As the Seattle Symphony performs at Benaroya Hall, they are overwhelmed by the King Of Instruments: the pipe organ!
Though some say the king of instruments is the symphony. Hard to argue with that, not because it is right, but because that is such a weird thought. Anyone who uses that argument must operate by rules of reasoning hopelessly opaque to anyone else.
I once had an overnight Wednesday-Sunday job. Sundays at 6am, in those days, a radio station had a program called “The Organ Loft.” I looked outside as I sat on the steps and listened to pipe organ music on my transistor radio. Maybe the pipe organ isn’t meant to be listened to on a transistor radio, I thought, because it sounded silly. Too much treble.
Dr. Phibes (Vincent Price) played the pipe organ.
There was a day in Fremont that predates even those long-ago Sundays. A neighbor across the street, window open, was listening to piano music. A guitars-and-drums man, I was struck with admiration. That person must be a real sophisticate, I thought. I would like to be able to do that.
St. James Cathedral has two pipe organs. I was there once on a weekday. After Mass, the organist came out and started to play. Lucky me, I had time to listen, and it was a thrill. I became one of the people who stays after Sunday Mass, listens to the organist play out his whole piece, and applauds.
I began taking note of the composers of the pieces played at Mass– my first contact with the ethereal Olivier Messiaen.
St. Mark’s Cathedral has an excellent pipe organ high up in back. You can’t get up there, same as the Benaroya pipe organ. The organist has to ascend that mountain alone and send the music down to the uplifted masses.
One night a courageous organist played Messiaen’s “Meditations On The Mystery Of The Holy Trinity,” one of the lesser-known works from a year that saw more than its share of historic music: 1969.
I went to high school just down the road from St. Mark’s, so I thought I’d take my wife down to show her around. Farther than I thought, we were on foot, and a downpour erupted as we were too far away from the church to get back without getting soaked. That’s what I get for thinking I could just go back to my high school and it would be fun. No big deal.
It was horrible. I sat in that church freezing and soaked, miserable, and listened to that crazy piece, thinking it would have to be one of Aimee’s least-favorite nights of all time. But, a classic night for me.
Someday, I hope I get another chance to hear that performed live, because it’s a startling piece of music, and one of the great cultural treasures of the Catholic church. Imagine trying to portray the reality of the Trinity in 70 minutes of pipe organ music. As it unfolds, one truly has the feeling of being on the threshold of the Ineffable. There are great outbursts of power chords and passages through deep tunnels of unexplored darkness.
Procure some Messiaen, or Buxtehude, or Bach, and go for a walk in the rain, at night, or a Summer twilight, in a forest, a field, and listen to pipe organ music through your headphones.
One of the Seattle Symphony’s yearly subscription series is a pipe organ recital series, always among the least-attended concerts of a season. Someday, an organist will play with a drummer– a jazz drummer, say– and that’ll be a great success. Give the organ something visceral and immediate to play off.
During public tours of Benaroya Hall, a demo of the pipe organ is included. People recognize that the pipe organ deserves more prominent and thoughtful presentation.
The Organ Rock Singalong Series will be a huge success. The symphony, with organ, plays “Whiter Shade Of Pale,” “Smoke On The Water,” You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “A Day In The Life.”
Why isn’t this being done?
Why? Why? Why?

The Moon is full, so it’s not a good time to ask this, but are you always self-contained, and in complete control of circumstances? A Zen Master is. I think.
Maybe I could just at least have a zen rock garden.
When we got a house, I thought I could have one, but the places I had in mind didn’t work out, so the idea was shelved.
Until I was put in charge of balloons at my son’s third birthday party.
Seventy white balloons to form a grid, and ten black balloons to form the special big rocks. Cost less than $10 for the balloons.
I could use little nails to anchor the balloons in the grass, but it was tough to get the nails in those little knots. The balloons flopped around and were different sizes. Not regular!
“Hey….” I noticed. “It’s not windy.” Take the nails out and just put the balloons on the ground.
The black balloons I taped together, in one case attaching them to a stick to form something meant to resemble a scholar’s rock.
