bookends

Thank God for three-day weekends.

Things have been insane on the work front. Unmentionably, and not because of my Unmentionable Screw-Up of last week. No, the office assistant has been, for months, causing undue amounts of stress with constant and quite important other mistakes, which one of the other staff members and I have been pulling our hair out to correct. Fortunately, said office assistant resigned, which has evened things out a little bit -- no new mistakes to deal with -- but I've taken over a number of her tasks, on top of the ones I'm already doing, and it's been, quite simply, wearing me out. I haven't been as sharp, as on top of things, as I usually am, more prone to slips of memory, and a little less energetic.

Argh.

The Boss-Man and his wife are both out on vacation this week, so I'm the boss in their absence, and in charge of the training of the new person we've hired. A little heady, at times, I'm sure, but not exactly a Relaxing, Cat's Away kind of week, where I get to take off my shoes and in a leisurely fashion tidy the office up a bit. So I need this Memorial Day like a fish needs water.

Yesterday I took a three-hour nap...then went to bed at nine, and didn't get up until eight this morning. I'm feeling close to human again, hooray of hoorays, and looking forward to a long shower and some time to clean the apartment. It's beautifully sunny out after a whole weekend of rain, which we certainly needed, but I'm planning on an afternoon outside, and it's much more fun to do that when it's 80 degrees and bright.

I'm still picking away at the guitar. I've named her Saturnina...don't know why, and I'm sure my parents' friends who indefinitely loaned me the guitar will get a hair-turn over that one. But it seems to fit. The lovely instrument stays beautifully in tune. I've taught myself how to play scales. Strumming is a joke still (my rhythm was always a fluid, organic thing; I was much more suited to Debussy than Bach on the piano), but I'm hoping to pick up lessons for that. Right now I'm learning the chords.

The two things I miss most in teaching myself tiny bits of guitar are my piano and all the theory books I hated so much when I was nine. My piano teacher, an old troll of a woman who used to make me cry at lessons (Laura and I would take turns as to who went first from week to week, and the weeks I went first and came out of the piano room with tears on my cheeks, Laura would take one look at me, and her eyes would narrow, and she would march in and deliberately play such an awful lesson that our teacher would come out with tears on her cheeks -- I love my sister), always had me filling in chords and transposing on music sheets and workbooks, and I always wanted to throw them in the trash, and now I'm glad she made me do it, and wish I had them right next to me, because guitar is all theory. I love picking out songs by ear, and it was so simple on the keyboard; I don't get it nearly as well on the guitar, because the execution of the theory is different, and so I have to do it all in my head.

Fortunately Meg and Phillip have an electric keyboard that I just found out about, so when I was at their house on Friday I picked out the chords to a newer rendition of a hymn I love ("When I Survey the Wondrous Cross"), and put it in the key of C -- so easy to work with -- and this morning I fiddled with it on the guitar, and it worked! It's far from perfect, because my fingers haven't learned the chords, so it's slow and fumbling, but the chords are right.

I love music. Writing is the world I live in, but it's a discipline, a craft, it's the work I do, the quest, the compulsion, the fire in my bones, the burden on my back, the blood in my veins, the place where the joy and the despair and the frustration, the succeeding and the failing and the trying are fused into one inseparable thing. Music is the kite, the wing, the wind, the thing that seizes me and lifts me away. When I step into a song, into the melody, the harmonies, the composition, there's no struggle, little effort, and no demand; there's just the listening, the hearing of the strains of harmony, and the joining; when I sing, I shed myself, I expand, I lose, for a few minutes, the burden, the consciousness of me; I go somewhere else, pierced by a joy beyond joy; I become fully alive: free. Writing is the journey (and I live and believe in the journey); music is home.