Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Like the fashion industry, church choir directors think two seasons ahead. 

My irises are blooming, and we have yet to put on this Easter’s program, but already it is Christmas around my dining room table and piano.   As I play through sample copies of various arrangements, I sort them into piles: “forget it,” “maybe – come back to it,” and “show Janet,” our organist/pianist.  Janet and I have worked together for many years, and we share programming sensibilities. 

She and I also have been fortunate to have been part of a close set of professional and professionally-trained musicians in the Pasadena Stake.  Somehow we’ve always managed to have a pretty deep musical bench.  Our ward in particular has had among us a soprano with LA Opera and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, a violist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and a conductor of the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus.  We’ve had any number of piano majors move in and out, and our stake right now has two Doctor of Musical Arts students at the USC Thornton School of Music. 

Our church has a great music heritage, what with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (which we affectionately call the “MoTabs”) and all, but the reality is, it is a struggle to maintain a standard of high-quality music in our church services and events.  We are all volunteers, so singing or lending instrumental support comes on top of everything else everyone is busy doing in their lives.  We may have our stand-out talents, but most of my ward choir singers do not read music, have not ever had any vocal training, and have not ever sung in any other choir.  Yet the goal is to sound as though everyone is a stand-out talent. 

So those of us here in Pasadena who bring our musical training to the metaphorical stable, like the Magi with their gifts, have had a “one for all, and all for one” attitude.  We constantly cover for one another, which includes taking time off of work whenever there is a funeral, to sing, play the piano, or direct the congregational hymns, occasionally for a family member of someone we may not even have known. 

Janet and I, and others, have talked about this over the years, and we think that perhaps our biggest church musician responsibility has been to raise children who themselves have become church musicians, trained not only in what to do – the music competencies-- but also in how to do it – to serve unconditionally.  At Janet’s request, I taught her daughters piano about 20 years ago; one of them has become a beautiful organist in her own right.  Many in our ward have hosted Akemi in their homes to have a “practice audience” before a competition or recital.  Just the other night, Akemi, home on spring break, played through a few pieces for her recital next Saturday night for one ward family, and we got to hear their son and daughter play their upcoming recital pieces, as well.  We all had such fun, and it was the kind of “pay it forward” evening I cherish.

One Sunday morning a few years back, Janet, Deanne, and I stood in the back of the chapel, watching our daughters Shannon, Allison, and Akemi rehearse a number together.  We put our arms around each other’s shoulders and told ourselves, “Look at that; we did it.”  Our children are taking their places not only as musicians, but also as music administrators and leaders in their own right. 

Tonight in between Akemi practicing Bloch’s “Baal Shem” and her other recital pieces, she has been taking breaks by plunking away at a few hymns, the results of NEC keyboard technique classes.  I’ve rotated in on the piano bench, reading a few more Christmas pieces at a time, and am proud I can ask her what she thinks of an arrangement. 

It’s Christmas in March, not only because of the advance seasonal choir planning, but because the Magi have brought the heritage of musical training to the stable. 

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

My dad set his spoon down, still regarding the hollowed-out grapefruit half on the kitchen table in front of him.  “Tonari’s tree is good,” he said, as much to himself as to me.  “I think I’ll go get me one.”

Tonari is what he and my mother often called my “Uncle” Mits, our neighbor with whom we have been bonded by land.   He and Mits periodically compared notes about how their trees were doing on their adjacent lots, former orange groves.   We didn’t have a grapefruit tree, and my dad liked having one in the morning.

Later he showed me the label on the tree he brought home from the nursery.  It was a then-new hybrid, developed as I now know, at UC Riverside, a cross between a white grapefruit and a pomelo called oroblanco.  The pomelo features make it large and very sweet; oroblancos are true to their “white gold” name for eating.

Once my dad’s tree started bearing fruit and he started giving them away, his became the grapefruit of choice among our family and friends.  After you had tasted one of my dad’s, the smallish tart ones off the large tree in my front yard just didn’t hack the breakfast scene any longer.   During the season, we would bring his grapefruit home from Peralta Hills to Pasadena, while my own plentiful but outclassed grapefruits found their way into marmalades, chutneys, and candied peel.  

When I landscaped my back yard three years ago, I put high priority on planting three semi-dwarves of exactly the citrus varieties I wanted: a navel orange, a Meyer lemon, and, yes, an oroblanco grapefruit.  The lemon started bearing fruit the very first year.  Then last year was the first year the orange kicked in.  I was excited to see my first oranges ripening on the tree, when one morning, much to my dismay and annoyance, I watched a squirrel scamper off with first ripe one.

