Being 60 -- Day 3

Birthenalia report: it was fun, touching, inspiring...

Right out of the chutes, and on a purely 3-D reality level, having someone else do the food was a stroke of genius. My wonderful massage therapist, Angie, is also a chef, and I asked her to come up with some casual brunch-type food for the party. She outdid all my expectations and brought mountains of delicious food items: bulgar/quinoa tabouli with artichoke hearts, feta cheese and walnuts ...... another yummy salad with corn, cherry tomatoes and fresh mozzarella ..... fresh figs with goat cheese .... spring rolls with peanut sauce ..... a cheese torte with pesto and sundried tomatoes. Oh it was heaven, having all that food just SHOW UP. All I made was watermelon agua fresca, and the always-popular chocolate bread with vanilla butter.

We are still eating party leftovers and I am fantasizing about having a live-in cook. Let's see, I could give up my office in the spare room to create a bedroom for Angie.... the thought of a) having food this good every day and b) not having to cook it myself ..... is a glorious one.



As the day went on, and beloved friends came and went, I was inspired to ask each one to share a hint or tip or a piece of general advice for me for the new year, decade and life in general. We started with the youngest and went up from there. I was touched by the results, which ranged from the familiar/cliche to the very personal. But even the commonest words rang strongly in my ears, coming as they did from seasoned human beings. The reason a lot of things become cliches is that they are actually true.

"Take responsibility for your own happiness -- and have fun"

"Presence is more important than presents."

"Plant pansies and paint pictures."

"Follow your Light -- you are the Light"

"No rain, no rainbows"

"Listen to the flowers"

"The Universe is teaching you: learn to steer"

Probably the two most profound pieces of advice came from women in their 80's. First, my 82+ year old mother-in-law told me "Life begins at 60 ..... or wherever you are right now."

And, from my 88-year old Aunt Rene, who phoned in the midst of the party, and when pressed for a few words of wisdom for the coming year/s, told me:

"Give your boy lotsa lovin', and make sure he knows who's boss"

In my 38+ years of marriage, I've pretty much operated that way, and if she's still vouching for it after 61 years of marriage, then I'll take it as good sound advice.

The final suggestion came from my near-twin, Barb, who earlier in the week had given me the Turning 60 Advance Report (look out for tired legs the first week). She told me I would have to do a tough bike repair on the 8th day. Pretty scary, considering my (lack of) mechanical skills. Any bike I touched would probably collapse into a heap of metal within seconds of riding. I'd better have a plan for next Monday.

On turning 60 -- the report so far

Yikes. How did it happen? The usual way, I guess: by living one day at a time. Whatever the process, here I am, 60 years old today. Like a good Leo, I am talking about it. Like a proper Leo in clown mode, I am mugging for my early morning birthday photo:



What am I doing to celebrate my natal day? Progress so far:

Got up at 4:30 for my usual coffee and journal time. Tried to think of some big goals for the year, and/or for my 60's in general. Decided on just two.

1. My current favorite journal notebooks are from France: Clairefontaine notebooks with lovely smooth paper and rather wide margins. From now on I'm going to go outside the margin lines in my journal notebook, so as to waste less paper and just live larger. Woohoo!

2. I'm going to cultivate more joy and gratitude, every moment I can. A lot more enjoyable than gloom, fear and pessimism, and better for the heart and brain.

And look -- so far it is already working! First my sweetheart, newly returned from the Oregon Bike Ride, got up and made our morning juice. He does this every morning without fail, but I am too lazy to make juice when he is gone, so the birthday juice is tasting especially sweet. Now he is cleaning the oven and soon he will vacuum the house for this afternoon.

Friends and family members, near and far, have phoned to sing or say 'happy birthday', and my near-twin friend Barb (born 8 days before me) called to give me the Field Report on the First Week of Being 60. She told me to look out for tired legs, the first week (she was also on the bike tour). Perhaps I should add a #3 -- 'get plenty of rest.'? It's always good to get these tips from older, wiser friends.

There's a party of sorts planned for this afternoon, though it's nothing more than my usual Birthenalia: food, conversation and lots of DIY live music. Musician friends bring their instruments and music and we all take turns bashing away at piano duets and assorted chamber music.

I've gone really wild this year and have asked a chef/friend to make most of the food, so my only culinary jobs this year are making the beverages (tea and watermelon agua fresca) and my infamous chocolate bread with vanilla butter. Here is the chocolate bread so far:



The menu also calls for sliced tomatoes with fresh mozzarella, so I am heading out to the garden to harvest some of my bounteous tomato crop. More on that next week.

Bee Guilt

I did it again. I murdered bees. Or rather, I hired someone else to murder members of the bee clan.

A few days ago I noticed yellowjackets flying around my legs while I was turning on the hose to water my front garden. Just a couple, and they weren't attacking me, but still ...........

Looking closer, I could see a telltale hole in the soil, right up against the brick facing on the front of house, with yellowjackets entering and exiting. Uh oh. This is familiar. Last September we discovered a large nest of yellowjackets under the front deck. By 'we' I mean my sweetheart, who couldn't figure out why he was getting 3 or 4 stings on his ankles every time he walked between the garage and the front door. We looked around and found a nice little entrance/exit hole under the fascia board, right in the main walkway part of the deck.

After consulting our environmental consciences and the local 'pest control' guy, we decided we had to do something drastic (for the yellowjackets, anyway) and had him come out and remove, ie destroy the nest. It was about time for piano students to start wending their way to the front door and I just didn't want to see them getting stung. Or us getting stung either.

