Wedding Day: Here Comes The Organist

Mendelssohn's wedding march, some Handel, a little Mozart. 

I looked forward eagerly to being organist for a wedding in a small church outside of Ithaca today. The organ itself was kind of like playing a Conestoga wagon when you're used to a motor car. It is a tracker contraption, meaning that each key is connected directly to the pipes with a little piece of wood, so that adding more stops increases the force needed to sound a note. With full blast on the little thing I practically had to engage my entire core and glutes and channel that energy through to my fingers. Additionally, the bench was so short that my knees were in my ears to play the foot pedals; I originally rectified this by placing two bibles under each bench foot (perching on the word of God), but this proved to be immensely wobbly and thankfully by wedding-day someone had brought me some hunks of wood in their stead. 

The rehearsal had gone well yesterday, working out all those important timings that should be effortless, that no one but the organist should even notice. The organist has the responsibility to land cadences once the bride's maids have arrived at the front, to manipulate music so that the bride and groom aren't left standing in silence, manage time so that nobody has to wait for a lengthy song to finish. It's about momentary glances into the rear-view mirror (almost a given to be warped and thus a fun-house mirror) to monitor the progression of people down the aisle, hoping not to lose your place in the music when your eyes arrive back down. It's also about the opportunity to participate in a timeless ceremony celebrating love and gatherings of friends, misty eyed and full of promise and the connection between two people. 

I had my dress and pearls in my bike bag, a plan for arriving early and warming up, for strategically arranging my music, for being quietly in the space a bit before any guests arrived, starting the 20-minute prelude early. I bicycled to the church in the rain and rolled into the driveway. But, huh: sure are a lot of cars in the parking lot. Colored dresses under umbrellas filing into the church. Men in suits congregating. This evidence accumulated, the curtain in my mind opening to reveal the horrifying truth that the ceremony began at 1pm and not 2pm as I had unfortunately thought. 

I had about 11 minutes. Welcome to the ultimate organist's stylized nightmare, to arrive late to a wedding. The bride can be late and it's sweetly dramatic and understandable, but for the organist to be late.... That is just very bad. 

Never in history has there been such a rapid transition from rain spattered bicycle to poised organ bench. I charged in the back door of the church, flew into the bathroom, tore off my wet and gritty clothes and stuffed them in a corner, pulled on my dress, and galloped up the back stairs into the sanctuary. No time for pearls. 

I was spiked with adrenaline but playing Mozart's Ave Verum soothed my nerves gradually, as much as it provided prelude music--in what time was left--for the guests. The bridesmaids were a few minutes late themselves and I did have enough time to play a handful of serene wedding-like prelude pieces. The grand processional music timing worked out, the bridal party arrived at the front of the church smiling, and the service began. 

I was stunned by the 10 minutes of grace I had. 10 minutes later and the resulting disappointment and disorder would have been unimaginable. I was thoroughly disgusted and astonished with myself; I like to consider myself a prompt and astute person. I had had this idea of perfection, the details I envisioned, and then due to my own imperfection none of that could be pleasurably unfolded and instead there was scrambling and mild panic.  

Mild panic in my own sweat glands, at least. But nobody, except the pastor, was the wiser. "Thank you so much for the music!" "It was beautiful!" "The organ sounded lovely." And, "I LOVE your hair!" (hair serving as decoy) The bride and groom were all gratitude. They mentioned, with that "cool to cross paths with you" enthusiasm, that they had passed me coming in on my bicycle. "We passed you, and were like, 'you go girl!', riding your bike in the rain!" Little did they know. 

So it was a happy ending to a true nightmare. And from now on--you know it--I will be checking and double checking the start times of everything. 

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Observations in Missouri

I spent a few days in Missouri on my way to Kansas this month but I didn't expect I'd be inspired to write one of my classic "culture curiosity blogs" without even having left the USA. But a few days in Missouri and I had plenty to describe. Much of it is the observations of Mr Soil Science and Mrs Sweet Mom who I was visiting there, my relocated friends from the wheat fields in Washington state when I was in grad school and a TA for Mr Soil. Grading 96 soil science midterms until 2am is a certain bonding experience and I paid these lovely people a visit (including their 7 year old son, Bouncy Philip) in their new home outside St Louis, MO.

Welcome to suburbia. Midwest suburbia of long commutes, large treeless grass yards, massive houses.

The parallels and little concomitant differences between myself and Mr Soil are remarkable. A career in soil science (me at a sustainable cropping systems lab at a land grant, him at Monsanto), being a niche kind of musician and applying it (me pipe Organist, him in the world-renowned barbershop group Ambassadors of Harmony), and a sense of travel adventure (me bike tripping in tropical places, him hiking the Appalachian trail). I'm a native plant geek, he's a weather station geek.

