A Night At Carnigie Hall

On the map it looked like an easy straight shot. We would walk from Penn Station down 8^th all the way to our hotel on 56^th street. Mapquest informed us that it was 1.2 miles, or 23 blocks. But when we emerged from Penn Station out onto 34^th street we discovered that it was raining. I say to Pam, “Maybe we should take a cab”, to which she bravely replied, “No, I’m fine.”

Unlike me, she was prepared, her feet fitted with comfortable walking shoes, and her umbrella at the ready. So, we headed uptown.

Forty-five minutes later we stumbled into the lobby of the Wellington Hotel. We should have taken that cab. But, we made it, and now we could check into our spacious room, relax, and rest a little before going out to explore the city. I knew something wasn’t right when as I opened the door to our room it immediately slammed into the closet door. The door on the left opened to a bathroom roughly the size of the shower stalls on cruise ships. When sitting on the toilet, you couldn’t lean forward without slamming your head on the sink. For the first time in our 28 years of marriage we would be sleeping in a full size bed. The good thing was that I could adjust the thermostat on the air conditioner without getting out of bed. “ This room looked so much bigger on the website”, “I offered in way of explanation.

Then we went out and walked our little slice of Manhattan. Though designed and built for a race of pygmies, our hotel could not possibly have been more convenient. Carnegie Hall was literally across the street. We checked out several diners, cafes, and bars where we might meet Patrick for dinner before the show. We chose PJ Carney’s for the sole reason that a review of it appeared on Yelp that could have been written by Patrick himself. It turned out to be a perfect spot. Fish and chips, chicken fingers and ice water without ice, all for the reasonable price of $52.

When it was time for the show, Pam and I left our Lilliputian hotel and walked across the street to the entrance to the grand hall. Our tickets entitled us to the upper balcony view, which required us to walk up five flights of stairs, Pam in high heels. The friendly usher told us to keep walking up stairs until you couldn’t walk anymore and then we would be there. Sure enough, in section J seats 31 and 33, we settled in, and gazed down at the tiny ant like people filling the stage. I felt like I was in a blimp at the Rose Bowl. Patrick’s choir marched in and we could hear the shuffling of their feet. The acoustics in Carnegie are legendary, but you have to be in Balcony J to really appreciate the miracle.

Pam and I are not opera aficionados. Frankly, our exposure to most of classical music is a direct result of our son’s gifts. Add to that the fact that this entire piece is performed in Latin, and well, this had the potential of being a long night. But, as a parent, you discover that you learn to love the things that your kids love. I did my homework before hand. I Googled this Verdi guy, and researched the work, read reviews, so I was semi-educated on the subject. Listening to Patrick before the show at dinner and seeing the passion and excitement on his face helped prepare me.

There were parts of the piece that bored me, to be honest, mostly the parts where the soloists were singing. But whenever the conductor would coil up like a spring and turn the orchestra and the choir loose, well, it was as powerful and moving a thing as I have ever heard. Following along with the English score, the music crackled with emotion and passion. At times I honestly expected the floor to open up releasing the demons of hell into the hall. Watching that conductor was amazing. What a feeling of delicious power it must be to have all that musical energy and talent at your disposal, waiting for your skilled exploitation. An hour and a half later he held his hands up, then hesitated after the final note. They hung there in silence. The sold out crowd hushed in reference. Ten seconds, twenty seconds, an eternity of soundless appreciation. Finally, his hands dropped to his side and the house erupted. Good stuff.

We met Patrick after the show at the Europa Café for tea and cheese cake. He was spent, but thoroughly satisfied with the performance. We walked with him down to the 53^rd street subway entrance, hugged him, then watched him disappear down the steps.

No parent can ask anything more from life than to see their kids doing what they were born to do. I am blessed beyond measure.

My Introduction To Amtrak

I, Douglas Lee Dunnevant, being of reasonably sound mind and body, do here-by declare that I have placed my future in the hands of the government run passenger train system for the next six hours. This is my first ever ride with Amtrak. So far I like it. Feels a little Arlo Guthrie-ish. Feel like any minute some old hobo will walk down the aisle with a six-string singing folk songs.

