Vienna after Midnight: Virtual Bike Tour Continues

←← | ← || →

Scott Smoot at Vienna's State Opera House, virtually, with the ghost of its former director.

Sometime after midnight, my friend Mark Millkey put Mahler's Titan Symphony on his record player and asked me to be patient: "This composer's a little long-winded." I had time, although it was a week night, because Mom had lifted my curfew for the last quarter of high school.

Mark and I had passed the hours after class talking literature, faith, and music. Now he let me discover for myself that Mahler's solemn funeral march was a nursery tune, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? ("are you sleeping, Brother John?"). I got the gallows humor.

That's what makes Vienna one of "the places I've lived or loved," enough so that I've covered 184 miles on bike trails around Atlanta just to make the side trip from Salzburg. Mahler conducted there, Mark visited there, and, driving home that night around 2:30 am, I felt that I, at 17, had reached the pinnacle of maturity and spiritual depth.

To the extent that I really had grown up, Mark had a lot to do with it.  Being so modest, he probably didn't know it. Freshman year, he'd been just a regular guy. After straining his voice in his job at a summer camp, Mark couldn't speak during our sophomore year. Abstaining from gossip and chatter, he learned to listen. He became a model of empathy and tact. When Mark could speak again, he asked about things that mattered; he was everyone's best friend and confidant.

Many of us were evangelicals; he was our only Roman Catholic. When he expressed mild amusement about a prayer he'd heard, "Lord, just tell me, can I run a stop sign at a deserted intersection?" (something I, too, was torn up about), I took a new look at my belief system. We joined Mark for Christmas at the church designed by Mark's late father, architect Herbert Millkey, where the priest fed us in the rectory after midnight Mass. Another Christmas, as Mark and I exchanged wrapped gifts, we knew by heft we'd both received the collected letters of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. I ended up much closer in outlook to Mark and Flannery than to the Moral Majority.

I was honored when Mark invited me with Joe A. and Matt H. to hike the north Georgia mountains for three days in the week after AP exams. Because of heavy rain, we pushed hard to finish in half that time; when tempers flared, Mark made peace. As Flannery wrote in a story, "I'm glad I've went once; I ain't never goin' again."

I used Mark's story to teach generations of middle schoolers about asking questions and really listening to the answers. At my best, I'm still emulating him. And I still love Mahler.

Miles YTD 458 || 2nd World Tour Total 13,993 beginning June 2020 || Next Stop: Warsaw

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