But then you have me without car, living alone in a hippy city in a rented apartment, a cat, walking or biking to work. And him with a big house and a family and two cars and a yard and a commute. Neither of us covet at all the other's life but we are indeed happy and satisfied in our very different circumstances.

I love this stuff, case studies in the ways of living, which you can only experience with a visit.

They both spoke of the differences in suburbia outside of St Louis compared with the small town in the wheat fields of Washington state. Like all cultural observations, I can only share what I observed or heard myself, and make no claim that this is the actual general reality. But I'd like to share my impressions, as disorganized as they may be. 

1. No downtown in their community. There's a shopping plaza of all the big box stores but no central hang-out location. This made me feel very grateful for the Ithaca Commons.
2. In the world of young families, with stay at home moms, what constitutes your friend group is whoever is in your cul-de-sac. If your neighbors have a pool, that becomes the central point for all the neighborhood kids.
3. I was told about one mom in the neighborhood who would drive her kid 2 lots over to the bus stop. Not send him on his own, not walk him, but cart him there in the car.
4. Nobody recycles, instead its just those big industrial sized garbage totes out by the road. Mrs Mom once engaged with a neighbor to share aboht recycling, and the neighbor said it was too much of a hassle to rinse out containers.
5. Mrs Mom and Mr Soil are considered "too redneck" for the neighborhood, because they spend time at the shooting range and like hunting. Compared with WA, where many of the men and women hunted.
6. At a dinner party, one of the Monsanto guys was talking about the Lake of the Ozarks, and how just about every year there's a BillyJoe JimBob who electrocutes himself on his dock from trying to string up lights in the water or some such.
7. Fireworks are legal in MO, so I enjoyed a very nearby display from the neighborhood collection of about a thousand dollar's worth of colored explosives. The only stipulation is that you can't shoot them off after 11pm.
8. They never see their neighbors to the right outside. Big yard and porch and everything, but there's no activity at all. Mrs Mom and Mr Soil have a beautiful raised bed garden, with trellises and a fence, and their neighbors complained about having to look at it. I can't imagine anything more delighting and hopeful to look at than a tidy garden.
9. Mrs Mom has a replicated sample population, because she joined a Bunko group (people who come together to play a card game, much like a bridge club) in both WA and MO. A study of card game groups in two states. Snacks were brought, and the differences: in WA the majority of the snacks would be homemade (hummus and hand cut veggies for instance), in MO the majority were store-bought (crackers and cheese dip perhaps). Most of the members in the MO group were 10-20 pounds overweight. In the little WA town people passed the time with generally outdoor activities, hiking or gardening. In MO, it is indoor things like shopping or going to the movies that are leisure activities.
10. Interestingly, homeschooling is quite popular in MO with lots of support and curriculum fairs and such.

Basically, there seems to be a striking difference in value systems between suburbia Midwest and definitely where I live in Ithaca and where we used to live in wheat-field college town WA.

When I wasn't doing a cultural study, the rest of my visit was spent: happily spending money in the funky shopping district of St Louis (The Loop), padding warmly around the Missouri Botanical Garden ("you've smelled an orange flower recently, havent you" said Mr Soil, pointing out some pollen on my nose), shooting a gun for the first time at their shooting range, watching fire works, and eating elk meatballs from the other piece of the taxidermy on their wall. An enjoyable and fascinating visit indeed.

The elk.

Missouri Botanical Garden, the quiet and moist rainforest enclosure.

For my Grandaddy. St Louis.

Graffiti in a women's room. Never seen it like this before.

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Impressions of Kansas

Written Saturday morning:

I write this reclining against my backpack (aka “Rick Steves”), waiting for a flight, my laptop splayed on my thighs. But I am doing something that NO ONE DOES. I am outside the Wichita airport, outside in the ornamental grass planting display, by the flagpoles. I’d much rather wait out here than inside. Why? The tiny blip-town of Wilson was 2 hours away from Wichita, and my colleague had the rental car, and his flight was much earlier, so there I was waking at 3:45am to get here to wait. I think I’ve learned over the years that it's not worth worrying about things like this. Rather, sally forth and sit by the grasses and spend time writing. 
 
I was in Wilson for a conference on the  perennial grain, "Kernza" (Intermediate Wheatgrass), hosted by The Land Institute. I've been reading about TLI for years, fascinated by the hugely sustainable prospect of a "perennial" grain, and thrilled when my lab group at Cornell started to work with Kernza. And then Professor Boss said he was sending me to this conference.

