Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I’ve been gone from these parts for awhile, but you haven’t missed anything.

At least until last weekend, which was a flurry of band activity. Saturday was all-day Band Camp for the marching band, held at Camp Long in West Seattle. We ran through our music as an ensemble, broke up into groups by instrument (sectionals) to work through the more difficult parts of our trumpet music.

After a bountiful potluck lunch we practiced marching (and playing) for the first time this year, dodging potholes in in a parade field and then onto asphalt to encounter their ankle-munching cousins.

The vibe of the band post-pandemic is a lot different, at least from my perspective. There are only 5 or 6 of us pre-pandemic marchers, everyone else seems under 30 and very talented. Coming back after the long hiatus, I feel like Rip-VAn-Fucking-Winkle, even without the white beard.

Monday night was our regular rehearsal night, and we took to the streets surrounding our host church, which is smack in the middle of the (Washington) University District. I’m sure we inconvenienced many a motor vehicle, but as we progressed, inhabitants of fraternity and sorority houses gathered on their front porches and cheered us on. We’ll see how it ages next week.

On a personal note, I’ve lost a little over 10 pounds, and it feels great, like why did I never think of this before. A large swath of my closet that had been off-limits for 10 or more years is suddenly available, and beckons to me in all its 80s-era glory.

Just tweaking memory here, which should arouse your immediate distrust…

Easter, ca 1955. my paternal grandparents loved to travel, always by car.

This one spring when I was like 5 or 6 they undertook a road trip from Ohio to Mobile, Alabama (now the Redneck Riviera) and decided to take me along, probably to give my parents space with my infant brother Larry Philbin.

Problem was I still believed in the Easter Bunny, and Easter would fall sometime during the drive.

Solution: Color eggs and put them in the fridge along with an empty Easter Basket in my grandparents’ house (from habit the Easter Bunny would visit both my parents’ house and my grandparents), leaving a note for the Easter Bunny about our circumstances and a map (probably a AAA TripTik) of our intended route, and beseeching his forbearance.

Easter morning found us in a motel room somewhere in mid-state Alabama. Despite our elaborate precautions, I awoke at an early hour on Easter morning doubtful that the Easter Bunny was channeling Amazon Prime at that early date.

Dark turned to gray, people rustled, and then didn’t, for what seemed like hours. The room grew bright and hope darkened in lockstep.

THen another rustle. My grandfather awoke and, looking puzzled, reached to the end of the bedspread and emerged with one of the eggs I had colored several days ago.

My heart gladdened as I whisked around the room, finding chocolate and marshmallow hidden goodies, eggs and finally the Easter basket that we had left so hopefully back in Ohio, laden with even more goodies.

That morning we attended a small church that could have been a set for To Kill A Mockingbird, then headed south to my first taste of salt water.

This piece is best enjoyed listening to a new a capella group of women called Lyyra, perform the haunting Here There Be Mermaids.  The piece pulsates like the surf as it builds to a thrilling climax, and then becalms just as suddenly.

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I’m driving along the coast highway when just as my eyelids are drooping I espy a sliver of an Oregon state park with a couple parking spaces, nestled between the surf and Hwy 101, too small to all but the most curious.

 The beach is almost totally rock, with a couple of incongruous sand patches, like the bald crown on Friar Tuck’s head. I take a seat on a rock and let the waves consume my senses. I relax and synchronize with the surf, attuning to the ebb and flow, neap and flood, systole and diastole that underwrite life on earth.

 I peer into the alternate universe of a tranquil tidepool, with its miniature polity of Miss Anemone pageants, and wily sea urchins selling real estate of dubious title to unsuspecting hermit-crabs, all in an underwater Whoville whose denizens have no clue of the disruption that the next wave will bring. I consider intervention for a moment, but remember that Horton would be an invasive specie to Oregonians .

