SILVERADO QUARTET sings the Dummy Song at Izzy's

SILVERADO QUARTET sings a Western medley at Izzy's Restaurant

ON PLAYING PIANO

I am what I call an "improv" piano player.  I love playing background music for events, restaurants, parties, with a huge repertoire of songs.  I play Girshwin and Cole Porter; Scott Joplin's ragtime "The Entertainer;" Billie Joel's "Baby Grand," "Piano Man," and "New York State of Mind;" the Eagles' "Desperado" and "Hotel California;" Beatles, Beegees, Simon and Garfunkle, John Denver, just to name a few; any decade from the Gay Nineties up through the 1980s, even some '90s, but newer than that just isn't as melodic as I like to play.  I don't have the benefit of today's video effects, fireworks and staging; for me, it's just music.  When I'm not playing out somewhere, I'm playing in my living room, however the spirit moves me.  Over the 60 plus years I've been playing, piano has been my musical psychiatrist, never failing to put me in a very happy place. 

I play show tunes and movie themes, the scores from Chicago, Les Miserables, Phantom, Sound of Music, Fiddler, Man of La Mancha, Fantastics, West Side Story, among many others.  I make a piano sing, playing the way I'd sing a song if I were still doing that, or the way I remember hearing it years ago.  I play from "Fake Books" or "Real Books" professional pianists call them, big lead sheet books with just the melody line and chord notations so that I can improvise the rest.  That way I can play anything, and most people listening don't realize I'm making it all up, instant arrangements, never the same twice.  And I can play for hours without repeating a song unless requested to; I've played five hour restaurant nights, wandering around to solicit requests, which I can almost always play.  My choices depend on the atmosphere, the noise level, the size of the crowd, how I'm feeling, all of that. 

Some years ago in the Willamette Valley I was the primary pianist for a melodrama theater, and one theatrical production was a weeks long run of a mystery spoof on Humphrey Bogart.  For that, I selected over a hundred favorite songs, mostly from the thirties and forties, to play for two hours during dinner and dessert, requests and anything I want to play, like the "Rhapsody In Blue," the "Warsaw Concerto," "Maple Leaf Rag."  And of course, Casablanca's "As Time Goes By." 

A woman came up with a request.  

"Don't your hands get tired?" she asked me.

"Never," I smiled back.  I could play for days, weeks, months.  Some days, when I am at home alone, after doing the farm chores I sit at my piano almost all day, playing all the great classics, everything I love, losing all track of time.  

I have three keyboards, a digital piano, and an acoustic piano which was a bequest from a beloved grandmother, a Baldwin Acrosonic Spinet left to me because my concert pianist aunt didn't want it, a treasured possession I have moved all over the country with me since I was eleven years old.  When I play, in my mind I am in Carnegie Hall, and my fingers fly over the keys, stunned audiences gasping to their feet in spontaneous applause.... 

I played the request:  'She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress...She may be waiting, just anticipating things she may never possess...While she's without them, Try a Little Tenderness...'

I stood in the receiving line after the play and a man squeezed my hand.

"Oh I loved your music!"  he said.  "Fifty years ago was my favorite time!"  Life was new to him then.

The muscles in my scalp above my ears ached from smiling.  

DOG IS GOD SPELLED BACKWARD; LOSING CAESAR, GAINING BOGEY BEAR

DOG IS GOD SPELLED BACKWARD, for a reason.

       Who was it who said until you have truly loved an animal, your soul is not fully open?  Or something like that.  Ah, here it is: “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.”

― Anatole France

       And another: “When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout. Animals' emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow.”

― Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy - and Why They Matter

___________________________________

LOSING CAESAR, GAINING BOGEY BEAR

       Eight and a half years ago, shortly after we moved to Central Oregon, when we answered an ad for Rottweiler puppies in Bend we didn't know how much our lives would be enriched and forever changed.  I had just finished reading Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series, and the name Caesar seemed fitting for the little fellow who was the only pup in his litter to wake up and crawl across his littermates to sniff Walt's hand.   Walt picked him up, handed him to me, and he nibbled on my chin, thus sealing his choice of us for all time.  He was just five weeks old, and we couldn't take him home for another two weeks.  Over the course of his life with us I often talked about writing a book called Raising Caesar, but it never quite materialized.

