On reindeer apostles, nonstop piano recitals and general, all-around gratitude (vol. xxvii, no. 11)

Dear Family,

Full disclosure: I am beginning this letter on Thanksgiving morning. I will not finish it until sometime next week (prior to my self-imposed month-end deadline). The delay will owe in part to some choir-related stuff in the coming week that I will probably want to record for posterity. But I am beginning now because, in the spirit of the holiday, I wanted to write some things that I am feeling especially grateful for at this precise moment.

Nothing especially insightful, but here they are in no particular order:

I am thankful for my running friends

Today began like pretty much every Thursday does for me — with a morning run that begins in front of the Shalom Kosher grocery store and proceeds through Kemp Mill, a lovely little neighborhood easily accessed by cutting through the woods behind our house that Ari devoted 1,700 words of their most recent letter to rhapsodizing.

Dubbed “Kemp Mill Hills” by regulars because, like much of Maryland west of the Chesapeake, the neighborhood has no flat terrain to speak of, the weekly run is usually attended by fewer than a dozen people. It’s a fun and welcoming little group and sometimes just knowing that my absence might be noticed is motivation enough to get there for the 6 a.m. start.

Because today is Thanksgiving, we pushed the start back to 7 a.m. The holiday, combined with the later start time, probably contributed to this morning’s larger turnout. I even got my brother Andrew to come.

See if you can spot him in the back.

I am thankful for the kind and encouraging people who let me run with them each week. I do my track workouts on Tuesday mornings with one group of folks, my tempo runs on Thursdays with the Kemp Mill crew, and my Saturday morning long runs usually with yet another group.

There’s a fair amount of overlap among these three groups, all of which are either explicitly or indirectly related to the Montgomery County Road Runners Club of which I have been a member for the past 11 years.

For the past six months or so, my Saturday runs have mostly been with my assigned pace group in the club’s “Experienced Marathon Program,” a spring/summer training program aimed primarily at preparing seasoned runners for fall marathons.

The program wrapped up this month with a banquet, attended by I’m guessing 80 or so of us, at the Maggiano’s in Chevy Chase.¹ Reminiscent of banquets I have been attending for the past 20 years as a swim team parent (except with alcohol and better food) the event served to celebrate everyone’s accomplishments during the racing season.

Like at swim team banquets, the coaches made a good-faith effort to celebrate elite and not-so-elite participants alike. While it was easy for the coaches to say positive things about runners who set new personal records or qualified to run in the Boston Marathon (or both, as was often the case), my coach had to be more creative when my name came up.

Rather than listing my accomplishments (which there were none to speak of²), she instead highlighted the varied and amusing ways in which I complained about stuff during long runs.

Coach had me pegged pretty well. And while I maintain that my penchant for complaining is one of my most endearing characteristics, I recently pinned an excerpt from Scripture to my (home) office door and set about memorizing it in the hope of becoming less of a whiner (and in turn, a more thankful person).

It hasn’t really helped yet.

But it was a pleasant enough evening. Lots of friendly, accomplished folks who don’t seem to think too much of themselves. (Or if they do, they hide it well, which is really all you can ask for.)

I am thankful for Crystal

It should go without saying that my gratitude for Crystal exceeds even my gratitude for my running friends. I only led off with running because I literally just got home from the turkey trot.

My appreciation for Crystal is apparently not so obvious to those who observe us only at ward choir practice, where I guess we bicker almost every week. On Sunday, a new member of our ward said something to me like, “You two have an interesting relationship.” I can’t remember the exact adjective she used — whatever it was, she paused before saying it, clearly searching for the most diplomatic way of wondering aloud how on earth we manage to tolerate each other’s existence during the other 167 hours each week.

We actually get along pretty well once the music stops³ and Crystal continues to move at a pace that I would have struggled to maintain when I was half her age. Her typical day begins at 5 a.m., when she gets up and rides the Peloton, gets ready for work, and is out the door a little after 7 a.m. She then teaches a full school day — primarily to a group of middle schoolers (boys, mostly) with high-functioning autism. When she gets home, she balances the mountains of IEP paperwork that consume all special education teachers, coursework and classes associated with the master’s program she is (mercifully) almost done with, and whatever latest welfare crisis she as the ward Relief Society president has the privilege of dealing with that day.

