Dream journal

Dream: I was playing one of two upper parts on a polyphonic Renaissance piece on the alto shawm, and after a few measures in it was Sounding Good, so the director (who had been sitting in a chair drinking coffee or something) gestured to make sure we were recording and for everybody around who wasn't playing a part to shut up. By two thirds of the way through the piece, I had no idea where we were in the sheet music and was praying that my memory held out to the end. And it didn't: I botched the last few measures, but in a manner consistent with the idiom so somebody who didn't have the sheet music might not notice.

Earth Day

Fifty years ago today, I put on a filter mask for my first political protest march, through the smoggy streets of Pittsburgh (where I lived then) demanding government action to reduce air and water pollution. My parents were sure I would rip the mask off as soon as it became uncomfortable, but even at age 6 I understood the rhetorical point we were trying to make, and kept it on for the whole march.

Within three years, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Act were signed, and air and water quality actually started improving. Now Pittsburgh has much better air, New York (where I live now) has much better air, pretty much every city in the U.S. has much better air -- and that was before CoVid-19 shut down most automobile traffic and a lot of businesses, so we've had even cleaner air for the past month.

Now I put on a filter mask to go to the grocery store for different reasons: not to symbolically protect me from pollution caused by human activity, but to actually protect those around me in case I have an asymptomatic case of a disease nobody had heard of six months ago, naturally occurring but spread by human activity.