       Caesar was our second Rottweiler, the first having been a female rescued from a man who had a heart condition forcing him to give up the dog. We named her Lava, and her world greatly expanded from the small RV in which she had been living when we brought her home to our 17 acre sheep farm in the Willamette Valley.  She marveled at the moving hands of a clock, images on a TV, fish swimming in the aquarium - all new things for her, and watching her wonder was new for us.

       Rottweilers are a special breed.  If you are ready to be followed from room to room, to never be out of the sight of your dog, you may be ready for this kind of relationship.  It's a big responsibility, one that leaves you in awe, humbled, wanting to be worthy of this kind of devotion. 

       When Caesar was five, we almost lost him in what turned out to be an Addison's Disease crisis; he had days when he wouldn't eat and we simply thought perhaps he'd eaten a rabbit somewhere on our ten acres and just wasn't hungry.  When the crisis came Walt had to carry him to the vet; his body temperature had dropped to 95 degrees and his adrenals had failed forever.  But modern medicine had an antidote, and with continuous expensive medication and nutritional supplements he made a recovery that we hoped would be a lot longer than the three and a half more years it lasted.  He became an amazing, 150 pound gentle giant Rottweiler who understood us and everything in his world so perfectly it should have lasted forever.

       For six months this year we had planned a vacation for early August, going back to Maine for a family reunion. But in mid-July, Caesar stopped eating again, and we cancelled our flights because we wouldn't leave him in anybody else's care. Nothing would entice Caesar to take a bite on his own; we began feeding him by hand, first raw hamburger, then cooked, then only roasted chicken, then a mix I made in my Vitamixer that was more balanced than pure protein. We fed him by plastic spoon so that it wouldn't hurt his mouth.  Because he loved us, when he stopped taking food from our hands voluntarily he allowed us to stick our fingers between his teeth, open his jaws, and insert spoonfuls of yogurt, cottage cheese, kibble mash, chicken, and a variety of supplements we thought might possibly help him regain his health and vigor.  Nothing worked; he lost muscle mass, had a galloping heartbeat, and was very suddenly, very old. 

       Tired of flying blind, we took him back to a vet for help and a diagnosis.  A complete blood panel showed that his Addison's was perfectly controlled; this wasn't the problem.  His blood said everything seemed normal, but it wasn't at all normal; Caesar was dying and our hearts were breaking.   We took him to another vet we greatly respected for a second opinion and got a confirmation of our worst fears; his time was limited and there was no happy prognosis.  After we tried some drugs to lessen his edema and it made him horribly sick, the next day we made the wrenching decision to let him go. He had been telling us for over a month that it was his time and we just didn't want to hear it.  We couldn't bear to accept it.   I can barely write this through tears even now. We spent his last two nights lying with him out under the stars on our front lawn, where the cool grass gave him some comfort. And it let us stay as close to him as we possibly could.

       On Caesar's last day with us, good friends came over to see him one last time and we all took some pictures and videos.  Caesar rallied, carried the paper in again, something Walt had taught him to do at seven weeks old; he gave us love bites, greeted his favorite friends and played with his pack mates, four female dogs of other breeds, all rescues, with almost his old enthusiasm before exhausting his energy.  We finished the day doing the inevitable and taking him to a crematorium called Annie's Healing Hearts.  His ashes are now with us in a wooden box on my piano with a memorial plaque given to us by other friends who also knew him and how much we loved and would always miss him, a soul so pure and perfect it defies description.      

       We were grieving, are grieving still, but fate took a surprising turn.  We had been surfing the internet looking at Rottweiler rescue sites and found nothing in Oregon; we said we didn't want to have to drive to New Mexico or some other far away state to get a dog.  When Caesar got sick, I had emailed a  breeder of champion Rottweilers we had met a few years ago in Bend and asked her if she knew of any that were available.  I hadn't heard back from her, so we didn't hold out much hope that she was still in our area.   Then three days after we lost Caesar we got an email from her saying she had a lead on a three year old male Rottweiler whose owner had just died; were we interested? When the email came in I was in the kitchen, Walt was on the computer.  I heard him exclaim,  "Omagod, we have a dog!!"  (He denies this, but he said it.)

