I love Cleaning. No, not the Pine Sol, Comet kind but the therapeutic you-have enough-time-during-the-summer-to-sort-out-your-life kind. I have long since been dubbed the family organizer. I’m abysmal at cleaning bathrooms, floors, doing dishes and windows but give me an office buried in paper and knickknacks and I can dig out a room. As a teenager I loved to spend hours ‘cleaning’ my room as I went down memory lane sorting through shoeboxes full or treasures. In 8th grade I served as an English TA and redid all my teachers files. In high school it was the band office and music library. In college Kirk’s office, the EdCC music library and the infamous ‘blue room’ in RLA. My reward for cleaning the blue room was spending the summer sorting through 30 years of Soundsation memorabilia and making collages and memory book. I still can’t believe I got paid for that. When I got back from my mission I was surprised to find that absence made the heart grow apathetic. I was dismayed to find my closet so full of stuff that I couldn’t even unpack my suitcases. I had weakened a lot of the emotional ties to my stuff and spent about a week sorting through my room- which I now shared with Suzie which is a whole other issue. I always have to organize Suzie’s stuff when she’s not around. I overhauled her whole room while she was on her mission.

As life gets busier and busier most of my merging and purging time has been pushed into the summer, just about now, after Summer Music School. This year has proven even more of a challenge because I had to pack and move my stuff and now figure out how to make enough room in the parents house to store what I’m not taking across the pond. Coming from a family of pack rats I’ve been laboring in vain to loosen their grip on the stuff that we’re drowning in. I see a light at the end of the tunnel but it’s going to a long summer of sorting. But, like I said it’s very therapeutic and I do love doing it.

One of the reasons that I have to do all this merging and purging is that I’m a keeper, an archivist. I’ve come a long way since high school when my friends would tease me for keeping every concert program, ticket stub, thank you note and hand out. I will say that I was able to contest a chemistry grade once because I had recorded in my journal that I was in class and had turned in an assignment. I’m also looking forward to getting a new scanner so I can organize teaching handouts and music. Woo hoo! Did I mention that my organizing bug also extends to organizing my computer files?

Tomorrow Dad and I attempt the garage. Anyone wanna come assemble some gorilla racks?

I’m looking forward to starting my new life with two suitcases and a carry on.

Every year Suz and I look forward to the annual pilgrimage to Jazz Alley to see Kurt Elling. Over the past few years I’ve gone more frequently to see other artists but Kurt is always our favorite. We get spoiled by the intimate atmosphere and almost being able to reach out and touch the artists. He didn’t come last year or this year and we were having withdrawal. He was here in May for the Bellevue Jazz Festival which I was able to go to. Seeing him in a theater just isn’t the same. Suz could come in May and so we decided to catch him at the Vancouver Jazz Festival July 3rd. Since I now have my passport I was set but Suzie needed to get an enhanced drivers license to get into and out of Canada. She of course in true Suzie style waited until the last minute.

I should insert here a paragraph about Suzie’s excessive nature but I just really can’t do it justice. Anything she does has to be thorough, all the way, full tilt and just so. In contrast I am all about getting things done now, simplifying and prioritizing. For example, she came over to get her license and when she found out she didn’t have the right paperwork she drove back to Ellensburg to get it and then back to West Seattle to wait two more hours and find out that they weren’t going to call her number. Then the next day when they did see her they didn’t even ask for paperwork. ARGH! Well she got it all sent off and then waited. It was supposed to take 2-3 weeks and the concert was 2 weeks away. I basically planned on not going since we just didn’t know if the mail was going to come. Flash forward to July 2nd. I’m having a great Heidi birthday dinner with friends at Olive Garden and I get a text from Suzie- my license came in the mail- let’s buy tickets! So off we went.

Of course Suzie had to drive from Eburg to Seattle on Friday and never mind that it was the Friday before the 4th of July and everyone else was on the road to some kind of weekend adventure. We were blessed that the traffic wasn’t too bad.

The weather was gorgeous and it was a beautiful drive. On the way up we listened to Divine Comedy sketches (highly recommended-go to the old videos) and Michael Jackson songs until both ipod batteries were low. After finding the theater and parking in downtown Vancouver we picked up our tickets and made it to our seats at 7:27. We were so hyped and then a little disappointed to find that there was an opening act. Remember that Suzie had just driven 4-5 hours and neither of us had had a proper dinner. She slept through most of the act and I tried to enjoy the Italian duo of Enrico Rava on trumpet and Stefano Bollani on piano. They were pretty good but no Kurt Elling and Laurence Hobgood. The main event was great, not as good as Jazz Alley and I would have enjoyed more old tunes but they do have a CD to promote. I loved A New Body and Soul. I listen to that track most mornings on the way to school. It’s delightful to discover that you have actually learned all 10 minutes of a vocalese.

