small gestures of gratitude

 

How did Brahms come up with such beautiful themes for his cello sonata? Simple. He took them from Bach’s Art of Fugue.

And they are quite beautiful to my ears.

Today is what my church calls “kick off” Sunday. They make a fuss over starting the fall program year. They bless the backpacks of students and anyone else who wants to bring a backpack to celebrate the beginning of the school year. After church they take a group picture of everyone at once on the lawn. Then we all walk over to a nearby park for a cookout and a pick up kick ball game.

I usually take some more relaxed clothes to change into after church and folding chairs for Eileen and me.

The choir is coming to this service. This will be our first meeting this year. Kind of brave of me to just plunge in with easy anthems and no weekday rehearsal for this month. But it will probably work out fine. Today’s anthem is a goofy clever combination of the Pachelbel Canon and “Tis the gift to be simple.” I plan on playing a toccata by Pachelbel for the prelude and then improvising a postlude on the “gift to be simple” theme.

The improvisation is an especially good idea for this Sunday because we try to hustle outside for that picture. If I’m improvising I can adjust the length to fit however long it takes people to get out of the pews and on the lawn.

I sent a friend request to a musician and to a poet yesterday on Facebooger. The musician was the organist/director at St. Paul and the Redeemer in Chicago. This is where we went on Friday to see Martin Pasi’s opus 15. They seem to be doing a similar type program as we are at my church: eclectic and classy (at least we are trying to do the latter). I messaged the musician in case he didn’t recognize my name.

The poet is the author of a book I picked up randomly at the library yesterday. Facebooger has this goofy challenge going around. Someone on Facebook will ask you to to list five things for which you are grateful in a daily message for for five days. Each day you are also supposed to invite a few other Facebookers to do the same. I got asked yesterday and did my five.

When I was looking at the poems inĀ They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full by Mark Bibbins, the last poem in the book was aptly titledĀ A Small Gesture of Gratitude. I read it and loved it. So I linked a copy I found online on Facebook and promptly found Bibbins there and sent him a friend request.

I am curious to see if either of these men responds.

Why #RussiaInvadedUkraine Matters – NYTimes.com

This is a superb discussion of the importance of language.

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