       We responded immediately, yes, we were interested, and she gave us a telephone number to arrange a meeting with the woman handling the situation, who, we were told, was very eager to place this dog, not an easy thing to do.  We agreed to meet the dog the next day, Labor Day, not knowing anything more about the situation.  The next morning the newspaper was full of the story:  a 78 year old woman had been brutally murdered near Sisters, and we realized this was her dog. 

       We drove to Sisters and waited with friends until the crime scene was cleared and we could go to the house where the dog was chained to his doghouse, confused and growling if anyone touched his collar.  We walked up and saw a beautiful, 110 pound intact male Rottweiler with a massive head and a 26 inch neck, a German type smaller than our Caesar was, but just as impressive in his own way. He reminds us of a big, black bear, so we decided to add that to his name, but I'm getting ahead of my story. 

       Bogey sat in front of his doghouse on a heavy chain attached to a very thick collar two inches wide encircling his neck, looking warily about at the people milling the scene. My first thought was, "Oh what a beautiful boy!" We learned later that he had forced his way into the house and ran to his dead owner, so he knew that she was gone and had no idea what was coming next. We explained to the watching family and neighbors that we had just lost our own beloved Rottweiler and that we believed he had something to do with our being there now. 

       Someone said that Bogey hadn't ridden in a car before, so the first hurdle was convincing him that he wanted to get into our car with us. We had brought roasted chicken pieces and some dog treats to tempt him, and with a little coaxing he climbed into the back of our car, a Honda Element perfectly designed for carrying dogs. He rode well on the trip back to Powell Butte, only losing a little bit of his lunch, peeing on the throw blanket possibly because it smelled of our other dogs. 

       We knew nothing more about Bogey, really; he had been mostly an outside dog, we were told, but had been inside some of the time.  From the looks of his chewed up doghouse, he had spent a lot of time chained to that.  We have ten fully fenced acres, but we are retired and our dogs all live with us in every sense, spending a lot of time inside, sleeping upstairs in our large bedroom.  We decorate with dog beds, I tell any interested person, explaining the abundance of large, soft dog pads scattered throughout our house.  So when we got him home, we brought him inside alone, leaving our four females of various breeds in our big kennel so that we could introduce them to the new "top dog" one at a time. 

       Bogey came inside and immediately began peeing on everything inside the house.  With some dismay, we were afraid that he wasn't housebroken at all, a daunting task to attempt in a male dog of his age, but after doing several loads of laundry and using up all of our enzyme cleaner, I was relieved to see that he stopped peeing and thankfully didn't do it again. We brought three of our girls inside one at a time, all with no problems, but not our large American Staffordshire Terrier, Sunshine, more commonly called a Pit Bull, because she was not at all happy to see this big interloper on her turf and ferociously voiced her disapproval.  

       Having had problems in the past with two large dogs fighting incurably, we were very hesitant to test this new relationship and put off their introduction for five days until Sunshine had calmed down and seemed to accept that this was a permanent addition to her pack and that her hoped-for Alpha status wasn't going to happen.  It worked; when we finally tired of shuffling the two back and forth to the kennel, Sunshine just danced a little jig, flirted with her new "big boy" and wasn't a problem at all.  

       We took Bogey Bear to our vet for shots and a chip, and got him licensed, making him officially a Wagner.  We did still have one major problem to solve, however.  For some unfathomable reason, Sage, our 10 year old fixed female McNab was just irresistible to Bogey, who followed her constantly and insistently, not understanding why she was rejecting him.  I did a Google search and discovered that some people had good luck applying Vicks Vaporub to females; I dabbed some in key spots on Sage; Bogey sniffed and sneezed; his ardor visibly cooled.  

        At first we didn't quite trust him inside the house at night, so for the first week, about 9 p.m. each evening we took him out to our kennel for the night.  He would begin to cry, a low, mournful howling, groaning sound that made us cry too, so we'd go out and sit with him and hug him.  He might have been more than just lonely; he could have been grieving for his lost mistress, as we were grieving for our lost Caesar. The bond between us grew quickly; we were delighted to see how fast he was adapting to his new environment and to us; he isn't Caesar, but he is a beautiful Rottweiler with all their characteristics very evident.  We were more convinced than ever that our Caesar was guiding him when he began to sit and sleep in all the places Caesar did.  So when after he had been here eight days and we decided to try him inside for the night,  he came upstairs to sleep on the biggest bed in our room as if he was born to it.  Caesar grew up in that bedroom, first as a tiny puppy refusing to sleep in his crate, insisting that he was big enough to sleep on a big bed just like the older dogs. 

