Spring Training Begins

Bart Giamatti (1938 – 1989), academic and MLB commissioner, on baseball:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

When I Find Myself in Times of Trouble ...

… I go to the piano.

We’ve had the piano for several months now. I play nearly every day, especially when I’m stressed or sad. It’s become a very personal ritual -- which is probably why I haven’t written much about it -- that occupies my restless mind and heals my winter-weary heart.

And yet, the comfort it brings me hasn’t prevented me from developing new (or rediscovering old) neuroses, especially in the category of how my abilities line up with what I think they should be. I try to remember not to be too hard on myself; after all, until November, I hadn’t touched a piano in twelve years. But I’ve found is that not only am I out of practice with getting my fingers to do what they should, but also with reading bass clef (which was never my strong suit, thanks to ten years of focusing on trumpet), deciding how to break down difficult passages so I can start to chip away at them -- all that stuff.

So last month, in need of some insight, I called Dad, hoping to mine some tips from his five decades of guitar playing. We talked about how to structure a practice session, the fact that plateaus are a natural part of making progress, the idea of running through your list of problem passages every day -- that kind of thing. And while all of that was great (there’s now a note on my music folder that reads PLATEAUS HAPPEN), the best thing I got from the conversation was some perspective by way of a music history lesson.

We’d been speaking in pretty general terms about my concerns and frustrations ("If you’re struggling with a piece for weeks and weeks, how can you tell whether it’s out of your league or you just need to work harder?") and I finally volunteered some specifics: "I’m doing well with the Sarah McLachlan. With the Beatles, I’m mostly working on later stuff from Paul: 'Golden Slumbers' -- "

"Oh, all that piano at the end of 'Abbey Road' is just gorgeous, isn’t it?" Dad asked.

"Definitely. But I’m about to walk away from 'You Never Give Me Your Money.' The left hand is just killing me. I swear, I can tell that Paul has bigger hands than Sarah McLachlan because I can reach all the notes in her bass lines."

"And don’t forget," Dad added, "he’s left-handed."

Holy crap! "Dad, I’d completely forgotten that! How could I forget? He’s Mr. Lefty Flip!"

"That’s right!" he answered. "So you can cut yourself a little slack on that, okay?"

I continued: "The other one that’s pissing me off lately is 'Let It Be.' Not the whole thing -- mostly it’s going well, even the bass part, which jumps around a lot. But you know that pretty little organ part in the middle, way up high?"

"Sure, sure."

"It’s so beautiful, but I’m just having a hell of a time putting the left and right hands together. The left-hand part is so tricky, but when I simplify it, it really loses something. I want to get it right, but this seems hard even for Paul."

"But that wasn’t Paul," he said. "That was Billy Preston."

"No! I knew he did the awesome solo on 'Get Back,' but I thought that was it!"

"Oh, he’s all over that album!”

Does it make sense that I felt really comforted by this? That I pressured myself to be able to hang with Paul (one of the greatest of the greats), but could forgive myself that Billy Preston was out of my reach?

Maybe it’s not logical -- unless you listen to the electric piano on "Get Back" -- but it sure helped. Thanks, Dad. :)

Besmirchment

I’m new to Joe Posnanski’s blog -- he writes a lot about sports and a little about pop culture -- but I’m getting to like it. Today, he had me swooning with this paragraph, tucked into a thoughtful piece on the ubiquitous A-Rod sitch:

I will say: I’ve never been entirely sure when the Yankees became the bastion of purity. That seemed to be at least one of the themes of the early A-Rod coverage -- that somehow he had besmirched the impeccable history of the New York Yankees. As far as I can tell, the Yankees tradition began with Babe Ruth, who would get chased on trains by naked women wielding knives. Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic; Whitey Ford was his carousing partner. George Steinbrenner pled guilty to obstruction of justice and later paid a gambler for dirt on Dave Winfield. Billy Martin was a five-tool rogue. Even just talking steroids: Brian McNamee was the Yankees strength coach, Roger Clemens was a Yankees pitcher, and we know at least one of them is lying. And so on. Not a knock -- every team has its past. Just saying I’m not sure that A-Rod betrayed some sort of saintly Yankees code.

Hear, hear!

Joe also recently did a nice little post after watching George Carlin’s brilliant take on the language of football versus the language of baseball. Joe’s post ain’t Carlin, but some of it is lovely (like how the language of the game “sounds like something a small child came up with long ago”) and it’s always cool to see what happens at the intersection of “baseball” and “words.”

Semi-relatedly: If you haven’t yet seen the PBS broadcast of the Mark Twain Prize being awarded (posthumously) to Mr. Carlin, it’s definitely worthy. And yes, the football-versus-baseball bit -- part of Carlin’s opening monologue in the first-ever episode of “SNL” -- is included.

Kitchen: Top Cabinets Done!

Given that I've only finished the top row of cabinets, the photo comparison below is a bit premature, but because I lurrrrve doing a before-and-after, I'll go ahead and jump the gun.

Here's a look at the original cabinets.

And, now: ta da!

Why, yes! That little framed item is an Addie Ray original -- thanks for asking! :)

Zoo Visit = Three Kinds of Otters!

Last Saturday, it actually got up into the 40s (!!), so we took advantage of the comparatively warm weather with a trip to the Minnesota Zoo.

We hadn’t been about a year and a half (cough*conversion*cough) -- our last time was with the Little Cowboy -- so it was great to re-up our membership and check out everything new! In particular, we were looking forward to seeing the Russia’s Grizzly Coast exhibit, home to Capers. :)

Even on a “warm” winter day like last Saturday, it’s still heavenly to walk into the humidity of the Tropics Trail -- check out those orchids!


The Tropics Trail is also home to the zoo’s Asian small-clawed otters, the smallest species in the otter family.

Around the corner on the recently refurbished Minnesota Trail, Emmet and a friend woke up long enough to say hi …

… and then went back to sleep.
The northern gray wolves came right up to the windows of their new Minnesota Trail habitat.

On Russia’s Grizzly Coast, the Amur leopards and the grizzly bears were snoozing in easy viewing range, too.

And of course, something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: getting to meet the zoo’s new sea otters! As you can see from the pics below, they were completely rambunctious -- terrific to watch, a little challenging to photograph.

I mean, seriously: don't those underwater shots look like the famous pic of the Loch Ness Monster's flipper? Maybe Nessie is a giant otter. :)