Oh Irene

It was a slower walk/run today than yesterday.  As I tune in to my body and trying to live more healthfully, I am learning that what I eat has a direct correlation on my workouts.  No carbs (other than fruit) today and I was very slow.  Energy was lacking.

On the other hand, slower isn't always a bad thing.  I look around and see more and enjoy my time outside.  Today there were gulls and geese, new landscaping near the river, Hurricane Sandy (10/22/12) cleanups ongoing, newly listed homes for sale, spring window displays downtown, fireplaces going (I love that smell), lots of dog walkers and miniscule peeks at the sun.

I'd intended to go for 7 miles but only got in 5.  It was really raw and windy and I could have used another layer.  Preparation is always half the battle.  I hadn't slowed down on Riverside Drive in a while so I hadn't noticed all the tiny flags from the gas company before today.  You know ... those markers the gas company puts out before you can dig in an area.  They mark where the gas lines are.  All of the homes that were abandoned or bought by the town in the FEMA buy-out after Hurricane Irene (8/28/11) have lots of little gas line markers.  This is because they will soon be a pile of rubble.

It took my breath away to realize the day that my neighborhood changes forever is almost here.  They've been talking about this for a year and I knew this day was coming.  But for it to be really here is so sad.  I look at those homes and think about the families that lived there.  Young ones and older couples.  People forced to relocate because the river overflowed into their homes one too many times.  I look at them and imagine birthday dinners and Christmas trees, kids taking their first steps and prom dates arriving, laundry, lawn mowing and laughter.  Simple lives lived in my dear sweet little neighborhood of regular folks just looking for nothing more than keeping up and enjoying what they have managed to acquire.  

My thoughts then turned to other communities devastated by natural disasters.  Ours was a blip compared to what you hear about on the news.  There are only a dozen or so houses coming down.  Statistically speaking, I suppose that's not a lot.  But when it's your backyard that will be changed forever, it doesn't really matter if it's 12 or 120.  Although it's 3 streets away and I didn't personally know these people, their stories are known to all of us.  Some have moved to different homes in the neighborhood.  Some just fled after the storm.  Some people built their homes back (one whose home slipped off it's foundation, built a beautiful, bigger house) and others couldn't face the thought of renovating only to have the next storm take it all away again.  I admit with the amount of snow melt and rain we have going on at the moment, I'm wondering if I can face the water that will inevitably invade my place in the coming month.

But what must it be like to live in a place that's completely wiped out by floodwaters or a tornado or earthquake.  How do you build back an entire town with schools, stores, houses and businesses?  How do you trust and have faith and courage to start over in the face of such disasters.  I'm in awe of the communities that do it.  Just as I'm in awe of mine.  Our disaster--albeit on a smaller scale--proved that you can face challenges and rise above them.  That hard decisions, like leaving your home behind and starting fresh, can be made and families can come through great difficulties.

I'm rambling again.  It was hard to be reminded of the reality that changes occur whether we want them to or not.  It's hard to accept that where people once lived, there will soon be catch basins for river run-off that will supposedly protect the other houses that remain along the river's banks.  Having houses disappear forever makes me feel insecure, I suppose.

Little tiny yellow flags lined up on the once well-manicured lawns of formerly well-kept homes.  Tiny symbols of surrender.  Oh Irene:  I guess you did win a few battles.

Evacuating on my street. My end of the road is just slightly higher.  This image was caught by the local paper in the hours just after the rain.

So Close

There have been a bunch of goals over the last 11 months.  Eleven months ago today I made a commitment to myself to get healthy.  The diabetes thing really scared me.  It was a major wake up call.  That diagnosis came 11 months, 1 day ago.  The first goals were to eat healthy again and to get moving for the first time since 1986 or so.  There had been very little real exercise since the kids were born even though in the years between college and kids, I was a part-time aerobics instructor (it was the heyday of aerobic dance).  Since I can be pretty determined and being motivated by visions of diabetic consequences, I buckled down and have been on course with barely a deviation for 11 solid months.

In Weight Watchers (my chosen eating program), there are built in goals. Lose 10%, lose the first 25, and more 25's after that.  It's very cute on line . . . I've been collecting little stars on my on-line graph for each goal met.

And now I'm so very close to a new star.  The 100 star.  So close that the last two weeks I've felt like the goal was achieved and yet the scale said differently.  Plateau.  The dreaded slow-down of weight loss.  The frustration maker.  Last Thursday's official weigh in lead to a couple of bad decisions in the food department over the weekend.  That was followed by a severe round of guilt.

