I am well aware that for a lot of people, the saga of my brother Nathan’s remarkable comeback from a serious brain injury has played out like The Feel Good Story Of The Century.... with one dramatically encouraging development after another in an essentially uninterrupted journey from Near Death to Full Restoration. Yesterday afternoon was
I have been teaching at Carthage College since 1991, and in those 22 years I am absolutely certain that there has never been a day like yesterday, when four recitals - yes, four recitals - were presented .... at 1:00, 3:00, 5:00, and 7:30. It was a veritable feast of fine music-making, a staggering celebration
As I drove to Madison late yesterday afternoon to see my brother Nathan for the first time since Saturday, I kept rerunning my dad’s voicemail to me from earlier in the day: “They had Nathan sitting in a chair for a couple of hours today, which is great - and they talked to him the
One of the toughest dilemmas raised by a personal disaster like my brother’s traumatic head/brain injury is this: what is the role of normalcy in the lives of the loved ones? What do we place on hold? What obligations or responsibilities do we wave away? And is it okay for us to immerse ourselves in
We just finished singing “Precious Lord, Take my Hand” at church - it was our closing hymn. At the time I chose it earlier this week, I was mostly thinking about our senior pastor, Bill Grimbol, whose beloved wife Patti died earlier this week, and the sorrow which he and all of Patti’s many friends
I am writing this during the dress rehearsal for the Choral Arts Society’s opera gala concert, for which I’m singing several taxing and challenging scenes - which normally would be an entirely joyous undertaking for me. But while my mind and voice are here, contending with the challenges of Verdi, Gounod, Bizet and Puccini and
Warning: The following blog is a RANT. I have a little high blood pressure issue these days, and am more inclined to let off steam than try to contain it. Here goes ... It began with an email from someone I didn’t know, asking if I would be willing to arrange for some singers to
I must confess to what amounts to a rather unhealthy relationship to food, and I don’t just mean that in the most literal sense of my physical health, although that’s by no means a minor matter. But I’m talking mostly about the strange combination of obsessiveness and mindlessness with which I tend to regard the
