"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.