Perfect Pumpkins

 

It was hard to pick one…they were all so perfect!

Many years ago, when my girls were only tots, someone from the same daycare they went to told us about a small farm off Blenkinsop Road where an older couple sold pumpkins every year before Halloween.  For some reason that intrigued us and we found the place and bought our pumpkins there that year, and every year after that.

The pumpkins weren’t cheaper than store bought ones, in fact they were more expensive.  But they were beautiful because they were taken care of.  They had been turned a number of times as they grew so that they weren’t as flat on one side.  They were hand washed and perfect;  once they were picked they were set out in a small garage, dozens of them, all shapes and sizes.  It was a beautiful sight to walk into the garage, into a sea of lovely, bright orange pumpkins.  We would take our time and find exactly the right ones.  Then the elderly woman, bent over with osteoporosis, (I always imagined somehow that it was because of her bending over for months turning the pumpkins before they ripened) would price them out, we’d pay for them and pile the pumpkins and ourselves into the car and head home.

As time went by, it was only the elderly woman who was there to sell them.  We never asked, but assumed that her husband was ill or had passed away.  As more time passed, it was the elderly woman and her daughter who attended the pumpkins.  Finally, it was only the daughter who came out to sell us our precious pumpkins year after year.

It’s a funny how traditions come to be;  over time the little ritual of going to the small farm every year to pick our pumpkins just became part of the fun of Halloween.  Cutting them open and taking a big whiff of that wonderful pumpkin smell, collecting the seeds for roasting later on, and carefully carving their faces–happy, scary or silly, was such a joyful thing to do.

As usual this year, the girls, who are now adults, and myself piled into the van and headed out to the little farm.  The sun was out and it was a perfect afternoon to pick our pumpkins.  Along the way we passed another, larger farm where dozens of families picked pumpkins, enjoyed hay rides and walked through a spooky barn.  Not too far down the road was our smaller, quieter pumpkin patch.

We almost missed it.  Actually, we did miss it and drove right past and had to turn around further up the road.  I realized later that we missed it because there was usually a stand with some of the pumpkins out front, and this year it wasn’t there.  We slowed down as we drove past.  “Maybe they ran out of pumpkins”, one daughter speculated.  “They’ve never run out before,” I replied, noticing that the barn was all locked up and no signs of pumpkins anywhere.  “Maybe they had to leave for a bit and locked everything up,” I offered.  Slowly, it dawned on us that maybe there would be no more pumpkins from our favourite place at all.   We grudgingly opted to go to a local grocery store and get our pumpkins there.

Of course, it just wasn’t the same.

The pumpkins were already starting to get mouldy and they certainly weren’t as beautiful as the ones we were used to.  They were unceremoniously thrown into large cardboard boxes, flies buzzing around, many of them too rotted to be of any use.

I suppose we could have gone somewhere else, like the other pumpkin patch we drove past.  But it would have somehow felt like a betrayal!  One of my daughters decided not to pick a pumpkin at all, the other one and I finally settled on two pumpkins we could live with and hauled them into the store.  Standing in line, we kept remarking about how weird it felt to get our pumpkins in such an boring and ordinary manner.

After we got home, one of my girls did a little research on the farm and found that it had been on the market and was sold last spring, which confirmed our sad realization.  It was the end of our wonderful little tradition.  All good things must come to an end.

Years ago, I included our little tradition in a song I wrote called Simple Life.  One of the verses went like this:

There is a woman, must be in her 90′s 
She sells her pumpkins every Halloween 
She’s all bent over with the weight of something 
And every year her crops’ the best I’ve seen

I actually remembered to bring the daughter a copy of the CD that song was included on one year.  It’s not that the song was about her, but I thought it would be nice to know that there was a reference to her in the song.  The chorus of the song is:

Don’t be unkind
Live a simple life
Laugh at yourself sometimes
Look at me now,
You’ll be here someday
So love a little bit along the way

It was based on the idea of that little expression “live, laugh and love”, and how simple things count the most.

We’ll never forget the simple joy of picking our pumpkins from the old couples’ farm.  Even though we never knew their names, we thank them all for giving us such a wonderful tradition to remember. Picking our pumpkins will never be the same!

IJ 

A "perfect" pumpkin I carved one year

What You Can’t Bank On

Don't get me started about banks.

Okay, I can't help myself.

