Dementia Diary: Sarcasm

Mom is now in a full-fledged nursing home because they accept Medicaid. When I have visited, she has smiled, she has nodded, and she has opened her mouth when I've held a forkul of Sloppy Joe or beans or rice to her lips. But she hasn't spoken. She has kept her eyes closed.

I spent some time with her Friday, chatting with the young woman who often feeds her mid-day. After awhile, I said, "Okay, Mom, I'm going home, now. Nice talking to you."

She said, distinctly, "Yeah. Right."

[I've posted stories and pictures since Mom's diagnosis in 2012. I've curated links to those stories at my page Dementia Diary. If you're dealing with a loved one's dementia, you may find useful tips and comfort there. ]

[A favorite photo from late 2019, just before the pandemic -- when Mom was still walking and conversing. A sharp drop-off followed in the months after, when only her Visiting Angel Laura Robinson could cross the quarantine boundaries around her.]

This was my Last Visit to New York

Well, I've said that before, in 2010, and again last March. I've seen all I want to see, and I like my routine at home with my lovely old dog, and I look forward to my next colonoscopy more than my next flight. Still, in case I ever go again and want to remember what I learned, or in case I never go again and just care to savor the experience I had, here's what I want to remember:

A bag of peanuts is not worth $300. Using Google.flights, I compared prices for round trips at my preferred times, and found Frontier Airlines for $300, half what was listed for competitors. Buying my ticket was like playing a video game, because offers popped up at different places on my screen, to choose a seat, to carry on a small suitcase, to have more leg room. Each offer required lightning-fast reflexes to admit, deny, affirm, reject. For all the stuff that my no-frills ticket lacked, the flight was fine. I had the window and an empty seat beside me going up, and my friend Susan was beside me going home. So my round trip ticket was only 2/3 the cost of my seat at the Metropolitan Opera, and all the underwear and black tee shirts I needed were able to fit in my laptop bag with room for regulation-sized hygiene products and a book of crosswords. I win!

Frick 'n' Friday. Susan and I took off from Atlanta around 2:30 and arrived in just enough time to check in at the Empire Hotel and hail a cab to reach the Frick Gallery in time for our reservations 6:30-8:30. We arrived at 7. I didn't expect a musical welcoming committee, but attractive young staffers greeted us in a chorus line. This was evidently a regular Friday evening occasion for art and music. We toured several rooms, serenaded by a couple of young men who played jazz bass and saxophone from music on their phone screens. They were stationed in a central courtyard while Susan (a painter) and I wandered through the surrounding rooms. They got special applause from the crowd and some words of encouragement from me when they played a gorgeous ballad by Monk, "Ask Me Now." Are you guys from Juilliard, I asked. "We wish," they laughed. To my question, the bassist said he had no regrets about not choosing the harmonica, as he struggled to lift his instrument to the exit.

You can love 18th Century Art, too. Mr. Frick had great taste, we thought, as his collection includes many pieces by Whistler and early impressionists. We like a lot of dramatic and opulent 17th century stuff, too -- Frick has lots of Rembrandts. But the 18th century has left me cold.

My takeaway from the Frick was how much I enjoyed the rooms devoted to the 18th century. A portrait of British General Burgoyne by Joshua Reynolds captured so much nuance of personality! We both disliked some "blobby" cloth in the backgrounds, but came to realize that these were like stage curtains gathered up to reveal the backdrop. So our subjects were star actors in front of blatantly artificial natural scenery. There were little domestic dramas in several Vermeers, too. I took a photo of Susan, herself a painter, between a Vermeer (drama: what's in the letter that the smirking maid reads to her startled mistress?) and a Rembrandt. Thanks to Android and AI, it was a cinch to erase another guest for an unobstructed view.

The two of us enjoyed a Goya piece that gave a lot of attention to the woman's face and hardly any detail to the torso. We had both known Hogarth from disgusting etchings of London debauchery, but we liked a Hogarth painting of a smiling woman with her frisky dog. We enjoyed noticing that the features in the face of a girl and the cat at her hand were very similar. "This is a fun room," I told my phone, and "I'm enjoying the 18th century for the first time."

