In Bruges - really.

In Europe, I think single women are assumed to be strong, wiry, and in constant search of exercise. Why else do I look back on a decade's worth of rooms at the very top of small hotels? Almost invariably, no matter where or how I reserve, I am shown to a room at the top of the staircase. (All that stair climbing does balance out a certain number of treats, of course.)

After years of flying to Amsterdam with NWA, I've got a new favorite way to go - Seattle to Paris, on Air France. Although the seat-back TV will still end up in your face when the person in front of you pushes all the way back, the general level of service and food is more polished and friendly than on NW. (But I can become a fan of any airline that offers real champagne as an aperitif in coach class!)

Bruges is lovely and historic, as advertised, and probably not quite so full of tourists as it will be in a few months. Everywhere there are signs of economic distress - too many empty storefronts, closed restaurants and "going out of business" signs. In spite of this, crowds still troop through the narrow streets and the Market Square, and the canal boats are full. Spring is in full bloom here. From my 4th floor window, I can see trees in full leaf, and huge lilac bushes blooming in nearby back gardens.

Spring comes and goes...

On April 1 this year it snowed - no fooling. Since then, the pattern is that we have one or two days of sunshine and warm temperatures, followed by cold rainy weather. We retrieve the winter jackets from the end of the closet and carry on.

"What's the weather like in Paris?" someone asked me today. So far I haven't checked, and I probably won't. Weather will be what it will be - I usually pack as if I were going to be at home here in the NW, and that's almost never a bad thing.

For this trip, my new toy is a mini-computer. For years, I've dreamed of a computer you really could put in a purse, and finally one is available at a reasonable price. (I used to drool over the tiny machines on a Japanese website, but prices started around $3400!)

Now I have the hp mini - a most charming small computer I first encountered when an obliging staff member at the Inn at Laguna Beach loaned us one to print boarding passes.

"We keep this around for guests to check email," he said. Much easier than running to the public library (which was closed Sunday night anyway!)

Now I have one of my own. It's loaded with programs, faster than my trusty Mac - and it fits in my purse.

(When I asked a sales associate at the Apple store whether Apple plans to jump on the Netbook trend, he said, with appropriate condescension, "There's an incredibly high level of dissatisfaction with netbooks.")

We shall see!

Time to update

Indeed. This cold wet spring favors reptilian instincts - my mind is curled up under a rock, waiting for the sun to be warm for more than a couple of days.

But it's time to come out, because three days from now I'm leaving for France, on the direct Air France flight, nine hours and a bit from Seattle to Paris. Just to complicate the schedule, I'm going directly from Paris to Bruges for three days, because the apartment isn't available until May 1.

Today I finally wrote down the "to do" list - a good time to put it on paper, because I can already check off so many things. But the list is still long enough.

Right now I should be getting out the suitcase (in which I would shortly find the cat, neatly folded into the "meatloaf" pose and giving me that "have you consulted me about this?" stare) but first I have to take bags of shredded paper down to the recycling bins, hoping they won't take up too much room. Preparing for a trip makes me want to tidy up in all sorts of ways, and this week the shredder has been getting a workout. No reason to hang onto nine years' worth of mutual fund statements.

It's the spring cleaning instinct. Another friend is attending a shredding party on Saturday. Her hostess has arranged for a commercial shredder, and guests are invited to bring their disposables. Lunch is gourmet hot dogs.

Aimez-vous Brahms?

The short answer is: most of the time. Today I have parts of "The German Requiem" vying for space in my head, and I have always liked the title phrase (though I've never read the Françoise Sagan novel of the same name.)

Yesterday our choir sang the requiem twice, accompanied by a good-size chamber orchestra. Brahms wrote intricate, densely chromatic music for this piece, and it requires attention and hard work to sing properly (or even passably.)

Then comes #4 - "Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen" ("How lovely is thy dwelling place") and all the work is worth it.

From time to time our choir sings this lovely anthem on an ordinary Sunday, in English, with piano accompaniment. Very satisfying.

To sing it in German, accompanied by a good orchestra, in a beautiful church where you have a long history, is as spiritual an experience as I need.

Thank you, Herr Brahms.

How one book leads to another ...

I admire people who plan their reading, because my own appetite for books so often leads me down random paths.

Last year, for example, I was intrigued by the example of a Unitarian minister who, in an article for the UU World magazine, admitted he handles the proliferation of reading material by saying, "I only read classics." This leaves him out of touch with party conversation, a minor inconvenience.

Concentrating on classics offered some illuminating moments (the astonishing modernity of A Sentimental Education; finding that important scenes in War and Peace happen in places I had recently visited; discovering that Anna Karenina rocks;) and some forgettable ones (I will never make it through Madame Bovary and am not too sure about Moby Dick, either.)