Today I got a phone call and I answered because the caller ID was from my bank.  Not my local branch, but a main branch as I could tell from the phone number.

But it wasn’t really from my bank, it was from a telemarketer who apparently had permission from my bank to call me and offer a new service.  That alone cheesed me off, but I listened anyway.

She went on to tell me that this new service was to protect my accounts against identity theft and described how my accounts and credit cards and credit rating could be compromised by identity thieves in many ways.  This new service is supposed to alert me if that happens and protect my accounts and credit cards.

I have no doubt that identity theft is a huge problem.  I would actually like to think that I could have some kind of solid protection against it.  But then she told me that the cost was $8.99 a month.  And that’s what put me over the edge.  If this is such a concern for my bank, why do I have to pay for it?  I already pay through the nose for lots of things because I have a bank account and banks make billions of dollars a year from people like me.  So why should I have to pay more for something I would hope they would already have in place;  protection against identity theft?

I know identity theft exists because I’ve had friends who have experienced it, and it is a pain in the butt to resolve.  It is a certainly concern of mine, but to have the bank offer to protect my identity and then to ask me for more money to do it is just a slap in the face.

Okay, I’m mad right now.

Don’t banks have an obligation to protect your money?  I mean, what is the reason you use a bank in the first place?  It is meant as a safe place to keep your money.  What other reason would there be to have bank vaults?  And now that banks have created websites where you can do transactions online, don’t they have the same obligation?  I realize there are stupid people who sign up for things or give their personal information which compromises their accounts, and banks can’t do much about stupid people.  But if I haven’t done anything wrong, why should I pay $9 a month to make sure my accounts are safe?  Did they call me up to scare me so I’d sign up for it?

Oh boy, I’m really getting riled up now!

What this tells me is that the only thing you can bank on is that banks will spend a lot of time and effort to find alarmingly new ways to take more of your money.

IJ

Shoeless Jackson

 

Unlike my shoe-crazy daughters, I don’t buy shoes very often.  In fact, I tend to pretty much live in the same shoes every day.  My excuse is that I go for a daily walk and I don’t want to have to change shoes. The only time I wear different shoes is on a special occasion.  Like Christmas.

I’ve been wearing the same kind of white athletic shoes for at least twenty-five years.   I want to call them “runners” because that’s what we called them in the 70’s and of course, they’ve come a long way since then.  Some of them don’t even look like “shoes”, more like foot gear from Mars.  Something out of Star Trek.  You’ve seen them.

Mine have always been white.  I like the clean look of white shoes.  My most recent pair are at least two or three years old.  That’s two or three years of almost daily wear, so they are not really white any more, but they are very comfortable.  My daughter’s boyfriend’s mother has exactly the same kind of shoe and swears by them like I do.  But realizing they were running out of time (ha, a pun there), a month or two ago I searched high and low to find another pair exactly the same to replace them.  But you know, shoes styles change as often as you change underwear.  Bad comparison, but that’s all I could think of.

The other day I was out for my usual walk.  It had been a particularly wet day, with thunder showers and puddles galore, but I was in my comfortable runners and I didn’t care.  And then I realized I had a soaker in my right shoe.  Arrgghh!!  I carried on with my soggy walk and when I got home, I looked at the sole of the offending shoe and realized it was half coming off.  I decided I needed to go out immediately and get myself a new pair.

Being the time of year when kids are getting back to school, I thought there would be lots of runners out there for me to choose from.  Well, there were, but they were not white.  They were neon colours;  neon pink, neon orange, neon green or a combination of all three colours and more, with all sorts of weird bits and pieces attached to them. And then, much to my delight, I found a pair of white ones.  They were on sale too, my lucky day!  So I excitedly had the sales lady check in the back for a pair in my size.

Nope.

I went from shoe store to shoe store in the mall and nowhere could I find what I was looking for. Not only that, but many of them were $150 a pair or more.  Ouch.  I briefly entertained the notion of a pair that were neon pink and black.  But I just couldn’t do it.  As I was going from store to store, I started looking at other ladies walking around the mall and noticed what kind of shoes they were wearing.  My research on the subject brought me to a stunning conclusion:  the only women wearing white athletic shoes were at least my age or older.  Mostly older.  Crap.

I went home shoeless, and pondered my predicament.  I was either going to have to give in to a new style or wait until I could find what I was looking for, which didn’t seem very hopeful.  I was forced to change out of my wet shoes and into a pair of leather shoes, which totally threw me. But I bravely carried on with my day in spite of my discomfort.