Everybody ought to have a goal. Saturday morning, with nothing else on our agenda, we visited the former home of my hero Stephen Sondheim (see my page of postings devoted to him and his work). So many nights in sleep I've dreamed of finding myself in that home on "Turtle Bay" close to the river. There was no bay, and the only turtles were figures in the wrought iron gates. But I was so excited to be on the street where he lived. Fun fact: My dad's business partner Alfredo owned the property.

Take a jacket. We walked across the street from our home, the Empire Hotel, to see the opera THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY. An hour later, we dined a few blocks north of Lincoln Center at Chama Mama, a Georgian restaurant. The temperature was balmy, but the first breaths of a vicious Nor'easter made it chilly for those of us seated on their terrace. Still, we enjoyed bread with a variety of pastes made from walnuts mixed with ingredients such as yams, beets and other plants.

My Time of Day is the Dark Time. Before sunrise the next morning, I walked to Columbus Circle, observing men as they stocked their food trucks. I saw one man ordering breakfast from another, and I enjoyed how thirty or so pigeons that feasted on seeds that one chef had thrown in the pool of light that his service window cast on the pavement, where he could watch them as he prepped food for the day. Except for those men and a couple of cars, I had New York to myself. I thought of Frank Loesser's favorite song from his own musical Guys and Dolls, a recitative for the gambler "Sky Masterson" that begins, "My time of day is the dark time / a couple of deals before dawn...."

Noon Departures are Easier. Delays (which we had) are less dreadful when you know that you'll still be back in time to feed dinner to your dog.

Distler's tiny masterpiece

[Editing the weekly church newsletter The Bells of St. James, I've added "Grace Notes," weekly highlights of music that the congregation can expect for the coming Sunday. Here is the first installment, after some improvements.]

A theme of the liturgy for this Sunday, the 17th after Pentecost, is how we in the Church must do our work even while others may reap rewards. "Don't lose heart," we read in Habakkuk. At a discouraging time, Paul lays hands on Timothy to rekindle his heart. Jesus asks rhetorically if servants deserve any special reward for doing just what they're supposed to do.

The hymns we'll sing amplify those themes. Hymn 3 describes serving God from sunrise to bedtime. Hymn 541 expands the meaning of its title, Ora Labora, that work is prayer, "a high calling [even] angels cannot share." In Hymn 704, Samuel Sebastian Wesley writes music for his uncle Charles Wesley's words that ask God to light a candle "with celestial fire" in our hearts.

A favorite of many priests is Hymn 312, composed for the 1940 Hymnal by David McKinley Williams. In words from ancient Syrian liturgy, the poet prays that God will "Strengthen for service...the hands that holy things have taken" in the Eucharist, and will keep the tongues that sang "holy" in church from speaking any deceit. There are verses for ears, eyes, and feet, too -- the whole body of Christ!

The anthem "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty" is a setting of the familiar tune, Hymn 390. We're told to remember, when discouraged, that God "reigneth," and "thy heart's wishes hath been granted by what He ordaineth."

In this anthem, German composer Hugo Distler (1908-1942) has written an a cappella version of the hymn that sounds light as a Renaissance motet, but it's crafted with 20th century techniques such as changing meters and tricky syncopations. Distler's intricacies are playful: on the words "music" and "joyful," voices rhapsodize with flourishes of notes squeezed in to the phrases without adding a single beat to the familiar song. On the word "resound," the low voices make an echo. They toll the last word like ponderous tower bells, while the high voices chirp like birds.

"A masterpiece doesn't have to be a big dramatic number," said music director Bryan Black. "A masterpiece can be like a precision-engineered pocket watch."

Living out the motto ora labora, Hugo Distler expressed intense religious faith in his work, for which the Nazi regime labeled his music "degenerate." Suddenly lost without a career, threatened to be drafted into Hitler's army, he ended his short life in despair. Thankfully, he left behind the gift of his joyful music.

Softening Opposition to Hard Church Music

(for our church newsletter) On his way from the parish hall to church Sunday mornings, Bob Kuzniak frequently sings his favorite hymns and songs of the Big Band era. He likes music to be "uplifting."

So he voiced some doubts about our use of unfamiliar service music by living composer Gerald Near. It wasn't uplifting, he said; it doesn't have a tune.

