1995

Greetings!

This should set a new lateness record for the generic Christmas letter. My apologies! I had to schedule jaw surgery for my 2-week Christmas vacation, and all the preliminary appointments, tests, hospitalization, convalescence, frequent post-op doctor appointments and general low energy levels turned the early winter into a Black Hole. [All for nothing, as it turned out; an alleged problem of the salivary gland turned out to be merely an enlarged muscle!] Thank you for all your Christmas cards and letters, which provided a bright spot in an otherwise dismal holiday season.

Now that I’m on “summer vacation” from the school library job, I’m trying to catch up on the backlog of my own work, including this letter.

Activities for 1995 were as usual highlighted with musical or art events. I’ve also been involved with the small, struggling local historical society and its newsletter. (Very few people want to do any work, hence the struggle.) But I was able to organize a roster of people to man our display table in the “Maritime Pavilion” (AKA the “history tent”) at the Harbor Festival, and I loaned a charcoal portrait my father had drawn during the 1930s of a grizzled old fisherman called “Johnny off the Whaler” for this exhibit. (It seems there was still whaling activity along this coast during the ‘30s, and the artists apparently talked this fellow into posing for their sketch club.)

I attended a Monet exhibit in San Francisco--works from his WORST years, when cataracts had ruined his vision; a very poor idea for an exhibit, in my opinion. But there were a couple of lovely paintings from his earlier period that made it worthwhile.

It was most gratifying, on the other hand, to see some of the BEST works by my father (A. Harold Knott) in exhibits at the Monterey Museum. Two (“The Sand Bar” and “The Golden Shore” are still on display, as the Lure of the Sea exhibit has been extended (at the Museum’s La Mirada satellite building).

American Association of University Women about my father’s career, and I showed a number of his paintings at this event. The presentation was warmly received, and spurred afew members to trek up to Monterey to have a look at the Museum exhibit.

I also loaned one of my father’s paintings. “Deserted Church, Cayucos,” for the Morro Bay Presbyterian Church’s centennial celebrations. The church in nearby Cayucos had been abandoned for some years owing to changing demographics, and within two years after my father did his painting (1928 or 29) the church was totally dismantled and a school subsequently built on the site.

San Francisco proudly celebrated the 50th anniversary of the United Nations with an array of events, the festive and joyous mood of which was all out of synch with the nearuselessness of the UN’s “peacekeeping” in the Balkans. But one could enjoy the events for their own sake, at any rate. I saw the Gluck version of Orphée at the opera house in May, and by June things were really hotting up both musically and meteorologically. The Opera de Lyon (France) - the orchestra of which is directed by Morro Bay’s Kent Nagano--performed The Love for Three Oranges, a first rate, hilarious production. Noye’s Fludde, performed in an old church by a troupe of Canadian youngsters in animal costumes and a few adult professionals was also delightful. At the symphony hall a concert version of Fidelio, directed by a peppery, brisk conductor (Eschenbach) and with Hildegard Behrens as the lead singer, was as rousing and exhilarating as Beethoven could have hoped for.

The temperature had reached about 100º (or was it 103º?) by the time of the open air concert in Stern Grove with the Opera de Lyon Orchestra in shirtsleeves but with both Maestro Nagano and soloist (Van Damme, singing Wotan’s Farewell--hopefully not prophetic, given the temperature) stoically enduring their tailcoats throughout.

Later in the summer I saw La Périchole in a full production by young trainee singers in the same spot, with the temperature then only in the mere 90-ish range.

During the regular fall season, Madama Butterfly was pretty humdrum.

I spent two 1-week sessions (Easter and August) continuing my research on my father’s career in old newspaper microfilms in the Carmel and Monterey libraries. (He lived there during the 1920s.) I also spent several days in Santa Barbara.

As usual I attended a number of programs put on by our Wagner Society in San Francisco, a cluster of which were arranged around the date of a performance of Die Walküre. We had a symposium on this opera featuring several cast members and the conductor discussing their approach to the work, and we also had a lecture and a reception (jointly with the Performing Arts Library & Museum) honoring the 100th anniversary of Kirsten Flagstad’s birth (one of the all-time great Wagnerian sopranos).

But our piece de résistance came in early December (before my having to deal with the surgery issue). This was what the Wagner Society calls its “Cosima Birthday Party,” celebrating the birthday of Wagner’s wife (Cosima Liszt Von Bulow Wagner). Since she was born on Christmas day, this December event also serves as a Christmas party. We met at the gracious old Century Club. After a glass of wine and conversation with other members and guests, we gathered in the foyer, where a tall decorated tree stood in the stairwell, and we were treated to a reenactment of Christmas morning in Wagner’s villa, “Triebschen,” in Lausanne, on Cosima’s 34th birthday in 1875. On that occasion, she awoke to hear musicians on their staircase playing what is now known as the “Siegfried Idyll,” which Wagner had composed as a birthday present for her. (Wagner himself called it the “Trieebschen Idyll.”) Two of our members in costume enacted the parts of Wagner and Cosima (in mime), and a stringquartet positioned on the stairs (and piano on the second floor) played the music. It was most moving; an outstanding occasion. Afterwards we dined upstairs (with more music from the quartet).

I was asked to write up the event for our quarterly journal, Leitmotive. Since the evening had been a perfect episode of time travel, I wrote it up in a time-travel format, and the article was published in our spring edition. (Gratifying to see oneself in print, even if no pay. However, copies are sent to Wagner Societies worldwide--and to the Library of Congress--so I can say I have an “international audience,” at any rate.)

