Fox Tales

The red fox and I are on the same morning schedule: between 9 and 10 he hunts, all flame and cleverness, and I practice the recorder. Yesterday, as I was doing scales, he pranced out of the woods across the road and caught one of the obese gray squirrels that gorge on spilled seed under our bird feeder. There was a high-speed tussle and somehow the squirrel, who must have had some muscle under all that fat, got away. The fox shrugged, and trotted off in the direction of the lake (for you non-Vermonters, that’s Lake Champlain).

Later, as I wrestled with an ornery passage of Telemann, I glanced out the window and there was the fox again, headed back towards the woods, with not one, but two squirrels in his mouth.

These were not infant squirrels, but full-grown, well-nourished ones. How do I know there were two? Because, due to the weight of his catch, the fox was trotting slowly, and I had plenty of time to stare, blink, stare again, and verify that there were two luxurious squirrel tails flopping out of his jaws. Have you ever watched a snake dislocate its jaw in order to swallow its prey? Then you have an idea of how wide my fox was holding his mouth.

How did he kill two squirrels? It seems impossible that he would have killed them both at the same time, so did he kill #1 and then see #2, put down #1, kill #2, come back, and retrieve #1? And why two squirrels? You’d think that a single plump one would suffice for such a well-muscled, shiny-coated fox as this one. Was my fox hoarding squirrels?

I still don’t know the answer to the first question. But I think I know the answer to the second. Foxes in Vermont mate in January and February. With a gestation of 49 to 53 days, it is reasonable to assume that my fox was taking the squirrels to his wife and children holed up in their den in the woods.

Now I worry about them all. How many babies are there? What if the father fails to find food? What if he gets run over while crossing the road? I’ll help him by keeping the bird feeders full so there’s plenty of spilled seed for the squirrels. As for getting run over, not only does the road between my house and the woods have a 15 mile/hour speed limit, but now that we humans are hunkered in our own dens, the traveling fox is probably safer than he has ever been.

This morning, at the appointed time, he swung past our house in the direction of the lake. I saw him crouch down and start to go after something. But he changed his mind, turned his head, looked at me, and trotted off. On his return trip he had something small and black in his jaws.

Zen and the Recorder

Now that I have entered my eighth decade, I am learning to play the recorder.  There is no time to lose, so I practice daily, much to Bisou's dismay.  The minute she sees me pick up the green plastic case that houses the instrument, she tucks her tail between her legs and leaves the room.  And I don't blame her--the squeaks and whistles I produce often make me want to leave the room.

 

But as if the noises weren’t bad enough, there is an additional humiliation:  spit.  When an inexperienced player such as I puts the instrument to her lips and begins to blow, saliva escapes into the mouth piece, adheres to the inside of the pipe, and does terrible things to the sound.  With the exception of occasional lapses during deep sleep, I haven’t salivated involuntarily since I got my first teeth.  And now here I am, practically a century later, drooling helplessly into my recorder.

Like one of Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of the bell, the minute I start to play my salivary glands go into overdrive.  This happens especially during a lesson, or while I play a duet with one of my recorder buddies.  We all know that stress triggers bad things, from headaches to heart attacks.  For recorder players, stress triggers salivation, and viceversa.  Sure enough, as soon as I hear that half-choked, reedy sound that indicates the presence of moisture in the pipe I go into alarm mode, which in turn raises my stress levels and causes rivers of spit to gush into my instrument.

“What can I do about this awful drooling?” I asked my teacher after a particularly cacophonous session.

“Just relax and accept it,” she said, sounding more like a Zen master than a recorder instructor. “Here, try reaming it out with this,” she added, handing me a cylindrical swab.

And she was right.  The swab helps, but the real key lies in my mind and in my heart.  The more I make peace with my salivary glands, the less they feel they have to assert themselves.  Sometimes I manage to play an entire piece without having to swab.  But if, in the middle of a passage that is going well, I think to myself “wow, this sounds pretty good!” the spit instantly pours forth.  It is not unlike what happens to me in meditation when, for a few fleeting moments, I manage to stay with the breath.  As soon as I begin to congratulate myself, my monkey mind leaps into action and all is lost.

My teacher assures me that with time the spit problem will get better, though it may not go away completely (that is why they make those special swabs).  Until then, it seems that the best technique is a spiritual rather than a musical one:  I have to stay open to the possibility of drools and squeaks, errors and embarrassment, and keep on making music as best I can.

Recorder Redux

A few years ago I began to learn to play the recorder.  Then last year, bedeviled by a damaged neck, a hard-to-milk goat, and Bisou's infancy, I returned the music scores I'd borrowed from T, my recorder mentor, and put the sweet pipes away.
 
These days, however, the nights are long, the goats and the neck pain are gone, and Bisou has settled down, and I have pulled my plastic Yamaha alto recorder out of the closet.  In the evening, before dinner, I set up the stand by the wood stove, open my Sweet Pipes Recorder Book, A Method for Adults and Older Beginners, and practice.

Wolfie and Lexi keep their distance, and Bisou scuttles off to the TV room to watch the news with my spouse.  I try to remember my fingerings, try to breathe at the right places, try, above all, to keep my beginner's spit from clogging up the pipes (I'm told that this problem decreases with time).

Spit is one thing I never had to worry about during my violin-playing days.  But then, the thing I love about the recorder is how un-violin-like it is.  Compared to that sadistic four-stringed sergeant, the recorder is a kindly Montessori teacher.  It rewards your slightest attention with a reasonable sound.  After just a few hours of practice you can play little tunes.  There is no vibrato, no position changes, no bow to confound the player.

At one point during my first attempt to learn the recorder, I became frustrated with its limitations--a less-than-two-octave range, no dynamic range, no bow.  I took my father's violin to a luthier to be reconditioned, bought a couple of method books whose names I remembered from forty years ago, and started practicing
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It was dreadful.  Not only were my tone and technique utterly gone, but holding my arms aloft was hard on my CFS-ridden body.  I was aware of so much about my playing that needed fixing right away that I would practice for ninety minutes straight--my jaws, arms and upper back rigid with anxiety--and then collapse.  After a few weeks of that I put the violin away and fled back to the recorder.

Now once again, after more than a year's hiatus, it has welcomed me back with open arms.  But perhaps what makes playing the recorder so different from playing the violin has more to do with what's going on inside my head than with the instrument itself.

To the recorder I bring what buddhists call "beginner's mind."  I am free from expectations, goals and priorities.  I barely know what to aim for in tone, and have only the sketchiest notions of breath control and hand position.  Instead, I'm simply focused on getting through the "Bransle" by Michael Praetorius as best I can.

And that's another thing I like about the recorder.  The method books are full of little gems from the (to me) musically hazy times before Bach, by composers I'd never heard of:  Tielman Susato, Claude Gervaise, even Henry VIII.  One of Henry's pieces is entitled "Alas, Madame," to which I mentally add "I'm going to cut your head off."

Right now I'm a couple of lessons into Book II of my "adults and older beginners" method.  Maybe if I practice faithfully, and get enough fingerings into my brain, and do something about all that embarrassing spit, I'll get to play duets with my mentor, T, before spring comes.