Yesterday I decided I had to go out and look yet again because leather shoes weren’t going to do it for me, so I chose another mall further away.  I visited every shoe store in the mall with no luck and finally ended up in the only one I hadn’t yet visited, a Foot Locker.  Much to my surprise, a customer, a lady about my age, was trying on a pair of those neon ones, and then another pair, and then another, all under the watchful eye of a young male employee.  I scanned the wall of single shoes.

Eureka!  They had a lovely pair of bright, white Nike’s.  The only thing on them that wasn’t white was a very pale blue Nike logo.  I could live with that. I grabbed the single shoe and patiently waited for the young man to be finished with the other customer.  She was taking a long time, which in turn gave me time to think.  Suddenly I felt really old, standing there with my bright white Nike shoe.  I somberly put it back on the shelf.  Was I going to be the last person on the planet searching for bright, white athletic shoes, or was I going to finally come into the twenty-first century with my footwear?  I started to walk out of the store, depressed and defeated.

As I was leaving, there was a rack of newer model shoes just past the doorway.  I looked at them and saw a pair that I thought just maybe I could live with.  They were not neon, but they were black and grey.  Black would be a real departure.

But winter is coming.  No white after Labour Day, they say.

Moe found a use for the shoe box. Beside her are my old, worn, sort-of-white runners.

IJ

The Wrath of Auto-Tune

A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine who had a recording studio in Nashville was telling me a story about an experience he’d recently had in the studio. 

Every year, all of the smaller recording studios used to hold open houses on the same day, where artists and managers were invited to come and check out the facilities so they would potentially record their next project there. This guy told me that at one point during the day, several well-known country artists were sitting in a room in his recording facility, jamming together as a couple of them played guitar. What struck my friend at the time was that some of them could sing, and some of them really couldn’t! He made a quip about how you could tell which ones needed Auto-Tune when they were recording and performing 😉.

Some of you may have heard the word “Auto-Tune” before, but most, if not all of you have heard its effects if you listen to music. For those of you who don’t recognize the word, Auto-Tune is a digital technology that corrects musical pitch. To simplify that, music producers use the software to “fix” the pitch of vocals or instruments so that they are perfect. Even the best singers can be slightly off pitch when they are recording or performing, so the software could save lots of time and effort by simply correcting it either while it is being sung, or afterwards in post-production.

The first time you might have heard Auto-Tune in its extreme was in Cher’s hit song “Believe”, recorded in 1998. It was used as an effect to make her voice sound robotic in a few places in the song’s chorus, particularly on the line “do you believe in life after love?” If you remember that song, then you’ve heard Auto-Tune. But the fact is that Auto-Tune is used in pretty much every single pop song these days. Everything you hear in this genre has been “fixed” with Auto-Tune. In fact, if you go to a live performance, particularly pop or rock, rap or hip hop, Auto-Tune is used as part of the performance. At music awards shows, many “live” performances of songs are run through Auto-Tune. You don’t hear the actual, raw, live voice of a performer.

You might think, well, what’s wrong with perfect?

A few years back, there was a music awards show broadcast live on television where Taylor Swift did a live performance. She appeared to be one of the only performers who DIDN’T use Auto-Tune that evening. As a result, her voice was raw and real, and it was not pitch perfect. Immediately afterwards, social media came alive with comments like “Taylor Swift can’t sing!” and other, more critical responses to her performance. At the time, I remember applauding her for her guts, but I think since then she has probably given in to the use of Auto-Tune in her performances.  The pressure to be perfect these days, has become too great.

From a performer viewpoint, anyone and their dog can “sing” now, and YouTube has had many, many videos with animals or public figures “singing” songs that they actually aren’t, the creators using Auto-Tune and some fancy editing to create these videos.

But what has happened to listeners, particularly younger people, is that their ears are now conditioned to desire “perfect” sounds, and when they hear something that isn’t, it’s aurally offensive to them. Anything that is real and imperfect sounds like a mistake.  Not only that, but it becomes impossible to tell real talent from manufactured, certainly when it comes to recording.  And performers become so reliant on the software, they can’t live without it.

There are, however, artists who refuse to use it and a campaign against Auto-Tune that is growing.  In a 2009 performance on the Grammy Awards, for example, Deathcab For Cutie wore blue ribbons to protest the use of Auto-Tune in the music industry.  Even some recording engineers and producers are now trying to wean artists off the thing in an attempt to bring “real” back into recordings and performances.