Now this spring for the first time, my own oroblanco is crowded with fruit, as well as with buds, ready to pop.  In a few days, my backyard will have the fragrance I love of citrus blossoms.  Maybe this is why my taste in perfume and lotions have gravitated to citrus and floral scents.   

At the two-week mark after a treatment, I’m feeling much better.  I can tell I’m back to normal again, as I’ve regained interest in eating something besides variations of chicken soup, in cooking at all, in poking around the garden, now in daylight-savings evening light, to see what I could collect for dinner.  Some arugula, kale, parsley, mint, and grapefruit segments, tossed with lemon olive oil?  Some baby beets sautéed with oranges?  Some “Bright Lights” Swiss chard and sugar snap peas in (more) soup or over pasta?

After a couple of weeks of feeling crummy in body and soul, I’m happy to be happy with spring springing, and the accomplishment of having my own oroblanco tree.  I know; a grapefruit tree might not do much for you, but it does something good for me.  

Thursday, February 28, 2013

As I was web-surfing tonight to see what was going on with sequestration, I learned that today was Rare Disease Day.  Apparently a number of world-wide organizations designated today for various activities to raise awareness for the so-called “orphan diseases,” those ailments which are “orphaned” from research attention because of the relatively small number of people they afflict.  In the U.S., a rare disease is defined as one that affects fewer than 200,000 Americans.

When it comes to “rare,” well, I’ve got “rare.”  The estimated number of Waldenstrom’s cases in the U.S. a year is only about 1,500.  Treatment approaches for Waldenstrom’s essentially have been extrapolations from treatments for multiple myeloma and more common lymphomas.  Too bad that this effort fell on the eve of the sequestration deadline.  What I hear in my university hallways is that all federal funding of scientific research is about to shut down, which isn’t going to help any of us.

I had hoped that after Tuesday’s treatment, I would be done, at least for a while.  Based on Tuesday’s lab results, though, my USC doctor reluctantly agreed with the Dana-Farber Thanksgiving-time recommendation that I stay on this course for maybe three more treatments, so nine more months, at least. 

The IgM level did drop, but the rate of the drop seems to be slowing down.  This isn’t unanticipated – I’ve read in the literature about various possible reasons why.  One theory is that treatment gets the “low hanging fruit” but ultimately can’t get to the most resistant WM cells which have managed to hide out deep in the bone marrow.  Others relate to whether there are WM stem cells at mischief.  It seems inevitable that I’m facing the “diminishing returns” scenario.  In any event, I felt much better today than yesterday, but still don’t feel like anything ambitious.

After Bing died, I discovered in the grocery store the “Mitford” series in paperback – a collection about a lovable Episcopal priest in a country town in North Carolina with a cast of townspeople dealing with one another’s travails and heart-warming joys. It was good, clean escapism for me, and I clung to it even though Akemi would routinely come into my bedroom and ask, “So how are things in Mitford tonight?”  I think it’s time to stop reading about sequestration, and head for Mitford instead.  

P.S. The narcissi growing outside my bedroom window.  

Monday, February 25, 2013

One of the reasons why I put up with the conundrums of university administration is because, if I allow myself, I can still be a student.  Each semester I read the works assigned in one of the courses being taught in the Master of Liberal Studies which I direct.  My job entails being up to speed on the curriculum in my program, I rationalize, never having really gotten over feeling that learning from the astonishing scholarship around me in the hallways is a guilty pleasure.  I’d go to class every week, if I could, but I make the students nervous.  (They’re fine if I show up once a semester, and all the better if I show up with food.  They also know I always fall for the line, “Dean Kamei, you haven’t baked us a chocolate cake in a while.”)

Over the MLS years, I’ve read some classics that I’ve skirted around: Oedipus Rex, translated excerpts of Tales of the Genji, O Pioneer!, The Stranger.  I’ve filled in more Jane Austen and Shakespeare.  Like the concert on the subscription series that forces ears into unknown territory, this reading discipline forced before me Luigi Pirandello and Tom Stoppard.  Actually, I was glad to finally get around to Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, common fare in humanities courses, although it was his Arcadia which really got me.

The work which has “gotten” me this semester so far is David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.  I haven’t seen the movie, and now am not sure I want to, because the mesmerizing aspect is his writing.  I’m in awed admiration of those whose who can hone and deliver on their own literary voice; to “nest” six stories together, each with a distinctive voice, has blown me away.  I figure I’m in good company, as Dave Eggers is quoted as saying this book is “one of those how-the-[blankety blank]-did-he-do-it? modern classics.”  Cloud Atlas is part of a fictional work line-up gathered together in one MLS course to analyze the rationale for reading and writing. 

