After chatting with Dawn on the phone yesterday I had several dreams last night which included a marimba. In one of them I was preparing to play a Bach two part invention with another instrument. This is funny because one of the first pieces I played on my marimba was the Two Part Invention by Bach. I played one of the lines on my marimba and I think that my friend Dave Barber played the other on flute. I also recall that we performed this at my Dad’s church in Flint. But who knows?

In one of the other dreams I was playing marimba with other musicians. But it seems that we were all standing on a flimsy balcony like situation which was threatening to collapse and was moving in a dangerous way.

I realized today that my dupuytren’s contracture would not affect my marimba playing since one holds mallets when playing. I am planning on practicing marimba as well as think more seriously about composing music using it and other instruments. This composing was also part of my dreams and thoughts last night. Sheesh!

I forgot to mention that Dr. Doug Strong reached out to me on Facebook recently. His brother, Dave, died last year. The three of us lived on the same street in Flint Michigan. They were both a bit older than me. Dave played trumpet and Doug played reeds. Dave went on to be a shop steward in Flint like his Dad I believe. Doug went to U of M and studied premed. He also played in U of M orchestras or bands or something.

I had surmised that David had died. Like so many things on Facebook it wasn’t quite clear and I only figured it out well after his death so I didn’t sent flowers, otherwise I probably would have. Doug informed me that Dave indeed died of Covid. I thought maybe he had since he and his wife attended a fundamentalist church. Dave continued to do music all his life. After I figured out he died I did a playlist of tunes that made me think of them. They were mostly Tijuana Brass but I remember Dave doing an arrangement of the Rolling Stones song, Paint It Black, while it was still being played on the radio.

My current Shakespeare play I am reading is Timon of Athens. This morning I did a search of podcasts and found one about this play. The person narrating it played a section of rehearsal from a current Royal Shakespeare production of it. Then he played some recording of rehearsal. As I listened I realized that the role of Timon was being played by a woman.

Cool beans.

I noticed I had a significantly higher number of hits on my blog yesterday. It went from 12 hits on Tuesday to 39 yesterday. I didn’t check further about where the hits were coming from. When I have an unusual number of hits I figure that something triggered search engines to send more people than usual to my blog.

I am blogging earlier in the day today. It’s about noon. Eileen has an MRI this evening. They are checking her right inner ear for a benign tumor that might just possibly explain the differential between hearing loss in her left and right ear. This is a long chance but Eileen and her doctor decided together that it was worth finding out.