A Chilly Start to Spring, But Choosing to Get and Spread Warmth (Martin Radeck, Gounod, Finnish Traditional Hymns, Löwe, Strauss)

In San Francisco it often is that winter, graciously lending spring-like sunny days in January and February, will demand those days back in March, April, and sometimes even into May -- late March and April in particular can be forbiddingly cold and windy ... but then, at last, spring's warmth will win out ... like this not-prelude-but-preamble by Martin Radeck, which begins menacingly but ends in bright sunlight...

That is what one hopes for as a mild winter suddenly descends into a cold spring ... and sometimes, one is surprised ...

I walked into a work situation remotely -- dealing with back-to-back-to-back doctor's appointments had me all the way messed up on keeping up with everything but my responsibilities. Those I kept up with ... so why was I walking back into a whole social media situation in my area of work and folks talking about "you should be doing this and this and this to respond" to rescue about 5,000 people that don't even know they need to be rescued and may not even be ready?

Now, I used to keep about 12,000 people on track -- it's not that I can't. It's just that folks just think they can slide that much responsibility back on me ... while they are the ones that saw the problem with no sense of responsibility, with me being out half the week, and that maybe they can use material I've already made available to solve the problem.

Now, the compassionate part of me realizes that people, confronted with a situation, run to the most competent person they know, and oftentimes they do not believe that is them.

And then I realized, with a sinking feeling ... these are the people from the old crew who overtook me in late 2024 ... they have grown, but not enough yet.

With a further sinking feeling ... they were singing for me the old siren song ... reverting to old habits ... it would have worked into 2023 ... my natural compassion is still very strong, and I can see how distraught people were ... yet with 2024 being a full year of peace, I also could see how distraught people can get over things that do not actually concern them and make work for themselves and everyone else that actually is a distraction from what actually needs to get done.

Then, I had a towering rage -- with myself. I was warned last spring ...

Frau Mathews, there is no bridge!

But there was an allowance made for me, because of my deep love and compassion for those whom I love:

You are a mountain guide!

So then, I looked back and saw these same people climbing and climbing hard to overtake me ... only to have gotten up here to start this old siren song ... "Deeann, because this is a problem in your area, you should ... you know the people need you."

The siren song sounds so beautiful ... it appeals to pride through compassion ... but see, I was warned. When Kurt Möll sings Mephistopheles by Gounod, one surely has a sweet singer alluring one's ears! As it was said of him in another villain role, he is disturbingly beautiful, for if evil were not sometimes beautiful, it could not allure and deceive so well -- and yet, as always, he does not also fail to warn the attentive listener of the extreme danger ... ostensibly good advice telling people what they should do, presented by the devil himself for his own ends!

That high G and all as he quietly eased over into baritone lane as a basso profundo ... utterly beautiful ... utterly terrifying in the context of the story of Gounod's Faust, in which said song gets a man killed and a woman damned in the next scene! Quite a warning about siren songs, indeed!

I was so mad at myself for even being in the position of having to hear this "community rescue" siren song again ... so much regret, temporarily, for forgiving and overlooking so much ... but then that rage crystallized like the last of winter's fury ... I've been open about the health things I have to take care of, and they came with all this ... with a whole docket of stuff they need to get done and focus on but they THOUGHT they were just going to drop all this extra on me that they decided to get worked up about ... no.

In my head, I turned on my heel, got my climbing gear, walked back outside and got to climbing ...

... and in real life I just shut down the server and moved on. I don't pull people away from edges of pits that they chose any more. That is a pre-2024 behavior and we are in March 2025. I left folks to figure it out for 27 months ... and so just added four more days.

Herr Möll had warned me. Martti Talvela popped up on YouTube in his most beautiful recordings and comforted me ... his beloved Finnish hymns, all based on Psalms that I could look up in English and read along if not sing along because my Finnish is almost non-existent ... and here presented with some of the same calming outdoor scenery that I so often resort to ... the sky goes by and the stress departs ...

Mr. Talvela still walks in as a tie for the most beautiful male voice in my estimation on any day he wants to ... and as it happens, Herr Möll and Jerome Hines, my other two favorites of European lineage, loved him too, so there would have been no jealousy between the three.

This got me through that day ... and then I was overtaken that Sunday by a number of my students, still eager to learn ... and bringing their little ones to me ... still a lot to ask ... still exhausting ... but ...

I decided to take a walk and think on it, with Mr. Talvela still ringing in my head as I considered the quiet of the Fuchsia Dell and my favorite quiet places there...