It was a lot smaller than I hoped it would be. I could have used ten times as many balloons, but who’s going to blow them up? For just the 70 I took two Advil for the earaches.
Then I got a ladder, climbed up on the roof, and started photographing it: from the roof, the ground, standing on a chair, a table, behind the balloons, in front of them, beside them, in the late afternoon, in the evening, after dark.
Then the wind blew. In the morning, they’d gotten all over the yard, even into a neighboring yard. They ran alone, as couples, in packs. They popped. They got stuck in a lilac bush, against a fence, the side of the house.
Out of dozens of photos, I chose two dozen and thought of options: print which ones at which sizes?
With cheap copies, I designed a poster, and had good copies made of those, but some didn’t print correctly and had to be deleted from the project or kept in their imperfect forms.
I had roughly equal numbers of landscape photos and portrait photos. Instead of one poster of all the photos, I thought I would arrange them, by those styles in linear fashion, so that the project would consist of two separate pieces.
To the local frame shop to get mats made on which to paste the photos. For that, I also had to get good archival paste and a brush, and practice on something else before pasting the photos onto the mats.
After experimenting exhaustively with the order of the photos as they were placed on the mats, I was satisfied I had them in the best order.
Then I had to mark the margins and try to paste the photos perfectly, which I failed to do, as the lady at the frame shop pointed out. I consulted with her as to how to frame the piece, and how to get perfect margins between the photos and between the photos and the frame.
Three weeks later, the job was done and I picked it up.
Then it took two days to figure out the best place to hang it at home.
What fun it was to have those balloons and carry them out into the backyard as people watched, wondering what exactly I was doing, making it up as I went along, encountering unforeseen problem, figuring out solutions, finally arriving at a piece of work I hadn’t anticipated at all– George’s Third Birthday Zen Balloon Garden!
Well, the next one will be way better.

Whether one prefers the misty, cloudy twilight for photography or the dramatic contrasts of shadow and sunlight, mid-Spring is an unsurpassedly excellent time to visit the Olympic Sculpture Park.
Rainy, a day may be, but from the Z-Path, the views are awesome of the clouds dissolving into ocean rains, or remaining on high, drifting overhead.
Among the tall pasture grasses, orange poppies proliferate, especially against the East Meadow’s heat-radiating concrete walls.
Darker colors of blue and purple Arctic lupins rise up in the meadows and Aspen Grove. Oregon sunshine and even dandelions are as yellow as anything short of a painted yellow sun.
A meadow is much more than amber waves of grain, which we have too: ambers and browns among brighter and darker hues. Not instead of green, because, greens, we have. Long, wide lawns of perfect blades of green grass.
Fireweed purple– color like that? Yes, it does deserves its whole own brand.
Snowberry green is evocative of olive. Salmonberry green is richer, with the ridges and serrated edges of that leaf. Dark and tiny are the individual greens of ground-covering kinnickinick. Long, dark and pinpointed, fronds of ferns. Of that sort of green are the leaves of Garry oak. Soft is the green of the quaking aspen tree. Softer still, red-twig dogwood. Mahonia leaves are glossy, and unabashedly prickly. To mention just a few.
Textures of leaves– as varied among these plants as their shades and colors.
Approaching the Cloud Bridge from the north, one turns right, downward onto the path along the train tracks, into a brisk ocean breeze stirring up aspen leaves, and feels, this is a lively moment, here and now.
White and gray, the clouds beyond the Olympic mountains, above Puget Sound, upon the Olympic Sculpture Park, and whether the sky be shiny or clouded, each engenders its own particular advantages for photography in the park. Or a hands-free walk.

You never know what you’ll leave with when you go into the grocery store.
QFC had its glory days long ago in 1970s Lake Hills and I still go there a lot although I wish it hadn’t disappointed me those times I couldn’t even get a can of cream of potato soup.
I too worked for companies that were sold to bigger companies that cared only about short-term profit, not the past, or the people, or the present, so I can’t blame the store for no longer being what it used to be.
I went to the Northgate QFC one day and heard REM’s “Man On The Moon” on their stereo. I, a guy who was no longer the guy I once was, listening to a song by a band who was no longer who they once were, in a store that was no longer what it once was, in a neighborhood that never was much of anything and probably never would be– saddest song in the world– not weepy sad, pathetic sad.
