The Note

Driving the bleak arteries of west mid-town, I hear an installment of "Musicians in Their Own Words" on Morning Edition. Cynthia Phelps, principal violist with the New York Philharmonic, speaks about the role of the viola section in shaping the sound, pace and texture of the orchestra.

Phelps calls herself a mediator. The spot ends with her saying, "I try and create a balanced middle ground. It really resonates with the way I am as an individual."

It's deeply pleasing to hear someone else say this, the same thing I feel about my role as an editor. I had never bothered to imagine that a musician might see herself this way.

Earlier in the piece, Phelps describes the opening of the second movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, in which the celli get the melody but the violas control the pacing and mood. She plays a lick of the cello part, then a recording of the actual piece begins.

This is music that too few people know, a rich swath of velvet melody, really much more singable than the first movement. (This is, I guess, the flashback, the tune you're humming just before Fate knocks on your door.)

So, yes, the celli are perfect, and now I'm listening for the the violas, watching the highway's yellow lines. Concrete walls and exit ramps, the overcast sky--this all is the empty theater for the music. After the opening duet, the full orchestra comes in and still--this is the Philharmonic, of course--the music is just as tender as before. At the last note of the phrase, where the music swells and holds, then drops as lightly as an eyelid, I am done in. I get teary and choked up.

To be honest, this probably has as much to do with my own sense of failure as a musician as it does with the actual music. Still, it's beautiful, and I need beauty. And it's powerful; all music is, the most powerful thing I know.

Phelps unabashedly acknowledges that one of the reasons she likes being a non-melody-getting viola player is that she has control at the base of the music. This control is not a dictatorship, though, because the power of music is a collective power. I think I could write more about this, but I'm not going to now. This post was just supposed to be about that one note.

Hot ... Now

On impulse, I stopped by the donut shop yesterday, shortly after 2 p.m., meaning to quickly get a donut and leave.

When I stepped through the doors, the burgeoning heat of afternoon sun through all the windows and heat still radiating from the now-quiet ovens slowed me down. I saw that everything was slow.

Behind the counter, a man mopped the same tiles over and over, in long flat oval pushes of a mop. The women in front of me in line carefully read the signs listing the price of donuts, and read them again. One of them asked a question about the price of donuts. The clerk listened, then thought about his answer.

When at last he brought the boxes of doughnuts to the woman, his mouth turned up ever so slightly at the corners in a slow smile. The smell of doughnuts, like a boa, wound around my throat and I was breathless. The doughnuts on trays beneath the glass case became, almost imperceptibly, browner.

I paid for my purchase in exact change and laid the coins into the palm of the clerk in separate piles, dimes and quarters. His skin was warm and dry. I folded the top of my doughnut bag one more time and left.

Little Thoughts on Music

Folk music Music that folks can sing or play from memory.

Folks The down-home people, the people in the cereal aisle, the people with a little hole in the elbow of their favorite sweater.

"Folk music" has come to have a musty smell. It supposedly lives only in church basements on Thursday nights when the banjo players and the singing family from the hills come to town to fiddle around. But I think that, for example, Bruce Springsteen is truly a folk musician.

The Quiet Dentist

My dentist works in half of a small brick building that looks like it has always been in that spot, trembling close to the ground while other buildings pop up around it. The waiting room has four wicker-seated chairs that could be new, or very old and scarcely used.

K-, the secretary, is also in charge of clipping the bib around patients' necks and handing them two tissues. She has a slight speech impediment and sounds as if she's chewing on her tongue when she talks. I am sure that the circa 1985 Toyota Camry wagon with the "Have you hugged your cat today?" sticker always in the parking lot is hers. However, it's possible that she came with the building and the car is the dentist's.

We found Dr. S- S- back when we had dental insurance but only one car. He was the only dentist in the Yellow Pages who was on our plan and on a bus line. Actually, he is listed after a Dr. I- S- at the same address, who I presumed was his father, perhaps dead.

Dr. S- is not a friendly man, although he can make sincere small talk for a few minutes. He doesn't smile much, which also means that he doesn't fake-smile. 1 has seen him several times and seems to like his quiet, earnest manner.

I used to wonder if Dr. S- became a dentist only because his father was one. His room is so small and so unchanging, though not quite joyless. A photograph his son took in 3rd grade of a bright yellow tree beside a large tombstone hangs on the wall. A window looks out toward the road.

The pale grey-green reclining chair, like the waiting room chairs, seems both old and new at the same time. I have only twice encountered another patient before or after my visit.

Why does anyone become a dentist? Today as I sat in the chair, squinting up at the ceiling, I wondered if the profession attracts methodical, obsessive people. A mouth, a domain with precise and controllable limits. Thirty-two subjects to be washed, dressed, fed and patted on the head, right to left and top to bottom. Do people become dentists because they imagine they will like the job, or because they ask, "How hard could it be?" Or do they become dentists because they need to, because they must bring order to something in this world and the mouth is a logical place to start?