... and there, the Ghost of Musical Greatness Past walked in as I was replaying that hymn collection on YouTube. He sat down by me in perfect, quiet joy, his smile as radiant as it had ever been when discussing the Finnish bass he also admired, and said not a word until those last great Hallelujahs ... he sang them with me and Mr. Talvela, taking a baritone harmony while I topped the chord in tenor -- der helige Akkord, all of the sudden, and it seemed that the distance between up home and that place had vanished for a moment!

"Indeed not, Frau Mathews, the space around you is becoming full of the echoes of peace and joy you will forever enjoy above, even as Martti Talvela closed that gap for himself, and left to me and then to you a way for anyone to hear him singing as he does now, then and now in his eternal joys. The gap is not so wide, Frau Mathews, as the physicality of the world and our limitations in it would make us think."

He paused, and then shook his head and smiled.

"I am trying to stay calm and keep my English," he said. "Of course I see and hear Martti singing quite often now in the bass section of the choir on high, but this little chord you have made for us here ... I came from home to find myself at home again!"

This was a huge echo of something precious written in John 14-16... of course every Christian thinks of someday going home to be with God, but rarely does anyone speak of the possibility of living in this world so that God can be at home with him or her. We are generally too busy, too much pursuing the things the world says we must have to satisfy the people we want to have around us ... but he had just reminded me ... that was possible.

On a more general level ... with our true friends and loved ones, we are ever at home, able to be ourselves and relax from the performance pressures of the world ... mutual support, shelter, encouragement ... a home in motion, along the road of life ... a bivouac on a climb.

"You have my eternal gratitude, Frau Mathews, for practicing in fiction what you strive to do in real life, the reason five generations -- two above you, one with you, two now below with your students bringing their students -- five generations of people flock to you is because you do your best to provide that shelter.

"Homely has come to mean something disparaging in American English, and even heimlich and heimlichkeit can be read in a sinister way in modern German ... but from Löwe we have learned that the idea of being secretive is to be home-like ... to attend to those things that are of home, and leave the world and its noise outside. The song is about choosing to go into the spring in a quiet and holy way, alone, as you realized as early as 2023 that you must do, and began then, and so climbed above all the noise that still was lingering from 2022 by the autumn ... so that you could have the music of home around you ... and like a rosebud, mein Blumenkind, you have been even physically transformed. You have had a holy Erklarung, and are reflecting the light of your eternal home with clarity that none who have not given up what you have given up will even comprehend."

He paused, and the ground quivered a little ... he was staying calm, but he was very much moved, and his immortal voice was leaking in its approximation to his mortal voice, just a little to the infrasonic side. He was quiet a long moment to correct that, but ...

"I would sing Löwe's 'Heimlichkeit' for you, but you know that one was a struggle for me in my mortal life because of the situation around the beloved and banished voice of Josef von Manowarda. At the moment, even in immortal voice but again on Earth, my voice will not hold a safe approximation for mortal ears and earthly fault lines between the contrast of emotions I am experiencing, remembering that loss, and my joy of making that Akkord here in accord with you. So I take the occasion to introduce to you my elder peer, Manfred Schenk, whose singing is so beautiful I wonder sometimes how a particular baby bass to him, born in 1938, ever got a hearing."

Quite an introduction to Manfred Schenk -- and he justified the introduction!

I sat and listened to the journey of the character in the song ... he speaks with his own soul, knowing he must go find the answers for his life within, and that what he finds will bloom out in due time in his life -- with the hint that it is a holy journey in at least the Jewish sense, for Moses is referenced. I previously noted the cultural harmony that Germany retained in the 19th century being heard in this song ... but that also, given that a man who became a Nazi did one of the finest recordings of this, highlights a tragedy so large that even so great a singer as Herr Möll, a generation later, struggled to cope with it to record the song -- and left the struggle on record, declining to do another take. To be betrayed by one who in childhood days was a voice of home ...

"So many have been and are going through it ... and in such a world, Frau Mathews, you have chosen to be a voice of home that is faithful and true ... reflecting the Faithful and True One as you walk, abide, adorn, appear, and now also choose how you will associate, appropriate, and what you will affirm. It is the latter three our lesson today addresses, as soon as this old professor can get his life into his grip."

So I was quiet, and enjoyed listening to the birds and the spring breeze in the trees as he calmed himself ... only as the sun passed over did I realize he had glowed up so high that I was still not in the shade!

"You are my sunshine, my Echo Sunshine ... ." I sang to gently inform him.

He rolled laughing, and so merrily that he had me laughing too ... and declined to dim his joyful glowing, but demonstrated what he was going to teach me later in substituting a different idea!

"Perhaps we should go down through the dell and see what spring is doing," he said when we had enjoyed all of that laughter.

"Not a bad idea," I said. "I presume you will be providing sedate octogenarian pacing, as ever."

"The same way you will be walking me clear up to the top of Buena Vista Hill in June or July, young lady!"