I would have gone somewhere else if I’d known that sad, sad thing was going to happen.
I’m always under time constraints when I go into the 3rd and Union Bartells, so I don’t anticipate that I’m walking into a muzak environment, but I’m often amused by the sometimes-familiar, sometime-not pop music they play. The variety of people in that Bartell’s, it’s pleasantly corny to think that management somewhere has decided, “Our customers will like this middle-of-the-road pop music.” Except that we’re all at Bartell’s, it creates a bond anyone would be embarrassed to admit and that only exists in my imagination. And maybe 3 or 4 people at any given time.
That’s different from QFC, as the city is different from the suburbs, and there is no QFC in the city.
In the suburbs live all of us who often feel we’re silly living out in the suburbs among people who disdain any hint of big-city danger, which includes the youth culture of rebellious music, be it so-called or not.
So surprised I was at 7:00 that recent Sunday morning in the local QFC, so quiet an hour that from a ceiling speaker an aisle away there was no mistaking Television’s “See No Evil.” I remembered “Man On The Moon” and thought maybe I could reach my heart before it fell and got all trampled, but it stayed, and would have soared if it still could, listening to that song that wouldn’t be tarnished by the incompatible surroundings. “It’s so early that somebody in back probably has that on before they have to play the regular stuff,” I rationalized.
But this morning, 11:30 on a Monday, “London” was “Calling.”
Maybe you saw years ago when the Grammys did some sort of Clash tribute and all these heavyweights played that, sweating, grimacing, chopping away at a song that is actually rather subdued, enough so that I’m grateful the Clash never did “MTV Unplugged” (did they?)
Now, the Clash, in my mind, “punk” though they were, were musical and idiosyncratic enough that to say they were punk is to give them short shrift.
People back then dismissed them and countless others on the basis of that one word, without any consideration for their merits as an individual group of musicians. Many of us thought it ridiculous that a group would be dismissed on that superficial basis, but we also liked being different from people who lacked our sophistication and sense of rebellion and adventure.
The Clash is long gone, and so many things that once seemed far-fetched have come to pass.
Youth of today, listening to the so-called wild music of yesteryear, thinking the music you listen to will never play in a supermarket….
Life is long.

As a long-time culture of one, “family” is an elusive concept, the identity one inherits at birth, so (apparently) easily transcended but so impossible to identify one never knows how much of who one’s self has been predetermined by particular jigsaw puzzle pieces that might come from any of a number of unknown people.
With a child, a lot of talking is done about who the child resembles. A parent can buy into that, and expect one’s child to take after himself, although, to observe the child, the idea that my son at the age of three and myself at the age of three would be at all similar seems unlikely.
To extrapolate back from adulthood to childhood, and vice versa, can’t be done.
Until recently, the idea that I am somehow a combination of my parents never occurred to me. That I would be much like my three brothers also seems way overly simplistic. Although how often I’ve wondered at myself, how I ever came to be this combination of characteristics, if maybe this predilection for implosion comes from my mother and my fondness from music from my father, my fondness for drink from my father, my fondness for literature from my mother.
That family is a great special thing has never been an experience of mine, and the idea that I should prize the companionship of family among any other group of people rings hollow, although very nice it is to be acquainted with companions, say, people from school, people at work, and describe them as being like family in a positive way.
The commonality of people seems the most telling thing of all. Aboard a bus, on the street, in traffic, I’m struck by how people can be both so individual and anonymous. I walk past someone and think how sad that I know nothing about him or her, although somewhere in the world, there might be a mother, father, son, daughter, long-lost friend, who would give anything to trade places with me so they could be close to this person whose existence gives his life its greatest meaning.
Maybe in Heaven people will have a type of transparence, so everyone knows everybody else, and one is always among people who have the truest appreciation of each other, with no distinctions of family, race, gender, any of the attributes we falsely identity with in this life. In Heaven, we’ll have our humanity, as we have it in this life, and to recognize that common humanity in everyone is to be a member of this one big family.

