Olivia woke me in the morning far earlier than either of us wanted to be up (and I had a sore throat, which is usually a sign of doom, but it didn’t get worse throughout the day and I turned out to be fine), but we had to go to church. On previous visits of mine, she had still been going to the church nearby in town, but over the last year had gravitated more toward a church she thought she would probably join, some distance away. Joel was also coming with us.
Let me restate that: Joel was also coming with us! To be going to church with him was a sign of great growth on his part and meant great joy to us. The one doubt in our minds came from the fact that he had been up very late through the night before after the concert, and might not manage to be up and dressed by the time we needed to pick him up. However, he’s been coming so regularly that Olivia is quite good at wrangling him in that highly specific situation as well as all the other everyday ones she encounters being his coworker. While we sat in her car outside his house, waiting to see whether he would respond to any of her texts, she regaled me with stories about times his phone has been dead or she has needed to break in to wake him.
At exactly the moment she had predicted he would come out (the latest possible), he showed up, dressed and nominally awake but about as dead as you would expect. Olivia was the only one of us with anything like her full faculties about her, so it was a good thing she was driving.
The morning was misty and cool, a pleasant contrast to the heat of the week before. We drove for a long time between bluffs and along the river, while Joel and I slowly woke up and he eventually reached a point of enough energy to kick the back of my seat.
Once at church, we found quite a few of the regular families missing, and so although we did not sit in the back row of the sanctuary, we were in the back relative to most of the other people there.
The music at that church leaves somewhat to be desired, as Olivia has observed before, but otherwise it was not too bad. Their young and excitable pastor got up to preach, and, with a nervous smile fixed upon his face, explained that since he has been preaching through the gospel of Mark for the last two and a half years, ever since he first came there, they had finally arrived at the end. or was it the end? His sermon today was going to be on the disputed portion of Mark chapter 16.
The nervous smile, and occasional anxious rambling and interrupting himself, remained throughout the whole sermon. I don’t think he needed to be quite that worried; he laid out the opposing viewpoints and the reasons for them quite well, in spite of everything. and his conclusion, that God preserves scripture no matter what, was of course quite sound.
To make a point about tension and the way we expect it to be resolved, he mentioned it one point that last week he had been listening to a fugue — the three of us perked up at this good sign, and Joel waved his fist in the air approvingly — “Ah, I see the musicians in the room know what I’m talking about,” he said. “Bach’s Toccata in something minor I think?” He ended his sermon by asking, nearly word for word, who would be a witness for my Lord. (Olivia got quite twitchy.)
After church, I met the first friend Olivia made in that church, who announced that I was going to be moving out there to help them in a combined book and coffee shop. There did not seem to be much left for me to say about it.
We stopped at a coffee shop on the way home, and while we sat in the drive-through the sprinkles of rain turned to sleet. By the time we got back in town, and were having lunch at Culver’s, it was snowing fairly determinedly.
Olivia had been lamenting the fact that she could not go to Angela’s last band concert, possibly the last ever, because she had a violin lesson scheduled for exactly that hour in the afternoon. Joel and I, as well as joining forces to encourage her to eat, agreed that she ought to ask about rescheduling it. What did she have to lose, after all? and she stood to gain a great deal. Back in our dorm room, she finally decided to go for it.
2 hours and 15 minutes later, she woke me up from a wonderfully restoring nap to tell me that we were going to a concert. It was still snowing. By this time it had become clear that this was a real snow storm, which would probably give us the already-accumulated three inches over again before it was done. we bundled up — I having to borrow socks, a coat, and mittens, as I had not brought any of these with me, on a day that seemed like forever ago, when it was so hot that I was sticking to the steering wheel — and set out through the frosty wasteland for the band concert hall.
I had never been to a band concert before; the little band music I had heard had all been for marching bands, none of them very good, and I had suffered through many an afternoon of listening to the SMSU band rehearse while doing music librarian stuff, which was quite enough for me. Olivia assured me that their repertoire was usually good.
This concert, which came right after a jazz concert in the same space, was also the band conductor’s final concert before retirement. (She was the conductor who had taken over the choir for the last year.) That made this another very emotional performance for most everyone involved. The theatre was packed, and as it was another of those where alumni were invited to perform in a couple of pieces, here and there throughout the audience you would find a perfectly ordinary-looking person sitting down with a trumpet or a French horn or something in his lap.
Between two pieces in the middle of the concert, an alumna came out and presented flowers to the retiring conductor and said lovely things about her legacy in championing the cause of music at the school over the past decades, and shaping the lives of the people who had passed through the program, which made many people cry.