Guilt gets  you nowhere.  Trust me.  Guilt got me diabetes.  I ate guilt.  Guilty feelings from the failed marriage, from wondering if I was/am a good enough mom, from never feeling as though I accomplished enough at work (or the other work, or the volunteer work), from procrastinating, from not having all the photos in scrapbooks, from buying a piano but not practicing.  I'm very well acquainted with guilt.

So after a little backsliding this weekend (curse you Irish soda bread) and the attendant self loathing, I straightened myself out.  Two great workouts and a fabulous dinner tonight and I'm feeling good about this week.  It could happen this week.  But even if it doesn't, I still can know I'm learning to cope.  Backsliding for two meals is a hell of a lot better than backsliding for, say, two years.  New me is able to bounce back.  

That has to count for something too.

The new fast food:
Top one whole wheat flatbread with fresh tomato slices, low fat shredded mozzarella (I use Weight Watchers 4 cheese Italian blend), calamata olive slices, shaved asparagus and grilled shrimp.  Salt, pepper, whatever herbs are on hand.  Bake until cheese is bubbly and tomato is heated through.  One flatbread makes two servings.

Middle Age Plus Six Degrees ...

We went to see a movie tonight, my mom and I.  Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut:  Quartet.  It takes place in England in a senior citizen home for retired musicians, mostly classical musicians.  It's loaded with British movie and stage stars and, as we found out during the credits at the end, actual real-life retired musicians.  I found so many of the themes of this movie resonating with me . . . for a variety of reason.

Like most movies I like, one of the intertwining story lines was a love story.  It was very sweet and rang pretty true to me because lest you think the classical music world is all, well, classic, I know it can be filled with drama, intrigue and deep romance.  As a piano major in college, I saw lots of it and life can get amplified when played out against a musical backdrop.

All the principal characters in this story are well past their professional prime.  Now that I have two feet firmly planted in middle age, I found myself thinking about what's left . . . will I look like them, sound like them, will I maintain my full faculties or become slightly--or a lot--forgetful.  They all have music careers in common.  And they all still make music.  Alone and together.  It made me miss making that music, more than a bit.  I must get my piano tuned and make some time for practice.  And I'm adding learning to play the cello to my bucket list.

The music making scenes reminded me so much of college.  Of sitting alone in the practice room and stopping to listen to the other students closeted in their own little cubicles.  Having concertos and soprano arias and horn trios and string quartets all producing a kind of cacophony that was confusing and yet made sense at the same time.  Pretty much all the time--24/7 Bach and Beethoven, Vivaldi and Verdi.  I never did practice enough (a result of being a double major and not fully committed) but I loved being in that building.  When my kids were young and taking lessons at a local music school, I loved sitting in the waiting room for the same reason.  All that disparate music wafting all around.  It's a beautiful thing.

So my mom and I (and my dad was like this too) always have to stay for all the credits.   I'm always curious about a movie's soundtrack and of course, the music credits roll last so I'm generally the last one in the theater.  This movie, having special appeal for older folks, had a lot of older folks in the audience.  It also had all the acting credits at the end so a lot of people were hanging around.  There were also these interesting pop-up bios of the lesser characters who were actual old, retired musicians.

This is where the six degrees of separation comes in.  My youngest brother moved to London for a year or two--about 20 years ago.  One of his (expensive) hobbies is investing in theater productions, mostly on London's West End but he's been invested in Broadway too.  He's been a part of Hair Spray, Legally Blond, Gypsy and several others.  Right now, he's invested in Top Hat, a new musical based on the Fred Astaire movie.  He does premiers and parties and meet and greets with actors, producers and directors.  And sees a lot of theater.  When he comes home for Christmas, we have the annual peruse-the-playbills evening (this year there were over 50).  He's very fond of a couple of actresses in particular.  He uses a photo of him and one of them, Sheridan Smith, as his twitter avi.

So the credits were rolling and I saw "Sheridan Smith" fly across the screen.  She'd played the home's doctor--one of the only youthful rolls in the film.  She's probably not so well known by the masses here since she's mostly done British stage and TV and I didn't recognize her until I saw her name.  The awkward moment came when I practically yelled "Oh my goodness--that was Sheridan Smith!  She's Paul's twitter avi."  Of course, I had to explain that one to my mom then open my phone to show her.  This is one of those stories that's only funny to me.  

Lots to think about tonight . . . as usual, my thoughts roam from past to present to future at such a fast pace.  I'm sure I should be dizzy much of the time.  I have a friend who uses the word "astounding" a lot.  Tonight I think I'm astounded at the connectedness of life  . . . with time and people and places . . .