Maybe if I were David Mitchell, I’d have an astonishing clever way of weaving together six of the many stories which have consumed my January and February.  But like any one of my MLS students contemplating a thesis topic, the more there is to say, the more overwhelming it feels to say it.  The good things going on in Akemi's life, contemplating ten years without Bing, the shifting sands of higher education, attempting to keep safe and secure This Old House, rendering ward choir successes with those untrained yet willing, spending four-and-a-half hours total with AT&T to sort out multiple phone plans. . .there, I dare anyone to nest together those six stories. 

But mostly over the past couple of months, I’ve been in a conundrum about this blog, my rationale for writing it, and whether I deliver on your rationale for reading it.  As my lymphoma marker has continued to slowly, but steadily, drop, I’ve moved beyond thinking of myself most days as the Cancer Patient.  Yet I have to accept, and still quite haven’t, that I can’t escape the need for some kind of ongoing treatment, at least until my heroes in science and medicine come up with some gene therapy.  I’ve been motivated to capture the family stories while I can write them down, but now that I feel better, I’m more motivated to live life while I can.  I've tried to stop thinking of more sleep and rest as being the equivalent of doing less, and that has meant going to bed instead of writing here (witness right now it is 11:55 p.m.).  This blog has been my companion, and yet, as with any relationship, it’s a companion who needs quality time, thought, and care.  

But I'm regrouping.  Tomorrow is my 25th treatment.  Who could have imagined?  Certainly not I, when all this started in August 2010.   Okay, let's look at what's good about 25 treatments: the 24 treatments have worked, and that I'm still here to be having treatments.  

Tomorrow I'll take to the hospital with me another book from the MLS course syllabus to read.  I promise to have more to write.  

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The pre-Christmas calendar got too congested for what has become our annual elaborate cookie decorating party (the decorating is elaborate, not the party), so Akemi and I moved on to new year’s preparation instead.  On the day after Christmas, we hosted for the first time our own mochitsuki – the making of the rice cakes served as the traditional first meal on New Year’s Day.

When we were in Anaheim for Christmas eve, we got my dad’s mochi-maker out of the Peralta Hills garage. My dad loved this machine.  It looks like an over-sized rice cooker, which, actually, it is.  It’s quite amazing: it steams the rice, just like a rice cooker, and then moves into a mode that is a combination food processor and mixer as it grinds and beats the steamed rice into a smooth paste.  No more bicep-building hefting of wet rice into big steamers.  No more jerry-rigged meat-grinders engineered by my dad and his brother.  My dad was happy to leave my childhood memories behind for the wonders of modern convenience.

When we pulled out the English translation of the instructions, I saw that my dad had written in the conversion from kilograms for the equivalent of five pounds of rice and the calculation of the necessary amount of water: 545 ml, to be precise.  “Aw, Grandpa,” said Akemi.  How like my dad.  I left it to a Harvard chemistry major, a Harvard computer science major, and a Tufts human factors major to carry out the assembly and machine operation.  We were encouraged when that heart-warming smell of steamed rice began to waft through the kitchen.

We sat around to mostly, literally, watch a pot boil, until I pronounced the rice “smooth enough.”  I tried to channel my Auntie Emi, who usually held the place of honor at the extended Kamei clan mochitsuki to push the hot rice into a long loaf and cut it into small pieces for everyone standing around the table to mold into little cakes.  The an paste came out of a can instead of being homemade, and many of the cakes were a little wrinkly instead of being glossy smooth, but our guests got the idea.  What we lacked in style points, we made up for in a good time.

In another break from tradition, we did not wait for New Year’s Day to eat our mochi, serving ozoni up immediately for our guest participants.  My mom’s family, the city folks, prepared clear soup, while my dad’s family, the country folks, always put miso in theirs.  In a concession to the Kameis, my mom since her marriage had made ozoni with miso, so that’s the way we know it. 

Since Akemi and I got a jump on our new year’s meal, yesterday for New Year’s Day at my mother’s home we went straight for the sushi.  We noshed our way through an afternoon of Stanford hanging on to win the Rose Bowl, chess games, and Uno.

2012 turned out surprisingly well, much better than I could have anticipated.  I always eat an odd number of kuromame – sweet black soy beans – for good luck, and this year ate a generous amount for an especially auspicious 2013.  Happy new year!