That nest turned out to be huge -- the guy who used a (somewhat environmentally nonlethal) poison powder to knock out the workers -- said it probably had 40,000 combined workers and larvae. Aiiieeee.

This nest turned out to be much smaller -- they were still ramping up to full size and worker production, since we're about 3 weeks earlier in the year. These guys are valuable predators but they are more short-tempered than the other bees/wasps/hornets we have around here, and once their nests get big they are very touchy and attack anything that comes near it. I am sure if I hadn't noticed the nest now, I would have gotten stung before too long. As it was, since it was only a few feet from the front door and right beneath the hose bib, I must have been stepping right on it each time I turned the water on or off. I was lucky!

So.......... I have bee guilt. I will apologize to the overlighting spirit of hornets, perhaps offer them some flower essences for rebalancing and stabilizing, and hope for all future nests to be far away from the house. Members of the wasp/hornet clan are very sensitive to 'noise' -- both audible and energetic disturbance, and perhaps there is something here that is drawing them to our home environment. A good reminder to be mindful of overall thought patterns in our home, and of the need to keep an open heart towards this home-and-garden as an integral part of the natural world.

July? What July?

Now I understand how bloggers come to feel the need to apologize for long time gaps between posts. I suppose I have an unusually quiet life that normally exists outside some 'real world' of constant busyness that I have no comprehension of. I know that I am very lucky that I am able to work out of my home and pretty much choose my own hours -- though this has been a conscious choice that does include a certain amount of (mostly voluntary) financial sacrifice. For these and many other reasons, I am fortunate to have long quiet mornings most days of the week, and at least in summertime, time to throw dirt around and hang out with the flower fairies to my heart's content.

By any measure, though, this month has pretty much vanished from the standpoint of my doing anything but music, music and more music. From the standpoint of the piano monster concert as a soil-less garden, July was a banner month. The concert was amazingly fun, exciting, and successful for all concerned: students, teachers, parents and most wonderfully of all, our unexpectedly huge audience. We actually filled the small hall (400 seats) with a warm, enthusiastic audience composed of not just family and friends of the players (47 kids in all, plus 14 teachers/adult performers) but seemingly random community members of all kinds. I have heard from parents of long-ago piano students, community choir members, a couple of bank workers, bicyclists, next-door neighbors of adult piano students, even my acupuncturist and many other surprising folks who somehow got the word and thought hearing 8 grand pianos played at once by a bunch of kids sounded like a good time out on a midsummer Wednesday evening.



That's me, on the front left, leading the charge in a piano quartet (2 pianos, 4 players) X 3 arrangement of 'The Stars and Stripes Forever' with all my best piano playing buddies. It was SO fun I could hardly stand it. And just so you can see that I do actually play the piano, here's another shot of me, filling in on one of the student pieces........



This soil-less garden was conceived over a period of about 4 years, but the actual planning, 'layout', 'seeding', 'cultivating' and ongoing maintenance took place over the last year. I'm giving myself a few weeks off, and then we start planning for 2010. Yippeee!

Monster Garden?

All of my gardening so far this month has been indoors. Call it a Monster Garden, a Piano Jungle, or just plain crazy, but for the past 2 weeks I have been buried in piano monster concert planning, organizing, rehearsing, and soon, performing! I believe the word 'garden' can encompass much more than soil and green living things, an idea that I've had for a while, but which has been greatly strengthened and enhanced through studying the works of Machaelle Small Wright of Perelandra. More on that another time, perhaps, but for now, here are a few more 'July yellows'!

And we teachers get to play too:

July is Yellow

Every year when the first Saturday in July rolls around, our house turns yellow. The flag goes up, and the daily schedule shifts into race mode. For the next 3 weeks, we follow the Tour de France, the world's greatest bicycle race and the most widely-watched sporting event in the world, live. For those of us living on the West Coast, this means settling into place in our official Tour de France sofa at 5:30 am PDT, most days. The mountain stages require a bit more commitment, as coverage begins anywhere from 3:30 to 4:30 am. But don't ever doubt it: we'll be there.

It's only been since 2002 that we've been able to watch the race live, from home. That was the year we joined the modern world and got a satellite dish, solely to watch bike racing. This was a vast improvement over previous years, when we had to rely on friends to tape a few key stages for us, which we then had to watch long after the results were known -- and even this coverage was still new to the US. There was no tv coverage of any kind of professional bike racing until the mid-1980's. Americans have been painfully slow to recognize any sport that don't involve either a ball of some kind, or motor vehicles.

This year the race happens to begin on U.S. Independence Day. This means we've had to combine race viewing with pie-making, a happy union as it turned out. Manly Pie Man created his usual splendid dessert offering for the annual shop barbecue, and Lil Ned did the decor, perhaps my most glorious creation yet.



But this July is doubly yellow. July also includes the first annual Bend Piano Monster Concert, and the t-shirts are ..................... yellow! Can it be a coincidence? No way around it. July is YELLOW!

Big Spi--- I mean, Big Brother is Watching

Yikes. Following my last post, I've starting getting ads for extermination services on my internet pages. With big pictures of ....... spiders, right there on my screen. Is Big Spider watching? Is Google in league with the the arachnidae? No doubt I inadvertantly downloaded some upgrade to my internet interface that is causing this. But it's a bit unnerving to suddenly see spiders everywhere on my screen. I think I got wasps after the initial post.

From now on I'm only going to post about bunnies and flowers and luuuuuuuuuuv.