My brother &
Sheridan Smith

Quartet (trailer) here.

Time for Music

I bought more tickets today.  Gavin DeGraw in Virginia Beach.  For someone else, this would not be out of the ordinary but for me  . . . well up until last year, I hadn't been to a concert--rock or pop, that is--in 29 years.  That time was Warren Zevon, with my former husband, or rather, fiance at that time.  Not my taste in music but I went for Mark (turned out to be an interesting night, but that's another story).  

My first concert ever was Seals and Croft in the summer of  '74.  A bunch of us snuck out of music camp in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts and hitch hiked over to Tanglewood and then weaseled our way onto the lawn.  At least that's how I remember it.  Funny, I hadn't thought about that in years but heard Seals and Croft in the grocery store tonight (of all places) and it brought me right back there.  Tweeting about hearing We May Never Pass This Way Again, I connected with a friend on Twitter and related the story about sneaking out of camp.  We had a laugh over it.

The next concert I remember (non-classical music) was Bob Dylan in Cincinnati, maybe 1979.  I think that's where it was.  Huge arena.  Mostly what I remember about that one is the haze of hemp that permeated that huge arena.  Since I'm not a partaker, I wasn't enjoying the atmosphere (so to speak) but I do remember thinking he was a genius.

That might have been it for me and live music had it not been for Dancing With the Stars.  That's right, Dancing With the Stars.  I don't watch Dancing.  Not my thing at all.  But everyone at work watches so I tuned in once last spring, March 2012.  There was this singer, a pretty bad dancer, but so charming, humble and generous.  His name was Gavin DeGraw.  Who?  Wasn't listening to radio, didn't watch One Tree Hill, hadn't checked a concert venue schedule in years, or I may have heard of him.  So I did what any other curious person might do.  I googled.  Then I listened.  Then I bought the music--every bit I could find, in duplicate (car and house copies).  After that came the tickets.  

My first time seeing Gavin DeGraw in person was in Big Flats, NY.  Four-ish hours away, I drove up on Sunday, sat in the rain for the show and drove home the next morning.  That night I travelled to Rye, NY to see him for the second time, again in the rain.  Rested up for a day then drove to Boston to drag my daughter to see him there.  Boston again, in September, Utica in October, Long Island in November, then back-to-back days in December in Worcester, MA and Manhattan.  Hooked?  You bet.

First and foremost, it's the music.  Soulful, sincere, original, very musical music.  Every song seems special to me.  Every song speaks to some part of me--past or present and even future.  It was listening to Gavin that gave me strength to begin to hope again that there could be something more to come in my life.  Maybe something to fill the empty spot.

Then came the summer evenings of listening to YouTube concerts and interviews.  Funny, funny interviews.  He has an endless number of stories about himself, life on the road, funny things that have happened to him along the way.  My favorite interviews are the more serious ones where he talks about music--his music or music in general.  I admire that in a business that is rather relentless, he's managed to stay true to himself.  I imagine there's been a price to pay for that.  For not always caving in to someone's else's notions of what his art should be, for having his own opinions, for his extreme generosity in regards to other musicians.  I was captivated.

I'd joined Twitter shortly before the concert adventures started.  I joined because it's one of the new ways the Girl Scout movement is using to relay information.  But I quickly branched out from @GirlScouts and followed @GavinDeGraw.  That may have been the best decision I've ever made.  Gavin tweets a fair amount.  I learned a lot about him through the short bursts of text known as tweets.  Then I started noticing other people who follow him. I followed them too.  Some of them followed me.  Before I knew it, I had dozens of new friends, all of whom were as deeply hooked on the man and his music as I was.  I began to meet them at the shows.  Some have become friends on other social media like Facebook.  I'm getting to know them and about their lives and families and they are very special people in my life.

So I give Gavin DeGraw the credit for lifting me out of the fog I'd been living in for nearly 20 years.  He accompanied me on my workouts and has helped me lose nearly 100 pounds so far.  He brought health, fun, anticipation and beautiful new friendships my way.  These are not insignificant things.  He pointed me in the direction of other musicians and so did the friends I've made because of him.  So in addition to the three Gavin concerts I've lined up, I'm also seeing Andy Grammer, Chris Wallace, Tyler Hilton and the Jamie McLean Band this spring.  

My life is filled with music these days . . . actual music and another sort of music . . . it's the music of happiness, of looking forward, of finally setting down that load of regrets . . . it's my music.

PS  There is dancing too.