you much about any one of the 16,133 days between that historic event and the one when she decided she’d seen enough of me.

What I can tell you is my overall impression of this lady who gave life to me and to my 4 siblings and who made life better for the last 57 years of my dad’s life.

She was short.  She loved my ex-wife a great deal, not only because my ex-wife is quite loveable, but also because my ex-wife was the only person in the family who was shorter than Mom was.  Even after my ex-wife put on her shoes, gaining that all-important inch that relegated Mom back into the “shortest” category.

She was a conservative to a fault, but she somehow managed to love me in spite of my failings in that area.   She knew that she couldn’t change my mind and I knew that I couldn’t change her mind and neither one of us gave a damn about that anyway.  She put humanity above republicanism, people above party, family above faults, and love above everything.

She was religious, although I honestly didn’t know how much until about 5 years ago.  I count that as a plus.  She worried about me and she prayed about me and she no doubt managed to mix those two things together; but she didn’t beat me over the head with her faith and she loved me in spite of my lack of it.

She was, as you may have deduced from my recent postings, not a lady with whom you’d want to tangle if she thought you were wronging one of her children.  I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to make things right for me against the odds on too many occasions to blow them all off as luck or pluck or general bitchiness or outright fear.  She stuck up for me (and I’m sure she did the same for my brothers and sisters) and won.

She was born with what I believe is referred to as “a tin ear” yet she still raised five musical children.  I heard her say many times (and I heard her sing a few times, so I believe her) that she only played the radio and the blender.  When I was young, she proved this countless times by playing the tune of the day while making cookies – by adjusting the speed of the cookie batter beaters.

Several years ago, she gave all of her kids a book containing a large number of the recipes that we’d all grown up with.  I don’t know how many meals I’ve made out of that book since I received it, but I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that I’ve used it 20 or more times a year since getting it.

She reveled in my accomplishments and she gave me the benefit of the doubt on my failures, regardless of how big or how small each was and regardless of how I viewed them myself.  If I was ecstatic, she kept me humble; and if I was humiliated, she kept me proud.

I could go on for hours telling you all about what a wonderful lady my mom was, but most of you already know it – and those of you who don’t will no doubt think that I’m just getting caught up in my grief.  You might be right about that, but if you think I’m embellishing, then you’d be wrong. She was not a perfect person – but she set the bar for everyone else I’ve known.

So I’ll end this entry now.  Those of you who didn’t know my mom might know her a bit better now.  Those of you who did might know a bit better how I feel about her now.  The present tense there is intentional.  She’s gone, but she’s still Mom.  My feelings will never change.

Goodbye, Mom.  I love you.

TWD

I guess “morning” might be somewhat of an understatement.  It’s currently about 5:00 AM (that’d be 10 in the morning for you, Al) and I’m awake for the third time after initially going to bed at around 10 last night.  The first time didn’t count – I hadn’t really fallen asleep yet and spent a few minutes at 10:30 trading a few texts with Chris.  I woke up again at around 1:00 this morning for no reason other than an inability to sleep.  Read a bit and went back to sleep until about half an hour ago.

This is starting to become sort of a trend lately, and it’s tough to say precisely what’s causing it.  God knows I like to sleep.  The last time I couldn’t was a few years ago – reference a recent “Momery” of my incoherent phone call to her at 2 in the morning – but we won’t relive that, okay?

I’m sure that, this time around, Mom is again involved with my insomnious ways, though in a markedly different aspect. I’m equally certain that a romantic interest is also wreaking a good amount of havoc with my normal circadian rhythms.  The current economic climate probably is contributing to sleeplessness as well.  Throw in a healthy dose of old-fashioned midlife crisis, complete with questions like,”What have I done with my life?” and, “What can I do with my life?” and, “Why can’t I start over knowing what I know now?” and I’d say I’ve got a great start on stumbling through the next several months on an average of, say, 4 hours of actual sleep per night.

So I guess I’ll just ramble here for a while and try to purge some of the numerous thoughts from my head by leaving them here to be perused at some future date when I’m more ready to deal with them.  Then maybe I’ll be able to catch another 20 minutes of slumber before dragging my dragging ass to work.