Anyway, Pam and I are headed up to New York city today to see Patrick and the Westminster Symphony choir perform Verdi’s Requiem with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie-Freaking Hall. No big deal. I’m sure that’s exactly how it will be billed too…”Patrick Dunnevant and the Westminster Symphony Choir present…” Seriously, it’s an amazing honor for him to be a part of something this grand, and it isn’t lost on him. He’s on top of the world. This will be an extremely long day, starting at 5:30 this morning, a 6 hour train ride, walking the streets of Manhattan all afternoon, then the show at 8:00 PM, followed by a couple of hours with Patrick, dinner at some yet unnamed restaurant around 11:00, then finally back to our hotel around 1 or so.

Just pulled up to a charming station in Fredericksburg. There’s a place called The Bavarian Chef right beside the tracks. So cool. This train travel thing really does give you a different view of the world. It’s amazing how many apartment complexes and crappy neighborhoods back up to railroad tracks. But once you get into the countryside, the views are overwhelmingly beautiful. Wheat fields, rivers and streams, trees ablaze with fall color, punctuated by junkyards, piles of discarded tires and hideous graffiti slathered on the backs of old buildings. America…the good, the bad, and the ugly. Unlike air travel, I’m allowed to walk up and down the train. Right now, I’m sitting at a table in the café car with my laptop plugged in to an AC outlet with free internet service. Cool. On an airplane, I’m not allowed to use my cell-phone, but on the train, I’m free to receive a call and a text from Sherri Matthews who informs me that the book and DVD that I left under my seat at church Sunday have been partially recovered. If someone stole my Art of Marriage DVD, well, I hope they put it to good use.

More to come…

On A Scale Of One To Ten...

Pam and I were asked recently to help teach one of those “marriage enrichment” classes at my church, to a group of younger couples. I suppose that chief among our credentials for this job was the fact that we have been married for 28 years and display no signs of hostility towards each other in public. We accepted with great trepidation.

This week’s lesson concerns the tendency that each marriage encounters towards isolation, the natural bias that we humans have for drifting apart. Very good point and an important topic. The example is given about this one couple who was asked to rate the quality of their marriage on a scale of one to ten…one being something akin to Dante’s 9^th circle of hell and ten being uninterrupted honey-moonal bliss. The husband quickly and confidently rates his marriage a 10, while the incredulous wife goes back and forth between .5 and 1. How can this be?

OK, before attempting an answer, I should simply say that I reject the question. It’s a ridiculous speculative exercise in score keeping. If I were asked such a question I would respond something like this…”Er. What?” See, for me to rate my marriage on a scale of one to ten, I would need more information. Marriage is a complicated, multi-faceted collaboration, that is divided into a series of relationships. There’s the parenting side, the financial side, daily operations, how the house is kept etc.., there’s the sex part, not to mention the quality of the meals. A guy might rate his marriage a 8.5 at the dinner table and a 3.5 for parenting. The woman might give the financial part a 7 while rating the daily operations at 2.5 because although her husband might be a good provider, he’s also a slob. As the kids like to say on Facebook…it’s complicated. But I suppose if a gun were held to my head and I was told to come up with a number, I would say that I think my marriage is a 7.875, give or take .075.

Then I get to the section at the end of each lesson called…”Date-Night Ideas”. This week I run across this gem…

“ Spend two hours on the couch together one evening

without TV, cell phones, computers, or the internet.

Spend time together talking, reading to each other,

or just sitting quietly together.”

I wouldn’t have any trouble talking with my wife for two hours. She is interesting, and beautiful to look at. I’m not sure how reading to each other would work. Maybe it would be fun actually, as long as I didn’t have to read or listen to anything by Danielle Steel or Nicholas Sparks. But the last one made me laugh out loud!! “Just sit together quietly”??? Are you kidding me? And do what…gaze into each other’s eyes, contemplate the time space continuum? I mean, is touching involved? Will there be snacks?

　

I can think of nothing worse than having to sit quietly in one place for two hours. For one thing, I’m not a very good sitter, and secondly, nature abhors a vacuum. Silence may be golden, but it also leads to madness. Walk the halls of nut-houses in this country and I bet you half of the occupants having spoken a word in years. If God intended us to be quiet, he never would have invented the cell phone.

Although I have a few minor quibbles, I’m actually liking this class. After 28 years, it’s refreshing to examine the fundamentals of my marriage. I already feel like the luckiest guy on earth to have found Pam, but there’s always room for improvement. Just don’t ask me to activate the cone of silence thing. That’s just crazy talk.

