7:00am OF, or: On Winter

This morning, as I waited for the bus, the sign outside the bank flashed "7:00 am OF" and I wondered what the "of" was about. Then I realized: zero degrees Fahrenheit. Oh my.

The boutique has bunnies maddeningly in the window. The only thing bunny-like these days is my new-thrift-store Angora sweater. Which is very warm. These days really the only thing we can think about is Warm.

We will have earned Spring. An area-wide jubilation and victorious cheer shall ring out: no equivocating or debating sides on that one. In the huddled and shivering area of central NY, this has been the coldest winter on record.

We are bonding over this cold. We always have something to say to each other. Whether riding the bus, changing at the gym, or waiting in the post office line. "Did you see Thursday's forecast?!", "Stay warm out there!", "Gee my hands hurt, how are yours?

I never thought I'd be saying this, but when 27 degrees happened today it felt astonishingly balmy. I unzipped my coat and left my ear-flaps up. Which is the equivalent of practically ripping off one's layers and prancing about in skivvies.

It is too cold even to bicycle the 0.8 miles to the bus stop in the morning. I tried once, and upon arrival the cold had drilled into my thumbs till they were no longer mine; I reverted to a thumb-sucking toddler to reheat. The Bicycling (Very Cold For Short While) vs. Walking (Moderately Cold For Long While) debate in this case becomes the Insurmountably Cold for all activities and hands must be contained in a matryoshka doll manner of gloves>>mittens>>pockets. And one cannot utilize pockets on a bicycle.

But even with the Call To Warmth, I only drive my car if my aunt gives me That Look and wields her presidential veto power to keep me warm.  But I prefer to be out in the truth of this winter, actually, and I am protected thanks to my brigade of wool and puffy coat and hat-that-makes-me-look-like-a-lamb.

And so a crunching cracking grinding swishing walk it is in the mornings, and I am lulled by the bundled movement and gaze out into the frozen rainbow sunrise sherbet which is the world. This is beautiful. And walking home at night, with the half-moon reflecting in the black ice and the points of stars pricking sharply, is also one of those times where I actually would rather be nowhere else.

But only because I have my hands in my pockets. 

Figure 1. Angora rabbit.

"She has music on her legs"

Ithaca is not devoid of organists, it turns out.

I did what I routinly do when I arrive somewhere and that is to google and email churches and introduce myself and see what comes back. But Ithaca is brimming with well-educated musical people and very unlike the organist-starved small towns where I've previously stomped. "We already have an organist and a list of substitutes" were the replies, "but you're sure welcome to worship with us!"

Ho hum.

But the Christian Scientists want me for substitute, at least. AND, amazingly, the lofty and venerable First Presbyterian church downtown responded saying that although they do have a full time choir directer/organist he would like someone once a month so that he could conduct his choir AND have them accompanied. And a mighty fine choir they are too. And a mighty organ. I blew myself off the bench when I played it after my visit, ensuring first the church was emptied. Like a child with a long-awaited birthday cake I pulled out the 16 foot tubas and the 32 foot rumblers and the horns and all the big stops. Yeeee ha!!! My ears were fat.

My first Sunday playing for them was just this past one.

The organ is a building within a building, the console this shed-like structure sitting by the alter. A building that could make a lot of noise. And I couldn't see, and barely hear the congregation, except if I slid to the very edge of the bench and peeked around like a vole.

But that instrument. A million dollar instrument. With pieces of it that are 32 feet long! Those 32-foot pipes give the most resultant and vibratious sounds and I love them. If I had a choice I'd rather play a 32-footer than eat a chocolate sunday.

Incidentally, and amazingly, and fascinatingly, this is the church I would trot along to with my grandparents as a child. I have only a few memories of being there. One was being too petrified to go up to the front for the children's sermon and instead sat solemnly in the pew. (thankfully I'm not too petrified to go up for the organ now) They provided Wiggle Bags, which my home church did not, full of crayons and coloring pages and I thought that was most novel indeed. I was probably nine or eleven years old.

I also remember feeling slight distress that dear sweet Grannie couldn't sit with us but was in the choir--though I was proud in my little self to see her up there.  But it meant that I had to sit alone with the venerable and formidable Grandaddy and I was timid then and didn't know how to deal with him. But Grannie developed how we could wave at each other--distant pew to distant choir--discreetly without flapping. It was scratching your right ear. And when I'd catch her eye and she'd lift her hand to her ear, that was the best part of the whole church service. Our little secret.

But this Sunday I was [hidden] at the organ bench behind the edifice, and my parents were there, but Granddaddy and Grannie were not.  I played foot-filled flat-full Presbyterian hymns as grandly as I could, include some 32-footers. It was a thrill, I tell you. Absolutely a thrill. For the occasion I wore my special Episcopal-gifted tall socks with the music notes on them.

After the service a sweet Chinese woman from the congregation gave me two colored hard boiled eggs; a young woman with shortish hair remarked "WHERE do you get your hair cut! It's the best!" (barber shop in T-burg for 15 bucks); someone told me I played beautifully; another asked if I worked in the windowless monolith at Cornell (she read my bio). And she worked there as well. Then Mrs Eggs came by again and insisted I have a chocolate. At one point I overhead a lady telling her husband (a couple my dad said he remembered from his childhood in that church), "She has music on her legs!"

So I did not feel ill-received there.

