Dear Family,
Crystal and I celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary this past week by doing the same thing we do most Thursday nights — we went to choir practice. Not very romantic, but at least we got to sit together. (The basses abut the sopranos in our choir and Crystal and I usually manage to position ourselves at the edge of our respective sections in order to be next to each other during rehearsals.)
As tends to happen at this time of year, we have reached the point on the annual choir calendar when I’m ready to be done with it.
Our choir year starts in September with preparation for Christmas concerts, which I love. We take a couple of weeks off and come back in January to prepare for Easter concerts, which I also love.
We then immediately launch into rehearsals for what we call our “summer pops” concerts in June, which is when I usually start to lose interest. The selections we go with for summer pops tend to be kind of hit or miss with me. I like some of them and a few annoy me. Most are kind of meh. None of the music is bad — it just isn’t my thing.
Because of America 250, this year’s summer concert is wall-to-wall patriotic music. I don’t mind patriotic music, but the dosage has to be right. Rehearsing patriotic music (and only patriotic music) for weeks on end is like eating a bowl of Lucky Charms with only the marshmallows. It’s also hard to do patriotic music without over-singing, and so my voice is pretty much shot every rehearsal with 45 minutes still to go. I’m finding myself getting increasingly impatient and irritable at rehearsals and I tell Crystal at least twice a week that I want to quit.
I probably won’t quit (and will likely feel better about things when fall/Christmas prep rolls around again) but the choir probably wouldn’t miss me much if I did. I have recently discovered that whenever the choir director hears something he doesn’t like coming from the bass section and asks us to do it again, I just have to go completely silent for the re-do, and that fixes it. When I don’t sing at all, the director smiles and nods and says, “Yes, that’s it.”
This works literally 100 percent of the time and I promise I am not making it up. You can ask Crystal, who (as mentioned) sits next to me and has witnessed the phenomenon on multiple occasions.
I’ve never felt like I was one of the better singers in the choir, but it also never occurred to me that I might actually be the worst.
But anyhow, if you like a bowlful of Lucky Charms marshmallows (and a little Hamilton sprinkled in) here’s where you can hear us next weekend and the weekend after.
Then we’ll go on summer hiatus and I can reset and start to feel better about things again.
Speaking of patriotic music, I had the privilege of being the organist at the funeral of my friend (and fellow congregant) Steve Kovalchik this month.
It sometimes occurs to me at funerals to look around and wonder whether this many people will show up to my funeral. At Steve’s funeral I didn’t have to wonder. There is virtually no chance of that happening. Steve was universally beloved — I’m talking “open-the-chapel-overflow-area-for-the-funeral” beloved. The guy who didn’t need a fake beard to play Santa every year at the church Christmas party (his Santa suit was on display in the foyer outside the sanctuary); the bass player in our ward’s barn dance fiddle band; the Primary teacher to a decade’s worth of kids. (The 12-year-old girl who sat behind Crystal and Grace — no relation to Steve except through Church — sobbed through the entire service.) The kind of guy who lit up with genuine excitement to see you whenever you caught his eye. That guy.
But if you only knew one thing about Steve Kovalchik, it was that he had served in the United States Marine Corps. If you didn’t know that walking into the funeral, you certainly knew it walking out.
The opening song was The Marines’ Hymn (alternatively rendered as “The Marine’s Hymn” in the printed program — apostrophes are hard1) I did not choose the music for the service, and there was a time in my life when I would have considered The Marines’ Hymn an inappropriate selection for a worship service. Now that I’m a little older (and out of the church leadership business) I still think it’s probably inappropriate, but I honestly don’t care. I mean, sure, back in the day, I was plainly instructed that hymn texts sung in worship services needed to be doctrinally accurate, and the fact that The Marines’ Hymn ends thusly might have given me pause:
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven’s scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.
I don’t have a clear notion of Heaven, where it is, whether it has streets, why those hypothetical streets would need guarding, or who’s in charge of all that. Nor am I aware of anything in our official doctrine that addresses these critically important questions. But since it had been approved, I felt like singing it gave me license to use some of the brassier organ stops that I don’t typically pull out during sacrament meeting, so that was kind of fun.
Another thing that doesn’t typically happen in worship services is half the room shouting “Oorah!” at the end of the opening hymn, so that was kind of fun, too. Ridiculous and completely inappropriate, but fun.
The rest of the service proceeded more or less like a garden-variety Latter-day Saint funeral. Loving remembrances by Steve’s children and siblings, a vocal duet, and concluding remarks by the bishop to put everything into its proper context. Then we sang the closing hymn (“Battle Hymn of the Republic,” naturally), someone prayed, and I started playing the postlude music.
