🎵Heroic!🎵
A musical-pictorial pause with Chopin (and Jane)
Sunday greetings and a happy-surprise reminder from the “shrink” side of newShrink:
Not all stopped-in-our-tracks-paralyzing, “memory-trigger-moments” are traumatic, bad or even sad. From from it, in fact.
Some are laugh-aloud joyous, like this one that arrived around midmorning Saturday. (You can click the link above to listen on Spotify to all or at least a sample, or browse to your own preferred music sources of this often-performed piece.)
I’ll explain. But first, a couple of logistical notes that may be needed and a bit of set-up:
Tech alert: Today’s post has more photo-slides and less of usual editions’ text with hyperlinks. A full slideshow can be great to present a coherent visual story with just a few words. But here, only some slides have been selected with an aim for clarity and minimal duplication of previously shared material. Unfortunately, photo slideshows in Substack, unlike embedded videos or podcasts, still may cause some email services to truncate (condense) some of the bottom of the emailed post. If that happens, you should see an option allowing you to click and open the full file. Please let me know if you can’t and we’ll do a work-around.
some backstory
As with Mother’s Day last week, I’d been aware and reflected some on my late mom Jane’s 96th birthday tomorrow, May 20th “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence” Day in her native Charlotte. With recent and previous newShrinks having discussed aspects of her and her life, marking the birthday itself here wasn’t an intense focus.
The post I had pondered, planned and completed for today will instead come out in your email and publish on the website next weekend. Eerily ironic given today’s “Chopin interlude,” in that edition’s closing “news relief” you’ll see an excerpted essay from the lovely late neurologist and author Oliver Sacks.
Sacks’ posthumously published piece reflects on close-up observations from his 40-year clinical practice helping patients with such neurological conditions as Tourette’s, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s among others. This gifted MD makes an eloquent, even poetic, tribute to what he describes as the two powerful, tangibly effective non-pharmaceutical or surgical regimens he routinely used and recommended. The two he cites:
Time outdoors in nature (or in his native NYC, its soul-saving gardens); and
Music.
Which brings us to this post and the Saturday morning, um, visitation of sorts that brought it about…
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The nearby Davidson College classical-music radio and streamable station WDAV is one of the near-automatic, go-to musical backdrops for different settings and purposes at home here. (Research findings support classical genre’s settling and beneficial effects on the adult brain and nervous system.)
It’s particularly effective for young humans and dogs as well, by the way. Which is why my Labradors are routinely sent to their giant kennel in the sun-porch when newcomers or service people arrive at the house. The dogs’ classical music station coming on has pretty much replaced the need for verbal “kennel” commands. Seriously!
Such was the state of things Saturday morning with a service guy here awhile, after which I went to release dogs from sun-porch to feed them. That is when I was met by the opening chords, then wave after wave of this astonishing piano piece with the heft of a full orchestra. It near-physically (and delightfully) “knocked me stem-winded,” as my late dad might put it.
Soon after came memory of my very young mom’s voice, with “oh Tishie, play Polonaise!!” Now, full disclosure requires me to clarify: When I obliged her, with what was a recital piece at some point, it was a much-simplified arrangement at, say, my 5th or 6th of 10 years of lessons, when I would’ve been 11 or 12.
Nor is there any way I could do that now, without starting new in sight-reading music and practice. Though I love and appreciate listening and watching music and musicians, and have sung in choirs and smaller ensemble, the opportunity and passion for being outdoors, reading and writing — preferably at the same time where possible! — have long since overshadowed producing music as a priority or a skill.
However…
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Those first few chords and recall of mom’s voice in the sun-porch also brought a vivid cell-and-muscle-memory, from 7- and then 8-year-old me at the piano. It was fresh, for back in January I’d happened to have photos that became part of the visual slideshow at our Jane-Celebration.
At left, missing front teeth and in the white rather than the black shoes, is the posed-at-home, pre-event-night shot. It was taken before what would have been my first of several piano recitals, playing onstage at the Charlotte Woman’s Club in Dilworth. (Notice the corsages, gifts from my maternal grandfather!)
At bottom center is the same pre-event home-piano shot taken a year later, me in the black shoes and by then apparently more demure (front teeth probably helped!) And at right that same night, the actual on-stage performance photo taken when I was 8. The sheet music shown at center, which I still have with $1 price tag, is another mom-repeat-request favorite.
Now as for viewing these pictures today, from standpoint of either adult- or 7-/8-year-old me, they are gasp-worthy. My doing this, at any age, is unimaginable.
Though she could be way-tough, on this my mother was not overbearing. Perhaps along with her sheer force-of-nature energy, and because her love and joy in this were so palpable, it never occurred to me that objecting was an option.
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So, this is how today’s newShrink theme became the birthday after all. My mother’s giggle about the people and events bumped to next week, just by her birthday, is almost audible!
Below is an abbreviated slice of the mostly photo tour. Her family of origin, life and history were unusually intertwined with that of her hometown. There’s a remarkable number of present-day buildings, institutions, statues, commemorative historical markers and archival photos that commemorate both Charlotte history and her own.
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Below at right is my childhood friend, present-day reader and another Jane (Patterson Suggs). The two shared the Meck Dec birthday and annual greetings over many decades. For the January celebration, Jane Suggs not only drove up from South Carolina to attend. She brought her own mother Betty, astonishingly beautiful, stylish and charming… at age 101.
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In today’s last visual below, you may note some themes and affinities that cross family generations. Among them: Love of road-trips of any sort, distance and locale; being on the move and behind the wheel — especially in any of a number of vintage Volkswagens I would love to still have. There was the Beetle I kept 20 years well into adulthood, from newspapering into corporate life.
Slightly visible at top left is either Obie (“Orange Bus”) or BB (“Brown Bomber”). The two were beloved, well-used VW camper-vans my dad had chosen in lieu of his company cars in the last two decades of his corporate career, then retirement life.
Pictured in front of the camper is the best-ever white combo pick-up/flatbed truck that served the extended family, my college and post-college friends, then next generations of us.
And at right, Jane’s storied Plymouth Valiant (see the “Jane” tag in front) in which she taught me plus a lot of my teen peers to drive a stick-shift, first in church parking lots and then at stoplights on steep Charlotte center-city hills in heavy traffic. She was a keenly attentive, superb and fearless driver until age 92.
etc….
Again, before closing, I hope you’ll pause to hear and enjoy the Chopin Polonaise of today’s title theme if you haven’t already.
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And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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