       I'm sure food has been a big part in Bogey Bear's acceptance of us as I doubt he ever ate as well as the dogs eat at our house.  His training at Walt's experienced hands is progressing well, too.  Yesterday was another hurdle passed:  we gave him a bath on the front lawn, with me sudsing him up with lavender Johnson's Baby Shampoo while Walt distracted him with bacon and hot dogs.  Now he smells sweet and his coat shines!

       When we leave the property and leave all five dogs loose, we always return with treats for them, teaching them that though we may leave them behind, we always return.  We were gratified to see Bogey Bear leading the pack yesterday, running faster than anyone else to meet us at our gate. 

       That this was fate is an inevitable conclusion to our story; we were facing a future without our beloved Rottweiler, and while we will miss Caesar forever, Bogey Bear is filling a very big hole and doing it remarkably well.

Rebecca Just Wagner

September 15, 2013

Last Harrah

A rediscovered gem from 1973, my rebellious days...

I originally got this published as a letter to the editor of the University of Nevada student newspaper.  At the time, I was married to the Chinese Lighting Director at Harrah's, raising horses and paying for them by working at Harrah's Club in Reno as a high limit Blackjack dealer.  Someone who saw this piece cut it out, copied it, and put the copies on all the upstairs bosses' desks at Harrah's; after which the employee counselor came downstairs, stood in front of my table and said, "Well you did it again, didn't you, Rebecca!"  No real problem; it gave them all a laugh.  The reason for the size regulation was so that nobody could hide casino chips in earrings, which anybody could see would be impossible with hoops. I still like the piece and remember the feelings very well...

EDITOR:
     For the past seven years, Harrah's Club and I have been engaged in a subtle warfare.  I resent being poured into a mold, stripped of all apparent individuality, and turned out onto the Blackjack table expected to be The Personality Kid.  Harrah's has an elaborate and explicit set of dress regulations, all of which I'm thoroughly familiar with and each of which I've stretched and bent many times.  One night recently, I was guilty of a grand total of six minor infractions of the dress code, yet somehow still managed to look like a little black-and-white puppet, just like everybody else.  The least obvious violation was my tiny, thin, inconspicuous gold-wire loop earrings, one-eighth of an inch larger than the diameter of a quarter, the code's maximum specified size.
     In any large operation, the managerial puppeteers periodically pull on everybody's strings, and on the night in question, a young pitboss began his little dance.  One can't blame him, really; he isn't paid to think or use his own discretion any more than I am, and being well-drilled in the fine art of following orders and an ambitious young man, he suddenly saw an obstacle along the yellow-brick-road to promotion - an impediment to his progress: my earrings!  Aha! Digging through the archives, he unearthed the long-buried phrase and presented it triumphantly to me to read.
     With a caustic comment on the admirable sharpness of his eyesight to have discovered so glaring an infraction so quickly, (I had been wearing them continuously for six months), I removed them and returned to my game.  When I was relieved for my break, I carefully hung them from my nose, and smiling benignly back at astonished grins, I pointed my chin at the ceiling and slowly marched out of the pit.  Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed my young pitboss, not a bad sort, really, his hand shading his eyes, scarlet with embarrassment and convulsed with laughter.  I think I made my point.  A word to the wise to all who work in a uniformed job:  Heaven help anyone whose individuality rears its ugly little serpentine head!

Rebecca Just Chang

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS - A Day In My Life On Our Farm In The Willamette Valley

'You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh; the fundamental things apply, as time goes by....'  I sing softly to myself.

My husband will be home soon.  Sometime this evening he will say to me,  "Did you exercise today?" 

"Of course," I reply with lifted eyebrows.

"What did you do?"

"Well, I began by mucking the horse stalls..."

"Oh," he says, his face falling slightly.  "Well, that's a good workout."

To put it mildly, I respond, unspoken. 