About 15 seconds into the postlude, the bishop turned around and told me to stop.
I stopped and watched from the organ bench as everyone in uniform took turns walking up to the casket. One by one they saluted, stated their name and rank and what sounded to me (someone who has never served) like a current or past duty assignment. Then they stepped off to the side of the casket to make room for the next guy. By the end, I’d say 20 or so uniformed people were standing at attention next to the casket at the front of the sanctuary.
It was all lovely (if unexpected).
But then some old codger (no idea who) who seemed to be the organizer of the whole salute-the-casket operation took it upon himself to come up onto the rostrum, step to the mic, and just start talking. I have no idea how long he went or what he talked about. I was too annoyed to pay attention to what he was saying. Few things in life irritate me more than thinking a long meeting is over, only to have someone pull a “one other thing” on me.
The old guy went on for however long it was — it probably wasn’t as long as it seemed. And when he stopped talking, I turned to the bishop to ask if I should resume the postlude music. I don’t remember the exact phrasing of my question, but according to the elders quorum president, who apparently could hear me from the back of the room (and laughingly told me about it the next day at church), I said something like, “So is this thing finally over now?”
I don’t recall putting it that way, but that certainly sounds a lot like how I would have put it, and so I probably said it. I probably offended some people I’m unlikely to ever see again, but they got a free organist out of the deal. Call it even.
May’s highlight, though, was Grace returning home from SVU for the summer. She’s getting a couple general ed courses out of the way remotely this summer in order to focus on her final remaining major courses so she can graduate next spring.
I have already put her to work here — she sang a duet at stake conference last night at my invitation and sang in the stake choir I simultaneously directed and accompanied this morning (I’m currently the stake music chair, among other things). She also recently picked up a job singing in the Grace Episcopal Church choir (the Lexington, Virginia, congregation that until recently was known as the “Robert E Lee Memorial Church”). This is not to be confused with the Trinity United Methodist Church, whose choir she also gets paid to sing in.
You’d think these jobs would conflict. They don’t, but it makes for busy Sundays. She sings with the Methodists in the morning, attends her Latter-day Saint ward in the afternoon, and then sings Evensong (a monthly service of scripture, prayer, and choral music that has been part of the Anglican tradition since the 1500s) and Celtic service in the evening with the Episcopalians. I imagine this makes her paternal grandfather jealous. Dad has always loved Evensong and has fond memories of going to listen to it at Lincoln Cathedral and at St. Paul’s. We’re going to have to figure out how to get him down to Lexington to hear his granddaughter sing in one.
As of yesterday, Grace is also now once again a temple worker on my shift (Saturdays from 11:15 to 5:00). We drove there together yesterday in advance of the shift so she could meet with the temple president and get everything finalized, get set apart, etc. This meant that I arrived at the temple a good 35 minutes before the shift started (shattering my previous record by approximately 32 minutes). I didn’t know what to do with myself during all the extra time.
Miscellaneously, my plans to resurface our rotting deck over the Memorial Day weekend were temporarily foiled by a combination of rain and three separate Home Depot runs that cancelled one another out. By the end of third trip, all I had to show for my efforts, net of all the purchases and returns, was one large box of deck screws. Fortunately, I managed to get the correct materials delivered by the time the weather finally started to improve a few days ago. I feel like I’ve made some decent progress.
I still have work to do, but at least I now feel like people can walk on my deck again without fear of falling through it.
Crystal and I also had a really nice evening at the Kennedy Center on Friday, courtesy once again of my running friend Ira, who plays in the National Symphony Orchestra. The visit to the Kennedy Center came hours after a federal judge ordered Trump to remove his name from it and not proceed with his plans to shutter it for renovations this summer. Sadly, the president’s name was still on the building when we went on Friday night, and I have no illusions that he’ll comply with the judge’s order, but I appreciate the gesture.
The orchestral program featured Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Mahler’s First Symphony and was magnificent.
It’s 4:13 p.m. and I am sitting in Mom and Dad’s family room. I have eaten dinner, briefly fallen asleep, and now need to figure out how to close this thing out.
Okay, I’ve given up. That’s good enough. See you next month.
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
- On a related topic, the plural of Willis is Willises. This is how we typically pluralize English nouns that end in “s.” We add an -es to them. Bus becomes buses; glass becomes glasses. And Willis becomes Willises — not Willis’s or Willis’ or whatever other stupid variant comes to mind. Apostrophes don’t pluralize words. Thank you and have a nice day.