a waking dream

my mother used to have a rosary. we were wondering where it was because we thought it might give her some comfort these days. i found it in a drawer and gave it to her. she was happy to have it. that night, she got up after only a few hours of sleep. she was complaining about itchy feet and couldn’t get back to sleep. maybe she has athlete’s foot. i put some ointment on it. she sat down in the living room. she picked up the rosary and looked at it and seemed satisfied as she said “ahh”. then used it to scratch her toes... “ahhh...”

i can’t help observing her and wondering about the brain’s functions and malfunctions.

later, she woke up from a dream and tried to explain to me what was bothering her.

“i don’t know how to say it – february 2 is a tuesday, it’s the day, you can touch it on the calendar.”

a friend of mine who’s dad had alzheimers described it best. she said that he was in a “waking dream”

“i don’t want to join this club next year”. sometimes she is like a simple person, sometimes like an insane person. always nice, sometimes even cheery. she’s happy in general.

keep thinking of film “curious case of benjamin button” – writer must have seen this. very child like. she still knows how to peel broccoli and shell shrimp.

it is sad that she has to go to a nursing home, but she is so fortunate that she has the means to pay for a place where they will look after her. lucky to have a daughter and son in law who are doctors. i keep thinking that the baby boomers ahead of me will figure out how to do this. they will fix it before i get there. how do you check out if you want to? or maybe the memory thing will be curable or we won’t get there to begin with. maybe by then, we will already be virtual people, giving up our bodies and living in the computer. maybe not...

the eagle has flown

i took jj to the airport to fly as an unaccompanied minor. i knew she could do it. she knew she could do it. she has traveled extensively for her 15 years. before she was one year old, she had already been to 9 countries. she has been on lots of plane trips. we knew she would be fine, but one can’t help feeling a bit tense sending off one’s child on her own on a long trip. we checked in then had a little dinner together. then i brought her back to the check-in desk and a lady took her to the front of security line. they went through and disappeared. she will go directly to the plane and be the first one to board. i texted p “the eagle has flown, the package is sent”.

she will be guided through transfer in london.

it was fine. she was fine.

violin camp

the organizers asked us to try to write a paragraph describing the camp. here’s my attempt at a synopsis:

“in an idyllic wooded setting by a lake, ogontz suzuki camp is a week of music for families with children who have studied string instruments through the suzuki method. it offers a remarkably supportive and unpretentious social setting, where young musicians experience camaraderie and a feeling of belonging in spending time with other young musicians and their families. in the lovely surroundings of nature, it inspires children and teens to enjoy playing music. “

the camp takes place in the woods near the “white mountains. with many of the same families coming back year after year, it has become a community. families catch up with one another.

everyone participates in chores and parents accompany younger kids to lessons, group lessons, chamber groups, and orchestra rehearsals. there are also dance and theatre classes that prepare a performance for the last day. most kids play a solo in one of the afternoon recitals. there are extra activities like art and swimming in the lake; special events, like water balloon fights and “polar bear plunge” early morning swim in the lake; evening performances by faculty. then, after all that, there is the brilliantly presented “optional, stay up late and play sight reading chamber music” in the cafeteria. the better you are, the later you can stay up. the camp has an amazing spirit.

i knew that she liked this camp. that’s why we came all the way from paris. however, i didn’t realize how MUCH she liked it. one night as we settled down in the screenless cabins, (she and her cousins in a tent), she told me that she LOVED this camp. she loved it so much that she was really sad that she would soon be too old to come. she loved running around the camp on her own and hanging out with the other teenagers. it’s a safe place that gives the kids a feeling of freedom. more than that, having all these friends who ALL play the violin or cello, who understand that part of her. it is sad that playing the violin can feel like a handicap as a teenager.

when i’m here at this camp, the thing i find particularly magic is walking past the cabins in the woods and hearing music playing, kids practicing everywhere. many parents are musicians too and we all enjoy the special time making music in the woods.

dsk charges dropped

charges against dsk dropped (dominique strauss kahn)– unfortunately typical in many rape charges, “he said/she said” is hard to prove. wish i knew what the paris doggy people are saying about it!

short mother-sitting

came down from camp to mother-sit for a day and night.

mother-sitting

i was surprised to see the dramatic change in my mother. my sister has been sending us email reports over the years telling us how the dementia was getting worse. it’s not that we didn’t believe her, it’s just that my mother didn’t seem that bad. my sister said that she was just really good at covering it. but now, my mother is not able to take care of herself. it was very clear.

