A farewell symphony

Last week I saw a poster near our subway stop informing me that the Prague Symphony was playing Mahler’s 9th symphony. A heavy piece like that was not what Kate was looking for so soon after getting back from a trip to the States, but our friend Ewan was interested, so he and I went on Thursday.

It was the third time I’ve heard the piece live. I know the piece from recordings, though a recording rarely gets the same kind of focused attention as a live performance.

The nice thing about hearing performances of a piece multiple times over several years is that you hear different things in it each time. Part of that is simply that each performance is literally different, but think about how you find new things when you re-read a book. The book is literally the same, yet you can find in it connections or meanings you’d missed. The same thing happens with a piece of music.

My first hearing of this symphony was also here in Prague, six-and-a-half years ago, as I wrote about here, when I happened to see a poster on a lamppost advertising an upcoming performance by my old youth orchestra.

The second was in July, 2016, with the Boston Symphony, at Tanglewood, with my father, as well as my aunt and a friend of hers. It was the last concert I went to with Dad.

A taste of resistance

I'm at my parents' for a few days. I guess strictly speaking it's now my mom's, but essentially it's still my parents', even with Dad gone.

I'm here to spend time with Mom and to help her with going through stuff. When you've lived in the same house for 52 years, there's quite a lot of stuff.

Today I cleaned out a file cabinet that mostly had completely unnecessary stuff: check books and bank statements and insurance payments, for decades.

And manila envelopes and hanging file folders with tax filings. Every year since 1958. Pretty expendable at this point.

But when you flip open the file for 1969, there's a type-written letter:

April 14, 1970

Randolph W. Thrower
Commissioner of Internal Revenue

Dear Mr. Thrower:

I pay my tax this year with the greatest reluctance and misgiving. I do not object to the amount; I would be willing to pay twice as much if it were well spent.

But I cannot voluntarily support the war in Vietnam (and elsewhere); it seems to me that both sides in Vietnam are essentially gangsters fighting for turf. If there were any effective way to withdraw my support of this, I would do it.

Sincerely,

Robert T. Seeley
Charlotte B. Seeley

In sync

I think it was the summer I turned 11, my parents rented a cabin on Cobboseecontee Lake in Maine, for a week's vacation. Each of us four kids brought a friend or two, so there were about 12 of us stuck in every which where.

The cabin itself was no frills, but it had a dock with a couple of canoes tied up. We passed the time swimming, boating, playing cards and board games when it was raining, eating, and enjoying the summer.

With Dad's Super 8 camera, we made a short silent movie, "Flaws," which aspired to be a parody of "Jaws." My brother Joe was the distressed mother of the shark's first victim. He was also the shark, swimming under water in his flesh-toned bathing suit, carrying a piece of a broken garbage-can lid as the shark's fin breaking through the surface of the water. My friend Ta was the might fisher who eventually captured the fiend, which turned out to be nothing but a small sunfish. I think I was a mighty-hunter-turned-hapless-victim.

One afternoon I decided it would be neat to check out an island that we could see from the dock, so I got in a canoe and paddled out to it. I don't remember if I made it to the island, or if it turned out to be further than I expected and turned back short of it. At any rate, when I got back, my parents were upset with me - and also relieved, though the "upset" part made the sharper impression at the time.

They were of course unhappy that I'd gone off without letting anyone know where I was going. They were also concerned that I could have gotten into real trouble if a contrary wind had come up. An 11-year-old usually doesn't have the strength to handle a canoe in adverse conditions, and on top of that, I didn't know what I was doing. I could paddle in the front when someone else was in charge, but I didn't really know how to control the boat.

Before the week was out, Dad made sure to teach me how to handle a canoe solo.

How to know

In fourth grade, Hyde Elementary School offered free lessons on any orchestral instrument. My friend Ta and I thought we wanted to learn trumpet.

This wasn't a well-informed decision - we weren't sure whether it was called "trumpet" or "trombone," but we agreed that we wanted to play the one where your fingers went up and down on some buttons, not the one where your whole arm goes back and forth.

For some reason I was under the impression my parents wouldn't be supportive. Perhaps because I'd taken piano and not kept on with it, and then drum lessons and hadn't played at all during the year we lived in Latin America, despite having brought along sticks and a practice pad.

So I brought it up in an offhand way: we were rolling down the driveway to go on a bike ride, and I said, "We can take instrument lessons for free for a year. Ta and I were thinking we'd like to play trumpet."

"Sure."

Having gotten their assent so easily, I realized I wasn't sure how much I actually wanted to do it, but at that point I felt like I couldn't back out, since I'd said I wanted to do it.

So I started playing trumpet.

Varieties of faith

This afternoon was the memorial service for my father, who died November 30th.

Kate took this picture this past August at my parents' New Hampshire house.

The service was at Cambridge Friends Meeting. Dad had been a member of Cambridge Friends since moving to the Boston area in 1954. My parents were married there in 1958, and my sister in the same meeting house in 1993.

Following Quaker practice, the meeting was "unscripted." We entered into silence, then people rose and spoke about Dad, as the spirit moved them.

Near the end, I rose and spoke.

After high school, I launched myself off to southern Indiana for college, and experienced culture shock in multiple dimensions.

One of those was the religious fervor of many of the people I was around. This was a change for me, sort of Quaker, sort of Jewish, coming from a high school where you knew roughly what church or synagogue people went to, but it wasn't a big deal.

One evening, I was discussing religion with a dorm-mate, who said, "You must have faith in something."