Even in death, Andr�s continues to educate me musically. I sang three hymns in Latvian this afternoon. Interesting language; sort of a cross between Swedish and Ukranian.

No, don�t ask me what I sang. I have an odd linguistic talent that enables me to read a foreign language and make it sound like I know how to speak it. I don�t know how I do it; it involves accents somehow, though. I�m just good with words. It�s all in how it sounds to the ear.

Funerals are strange. If you want a seat, you have to arrive early, but no one wants to talk, so you sit in silence for ages until the family arrives. There are never enough seats (except at Eric�s funeral this spring; there was plenty of room in the synagogue, but that was the only funeral I�ve been to that had adequate seating), so people stand in the side aisles and at the back of the church. I�ve been paranoid about being late for funerals ever since the funeral of one of my best friends in my first year of university, where I arrived right on time and had to stand in a crowd at the back of the church, so today we arrived forty minutes early.

This service was one of the nicest I�ve been to. Even though Andr�s was taken from us so suddenly, the congregation was there to honour him, not for consolation. I wish more funerals could be as this one was: a commemoration instead of grieving. Yes, death is always a shock; yes, we are left, bereft and confused; but in the end, it is ourselves we weep for. If we gather, it should be to celebrate the deceased�s life and accomplishments. Mourning our loss always seems so selfish, somehow, when set against the brilliance and joy of the days and years lived by someone we all loved and respected.

I love the way my circle of friends counts down to Hallowe’en as most people count down to Christmas.

(And it even has nothing to do with the fact that a large chunk of the aforementioned circle is Pagan.)

Proof of my good taste:

Ingredient listing for Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar: Milk Chocolate (sugar, milk ingredients, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, soya lecithin, natural and artificial flavour).

Ingredient listing for a Neilson Jersey Milk chocolate bar: Condensed milk, sugar, cocoa butter, unsweetened chocolate, butter oil, soya lecithin, natural flavour.

No wonder I prefer Jersey Milk bars. They don’t add fake chocolate flavour to it. And what the heck is a “milk ingredient” anyway?

No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.

It’s over. My acclaimed return to the stage of retail (a limited-run engagement) is finished. I’m back in retirement.

Body count: zero. I’m still alive; customers are still alive; no co-workers were harmed during the course of this encore performance.

I learned a lot from this past week. The primary thing, of course, is that I was absolutely right to leave retail. There were other things, too, though, that put a few worries to rest. For example, it confirmed that the reason I left sales after eleven years is completely due to the customers, and not the actual work of running a bookstore. It also confirmed that I enjoy teaching more than working retail (not a surprise, but nice to know). And this week also proved to me that no one resents my departure from the store, and everyone really enjoyed having me back. Okay, so I’m insecure: I was worried about what management and staff really thought of me. You know how you have those sort of acquaintances where you don’t see them for a while and you run into them, and they’re distant and you wonder if you were ever truly friends? I was tremendously afraid people would be distant, proving to me once and for all that I was nobody special. Everyone was thrilled to see me, however, sharing news and making lunch dates, and I frequently heard comments to the tune of, “It’s so good to have you back.”

After work I taught a two-hour introductory survey of divination methods last night, and it went just swimmingly. I knew I was teaching it, of course, and I had all my handwritten notes in a notebook (written on a GO train in July, if I remember correctly), but it didn’t sink in until the end of the day on Wednesday thanks to the chance comment of a client. I realised that I hadn’t truly prepared the class, and as this would be the first time I was teaching it, I needed something a little more substantial than three 5 x 7″ pages of notes. So home I went, weary from a day of work, and spent my anniversary evening in front of the computer while my husband watched TV. My usual practice is to think about the new class for a few days, then sit down the day I am to teach it and type out the scribbled notes that have accumulated over those days of thought. Well, I completely forgot that I was working the day I’d be teaching this new workshop, and that I’d have to do it some other way, which unfortunately ended up with the two of us in separate rooms for two hours, and then falling into bed from exhaustion.

The workshop was a success, however, and I can add it to my roster of classes to offer again. I think perhaps another reason the knowledge that I had to prepare it slipped my mind can be attributed to the fact that my past three or four classes have been cancelled due to lack of registration. It makes sense; September is back-to-school month, and eighty percent of my class attendees are university students, who at this point are still settling in. The last thing on their minds is registering for extracurricular workshops! Looking at the registration book last night, though, I observed that October is already looking better, much to my pleasure.

I find teaching to be an odd experience. So much of it takes place out of the classroom, before the students even get there. When I develop a new workshop, I’m working in a vacuum; other than having a topic that has been generated due to observation of client interest in the store, there’s nothing to indicate the outline at all. I decide the direction, what information to give, what information to discard, the format, the books and web sites to recommend for further research, the exercises, and so forth. Alone at home, out of context, I always create a workshop that seems flat and about half an hour long. In action, though, it always springs to life and ends up pushing the two-hour time frame. The sweetest part, however, is the unsolicited thanks I get from excited students at the end of a class. When I then ask if this is what they were looking for, if it was what they expected when they signed up, inevitably I get an enthusiastic confirmation, and I can breathe a sigh of relief. I always ask if they have any suggestions of information they think I should add, areas we didn’t cover, which I think is an essential part of the teacher-student dynamic. It’s a dialogue, after all; as one of my Liberal Arts professors used to say, pounding his fist on the long table about which twenty of us were sitting, “This is a seminar, not a lecture!” A teacher who doesn’t listen to his/her students is a teacher who will quickly become unpopular and out of touch with the demographic to which s/he is contracted to communicate.

