Melanies Blog

Webster’s Dictionary (online version) variously defines the word community as:

- a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society <a community of retired persons

- a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests <the international community

- a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community

The spring edition of our electronic newsletter, “Brava,” was emailed earlier this week.  If you haven’t yet read it, it provides an update on some noteworthy events taking place at SFGC this spring and summer, including our annual fundraising gala, the Chorus America conference we’ll host in June, and the exciting tour to Cuba our girls will take in July.  Our newsletter in this format often prompts a range of responses from readers who recall various incarnations of this type of SFGC publication over the past 32 years.

Spring break is over at SFGC, and the girls returned to Chorus last week. Having completed our annual gala at the end of March, the administrative staff is now in the home stretch of the season, working away at projects and programs coming up in the next 3 months, before the end of this fiscal and school year.

What a teaser this so-called spring weather has been! What with Saturday night’s gale force winds, (which took some sheets of tin off our barn roof) and the return of the rain on Tuesday, March seems to be roaring out like a mad, wet lion.

I found a red balloon nestled in the sage bush in my front yard last week. It definitely seemed like some kind of omen, since the 1956 French film about a boy and his balloon companion have been an important icon for most of my life. (And then I read in SF Gate the next day that 10,000 red balloons had been released over the Bay as part of a promotion for a new video game…)

It’s the shortest month of the year, but somehow it feels like the longest.  This seems to be a widely shared feeling, and maybe it’s not just about the weather, which, until the forecast for SNOW(?!) this week, has been rather mild.  The jazz violinist Regina Carter wrote a tune a few years ago, called “Forever February,” to try to capture that late winter restlessness so many of us feel. 

Last week I read about a time capsule from 1910, opened by the Cleveland Elementary School in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco.  It was an interesting glimpse of life in post-earthquake San Francisco, as the geographic boundaries and the population of the city were rapidly expanding.  Put together by the Excelsior Homestead District, the  capsule was intended to give future San Franciscans a glimpse of the city’s status and revitalization following the quake.  Evidently the Excelsior area was envisioned to one day comprise many “solid, fine mansion

Today is the poet Robert Burns’s birthday, also known as the holiday Burns Night in Scotland. I’m not especially attuned to Scottish holidays, but it showed up on my European calendar this morning, and then there was a tiny paragraph about it in the New York Times.   The Times gave examples of a couple of American poets whose birthdays could be honored with special feasts (definitely without the haggis!), and that got me thinking about the broader landscape of cultural values in this country.

I just read former NY Times food critic and Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl’s memoir about her mother, For You Mom, Finally. In Reichl’s previous books, her mother stands out as one memorable lady, but perhaps for the wrong reason. While the culinary mishaps of Mrs.

I’m not trimming a tree this Christmas. It seems shocking even to put that in writing. We’ll be visiting my parents in Oregon for Christmas, and then pruning vines and planting trees in Lake County over the New Year’s weekend. Since we aren’t going to try to squeeze in much entertaining between concerts, travel and farm work, lots of decorating just doesn’t seem necessary this year.