The end of March means spring is inevitable. Randy is dead of ruined kidney, then rotten lung, then thirty-five years friendship gone, three months silent. No rites of spring sing in mud season, fitting mud damping sounds, muting music of spring melt.

He lived for music, the medium of energy, essence of emotion, yet love is silence, silence of men quiet with corpses, still brothers and soil and love means silence and fathers gone and music and mud.

Emotion guided his finger tip touch with the Opus 109 or 110 or 111. He caressed with keys, with Steinway and Schubert. Never with words. At his brother's bier both were silent in the humid darkness that is men speechless with the weight of dank death.

Rain is predicted.

The arts reveal us.

In that we run the risks of silly melodrama, self-centeredness, self-importance. In the arts, self is the center of the artist's work. William Stafford, among the best of the 20th Century American poets, wrote about his own writing "I know that back of my activity there will be the coherence of my self, and that indulgence of my impulses will bring recurrent patterns and meanings again."

This echoes my half-conscious thinking while writing that whatever comes may be crap once but with further writing becomes the material of linkages, having in common the steady state of selfhood. Writers are forever discovering patterns and themes in their accumulated work that they hadn't known or hadn't quite known were there or so strongly there until suddenly those patterns are clear and the rewriting can recommence. Meanwhile the production must continue.

Artists have to study themselves and their own work. This is also true in singing. We polish only when we obsess about our own production. We must be self-centered to be able to offer anything good. We have to keep singing to have the product for the self to examine.

This probably helps explain how some musicians can be such crazy people, or flamboyant, or even cruel. This examination of personal production is so exasperating and occasionally thrilling and often disappointing and about me me me. There's something bad mannered about this. My stolid Norwegian ancestors with their straight faces and horror of public demonstrations of feeling and disdain for self reference would spin in their graves--if they could summon such strong expressions of disapproval.

How did I ever get into writing, teaching writing, and singing? Me me me?

I get up early in the morning and turn on a light. I get ready for work looking forward to more, to greater seeing. In this I have never been disappointed. My work is a privilege, the gift of greater knowing, of more light.

My students don't know how I feel about their work. There is no reason for them to know. They need me to do my job.

They don't know that I feel privileged. To the extent that they write and let me see what they write, they let me in. This is not a small matter. For all our social natures, we humans are isolated. We don't know each other very well. We live inside, where no one can see us.

Each piece of writing is a small illumination, an opening to the privacy of self. As a writing teacher, I see lots of light.

To students, I am a man doing his job. To me, I am a privileged man receiving glimpses of lives I could not otherwise know. The work isn't only work. It sustains the worker. To quote Gertrude Stein (I think I'm remembering this right) on her deathbed, "More light."

I'm back from the choir tour. It was such a rush that I'm punch drunk. I intended to write all about it, but I had to check in on the four blogs I read every day and one of them was so powerful that now I'm stoned in a completely different way. Loralee is a stunning person, with more courage than I'll ever have. It's distracting to read things that powerful. My choir experience feels really trivial now.

Still, it's real.

At yesterday's home concert I had one of those rare singing experiences. I was looking at Brad, the director, and everything went black except his face. The whole world went away and there was only his face and his hand moving and the music. When the song ended and the applause started I realized I needed to wipe my eyes because of tearing up.

Exaltation.

That was my last concert with the choir as an entity in itself. We will sing the Mozart Requiem (again, exaltation. Perhaps the most beautiful choral work in existence. I can hardly believe I get to participate in producing it.) next month, but it will be with other choirs and an orchestra, directed by someone other than Brad, and will not have the single stamp of our choir. I have a strangely lost feeling about this. For four years I've spent ten hours per week devoted to this choir, and now it's over. It's time to move on, but right now I'm grieving.

At one of our performances early in the tour I had a brain fart during my solo and forgot what I was supposed to do. I muttered garbage until my mind returned. The choir members and Brad ribbed me mercilessly about that. It was so much fun that I'm glad I made the mistake. Of course, it helps that I did it right after that. Big bass voices can be dramatic, but they also can sound really stupid when uttering nonsense. There is a fine line between high drama and absurdity. I seem to waffle back and forth over that line.

Grief. Intense commitment to a group effort is also intensely rewarding. Ending that commitment is oddly lonely.

Blogger is doing bad things to me. My last posting didn't post. Some of the comments I tried to post disappeared into the ether.

I'm off tomorrow morning for the annual choir tour--my last one. Won't be back to the blog until Monday.

Day Twenty-two. Late Friday afternoon I finally saw my doctor. He said that I had a splendid infection and needed antibiotics in large doses for a long time. I told him that a week earlier.

Coughing. Day Nineteen.

The guy from Utah wants to see me, hear me in person. How am I going to arrange that? Little problems.

Doctor appointment in half an hour. Finally.

