Knuckleheads and Music

As the dog and I returned to the neighborhood from Green Road this morning, we surprised a lady enjoying the scents of spring.  She was dressed all in shades of purple, and we passed her as she was drawing a branch of a tall lilac bush closer to her face so she could breathe in the flower’s fragrance.  The action and all those purples made a lovely vignette.  She seemed unaware of the picture she made, and the moment seemed a private one, so we walked on, the richer for having seen her.

     When Sue and I walked along the boardwalk by the river this afternoon, we stopped in the shade to look at the selection of turtles basking.  What caught our eyes was a couple of whopper soft-shelled turtles enjoying the sun where we usually see only smaller turtles of various hard-shelled persuasions.  Our favorite parts of the picture were the big soft-shelled turtle with the little painted turtle sitting front and center on top of it, and the medium-sized painted turtle perched at the very end and highest point of the downed branch, like the figurehead on the prow of a Viking ship.

     We were walking the other way on the other side of the river when a men’s crew team crossed our path carrying a variety of sculls.  We don’t know if the team came from the University of Michigan or from a local high school.  My guess, though, is these were high schoolers.  The men didn’t seem as big or as disciplined as you’d expect collegiate rowers to be.

     There were a couple eight-man shells and some quads and, as this is the tail end of the academic year, the boats were out on the water in a twinkling.  What fun to watch the boats sweep by, elegant of movement and light on the water.  We mostly couldn’t hear the young-lady coxains on the large shells, but the coach had a megaphone and came in loud and clear.

     Especially as we neared the bridge that’s right before the dam.  Both of the big shells had stopped broadside to the bridge to await further instructions.  They got them. 

     “You can’t stop there!” the coach yelled.  “She’s about to float under the bridge, and you’re sitting there like knuckleheads!”  There was more, but the young men did get their acts together and move away from their untenable positions.  This episode supported our theory that this was a high school team.  You’d expect better leadership from inside the boats at the college level, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that college coaches were less likely to use words like knuckleheads.

     My friend Cindy and I attended our mutual friend Rhonda’s spring orchestra concert one afternoon this week.  It was a pleasure, largely due to the director, Dan Long.  Dan taught middle-school orchestra in town for many years before his retirement, and now he leads this group of, mostly, other retirees.  He chats with the audience and orchestra between pieces.

     My favorite thing he had to say was, “What you see before you today is the triumph of music education.  These are people who learned to play an instrument when they were young, and they get together now to make music together just for the fun of it.  Isn’t that wonderful?”

     He said there are members of the group that he had as students, and that he also has parents of former students.  At first, I thought he’d misspoken and meant, children of former students, but I decided he meant exactly what he said.  Dan made and makes music so much fun that his students’ parents want to be part of it.

     Part of what made the concert memorable for me was having a retired conductor sitting next to me.  Did she identify herself as such?  No.  I’d pretty much pegged her as a former music educator, through conversation and the people she clearly knew well.  What made me sure of it was her behavior during one piece, when Dan was urging the orchestra to dig deep and swell the sound.

     Seemingly without realizing it, my neighbor reached out her left arm and made the same gesture Dan did, at the same time he did.  Isn’t it remarkable that someone can know a piece of music so well and have conducted for so long, that conducting it becomes a matter of muscle memory?

     Dan’s orchestra didn’t do an encore, but Cindy provided dessert.  Once again, she baked three kinds of cookies for Rhonda’s concert, packaged them all individually, and offered them to the performers and the upwards of a hundred concert-goers.

2 May 2025