After the service the choir director gave an adult education class not on the book of Job or Ecclesiastes or something dryly theological but instead on the brain and music. Evolution, the role of music in culture, how music excites the pleasure sensors in our brains in the same way recreational drugs do, how violinists' brains have a larger lefthandsius medius or whatever. And the comments from the audience were as thoughtful as the presentation was engaging. With the two institutions of higher learning in this town, and the general enclave of cultivating expressive strangeness and the arts, this is a brainy and engaging place indeed. My parents and I sat in varying degrees of rapt attention and listened and ate egg salad sandwiches (imported to church basement from car). At one point there is a decided loud crinkling and I look over and my dad has his sandwich baggie inside out and is focusedly fetching out the stray bits of egg filling. "Mum!" I whispered,"Would you poke him!"

Brainy and strange is my Daddy, as well. A suited gentleman approached us after the service and announced he remembered the day my father was born. I liked closing the loop and returning to this church, as magnificent and intimidating as it had seemed at first.

Richard Feynman on connectivity

Last night was remarkable in that I wasn't in bed by 10pm. It was Friday and I was out stamping around Cornell and collegetown in the callousness of winter, although winter is not at all conducive to Going Out (GO). First, unless you're an undergraduate girl for whom leg attractiveness is more important than frost-burn protection, you bundle. 

For me this involves my purple puffy coat, a scarf extended and then spooled around my neck, my "bah" hat with fleecy ear flaps which straps under my chin in a manner appropriate for the hat of an infant. Then purple mittens (yes, I am five) and 4-pound boots and by the end of this I'm so encased that I can basically take in no sensory information and I hear my aunt say something in the next room. Muffled like cars driving on deeply-snowed roads. She's saying something to the dogs about Marvin Gay.  

Oh wait, no, how rude of me. "Thank you!" I call out thickly after a dismally long pause, which is the appropriate response to "have a nice day!" 

Marvin Gay. good grief. 

My evening started at the Big Red Barn, the hang-out spot for graduate students. And what looks like a graduate student and behaves like a graduate student, is a graduate student by certain definitions and so I went.

The Big Red Barn is like walking through a field of people, everyone elbow to elbow--sometimes backpacks jutting out creating impasses--talking about their research, being young and smart, drinking $1 beers. All in groups of people they already know. 

I want to be doing this and I always feel a little like an unduly hopeful meerkat, peering around, standing alone. But the first time I went I managed to strike up conversations with a couple different strangers, to my utmost glee.

One was a student from Puerto Rico studying biomedical engineering, amazingly from the same city near which I was staying for my farm and beach visit a few weeks ago. Of all places in the world, and here we were in this crazy barn. We spoke of the same road, Route 13, which is lined with mango trees where you can just pull over and load your car up with roadside mangoes. And then a man from Brazil studying chemistry who told me that I was having a beer in the very same building where Richard Feynman would come for beer himself, and where Carl Sagan would work just across the path. 

And a guy from Italy studying planetary science. I stood there with the dollar beer he'd bought me (I no more than looked at him for half a gaze and voila, was given a beer) and took in his theatre of hand expressions--it may be a stereotype of Italians but in this case the data were affirmative. Hands rising grandly for mountains, thumb and fingers pressed together for delicious, some sort of miserable wave for how cold it was here. We were talking about traveling in the tropics and Mr. Italy, in his description of huge plentiful insects in places warm, formed the international sign for Humongous Big Bug (thumb and forefinger) and rolled out: "The nature is very aggressive!" 

Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Portuguese, oh the languages! What a collection of brilliant minds from around the world, studying everything from planets to soil, all elbowing their way around the din of this space. If you step back and really think about it, all the places and ideas and topics of study represented here: wow.  

People ask where I'm from, and while I can make conversation with pretty much anyone about pretty much anywhere in the world, I can only answer, "Um. Well. About 90 miles north of here actually. A small town you've never heard of." 

Everyone else is from everywhere else. 

The second time of the Big Red Barn was last night, of the heavily bundled me. That place is not designed for Winter: ergonomically challenged indeed. Having a building capacity is all fine and good, but this fails to account for Winter where everyone now takes up at least 30 percent more volume in their outerwear, or at least I do because I dislike being cold. And then that volume needs to be removed and hung somewhere. There are approximately 7 coat hooks for 435 people, the coat hooks, incidentally, situated in the decidedly narrow hall leading to the men's bathroom. And in their slidy-puffiness coats do not stay suspended in bulky aggregation if they are draped atop each other. And so the men were like Jesus on palm Sunday walking over downed pile of coats.

 

So I come into this lively furnace of beer and research and then have to unwind the scarf, pry off the hat, juggle the mittens, and suddenly it's like I'm carrying an armload of laundry and I'm dropping socks and underwear on the stairs.

 

But I found a spare horizontal space above a storage box and stuffed the lot and went mingling. There I found Moustache Nick, who I'd met before, and so was welcomed into the loud fold of his friends and thus they adopted me and we all went out afterward.  So I had dinner with a bunch of plant breeders who I didn't know and had a great time. (another lovely serendipity: found an enthusiastic soul in a similarly-shorthaired woman who went to highschool in that impossible-to-pronounce town of Puyallup where I did my master's!)

Then I went salsa dancing, and with music and moving like that you forget about frostbite and mittens. 

There I was approached by a gentleman in a purple colored shirt with his wife. "This is the third time I've seen you this week," he explained, "and I just need to introduce myself."  I, however, had not been so observant and did not recognize him.  He explained that he'd seen me at the Trumansburg Presbyterian Church (where Aunt Awesome plays pipe organ) on Sunday, then at a seminar about deer browsing and invasive plants on Thursday, and now finally at salsa dancing. "Those are all so disparate that I almost didn't believe it, but no one looks quite like THAT" he said of me.

He was the head of the Horticulture Department.  

So many connections out there in this world! We just have to dig them up. And make more of them.