Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Quiet and non-dramatic Thanksgiving here.  That’s what happens when there’s only 3 of us left.  Son Andrew came over Tuesday from his home in Twisp (Eastern Washington, Methow Valley) to take his girlfriend to SeaTac and a flight to visit her family, and he’s been hanging here and visiting city friends.

We’ve done several urban hikes, and yesterday checked into our gym for a family workout.

Today was just vegging until dinner.  We (well, let’s be honest, Mrs. Perils) didn’t do a whole turkey, instead got a nice breast and thigh from PCC and surrounded it with roasted Brussel’s sprouts, an herbaceous non-cavity stuffing, roasted potatoes and cranberry sauce.

We used to do large, raucous orphan’s Thanksgivings when we first moved here and had no family within 2500 miles, very festive for 20-somethings in the same boat.  We would relish the seeming emancipation from fraught family Thanksgivings and it was lots of fun.

That 20-something crowd eventually had their own kids and made other friends and married other people, and our insouciant, celebratory gatherings dissipated.  I miss that scene, but I love the casual intimacy of our recent 3- or 4-person repasts, and the lack of expectation and drama.  We genuinely like each other and have a wonderful time.

The weekend stretches before us.  Tomorrow morning, way too early, Mrs. Perils and I will don our Rainbow City marching band uniforms for the first time since early August and head downtown to march and play in the Macy Seattle Thanksgiving day parade.

Old news for some, but I began playing in the Rainbow City Band, an LGBTA organization, in the fall of 2009, under some interesting circumstances.  Mrs. Perils and I met in high school band, and she still had her student clarinet, stowed in the closet for 40 years.  She unearthed it and joined the band the next year.

We’re a wind symphony/concert band fall, winter and spring, and become a marching band in the summer, performing in all the major parades in our region.  We love playing together, and the band has become the main hub of our social life. The band also has a mission of reaching out to the community at large, to show that we’re not that much different from other communities in our urban soup, and that’s led us to arise at 6 tomorrow morning for the privilege of shivering in the November Seattle cold and rain.

I kid, I think it will be a whole lot of fun.  We work pretty hard at both our concert and our marching band personae, and like to say that we’re a concert band that marches, meaning that the quality of the music is our first emphasis.

Here are a couple of examples:

Thriller, with dance routine:

Jump:

And one we’ll be playing tomorrow, Shut Up And Dance:

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

I play in an 18-piece swing band and tonight we had a Halloween gig at a retirement center. It was one of those upscale retirement centers where folks can comfortably downsize at age 62 and still celebrate their mobility, whether or not they have an inkling of the physical surrender ahead .

We start playing, a robust round of 40s swing tunes, 60s vocal ballads, contemporary standards, and several couples are dancing away. At one point I espy a woman in the spectator group mouthing the words to At Last as KJ, our vocalist, kills it.

Nothing makes us want to play like people dancing.  There’s a lusty cheer after every number we play, and we feel a glow that we’ve given a lift to what we blithely assume is a mundane day-to-day experience.

As the capable dancers cavort, however, I look at the rest of the audience and take note of the demographics: there are 4 or 5 men to about 35 women, all in various states of physical challenge, and the euphoria of my missionary zeal gets real:.  I realize that I am looking at people who were cheerleaders, homecoming queens, sports heroes, wallflowers and valedictorians (and at least one former PAC10 head football coach), and they’ve all arrived at this inexorably humbling moment where the desire to dance, and live, collides with physical doubt and the formidable odds against garnering a partner.

There’s an intermission and a costume contest, winners are chosen and the mood is jovial. We begin to play again and the personal pleasure I derive from playing with these close friends and talented musicians crests.

Then I look back at the audience and once again notice the woman who was sotto-voceing At Last.  Her Rollater seems from my still-nimble perspective to be a flimsy barrier to the dance floor, but in reality it is insurmountable.  The sense of loss that I project onto her spars with the ever-present euphoria of making music and I finish the set. But if it were me still feeling the beat after the music ends, I think I’d still be left with that yearning.

That inextinguishable yearning.