Summer Play Dates

Susan brought her grandsons over on Wednesday and they played with trucks while she and I taped newsletters. The four of us ate lunch out on the porch. I was reminded of those summer days when my girls and I would join Susan and her mother and her girls for luncheons on Susan’s porch. The boys ate peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches. I had plain old peanut butter and jelly. We sampled some of the fermented pickles and they were such a hit that I sent a jar home with them. The four year-old and I rode around in the golf cart and on the John Deere tractor and both boys climbed on the construction equipment and sat inside the trucks.

Sometimes I don’t know who is having more fun. 😁

I got a text from Elysian yesterday morning. She knows I usually go to town on Thursday mornings, so she asked if I could drop WS off at Kids College for his YouTube Content Creators class. I love Kids College. The program began around the time my girls were in elementary school. The community college offers week-long classes throughout the summer on a variety of topics. On the drive there, WS and I were trying to remember all of the classes he has taken. He is 9 now, and I think he started when he was 5 or 6. I’ve been his Uber driver occasionally over the years and it was fun to do it again yesterday. He was in class from nine to noon, which gave me plenty of time to run all my errands. On the ride home, he entertained me with his repertoire of knock-knock jokes.

I had a Zoom meeting scheduled for yesterday afternoon, which didn’t leave me a lot of time for sewing, so I did prep work for my Needles 101 class on August 9:

We’ll be sewing on various substrates with different kinds of needles. Everyone will get a pack of needles and about a dozen different fabrics. This is the stack of knits—a cotton jersey, double-brushed poly, fleece, and ponte.

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I am the pianist at our church. Elaine also plays and fills in for me when I am traveling. I do reasonably well, although if I could change my short, stubby fingers into long, elegant concert pianist fingers, I think I would be even better. I am in that category of church pianists who are not professionals, but who don’t want to play easy, boring arrangements. Finding interesting arrangements that don’t take hours of preparation is a challenge. I am sure that some arrangers also get bored easily. I found one arranger whose early work I loved, but she made a comment in one of her later books that “pianists should be able to play with equal facility in every key,” and veered off into bizarre arrangements in keys with four and five sharps.

[Elaine and I joke about Marty Haugen, who is a Lutheran arranger with the same tendency toward bizarre arrangements. I played Holden Evening Prayer one December for the Lutheran church where I used to fill in, and that piece has one section in E-flat minor, which has six flats. Do you know how hard it is to remember to play C-flat instead of C?]

A few years ago, I ran across a young arranger named James Koerts. I have just about everything he ever arranged. The pieces are interesting without being fussy. He arranged a wide variety of contemporary praise songs and beloved hymns. I was part of his monthly Piano Club and received a new arrangement every month. Last week, I got a very cryptic e-mail telling me that my Piano Club subscription had been canceled. I pondered that for a day or two and then received an e-mail from his team saying that he had died suddenly after a short illness in June.

I am very sad about this. He left a wife and kids, apparently. I will miss getting his new arrangements every month, although I have enough of his work to keep me busy for a long time.

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After a lovely few of days of cooler weather, the heat has returned. I expect to be getting ripe tomatoes soon. And it looks like at least one of my mystery squash plants is producing pumpkins:

Every gardening season should have a couple of surprises.