"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.

“For he himself is subject to his birth”

 James is 13 today, and he is just about the greatest kid. I don’t know of any older brother who punched his little brothers less, even when they definitely deserved it. He is gentle, considerate, and sincere. Your heart hurts for him when you think about him entering the outside world.

His heart hearts for itself too. He likes having a birthday, but he doesn’t like being reminded of how old he is turning or hearing that he is getting taller or being called “grown up.” I think he just wants to stay a child. 

And he can’t. Just as our 40th birthdays are starting to loom forward, so our oldest son is confronting his own coming-of-age. The thing about James is that however his Bildungsroman takes shape, he will be a great hero. He is already that mix of formed and unformed parts out of which an interesting, likable, and noble grown-up can be formed. 

He has been a great kid, and as it gets less and less accurate to call him a kid I have every confidence that he will continue to be a great James. 

As he learned this week, “he himself is subject to his birth” uses an intensive, and not a reflexive pronoun. We had fun (grammar is EVER so much fun) diagramming sample sentences, including the (incorrect) reflexive sentence, “Why does that Poky Little Puppy feel sorry for hisself? He should just get some strawberry shortcake at Memwins.”

Of all the grammar controversies, however, the biggest dust-up was Owen’s objection to the truth of the statement “Mom herself is the most beautiful woman in the world.” 

He is apparently campaigning to receive (for himself) the smallest slice of birthday cake. 

"Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life Extorted treasure in the womb of earth..."

 Owen got a metal detector for his birthday and our yard may never recover. 

We did the tutorial (several coins, a sheet of aluminum foil) so that he could practice finding different types of metal and I showed him how toggle the various controls so that he could blah blah blah blah I'm making you wait so that you can't use this thing yet and it has fun buttons blah blah blah.

(This is, based on how he's currently using it, what Owen heard while I explained how the different modes.)

He's found SO much treasure. Even before he needed the shovel he found about a dozen matchbox cars that had been left outside and grown over from the summer. But then he got the shovel out and started to dig up the wealth of centuries.

There was a rusty old hook and eyelet, a massive (4 inch) iron pipe that was perhaps a bit of irrigation? (It was angled down and filled with water.

Then he found what I assume was some sort of old electrical line and pulled up a solid twelve feet of it from various points in the yard.

"Don't worry, Dad, I'm filling in all of the holes that I make!"

There were some bits of wire and some other treasures as well. At some point I found it was easiest not to look directly at the digging, so they might've found something truly valuable that I just haven't heard about yet. But they are running out of lawn, and they need NEW places to dig. 

"Dad, can we go to the lake today?"

"When are we going to Albion today?"

"Do our neighbors need anything found in their yards?"

"You come most carefully upon your hour..."

 You can be many things in a professional orchestra, but you can't ever be late.

That's true in the sense that you have to play in tempo as well, but even more than keeping time you must show up on time for rehearsals and concerts. And five minutes beforehand is not on time.

It actually is contractually late in most places to be there only five minutes ahead of time. You're required by your work rules to be in your seat, prepared to play, and in proper dress code five minutes before the service is scheduled to start. 

This ethic isn't enforced through the work rules, though. It's an unspoken culture that gets ingrained in you from the very beginning. You MUST be on time. For most people that means being in the building a half-hour before the "shift" starts. 

It's a good way to do business. Even when the unthinkable happens (traffic jam on the thruway, all the parking spots full in the garage) and you are rushing in twenty minutes later than usual you are still technically "on time."

But it's a very different world than the one that my students live in.

"I forgot." 

"The coffee line was really long."

"I couldn't find my music."

"I was talking to another professor."

But they finally got one up on me yesterday, or at least one of them did. I was ten entire minutes late to my first student's lesson. (Childcare handoff delayed due to traffic.) 

I've lost the moral high ground with that one. 

What art thou that usurps't this time of night?

 I've found transcendent inner peace.

The problem is that you can only get it at 4 in the morning.

I had a nice two week stretch of almost no evening concerts/rehearsals, and J and I both flipped our sleep schedules around so that we were in bed before 9 and getting up early. Very early.

We've been setting our alarms for 5:30, and I actually ended up downstairs at more like 4:30 most of last week. It's dark, cold, and completely silent.

It's amazing. There are no children around anywhere. No one is actively making any messes. I don't need to adjudicate any disputes over football card ownership. No one is spilling anything. No one is shouting. No one is banging away at Axel F on the piano. 

(We did the Kirkin' of the Tartan at church last week, and when I heard the bagpipes start to wheeze up I realized that I was expecting to hear Axel F. I've formed a conditioned response to obnoxiously loud noise and that lick.)

I pull an Americano, read the psalms for the day, and then write, read, and draw in my notebook. I do composition exercises in French and Greek. I sometimes pull on a coat and boots and see what planets are up outside with my telescope. I learn things about the moon, birds, plants, grammar, anatomy, Hebrew, and geology. The sheer silence is like soaking in a hot bath, even though it is very much the opposite of hot from my chair by the library window in mid-November.

A few nights ago I woke up and realized it was 3:30. I turned back over to go to sleep and then thought to myself--"I could read for an extra two hours if I got up now."

And I did. It's not at all like reading once the kids are in bed. They've used me up by that point. I can still think, but my ears are full of their noise and storm.

In the dark hours of the morning there hasn't been a single sound made yet, except for the grinding of beans and the hiss of the kettle.

J is loving it too. (Well, she doesn't love it, but she loves having her workout done before she sees any children.) We eat breakfast together and no one complains about the food or spills it down their front or uses their shirt as a napkin.

And then someone appears. (It's always Owen.) And he plays his morning Axel F. And we're happy to see him. I think we're more ready for him when we've had the quiet hours before he came down, and not after.

I don't think we can keep this up. I'm going to be playing too many concerts when I won't even get home until 11 or midnight.

But I think I am officially a morning person...