I’d have a $20 bill and I’d be set for a week in those mid-’80s days. Ten-pound bag of potatoes, a few cans of soup, bags of rice and noodles from the food bank, and enough money left for a six-pack of Schmidt and a couple of candy bars for the weekend.
Finally got a decent, full-time job in the late ’80s and moved to my first decent apartment in Fremont, next door to the Fremont Classic Pizzeria. I still remember the cashier…. Every Sunday I got a large pizza to build up my credit ranking.
I loved going to Marketime every day. Now I’m buying good beer, in bottles, the weird microbrews suddenly, miraculously rampant. Twenty dollars a week spending money? Not any more, baked potato breath! Fifty dollars wasn’t unheard of.
Now we go to PCC every Sunday with the goal of staying under $140. Don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that.
When I was a boy, food could be trusted, we thought. If food was in cans, that had to be because cans (and plastic containers) would shelter and preserve the goodness of the food.
All those chemicals– science, right? Although soft drinks– we would read the ingredients sometimes and try not to think about it. What is the taste of Coca-Cola, anyway? Can’t really think about these things.
Enter the new Puritans. My wife is one of these shoppers whose approach amounts to an overturning and reinvention of the food industry as, in my life, it has been known.
Food will not come in cans or plastics. Obviously, those materials consist of substances that just might, by the tiniest bit, contaminate the food with pollutants that will accumulate and not play nice with the human body. (Glass, paper, and some other things are okay.)
Non-vegetarian food is mostly horrific, meaning, all those rows of canned meat products, benign though the many varieties of chili seem to be, one must answer to the reality of the so-called lives of the chicken, cattle, sheep, pigs, overfished fish, lives truly “nasty, brutish, and short.” At some point, one wants nothing to do with all that, especially with relatively humane alternatives available.
As some people sensibly eschew any type of drugs in their lives, nowadays the default choice of sustenance is to choose food grown in clean soil, not exposed to pesticides and questionable fertilizers, grown by people with a kindred philosophy of prioritizing a clean environment, relocating human agriculture within a greater web that allows a full spectrum of ecosystems.
Buying the cheapest stuff, eating anything without thinking about it– I miss those days. Not because they were better– just because, I guess, I had the best of that world, as I knew it, as I have the best of the world now, as I know it, this world in which one always longs for a better future for this world, this life that is never without a taste of deep sadness.

With a yard like mine, one looks outside and right away sees something that ought to be “gardened.” Swoop down, determined to put an end to the big dandelion, the patch of stinky bob, the dead rhododendron, whatever I see, wherever I happen to be.
Can’t do that at my gardening job. That’s a job where I am not the boss. Several people above me are the bosses, and the job is at a 9-acre park, visited by multitudes every day. The park has its more popular, populated spots, with their particular landscape issues. The park has me as an employee, responsible to explore its width and length, height and depth, every day, with a critical eye to spot issues immediate and critical, subtle and less consequential.
Before choosing a particular problem to tackle, the whole park has to be looked over so priorities can be assigned.
A particular task– eradication of a caterpillar nest on a branch of garry oak– might be quickly accomplished. Another task– removing the vetch from the kinnickinick– might be ongoing.
Certain tasks might need rethinking. What is to be done with dandelions? If one is committed to non-chemical means of weed control, and one has a large space, limited time, limited labor, and competing priorities, maybe one has to accept that at any given time, a certain number of dandelions will be there in the lawn.
Dandelions are never going to renounce their claim to my yard. They will show up in force every year, in their baffling variety. I can commit myself to attempting to dig out the taproot of every single one– or, I can allow the yellow blooms one day in the Sun, then pluck ’em and spend my limited time elsewhere on less-futile activities.
If one has smaller sections of particular lawns that are not cut short and micro-managed, lawns with high-growing grasses, trees, and shrubs, perhaps one can simply pluck the dandelion flowers as they bloom, and elsewhere, do the same. Then one has the peculiar lawn that has dandelions, but not blooming ones, so the dandelions seem like a strange type of grass.
Establish the time limit, look over the entire yard, or section of yard to work on, focus on the biggest things, then work down to the smallest things.
Why spend an hour on a minor thing when a bigger problem could have been handled, had one taken the time to look over the whole yard?
