Last Day of Summer

Never mind the equinox - August 31 always feels like the last day of summer. It's time for school to start, for foggy mornings and earlier darkness, and a rush of family birthdays and anniversaries.

In ordinary years, some of our best weather arrives in September. This year we have had almost nothing BUT good weather, since May. If next summer is anything like this one, people who sell air-conditioning equipment will make a fortune.

City of Seattle public libraries are closed from today until September 8, for budgetary reasons. No book drops, on-line catalog - or library fines for anything that was due this week.

Last Friday, in search of escapist reading (I'm interested mostly in escapist reading at the moment) I ventured into the central downtown library, our Rem Koolhaas-designed showplace. ("A waste of good steel," according to the metal workers in the family, but spectacular nonetheless.)

The library's huge interior spaces are soothing in a way I did not expect. Normal noise and hubbub from numbers of people engaged in customary library activities just rises up to the high cantilevered ceilings - and dissipates to whispers. There are thousands of books on shelves, and enough space for thousands more, a reassuring feeling.

A few months ago, I had planned to be on my way to Transylvania this week, but it's a trip that will have to wait. Fortunately, someone else from the partner church group is able to attend the international Unitarian-Universalist conference in Kolozsvàr this week, so we'll get a first-hand report when she returns.


We'll also get a report on life in the partner village, where the minister since 1997 is leaving, and we don't yet know when someone new will be appointed to the pulpit. At the end of the conference, a whole group of American attendees will journey to Torockószentgyörgy for a festive dinner in the new pension (one of the many changes to happen in the village since I first visited in 2001.)

"There's opera -- and then there's Wagner"

That's a quote from the man who sat near my two friends and me during "The Ring" last week.

Since 1975, "The Ring" has been a quadrennial phenomenon in Seattle. This most recent production (first presented in 2001) just gets better on repeat viewing. Many of the same singers have returned time after time, digging deeper into the story and the music for each new cycle.

That said, "The Ring" is as exhausting as it is exhilarating. The shortest of the operas is 2-1/2 hours long, only because it runs without an intermission.

Last night's finale, "Götterdämmerung," began at 6 p.m., with a first act that lasted almost 2 hours. Two acts and two intermissions later, we staggered out of the Opera House, at 11:30 p.m.

When "The Ring" is on, Seattle becomes a truly international city. The opera cycle attracts people from all over the US and the world - this year there are visitors from 49 states and 23 countries. I love hearing all the accented English and foreign languages.

The international audience also lifts the general standard of dress at Seattle Opera. Here in the Northwest we're casual to a fault, and jeans and shorts(!) crop up where you hope they would be least expected.

At "The Ring" the holdouts may still turn out in REI chic, but the visitors (and determined locals) dress up. There were women in long gowns, men in full formal dress - and lots of sleeveless, backless and/or very short dresses. The range is great - my two favorites were a 70-something woman, blonde and charming, turned out in full, authentic dirndl; and a tall, white-haired man in formal kilts, complete with jacket, knee socks, and sporran.

Those horn calls are still running through my head.

Centennials of note

For a couple of years now, the Sousa Band has been a go-to musical group for centennial celebrations.

Seattle was a bustling, bumptious, fast-growing place during the first decade of the 20th century, and many of the events and locations of that era are worthy of commemoration. Sousa (along with Henry Fillmore, Carl King and a number of others) wrote marches that were some of the most popular tunes of the day, so the band is a perfect fit for a musical look back.

Two years ago the band played for centennial celebrations for the Pike Place Market. (That is the proper name for the Market, and if I hear one more person talk about "Going to Pike's Market" I will say something intemperate, even if I AM on a bus.)

The band also played that year for the 100th anniversary of the Good Shepherd Center, which started life as a home for wayward girls and now serves as a busy community center (and the band's practice space.)


This year's big event is the commemoration of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which took place 100 years ago on the site now occupied by the University of Washington. (More information here.)

In July, the band helped welcome a group of vintage cars (Model T's, mostly) re-creating a cross-country race that was part of the original AYP festivities. Among the tunes that day was a march written especially for the exposition (Washington State's very first World's Fair.) It was appropriately titled "From Alaska to Panama," but written by an eccentric composer from Pennsylvania who probably never set foot in the Northwest.

Yesterday a beautiful lakefront park celebrated its 100th year. Although the casino, shown in the picture, is long gone, Leschi Park still occupies choice acreage on the shores of Lake Washington. In 1909 people reached the park on a cable car, and in 2009 you can still get there - easily - by public transportation (one change of buses from my house to the park.)


The band played for an hour, entertaining a good crowd, coping successfully with a stage set on ground that sloped slightly backward. (That had to be the reason the Sedentary Majorette accidentally tossed her baton among the clarinets.)

Greening up

This evening we had real rain, along with enough lightning to make the radio crackle, and a couple of thunderclaps.

In spite of the long drought, the grass is reviving. From my window, I can see a tinge of green on the slopes at Gasworks Park, as if the dry grass had been lightly misted. After a few more showers, the park should green up, as if this summer had never happened.

And in spite of an August date on the calendar, it's already fall. This morning there were 17 geese floating in formation on the lake, first I've seen since early spring. They took off in a rush, swift and vocal, intent on arriving somewhere not visible from here.

It's raining!

After 26 dry days. I have never seen parks, lawns and roadsides so completely dried out as they are this summer.

