Eileen and had a nice chat with Sarah today. Saturday is our usual day to zoom with her. Eileen’s morale is slightly improved. She is making some good headway with her new loom. I think that helps. The house stuff has really gotten her down. I will think of more ways to shoulder some of this responsibility. We discussed me contacting the builders who installed our upstairs screen door and the siding. I suggested we should badger them and threaten to go public on Facebook with our complaints. We’ll see. They may not be at fault or at least not legally responsible.

My friend Rhonda texted me a question about my harpsichord (Is it an 8′?). I’m not sure if she is going to end up using it. I will contact her next week and find out. Since if she is planning on using it she has already told me they could return it to my home instead of the church. This would save me figuring out how to get it from the church to the house.

Eileen and I could easily move the marimba by ourselves since it disassembles into manageable sections. I would dearly love to get every little thing out of the church since it’s been a while since I retired.

If I have to move it myself, my next step is to call Mary the administrator and find out if Jen or Jim received my texts from before Thanksgiving and if they have thoughts about who could help me move the harpsichord.

Either way I will probably check with Mary about recommendations for someone to repair our broken window.

I have been learning about the history of public hangings in the U.S. I’m reading The Death Penalty by Stuart Banner. I had no idea that public executions were the kind of event they were. I was surprised to learn that public sermons were usually an important part of this event. In the American South, these sermons persisted at public hangings into the 20th century.

Banner points out that unlike executions in England which were carried out by a public executioner (who was often despised), executions in the U.S. were usually the responsibility of local sheriffs who did not relish this part of their duties. Often sheriffs did whatever they could to get someone else to take charge of it and build the scaffolding, run the execution, and then dispense with the corpse. Sometimes people who had been sentenced to die were able to commute their sentence by serving as an executioner. This is more understandable when you factor in the many trivial crimes which resulted in death by hanging.

Banner meticulously documents hanging after hanging. After a while I realized that the period of these deaths is also the period of many of the folk songs in my Child Ballad collection. I read through some today and found at least one reference to a hanging.

I am still very interested in the melodies of these ballads. I continue to entertain composing some settings maybe along the lines of what Bartok did with folk melodies or even some modest attempts to emulate Copland.

I had a busy day yesterday. I took my Subaru in to replace the tail light we broke while moving mattresses. Then I went and had my new lenses installed in my frames. Eileen waited in the car because she wasn’t very impressed with the lens store people. Previously they had been haphazard about their approach to masking. But yesterday everyone was masked up. Unlike the auto place where I was the only one wearing a mask. Then Eileen and I went to the bank and talked to a banker about our finances. This was a hundred per cent better than the visit with the person at Edward Jones.

At some point Eileen was very unhappy to discover that the door on our upper landing had come away from the siding.

She reported it to the people who installed the door and siding about three years ago. We haven’t heard back from them yet but Eileen had trouble sleeping last night because of worrying about this. This morning I called State Farm about it. They told me what my deductible would be $1,135 and that I should wait until I have heard from the builders before putting in a claim.

This morning I made bread while listening to the Brandenburg Concertos of Bach. Eileen and I had fresh bread for breakfast. After breakfast I went grocery shopping. When I came home I could still smell the bread.

I am continuing to enjoy The Book of Form and Emptiness by Oseki.

“We books would say … that story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.” Ruth Oseki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

I also am continuing to enjoy retirement and beginning to understand what it means for me. In many ways I am returning to my self. In my dream last night I was riding with my parents to go to a restaurant. In the dream I was exulting on not having a job now and realizing that I could do whatever I wanted to do including going with my parents to a restaurant.

Eileen and I had a conversation about our differing styles. Yesterday when we got home from getting stuff done all Eileen could think about was the door upstairs. I told her that I was feeling like we had accomplished quite a bit. I told her that I’m like the character in the Ozeki novel, Benny. I am overly sensitive and acting like a grown up takes a lot of emotional energy from me. So we agreed to work on stuff next week. We also agreed that we would touch base on our finances on Wednesdays. This is mostly for Eileen’s benefit. I continue to have trouble believing in the idea of money. But I don’t want Eileen to feel overwhelmed with thinking about money.

It’s kind of like church, just because I don’t believe in money doesn’t mean I can’t function in regards to it. The only difference is that now with church I don’t have function any more.