Other activities of ‘95 included a small college reunion party at a classmate’s home in Oakland. I opted out of the gigantic, multi-class reunion activities on the campus (Stanford). And a full-scale high school class reunion in San Luis Obispo. The school having been pretty small by modern standards, this is a very manageable-sized gathering. (In my teen years there was no high school in Morro Bay and we rode a bus to SLO every day, 14 miles each way.) It was fun to discover that one classmate has been appearing in TV commercials from Los Angeles as one of the wry, irreverent “old geezers” advertising Rice Krispies cereal. He says doing commercials is much more lucrative than his former career. He also says they made them EAT the Rice Krispies. (I won’t quote the effect on his insides.)

Now for more mundane matters--how about reroofing the house last fall, after serious leaks the previous winter. This involved flinging two layers of old cedar shingles onto the ground in two huge piles on either side of the house (which drove the cat crazy when I let him out to inspect things at night), and massive debris fallout into the attic and service porch inside, which drove me crazy, plus three weeks of chaos (and noise) to complete what the contractor had thought would be a three-day job. On top of that, my aesthetic sense was offended by the city’s requiring fake fireproof roofing materials instead of real wood as specified by the original architect’s design. But California being one vast tinderbox, aflame regularly every summer and fall, one can hardly argue the point, and who has energy to fight city hall?

And underneath the house--another problem. By wintertime, my insurance carrier was demanding certification that the house was bolted to its foundation in order to continue my usual earthquake coverage. What do you know? Contractor went down to have a look--no bolts! Furthermore, this so-called “crawl space” was not sufficiently crawlable for him to get in and do the bolting work, owing to massive earth mounds thrown up by gophers over the last several years. [Note to non-Californians: many houses, if not most, do not have basements--just “crawl spaces.” Gophers are mole-like rodents who burrow underground eating roots of every plant you really want or pay a lot of money for. They construct a network of tunnels and throw the earth up onto the surface in huge piles.] Since there are no plants under the house, why are they so busy down there? Do they find the earth warmer and cozier for their sleeping quarters? Is it that the dry ground is preferable to hang out in when the outdoor earth is soaked with rain? Or are they just doing this deliberately to sabotage my house? If so, they are pretty successful.

At any rate, in order to meet the insurance company’s deadline, I had to have all this work done during the rainy weather, hiring a number of stalwart Cal Poly students to dig out the excess earth, at well-above-average wages (otherwise, who would do it?) I provided dust masks (changing the filters twice daily), sundry tools, and an old rug on which to load and haul out the dirt. The work was so difficult, dirty and exhausting I felt compelled to also ply the lads with Coca Colas and substantial sandwich lunches. The boys would hack and dig their way into the dirt under the house, maneuver it onto the rug (tied like a hammock on each end)and drag it out. They emerged each time from the crawl-hole covered in a thick coating of dust, looking like grotesque space-aliens. Then, outdoors, the pouring rain quickly turned their dust coatings to mud, which streamed down their faces and clothing like a variation on the old “fire in the wax museum” movies.

All this dirt brought out had to be piled elsewhere on the property, and with the rain and the insurance deadline there wasn’t time to have it nearly spread around, so I still have to decide what to do with the pile. Anyway… after several weeks of this digging/hauling activity, the boys had carved out enough space for the contractor and assistant to get under the house and bolt it down, just in the nick of time to send off the insurance certification. One more hurdle in the joys of home maintenance and bureaucratic demands surmounted.

Now let’s get back to those gophers. Most of their activity is outdoors where you can see it--that’s part of their fun. They love to throw up piles in pathways and bury the lawn in dirt mounds, not to mention piling dirt against wooden fences and walls so that the termites have easier access to good eating. (The Conspiracy Theory.) And I regret to say that my famous cat Whiskers is no help at all, indifferent to the whole problem, considering himself essentially a “people cat,” or “lap cat,” and not a hunter. I even carried him to a gopher hole where the rodent had just peered out; old Whiskers just turned and walked away. Lovable as he is, he is not a professional cat. He only catches prey when he’s in the mood.

Most of this season I’ve had just one frog hanging out in the rain barrel (which is actually a dark green plastic garbage can full of rainwater, with a lid which I keep slightly ajar for his benefit. I don’t know if this is one of my original Fred’s descendants or relatives, but he definitely feels this is his home. He doesn’t say much, though. While a whole frog chorus sings out when rain fills an abandoned fishpond down the block, I rarely hear a solo number from this little amphibian friend. Just this very morning of writing, however, I found a small frog just inside the kitchen door trying to camouflage his skin to match the floor covering, so I took him out to put him in the rain barrel. He leaped out of my hand before I got the lid open, but then I discovered two additional frogs in the barrel--so this makes a total of FOUR frogs as of mid-July! Hurrah! I’m doing my part in keeping the species alive (since I’ve read that frogs world-wide are dwindling severely in numbers--baffling scientists; but one of the leading theories is ultraviolet radiation owing to the thin “ozone layer” problem in the skies…)

Another species turned up last year on the lawn, which I took to be a dead bat. However, as I tried gingerly to maneuver it into a bag for disposal, it raised its head, and -- EEK!.No, it didn’t turn into Bela Lugosi in a black cape lunging for my throat--but it did hiss menacingly, repeatedly. I backed off, realizing it must be a sick bat, since it didn’t fly away. I covered it with a flower pot and called the County Animal Regulation Dept. to come and fetch it. (More bureaucracy; they require a written request pinned to your door authorizing them to enter the property and remove the animal.) As I was anxious to have a potential rabies-carrier removed, compliance was no problem.

Well, so long, bat, wherever you are; perhaps among the eternally Undead characters in those old Dracula movies.

I’m cutting this off with “winter” more or less, in the interest of space, and assuming I can get the Christmas letter off in timely fashion will save the bulk of 1996 reporting for that. It’s too late for Merry Christmas/Happy New Year/4th of July etc., but here’s wishing you a good summer, and I’ll look forward to hearing your news around Christmas.