It was pretty magical for me to visit the Land Institute, but also in that way where something that has seemed so awesome and mystical actually shrinks a bit, becomes less impossible and more accessible. To be in the greenhouse, full of perennial grain plants, and realize that very greenhouse was the backdrop to photos I’d seen on the Land Institute website or in bulletins. Eat dinner next to the famous researchers there, chatting with them about Ithaca (small world) over a beer, seeing the research plots. I even bought a T-shirt (which I also don’t think I’ve ever done) because I am so excited about their work and want to be a flag for them.

I may be only a “technician” (although Professor Boss referred to me as a "SuperTechnician" recently), paid so much less than the professors, and with less future hope than a PhD student, but I feel I am still fully contributing to the work on this crop. I wrote most of the grant that got us funding last year to work on this. After two days of this conference—which felt much like summer camp with us staying in the same historic building, eating meals together, and then all hanging out with Kansas-made beers on the patio—I feel like I have so much of a better idea of the “bigger picture” of Kernza, this first best stab at a truly hopeful perennial grain. Wes Jackson (TLI director) thwapped me on the shoulder and said how happy he was that I was there. Of course he had no idea who I was probably, but I think he’s just thrilled to have researchers all coming together over his dream.

There were about 30 people at this meeting, and we all gave a little talk about our work with the crop.  Everything from researching the QTL gene, creating genetic maps, testing fertilizer needs, trialing it in baked goods, and brewing it for beer. I spoke about agroecology and the plans for our new grant. So you could say I was “an invited key-note speaker at the first international Kernza Conference.” Which is to say, they asked me to give a talk, and there were guys from Australia and Canada there. 

I took the evenings to go on bike rides or walks around the pop. 781 town. The bike was “rented” ($1 per day!) from the hotel: a “cruiser”, meaning it had tires like oatmeal, a seat like a parking lot, and handlebars spread wider than a longhorn’s. I dug into muscles deep in my hamstrings, muscles that should not be used for biking ultimately (the thing was not ergonomically effective), and creaked along at 2.5 mph. But I could ride out of town, along the empty roads, gazing at clouds and fields, just enough rolling to create contours in the landscape viewing. I met a Horny Toad, saw dead snakes, wondered at the native weed species in the ditches, and reveled in the huge sweeping glory of the windmills. One wouldn’t think there would be a fantastic way to pass time, out there pedaling about on a slow bicycle, but I saw all these little notes that would be otherwise missed.

With the sun setting down into the endless stretch of the interstate, I stood on an overpass and did that activity that I love abashedly so much, no matter whether I’m 14 or 28. It's called “Overpass Truck Honk Inducing.” International pump your arm sign, honk the air horn sign! Woooooo!  I love how truckers so easily oblige this, I can see them reaching up and yanking down as they fly beneath me at 70 mph, TONK TONNNNNK! The Doppler shift in the sound as they shoot below. I like to imagine it adds a particle of interest to their endless drive too.

Pedaling around the town of Wilson, however, was silence. House after house, all the little roads in a grid—east-west, north-south—little yards, maybe some worn bikes leaning in the grass, maybe a small garden. One bar, one squat library, one antique shop, one Grannie’s Soda Fountain. The houses were so still, blinds drawn, nobody on porches, nobody in yards, nobody walking. It felt like being on an empty theatre set for a play. I did see one woman in bright pink workout top, slowly riding her bike around town, I imagined for her nightly constitutional exercise. And a guy with a cigarette mowing his lawn. But where is everybody else? How do you spend your time in rural central Kansas? What do you look forward to? What makes you happy? Is it truly all that different from my Ithaca town experience or does it just appear to be?

An old maroon sedan floated past, two young males in the front. They rolled down the window. No matter, I’ve been hooted and honked at and questioned all over the world from car windows, and usually its worth no more than an eye roll. But these two leaned out the window a bit and simply said “good evening.” And drove on.  That was it. A polite simple greeting. Incidentally, just about every other car that passed gave me a little wave as well. “Look Mary-Joe, a human walking!” I could imagine Farmer Hank saying to his wife.

A conference, experiencing a different place, and the little ways of traveling. Even though mundane, the little support systems I set up for myself while traveling I find indeed satisfying. The little planned-ahead details, the home-making while mobile, the provisioning for travel with that quiet pleasure in self-sufficiency. I’ve always had this, whether it was a bag of tuna fish in the Seattle airport (“I’m saving space and getting protein!”) or sneaking into a continental breakfast on a road trip (“how scandalous and I don’t need to buy breakfast!”). Today its my little stash of snacks in my bag, as I take issue with spending money on food at an airport (I do it occasionally, when pantingly desperate only, for, say, a weakly-warmed piece of $7 pizza, or a foamy plastic-wrapped apple). But yesterday during the conference I thought ahead all day, and since I know too much about food and know that leftovers will be wasted, I happily started gathering. Two pieces of bread gleaned from breakfast. An extra trip from the lobby to bring a load of tangerines to my room. Eating only half my pesto-pasta last night to save the rest for today.

