Monthly Archives: December 2015

Counting Days

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I can’t remember a year when I didn’t have an advent calendar.

For most of my life, these tangible countdowns to Christmas were simple affairs: a pretty, seasonal picture (sometimes religious, sometimes not) with perforated doors, one for each day. You wuld fold open the flap, and inside would be another picture, an inset of the greater image, perhaps, or an enhancement. One of my favorite calendars had an image of a Christmas tree in a Victorian bay window, and every door added an ornament.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned about advent calendars with ‘stuff’ in them. Now, usually this ‘stuff’ consists of cheap, waxy milk chocolate, but apparently there are some that come with toys, as well. When I learned about them, I spent five minutes feeling gypped, and then I realized I liked the old-school version where the only treasure hidden behind the open door was my own imagination, sparked by the ever-dwindling number of days until the Big Event.

Of course, we count days throughout the year, not just during advent, not just in December.

We make red Sharpie x’s across the calendar squares that march us toward the next deadline, the next paycheck, the next special occasion, the next vacation.
We open our own doors and windows, and we find whatever life offers, and some days it’s as precious as a baby in a bed of straw, and other days it’s the manure from the ox in the corner, but we keep on counting.

Counting up: I’m five, ten, sixteen, twenty-one, thirty, forty-five.
Counting down: Christmas, the new year, Valentine’s Day, tax day, another birthday.

I read about my friends who have advent calendars with pockets that hold treats for their children, and I’m wistful for the days when I was innocent enough to believe marking a day on a calendar, picking a toy out of a pocket, burning the candle down to the next mark, held some kind of special magic.

And maybe, just maybe, they did.

And maybe, just maybe, recent years have led me toward virtual Advent calendars like #musicadvent, or Holidailies, or even the collection of poetry my friend Jancis is doing on his tumblr account because that’s the grown-up way of opening a door and finding a prize to help you count the days.

Holidailies 2015

Bolero

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1984. The Winter Olympics. British ice dancers Torvill and Dean nearly melt the ice with their passionate performance to Ravel’s Bolero. It makes ice dancing sexy. It takes the world by storm.

I was thirteen, watching the Olympics with my mother. We both love ice skating, and used to make televised ice shows into appointment viewing. Once I was old enough to have a real income, treating Mom to skating shows at the Shark Tank in San Jose became a tradition. One year, we even had seats on the ice.

1986, my junior year of high school. I’m sitting in my Humanities class watching a video of Zubin Mehta conducting Bolero. He’s wearing rehearsal clothes. Black, I think. A t-shirt or a turtleneck. Or maybe it’s just a blazer. A classmate (whose name I won’t mention because it’d be wrong to name-drop during Holidailies) says aloud what I’ve been thinking: Conductors are so sexy.

2002. I’m flipping channels and a half-remembered video is playing on PBS. I saw it once when I was much younger. Dinosaurs marching to extinction to the familiar Ravel composition. Bolero.

2014.  I’m in my mother’s rental house in Mexico, the one across the street from the house they were building –  the one they moved into in May.  The wind is high and I am watching hawks circle the cardon cactus, their circles looping higher and higher as the currents change. I’m starting a new story for a fiction community I belong to. My inspiration comes from the hawks and the music from my ipad: Bolero.

2015. I bought a guitar for my birthday, but all year I’ve also been falling back in love with my cello. I decide to challenge myself. #MusicAdvent wants an alphabetical list this year.  I decide to see how many of my choices will feature the cello.  Today is Day 2.

I choose Bolero.
Played by 4 cellists.

Back to December

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December has come to mean two things to me: Holidailies and #musicadvent.  Both begin today.

The first CD I ever bought was Yo-Yo Ma & Bobby McFerrin’s collaborative album Hush.  There isn’t a cellist my age who didn’t grow up following Ma’s career, and McFerrin was just becoming popular when I was a freshman in high school. To me, the pair of them represent some of the best of my musical memories from those four years.

Hush is also the album I come back to, over and over.  Just as I do with favorite novels, I find new things in it every time it resurfaces. Originally, my favorite pieces were the eponymous Hush, and the Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3, but lately it’s the Ave Maria that really speaks to me, maybe because there’s such peace in that song – the kind of peace you need at the beginning of December so that you stay calm and strong throughout the month of craziness and busy-ness and inevitable crankiness.

The entire album, though, is just lovely. The combined talents of these two men draws you in and makes you focus on the music first and the musicians second, and while it’s grounded in classical music, it pokes fun at the serious tone of the genre, and softens itself with lullabys.

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine who is also a writer in which I explained that I think in music.

At this time of year, when I go back to these two projects, I’m really going back to the Decembers of my youth and celebrating themm in song and story.

Today’s Song::

Ave Maria (Bach/Gounod) as performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin on the album, Hush.  (audio only) :