bear

I think I am pretty much doomed to never catch up.

( a few days in Boston )

And then I get back Sunday afternoon and hyounpark greets me with "I said yes to performing at the Opera House this week, but I don't know if you've been checking your email, but I think they're assuming you're performing too because that's what happens when a married couple joins a choir?" Me: "A who in the what are we doing now?"

I'd thought our season was over. But our choral director got a last-minute call for us to close out a symposium on gun violence prevention and the role the arts can play in community healing, being done in conjunction with one of the operas San Francisco Opera is doing this season (Innocence) about the aftermath of a school shooting. So I went to Boston to recover from tech week and then came back into a surprise tech week, heh. Still very glad I did it, though. Afterwards, us singing in the stairwell of the Opera House, even more ethereal and better acoustics.

In the middle of that tech week, though, we had tickets for Sarah McLachlan at the Greek, and damn, I hope I still have those kind of pipes when I'm her age. I'd been expecting she was just going to do the songs off Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, but she began with a full set before that.

( Feist opened: )

( Sarah McLachlan setlist )

Somehow, this has become the month of shows - on top of our long-extant plans for SML, we saw The Lehman Trilogy last Saturday with CJ and Elana; for our part in singing in the symposium, we have tickets to go see Innocence next week; I have tickets for Iron and Wine at the Fox at the end of the month. And then my freshman year roommate messaged me a few days ago and was like, "Do you like Vampire Weekend? I've got an extra ticket for their show at the Greek." So definitely keeping busy!

22 years, and it will always feel a little unreal.

Here in the Bay Area, unless you're a politician with a national profile, or somebody with strong ties to NYC or DC, it's just another day. I've been home for four years now, but having spent nearly two dozen years before that in the Northeast, with that formative event shaping so much of what came after? Makes me feel out of step with everyone around me today, disjointed. And I don't mean in a "patriotic" flag-waving kind of way; it's the collective trauma and grief from that day spread unevenly across the country. My east coast expat expectations running up against time and distance, the sudden political swell of the flags on this date awkwardly angering me as always but there's a part of me for which it still feels like recognition when the rest of the country has moved on to the point of forgetting?

I don't jolt awake at 5:46 am Pacific anymore, three time zones west of where I spent my 20s and 30s. And even so, 8:46 am Eastern usually meant I was on the T or at my desk, at least if it was a weekday, taking a moment, seeing others sharing that ambient awareness and pausing, too. I would jolt awake if it were a weekend with a sense of having failed, somehow, illogical and ridiculous as that is.

The last couple of years, when I've had words for these pandemic-era reflections on 9/11, they've been more quietly despairing than they have been in awhile. I don't know how much of that is the unevenness of grief despite distance in space and time, versus what we're now calling the polycrisis; last year, I described it elsewhere as "because we've had so many more awful things since [then] piling on at an exponentially accelerated pace." The year before, "it feels like we should have been able to do more and better since then."

A friend of mine described the things that have happened to us since then on the anniversary as a kind of "layering;" there've been good and bad things, but most of them on a personal level rather than a societal one. That the grief has remained the same, but life has gone on; trees shedding their leaves, burying the grief in these other larger layers of living, but then suddenly the wind shifts, and the grief is exposed all over again, no matter how long it's been.

In Boston, there was always this emotional undercurrent on the anniversary - half the planes left from our airport; everybody knew at least somebody who was there, and most of us knew many people directly affected, close friends and family. For someone living in the heart of Red Sox Nation - literally, I was living four blocks from Fenway Park at the time - I knew an awful lot of transplanted Yankees fans (and one contradictory die-hard Mets fan), most of whom came up to Boston for college and then never left; many of whom were there on the day. (I even dated one of said Yankees fans for awhile; I like to joke that when we broke up, that was what reversed the curse a month later, you're welcome.) But it also meant the survivors' guilt was real, was always closer; that the sensitivity around it was that much sharper than for others whose ties to the events were more attenuated.

It was an impossibly beautiful late-summer morning, then, clear blue skies. The day before, she talked about seeing a rainbow from her office on the 99th floor of the towers, right after a short but powerful burst of rain.

Today, there was this.



And now, my fellow soprano has been gone longer than she was here, silenced prematurely a lifetime ago; even her faded unofficial memorial sticker in the Union Square subway station now removed. Singing along tonight with Water Night, one of the last songs we sang together; with the Faure Requiem which I sang that fall with hundreds of others to honor all the dead. Dies illa, dies irae calamitatis et miseriae, dies magna et amara valde ... dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.

happy birthday, kelbelle and bubba!

i like this feeling i have of living in a neighborhood ever since i moved back to somerville. i guess that's not precisely the right word that i'm looking for, since it's a very different feel from when i lived in the fenway, which was quite a character. there, you had the awesome little restaurants on peterborough, a little bigbox mall close by with a movie theatre and an awesome art supply store, fenway park with all the cheers and jeers inherent to living four blocks away from america's most revered ballpark, and walking distance to back bay which meant many evenings rather than deal with fenway traffic on the bus or an overheated D train, i'd simply walk home from there.

it's not that i don't have amenities nearby in camberville - porter square a ten minute walk away, harvard square under twenty, all the restaurants of mass ave close by, the fifteen (fifteen!) independent bookstores within spitting distance, a supermarket three doors down, a pie shop four doors down, and kitty corner from some of the best deli sammiches and burgers in the area. but yesterday afternoon, i walked down to jen civ's for a barbecue. melissaagray walked; douglaslain walked; fes42 and stranger78 walked. (well, okay, from harvard square; i can't blame them for not wanting to walk from watertown!) and noghri commented to me, "i didn't realize how close everyone is once i hop on my bike." later that evening, hyounpark and i went down to the ljless jimmy's and ended up in a long game of puerto rico; it was almost 1 am when we left! but it was warm enough that i thought about walking home, though the timing just wasn't right.

it's a pretty miraculous concept to one who grew up where her nearest friends were at least a fifteen minute drive away. honestly, i think that was one of the things i loved best about boarding school and then college - people were suddenly so easily accessible.

i'm glad we have TV night every couple of weeks. we're geeks, so we trend towards things like mythbusters and good eats, though studio 60 is sure to feature prominently come next fall. but it's also an easy time for us to meander in and hang out with each other; catch up on each others' lives.

separately, both noghri and jimmy commented to me that not enough game nights happen, and i miss them too. so there should be one soonish, i say. locals, do you enjoy games like settlers, carcassonne, and puerto rico? are you a card shark in poker, or do you kick peoples' asses in cribbage or canasta? or are you more apples to apples? i know a fair number of you go to trivia nights at the local bars; would you be interested in a game night?

so i looked up and out the window and there were these gorgeous cotton-candy clouds floating along outside, stained pink by the setting sun.

and outside, there were people, cherishing the warmth of a summer evening, but more so than usual. it's in the air - no one wants to say anything, make any direct references that might taint the spirit of tonight. celebrate togetherness. remember innocence. silently hope that everything remains peaceful, but shake the worry out of your head before it can affect things, for now.

but never, ever take things for granted.

that's why they're out now, strolling with their babies, picnicking on the grass, sitting at cafe tables for hours. relaxing. being neighborly. telling the stories that the clouds are writing. all this, activities typical to a summer evening - but with a keen subtextual urgency to it.

tomorrow is for mourning, remembrance, and peacefully honoring the people who died a year ago, and the way of life that died with them. tonight - tonight.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
--john mc crae, in flanders fields