sometimes, it was as if she were in a dream. it was a state that seemed so familiar. in my dreams i would hold one object that would transform into the functionality of another. like talking on the telephone, that suddenly was a deck of cards that i’d be dealing. something along those lines. i’d be with one person, who would suddenly be someone else. in one place that suddenly became another, as if in a movie with a twisted story line. especially in the late afternoons when she was tired, my mother would be much more confused. this is a common symptom that is called: “sundowning”. in her own home, she would say, “i want to go home”. in the first floor office that she had converted several years ago into her bedroom, she sat on the bed and would talk to me as if i were the nurse in a facility. she said “where should i sleep?” i would point to the bed. “should i sleep here?” i said, “yes, this is your bed. see? here is your bedspread.” she said, “oh, you even brought that here? you are good.” it was a very strange state. i would lie there wondering how it seemed so matter of fact. it didn’t seem emotional. i figured i was just too repressed to have any feelings about it.

i decided that i should extend my stay a little longer to help out. i was able to change my flight to a week later. jj would have to go back to paris on her own. meanwhile, we visited boston for a couple of days. took care of some business, but hardly had time to see any friends. i “mother-sat” for a few days and then it was time for violin camp.

violins allowed

i spoke to several different employees of the airline that had refused our violins as carryon. the last one had the info and directed me to the page on the website that states clearly the policy for musical instruments. there is a different dimension allowance for them and small instruments up to 50” long are allowed on board. i will be writing to the airline to complain and try to get my baggage fee back...

ma

it was a good time to come home to visit the family. my sister and family live in concord, new hampshire and my mother lives a street away in her own house. she is 85. she loves her house and her privacy. she has said that she never wants to move and that when she finally leaves her house, it will be horizontally. she has been getting more and more forgetful for many years now. call it what you want: alzheimers/dementia /senility /forgetfulness/memory impairment.

little neurons have been gradually disconnecting in her brain, or getting clogged, but she seemed to still be able to get along. in the last 2 weeks there was some little connection that was lost, that was a critical one. she suddenly cannot find rooms in her own home. my sister has taken a month off from work. she has basically moved in, being with my mother round the clock, and at night getting up every 2 hours when my mother gets up, to help her find the bathroom. i always wondered how we would decide that it was time for her to go to a facility, but now it is very clear. there is no question about it. i was happy that the timing of our trip allowed me to be back so i could relieve my sister a bit.

no violins allowed

jj has been playing the violin since she was 5. that’s been 10 years now. she has been following the suzuki method. in the summers there are suzuki method “institutes” or camps. we have been going to a wonderful one in new hampshire for several years with jj’s cousins, the daughters of my sister, who also play the violin. many students from the music school in cambridge that jj used to attend, go there too. we all go back year after year. last year we did not go, since we had just moved to paris. this year jj said that she wanted to go. it seemed like a good opportunity to go back and see the family.

i found a flight transferring through london. we packed carefully so that we could each bring a violin as carry-on baggage. one was a smaller violin that i wanted to bring back to sell. i knew that the violin’s dimensions were longer than the allowed dimensions, but we always have brought them in the cabin in the past. however, this time, in paris, the check-in lady would not allow us to bring it on. she said the rule was clear, that only things that fit into the specified dimensions were allowed and that they would have to be checked into the hold. i told her that these were delicate instruments and that we always carried them into the cabin. not only was i worried about them being thrown around with the luggage but temperature change would be harmful to them. she said she could put a “fragile” sticker on them. when i continued to protest, she called her manager who said that we could buy tickets for each instrument (we had paid $800 for each of our round trip tickets). she was firm. jj was in agreement with me, we could not send the violins below. i had brought a very large suitcase planning on bringing things back from the US so it was mostly empty. we repacked everything to put jj’s suitcase inside my case. we took the 2 violins out of their cases, left the bows in them, but stuffed the empty space with underwear. then we wrapped the violins in a sarong that i like to travel with because it comes in handy for so many things, like for example, wrapping 2 violins. i put them into a canvas bag to carry them onto the plane. we sent the 2 cases on, and to add insult to injury, we were charged 45 euros for an extra bag. it was scary to not have a protective case around them, but seemed like a better solution than letting them go down below. i held my arms around them to protect them as jj walked in front like a body guard running interference as we passed through the crowds of travelers. i was quite fuming. i knew she was wrong, but i had no choice. we even saw another passenger with a violin case getting onto the plane. when we got to the plane, i asked the steward about it. he said, “oh goodness no, i play the violin too and i would never send my violin into the hold. it would be too dangerous for them. violins are certainly allowed on board. we regularly carry whole orchestras. cellos do have to buy seats though” i told him we had the violins with us, outside of their cases. he was shocked. he told the head stewardess who was also aghast. she said that the ground crew were from a different airlines that had recently joined with them and there had been lots of complaints. i asked if it would be possible to get the cases back out so we could have them. she promised to go and ask the ground crew to see if it was possible. i wasn’t surprised when they said “no”, since we were about to take off. in london i asked the manager about this and he said that it was at the discretion of the flight crew, but at least the checkin lady should have let us bring them to the gate to see if there was space. i had hoped to get the violin cases out at london but it was impossible. all the luggage is put into containers for cross atlantic flights (imagine the violins at the bottom of a container!).