Cy is supposed to be in South Carolina this afternoon or tonight, and I do hope that Mom has some energy left and is lucid enough to have a chat with her.  I must admit that I’m somewhat astonished at the speed with which cancer has taken its toll.  My most recent basis for comparison was the demise of my friend David Willard, who carried on for over a year after his initial diagnosis and who was up and about right up until the day he checked in to the hospital and summarily checked out.  Granted, David was being treated during that year, rather than just choosing a hospice situation; but I think I still had it in the back of my mind, after seeing her in December and January, that Mom would be around until April or May at least.  After my visit last Saturday, I realized that my calendar was remarkably optimistic.  I don’t know how long a mind can will itself to carry on after its body has pretty much thrown in the towel, but I’d guess it has a lot to do with how much the mind thinks it has to accomplish.  My thoughts regarding Mom’s mind in this scenario are that she wants to talk to each of her kids, make sure we know our assignments going forward, and then she’ll decide the best time to call it a life.  If that’s the case, then her to-do list is just about completed.  She talked to me last weekend.  She’ll talk to Cy today. 

We were the last two kids on the list.

To Dad and my siblings, I apologize if the above comes across as cold or unfeeling or matter-of-fact or callous.  It is not meant to be any of those things.  I love my mother and, as the baby of this clan, it’s rough to think that her moribund state is probably the first of several that I’ll be witness to within my own family.

If anyone else who’s reading this thinks my thoughts border on the reptilian, well…bite me.

What else, what else?

Oh.  That romantic thing.  Yeah.  Spoke to Chris last night after two relatively tacet days over the weekend and a series of obviously distracted responses to my messages yesterday and heard that she wasn’t deliberately blowing me off, but that she was busy with applications for her grad school.  Guess that cockroach-infested university she visited made a favorable impression after all. 

Now I know I’ve been saying since revealing her existence that it wasn’t going to last and nobody should get too excited about it and yada yada yada…but I think I also mentioned recently that I’m a very hopeful person at heart. I had hoped (hell, I still do) that the two of us had a future together.  That hope dims a bit more each day and I’m not foolish enough to think that I’m going to hold on to a woman like her after she’s moved out of the range of, say, a spontaneous dinner date – particularly when she’ll have scads of buff young graduate students clamoring for her attentions; so I’ll just say this to her and let whatever chips are going to fall do so: You amaze me, I love you and I wish you the best in your endeavors.  I know you’ll do well.

And if you don’t get in, give me a call.

And while you’re waiting to find out if you get in, give me lots of calls.

Which brings us to midlife crises and finances.  God.  Those two seem to be fairly intermingled.  They say money can’t buy happiness, but it can sure as heck buy a lot of stuff that helps get there.

I don’t know if I am, was, or ever will be good enough to get a degree or a career in music, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that I’m probably never going to find out.  I’d love to be able to take a couple of years and practice and learn and perform and practice some more – in other words to be an undergrad music student again – but little things like mortgages and car payments and groceries and gasoline and other assorted expenses necessitate that I actually hold a job; and I’ve yet to find one of those where I’ll get paid to show up for an hour or two a day.  Paid enough actually to be able to take care of those bills, at any rate.

The lessons with Bernard have been fun and somewhat helpful (also somewhat distressing); but I don’t know that they’re actually preparing me for anything.  Perhaps if I had the time (and the funds) to do them for two hours a day, 5 days a week, I’d be more inspired.  An hour a week, however, along with whatever practice I can squeeze in on my own, is all I’m going to be getting for the foreseeable future; and I have to wonder if maybe that’s $200 a month that would be better-spent on an extra credit card payment or on home repairs or (let’s be honest here) a few bottles of scotch.

There must come a point in one’s crisis when one simply throws up his hands and says, “Enough.  This is all bullshit.  You’re fooling yourself.  Suck it up, forget about dreams and realize that you made your decisions too many years ago to back out of them now.”

I’m not at that point yet.  I’m just beginning to understand that that point does indeed exist.  Actually, I think I’m seeing it coming over the horizon.   To wax philosophical, maybe that’s the real crisis: when you realize that your crisis is, in fact, a fact.  That you can’t get a do-over of your life simply because it didn’t work out the way you’d hoped.

Well, everyone should now thoroughly be depressed.  If not, I can mark myself down as a failed epistolean along with everything else.  Considering that my initial plan was to be a writer, that’d be the most delicious irony, huh? 

As it is now 6:45, I guess that idea about additional slumber was a tad optimistic.  Methinks it will be a long day of coding.

Hug your parents, spouses and significant others today.  It might not make you feel better, but it’s sure to spread germs of one sort or another.  That’s an accomplishment.

TWD