Somebody asked me what I'm reading. In the last week I've read a novel by Patrick McManus (the humor writer from Outdoor Life, for all you who wouldn't dream of touching such a magazine), Beloved by Toni Morrison (again. Terrible, wretched, wonderful book.). Something in the Wind by somebody I can't remember who is from Spain. The Amalgamation Waltz by Stephen Wright (stunning, so good I couldn't stop, also fascinating about the Civil War and slavery, terrible, wretched, wonderful). The newest Toni Hillerman. The newest Gene Hackman. The newest Jeffery Archer (about Van Gogh, sort of, and utterly addictive). There's another one in there I can't remember right now.

The best of the season so far is still Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, a book about Lincoln and his cabinet.



I'm off to play in the water at a water park in Duluth with my two nephews. Back Friday afternoon.

This deep voiced whore is still coughing. Coughing.

It's hard to think of interesting things to write when all I really want is a good, deep breath.

I had to do the audition last night. My voice teacher said there just wasn't enough time for me to get healthy again before the production company opening would close. So I did it. My lungs are so congested that I couldn't hold on long enough to finish the long phrases. The voice itself seemed healthy enough, so the tone quality came through. Guess that's all I can do.

We'll send out the CD today. Then wait.

Still coughing.

Amazing how exhausting it is not to be able to take a deep breath.

Just discovered a blog by Loralee by reading my other favorites. I would link that, but I've forgotten how. Anyway, she's an opera singer in Logan, Utah. The audition I'm supposed to be doing is for a summer opera program in Logan, Utah. Weird coincidence.

Judging by my progress so far, the summer will be over before I can make that damned tape. Choke. Choke.

A kind anonymous reader reminded me of the link procedure. Here's the one for Loralee .

Here's a draft of a new poem:


summer resort sunsets
matter more than
city settings

log cabins reflect light
in gradations
sidings or shakes are too shallow
to allow or
to contain

docks and shores share
childhood musing, middle age's
knowing, old age's
rememberings
more gently
than sidewalks and curbs,
more gently
than lights too bright to see
the day's end approaching

summer resort sunsets
are shaded with consciousness
of vacation's end, and then the next end,
remind us of what lies ahead,
grant us moments to be
comfortable with silence beyond horizons

The bug is still reproducing. No audition until I can breathe without coughing.

From adolescence on I've been frightened of public performance as a solo singer. I've been afraid of public speaking, too, and still am to some degree, but thirty years of teaching has lessened that somewhat. Part of the fear is a long, odd relationship with my own voice. Sometimes I think of it as separate from me; sometimes it's expressive of me. The first is clinical; the other is intimate and, hence, vulnerable.

When my voice changed, it changed in a big way, from little boy alto to lowest second bass. The process took about ten days during the summer after seventh grade. I was twelve. I got hoarse, thought I was sick, realized I wasn't sick, and then I was the deepest voice I knew. Since I was about five feet tall at the time, I made a pretty ridiculous package. A rumbling eighty-five pound twerp--not the person you expect to sound like God.

At first I couldn't control it, either. I talked right at the bottom of the range because I hadn't yet developed the musculature that came later. It was so much work to pick the pitch up that speaking was heavy work. I rumbled. I had to exaggerate my pronunciation to be understood. I've seen that in many teenaged boys, though not at such an unusual pitch.

So I've absorbed a lot of crap from people because I was (and to a degree, still am) comically unsuited to my own voice and because people thought I was lazy or putting on an act while speaking. With time and singing lessons my vocal apparatus developed to where I now can speak with "normal" pitch variation and no longer talk at the bottom of my range, but even yet I get lots of reaction. Last term a student wrote a laughing teacher evaluation of the little guy with the too-low voice. Yesterday at the drugstore the lady behind the counter said "Say 'this...is CNN,' " which I did to her great amusement.

Choir directors love it. They haven't necessarily wanted me for vocal beauty; they've wanted me because I can sing pitches most people can't hit. I love singing, so choirs have been good for me--I can sing without standing out. In many, many years of choir membership I have done a solo only once, and that was because the director demanded it. I never audition for solos.

This past week my current choir director held auditions for the solo parts in the spring tour and home concert. I didn't go. This week he asked me to do one that others had tried for and I hadn't. I don't know what to think of that, but I'm going to do it. I'll be scared too.

This term that same choir director put me in the care of my current voice teacher. Under his instruction I've learned I can do things I didn't know I could do. He already has had me solo in front of the voice studio. I didn't sleep well for two nights ahead, though to my own surprise I wasn't remarkably nervous during the actual performance. Now he wants me to audition for an opera company. The thought of a summer spent doing several operas is plain shocking to me.

I'll do the audition. Again, I'll be scared, too.

Better to be scared and give it a try than to pass up chances and live with regret.

I've been sticken by a bug, a mean little bug that crept into my nose during the night and began reproducing. Offspring have traveled to my eyes, ears, throat, and lungs. Yesterday I coughed up bugs every minute or so. Today every five minutes.

Odd that while I was at home yesterday, bored because coughing isn't very interesting, daytime television is unthinkable, and the tears running due to the coughing made reading difficult, I thought about my poor neglected blog, as though it had a personality of its own and I was mistreating it, as though I were forgetting to pet Molly the collie or let her go outside. Poor blog. pat, pat.