I’m pretty sure the faculty of Cambridge University has not caught up with my humble little blog, so I feel fairly certain that what I say here will not be reverberating up and down the hallways of that venerable institution.
Yesterday was Palm Sunday, which for a church musician like me is a Red Letter Day – and adding to the joy and the busyness of the day was a big choir concert at Carthage that afternoon. And right after that, I had to hustle off to WGTD to record a phone interview with one of the world’s foremost experts on Charles Darwin- a gentleman who is coming to the area to speak later this week. We played phone tag before finally getting something set up: I was to call his hotel in Chicago Sunday afternoon at 4:45 and we would talk for about 45 minutes about Darwin. I rushed off from the concert to get to the studio in time, notes in hand, ready to go. . . only to find when I called the hotel that the gentleman in question had already checked out. Arrrgh ! ! ! So I went rifling through my emails until I tracked down the gentleman’s mobile phone number, but because it’s a British #, I had to try the call on several different phones at the station before I found a phone where the call would go through. And when he answered (and it’s a good thing he picked up) he informed me that he was no longer in Chicago but rather Denver, Colorado – – – which of course is a different time zone, so he had expected my call an hour earlier. . . and was now en route to another event and then dinner after that. So . . . could I call him back three hours later? Arrrrgh Again ! ! ! But I kept the “Arrrrgh” to myself and said that I could do that, and dutifully went off for some Chinese food (the ultimate comfort food for me- Chicken and Broccoli with Garlic Sauce) – and then actually drove all the way to the Racine Theater Guild to catch the end of the annual meeting, which is where my wife was, before heading back home to play with the dogs and fold some laundry before heading back to the radio station at 8 p.m. in the hopes of finally getting the interview recorded. And wonder of wonders, he was where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there. . . and we had what turned out to be a wonderful interview about Charles Darwin. And for most of our conversation, I was marveling that someone could be so brilliant in most ways but rather a dunce when it comes to matters like calendars and schedules and time zones and knowing the difference between Chicago and Denver. . . or between Saturday and Sunday. Of course, in the pantheon of Absent-Minded Professors, my portrait hangs quite prominently.