Enough about work. I intended to sleep in this morning, but after a week of getting up early here I am, awake and thinking. At least I’m in bed with my laptop. My plans for the day involve reading books, listening to music while doing nothing much, a bit of sewing, and maybe catching a bus downtown to stop by HMV to pick up a CD that I ordered in June which has finally arrived, and possibly that new shirt that I saw a week or two ago as well. Tonight, the company of good friends at a party; tomorrow, teaching in the morning and the memorial service for Andr�s in the afternoon. And on Sunday, my husband and I will finally be able to appreciate one another’s company and celebrate our wedding anniversary.

Sometime on Tuesday night, while I was raising cider in honour of MLG, my conductor passed away “peacefully”, I am told, in the hospital.

Life can be very cruel, sometimes.

Glenn Gould! Glenn Gould! Glenn Gould!

Yes, it�s his seventieth anniversary. Most of you probably don�t know that I am a massive Gould fan. Those who do are probably scratching their heads and saying, �I thought she got over that. Isn�t this her third wedding anniversary? Shouldn�t she be blogging about marital bliss?�

My marital bliss today involves being thrilled that my significant other enjoys Gould as well, thanks to me. Our first official outing was to a Gouldian book launch at the NAC in Ottawa and a film festival on Gould�s work (duly reported to the F-Minor group!). And, of course, a couple of years later, completely by coincidence, we were married on September 25th: Glenn Gould�s birthday. (It meant that I had to miss the bi-annual international Gould conference that I had been planning on attending, but well, after weighing priorities, I think everything came out all right, don�t you?)

No, actually, my husband woke me up an hour before I had to be up and brought me breakfast in bed this morning, and a rose, and tea. Very sweet. I couldn�t eat it, mind you (I can�t eat until I�ve been awake for a good hour or so), but it was a lovely thought.

He left, I turned on the radio, and lo and behold, it�s all Glenn Gould, all day on CBC Radio Two!

The agonising and unfair reality of things, however, means that I am working at the store today and I can�t listen to it. Argh! They�re interviewing people he worked with, playing clips of interviews done with him, asking Canadian and international musicians and producers for their opinions of his work, and playing Gould, Gould, Gould� fourteen whole hours of broadcast. I�ll hear a couple of hours tonight, but I wish I could hear it all!

I discovered Glenn Gould by buying a copy of his 1955 Goldberg Variations in ye old Sam the Record Man downtown. The playing was rough, spilling over with emotion and drive, and I was hooked. I did research, bought academic analyses, acquired as many recordings by Gould as possible that wasn�t the work of twentieth century composers (Bach, Bach, Bach!), and ended up outlining and writing a third of a thesis on Gould�s dual use of performance/recording and the written word as communication about music, for he wrote many articles and many of his own liner notes as well. I was supervised by a professor of drama in the English department, who was excited about the project and foresaw an examination board made up of people from the music faculty and the English department. Everything was green-lighted� and then my advisor vanished from the face of the earth. He didn�t return e-mails, didn�t return phone messages, didn�t respond to the drafts I left for him in his mailbox. The project trickled to a stop as I lost confidence in myself and the thesis, and my life went to hell in a handbasket as my first wedding was called off and various other problems surfaced in my life. Ultimately the thesis was abandoned, replaced by my brilliant (yes, I reread it recently) thesis on Nostalgia in the British Academic Novel: Reconstructing the Past in Thatcher Britain (available on microfiche, by interlibrary loan, and somewhere federal in Ottawa where all theses written in Canada go to rest in glory). This means that I have the bare bones of a major Gould work somewhere on a floppy disk (I shudder� it could be anywhere).

In the meantime, I was an active member of F-Minor, a mailing list about Gould�s works. In fact, if I search my birth name on the Internet, the first thing that comes up is a post to F-Minor from the archive. I have in the past few years received e-mails from strangers asking me questions about Gould and Timothy Findley for school papers as a result of this archive still being up and available to the public, which is flattering and slightly time-warpish. I unsubscribed from the list not long after the thesis fell apart, being so very hurt by the callousness of the vanishing professor (who went on to retire and not inform several students he was supervising), but going back through it this morning has me convinced that I�ll re-subscribe, if it�s still active.

Since I can�t enjoy the festivities today, do it for me! Visit the official web site at http://glenngould.com/gg/; or listen to CBC Radio Two�s Variations on Glenn Gould via the airwaves or on the Internet (Radio Two, down on the lower left), even if it’s just for a few minutes to get a sense of who this man was; and read about it on the CBC web site. I�m going to be late for work now because I blogged so long about a topic that I love, but since I�m not the one with the keys� as Bill would say, �neener, neener�!