Pearls & Rain Pants (and Ithaca Fest!)

This weekend has been Ithaca Festival, perhaps one of the most notable weekends all year in this little city.  Blocks of downtown have been blocked off, a number of different music stages set up. Blues, folk, eastern belly dance, hip-hop….these fill the streets. Food trucks sell Cambodian pancakes, deep south grilled chicken, Mac N Cheese.

My Mansard roof is just one block from all this; from my window I can hear even the words to the music clearly, and see the food tents. I am positively gleeful to be living inside such a fantastic festival. Instead of waiting in line for a compromised blue plastic porta-potty, I can trot back to my very own bathroom. I brought friends up too, for ice water in this mugginess. I took breaks to make popcorn, to snuggle with Cat, to bake gingerbread, to nap.  And then down my stairs and out into the music again!

Saturday of the festival was thick with heat and humidity and I danced in the park, bare feet in the grass, until the rains came and I retreated up to my apartment.

I was in the parade Thursday, riding with the AIDS Ride For Life bicycle fundraiser ride. We wore matching blue tee-shirts and pedaled along following the bagpipers (which was a lot of fun). The other bicyclers and I looped circles around the banner, like a small smiling swarm of bees, avoiding getting run over by the following fire-truck. My chest got all swollen with happiness to see the faces of this city lining the sidewalks cheering on the parade. Glowing, eager faces. A high population of vegan faces, faces with many higher educational degrees, faces of professors, faces of professor children wearing paint.  

Unlike the wee town of Ontario parades I’ve accompanied my father’s cars in, this parade had no tractors but instead Planned Parenthood all marching in pink tee-shirts, and Save Seneca Lake! anti-oil group waving banners, and the local solar company.  Ithaca sure is a unique place.  And I’m happy to be living here.

I’ve spent the entire weekend padding about the festival, eating Lemongrass Meat On A Stick, running into just about everyone I know, and happily soaking up the music.  Sunday I finished out the festival with a high of newly-discovered band love. The gun poets. Can’t-hold-still hip-hop with poetry lyrics. Not jaded. Instead about life and appreciating and community and all to a fiercely grooving beat. I don’t know how anyone could be nearby and not be moving. For me it was involuntary, and I danced that glorious celebratory dance of existence. Dancing alone and not caring, but dancing with everyone too. Where the band knows they’re getting to people, and they have their souls on their instruments, and it’s this feedback loop of crowd upping band upping crowd. Little children wearing huge ear-muffs, highschoolers, the bottle-picking vagrant population, parents, students, everyone. Everyone moving and grooving together. All a heightened state of humanity.

Sunday morning I escaped the food tents and the crowds to be organist at a church for whom I’ve never played before. The United Methodist Church in Lansing, which wasn’t exactly convenient in time or location.  (#carfree) Their service began at the, erm, sprightly hour of 9am and choir rehearsal was before that as well. Nine miles away and up a hill….mercifully I discovered a bus that ran at 7am going partly in the right direction.

It was raining that morning. And cold. All the July sunny mugginess of Saturday had phase-changed into November.  Gray froth hung wetly over the land, and steam churned about the falls. The roads were dark with puddles. What could make bicycling in 7:30am cold rain worse? But wind. So I bicycled into a stiff north wind.

I’ve bicycled in miserable conditions before. I suppose that’s a thing to be grateful for having been such an incorrigible bicycler and traveler: that even if it’s a bit miserable now, it still won’t top the previous winners of misery.  So the pearls and the rain pants powered forth. I realized I was decidedly inward focused, because instead of watching much of the world go by, I was considering a drop of water sliding back and forth across the brim of my helmet. Right there in front of my face. Sliding to and fro with my left-right rocking action of driving into the wind. To and fro. It was like a hypnotist’s watch. Somehow this was incredibly irritating. My feet were cold, my hands were stiff and wet, I was pushing hard. But that droplet.  Grrrr.  I flicked it off.  Soon another formed.  I flicked that one off too.

And then. The smile once I turned downhill and out of the wind. The church in sight. Cruising…15 mph, 20 mph. YES. Oh, how earned that feeling was.

A country church. I arrived and cracked my cold hands from their handlebar grip and amazingly they warmed to play the pipe organ. A straightforward little instrument it was, two manuals, nothing fancy, but my feet connected effortlessly with the pedal board.  And within half an hour of warming up we were one.

Pastor asked if I could play “a little somethin-somethin-somethin” while people sat down before the prelude. What I call “filler” music, or “emergency backup” music. I hadn’t brought any, but was able to forage through the sliding piles of books around the organ and find something appropriate. “Noodle music”, as Mr. First Presbyterian Choir Director would call it.  I noodled away and watched the church fill.  And fill.

Every pew filled. The children brimmed all over the front steps for children’s time and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a congregation with so many brightly flowered dresses or bow-ties or suit-jackets in such a long time. I do enjoy the Methodists. And with my experience playing for Methodists before, I know they especially resonate with the happy and “boom-chunk” music.  I had fun. I had so much fun in church this morning.  I charged the hymns right along and people sang lustily.

“We’re so glad you’re not doing only soil!” said one of the choir members, when they learned of my actual day-job.

I played Emperor’s Fanfare for the postlude, all big chords and trills and DAH DAH DAH deep pedal notes. This piece takes no small amount of concentration and it is a blast, in all senses of the word. I landed the final chord, and surfaced back into the world, and heard something I’ve never heard in church before. The people weren’t only clapping, they were cheering. Cheering and hooting. I was blown away. I loved all those Methodists even more.

Mrs. Alto was standing at my elbow all smiles: “You PUMP IT, girl!”