Why spend three hours to halfway finish a job in the back when one could spend an hour finishing a job in the front?
Sometimes, you want to make the yard look better. Sometimes, you just want to deal with something that’s bothering you.
Nowadays, one always has to ask– is it good for the bees?

I mentioned to Aimee that I’d probably go to Silver Platters after work, because it was Record Store Day, and I’d never gone to a record store on Record Store Day. We tried one year, but they closed just before we got there.
“If you can’t find anything, you could get me ‘1989’ by Sailor Twist!” she said.
“Sailor Twist” is an easier name to remember than “Taylor Swift.” Just so, Tina Shrimpton is easier to remember than Tilda Swinton.
I wandered around and got some stuff.
As the weather warms, I always like to get African music, so I got “Radio Mali” by Ali Farka Toure. Rai music is an old favorite, so I got an Algerian compilation, “Algerian Proto-Rai Underground.” Also got two DVDs: Rory Gallagher “Irish Tour ’74” and “Gimme Shelter,” about the Rolling Stones’ ill-fated 1969 US tour.
Algeria isn’t far from Tunisia, and when I think about the Rolling Stones, I remember stories about them smoking hash in Algeria, so Algeria has always seemed like a cool place. “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out” was recorded from that tour, and I always listen to that in the Summer too.
If you want to learn to play guitar, just learn that album and you’ll be well-equipped for wherever your musical inclinations take you.
My current haiku project includes last week’s installment, “Irish Summer,” so even the Gallagher purchase has a Summer connection.
No Taylor Swift, so I inquired at the cash register.
“She’s in the Country section.”
“No way!”
He dashed off and got me a copy of “1989,” still on sale.
Hank Williams and Porter Wagoner are looking over my shoulder (literally: souvenir black & white photos I got at the Country Music Hall Of Fame in Nashville) and I like to think they would approve of my objection to the idea that Taylor Swift is a country musician.
I read the review in The New York Times that said Ms. Swift is too singular an artist to be in any category smaller than the category of Pop that is the genre of music that not only aspires to but actually achieves a level of universal popularity. I agree.
You might not like Taylor Swift, out-of-step person you, but you know her. She is gigantic.
I can’t help but think of Shania Twain, because she was still called a country musician when what she was up to was something that had no trace of country at all that I could tell. Then I saw a photo of her wearing the classic Ramones t-shirt, and who am I to judge? She was married to Mutt Lange, so she presumably knows her way around AC/DC.
I wonder what Taylor thinks, because, little-known fact– I too am a country musician, though no one thinks so, but it’s true, and that doesn’t stop me from also being a blues musician who sometimes plays jazz too.
A musician shouldn’t be blamed for being extra-musical.

If something seems missing from your life, maybe you just haven’t been to a music store in too long.
Used to be lots of them in Seattle’s U District: Cellophane Square, Tower Records, others names I forget.
When I go to Bellevue and drive past a certain strip mall by Bel-Square, I remember the little music store used to be there where I heard the Clash for the first time, “White Man In Hammersmith Palais” blasting over the stereo as I walked in. Never heard anything like that! Didn’t know it was that group the Clash I’d been hearing all about.
A little ways away was another record store where The Undertones did a meet-and-greet a few months before I became acquainted with them– a missed opportunity I’ve always keenly regretted. Out toward Crossroads, the heavy metal record store frequented by the folks who kept Lake Hills at the forefront of the metal world.
In this room I have albums in a crate that reminds me of Peaches, a record store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where my older brother and I bought Zeppelin’s “Houses Of The Holy,” among others, in the ’70s. We had record crates from Peaches. Where my wife and I got Spirit, our first chinchilla, once was a Peaches.
Now we have Half Price Books, where I get most of my CDs, used, slowly walking past the big box, scanning up and down the sections. Why are these the Guided By Voices CDs you have? Those were the ones they had at Half Price Books.
Yesterday when I went up north to pick up George, in the back of Grampa’s car, I saw a CD case from Amoeba Records in San Francisco, so I had to tell Grampa all about Amoeba Records at the top of Haight-Ashbury by Golden Gate Park. Only place I’ve ever found vallenato CDs!