Thank goodness Raymond Chandler counts as a classic, because I love mysteries.

Sometimes this reading plan involves nothing more complicated than finally getting all the way through a book already on hand.

For example, The Tale of Genji, which I bought in a very nice two-volume hardback edition sometime in the 1980s, and read part way (the bookmark is from a small independent bookstore swept away almost 20 years ago.)

A couple of months ago I picked up the first volume and plunged in, finding 11th-century Japan an interesting retreat from the present. Then this article alerted me to a more recent translation, and I abandoned the hardback in favor of a fat, well-annotated paperback. (You must read the footnotes to follow the action.)

Because Heian Japan is so far removed from the modern world (Japanese also read the novel in translation, because their language is about as remote from 11th-century court Japanese as our English is from Beowulf) I departed from the novel for a while in favor of a book about court life in ancient Japan - The World of the Shining Prince, by Ivan Morris. When the library copy turned out to be crumbling, dirty and stained (it was written in 1964) I bought a brand-new paperback edition, with its illuminating introduction by a professor of Japanese literature and culture who was a student of the late Dr. Morris.

So - what IS it about a book that people have been reading for 1,000 years? Morris points out that Genji is about a minute coterie of highly cultured people surrounded by peasants who lived very little better than their animals. Transportation was primitive, and being sent into exile involved going no more than 20 or 30 miles from the seat of government.

The book is often called the first psychological novel, because of its focus on the involved relationships and complicated feelings of a tiny community in which everyone knows everything about everyone else. Murasaki Shikibu, the author, was part of this world, a clever, well-educated observer who wrote about what she knew. And the novel is also about longing, loss, and the impermanence of everything - beauty, love, life itself.

When Arthur Waley's version of the novel appeared in the 1920's, Virginia Woolf was elated to discover a major work by a woman previously unknown in the West. The irony of the novel's long history is that in its own time it was considered an inferior form of literature. Men - emperors and princes - composed imitations of classic Chinese poetry. Women, generally discouraged from studying the dominant Chinese language and culture (although Murasaki, the daughter of a scholar, was allowed to study the language along with her brother) used the developing Japanese script to write "tales" for the amusement of the court.

The poetry faded away. Murasaki's "tale of the shining prince" remains -- along with longing, loss, and the impermanence of everything.

Spring is coming. Really?

Yesterday Cliff Mass said "Snow in the mountains," but this morning I woke to see quarter-size snowflakes plopping on the deck (which is perhaps 100 feet above sea level.)

The snow was soon followed by rain, then sun, then wind, then more clouds and rain - and next Friday is the first day of spring. It could snow then, too.

I would happily desert Seattle for almost anywhere warm in March. My good friend in the building insists February is the month to be away - "It starts to get nice in March, and all the flowers begin to bloom."

Though it can be cold and snowy in February (especially this year) we often get a week or more of mild sunny days that make you think spring is just around the corner. And besides being a short month, February has Valentine's Day, my birthday, and President's Day weekend - all reasons to stay here and enjoy.

March is too long and too gray. Fortunately it offers at least one opportunity to celebrate - Z's birthday. This year she was enmeshed in tech rehearsals the week of her birthday, and I had both a board meeting and an orchestra rehearsal on mine, so we combined celebrations last Friday, the 13th, with dinner for a small friendly group at a nearby restaurant. Along with belated birthday wishes, the dinner was a chance to celebrate the "best overall production" award Z and her actors won last week at Kaleidoscope, a one-act play festival sponsored by the Washington State Community Theater Association. Now they go on to regionals, and everyone thinks good thoughts!

Miscellaneous rumblings

The unit upstairs goes on the market next week.

Tonight the owners are rolling heavy objects from one room to another. Their unit is the penthouse - the entire top floor of this building - so they have plenty of room to rumble, as it were. From time to time Sparky crouches, looks up, then runs to another room.

Outside we have rain, wind and snow in the mountains, after a week or more of cold but clear weather. It was especially annoying to set clocks ahead last Saturday night with snow falling - Daylight Saving time is supposed to have something to do with spring, after all!

Cats have the right idea:



But I'm not a cat, so I bundled up and went out, to see the current exhibition, works from the Munich Secession,here. The Frye has been part of Seattle's art scene for a long time, with a collection best described as "eclectic." Because much of the permanent collection was acquired early in the 20th century with the help of an American artist who had studied and exhibited with the artists of the Secession, everything on the walls converges at this exhibit. Some paintings are beautiful, a few are downright creepy, but the show is well worth a visit. Look for the Childe Hassam painting of woman and child in the Parc Monceau, and the portrait of a woman in a pale pink ensemble that is the essence of fashion circa 1907.

This painting, called "Dead Man on a Beach," looks astonishing like one of the more jarring scenes in Erwartung. If the woman were only wearing a white robe instead of a black shawl...