note from the future

[this is actually a note from 12/8/11 – speaking from the future... i got a little stuck in august about writing this blog. i wasn’t sure how appropriate it was for me to write about certain personal events which involved family members. now with several months having past, i think it’s fine and part of life and am plugging them in here. i think about the blog often. i think of it as a friend to whom i want to tell my day to day stories, which, of course, it is. it is the mass mailing connection to you, my friends and family. thanks to blog reading friends who have “pinged” me, asking me what’s up.]

maynard on late night tv

well, maynard, the dog, did make it onto late night tv afterall. a few months ago, we were on our morning run at the champs de mars by the eiffel tower. maynard was called onto screen by actress kristen bell who was a guest on “the late late show with craig ferguson” who was filming in paris. you can see his screen debut by going to this web address and fast forwarding to 3:40 mins almost at the end. i appear briefly in my not-ready-for prime-time jogging outfit. how embarrassing! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv5afjXgSLU&sns=em

film shoot

i have walked by several film shoots around our neighborhood in the last couple of months. first there was a shoot where a car came screeching to a stop as a police car with sirens cut it off. i thought i heard it was for a tv show. then there were trailers with stars dressing rooms near our apartment. the area around a fruit and vegetable store was blocked off. i didn’t stay to watch, but the apartment windows were open and every 20 minutes i heard a series of gunshots. that was about the right amount of time to reset everything and do a “take”. then we were all heading out to run an errand and walked right into another film shoot on our street. p noticed that daniel auteuil was right there, standing next to us. he is possibly the #2 known french actor after gerard depardieu. the 2 of them played opposite each other in marcel pagnol’s story “jean de fleurette” in the 70’s, where auteuil plays an unrefined country man. then auteuil was in the sequel “manon des sources” playing opposite emmanuelle beart, whom he later married. these are 2 great films, with classic storytelling. i highly recommend seeing them. anyway, there he was, daniel auteil, playing a cop chasing after cars shooting at them, on our street. we watched a few run throughs. the director was italian. someone yelled “seee-lance” (silence) and then “acsheeon!” (action) and then the actual car chase, with a grand finale of the car running into another car. i hadn’t expected the car to actually hit another car, so i sort of said “jeeez!” a little loud. “coupé!”(cut!) (rhymes with toupee). i was afraid they’d ask “WHO YELLED JUST NOW!?” but was glad to find no one noticed. jj took video of the shoot. i had thought all these shoots were for the same film, but in fact, they were 3 different projects. this film is called “le guetteur” directed by michele placido, also starring mathieu kassovitz. we’re in hollywood, france!

rhodes,greece

i decided that we should change our approach to travel. instead of deciding to go somewhere and ending up paying prime time money (ie. going to morocco at the ultra high season of christmas/new years week) we should see where the cheap flights are going and pick one that fits in our schedule. we wanted to go to a greek island and i found cheap flights to rhodes direct from paris. 

it has been a cold summer in paris. last month felt more like april than july. overcast and wet and spring temperatures. we were looking forward to greece. rhodes boasts 300 days of sunshine every year and was supposedly the domain of the sun god, helios. yay. chances were good we would get some sun.

it was high season, but i was able to find a fairly reasonable apartment right on the sea, in a fishing village. the fact that greece is going through economic troubles and has been on the news with riots in athens actually benefited us. people become scared of news like this and stay away. i knew that the islanders relied on tourism and all would be calm there. otherwise, rhodes is “one of the most popular tourist destinations in europe”.

we spent a week of hanging out at the beach in front of the apartment, visiting archeological sites and ancient towns, taking a few hot hikes and visiting various other beautiful beaches with crystal clear warm water. rhodes town is an ancient walled city which was the home to the ex-crusaders who became the “knights of rhodes” before they were kicked off and went to malta to become the “knights of malta”. lindos is an ancient picturesque town with an acropolis on a hill.