Portland has Powell’s, about as excellent a place as one could ever hope to go, but if I had to choose between that and Everyday Records, just up Burnside, I’ll take Everyday Records.
Northgate isn’t exactly Seattle’s finest neighborhood, but they do have a Silver Platters.
Driving home from work on a Saturday, I’ll think of something sometimes and stop by there. Maybe I go to the back, to the jazz and country sections and look through all the names, trying to remember people and bands I’ve read about in jazz magazines and newspaper articles. An entire row is all metal, all the fascinating subgenres, groups never heard of that I’ll probably never hear, all types of music and musicians I someday hope to hear.
Maybe in the videos there’ll be something new I haven’t heard about– maybe someone has found a complete film of a Yes concert from 1973, or a complete film of “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” when Genesis toured that.
I wish a presidential candidate would make a promise to listen to a new CD every week as president. Presidents never seem to care about music, although Bill Clinton and Vaclav Havel went to Reduta Jazz Club in Prague one time and Clinton played the saxophone there.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” the Silver Platters clerks usually ask. A store full of music– I’m always happy to find that!

Years ago, a few weeks before Easter, someone walked past me eating Easter candy.
Not easily shocked, I think of myself, a veteran of the tough streets of downtown Seattle, but by that I was taken aback.
People I know now celebrate Easter as an occasion, but not as a religious holiday. I struggle to make sense of that, though I don’t know why, because that’s much more the case with Christmas.
Sell the candy, people will celebrate the marketed holiday.
Christmas has always been that way, though, whereas Easter hasn’t been so much so that until nowadays.
Even college baseball is starting to have a presence on television, although not so long ago that was completely obscure, maybe because baseball’s telegenics suffer compared to football and basketball.
Easter as a secular occasion is a tough one, though.
My wife wasn’t Catholic before we met. She converted so we could have a Catholic wedding, after I explained that any other kind of marriage wouldn’t seem necessarily more serious than any other type of civil contract. (Although my relationship with my wife would not have depended on that contract for me to have the deepest loyalty to her and our marriage.)
So Catholics we are, and a Catholic child we have. Christmas and Easter are religious holidays, and as the first Catholic of the family, I have the obligation to promote, cultivate, and maintain this aspect of our identity.
Not easy.
Can I prove that what we believe is valid? Of course not.
What I can do is try to explain why I find plausible what we believe.
First, the belief in God. Given what we know of the universe and the cosmos, the idea of an Omnipotent Creator seems far-fetched. The idea of Dark Matter seems far-fetched to me, though I trust the scientists who accept it as fact. I’m not an expert in the field, so I learn from them.
I’m not an expert on God, but there are people who are, and these people are found in every religious tradition. I learn from them, and piece it all together into a workable scenario. These people are compelling and convincing enough that I believe they’re right, everyone from Elijah the Tishbite to John the Evangelist to Catherine of Siena to Paramahansa Yogananda to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nothing in life is more frustrating than the truth that we really know nothing about what happens after death. Is what we believe all for nought, in the end, despite the value and meaning we derive from our religions in this life? It seems impossible to imagine any kind of scenario that has any chance of being at all accurate.
Is Charon, namesake of a moon of Pluto, out there taking people across the River Styx?
Jesus, some of us think, really did die and come back, so He is the proof of life after death, but that depends on believing in the literal truth of those Gospel accounts. Not exactly science journal material!
The idea of Jesus walking out of the tomb in those wee hours is frightful. Only someone of truly great faith would want to go back and wait outside that tomb.
But is it at all far-fetched that the Son Of God would do that? Or be born of a Virgin? Or die on a cross? Not far-fetched at all. That Jesus did all that would help explain how the Apostles were transformed after the Resurrection into the fearless characters they became.
Dubious as it can sound, the idea of guidance by the Holy Spirit can explain why so much good is done by so many in the world.
So long ago. Such different times. How can we believe in all that?
In Tales Of The Hasidim, there’s a story about a person who grew to doubt his faith. No one he went to could convince him otherwise. One day he went to visit an old rabbi.
“Suppose it was true?” the old rabbi asked with a smile.