Anniversary music

I haven’t been here in awhile. Occasionally I get tired of my own stuff and just don’t want to think about it for awhile. I wish other bloggers did that occasionally. But of course I am not a blogger. Bloggers do stream-of-events or stream-of-consciousness. For that, the online environment is a must. I don’t want that. I still want to be picked up like a newspaper.

Karen and I celebrated our first anniversary this morning. We were married at home one year ago, out on the patio on the hillside, with its totally analog impression of being suspended between earth and sky. “We live in a treehouse,” Karen said, looking out the kitchen window last week. I am 63, she is 55. We are very lucky.

We celebrated at 8, the hour of our vows. Between us, champagne and tears flowed in morning December light in Southern California, light like no other, and a sharp Santa Anna wind out of the east. It all filled me up. In fact it overflowed. I lacked the capacity to hold all the feelings, and trying to do so, stretched me a little. I told Karen that: “You stretch me.” On our second anniversary, I will be able to hold a little more. Our third anniversary, a bit more still. And so on. I will always be too small to hold it all, and that is exciting.

We put our wedding music on again: a CD of an Andre Rieu concert, live in Tuscany, turned up to semi-blast. At some point, they played Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” just the Lone Ranger part, without the reflections-in-a-languid-pool buildup. I wished for the intro – it sets up the hellbent part so nicely – but I guess it would not have been practical, in an outdoor concert venue in Tuscany.

So there went the brass, sounding charge for the cavalry of horns and strings, escorting hearts and souls forward and upward into their own suspension between earth and space, and what I thought was, this music began as notes on paper. Rossini never heard the “William Tell Overture” until he wrote it. A man in a study, penciling music language onto paper, as I do now in my back-room office – or is that where I am, really? - connecting my mind to a page in essentially the same way, though I don’t have to crumple a page and start over.

I thought about how Rossini, at his work, was going to be filled up by what he was doing. His notes on paper were going to create a sound. On this page of mine, I have the liberty to go back to his study, before his overture joined the world’s sounds, and sit next to him in my mind, look at him scribbling away, and think: what is this work he is doing, going to do to him, when for the first time he hears the music it makes?

I shiver at the reality. Rossini, in a hall, the music cavalry onstage, swirling delicate figures in the lanquid pool, until it is time. Then: hi-yo, Silver. How did he stand it? How did Gioacchino Rossini, age 37, survive the evening of Aug. 3, 1829, at the Paris Opera?

Same way I survived the morning of Dec. 3, 2006. I filled up, overflowed, and had to stretch a little. And now I am connected to a page, and I wonder if it were translated into music, how would it sound? Now that it is finished, I hope I can hold at least a little more than I could when I started at the top of the page. And it would be great if people reading this for the first time felt different at the end. What if it stretched Rossini? Always there to shoot for. But you can’t do it every day.