From Nov 30, 2008

I dreamt about my grandmother the other night.

My aunt Cecelia has been telling me for years that Heni, her mother, visits her while she dreams.  I have asked for this gift, and for a long time, nothing has come of it.

Just two nights ago I dreamt of her.  It was the first time I had seen her since she passed away fifteen years ago.  She was younger than she was when I knew her.  In this lucid place, she talked to me like I was her peer and not her thirteen year old granddaughter.  It was a sort of disturbing dream– we were at an amusement park and either the police or ICE were raiding the place.  She told me she didn’t want to go through this again.  We had nothing to hide, so I wasn’t afraid.  I tried to comfort her.  She may have had to go through raids like that in her childhood.  She was a young lady in Germany during the second world war.

She was a teenager when she came home from an extended absence.  She returned to find two (I think two) young American men occupying her family’s house.

She did what any young lady would do!  She began a relationship with one of them.  He would go on to propose marriage to her, and when his tour was over, her mother made her live up to her word and travel to America to marry this gentleman.   He would turn out to be my aunt Cecelia’s father, and though my father was the son of another man– the one Heni would truly fall in love with– he also raised Keith until he was seven.

These stories I’ve recently learned are quite amazing.

I wonder if one day my story will be passed along about me.  I wonder about their truth and accuracy.  I feel as though it’s my job to set the stories clear.

From Nov 30, 2008

Music is such a beautiful thing.

I added all of my long-time favorites to my playlist and have been sitting here, listening… pretending to surf the internet.  Instead of searching, though, I’m nostalgic.

It’s a beautiful thing.  This life is beautiful.  The experiences I’ve gone through are beautiful.

Music accentuates the moments.  They enhance the emotion.  There are songs I didn’t put on here, simply because the times I associate with them are so painful that I wouldn’t want to revisit those thoughts any time soon, and especially not while I’m playing the songs that are supposed to provide me “mood” music while I write.

Instead, I chose those songs, forever engrained in my heart, that draw out positive emotions.  Or powerful emotions.

Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the stories behind these songs.

Maybe not.

From Nov 28, 2008

I have a theory that playing the piano somehow makes me smarter.  Not in that I’m smarter because I play the piano, but because playing the piano uses a part of my brain that I otherwise don’t use very much.

It’s that whole dexterity/creative part.  I’m sure it falls into my motor cortex rather than my frontal cortex, and this is how I know:

When I think about what it is that I’m playing, I fuck it up.  My fingers hit the wrong notes and it sounds all crummy and sloppy.  But when I don’t think about it, I play beautifully. I just let my fingers do the movements, and wah-lah!  Music flowing from my fingers.  It’s rather amazing.

I was thinking this while I was playing today.  I was thinking, “Wow, Ash, look at your fingers GO!” They were like wild fire, a mind of their own, and something brilliant was coming from them.  Astonished might even be the word.

As long as I know how the song “goes” I can play it well.  I have to know exactly how it sounds in order for it to come out right.  Also, I have to practice reading sheet music, but once I have that down, I can play what’s on the paper just out of sort of “instinct” as to where those notes make my fingers go.  Of course, if I’m picking up a piece for the first time, then I will be sloppy and have to spend all day making it work.

Eventually, though, once the part of my brain that hears the music coming from my fingers knows how the tune goes, then I don’t have to think about it much at all.  In fact, my cognitive processes totally get in the way of my ability to play!

What I’m playing now: Five or six Bach pieces, Fur Elise, and now Pachelbel’s Cannon in D.

I started out with the hard version of latter.  And I’m able to play a little more than half of it– stretching the bejesus out of my fingers and skipping over a few notes because there are just too few hands to make the notes work… And finally, after playing a great many hours on this, I decided to look at the second version of the Cannon in D that I printed out at the same time as I printed the hard version, and was SHOCKED to find that I had also printed the super easy version.  So I spent some time on that as well.

It was a good day.  I’m almost done with the laundry, I got to spend some time with Raine, and I spent hours at the piano.

Ei, my achin back.

From Nov 27, 2008

I’m a little weirded out to discover that Thanksgiving is an American holiday!

I know, naive.

But still…

So, for my non-American pretties, I’m going to tell you what today was all about!

We (the kids, my honey and I) first went to my family’s.  We get together for every holiday and there’s usually 20-30 of us who sit together and eat turkey, green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, carrot & onion casserole, rolls, and this year we had a relish tray (dunno why it’s called that, there’s no relish) with artichoke hearts, olives, pickles, and… cucumbers).  We also had Landon’s amazing baked butternut squash, cauliflower, broccoli, asparagus, beets cooked with orange marmalade…

Then we went to Landon’s family’s and repeat.  There we had proscuitto-wrapped asparagus, ambrosia, and… baked sweet potatoes with fruit.

Traditional desserts are pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, apple, cherry, or any other peach pie… *drool*

Both Landon’s & my families are basically Lutheran, and there’s always a prayer of thanksgiving and this year both houses had wine and beer (hooray!).

We eat until we’re so stuffed we must rush home to unbutton our pants.

And then the families send us home with turkey carcasses and leftovers so that we can eat turkey until we’re content and Landon can make turkey noodle soup.

It’s a holiday of giving thanks for your family, and spending time together (sometimes pretending) you like each other.

I love it; it might even be my most favorite holiday ever.

From Nov 27, 2008

l might be the most blessed person I know.