I am interrupted by insistent splashing as the tide creeps up the slab. As I resettle to a higher spot the wind begins to rustle in the trees across 101 in answer to a markedly rougher offshore surf. I consider saddling up and leaving, but I find the increasing tumult invigorating.

 Meanwhile, the rustle in the trees becomes a soughing, and the soughing becomes a lowing, and the lowing becomes a keening high in the trees, and the keening becomes a polished soprano chorale that lures kittenish cougars and puppyish wolves to the water’s edge to innocently cavort with unicorns.

As the chorale begins driving to a crescendo I take a delirious look at the water’s edge and see a comely humanoid creature beckoning me into the surf with a scaly flash and a powerful thrust.

With a mixture of lust and trepidation, I turn quickly to my side, but the wax earplugs I always bring with me to the seashore are nowhere to be found.
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I’ve been gone from here a lot lately. It’s been a gloomy, drippy solsticial season. I still take my nightly strolls, but it’s been pitch-dark when I get home from work and shame myself out the door like a reluctant cat.

Today, however, the cloud cover dissipated and there was this brief harbinger of longer days at the lake, when a week ago there’d have been an inky black hole where this photo was taken..

I don’t have a Super Bowl favorite, don’t think I’ve seen either team play. That’s not a surprise since I leave it all on the couch on Saturdays during football season. Some years I find myself fast-forwarding through the game play to just see the ads.

In other news, our 52-year-old Payne gas furnace died last week Well, it didn’t actually die, it was euthanized by a gas company employee who was working on our meter, took one look at the old crone and forbade us to re-light the pilot light.

Suddenly I’m having to educate myself about heat pumps and side vents and SPEER and BTUs.

We each have our respective person-caves with electric heat (my office downstairs with a Vornado and hers an upstairs bedroom with baseboard heat) but the rest of the house reminds me of when I used to do inventory in cold-storage warehouses, opening containers to ensure that their contents were really frozen King Crab legs and not barnacles scraped off a crab pot.

Snd this welcome ability to remain comfortable in these segregated spaces means that the bathrooms are tantamount to outhouses, with the attendant discomforts.

 Yesterday would have been my dad’s 99th birthday. Irascible and sentimental. I recall a time about 10 years ago when I was flying east for work a lot and stopping at my folks’ house in Ohio for an appended weekend on the way home from Seattle. I always had a rental car, and parked it in the same place in their driveway apron, well out of the way of “anyone” driving by what he might have seen in his rear-view 20 years ago.

 On one of these visits when leaves were adorning their place we were in the driveway and he said something like it made him happy to come outside and see the bare pavement where I always parked. Why?, I asked. He said, “that’s because it reminds me Phil was here”.

 In the tumult of life wherein jet engines throb and continents await and boarding passes hasten, the momentary quietude of a rectangular piece of northwest Ohio asphalt becomes an unlooked-for token of love.

Well, about 3 weeks ago I declared here that I was rejoining Rainbow City Band after a long hiatus due to the pandemic and my target-rich pre-vaccine demographic.

But after more than a year without touching my trumpet, picking it up and pushing it at my mouth seemed like the most unnatural thing I could do, sort of like an Ikea DIY facelift kit mis-applied in the wrong place and with parts left over.

 I’ve often thought that I was physically mismatched with the instrument, and initially I thought maybe this was perhaps my chance to try the oboe or some other woodwind that would reward my ample air supply with mellifluous bamboo vibration.

 Instead, I parked my trumpet in the basement and, little by little, lost that raspy lozenge of guilt that used to spur me every night down to the basement where no one can hear you scream..or practice.

 So, for four weeks now I have reluctantly headed downstairs and done purely calisthenics: lip slurs, long tones, 8th-grader stuff, considering giving up altogether, and then..flickers of musicality have begun to infiltrate the clangor of distressed metallurgy, and I’ve started to add actual music to my nocturnal finger-Nautilus.

Looking forward, now, to joining my trumpet section as an asset and preparing for our February concert at Benaroya Hall..