If the type of person who made the decision to cut the liberal arts programs had also been the type of person to come to concerts, this weekend would have demonstrated to them abundantly the value of the arts, particularly music, to the point where they would have needed a stronger defence than “but money!” for lopping off half of the entire university. For some reason you don’t see this sort of thing happening around strictly technological or scientific events. Business majors rarely find their topics of study moving them and a room full of other people to tears. Political science students don’t often find themselves drawn together into a sense of unity around a common activity with people they would ordinarily have nothing to do with. But, that sort of person is not the sort of person who goes to concerts (requires too much soul), so of course they were not there and did not see it. (It’s not just me grousing; other people around us in the audience made similar comments both before and after.)
The other highlight of the concert was the world premiere of a piece commissioned by one of the university’s foundations, written with this band in mind. It was called Towards the Stars, and when the composer of it was called up to introduce it, he was revealed to be the nice young man outside the door Ang had stopped to talk to the other night. I have worked with one other living composer of a piece before, which experience did leave me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about composers who come to see their works performed. And indeed, when it’s the world premiere of your work in question, we can understand a bit of self-centeredness. But this composer was not like that at all. One of the band members (also a friend of Olivia’s) had come up with the name of the piece, and he mentioned him by name to give the credit where it was due. While the pece was playing he disappeared from the stage and watched from the side one of the theatre doors, in the shadows, seeming but his facial expressions to be quite wrapped up in the music. When it finished and the conductor went to point to him for the applause, she couldn’t at first find him. He had to be called back onto the stage. After that, he blended into the crowd of alumni in the audience, holding a trumpet on his lap, and during the final pieces when the alumni joined the band on stage, he snuck into the trumpet row quite unobtrusively, and joined in all the applause for everyone else with great enthusiasm.
This concert also concluded with the Alma mater, and afterward, as the lights went up and people stopped crying and started to talk to each other again, in what was becoming quite a pattern, the crowd began to trickle out into the foyer and then brave the wet and windy outdoors for the walk to the reception being held in another building. Olivia and Angela and I went briefly, but soon returned to her dorm. Olivia and I continued on to the ceramics building, where our creations from the day before were not nearly as dry as she had then estimated; having 100% humidity in the air and all the windows being left open probably accounts for that. We also discovered some quite distressing leaks in the ceiling of the room the kiln was in, with water spurting near a light bulb that had been left on, and we ran around turning off switches and putting buckets under drips for a while.
That night we got to go to bed early. It was still snowing.
Monday started off as a more relaxed day, at least for me, once an early-morning meeting with someone on campus was finished. Olivia was trying to listen to an online class on her computer at the same time as packing to leave for the two places she would have to travel to for other musical engagements that week, while asking me about every 10 minutes when I was going to leave. the schools in that City had declared a snow day, and the sky was still gray and threatening. I wanted to wait a bit and see what happened. As I did not work until the following afternoon, I could afford to wait and go back in the evening if I needed to.
For lunch Olivia made waffles and we had a living room picnic with Angela. At 1:00 we heard the bell ring. Olivia and I grew quiet to listen. We were not entirely surprised when it rang a second time. Ringing 12 times was fairly commonplace by now. A 13th ring made sense. But then it went on again! Whoever was ringing the bell, machine or man, did not stop until it had rung 20 times. And as Olivia immediately ran off for parts unknown, it remains an unsolved mystery.
After a visit to the Ceramics building to polish up our projects from Saturday, the snow was beginning to melt noticeably and I no longer had excuses to stay. (Olivia may also have reached her limit for being able to put up with me.) We got road food for me, and hauled all my things out to the car, made sure the car started, and cleaned the snow off it. On our last trip down the hill, the snow was starting to fall off the trees. Great clumps of it fell with a sploosh into the creek or tried to go down the back of our necks. Bits of blue sky and green leaves, suddenly so unfamiliar to us, began to be revealed.
As I drove, avoiding rush hour in the first city and getting to go around the one that had so terrified me on my way out, and encountering no issues in the third, the sky got lighter and lighter. The further west I went the less snow had fallen, but also the less green the grass was and the fewer buds were on the trees.
I had an audiobook with me, the radio adaptation of Prince Caspian, saved from my library’s recent cull, and found myself unexpectedly sobbing as I listened to it. The thought that someday something so good could happen that it swallowed up and undid all the bad things in the entire world and made them seem small in comparison — and I don’t know about you but I am almost always acutely aware of the variety of evils in the world around us, however comfortable my own life is at the moment — as depicted in such small precise examples as Aslan restoring youth to a woman who had grown prematurely old teaching mathematics to a pack of unappreciative boys, or healing an old woman on her deathbed, whose niece had been crying about her, suddenly and unexpectedly brought it home to me. Sometimes things seem too good to be true — but then, so did the triumphant return of Aslan seem to be too good to be true to the Narnians who had lived under the Telmarines for ages without any sign of his presence or intervention. Perhaps good things, like the Golden Age of Narnia under the four English children, have to end — but perhaps they do begin again. It is Easter.
Fin.
Of Dreams and Swords 