I intended to post while I was gone, I really did. It turns out that
teaching at a four week high school music intensive does not leave a lot of
time for reflection, much less recreational writing. It was like any experience
of being at camp: the community is a bubble and time is strangely fluid.
Everything is so compressed that you get close to people quickly, and each
evening it's hard to grasp the reality of whatever you did that morning
It was a little surreal going back to my cubicle at the office on Monday
and sitting down in front of a computer for all those hours. I drove home on
Sunday with all of my crap packed into my car, including my bike, and a new/old
giant mirror and two new/old lamps from Goodwill. The AC is out in my car, so I
had the windows down and the local radio stations of northern IA cranked up. I
had two cooler bags full of a growler of my favorite local lager and the leftover
groceries from my fridge. I was salty with dried sweat. Clouds kept gathering
in the west but it never did rain. I was grateful for anything that kept the
blazing sun off my left arm.
The morning had been packed with goodbyes and closing worship and music
music music. The kids were all tearful, standing around with their arms around
each other. (I personally know two married couples who met as campers at this
particular camp. I wonder what relationships formed this time around.)
For the last four weeks, I lived in a student condo on a prairie in a bowl
of land between the river and bluffs, with an organist and a pianist. Raptors
circled over the prairie every day, catching updrafts, and deer trekked through
the tall grasses every twilight. In the adjacent condos there were brass
players and woodwind players and singers and a percussionist and pianists and
string players and staffers and the chaplain. Behind the condos, the woods
stretched straight up a steep hill that rolled gently down to our place and past
it to the main drag. Each morning, I rode my bike down the hill and across the
street and up another hill to the music building and taught a class or coached
a small ensemble and then taught lessons and had rehearsal for the rest of the
afternoon. After dinner, there was a concert every night. I've never heard so
many recitals in such a short span of time--and a LOT of new music, a lot of
avant garde freaky shit that those kids were so incredibly lucky to hear. And once
the kids took over the performing at the end of the third week, we heard a lot
of exceptional young people working it on out onstage.
I missed most sunsets or came out at the tail end of them, after the
recital or evening prayer (which I usually ditched), and would go for a quick
bike ride along the river, where the whole trail would be lit up by fireflies
and I'd see deer standing off to the side, silhouetted against the sky,
munching grass and blinded by my headlamp. Toward the end of camp, I traded
most of my bike rides for walks with friends down toward town to the little
brewpub or the genius courtyard bar that only had outdoor seating and where the
bartender played Caitlin Rose. After my big vocal ensemble concert, I got sick
enough to cancel an entire day of teaching and rallied to perform a Bach
cantata two days later. I still have a little cough--I say "still"
but really, my sick day was only the Friday before last, or 11 days ago. A
cough can stay for weeks.
One of the strangest features of living there for most of us grown folks, I realized after two weeks, was all the communal meals. We ate in the caf with all of the students, though
the faculty and staff segregated ourselves in one area by the giant windows
overlooking the valley and the wind turbine. I fell right into the communal
meals, where you'd sit there through your companions' comings and goings and
end up dining with maybe three different groups of people, but it did seem
funny to think of how many people I was eating with twice a day (I never went
to breakfast, since we had a mandatory meeting every day at 8 AM and that
schedule was a huge stretch for me), when here at home I eat alone for every
single meal and think nothing of it. I had today off from the office, as I
usually do on Tuesdays, and it was so quiet, so strange to rattle around here
doing prep cooking and unpacking stuff and getting reorganized and reacquainted
with my place. I tell you what, after a month of spartan living it seems like I
have way too much shit. I might have to address that while I still have the
momentum (new/old Goodwill lamps notwithstanding).
Anyway, I guess I might miss the communal dining a bit--that option to
always have people to visit with over dinner--but I'm thrilled to be back to
eating what I like. The food wasn't bad--lots of it was even locally grown--but
of course my salad intake had to at least double because the non-salad
vegetarian options weren't what you want to eat all the time: pizza, veggie
burgers, pasta. I ate many, many leaves. And everything started to taste the
same after a couple weeks no matter how many choices there were: you hit a wall
and that's that. The first thing I made today with yesterday's grocery haul was
spicy Asian slaw with cabbage, carrots, marinated tofu, and plenty of sambal
oelek and sesame oil. Then I made a tub of guacamole. In a little while, I'm
going to put together a chickpea sweet potato salad with red onions and tahini
dressing and these incredible little sungold tomatoes. These are things I
missed.
What I'll miss most now that I'm home is that intense musical community,
which I've not really had since grad school. And even then that was a pretty
singer-heavy community, because everyone gets ghetto-ized into their little
programs and doesn't mix much with others. But now I have all of these very
accomplished colleagues who play instruments and sing and teach all over the
country. We joked, we collaborated, we commiserated, we floated down the river
in inner tubes. My net has widened considerably, and that has already been so
good for me.
I'll also miss being in the studio every day, singing and teaching, and I
might even miss the classroom a bit. I worked with great kids. The whole
experience has given me some momentum to execute my plan of getting out of my
day job by the end of the calendar year so that I can do what I'm trained to
do. It’s amazing how hard you can work, and how good it feels to do so, when
you care about what you’re doing.
I’ll miss the fireflies and deer too, but the frogs and bugs are singing
their heads off outside my window right now, and I’m glad to be home.