Dr. S- has become noticeably greyer over the past seven years. He is entirely medium in height and build, with grey eyes and a smooth, medium-sized face and nose. His two sons differ widely in ages, the products of different marriages. I know this from our first visit, when he seemed to be trying to make us feel comfortable about bringing 1 there. My husband has never returned, saying Dr. S- is too rough in his handling of the tooth-scraping tools. This is true, or at least Dr. S- never asks if one is "doing all right."

Last month, I took 1 and 2 for a visit. While 1 was in the chair, I had to take 2 to the bathroom. We passed a second exam room, just as narrow, one that I had never known was there. The door was open, and I could see the white hair and white dentists' jacket of a man sitting, his back to me, in the patient's chair, slightly reclined, reading the sports section of the daily paper.

Surely it was Dr. I- S-, the father. Maybe he sits there every day, reading the newspaper for a couple hours. Maybe he sees a patient or two, or maybe not. Just before lunch, maybe he gets up and stands at the doorway of his son's exam room and asks him if he's hungry. Maybe they look out the window together and consider the options.

Super-Grouch

1: What's wrong, Mom?
Me: People keep asking me questions.

I think this is possibly the funniest thing I've ever said.

A Matter of Taste

I've been so sick, ugly sick. My body's capacity to manufacture mucus has astonished me. It has, actually, humbled me.

I started blowing my nose the Thursday before Thanksgiving and I still haven't stopped. Although I was most miserable--with fatigue and fuzzy-headedness--just a few days in, the strangest part of my illness beset me after the first nine days. For four days, I couldn't smell or taste at all. I've never had that experience before--muted senses, yes. But this was an entire loss of both functions.

Eating was joyless, even disgusting. Coffee, stripped of its flavor, is starkly a drug, chicken is dry flesh that refuses to be chewed quickly. Lettuce is even more pointless than usual.

It was unbelievable that I could tear a basil leaf right under my nose and not smell a thing, while someone sitting several feet away could easily catch the scent. For the sake of being attentive, I tried to put words to what my mouth was experiencing: a square of Hershey's chocolate felt thick, like curtain of very soft heavy cloth loosely wrapped around my tongue. I thought I could tell it was sweet. Coffee was like prickly sawdust. Granola was like biting the sound of falling dishes.

Well, I just made that one up right now. My most recent batch of granola wasn't the best to begin with anyway.

My smell and taste has been fading back in for the past two days. Oddly, as it was fading out, I didn't even realize what was happening. I remember eating Thanksgiving dinner with extended family and thinking, almost subconsiously, that it wasn't very delightful. Two days later, I wondered why the blueberries my mother served with the pancakes were so bland. At lunch, I could taste the vinegar in the souse my father waxed nostalgic over (souse? oh, never mind), but by the time we drove home to Virginia and my husband cooked supper, I had lost it all. I had a mouth was full of rice and I realized I was chewing soggy cotton batting. Then I took a bite of kim chee and my mouth ignited. That's when I knew something was wrong--I haven't experienced kim chee as a spicy food for nearly 10 years. But without taste, my naked tongue was cowed by the capsaicin.

It was a sad stretch of days, being without smell and taste. I hoped that my senses would return all at once, like a light switched on, and the glorious music would blare and I would taste apples! coffee! cheese! cranberries! green beans! like never before! But they're just creeping back and all I can do is swear to myself that I will appreciate them wholeheartedly for the rest of my life.

That's Neither Hair nor There

There's a barber shop in our neighborhood, owned by a neighborhood resident and fitted with grand old barbershop chairs, the kind that have an ornate metal footplate.

It also shows art on its walls and has a nails table.

I wanted to make an appointment there for a haircut, so I looked in the yellow pages, first under "Hair." O, the world is not that simple. I was directed either from "Hair Cutting" to "Haircutters & Stylists" or from "Hair Dressing" to "Beauty Salons."

Oddly, there are fewer than 2 dozen entries under "Haircutters & Stylists." It must be too straightforward. Or maybe too dissonant: if you just want a cut, you don't care about style.

Where does the term "hairdresser" come from? Who still uses it? I turned to "Beauty Salons." I didn't find what I was looking for.

Could it be, that in spite of its art gallery pretensions, its fingernail attentions, and, on top of it all, its female-turned-male one-who-cuts-hair named Cupid, our local facility is actually a Barber Shop?

It does, in fact, have "Barber Shop" in its name. I don't know why I was surprised to find it under that yellow pages heading.

My husband--he goes to a barber shop. It has one chair and one old Mr. G- with a pair of scissors and a razor. It's filled with plants and old men watching Godzilla movies. I've never been in; I doubt Mr. G- has cut a woman's head of hair in the past 20 years, if ever. Mr. G- charges $5 for a cut and used to try to give my husband the student rate of $4. Now that's a barber shop.