Musical Wanderer

I recently finished reading Patel's Life of Pi .  Very good book, inspiring one could say.  The narrator mentioned taking his prayer rug to pray to Allah to different places.  I remember seeing men with rolled rugs loosely tied over their shoulders in Turkey and Israel.  It draws no attention there, like a woman's purse here.  As I thought of it, rolled yoga mats are rather common in this area, in purples and pinks and greens.  Then it came to me.  Yoga mats are the American prayer rug. Muslims consider praying an obligation to God, so they have prayer rugs with them when the need arises to praise god and listen to god any day of the week.  So too do women around here carry their yoga mats for classes available every day of the week.  You see them everywhere, well, everywhere where white women with at least one college degree are a heavy presence.  Well, heavy in numbers, not in girth, as most of the women with the mats tend to be thin.  And that's part of the point of

I've been a classical music dork for decades.  Listening to symphonies in my room, devouring the notes on the back of the albums.  Reading up on composers in the two old classical music books my folks had in their library shelves.  Buying the 99 cent albums of the great composers at Safeway.  I moved on to CDs when I was in my twenties, though I couldn't part with my old cheapo turnabout and nonesuch records that introduced me to what would be lifelong friends: symphonies, tone poems and the like. After a while, listening to even the best works can be routine, waiting for my favorite bits, spacing out during the interludes.  That changes when I splurge on symphony tickets (well, the cheap seats).  Last two weeks gave me chance to hear Tchaikovsky Symphony #4 and Shostakovich #5.   Jaap van Zweden brought out a lot of nuances that recordings somehow hide in the Tchaikovsky.  The meandering woodwinds, the slight jumps of intensity, the driving Russian folk melodies.