In reality, it’s probably one thing too many. (For me, it would be at least three things too many.) But educators are in short supply; special educators are in particularly short supply; and autism-specific special educators are in critically short supply. Crystal describes her students at times as “emotionally draining,” but she’s also clearly quite fond of them and I think genuinely enjoys being helpful.

November was momentous for Crystal in that she received notification of having: 1) successfully completed her graduate program’s three-hour capstone exam — one of the final hurdles standing between her and her master’s degree, 2) been approved (finally) for her Maryland Educator Certification (she had been teaching for the past year-plus under some sort of provisional license — see the above-mentioned teacher shortage), and 3) earned enough JHU credits to qualify for what the Montgomery County Public Schools teachers union contract calls a “master’s equivalency,” which means, even though she does not finish her degree until spring, she is now getting paid as though she already has it. Presumably, this means she could bail out off the program now if she really wanted to, but Crystal’s mama didn’t raise her no quitter and (for now) Crystal seems intent on finishing it.

She’s pretty amazing.

I am thankful for my children’s musical gifts

We have everyone at home for Thanksgiving this year, except Hannah, who is spending the holiday weekend with girlfriend Emma’s family at Disneyland (the small one out in California). If we get pictures, I’ll include some.

But everyone else is here, which means, among other things, that at least one of our two pianos is in a near-continuous state of use. At least 15 times a day, somebody (usually Sophie) sits down and begins to play. Within 60 seconds of the piano starting, at least one other person (usually Grace, but often Crystal, sometimes Ari, and occasionally all of them) enters the room and starts singing.

Despite likely not having been commonplace since the Ozzie and Harriet era, these impromptu gatherings around the piano feel normal to me. Normal and comforting. As I am someone who craves quiet and generally prefers places that don’t have a continuous soundtrack running in the background, you could be forgiven for thinking I would eventually tire of the non-stop piano playing. But for some reason I don’t.

The piano lies fallow at this moment (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to type coherent sentences) because everyone’s hands are occupied in the kitchen shaping rolls, baking pies, and otherwise preparing for this afternoon’s feast at Jess-and-Andrew’s house. Instead of listening to them sing and play, I am eavesdropping on a spirited debate about the virtues of the original version of The Music Man relative to the 2003 remake with Matthew Broderick. Par for the course around here.

Earlier this month, Crystal, Ari, and I drove down to Lexington, Va., to hear Grace perform with the Southern Virginia University Chamber Singers. (Chamber Singers is SVU’s “premiere auditioned SATB ensemble,” according to the school’s website. Very few freshman get into it. Grace is special.) They were phenomenal and totally worth the 4-hour ordeal contending with Friday-afternoon escape-from-DC traffic. (I only complained for 3 and a half of the 4 hours.)

We missed having Hannah for Thanksgiving, but she appears to have had a good enough time where she was. That’s enough to make me happy.

I am thankful for Christmas music

My second year singing baritone in the Washington DC Temple Choir is shaping up to be a lot like my first year. Our Christmas season kicked off this past Sunday night (I am now typing one week after Thanksgiving) with a performance at a devotional for temple workers on the top floor of the temple.⁴

In addition to singing, I am also one of the accompanists,⁵ which meant I got to play the organ up there for the first time in longer than I can remember — it’s been at least a decade. It was fun, even though the acoustics in that room are such that you don’t hear what you’re playing until like a half-second later, which is hard, and you really have no idea how loudly you’re playing until someone complains about it. (Which is sort of like me at church every Sunday morning — except I already know how loudly I’m playing on Sunday mornings, even before people complain about it.) Don’t care. Still fun.

So, Sunday night we sang in the temple. Tuesday and Wednesday nights, we performed at two private “lighting ceremony” events the Church hosted for ambassadors, elected officials, and other important people to kick off the monthlong Festival of Lights at the Washington DC Temple Visitors’ Center.

The podium was graced by U.S. senators, congressmen, and other notable folks over the two nights, but the most inspiring words were delivered by Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He spoke after a brief round of audience caroling that included “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” He began his remarks both nights by explaining that his last name in Swedish means “grove of reindeer.”