I pointed out that Near is emulating ancient chant. Bob appreciates the difference in chanting. Instead of fitting words to a tune, the composer of chant elevates the text, sometimes stre-e-tching syllables for emphasis. A communion hymn for a recent service was like that, "Where true cha-a-rity and lo-ove dwell" (Hymnal 606). Unlike tunes, made of repeated phrases with chords and a beat, a chant is all melody, smooth and sweet. Our word melody derives from meli, the Greek word for honey.

Bob conceded that some songs are uplifting even when they don't swing like the Spiritual that the choir sang last week. There's a piece Bob loves, with instruments playing chords under a flute melody. It all builds slowly to a high point, then falls. It's not a tune, but it's very musical and uplifting.

Gerald Near, from the web site for the PRM program Pipe Dreams

This week, by coincidence, the choir's anthem follows that same trajectory, reaching a climax at the text "They shall mount up with wings as eagles" (Isaiah 40:31): the voices rise while the chords in the organ add glorious color to the eagle's flight. Guess who wrote it? Gerald Near!

Bob also conceded, as we'll be singing this music through late November, "I'll get used to it."

Still, for Bob's sake, I've started sketching out service music that we might use in the future, based on Glenn Miller tunes. But we have to wait 16 years until Miller's songs go into public domain. Until then, you can imagine the Gloria to the tune of "In the Mood," and "Sanctus" á la "Moonlight Serenade."

Atlanta Ballet's "Balanchine and Peck" Uplifting

This is what I've been missing all along. Everyone else who filled three tiers of Cobb Energy Center already knew: at the ballet, you are amazed and delighted to see a company of men and women exert their finely-honed bodies in runs, lifts, leaps, twirls, falls, each move precisely fit to music and to what the others are doing.

But I've always been a word guy, looking for narrative and ideas, who has always scoffed at ballet for what it lacks. But watching the Atlanta Ballet Company last Friday, I felt delight, amazement, and gratitude all the way through.

The first act was "Emeralds," a portion of the larger work "Jewels" by classic choreographer George Balanchine. To the sweet, aromatic pieces by Fauré, combinations of male and female dancers suggested romance and friendship. Without a story, without ideas, with only the title and green fabric to suggest a theme, I read the movements as characters enjoying themselves by enjoying each other.

The second act was "In Creases" by choreographer Justin Peck, who choreographed Spielberg's film West Side Story in 2021. Two pianists seated upstage at amplified grands played musical patterns by Glass while the company played with spatial patterns. Again with joy, these dancers criss-crossed, lifted, rolled, advanced, receded, circled. Sometimes, briefly, the dancers seemed to be pins or pistons in a machine. Once, dancers took turns high-stepping over their fellow performers in a way reminiscent of a football drill. These incongruities made me laugh every time -- before the image dissolved into something new.

Act Three was Balanchine's telling of the familiar parable of "The Prodigal Son," to music composed for the ballet by Prokoviev. Here, I was intrigued by the economy of the storytelling. A young man at a fence repeats a pair of energetic hand movements that suggest beating a drum and going out beyond the gate. Two sisters and the solemn father (costumed with long gray beard and robes) draw him into prayer, seated in a circle, heads bowed. But the young man rises, hands two serving men some clay jars, and bids them follow as he leaps past the gate.

He arrives in a land of males whose clothing and baldness made them look reptilian. The young man buys their friendship and falls (literally) for a statuesque temptress wearing a tall helmet like Nefertiti's. When the jars are empty, he's beaten and stripped. Crippled, he claws his way across the floor with a staff. When he collapses at the home of the father, the sisters summon the old man.

Only now, thinking back on the simple-looking movement that ends the ballet, I realize what strength and control was required for (SPOILER) the young man to climb up onto the old man's chest and hang there curled up in fetal position. The father wraps his arms around the boy and turns to take him inside the house.

Light fades slowly; former dance skeptic dissolves in tears.

Passage to India on a Bicycle

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[Scott Smoot in central India, virtually, at the Pillar of Ashoka. ]

Since September 2024, I've biked 2600 miles on trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from The Red Sea to central India. The bike in the photo is new, purchased this month when myriad worn out parts failed near Narrow Path Bicycles, located along the narrow path that I've taken to Stone Mountain most warm Saturdays since August 2009.