So what’s wrong with perfect?  It makes everything sound the same.  Perfect pitch, perfect timing, perfect everything, creates perfect garbage.  And who needs more of that?  Let’s keep it real!

IJ

A Not To Do List

 

I’m on my second-to-last day of holidays and the itch to write a to do list is driving me nuts.  I was going to wait until Monday, but instead I thought I’d throw out a “not to do” list (see below) just to satisfy my hankering.

My three week’s of vacation has been quiet, which is good.  I got back into meditation, I read a couple of fiction books, which I haven’t done for a very long time, we went for a few days to the mainland and saw family and friends.  We played a little golf, did some “tourist in your home town” kind of things, and we spent a lot of time just sitting in our little backyard haven.  We set up the backyard to be just that; we created a nice garden, built a little patio with some comfortable patio furniture, all to give ourselves a space when the weather is nice to sit and relax.  And it has come together quite beautifully.  So I would say, all in all, it has been a good and restful vacation.

It’s not to say that I’m going to be overwhelmed with students come Monday.  They will trickle back, actually, because many of them are still on vacation themselves, or are planning to start back in September which is a couple of weeks away.  Instead I will be working hard on scoring several television shows, which I very much enjoy doing, although it’s quite time consuming.  I have a website where you can listen to some of those compositions I’ve written over the years…it’s called Moonstone Productions.

But before I get back to work, here are two lists based on my holiday reflections:

7 Things NOT To Do When You’re On Holidays

1. Quit counting down!  Only two weeks left, only one week left…I mean, you’re on holidays, how dumb is that??

2. Email is a curse.

3. Stop reading weird things to keep you from being bored.  Like the obituary column in the paper.  You’re not in there yet.

4. Impatience is meant for when you are in a hurry, not on holidays.

5. Avoid mirrors and reflective store windows at all times.  Just in case you’re getting fat.

6. Don’t upload your photos to Facebook until AFTER your vacation.  Yeah, what are the chances of that??

7. Don’t answer the phone when you see it’s from THAT number.  That’ll ruin a holiday state-of-mind quicker than anything.  In fact, turn your phone off altogether.

7 Signs My Holidays Have Had An Effect

1. Driving to my golf game yesterday, I was singing along with my iPod playlist in the car at the top of my lungs.  With the top down.  People could see me.

2. It’s now exactly 11:18am and I’m still in my pajamas.

3. The house is a mess.

4. There was an embarrassing amount of empty wine bottles when we took everything into the recycling depot for a refund the other day.

5. I can almost recite the dialogue from every episode of Downton Abbey, I’ve been watching them so much.

6. I broke Rule #5 of things NOT to do.  Ugh.

7. I have no idea what day it is.  Oh yeah, it’s the second-to-last day of my holidays 🙁  Back to reality…

IJ

It’s All About Me

Is it sad that the first thing I did on my recent birthday was to log in to my Facebook account to see how many birthday greetings had been posted on my wall?  As much of an adult as I think I am, there are still those moments (and occasionally days) when I get all caught up in myself.  Who’s thinking about or remembering me today?

I remember once seeing a titillating Facebook ad that asked “who’s been reading your profile?”, tempting me to click on it.  And of course, it lead to something else that I had to sign up for in order to see who was looking for me.  Which I didn’t.   But I’ll just bet you that they got a lot of hits, all because we’re so often obsessed with ourselves and we want to know who else might be!

Having said all of that, I do think that a certain amount of time and space is required to nurture and care for our “selves”.  When I first became a mother, I was overwhelmed at the amount of time and attention an infant took, and at some point I became aware of the feeling of having lost my “self” in the process.  As much as I wanted to go back to my old “me”, I couldn’t after that. Even as my children grew and my circumstances changed, it was like un-ringing a bell;  it couldn’t be done.

Over time, the same thought and attention was given over to my work, and also to my parents who became more and more dependent on my help.   My needs became less and less of a priority.  The problem is, of course, that we all need a little healthy time spent on ourselves in order to be able to do the best we can for others.  I have had guitar students who were new mothers, and I’ve encouraged them to get rid of any guilt they feel for spending a half-hour a week playing guitar to do nothing more than simply to please themselves.  A half-hour is nothing, but when you are totally detached from the “real world” for that thirty minutes, it can completely re-energize you.

