South for Christmas

Like the rest of my family, I was born and reared in the State of Washington.  The famous "Northwest Corner," as my blog would have it.   Unlike every other member  of my family, I still live in that state.  In Seattle.

The rest of the family, the shameless renegades, have flown to the far corners of the ... well, of the West Coast I guess.  My sister and my youngest nephew Jesse live in Challis, Idaho.  My brother moves about between three residences co-owned with his daughter -- all in Southern California -- Palm Desert, Oxnard, and Big Bear.  His daughter's usual residence is in Glendale.  My eldest nephew lives in San Francisco.  My "middle" nephew has lived for the past several years in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with his wife and daughter; they will return to Sonoma, California, however, at the end of this school  year.

I have hosted Christmas and Thanksgiving on a few occasions over my lifetime, but generally no one wants to come to an area they now consider either a rainy bog, or a state too close for comfort to the Arctic Circle.  Instead, I get regular invitations to visit them, and to do the traveling myself.

Which is merely a lead-in to my announcement that I will be flying from Seattle to Palm Springs tomorrow.  My brother will meet me at the airport and escort me the 14 miles eastward to his home in Palm Desert, where he has offered me places around the family Christmas tree and the dinner table.  I'll be returning next Tuesday.

These announcements of departure from Seattle used to be necessary to explain why eager readers of my blog needed to expect a week or so without the joy of reading my latest essay.  Now that my frequency of publication has sunk to a level explicable only by old age, incipient dementia, or -- most likely -- criminal laziness, this sort of announcement really isn't necessary.  In fact, it's farcical.  Nevertheless, old habits live on. 

And so -- "No posts, gang, until at least next Wednesday!"

Getting to know Arthur Ritis

With all good intentions, people say to me "Oh, you're not old! ...
"My uncle is ninety and he walks eight miles a day." 

Lucky Unk.  I hope he never meets that old bully Arthur Ritis or his mean wife Sciatica.

--Ursula K Le Guin, No Time to Spare, "Going Over Eighty: The Sissy Strikes Back"

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Fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin was 81 years old when she stepped from fantasy fiction to harsh (if often funny) reality in her published collection of essays from her blog.  

The quotation above is take from one of her earlier posts.  She was sick of being told "You're only as  old as you think you are."  Such comments, she feels, are well meant, but encourage older people to deny the obvious changes in their bodies, and their obvious resulting inability to still act like a kid.

She herself suffered from arthritis and sciatica at 81.  She didn't drive.  Her formerly enjoyable walk to the grocery store to pick up one item or another was now a torment -- she was forced to limit her grocery visits to one per week, keeping a list during the week of her needs for the visit.

I chuckled sympathetically when I read her little essay a couple of years ago.  I didn't realize how quickly one can go from being a light-limbed and light-hearted youth to an arthritic cripple.

"Cripple" is a bit of an exaggeration.  I can still get around; I can walk a couple of miles with only minimal pain.  But so far, I haven't been able to walk much farther than that without developing pain not only while walking, but for the next day or two.

What's been surprising to me is how quickly it all happened.  If you skim over my blog essays for the past six months or so, you'll note that I was still hiking steep paths without complaint last May.  In July, I developed a strained groin muscle that very gradually became more painful.  In July, I decided to cut back the distance of my daily walks from four to five miles a day to something like two.  Within a couple of weeks, without known cause, I began having Achilles tendon pain in the same leg.  

Note that the groin strain and the tendinitis were both annoyances of the sort that are somewhat easily treated, primarily with rest.  But by the beginning of August, I was developing knee pain in the opposite leg.  At first the pain was minor, but it soon became more worrisome than the Achilles tendinitis.  (By that time, the groin muscle was no longer really a factor.)  By the time I left with friends for Scotland at the end of August, it was clear that I wasn't going to be able to participate in the group's daily hikes.

I saw an orthopedist, whose radiology revealed moderate arthritis.     He suggested physical therapy.  The plan would be to strengthen my leg muscles, thus increasing the stability of my knee joint, and reducing or eliminating pain.  I haven't really done that, of course.

A friend tells me that his wife found physical therapy to be useless in combatting her arthritis, but that she's intrigued by a remedy that her grandmother swears by -- raisins soaked in gin.

Intellectually absurd, but tempting.  Even without the raisins.

I do something occasionally similar to consuming gin, but with fewer side effects -- I take a Tylenol or two.  Even one reduces the pain noticeably, but doesn't entirely eliminate it.  I kind of like the background sensation of mild pain, because it reminds me not to get carried away and walk long distances before my body's used to it.  

If it ever will be.  Most on-line experts say that you're stuck with arthritis for the rest of your life.  The only change is that it generally gets gradually worse.

Anyway, I don't take Tylenol regularly, at least yet.  Taken too often and in too great a quantity, it ain't good for your innards.

I go back over my years of writings, in this blog and before, about the hikes and climbs I've taken.  Many of them were exhausting, some even painful.  But the exhaustion came from my lungs' efforts to suck in enough oxygen.  And the pain came from the pain that younger muscles feel as they learn to work harder and longer with training.

These little essays make me sad, knowing that they document challenging hikes and climbs, most of which I'll never be able to do again.  But reading about them makes me happy that I did them when I did, year after year, always exhausted but always happy.

