Last Car, Etc.

In our fifty-some years together, my spouse and I have owned more houses than cars. But recently I’ve been thinking that, since we probably have another ten years before we hand in our licenses, we should drive a car that is less likely to leave us stranded on some dirt road in mud season. Last week, with a mixture of apprehension and regret--giving up our 2008 Subaru felt a bit like euthanizing a pet that wasn’t sick, just old--we exchanged it for a new hybrid of the same make.

In the past, when we traded one car for a newer model, there were always a couple of new things to learn, such as opening the windows with the push of a button instead of a rotating handle (which saves roughly twenty calories per day, thus contributing to the obesity epidemic). Other changes, such as heated seats and CD players, were pleasant additions that did not interfere with my driving.

This time, however, it’s different. The only things the new car has in common with its predecessor are the turn signal and the windshield wipers. Everything else is new. Everything else will require learning, and practice.

“Just play around with it,” the salesman said, handing us the keys (which, oddly, don’t actually start the car). “Then make a list of questions and come see me.” These were the exact words that the AT&T salesman said to me six months ago when I bought my smart phone. Since then, I have barely scratched the surface of the little gizmo’s potential.

The first morning, it took me twenty-five minutes to get the new car out of the garage. Nothing was where I expected it. Nothing did what I wanted. Instead, many attractive screens and displays lit up, giving me information I didn’t need. What I needed was to release the parking brake. As I tried various combinations of buttons and pedals, the car’s bells and whistles tolled and whistled, admonishing me that, although “love is what makes a Subaru a Subaru,” it’s not unconditional love, and I had better get to work on the three-inch stack of manuals that came with the car.

This is not a car, but a computer on wheels with a mind of its own, which sends me emails from the garage keeping me informed of its charging status. I miss my old car, with its plain and unassuming airs. Like an old-fashioned servant, it would no more have presumed to send me emails than it would have thought of leaving the garage and joining us in the living room.

It isn’t easy being green, as Kermit used to say, and the only consolation for the learning curve that lies before me is in knowing that by driving a hybrid I’m helping the planet more than by taking reusable shopping bags into the market or composting my banana peels. Also, the car’s umpteen safety features may lengthen my driving career (lately I’d been parking great distances from my destination just to avoid backing out of a parking slot). Just now, when I arrived home and opened the driver’s door, a little screen popped up reminding me to check the back seat, where I had put my purse. This feature is bound to become more handy, even essential, in the coming years.

My first car, an adorable tea-cup sized blue Renault Dauphine, felt like it was made of nothing more substantial than paper mache. It had a straight shift, roll-up windows (the handle used to come off in your hand if you weren’t careful), and no radio, so I could concentrate on the driving. My brand-new hybrid will in all likelihood be my last car, and it behooves me to make friends with it before I get a minute older.

The new car is one in an increasing series of lasts.These days I’m also living in what will almost certainly be my last house. And Bisou is surely my last dog. If she lives to age fifteen, I will be eighty when she dies. Even if I’m physically and mentally up for it, will it be responsible of me to get another dog, even if it is not a puppy? As for the cat Telemann, who will be three next month, if he lives into his late teens, as many indoor cats do, I will be unimaginably ancient when he expires, so he is likely my last cat as well.

I remember when life was a string of firsts: first pair of heels, first graduation, first (and so far, only) marriage, first baby, job, house…. I don’t mean to be morbid with this list of lasts, but it’s healthy at my age to get used to letting go, to practice with the smaller things so that when the big Last arrives, I will be able to greet it, if not gaily, at least serenely.

From My Father's Hand

I found the manuscript of a piano sonata of my father's among some papers a while ago, and today I scanned it and sent it to his editor in Barcelona.  She is hurrying to get his few remaining unpublished compositions out in time for the celebration of the centennial of his birth later this year.

The score is signed and dated spring, 1966, two years before his death.  The paper has yellowed with age, but the familiar blue ink has kept its color, and it called up for me the memory of my father sitting at the dining room table, copying out scores by hand.

He composed at the piano, alternately holding a pencil and a cigarette between his right index and middle fingers, squinting against the smoke and trying out chords one after another.  When a piece was finished he orchestrated it.  And when that was done he copied out all the parts, by hand.

Like most professional musicians, my father cobbled a living playing the violin in orchestras and chamber ensembles, and teaching college classes and private students.  While he was alive, his compositions brought him recognition but no significant income.  So the copying out of scores had to be sandwiched in between endless rounds of classes and rehearsals and his own violin practice, not to mention driving my mother to the grocery store and all of us to church on Sundays.

In the evenings, after the last private student had packed up his violin and left, he would sit at the dining room table with his ash tray and his cigarette and his fountain pen with the blue ink and copy out the music he had written, note by note, stopping every once in a while to push his glasses up on  his nose.  And when I showed up with the plates and silverware to set the table for dinner he would blow on the ink to dry it and stub out his cigarette and put everything away without a word.  Then we would eat and when that was over he would leave for orchestra rehearsal.

I wonder what he thought about during those endless hours of copying music?  Did he hear it in his head?  Did he resent having to do this mechanical task when he would much rather be at the piano creating new work?

I never saw him rush.  He never seemed frustrated.  He sat there for however long he had, peacefully making marks that I found, and still find, beautiful in themselves--the verticals perfectly vertical, the bars on the sixteenth notes parallel with each other, and the tempo and mood indications in his  sweeping, old-fashioned hand--allegro ma non tanto, moderato cantabile, molto espressivo.

