"Your leave and favor to return to France"

 When Notre Dame burned in 2019, J and I were struck with particular horror. We had been in the building the previous summer on our first trip to France. We'd toured the crypt, we'd attended a vespers service, and we'd both been deeply moved by both the weight of history before our eyes and the very real, very live reading of the psalm about "nations gathering in the temple" as tourists made their way around the sanctuary. 

Cathedral architecture is one of those subjects like sailing or astronomy that seems to consume those who get a taste of it and can lead them to laying out enormous sums of money for obscure pleasures that other people would probably regard as punishments, like standing in line to climb a narrow staircase just to look at some dusty rafters somewhere in the north of England in winter.

I'm aware that I'm curious.

But I'm genuinely curious, informed about the architecture or not, to see the inside of Notre Dame again. And I also want to hear a grand cathedral service again. 

I found a great free app (after several failed attempts to load a massive pdf document on my kindle) that is basically an index of the Liber Usualis. It's a calendar-referenced library of the entire chant tradition of Western Christianity, and it's become an every day part of my morning. 

I am (mostly) reading chant notation fluently now, and am even working on a service at church where we'll have all plainsong instead of congregational singing by rewriting the service music in a way that the choir can guide a Presbyterian congregation through the day's chants in modern notation. (It helps that we can project Latin translations on our big screen.)

It's evident from the re-opening photos that Notre Dame will be different the next time we see it. But, like so many other aspects of life in France, the modern update is still enchanted with magic of the past. And we can't wait to see it and hear it again.

“But where was this?” “My Lord, upon the platform where we watch.”

Last weekend I took Owen and Felix to the bay. It was late afternoon and already almost dark, but Felix has gone full throttle into birding over the past month and I wanted to show him some of the waterfowl before the bay freezes over. 

We hiked up one our regular Lucien Morin park routes but then turned back north to climb to the top of a hill that overlooks Empire Boulevard and the bay where we would usually go down into the wetlands and the park. We were skirting the top of the ridge between K2 Brewing and BarBill, and even as the sun continued to sink we could see hundreds of gulls sitting out on the mud flats where the water had gone down and left the winter ooze behind.

It was cold and windy up as high as we were, but Felix dutifully searched with his binoculars and his Junior Birder book while Owen poked around in the scrubby brush with his metal detector. 

I helped Felix find some ducks, identify a couple of gull species, and then pulled out my telescope. The boys were climbing up and down the dirt escarpments now, and Owen was whooping with excitement about having found a cross carved into an old stump. (I think he was enjoying the echo that his voice made in the hollow space before the tree line started.)

“Hey boys, come look at this!”

I had looked right past them the first time I looked over the area, but smack in my telescope now were two bald eagles perched on some grounded driftwood. 

Owen shrieked so loud that I was afraid he’d scare them off. Felix immediately looked for the bald eagles in his Birder book. 

“Dad, guess what! There’s something for you to know! I think that one of those bald eagles…is a genitive bald eagle!” 

“A genitive bald eagle?”

“Yeah, you can see its head isn’t all the way white yet, but it isn’t a baby anymore either. Yup, it’s a genitive.” 

“Oh, you mean a juvenile—“

“You’re right, Felix! It is a genitive bald eagle. I LOVE HAVING ADVENTURES!!!”

"You cannot speak of reason to the Dane And lose your voice"

Owen and Felix aren't particularly interested in their own school, but they love to do James' work.

James is in the second book of a Logic course called "Critical Thinking." Logic used to be his favorite subject, back when he just had to solve a logic puzzle every day. Then we started this formal course and entered the world of contrapositives and double negations. He doesn't it like it quite so much anymore.

But Owen and Felix love it. Whenever James and I are working on logic they stop attending to whatever it is that they are supposed to be working on and listen in to his problems.

"Evaluate the following advertisement: Harry Handsome, the movie actor, is shown slapping SMELLY after-shave lotion on. Four beautiful women come up and put their arms around him. "We just can't resist a man who uses SMELLY!" says one of the women."

James: "Is this from my propaganda techniques section?"

Owen: "It's an assumption contrary to fact!"

Felix: "NO! It's a substitution of a contrary fact!"

(Correct answer: It's the propaganda technique of Transfer, and not Testimonial, because Harry Handsome never actually says anything.)

Owen and Felix are both convinced that they are great logicians, partly because they really HAVE picked up on some of the technical bits of language about propositions that have evaded James. They hunt for fallacies in the wider world (apparently so far as Junior Choir rehearsal) and happily point them out to unsuspecting adults. 

If you are challenged by a shrill and self-righteous junior logician, please feel free to remind them that their argument is a Red Herring from the schoolwork that they are supposed to be doing.

"Tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart"

 I finally caught the cold that the boys have been passing around, and just in time for the 24 hours that J and I to ourselves this weekend.