My husband is a personal trainer and body sculptor; he does marvelous things to his body in a gym on expensive equipment.   But workouts for me - time is so precious.

I derive great satisfaction from what I am able to do by myself.  A slight 125 pounds at 53 years old, I would be handicapped without my Rubbermaid two-wheeled cart.  I bought it as a present to myself last spring after wrenching my arms trying to balance the one-wheeled barrow with a heavy load.

My daily "workout" consists of repeatedly hefting a manure fork full of horse droppings and wet straw, (back, shoulders, arms) twisting it into the cart, (biceps, waist) and pushing it uphill (legs and glutes) up the driveway, down over the lawn to the dumping site, pressing the handles up over my head and tipping the contents out onto the compost pile, (triceps and pecs) turning and pulling the cart behind me, (posture, back, and triceps again) back up over the lawn and down to the upper barn.  (I know the terminology; you get the idea.)   

I fill the cart full of straw and steer it down to the lower barn where I spread straw in the horse stalls, then fill it again with grass hay cut from our own hay field every summer, stored in the lower barn.  I push the cart back uphill and throw the hay out into the sheep and llama pastures, more mud than grass at this time of year.  Then I carry three big, heavy buckets filled with grain out into the fields for the ewes and the rams.  I'm sure I work every muscle in my body, not in a way likely to sell many fitness manuals, but a way that makes sense to me.

Hay hooks are another great enabler.  With hooked extensions, my puny arms become amazingly strong, and I can maneuver great blocks of compressed grasses I couldn't begin to lift without them.  I began wielding mine more than 25 years ago, when I was a one-woman horse breeding/green breaking operation in Nevada.  The hooks were a gift from a dear friend, an old, wiry, grizzled, gap-toothed Oklahoma cowboy I met by lucky chance, who could do anything with a horse.  I absorbed his wisdom like a sponge; to this day, whenever I work with horses I ask myself  what he would do, as my final equine authority. 

Today I decide to give the ten pregnant ewes their first taste of green candy this lambing season.  I lamb late, hoping for good weather, so they are still five or six weeks away, their impending motherhood evident in swaying, stilted stride, swelling bodies atop impossibly spindly legs.  

I carefully balance the unwieldy, heavy, welded iron ladder almost vertically up against the cross beams in the upper barn, climb to the top and secure the ladder onto a pole with that great farm fix-all, a piece of baling twine.  Then I ease off, working my way around the pole, inching sideways onto a platform.  There is no floor here; a wrong step will send me falling into nothingness between the lofts.  My hands grip the pole; I don't look down until I'm safely on the alfalfa loft.  Then my hooked arm extensions lever, balance, and tumble three 120 pound bales down off the loft onto the gravel floor below.

I maneuver my way around the pole again to the top of the ladder and descend, then roll the bales up onto a wooden flat in the corner, my boots slipping on the feathered lining of a fallen barn swallow's mud nest.  The alfalfa looks unpromising, dusty and gray, but when I cut the strings on a bale, the blackish moldy shell cracks to reveal a leafy green inside, even though the bales are over two years old.  I call to my "girls" in a high, sing-song voice.  They run toward me; they love alfalfa time.  I count backs; six black, four white.  Or rather six charcoal/taupe, four sweet cream.  My fleeces are legendary, long, soft, and curly.  I ache for the time to spin again.  It's been awhile since I've felt the yarn form magically under my fingers.

The bulbs are up four to eight inches now, depending on the location in regard to the sun; some of them are forming heads.  In a week my yard will be a riot of daffodils, hundreds of golden, bobbing bonnets, but today it's early, treacherous February, and the temperature at three o'clock has already dipped to 33 degrees,  sending me back out into the chilling afternoon.  

I decide to clean and refill the eight big stock water troughs while the hoses still run.  I'm in luck; two of them are clean enough to just top off.  I don't top them every day because I have to let the water level drop down far enough to tip over for scrubbing, and many of them are heavier than I am.  Today I tip and fill five of them, water the fuchsias wintering in the greenhouse, then disconnect and drain all the hoses.  I plunge my numb, rubber-gloved hands into the ruff of my huge dog and constant companion, Yukon.  He has the thick, double coat of a great silver timber wolf, a not-too-distant ancestor, and is always warm.  He is beginning to shed, another harbinger of an early spring.  Tufts of soft dog wool cling to my rubber fingers.  He licks my frozen chin.