Since 2020, my bike rides have covered mileage between places I've lived or loved. Though I've never set foot in India, I do have three strong long-lasting connections to the place.

First, with friend Julia Chadwick, I taught the history of India to seventh graders in a World Cultures class for many years. India was my favorite unit because I got to talk about Gandhi, Buddha, and a Hindu holy text that I read and admired, the Bhagavad-Gita.

This pillar of Ashoka unites all three. Ashoka came to power through war, but then he imposed "Ashokadharma," rules that replaced warrior culture, animal sacrifice, and superstitious ritual with values of kindness, truth, social justice, and non-violence. For this reason, Ashoka is often seen as a precursor to Gandhi.

Second, I was hungry then (ca. 1988) for more and more minimalist music. My favorite recording was Satyagraha, the opera by Philip Glass that tells the story of Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa uplifting Indian immigrants. The story advances through Gandhi's early years, but the text is drawn entirely from the Bhagavad-Gita. A key line is one that I've memorized, more or less: "for the athlete of the soul, pleasure and pain, success and failure, are the same." I Invite you to read my reflection on the opera.

Lastly, I taught dozens of students of Indian descent in the middle grades at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Jackson, MS and at the Walker School in Marietta, GA for 40 years. Whether the class was about history, literature, music, or drama, every one of them was unfailingly courteous to me and to classmates, hard-working, curious, and willing to try anything I suggested.

I remember a jumble of names and faces of students from families of Indian descent. Here are the names I remember, some of them family names, some of them given names: Arjun, Arun, Ajit, Agrawal, Amit, Anuja, Anu, Chakravorty, Desai, Gautam, Goel, Gupta, Hisamuddin, Kushboo, Malav, Maya, Nair (Piya Nair wrote one of the most meaningful nice things about me on Facebook -- "In his class, I always felt seen"), Nikhil, Nikhil Moro (an adult friend), Neil, Patel, Rana, Raju, Rahul, Ravi, Sahil, Sanjay, Singh, Srinivasan, Subramony, "Ticha" (nickname for a little guy who turned into a collegiate bike team athlete and helped me to develop as a cyclist), Vijay, and Yanik. I remember all of your names with gratitude and a smile.

PS - After I posted this, the alumni magazine from St. Andrews arrived featuring Alumnus of the Year, "Ticha" Patel. He's in his mid-50s now, but I recognized his smile before I read the name. At the dinner in his honor, last year's winner Arjun Srinivasan introduced him as doctor, lawyer, and entrepeneur, "giving all parents nationwide another reason to be disappointed in their children."

Miles YTD 1795 || 2nd World Tour Total 20,845 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Japan

←← | ← || Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.

Weapons at the intersection of horror and fun

Weapons left me grinning. It was satisfying, not just for delivering thrills when bad guys emerge from unexpected places, but for a neat puzzle where all the pieces click together in a way that serves justice. The climactic spectacle is both a surprise and just what you wanted, both horrifying and exhilarating.

No spoiler, here: what's great in the movie is all in the trailer. In the trailer, we hear that children from one teacher's classroom left their homes at 2:17am and that they have not returned in a month. We see children run, arms outstretched, through dark suburban streets. We see one distraught parent (played by James Brolin) trace lines on a map of the neighborhood from each front door to the last location captured by doorbell security cameras, and we can see at a glance that their multiple lines intersect at a single point.

A cool thing about the movie is that multiple storylines also intersect at one point. We go over the same basic period of time from different characters' points of view, all intersecting at the residence of one outlandish character. This approach helps us to be deeply invested in the different characters before the climax. We are especially sympathetic to the teacher, that father, and the young boy left behind.

The extreme violence (some brains, some dismemberment), doesn't feel disturbing, being all part of this puzzle-constructed game. What does disturb is the resonance with real-life school shootings and their aftermath, those makeshift shrines of stuffies and flowers and the raw emotions when parents confront authorities.

Before the movie, we got previews of several upcoming horror movies. It was a dismal warm-up act. None of them generated the curiosity of the puzzle presented in Weapons.

Atlanta exclusive: Being in Atlanta gives me some proximity to film-related activities. So I have this shot of the cake that the cast and crew dug into at the wrap party for Weapons. Viewers of the movie will recognize the cake for its uncanny resemblance to the character Aunt Gladys.