The same quarreling pairs visit me every January -- Hope and her sister Fear, Determination and his shy wife Reluctance, Confidence and her bullying boyfriend Despair. Today is the third day of what should have been the first full week of "normal." It is my friend Bernardine's birthday and I haven't prepared a card for her (we have a humorous history going back thirty years of my failure to send her a greeting) because it needs a letter to go with it and I haven't been able to marshal the mental resources to do that. Lynn realized today that, among other responsibilities that escaped her attention this week, she forgot to draw up the schedule of Key Club members' attendance at the Kiwanis luncheons for January.

This morning I wrote a three-page remembrance of Mr. Rosenthal. I took it with me on my shiva call where I sat in his book-filled living room offering what little comfort I could to his wife and daughter. His granddaughter crawled about, played peek-a-boo, laughed. The writing, requested by the family, was mostly for her, for her future siblings and cousins who will never know their extraordinary grandfather.

Then I went to a gift shop I like, bought a slab of handmade soap for Lynn to take to her host family this weekend when she attends the district chorus festival, and a pair of embellished socks for myself. (My feet are the only feature of my body I have always liked and taken pleasure in, and to dress them well makes me feel pretty.)

This evening we attended Lynn's winter band concert. Lynn plays flute only in the concert band, not the marching band. All marching band members are also part of the concert band, and both groups are directed by the same person. As in many schools, marching band at Susquehanna is something of a cult, and there is some, well, tension between those who march and those who merely sit and play.

To be honest, I've harbored a certain negative prejudice about band. I was a string player for many years in several school and community orchestras, and somewhere along the line I picked up the notion that symphonic band music was the stepchild of the classical repertoire. Perhaps it was because most of the music I heard was adaptations of works intended for full orchestra, Beethoven symphonies and Tschaikovsky ballet scores with clarinets standing in for the violins. Maybe there weren't good original compositions for symphonic bands, or maybe those who directed the groups I heard didn't seek them out.

The band director at my high school had a similar prejudice against orchestra. He was the first "band as cult" leader I knew -- band was your whole life, your family, your religion. My school didn't have an orchestra, but I needed his signature and his participation in the local music educators' association in order to take part in the interscholastic activities that were available to me. In my junior year I was excluded from a number of these events because he'd neglected (refused, actually) to attend some meetings. (Yes, I know, it's been almost forty years. It's been almost fifty years since Mrs. Stone of fourth grade, and I'm not quite finished being mad at her.)

I've detected the same attitude in (or perhaps projected it upon) Lynn's band director. Marching band is the premiere activity, and those outside it are just that, outside it. The attitude spills over into the school musical. Perfectionism rules and rehearsals can be called capriciously or held overtime so parents are at a loss to schedule family time or, worse, left sitting in the cold on the parking lot.

For several years now it's been my practice to write a letter of thanks and praise (almost extravagant in its tone) to Lynn's choral director expressing my appreciation of the winter concert, given a few days before my holiday party. I send it by e-mail and copy it to the principal and the superintendent. I haven't done the same thing for the band concert, which comes barely a month later, and I've wondered why. After all, the music is no less carefully chosen and prepared, and the kids are no less sincere in the efforts they devote to learning and presenting it. 

I'm sure it has something to do with what poet Linda Pastan calls "all the vacancies of January." It's a less romantic time, and I guess we're pretty saturated with both receiving and extending fa-la-las and good will. 

The concert tonight began with a piece called "Proudly We Hail." About eight or ten bars into it some audience members realized that what they were hearing was the national anthem in theme and variations, and one by one they began to stand. After nearly everyone was up, the music changed, and we were hearing theme and variations on "My Country 'Tis of Thee." People started to sit down. The the music changed again, playing both melodies in counterpoint. Now we didn't know what to do. 

When the band director turned around to acknowledge our applause and saw us all standing he laughed and apologized for not including a note in the program indicating that it was not necessary to stand. He'd thought of it, he said, but that was one more thing that fell through the cracks this week.

It's been a difficult week for all of us. We started out so resolutely last Thursday wanting just to get back to normal, only to find that normal would be longer in coming. I'd seen the band director at Mr. Rosenthal's funeral, and tonight in his remarks he made an allusion to our loss that was tender and sincere, subtle enough to be effective without being maudlin. I was surprised, and touched.

Music does have charms to soothe, and as I sat with what he described as a kaleidoscope of musical textures washing over me I looked at our beautiful kids and thought, we have a shared history, we are moving into a shared future, and we'll be all right because we have each other.

And tonight, still mindful of the rabbi's injunction to speak my love, I wrote a note of thanks and praise to the band director, and copied the principal and the superintendent.