I’m contemplating whether to restart my Youtubetv subscription with a Buckeye game squarely in the headlights Saturday. In view of my truncated TV viewing habits, is it really rational to spend $70 per month for 4-6 hours on the couch on Saturdays until January?

Just go to a sports bar, you say, but you’re not smack in the middle of a butt-hurt horde of PAC-(insert dwindling integers here) fans who would feed me to the Orcas if I asked to turn the TV to a game featuring their 2024 Rush big-brothers.

OTOH, I could actually attend the games in person for the weekly cost of:

• airfare
• Uber from lightning-prone midwest airport to hotel featuring a view of soybeans, and video purchase receipts DM’d directly to my home
• purchasing a “game ticket” from tweaky-looking adolescent for probably more than the airfare cost, that turns out to be a Forever stamp affixed to a parking ticket
• Buying a verified game ticket from Stubhub for the price of a first-class upgrade home
• Attending the game, buoyed by $17 beers
• toddling nostalgically over to the former strip of lively and lubricious student bars now dominated by fortune-tellers and payday loan sharks
• probable arrest and incarceration for public urination. released hours later upon agreeing to do volunteer work for Leave No Trace;
• missing my flight home and riding coach.

No, $70 is a cheap game ticket, all in all.

My dad eschewed golf when I lived at home (probably because of the country club socioeconomics; he was raised as a fisherman and hunter). He called golf “the only game where you hit a ball and have to chase it yourself”.

Then when he retired and started to become inextricable from his chair on the porch, my mom goaded him into trying the game with her. (I believe it was more of an ultumatum)

Bam! On visits home after college, golf became an amiable way to enjoy each other with no more drama than “which tree did I hit?” and how the phrase”I’ll take my mulligan now” was never, in recorded history, singular. I called my parents “born-again golfers”.

As for me, I never took up golf, but not for the same reasons as my dad. After a couple tries, I realized that, with its ten ways to hit ( or fail to) each club in the bag, it would drive me bonkers. But I did play with my parents and brothers as above. I would flail piteously and mark my “10″ score each hole after at least 25 shots, and hope I wasn’t depriving someone more worthy from renting my clubs.

But every now and then I’d roll back and let fly, the impact would make an otherworldly sound, and I’d blurt out, “Gawdamn I smacked that fucker.” The euphoria would last until my next drive from the Ladies’ tees.

After a nice weekend of seeing a brother, sister-in-law, son and his especially SO a week ago, sometime around midnight on Monday my head started to resemble a cement mixer, and by Tuesday morning I could hardly raise my head above my pillow.

For the next 72 hours all I could do was grab a gulp of water and sleep again for 4 hours. This is not like me, I haven’t even had a head cold for 4 years.

Friday morning I felt pretty good but thought I should try to test for Covid. We had acquired several free test kits during the pandemic, but by now they were all expired and had taken their place among the other mislabeled and/or unidentified wonder drugs sticking obstinately to the rusting shelves of my medicine cabinet: merthiolate, mercurochrome, paragoric, Cherocol D, Aspergum and, amazingly, still-viable leaches..

In an abundance of caution, I decided that I should trek to CVS for fresh tests. I did one of the new ones and, just out of curiosity about use-by dates, also did an expired test from my brownfield medicine cabinet.

Results: I do/did have Covid, and I will give birth to a lovely daughter next March.

Had a “wellness” exam today, first in many years, maybe decades.

The assistant prepped me, told me to strip, don a robe on the exam table and tie it in the back.

This must have been some sort of cognition test. Tie it in the back. Truth is, even when I’m looking at my shoes while tying them, I often tie the left and right together and tumble down the stairs, landing on my back with my feet in the air like a Thanksgiving turkey on its way to the broiler.

Doc did a cursory look at me, pulled out a pen & pad and earnestly began to review my healthcare directives.

I really didn’t have to get naked for that.