This area always gets a dry spell in the summer, when the grass dries out and the trees get grayish. This year the dry weather has gone on so long that I wonder if everything can come back. By next spring we could see many dead trees - but I hope to be proved wrong.

On Sunday the Sousa Band played at the Ballard Locks, everyone's favorite gig. The time and weather were both perfect - 2 p.m. on a suddenly sunny summer Sunday - and the crowd was the largest I've seen for any of these concerts.

This year I was in the audience, wishing all the while I could be up there playing.

If you missed this concert, think about coming to Leschi Park next Saturday, when the band plays for its centennial celebration. (Liz, the band director, said on Sunday that the Sousa Band has become Seattle's favorite centennial celebration band - ever since 2007 we've been playing for various commemorations.)

More information at the Sousa website: www.sedentarysousa.com

At large in my own city

From time to time something new in Seattle is so different or so longed-for that it brings on a classic "Wait, where AM I?" moment.

Almost eleven years ago, we got a beautiful new concert hall, in the middle of downtown. Not only does it offer two fabulous performance facilities (large and small halls) but the three-story atrium-lobby is one of the most spectacular venues in the city. On a summer or winter night, its curved glass facade facing the lingering twilight or glittering city lights, it is a wonderful place to be.

And almost every one of my friends had exactly the same reaction to the hall on their first visit - "Is this really Seattle?"

Today I had another of those moments, when I rode the new Link Light Rail. In town, the sleek train cars run in the bus tunnel that has been part of life for 20+ years (if you subtract the two when it was closed because engineers discovered it would not, after all, support train tracks without major refurbishing. Oops.)

That's all in the past. On July 18 the trains started running, and finally, 42 years after a former mayor urged the city to develop a light rail system, we have it. There is only one line so far, and it won't reach the airport until December of this year, but it's a major step forward.

So today I checked it out, riding from Westlake Station to Tukwila. For much of the route, the train tracks follow a couple of major streets, but one section of the route is a tunnel, that emerges into an underground station that's all curved steel walls and sculptural glass panels.

That's when I had the "Where am I?" moment. I've been in other stations like the one at Beacon Hill - in Copenhagen, Vienna and Berlin. Here is an architecturally breathtaking place, half an hour from home.

There's nothing quite like playing tourist in your very own city.

Temperature drops! At last!

Only in the Pacific NW? On Wednesday the 29th Seattle recorded its hottest day ever - 103 degrees.

One week later, August 5, it was 40 degrees cooler, and cloudy - but by evening the sky had cleared enough for a clear view of the full moon.

Today it was gray and cool, and I didn't hear a single complaint.

It's a good time to read. Last night I stayed up far too late, finishing another Dan Fesperman novel - The Arms Maker of Berlin. Germany, WWII, spies, counter-spies, Cold War machinations, fallout from German reunification - it's a great read.

(But I really should have turned out the light before 2 a.m.!)

Lovely weather - for flowers

But it's still too hot, especially at night. Years ago a colleague of my late husband's said that people in the Northwest are like house plants - unhappy if the temperature goes much above or much below 65.

Just by luck, I replanted the deck pots the day before I broke my wrist, and the cast does not get in the way of watering or deadheading. Petunias respond to good weather and regular attention with a bounty of blossoms.

The Blue Angels roared overhead for the last time today, the finale of Seafair. The planes are so loud and so fast that it's a trick to spot them, because they are always far ahead of the sound.

The other major weekend noisemakers were the hydroplanes that race on Lake Washington. Although their turbine engines seem loud enough (we could hear them all too well when we lived on the east side, several miles north of the race area,) an article in the Seattle Times said some old-timers miss the real "thunderboats" - the first, post-WWII hydros, powered by airplane engines! (Think B-29 with a roostertail.)

I'm ready for rain. The grass is brown everywhere, and even the broad-leafed plants are drooping.

August already?

And I'm typing with all ten fingers, though five of them still protrude from a fiberglass cast. Until August 21, after which I'll have a removable Velcro thing, which presumably will free my hand up enough to get back to the flute.

When the cast first went on, I worried about looking vulnerable. Then I took another look at the rigid fiberglass enclosing my entire forearm, and thought, "What a weapon!"

And OF COURSE I get a seat on the bus, especially when wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

If I had a garden, I'd probably be working in it this morning, because the weather is finally back to something comfortable enough to enjoy. For more than a week we have had temperatures in the 80's and 90's, and on Wednesday it got to 103. That's too hot in a place where most people do not have air conditioning.

On the hottest day I landed briefly at the Ballard Library, which DOES have AC - and felt lucky to find a seat! At our corner store, the proprietor periodically hosed down the sidewalk, aimed a fan INTO the building during cool morning hours - but said he couldn't complain, because the heat was good for business (ice, beer, ice cream...)

Last night I alternately smiled, laughed, sniffled (and fumed because the theater was 80% empty) while watching "Blue Window" at Driftwood.

Craig Lucas' play demands a small skilled ensemble cast. This group did a fine version of the play in February, working in a tiny performance space that barely qualified as a black box theater.

The current production is a fund-raiser for Driftwood - and a chance for the actors to spread out, on a real stage. The actors appreciated the chance to revisit the play and their characters, and the audience stayed right with them all the way. Congratulations again, everyone.

Now if some people will just COME TO SEE THE PLAY! It's on tonight and tomorrow afternoon - Wade James Theater, in Edmonds.