Concerto in E Minor, Opus 64, for Violin and Orchestra

I am listening to a recording of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. I can’t hear this piece without thinking about my friend Ann. We met in college in 1965 and were close friends until her untimely death 10 years ago.

She liked classical music and was fairly well informed about it, but I think she felt a little intimidated around me since my background in music was extensive.

Once back in the late 1970’s I visited her when she lived in Washington, D.C., and one pleasant evening we went for a walk down Embassy Row. As we strolled along in companionable silence, looking at all the fabulous sights, she began to hum. The tune she was humming was the theme of the first movement of this Mendelssohn concerto I’m listening to.

Suddenly, she stopped walking, grabbed me by the arm, and said happily, “Hey, get me! Humming Tchaikovsky!”

Bless her heart. I still miss her.

You have to break some eggs to make an omelet

Within the last few months I became a convert to cooking hard eggs in muffin tins in the oven. I experimented with only a few eggs at a time so as not to waste many. My first attempts failed, but I adjusted times and temperatures and muffin-cup liners and finally achieved what I thought was the ultimate method.

I kept a running account of my efforts on Facebook, surprised by how many people indicated they were waiting for my final "recipe." Once I achieved success, I became a tireless advocate for the baked hard-cooked egg. I swore I'd never boil eggs again.

Then a few weeks ago, for no reason I can think of, I ended up with a dozen eggs thus baked that would not peel right -- a layer of white adhered to and came off with the shell in several spots. It bordered on disaster.

For the first time since, I made hard eggs today, and I admit that I went back to boiling, with excellent results. Now, however, I am faced with the prospect of having to go on Facebook and recant. It will be embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as taking deviled eggs to a pot-luck that tasted good but looked like hell.

But I am reminded of what Thoreau said about speaking your mind in a loud voice today and again tomorrow even if it's different -- something like that. Wait. I need to look that up.

Here we go: “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”

Right. Except it wasn't Thoreau, it was Emerson. I always get those two guys mixed up.

Not when I lived in New Orleans

Once long ago I had a young guitar student whose name I don't recall but whom I remember as being a very nice girl, a little shy and what I would call wholesome.

She had the unfortunate habit of saying, "Oops," whenever she made a mistake while playing, which was often, sometimes so often that she hardly had time to take a breath before saying it again. After she finished playing, I would ask her, "Where in the music does it say, 'Guitarist says Oops'?" I never broke her of doing it.

One week I had assigned her to practice the next piece in her songbook, which happened to be "The House of the Rising Sun." The lyrics were printed after the music at the bottom of the page:

There is a house in New Orleans they call The Rising Sun.
It's been the ruin of many a poor girl, and, oh God, I know I'm one. 

I've got one foot on the platform; the other foot's on the train.
I'm going back to New Orleans to wear that ball and chain. 

Now mothers, tell your daughters not to do what I have done,
Spend their lives in sin and misery in the House of the Rising Sun.

At her lesson the next week, she was oops'ing her way through it when she stopped and said with a frown, "What's this song about?"

"Well," I said, hesitating because I felt delicacy was called for, she being fifteen and innocent and impressionable. "It's, um, about a house -- of ill repute."

"Ill repute?" said asked, furrowing her brow.

"Yes," I pressed on, "it's, uh, a house where men go to, um --"

"Do you mean a whore house?"

Uh-huh.

Check the Index

The Internet has revolutionized genealogical research, and its greatest treasures are historical records that have been indexed. Instead of combing through physical pieces of paper in the county clerk’s office or rolling through reels and reels of microfilm in the library basement, one can search online and in many cases find links to images of the actual birth record or census report or marriage license.

But somebody has to do the actual indexing, and that's what I've been doing for the past week, as part of a campaign by the FamilySearch.com* web site to make more records available to online researchers. They provide the images of the old documents, and I transcribe what I see.

I have done almost 1000 Cook County, Illinois, birth certificates for 1936 and 1937, including some births that occurred at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, where I was born and also had my tonsils out.

What I’ve enjoyed even more, however, is transcribing mortality schedules, which are supplements to the federal census. As they went from door to door interviewing people for the census, the enumerators were required to ask if anybody in the household had died during the preceding year. If so, the deceased’s name, age, race, place of birth, month of death, and cause of death were recorded.

The ones I did were from 1860, 1870, and 1880. The various causes of death are fascinating and include some of those old-fashioned terms like dropsy, consumption, and childbed fever, plus things nobody dies of any more (usually), such as typhoid, scarlet fever, small pox, diphtheria, and cholera. In Shelby County, Illinois, in 1870, there were an inordinate number of infants who died of hives.

There were accidents (kicked by horse, run over by wagon), one suicide by shooting, and there's no wonder that some of these things could kill you: amputation of arms, paralysis of bowels, and cancer in the eye.

In one 1880 schedule, the cause of death of a 64-year-old man was given as “old age.”

I guess I'm on borrowed time.

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*FamilySearch is “a service provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

A Nose for News

When I was growing up in Palatine, Illinois, there was a weekly newspaper, the Palatine Enterprise, which came out on Thursdays. Our neighborhood, called Orchard Hills because all the streets had tree names, had a social column, as did other named sections and subdivisions of town. The woman who wrote it called my mother often to find out what the Knez family was up to.

Sometimes our comings and goings were more or less newsworthy, such as my appearance in a piano recital or my brother attending summer camp, but mostly it was mundane and trivial in the extreme. There are numerous reports of our having dinner at my grandparents' house on a Sunday or having relatives visiting from out of town. Here, for example, is an item from February 24, 1955:

Mrs. Betty Knez of Cedar st. is enjoying a visit from her mother, Mrs. Ralph Weatherford, of Litchfield, Ill., this week. Last Thursday Mrs. Knez and Mrs. Lee Vogeler, also of Palatine, took a bus trip into Chicago to do some shopping.

And how about this fascinating little tidbit from September 15, 1960:

Al Knez of Cedar st. attended the machine show at the amphitheatre last Saturday.

There is one piece, however, that I have never forgotten. It appeared on March 18, 1965:

Jan Knez and a co-worker, Miss Trudy Glovits of Arlington Heights, stayed in the city after work last Friday to have dinner and attend a performance of the Smothers Brothers at the Opera House.

That’s all true, except that my co-worker’s name was Trudy Benson. While giving the details to the social reporter lady, my mother couldn't remember my friend’s last name, so she made one up, assuming nobody from Arlington Heights would ever see it.

But Glovits?  I have no idea where she came up with that one.