It has already dropped below freezing in the north pasture where the rams live; the hoses almost won't run.  That side is always colder.  On frozen mornings, I climb over the barbed wire fence to chop ice out of the water troughs with a flat-tined pitchfork, then lift and pitch the chunks out onto the ground so that they don't quickly freeze back together like cracked crystal jigsaw puzzles.  

In the rams' trough the ice is always thicker.  On very cold nights it freezes almost two inches, but as long as it's only on the top, the water lasts almost a week, and by then the weather has usually broken.  Western Oregon has a mild climate, thankfully.  When faucets freeze, lugging water in buckets is too hard a workout for me; it makes my arms lengthen, shoulders slope.  I'd rather slog through mud than slip on ice, 'though today I have to curl my toes to keep the mud from sucking the boots off my feet.

I sing softly:  'I'd like to swim in a clear, blue stream, where the water is icy cold; then go to town in a golden gown, and have my fortune told - just once, just once, just once before I'm old...."  I look down at my stained, baggy blue jeans full of barbed wire holes, and my vision clouds.  In my mind, I see myself as a dark-haired teenage girl, sitting at my piano playing and singing this song, when "The Fantastics" was new and life was a promise yet to come.  A lifetime of choices ago.

I still have the horses' water to do.  It is the most difficult, a 100 gallon tank I really struggle to tip before I can clean and refill.  I stand watching the water swirl into the tank, Oasis, our six year old Arabian mare, watching over my shoulder.  She turns her head and I breathe warmly into her nostril; we touch noses in silent communion, watching the water, my pale gloved hand light on her warm neck.  The wind is chill today; wisps of my white hair tickle my face as Oasis gently pulls the tie string of my hood.  

Her Mister Spock ears tuned toward us, our Peruvian/Arab filly, Amazing Grace, watches intently for any hint of apples appearing from my pockets.  Her head snakes forward; she bites the plastic bag of apple slices, swinging away, refusing to give it up.  I laugh and pry the bag from her teeth; two sets of gentle horse lips compete for the apples in my palm.  We have to fix the dripping faucet stem; it's getting worse.  I try to ignore it.  

It takes forever to fill 100 gallons.  I sing:  'I'd like to dance 'til two o-clock, or maybe dance 'til dawn; or if the band could stand it, just go on and on and on - just once, just once, before the chance is gone..'  So many years.  Vision blurs again.  Why is it so hard to sing that song?  'But I want much more than keeping house; much more, much more, much more!"

Tonight I am a piano player, my favorite thing to be.  I'm the primary pianist for a melodrama theater, and tonight I'm in a theatrical production, a mystery spoof on Humphrey Bogart.  I have selected over a hundred favorite songs, mostly from the thirties and forties, to play for two hours during dinner and dessert, requests and anything I want to play, like the Rhapsody In Blue, the Warsaw Concerto, Maple Leaf Rag.  And of course, Casablanca's As Time Goes By. 

A woman comes up with a request.  

"Don't your hands get tired?" she asks me.

"Never," I smile back.  I could play for days, weeks, months.  Some days, when I am at home alone, after doing the farm chores I sit at my piano almost all day, playing all the great classics, everything I love, losing all track of time.  I play from "Fake Books" or "Real Books" the professional pianists call them, big lead sheet books with just the melody line and chord notations so that I can improvise the rest.  That way I can't make a mistake; I can play anything, and most people listening don't realize I'm making it all up, instant arrantements, never the same twice.  

My piano was a bequest from a beloved grandmother, left to me because my concert pianist aunt didn't want it, a treasured possession I have moved all over the country with me since I was eleven years old.  When I play, in my mind I am in Carnegie Hall, and my fingers fly over the keys, stunned audiences gasping to their feet in spontaneous applause....Tonight I play the request:  'She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress...She may be waiting, just anticipating things she may never possess...While she's without them, Try a Little Tenderness...'

I stand in the receiving line after the play and a man wrings my hand.

"Oh I loved your music!"  he says.  "Fifty years ago was my favorite time!"  Life was new to him then.

The muscles in my scalp above my ears ache from smiling.  

Rebecca Just Wagner, 1997