I've passed on the moral that I derive from my life history to my younger friends on Facebook:

"Don't kid yourself that you're too busy with work and family to go hiking or climbing now, but that you look forward to doing it when you have time, once you retire." 

Because maybe you won't. 

Singing like angels

Christmas is packed with traditions.  One of my more recent traditions -- interrupted for a couple of years by the pandemic -- has been attendance at the annual "Festival of Lessons and Carols." presented by the Northwest Boychoir and its teenage affiliate, Vocalpoint! Seattle.

The combined choirs present their concert at eight Seattle venues each December, leading up to their final concert downtown at Benaroyal Hall.  Last night, I attended their concert at St. Mark's Cathedral, not far from my house.

The singers this year included 29 boys from the Northwest Boychoir, and 32 teenage boys and 15 teenage girls from Vocalpoint!.  The concert each year is based closely on the Christmas Eve service at King's College, Cambridge -- portions of which are available for viewing on YouTube.

In the versions by both King's College and the Northwest Boychoir, the most striking moment -- for me, at least -- comes at the very outset.  At St. Mark's, the singers enter a short distance into the cathedral from the rear, behind the congregation, and pause before advancing farther.  The congregation is hushed as the solo, ethereal voice of a very small boy begins the first verse of "Once in Royal David's City," his voice swelling as he nears the end of the verse, filling the volume of the entire cathedral, from the congregation on the floor all the way to the high rafters above. 

At the second verse, the entire choir joins in as they enter and file to the front of the cathedral, lining up in rows and singing all six verses without accompaniment.  Their singing becomes more complex with each verse, and the final verse is sung with a soprano descant soaring high above the pitch of the main melody.

After singing three more carols, the choir proceeds with the lessons.  A boy -- this year, also a girl for one of the readings -- begins each lesson with a reading from the Old or New Testament.  The choir then proceeds with a carol, related to the reading,  followed by a well-known and popular carol in whose singing the entire congregation joins. 

The overall effect  is magical, and is concluded -- after nine such readings -- with the choir's singing of "O Holy Night," and -- as they file back out through the rear of the cathedral -- "Joy to the World."

As I've mentioned in a past year's blog, I have reservations about the piano accompaniment, although the accompaniment is quite musical in its own right -- not merely a support for the singers as  in a typical church or Sunday School service.  These singers need no support, as was well illustrated in the two carols that were sung without accompaniment -- the initial "Once in Royal David's City" and a Gregorian chant with challenging polyphony, "O Magnum Mysterium."  Both pieces illustrated the skill and musicality of the singers, young and older, beautifully.

But all the carols were beautifully done, with or without accompaniment.  As we filed out of the Cathedral, we were greeted by smiling Boychoir singers, still dressed in their gowns, who were distributing small candy canes.  

All of us, in fact, were smiling.  Even Ebeneezer Scrooge, had he been present, would have been smiling as he walked out the door.  

We're No. 2

So, the University of Washington football team is the second best in the entire United States of America.  The AP says so, the Coaches' Poll says so, and the thirteen voters in the almighty College Football Championship say so.

Very cool.  But, those of us who aren't totally committed Husky fanatics, or at least current UW students, have our doubts.  The team, despite its 13-0 record, has seemed shaky in game after game.  Would the second best team in the entire known world really have to struggle to get past Stanford, Oregon State, and Washington State?   We, along with most of the nation, have asked ourselves that question repeatdly. 

And beyond that, here in the Northwest Corner, regardless of ethnicity, we tend to be Scandinavian in our attitudes.  "Be humble.  Don't brag about yourselves.  Don't call attention to yourselves.  Remember that if you're too happy today, you're bound to be miserable tomorrow.  Things can always go wrong, and usually will."  Pessimism is our proven default.

And even my mildly felt, Norwegian happiness at the Huskies' success is offset by my displeasure with everything else in the world of college football.  The advent of the College Football Championship has been motivated by television's quest for bigger bucks.  It's been built on the destruction of the New Year's Bowl traditions, and on the destruction of regional football conferences with century-old traditions (notably this year, of the Pac-12), and the growing conviction that football conferences themselves are no longer necessary.  That their championship games, especially, should be done away with.

When you have a play-off system that determines the champion of the entire Universe, who needs regional conference championships?  They just clutter things up.

And, of course, the antique need for "regional" conferences is now obsolete, now that we can fly across the country in five or six hours.  (And now that football players aren't seriously expected to have the same lives and academic strivings, interests, and responsibilities as do common college students.)  With West Coast teams now set to join the "Mid-Western" Big Ten conference, joining recently-added Atlantic Coast teams like Rutgers and Maryland, the term "regional" is rather anachronistic, right?.  

My mind is still reeling from the idea of Stanford and Cal playing in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

I can't predict where it's all heading.  I just know I won't like it.  In fact, as a teenager, I hated the disbandment of the "Pacific Coast Conference," and its temporary replacement by the Pac-5.  Even though the Pac-5 was, within a few years, expanded back to the Pac-8, leading to the snide comment that the schools had chosen an unnecessarily complicated way just to get rid of the University of Idaho. 

So, bah!  My politics may be liberal, but my attachment to traditions, to the "way it's always been," is downright conservative.  Even Tory!  Stop the world, especially the sports world.  I want to get off.

But anyway.  Go Dawgs.  Beat the Longhorns! And the Wolverines!