Monday, April 13, 2020

What Day Is It?

Another Manic Monday.
Okay. Another Pandemic Monday. See, all this stress is starting to turn us all into bad versions of Weird Al Yankovic. It should be pointed out that even Al had the good taste to pass on the low-hanging fruit of "My Corona."
Meanwhile, we continue to mark the days in the ways we can. A friend of mine from work suggested that we now refer to days as "the other day," "a few days ago" and "in the next few days." Sundays look a lot like Tuesdays now we can have tacos delivered to us by some guy on a scooter.
Back to music: My wife and I have been telling Google to play music by classical composers. This has the effect of challenging our rusty minds to recall the names of people who have not recently succumbed to a virus, but who have been dead for hundreds of years. We've had Chopin day. And a Mussorgsky, whose first name was Modest. We started a Mahler day, but that became a little oppressive. So far we have steered clear of easy targets like Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. Instead, I find myself poking around in the recesses of my memory looking for composers who I remember from all those years of piano lessons and the sheet music I remember piled next to the lamp on my mother's baby grand.
Which puts me squarely in place to walk across the office and start to plink out tunes on the piano that my son practiced on during his keyboard period. I have some skills left over. I can still read music, and I know where the notes are located, but I don't imagine that the decades I have taken off my own regimen have done my coordination any favors. Every Christmas I make a big show out of playing the first few bars of The Little Drummer Boy. Other than that, we have a very substantial piece of wood furniture upon which we can stack our family photos.
Oh, and there's cooking. I have done more of that since we have been locked inside. I have done my share of opening boxes and shoving things into a microwave, but I have taken the occasion to cut up some vegetables and sauteed this or browned that in hopes of eliciting a reaction from my wife. Which is pretty much the work I feel that I really need to accomplish during this shelter in place: eliciting a reaction from my wife. I want her to say to me, "Remember the other day when you just started playing that song on the piano?"
"The Mozart?"
Oh yea. That would be excellent.

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