Night Walking

Strolling around at night is one of my favorite things. I love the quiet of the empty streets, the secrecy and anonymity of the solitude and darkness and the opportunity to see the place I inhabit from a different perspective. Tonight I walked giddily home from a night out, the entire way strolling down the very middle of the streets and never meeting a car, skipping up and hitting low-hanging catalpa beans with my fingers and poking patterns in the icy top layer of the snow along the curbside. I came across the intersection pictured below, where when I was 10 or 11 years old on a bike ride with my dad, he took a sharp right turn at the last second and I was so paralyzed with indecision that I careened straight into the street sign, causing it to lean as pictured. I wonder if anyone else knows how that came to be. 

 

Largo

I got a little lost today with addictive kindle bubble popping games and later decided I should practice piano in order to try to repair any damage I may have caused my soul. Hehe!

 

Growing up, I practiced on the very same ancient Baldwin that now sits in my home. From the time I was eight years old until graduation, I played it for hours almost every afternoon in my grandparent's dining room at the farm.

 

My grandparents had a range of attentiveness. They sometimes sat in the dining room with me and listened with closed eyes (my music-loving grandfather's favorite was Offenbach's "Barcarolle" and my grandmother loved Grieg or anything that "sounded like waterfalls"). Other times they cranked up the volume on Jeopardy or Days of Our Lives (usually when I was very emotionally connected to something and thought they were sharing a moment).

 

Today I remembered how frustrated I occasionally got when assigned a piece that I either found boring, that included a key that was dead on the old piano, or had some tricky embellishment that drove me insane. Handel's "Largo" from the opera Xerxes was one of the pieces that bored me to tears in my youth (listen to the symphonic version here).

 

Today however, it triggered tears for a different reason. The massive chords caused me to miss my beautiful grandparents with an abyssal depth, recall the pristine solemnity of the passing of time and rejoice in the restorative reflection that music can trigger.