“That’s why they sent me here,” he quipped. “I’m the reindeer apostle.”

Everybody laughed, except me apparently.

So the long and short of it is, we have performed three times since Thanksgiving, but none of these performances have been open to the public. Our two public performances are on Sunday, December 10th, in Centreville and Thursday, December 14th, at the Visitors’ Center. Same concert both nights.

We’re not as good as the SVU Chamber Singers, but we’re pretty good and you should come! GOOD NEWS: The Visitors’ Center has ended its disastrous experiment with ticketing, so you don’t need one. Just show up and you’ll get in.

And finally:

I am thankful for the pro-Hamas⁶ miscreants who vandalized my office building

Admittedly an odd thing to feel gratitude for, the protesters apparently used some of the leftover red paint they used to vandalize the front gates of the White House and other parts of D.C. that same weekend to scrawl a bunch of anti-Israel graffiti on the Rosslyn office building where I work.

Workers had hung butcher paper over the words and were still cleaning it up by the time I got to work on Monday, November 6th. I took this picture at lunchtime (while the cleanup with still ongoing).

The vandals’ ire was directed at an Israeli defense contractor that we happen to share our floor with. Consequently, my employer decided “out of an abundance of caution” (I love that phrase–it can be used to justify almost any decision not to do almost anything) to have everyone work from home for most of November.

This was a welcome and timely decision (even though I seldom go into the office more than a couple times a week anyway) because it afforded me some extra time to help tend to my ailing parents.

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know (and I hope they don’t mind my telling the internet) that Mom, who has been stuggling with intermittent bouts of fatigue and dizziness, was diagnosed (finally, after multiple inconclusive tests from various doctors) with heart block and, as of Monday, is now the proud owner of a pacemaker. With Mom working through her issues (and while she was out of town), Dad apparently thought it would be a good time to fall down the stairs and fracture two vertebrae.

So he’s in a lot of pain and is anxiously awaiting an appointment next week to have cement injected into his spinal column, which will hopefully cure everything. Seriously, that’s what they’re gonna do.

If you happen to be praying anyway, I would imagine both he and Mom would appreciate a mention.

Anyway, I don’t spend enough time with Mom and Dad ordinarily. And so I appreciate the vandals’ affording me the opportunity.

Love,
Tim

1. Geography aid for non-locals: “Chevy Chase” refers both to a municipality in Maryland and to an adjoining neighborhood just across the District of Columbia line. Maggiano’s is on the D.C. side. The Chevy Chase chapel, where my parents’ wedding reception was held shortly after they were married in the Salt Lake Temple (2,100 miles away — the closest option for Latter-day Saints living in Washington in 1970) and where Aunt Coco went to church until it was destroyed by fire earlier this month, is on the Maryland side, literally across the street from the D.C. side.
2. As reported last month, I did in fact complete a marathon in October. And I recognize that many people might consider finishing a marathon to be an accomplishment. In this group of “experienced” marathoners, however, most of us had goals beyond simply finishing
3. We get along pretty well in most musical contexts, too. But for reasons having nothing to do with anyone in particular, I find most ward choir rehearsals irritating — probably because they’re at the end of church, at a time when, not unlike a lot of 5 year olds, I am generally ready to be done with being at church — and they tend to bring out the worst in me.
4. Our name notwithstanding, and even though we are probably the only choir that has performed there since the rededication, we actually have no official affiliation with the Washington DC Temple. This is probably why the member of the temple presidency who conducted the meeting referred to us simply as “this choir,” as opposed to by our name.
5. The choir has four accompanists: two women, both of whom play light years better than I do, me, and another guy who may or may not play better than me — I can’t tell yet. The choir doesn’t really need either one of us — the two women (one woman and one girl, actually) could easily handle the choir’s entire repertoire on their own. But the directors let the other dude and me play a few of the pieces, I think mostly just to be nice.
6. The vandals would probably prefer to be referred to as “pro-Palestinian” rather than “pro-Hamas,” but when you purposely damage things that aren’t yours, then simple-minded people like me are liable to start lumping you in with the hostage-taking, child-murdering terrorists whose barbaric actions you and your ilk seek to justify. Sorry, that’s just how it works.