My father's handwriting was famous in the family.  He was said to have inherited this talent from his father, a silent, obsessively orderly man whose hand was even more perfect than my father's.  It was considered unfortunate that the calligraphy gene had passed me by, though at least the musical one, for better or worse, had not.

It struck me, as I scanned the score and with one click sent it flying over the Atlantic and across the width of the Iberian peninsula all the way to Barcelona, that my father had copied out that piece using the same basic technology as Bach--a pen, some ink, and his own hand. Or, in the case of Bach, someone's hand, since Bach's twenty children, I am sure, were put to copying scores as soon as they could hold a pen, or their father's could never have managed his enormous output.

I'll never know how much more music my father might have composed if he had had either twenty children or a computer and a printer.  But those blue ink lines on yellowing paper contain far more than potential melody--they hold the very presence of my father in the dining room at dusk, bent over his task, while my mother sautes garlic on the stove and I put away my geometry problem set and get out the knives and forks, the napkins, and the dinner plates.

November 15, 2008 "The Amazing Apple Smasher"

Left to his own devices, my husband would live in a condo, surrounded by computers and electronic gadgets, and eating TV dinners. Homesteading, going back to the land, living the “simple life” are strictly my obsessions, not his.

He is, however, an extremely accommodating fellow, and over the years has built, mostly out of scraps, a number of objects that have enabled me to live out my fantasies. He has made chicken feeders and chicken roosts and nesting boxes. When I had goats he made me a couple of elaborate milking stands, hay feeders that minimized waste, and a cheese press.

But of all his creations, the one closest to my heart is the latest, the Amazing Apple Smasher.

This was a terrific year for apples in Vermont, and even the wild apple tree in our front field was covered with fruit. The trouble was, the apples were small, hard and bitter. Still, they were apples, so I figured that somebody should eat them. The answer, as always when a questionable food item is under consideration, was the chickens. After all, they adore spent broccoli plants and discarded Halloween pumpkins. Surely they would love those apples.

We picked a great barrel full and carted it to the chicken yard. We threw a little green apple on the ground, where it bounced and rolled like a golf ball. When it came to a stop, Buffy, the boss hen, gave it a peck, but she turned away in disgust when she couldn't make a dent. Not even Charlemagne, our 50-pound rooster, could crack that apple.

“They'll eat it if I break it up for them,” my husband said, hitting the apple with his heel. Sure enough, the apple flew into fragments and the chickens gobbled them up.

“Here, you do it now,” he said, handing me another golf ball. I put it on the ground and stomped, then jumped on it, but I couldn't smash it. All I got was a sore heel.

“This isn't going to work” I said. “I think we should just throw the apples in the compost.”

“Just hang onto them for a while,” my husband said, and went into the basement.

That evening, he handed me two scrap pieces of two-by-four, hinged together at one end.

“What's this?” I said.

“It's an apple smasher. You put an apple between the boards and stomp on the top board, and that smashes it.”

How can any woman turn down such an offering? I didn't think it would work, but to be gracious I carried it to the chicken house, set it on the floor, put an apple in and stomped. Pieces of apple exploded in all directions, with the chickens after them. Then they came back for more.

Now, when then see me with the apple smasher in hand, they gather round expectantly. They love the apples, and I love the stomping. There's something cathartic about the stomp-squish-scatter sequence. And thanks to the apple diet the egg yolks in our eggs are still as bright orange as they were in the summer.

Which goes to show you that you've got to have high tech, if you want to live the simple life.

Apple Smasher and Hen

September 9, 2008 "Music For The Queen"

The Queen Listens

When Pau Casals was a child prodigy, he played the cello for Queen Victoria. When he was an old man, and considered by many to be the finest musical interpreter of the century, he played for Golda Meir. Now, he plays for me.

He plays the Bach Cello Suites that he rescued from oblivion and practiced for years before performing publicly. He plays the Bach Gamba Sonatas, where the long sustained notes are among the purest sounds ever heard in the universe.

When Bach was a young man he walked 25 miles to hear the great organist Buxtehude play. But with the touch of a finger—in the car, the kitchen, the shower even—I can hear the best music ever written, music that for centuries only a tiny minority of human beings had access to. I'm not Frederick the Great, but I can listen to Mozart any time I want.

Music is all around us, and we don't hesitate to hum along with it, or ignore it. Music has become universally available only recently, just as brightly-colored man-made objects have a relatively short history. For millenia people lived with only the muted colors produced by natural dyes. Now bright, eye-popping color is everywhere, and many of us have grown almost blind to it. The blindness may be a defensive gesture, as today color often assaults our senses—think of the plastic toys defacing people's backyards, or the expanses of gaudy merchandise in many stores.

We are assaulted by music as well, in elevators, from passing cars, from computers. Handel is supposed to have fainted from sheer emotion when he heard the voice of a famous castrato. What would happen to him if he walked into a typical American house and heard his own Hallelujah Chorus issuing from the kitchen radio, advertising jingles coming out of the TV, and hip hop from the kid's bedroom? He would surely faint again, as would Fra Angelico if he walked into Toys R Us.

Sometimes I feel that I might faint too, if I can't get away from all the music. There has to be silence at certain times in order to really hear at other times. It is ironic that humankind has spent so much energy and effort making music universal, and now people like me spend energy and effort trying to get away from it.

Still, on the whole, I'd rather have it this way: Casals playing Bach, Alicia de Larocha playing Mozart, and Winton Marsalis playing anything, all at my fingertips. Where music is concerned, technology has made me an absolute monarch, and I don't even have to worry about hungry peasants threatening revolt.