So it’s 10:30 we’re out and hungry with a long drive ahead of us. We had originally planned to stay the night at a friends house in Bellingham but she decided to choose this weekend to run off with two of my other friends on a New England adventure. [They did invite me originally but I’m saving for my own Old England adventure.] There aren’t a whole lot of places serving dinner past 11 and so we found ourselves at Shari’s in Bellingham at midnight eating Cinnamasation French toast which we shortly regretted.

Then we stopped at Walmart to get an ipod charger to fuel our drive time sing along. At Walmart [around 1:30 a.m.] Suzie also picked up a new tooth brush holder with a smiley face that Nicole named Tweedle-Bop. [She’s the family namer- for animals and inanimate objects.] I was amazed how we managed to stay awake, powered mostly by all that syrup and old school soundtrack sing alongs to Newsies, Tarzan and Anastasia. We were pretty much delirious by this point...

We got home around 3 and Suz slept on the couch. Consequently we spent most of the 4th sleeping, it’s my favorite activity. And even though I give Suzie a hard time about the ways in which we’re different, she’s my favorite person in the world and I love adventuring with her.

It started three years ago when I was student teaching. After teaching choir, piano and drama from 7-3 my brain was so full of music that I would get in the car to drive home and really needed a break. It was then that I got hooked on NPR and PRI. They have lots of great random talk shows that are interesting in a PBS kind of way, and I love that you can just download podcasts of your favorites for later.

This year as I get in the car after jazz band I’m usually just in time for Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. He has such a fantastic radio voice and I love listening to him. I haven’t listened to took many episodes of Prairie Home Companion but enough to be intrigued by the old school style radio show. I love that they have live music and actors and they find humor in humanity and everyday life without having to pander to the base. He has such a marvelous sense of people, community and memory. Tonight [7/1] we watched a PBS documentary about him: “Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio with the Red Shoes.”

“When I was 13, 14 years old, my father took his Kodak camera off the shelf and he took pictures of all of us. The prints came back and I looked at mine and I destroyed it immediately, but it stays in my memory. Looking at this strange person, these spindly arms and this ugly plaid shirt. I looked at him and I thought nobody’s ever going to be your friend. You’re going to end up an old man living all by yourself in an old rusted green mobile home at the end of a long dirt road, with a sign out at the highway that says no trespassing. But you don’t need that sign: nobody’s going to come in there anyway. That’s going to be your life. And then I thought no, maybe radio.”

Of course it’s the final line that totally makes that. It says I’m telling you something about learning about myself, adolescence and reality but I’m not taking myself too seriously. He also talked about how he didn’t get a job writing for the New Yorker and what that that changed his course and now this radio show he does has been on for 37 years. Can you imagine?

“I loved summer when I was a kid so much, because when school was out that meant that you could read as much as you wanted to. This was the summer that I think I became a writer. I was 13 years old. I wore steel-rimmed glasses and I was a very solemn boy. Not that I was sad but I simply was paying attention. I had been given a typewriter by my uncle george. He gave me his old underwood typewriter. I had a secret place under the stairs where my parents could not see me, because they were worried that I didn’t go outside. I just wanted to do one thing. I just wanted to find things to write about.”

It was really inspiring and fanned my little dream of being a writer, which goes along with little dreams of singing, acting, dancing, photography and design. You should check it out.

"I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO GET MORE THAN ONE LIFE: TO GET A SAINT PAUL LIFE BUT ALSO A NEW YORK LIFE AND A COWBOY LIFE, A SHOW-BUSINESS LIFE, A LITERARY LIFE, AND A SECRET LIFE. I’VE LIVED A LOT OF LIVES VICARIOUSLY AS A READER AND INVENTED A FEW LIVES OF MY OWN."

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To say I love reading is a bit of an understatement. After eating, sleeping and making music comes reading. It’s only natural that a love of reading would spill over into a desire to write and take part in creating something I love so much. That being said I hate writing for school. My writing rambles badly but serves it’s purpose marvelously in my journalling. I don’t write consistently but I do feel driven to record. I’ve been journalling for about 15 years, some years better than others. Last year I wrote 128 pages from Jan-August, mostly after the fact. I find journalling a very safe outlet because there’s no editor, limited readership and it serves the purpose of allowing me to reflect upon my life and put my thoughts on paper.

I love wonderful writers. I love their turn of phrase which I know is the result of lots of work and editing, their vocabulary and their ability to capture everyday or common life experiences in universal and novel ways. Of course, I’ve experienced that! It would never have occurred to me to put it that way. There’s a whole lot of writing in the world. What makes us value some more than others? What makes us keep reading and long for more as opposed to wonder why we can’t get through a single sentence?

What are your thoughts and experiences with reading and writing?