We soldiered on through despite my shivers and sneezes, and most of our Christmas shopping is now done. 

I'm turning around now to take a shower and get into a suit so that I can play a Messiah in a cold church.

If you are going to bed at 7 PM with a mug of tea tonight, please enjoy it for me.

"Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black"

 I almost don't need a tailcoat anymore. One of the groups that I play with most regularly has just abolished the dress code stipulation of tails for Masterworks concerts, and my regular job in Syracuse has been "all-black" only ever since I joined.

(Confusingly, they call it concert black, which used to mean "short tuxedo, white dress shirt, and black bow tie"...but apparently not anymore.)

Orchestra dress codes are labyrinths of complex and contradictory information, mostly designed to punish young women who might be more attractive than the older women who write the dress code rules.

The men's side is simpler, and we usually only need remember whether we're supposed to be wearing a black button up shirt (most often, in my case) or a white button-up shirt. Some groups enforce the details more rigorously than others, but a black suit and black dress shoes gets you 90% of the way there for most work.

In the increasingly blurred gender boundaries of the modern workplace, however, we are switching more and more to Option 1 and Option 2 dress codes, which don't specify traditional male/female boundaries. And (this is largely a good thing) the fussier dress police are agreeing that it's simplest for everyone just to dress in black.

But not this time of year. Holiday Pops means pops of red. For me, it's a flannel tartan tie. I have a few other red ties as well, and maybe even a red cummerbund buried in the arm of a tuxedo sleeve somewhere. It's nice to have something a little more colorful than just "black" to wear to work now and again. 

(Especially when you are going to work all day every day for the foreseeable future...)

"If thou art privy to thy country's fate, Which happily foreknowing may avoid"

The email to Kindle feature is one of the best features that I've discovered about my e-Reader. 

Each Kindle device apparently has its own designated email address, and you can send yourself PDF documents that you don't want to attempt to read on a laptop/phone to be perused at leisure (here meaning, during movements when the trumpets are marked "tacet") with your kindle on your stand.

I've downloaded a few reference books, I downloaded all of the Ian Fleming Bond novels (they aren't very good) a few years ago, and am currently working my way through a biological study of Irondequoit Bay (which is immensely practical) and an old guide to triangulating your position at sea. (Which will hopefully never be practical.)

But the big read right now is the 2025 Mandate for Leadership document, commonly called Project 2025. It is horrifying. It is an astounding exercise in thinking in an alternative reality. It is consistent, organized, and would be incalculably damaging to the country I hope my boys will inherit.

If there is one small silver lining about this incoming President, it is that he appears to be utterly ignoring the recommendations in this document and appointing his friends, cronies, and flatterers instead of the very sincere and capable politicians who would actually be capable of making the Project 2025 agenda happen.

"Whose sore task does not divide the Sunday from the week"

 I am riding the thruway for the foreseeable future. I'm not complaining about it, because it's good to have the work. Basically every day from now until Christmas (I do get Thanksgiving off) I'll be driving somewhere to play a concert, and very often driving to two places to do multiple concerts. (Buffalo and Syracuse are just close enough to be able to get from an afternoon show in one place to an evening show in the other.)

So, I am sorry that I am not available to get together for Christmas drinks or invite you over for a cup of coffee. I'm driving somewhere, or sitting on stage somewhere, or finally back home and have fallen asleep still in my suit collapsed in the chair.

There are many things that I'll miss about the next few weeks. I'll miss participating in the Christmas decorating with the boys, and I'll miss pretty much all of the upcoming Bills games. I'll miss my wife, who hopefully can still recognize me on Christmas morning, and I'll also miss the days when it wasn't dark before 5 pm. 

But there are some consolations. I have hours of audiobooks ready to listen to on the thruway, and I've never felt more ready to notice the natural features of the drive. There are plenty of miles of driving in Upstate New York that are flat, featureless, and grim. But when driving in daylight I've spent years cataloging a list (I keep the actual physical copy of it in my book) of the features of I-90. 

Did you know, for example, that there are some ruined stone arches just visible through the treeline at mile marker 296? Or that you can find egrets on the eastern side of the Montezuma preserve at marker 313? There is an enormous stand of Norway spruce on the north side of mile 408, and there are innumerable creeks (Flint, Black, Tonawanda, White Bottom) that pass under the thruway that become more interesting once their names are known. The same with the farms--like Meadville, Dendis, and Del-Mar, that I learned to look for once I knew their names.

I've tried to treat the drive like a a London Cabbie learning "The Knowledge." It all has to be memorized and internalized, and once it's been ingrained through a hundred repetitions you all of a sudden know the rhythm of the city. (Or, in my case, the 128 mile straight line.)

The next four weeks are going to be largely awful. But there is some joy and interest even in the most boring part of the task.