There’s a male cardinal out there in the cedar tree. He is iridescent red, in the sun. The hummingbird feeder I bought has little fake red flowers on it that lead the long beak to the pool of nectar within. I didn’t like the phony flowers, which all such feeders seemed to a have till it was pointed out to me that they are red by design. That’s what draws the hummingbirds in. The nectar is also red. It’s in a clear glass jar. Out the right side of my eye I saw another red reflection in the window, the reflection of the red handles of those Craftsman needle nose pliers I have. I moved the handle to the other side of the window by the hummingbird feeder, so there would be yet again more red to attract the little birds who always dart by but never seem to stay.
Just got off the phone with a high school teacher whom I hadn’t spoken to in over thirty-five years.
And you know, I wrote two lovely paragraphs about this just as it was happening had the sort of thing transpire that used to plague us all in, say, 1998. My computer crashed and all the work was lost. These days computers are so much smarter, and software is auto-saving all the while, right? Yes, but Microsoft only seems to offer that feature now, if I’m saving to their cloud. I already have crap stored in the Google cloud and up in the Apple cloud. Do I really need my docs in Microsoft’s Azure world as well? No. I don’t. But, in classic old Balmer fashion, the Nadella Microsoft seems content to annoy me into thinking turning it on would be a great idea. We’ll frustrate you into buying our convenient storage option. Instead it makes me want to just dump the software once and for all and use Google docs to draft. I’m sure there’s a brilliant way to make it all work without saving to their cloud, but they certainly don’t make it easy. Ach, two paragraphs. Mediate on the travails of Thomas Carlyle, John.
Any rate, this teacher and I had a great talk. I thanked him for a lifetime’s worth of jazz appreciation, for he’d planted the seeds during the ‘jazz class’ he’d offered up in his apartment there on campus during my senior year. He’d had an encyclopedic collection thirty-five years ago, which I assumed was completest by this point, and so I tried to thoughtfully suggest that my interest had blossomed rather broadly in all this time, but as I mentioned Harold Land and his west coast drummer Frank Butler, which lead me to the pianist Carl Perkins who’d had polio and played in a unique stretched-arm posture in one breath I felt subtlety slip away.
Yes, he’d kept in touch, which most of my dearest classmates. Yes, he was still writing, and I immediately found a work or two of his, on Amazon as we chatted away. Yes, he had many substantive suggestions when I mentioned that my theme reading was presently all about slavery. (Many of them, including his own work are already on their way to my home.) And when it was done, we weren’t quite over as he sent me a Harold Land clip and I returned with something by Ed Thigpen. We agreed to speak again soon and I suggested I’d ping him, once I’d read his book: “The Kidnapped”
Not sure when I’ll get out to Detroit or see him back in New York, but speaking with a grand old teacher of mine, it made me think of all the thousands of students I’d engaged with and since lost touch with.
Wednesday, 05/20/20
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