Which brings me to the point of this post…

Last summer when I took time off from teaching, I had a To Do list as long as your arm.  And although I may have accomplished a couple of things on it, I didn’t come anywhere near completing it.  Ultimately, that had the opposite effect of “time off” because I felt bad at not having done what I set out to do!  And what good is that??

We have some plans for a quick getaway, but only for a few days, so the rest of the time is up to us.  And I’ve decided that the travesty of last summer’s To Do list should not be repeated, so my slate is utterly clean.  It sounds deliciously self-indulgent, doesn’t it?  Especially when you spend most of your week day time preparing for the next job, student, task, client, customer…whatever your job may be.  My time off this summer is all about me.

I’m used to teaching in the evenings, so last night, Monday, was my first weekly evening off.  And I had no idea what to do with myself.  I tried sitting out on the back deck and reading.  I spent time on my laptop, perusing this and that.  But I was restless.  My husband, who is used to spending alone time in the evenings since I’m always teaching, said that I would eventually figure it out, but I think this “me time” is going to take some getting used to.

Simply going from one moment to the next is a different way to live, even if just for a little while.  It makes me realize how much of my life is lived habitually.  You get up, you read the paper, you shower, you have breakfast, you get on with your day.  I’m still doing the first four;  it’s the “rest of the day” that I’m not used to having unplanned.  Is this what retirement is going to be like? (Update Dec/25 ---- yup!)

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Now I’ve got to get on to whatever the next thing is…dum, dee dum…

IJ

Life Must Be Lived “Forwards”

 “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” 

- Soren Kierkegaard 

I came upon this quote today as I was perusing my usual website “hangouts”, and it helped me to put this past week in perspective.  It was a difficult week for me, mostly because of my father who is struggling with dementia. 

Rather than going into what happened, let’s just say that I came to realize that his disease has progressed and his health has declined more so lately.  When we first brought him to the care facility several years ago, I was sad at the thought of him losing his independence.  But gradually over these years, he has also
been losing himself, which is saddest of all.

Last night I got into a conversation with two friends who are also experiencing the difficulties of elderly parents and their various physical and emotional struggles.  This helped me to feel not so alone in my fears and my sorrows…you need to have your friends and family around you sometimes to know that you are not the only one.  It was also a big help when I came home to my two daughters who hugged me for a long time when they saw how upset I was.  

I kept thinking that one day, they’ll have to go through this with me and with their father and that even though they are sympathetic to my situation, they really don’t know and won’t know what it’s like for a long time yet.  Hopefully.

That expression “youth is wasted on the young” came to mind as we hugged and I thought about the freedom they have from the worries I have.  But the truth is that youth is not wasted…thank goodness we have times in our lives (hopefully!) where we are so utterly oblivious to the problems of the world.  Thank goodness.  

I am so grateful that I had days when I had no, or very few concerns.  I want my daughters to enjoy their young lives as much as they can, because everything around them will continue to change and evolve
and sometimes you don’t even realize how much things have changed until you look back, just as
Kierkegaard said.  No, youth is not “wasted”;  hopefully it is simply well spent and enjoyed.

Then I thought of Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi line “don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”  Because many times you don’t realize what you had when you had it.  Ain’t that the truth?  There is a tendency, when we are going through difficult times, to want to look back to when days where happier and when life was easier, and why wouldn’t we? It’s just that the chances are that we have long forgotten there were also difficult times back then, they were simply different problems or struggles.  My daughters think they have bad days and rotten experiences from time to time, and they do.  It’s just that their bad days are different from mine. Youth is not necessarily as great as we remember it was!  And remember how when we were much younger, we longed so for the future and what it would bring us?  Well, here it is!

If I spend too much time looking back, then I am not fully engaged in the present.   So although I want to occasionally look back in order to understand my life and put things in context, I don’t want to spend too much time there.  And that’s why I’d like to add to Kierkegaard’s expression, with apologies to his much higher intelligence.  Life must be lived forwards, but it also must be lived “presently”.   I am increasingly aware of what I actually have to look forward to in my old age, for lack of a better phrase, and as I age my perspective changes considerably.   So today I’m thinking more about the line from Carly Simon’s song “Anticipation”…”these are the good ol’ days.”  Because they ARE!

Where are you Irene?
I am right here 🙂

IJ