So Much for Posting at Least Once a Week

I have learned more about what it means to be a coot.  (Oldish, I say in the bio next door.)  iI have actually had a lot of stuff happen to me since I wrote that last post that is interesting enough that I will post it just so my progeny can see i and know something more about how they got the way they are.

I did get to Columbia and I sang in the open singing Messiah.  I happened to sit next to a guy who shared some experience with me.  I gave up trying to sing really good choral music for performance last year at Christmas.I had been getting the “stare” from the choral director for most of the autumn.  If you are used to being one of the best in your area ( I have been a bass, slipping into baritone and occasionally filling in as tenor if there was a shortage.  In that last few months of rehearsal I didn’t feel like I could read, or count, or much of anything)  it is hard to cope with the “stare”, especially when you know it is justified. 

The guy sitting with me in the bass (sing along) section had been through the same experience.   We both bucked up and marked our scores pretty well and I felt like I was –at least- not embarrassing myself until the next to last chorus.  I had failed to mark it in my script and was all set up for the Amen (a fairly tricky piece of music anyway) when everyone started singing something else.  By the time I figured out where we were and where we should have been we were actually on the Amen.  It was still a wonderful experience that I would not willingly have missed.  Even with the mistakes, I was on a high all the way home.

The next morning I cooked the turkey, and my family said”It is good”.  But screwing up music, and failing to screw up turkey are just some of the things that have made me aware of how much I am failing, and in how many ways.  If it weren’t for the GPS in the front of my car, I would be lost half the time.  I can hardly count the number of times I have started off to the drug store and pulled up into the Wal Mart parking lot.

When we first came to Georgia we laughed a lot about the frequency of old cars and pick-ups going down the road at ten or twenty miles per hour less than the speed limit allowed, and we chortled at how frequently the driver of such a car was a little old man wearing a hat.   We developed all kinds of funny stories about old men with hats peering over the dash board of their cars as they proceeded to whatever destination they had or didn’t have in mind.

We live about half way between Statesboro and the little town of Brooklet, where we once lived.  We have found that it is faster to take a package to be mailed to Brooklet than to the main Post Office in the “city”.  There is also a good discount (bent can) store and an excellent IGA store so we go off to Brooklet with some frequency.  Yesterday I was driving down Highway 80 to Brooklet when my wife, in her subtle way, asked me if I had forgotten my hat?  “No,” I replied, “Why would I wear a hat, the weather is cold, but sunshiny?”

There was a pause then she asked “What is the speed limit here?”  Glancing at a passing sign, I replied “55, Why?”  “How fast are you driving? “    I glanced at the speedometer and said “45 “.   “That’s what I thought as I noticed the line of cars behind us, so I wondered why you weren’t wearing your hat.”    I gulped, muttered a bit about “the most unkindest cut of all” and sped up to 55, or even a few mph above 55, and my cheery wife roared with laughter all the way to Brooklet.  She has promise to keep a hat in the back seat in case I need one again.

Mumble Grumble Mumble.  It was about the female gender that Shakespeare wrote “Age cannot wither, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”   Shakespeare didn’t have to worry about hats if he decided to slow down on the high way.