Christmas in October

Ok, I’m going to make this quick. It’s not good form to dance on anyone’s grave and all, but I just can’t let the events of tonight pass without a comment or two. I mean, I could wait until the morning and the clarity that always comes after a good night’s sleep. But I can’t help myself. Something as thrilling as the Yankees getting swept out of the playoffs is just too good to wait until morning. To hell with perspective!!

The Dark Side of the Force has been vanquished. The pinstripes crashed and burned in fantastic futility to the Detroit Tigers. In four games, the mighty $200,000,000 dollar payroll managed to dent home plate a laughable 6 times. All that money, all the swagger and superstar egos combined for a .157 batting average with 36 strikeouts. If that wasn’t awesome enough, we got to see the complete and total humiliation of A-Roid, the $30 million a year self-confessed cheater who got pinch hit for and unceremoniously benched for the last two games of the series. The Evil Empire is in shambles, a hulking, slow-footed, ageing collection of overpaid choke-artists. Derek Jeter’s horrible ankle injury is the only thing about this series that has put the slightest bit of a damper on my raging schadenfreude.

But, fear not Yankee fans. Over the off season I’m sure Cashman and the Steinbrenner boys will go out a buy up all the best free agents. Next year old Josh Hamilton will be playing center field, maybe you guys can work out a swap of A-Roid and Pujols, and I’m sure you’ll land a couple of big time pitchers, which will make it even sweeter watching a $250,000,000 payroll implode.

For this baseball fan, Christmas just came early!

What a Sight!!

On the day after the second Presidential debate, you might expect me to offer my brilliant insights into who won and why. But the thing is, the debates have managed to suck all the brilliance out of me. The other thing is, I only watched it during the commercial breaks of the Yankees v. Tigers game so, there’s that. When I did tune in, it seemed to be all hand waving, platitudinous talking points and questions being asked by that most rare of electoral species...the undecided, disappointed, democratic voter from Long Island. Let’s call it a technical draw and let the media declare Obama the clear winner, and move on.

What I do want to talk about is the amazing thing I saw yesterday. I was driving on Dumbarton between Lakeside and Staples Mill when I was nearly blinded by the most hideous vision. At this point I must pose a question to the ladies in this audience….WHY??

What I saw walking down the side walk was a very large woman, what our parents used to call “big-boned”. I’m thinking this woman would weigh in somewhere between 275 and 300. Her girth was spread out over a not so nimble frame of 5 feet, 4 inches, so, if she were a running back, the announcers would refer to her “low center of gravity”. Anyway, this particular woman was wearing a pair of blaze orange spandex pants. Her ample backside looked like it consisted of two or three watermelons with a couple of cantaloupes thrown in for good measure. And, all of them somehow stuffed into those pants the color of brand new, never used traffic cones. To complete the ensemble, she chose a smart midriff cut sweatshirt that let all the world see a two inch sliver of flab protruding out all the way around. The color of this odd mini-top was some sort of electric, neon magenta. The combination of these two colors was enough to not only stop traffic, but make traffic do u-turns and speed away in the opposite direction.

In fairness and in the interest of full disclosure, the point should be made that I am not exactly a fashion plate myself. No one has ever mistaken me for a GQ model. I’m a Men’s Warehouse kind of guy. I buy clothes once every two years whether I need any or not. But, what the heck? Why do women allow themselves to be seen in public adorned in this way? Do people like this ever avail themselves of mirrors? Did anybody look at this poor woman before she stepped outside and say something like…” What...wait, Edna. You may want to rethink that look.”

As my car passed her, I tried not to stare. But after awhile, I glanced in the side mirror to check out the front view. Emblazoned across the magenta mini-top, swaying mightily were the words…”I’M HOTT”. Yes dear. Yes, you are.

Missing My Mother

It’s been three and a half months since my mother passed away. In the week or so afterwards I was so caught up in the enormity of the thing, I never really had time to, for lack of a less hackneyed word, grieve. There were arrangements to be made with funeral homes and cemeteries. There was a funeral to plan. There wasn’t much time to devote to contemplating big issues of life, death, and loss. Then after all of that sound and fury had passed, our minds were fully occupied with the care of my Dad. To a large degree, the pass couple of months have consisted of hammering out a workable plan for what my father’s life would be like without Mom. Just recently, Dad’s life has begun to settle in to something close to a routine. Finally, last week I had some time to reflect on the fact that my mother is, in fact, gone.

