Not All Who Wander Are Lost

All I Want Is Loving You And Music, Music, Music

The days blur in the heat and the constant acceleration towards graduation day. Threads stand out more than chronology: mother's day, trustee weekend, a low note of coffee. Throughout, a soundtrack, a musical motif. We'll start there; it's as good a way as any to get at things past.

Found two CDs my parents had given us last time we went to Newton: something sweet and encompassing Alison Brown: Best Of The Lighthouse Years and the Waifs' Up All Night. Both turn out to be excellent. Cleaned the house to them this morning while Darcie and Willow napped. Lighthouse -- track 4 on the Waifs' disk -- is worth it all. My parents have such good taste in music; I'm glad it's genetic.

Found it hard to focus on cleaning, though. I really depend on weekend sleep -- that magical banked time on Saturday or Sunday morning can make up for a whole week of down at 2, up at 7 -- but this weekend was actually less restful than, say, an average Tuesday/Wednesday workweek shift. Breakfast with the trustees and other faculty governance chairs, in suits on a Saturday morning, after a late but quiet Friday night of dorm duty sifting through the songs on the school radio station's auto-playlist...which led to Saturday morning's farmer's market, a stop-by on Darcie's grandmother with Willow and flowers, and a full afternoon mostly-hopelessly shopping for Mother's Day gifts with Ginny.

Then, after an even later duty last night (dorms close at 11:30, and hour later than usual, on Saturdays), up at 6 this morning to watch Willow while her mother, on her first Mother's Day ever, got to sleep late. Between their naps I gave Darcie the light world-funk Habib Koite CD she had asked for with a bunch of cards "from" me and Willow. After Brown and the Waifs I turned the Koite on, the house almost clean, to re-don charcoal slacks and blue silk blazer for Sacred Concert, sure I would fall asleep in the warmth of the auditorium but willing to give it the old prepschool try.

Sacred Concert started a hundred years ago when D. L. Moody, NMH school founder and evangelist, decided to have his students serenade his own mother. Today, it is a required, special-dress event -- suits and ties or dresses and heels -- for all students, with mothers encouraged to attend, although many instead just get frustrated that their students aren't supposed to be able to come home for, say, a traditional family dinner at a fancy restaurant. Today I went solo as Darcie went off with her parents and sister for a nice Mother's Day supper, sat with the dorm and had my own supper of bacon-wrapped scallops and honeystung chicken afterwards at the dining hall with librarian Pam and her late teenage local son. The school chorus and orchestra sound like professionals, not high school students, and the music itself, from hymns to Handel, was exquisite. Bummer I had to go alone. Didn't sleep though.

Tonight from 6-8 Acoustic Cafe, a nationally syndicated you-probably-get-it acoustic folk, rock, and country featured a set of five Patty Griffin covers by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Melissa Ferrick, Maura OConnell, and the Dixie Chicks. Ginny and I, out on an excursion after soapmaking with Darcie and her Mom in the student center kitchen, found it just as the coverset started. We drove the long ride home to listen. [a hypertextually semiotic pun!] O, heaven is a set of diverse interpretations of the work of my favorite songwriter, a friend and sister-in-law, being married to a mother -- so much, really, is right with the world; even in the midst of exhaustion, it's wonderful to hear the ozone rain on the flat roof.