I got the vegetarian option last night (we were doing set-plate, not off-the-menu) and instead of chicken, the vegetarian option was pesto pasta. Which means: I had pasta with a side of rice. Would you like a carb with your carb?

But the other night it was off-the-menu, and I asked about the Large Salad vs the little Side Salad, how big it was.  “I don’t know”, said the server, “nobody’s ever ordered the Large Salad before.” 

Kansas sky by bicycle

In The Land Institute's field of Kernza

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Amtrak

"Hot hot HOT coffee!" trilled the conductor's voice over the loudspeaker, which is what finally woke me this morning. I had woken up with at least two locations in my body having turned into end-of-the-line tracks, left hand and right foot in a buzz from lack of blood. The man sitting next to me pulled what looked like half a grapefruit skin from a plastic bag and ate two bites of a stinky mustardy sandwich before replacing it. Or maybe the stinky mustard was my feet. I stretched like a kitten in a small basket and out from my kinked body rolled a burp so loud the man jumped.

There is little glamour in riding coach overnight.

I am on Amtrak, going to St Louis MO to visit a grad school friend, and then heading to Kansas for a conference for Cornell.  I have never ridden more than a commuter train in my own country before, and traveling a distance by train was on my bucket list.

I boarded in Rochester last night at 11:40pm, glazed and tired and a little surreal, climbing steps into the silver coach. I walked the dark hallway and found a seat next to someone non-threatening who wasn't snoring. I'd bought a blanket-by-the-pound blanket, cheap, from the new goodwill surplus store, planning to leave it after the night, and snuggled in knowing it would be the only night we'd have together.

It feels a bit like camping, perhaps, in the acceptance-of-grime way, but with a scenic movement view and many more people. My sandals went stick stack stuck as I approached the tiny toilet in the bathroom. My yoga muscles asserted themselves and I stayed balanced as the bathroom swayed around me. I imagined some man before me in this tiny space, weaving and large, who probably had no yoga muscles, judging by the state of the toilet seat.

But upon returning to my seat I learned we were in Indiana and I looked out the window and noticed the roadside weeds were different. The delight of travel!

This train is a mega-diverse landscape, as it were. All colors and levels of income and ages. Walking the aisle at midnight to my seat, all the sleeping people in various degrees of nesting with blankets or with stoicism uncovered. The sweet scenes of people revealing their affections in sleep, children wrapped around each other, two women with their cornrow hair mingling together, a small girl tight between them.

To pass the hours I could read, I could write, I could listen to music. But for some time i was just looking out the window, realizing that a train passes through the inglorious back rooms and junk drawers and forgotten closets of these Midwest towns, the garbage centers and storage facilities and lines of abandoned porta potties backed up against the track. And also grain elevators, trampolines and squat aboveground pools in backyards.

And endless corn. So much corn.  Irrigated corn. This I find incredibly depressing, that so much of our land area is going to feed cattle or to be made into ethanol.

The travel eagerness and curiosity is setting in. What's it like to live in South Bend Indiana? What makes this place different from another? Who rides Amtrak versus flying or greyhound? What are those orange clumpy-headed weed flowers along the track?

I changed trains in Chicago, stuffing my luggage into an expensive locker, and climbing from the underground platform into the bright looming city. I walked for hours, staring at buildings, moving to counteract the sitting. I padded around Millennium Park, found a shirt with Jesus Lizards on it in my favorite clothing chain (in hip cities and nowhere in the fingerlakes), and ate the best baba ganoush of my life (for $4). [yes Chef Kevin that is a challenge]  To pad around, exploring, feeling porous and delighted by the simple fact of being somewhere new, my traveler surges alive again.

This way of travel also seems more believable, that I am actually truly moving the distance between the east coast and the Midwest. In a plane it is too quick, too high, too removed. The clanking chimes of the crossing guards blocking the road, for once not holding me up as a car but making so I could be one of those to blast through. In this way I am finding train travel to have a magical aspect to it, exciting and lulling and expansive and detailed, all in one.

My goodwill blanket, morning after.

The inglorious back room of our Midwest, the stuff seen from the tracks.

Chicago walking.

A large mirror sculpture in Millennium Park. Where's Waldo?

I had a feeling of Seattle urban affection to see this sculpture.

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