March 30, 2025
LAVA Center Intergenerational Choir
Put together in 48 hours.  They did great.  





Outrageously ugly day.  Truly!   It was gray, rainy, cold, and just north of us it was ice and a lot of electric outages.    I warmed up chicken soup and I ate hot dogs. Meals were made up of comfort food.   And at 3 I went to hear the concert.



A group of about 50 kids and adults came together to work with a gentleman who is a sacred music professor.  He and a two local musicians worked with 2 after school programs and about 30 adults and put on 2 days of concerts.  Yesterday the kids performed, today some of the kids joined the adults and they made up an intergenerational choir.  They sang spirituals and learned about song as a contemplative study.  The audience was moved, people were visually affected as they came out of the concert into the social hall of the church.




The day was also full of odd curiosities.   I was going through poetry and putting together a few more submissions and I found this collection of poems I wrote two Decembers ago.  A few of them took place on Signal Hill, so I felt it was important to put one up.   There was also one I had written about Richard Chamberlain.  About an hour later I heard he died today at 90.  I posted it on fb.  So here's a Signal Hill poem. 


Comstock Lane was dug into the

Signal Hill hillside and on one side 

a 15 foot embankment lined the road.

On the other side, houses were built.

 

Before Freddy moved in

when I was just old enough

to go out on my own,

I would crawl on all fours

to the top of that embankment.

Feeling like the king of the mountain

 I‘d slide down

pulling soil and rocks all

the way to the bottom,

my shorts layered with dirt.

Laughing, I’d crawl slowly

back up to the top

feel high up and tumble back down,

filthy, damp, happy.

 

I don’t know when I stopped

believing it was fun to tumble

down a short hillside

my clothes encrusted with dirt.

I wonder if plant life took over

roots filling the loose soil so you wouldn’t slide?

Or did I just grow old?

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