Just before I traveled to Chicago, Pam was checking the messages on our old, seldom used land line. There she found a message from my mother. I listened to her words with a tightness in my throat. It was an uneventful message. She was calling to see of Pam could take her to a doctor’s appointment that she had forgotten about. It was not a good day for her. We could tell because she had that sadness in her voice that we had come to notice when she wasn’t feeling well. As I listened, I desperately wanted Pam to erase the message, but I said nothing. I preferred not to remember her this way.

When I was in Chicago, I had long portions of the day with very little to do. In my mind, I kept hearing her voice on that message, one I wished so much that I had never heard. During the Presidential debate I was texting back and forth with my son about the debate, but mostly we were enjoying talking with each other and catching up. When it was over, for an instant, I thought that I should call Mom and let her know how Patrick was doing. I always liked doing that with her. I’d call and tell her what the latest news was with Kaitlin or Patrick, and no matter how she was feeling or sounding when she took the call, within a few minutes she was on top of the world, so proud was she of her grandchildren. I wanted to talk with her about my kids. I wanted to ask her what she thought about things. I wanted to get her riled up about something since she always did her best talking when she was in a bit of an uproar. But the line was dead. She wouldn’t answer. She couldn’t answer. The full weight of the fact of her loss hit me on a treadmill in the workout room of the Michigan Avenue Marriott.

When I got back in town, I visited her grave for the first time since her funeral. Nothing. I felt nothing. She’s not there, for one thing. It brought back memories of caskets and funeral homes, and the slippery merchants of death that I had to deal with for 48 hours so that she could be placed in that spot. Instead of comforting memories of a wonderful, warm human being, I was thinking about people trying to sell me state of the art burial products and writing checks that would have appalled my mother. I could almost hear her voice saying…”That money should have been given to Lottie Moon, and I should have been buried in a pine box in the backyard!!”

Perhaps I’m a bad son for not spending the last three and a half months racked with sadness and longing. Or maybe I grieve differently than most people. I’ve never lost someone this important to me before so I have no prior experience on which to draw. All I know is…I miss my mother.

The Collapse of the Nationals

The dream season of the Washington Nationals came to a nightmarish end last night. The youngest team in baseball…looked it. After exploding out of the gate with 6 runs in the first 3 innings, it was going to take a monumental collapse and an epic comeback to end the Nationals’ season. Unfortunately, the long suffering Washington fans got both.

There are a multitude of ways to lose a game, and no one player or one play is ever solely to blame. But it is possible, in hindsight, to find the reason. Here it is. One stat tells the tale. The St. Louis Cardinal pitching staff issued one walk the entire game. The Washington Nationals pitchers issued a maddening 8 free passes. While bases on balls are never a good thing, they are especially toxic when you have a 6 run lead. If you’re going to be the victim of a heroic comeback, at least make them put the ball in play. Gio Gonzales wasn’t up for the challenge of October baseball. The 21 game winner pitched 10 innings in this series and issued 11 walks. The poor guy couldn’t throw a strike when it mattered to save his life. Do the Nationals make the playoffs without him? No way. Did he perform like their ace when they needed him? No way. But the bull pen wasn’t much better under the pressure of an elimination game. Both Edwin Jackson and Drew Storen walked two of the batters they faced and each of them scored.

None of this is meant to diminish the incredibly clutch performance of the Cardinals. They deserve everything they got. Any rational baseball fan has to admire the amazing fortitude and grit with which they compete. I just wish they had been forced to hit their way to glory. But, that’s baseball, and sometimes baseball can be a little bit like hell.

So, thanks Nationals, for entertaining me for the past 6 months. You have been fun to watch, and even though last night was agony, there’s always…next year.


PS...My wife stayed up to watch this game with me. Pam hates sports, and especially hates watching sports on television. That she would stay with me until after 12:30 in the morning tells you all you need to know about her awesomeness. On the other hand, maybe she was just worried that I might have a heart attack and didn't want to leave me alone!! Either way, thanks sweetie!