Random Ruminations at the End of Summer Holidays

This past Friday was fullness itself. Jan and I began the early afternoon with a trip to Fenway Park to watch, for the first time in our (admittedly limited) experience, the Red Sox beat another team. This was doubly wonderful as the tickets were rainchecks from the spring. This was a pretty inconvenient time for us and this bit of deliciousness came with a cost. As soon as the game ended we got out of the park as fast as possible and drove as quickly as we could safely do completely across the Commonwealth to the Berkshires. We had been long scheduled to join with four friends from the Society to take in two performances at Tanglewood, that evening and the next.

We arrived ten minutes too late to be seated in the Shed, at least until the intermission. But attendance was a tad light and we had no trouble getting seats on the benches at the farther edge of the Shed. Which was a good thing as it was wet out that night.

That evening featured Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, followed by Brahms’ Symphony Number 1. (As one of our more sophisticated number observed, “an old war horse, but worthy…”) The next day featured another opera, Berlioz’s La Damination de Faust. Both performances were conducted by James Levine, much slimmed down from the last time we saw him, although fortunately for me he still waddles as he walks and continues to remind me of Burgess Meredith’s Penguin in the campy Batman television show.

So, there I was having dashed across the state in a day moving from an experience of hotdogs, cheering kids and adults to a rainy and chilly evening filled with wafting voices and full orchestra. And in the middle of it all I realized this was it, the last of our family adventures for the summer.

So, what lessons, if any, did I bring home from this time mostly away from formal labors? I hoped it would be a little more than the lessons of the two operas which Jan succinctly put as “if your sweetheart gives you a magic potion to make your mother fall asleep when he sneaks in through your window, don’t use it! And if he has a torture chamber in the basement, run like hell.” Good advice, I’m sure. But, I did hope for something more.

And sitting there in the Berkshires, in Tanglewood’s fabled Shed, it occurred to me, what I got out of our trips to the Pacific Northwest, to New York City, to various baseball games (particularly to the Pawsox games in Pawtucket – what baseball was meant to be!) and then at the end this juxtaposition of a most popular event and a rather rarefied bit of high culture. And that was how lovely life is.

I am always haunted, when I feel such things, by Candide’s blindly foolish Pangloss’s “best of all possible worlds.” But, there is something wonderful in our human condition, some bubbling joy at the heart of our lives that does appear in those moments when we’re (or maybe its just me) not completely distracted by the busy-ness of life.

There is something fundamentally good about life. Something extraordinary in the very ordinary.

Of course it doesn’t take an evening at Tanglewood, and not even watching the Sox win at Fenway to truly see this – although those are such nice ways to do it.

All it takes is that quiet walk down the sidewalk with your sweetie.

Or even alone, if your heart is open.

Such joy.