rhodes has a long history. it played an important role in the ancient greek empire and then was overrun by everybody in power down there from the romans, byzantines, venetians, genoese, ottomans, italians, to the nazis. now it is overrun by british tourists...

our town was called chiraki or hiraki. a former fishing village, it is now a string of tourist restaurants, bars and apartments lining a bay. the beach was lovely and convenient. the

apartment was nothing special, but it was clean, on the boardwalk with a balcony facing the beach. the water was warm, the weather was hot. chiraki was only there now for the tourists but it wasn’t too crowded since there were only as many tourists as the housing would permit. people didn’t come to visit this beach just for the day. the people who were here, lived on top of each other. there were greeks, italians, french, brits and american greeks. people lived on their balconies and back porches on the boardwalk. it was like their back yards. it was like their little street. kids biked on the boardwalk. restaurants had their kitchen in the building and their tables on the beach side of the boardwalk. waiters would have to cross the 3 paces of the boardwalk with care. it was part of this town’s accepted culture that the boardwalk was the public way and the waiters would just laugh as they narrowly avoided a kid flying by on his bike with training wheels. in the early morning, the local ladies could be seen swimming wearing their sun hats. if i stayed here for a while, i’d end up doing that too. the sun is pretty strong. 

i swam every day, but not until the last 2 days did i use a pair of goggles. it totally changed the experience and when we went to one particular beach with a few more fish, i didn’t want to leave the water. overall, the food wasn’t as good as i had remembered it from 20 years ago. it was good but not great. having an apartment was convenient since we could cook a little for ourselves. i made lots of greek salad and we ate relatively healthy breakfasts of fruit, yogurt and granola. 

i had been to rhodes 20 years ago, when i was living in paris. there was an australian couple living in the same building and they had invited me to take part in a sailing trip to the greek islands. the woman told me i didn’t need to know anything about sailing because her husband was a champion sailor. her father was coming to join us, and he too, had been a champion sailor. i was happy to see what life on a boat was like and it sounded like fun. another young woman friend of theirs was joining us too. unfortunately, we didn’t have any wind and the water was a bit choppy. we ended up motoring around, which infused the time with the smell of exhaust. i felt a bit sea sick throughout the trip. in addition, the benefit of having one champion sailor on board was negated by having another champion sailor on board. the two alpha males, one in his prime and the other of the previous generation, perhaps insecure about his losing his dominance, bickered and argued about every little technical detail of sailing. it was like watching an animal kingdom show. finally, i had enough and jumped ship in rhodes. i hadn’t stayed long, since it was too touristy for me at that time. coming back now, i recognized the town and remembered this story.

amy back

i did a little more work on the eiffel tower painting, finishing it. total was around 3 hours. then i packed, since we are heading to rhodes, greece tomorrow, for a week.

my “cousin”, amy is going to use our paris apartment for a few days, while we are away, so she arrived into town today to overlap with us. amy was the one who had been living in aix en provence but had moved back to oakland, california in december. she spent a few months in new york, while her husband was there for work and now they were coming back to france to visit.

tourist painting

we went to meet jj’s new buddy, a girl who will join the school in september. she is from new zealand but she and her family have been living in paris for a while already. she lives near gard du nord, so has a bit of a hike to get to school. she has played the cello since she was 5 and goes to various music camps and groups. jj was excited to hear this since she wants to organize a quartet. i’m looking forward to hearing her play.

i have given myself a bunch of tasks for painting, one of them being to do a painting quickly. i want to try to loosen up my style since i feel that my paintings are too uptight. i try to push and exaggerate the colors, but there is too much detail and they look too photographic. there is a fashion now for some artists to do a painting a day. funny, though, many don’t actually do “one a day”, they have watered down the concept to just do “one IN a day”. in any case, i figured if i could try to complete a painting in 1-3 hours, it would free up my style a bit and make it more “impressionistic”. the other task i had given myself was to try to paint tourist landmarks, but in a more artistic style. hopefully a classier style than the stuff the artists sell to tourists on montmartre. someone told me that you can actually make a pretty good living in a few months, selling paintings to tourists. in the past i would’ve called it “selling out”, but now, i figured that every hour i spend painting is improving my skill and if i can make a little money on it, it doesn’t matter what i do. so today i made a quick painting based on a photo i took of the eiffel tower – but just a part of the tower. i was quite pleased. i started with an orange base, because i had wanted to experiment with that. i saw another painter use it and then i looked it up on the web. it is a well known technique. i loved it. the orange peeks through the image and makes it feel more light. when i paint on white backgrounds i work so hard to cover every little bit of the canvas, but with this method i don’t have to do that.