Our walk got off to a short start at first ... we ended up on the bench here, seen through the rhododendrons...

... after I described my week and then said, "I just don't know what to do."

He stopped, and let me walk on and then notice him missing so I could turn around and look back and up into his face ... a loving but complete refusal of the whole idea.

"Yes, you do," he said, his voice at its utmost gravity as he reached out and put his hands on my shoulders. "Yes, you do, Frau Mathews. You are here. Yes, you do know what to do."

We sat down on the bench, and he gave me a few minutes to process what he had said.

"I have not been as efficient as I would have wished today in making this very point, although as an object lesson I have succeeded marvelously: any number of people will delight in your presence, mein Blumenkind, as people love to have roses and fine fragrances and beautiful things around them. For that matter, how does that Americanism of good theology go? Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but ... ."

"Nobody wants to die," I said, closing the idiom with a chuckle.

"This is also why I insist that you raise the standards for your company so high," he said, "and have been glad to see how you have done this inside the boundaries of your own loving personality: you are now well advanced in the habit of turning right around, virtually and physically, and coming back out here when people cannot and will not meet your standards."

"Oh ... that's what you meant," I said.

"Frau Mathews, I confess I became just a little excited this week when you walked into that situation and realized: you can associate or not associate. You can affirm, or not affirm. You can appropriate new work to do or NOT appropriate new work to do. The way you shut that computer down and gave zero attention to the attempt to get you into rescuing 5,000 people who did not ask anyone for all that! Martti Talvela and Jerome Hines might have had their hands full with some little bouncing German bass not called on high until a spot between them opened, for just such an emergency!"

"You up there jumping up and down and breaking risers in glory -- you are so silly!" I said as I broke out laughing.

"Now of course building materials on high do not permit such accidents," he purred, but that just had me laughing harder even before he said, "and things are foolproof because there are a few excitable fools who still will do the equivalent of climbing up on the orchestra box while singing, and it isn't even April 1 yet ... but you know my birthday is not all that far from April Fool's Day and I do claim the entire month as a basso profondo buffo... ."

"I don't think I'm ready to even cope with what you have planned for me on the Thursday nearest your birthday this year if this is how we are starting the spring!" I said.

"Well, meine liebe Dame, you still have two weeks to gather your strength ... why do you think I am sedately walking you through March, and softening you up with fits of laughter?"

He paused, and then, of course ...

"My mock-villain schemes remain undefeated -- Mwahahahahahahahahahahaha!"

We were laughing so hard, and contralto and basso harmony are rare ... but there was no crowd there in the winter, and by the time our laughter echoed down to encourage a goodly number of people to climb up, we had stepped off into a lesser-known path to cross over to a more remote trail...

... and had vanished.

"Ghost moves on these park trails -- I am impressed, Frau Mathews!" he said softly.

"Gotta always know two or three ways to get in and out of a locale as a woman walking alone," I murmured. "You think I just jump off a path to be doing it -- nope."

"I am not unaware, Frau Mathews, of the ways within your loving personality that you attend to your security," he said, likewise lowering his voice to a stage whisper. "I am inclined to think of myself as your security when you are in my presence, but I respect what you have done as one walking without a man to provide that, guided by the One Who has called you to be only with Him in these places."

"Still inclined to moonlight on my security even though you already know that's taken care of," I said, "but I do write you as a man, not an angel."

"You write me as you knew I was in life: a kind man with a gentle soul," he said, "and every inch a man, so of course as a proper Teutonic gentleman, I'm still going to moonlight on your security. With this midnight voice, of course I have to moonlight!"

"You and those high Gs in Gounod, bidding for the day shift!" I said.

"Well, you know, they needed someone to do that in German, and really it is a baritone part, but you know, sometimes you are minding your own business as a basso profondo buffo baritone and you get a phone call because somebody knows you can sing all three Gs from high to low convincingly because you nailed that baritone tessitura in Haydn all those years earlier, and you think, 'Well, I could buy that dress I was going to surprise Frau Möll with this month instead of next month ... .'"

"You are a whole ethereal basso profundo buffo baritone April Fool who cannot even wait for your birthday month to act your part!" I said.

"Well, I didn't have a computer to shut down, and it is so rude to just hang up the phone on people ... ."

He was still rolling me laughing, but he had came around to the point again.

"You see, Frau Mathews, I chose not to sing Hagen to preserve my voice just as it was, so I could do those things that fit my unique voice and calling. Now, there were times I did gently stop various phone conversations and then, in the silence a Nein uttered anywhere at a D2 or below will bring to any conversation, I thanked them and said Auf Wiedersehen or Tchuss as the relationship determined, and hung up that phone."

"I imagine some people never dared call you again," I said.

"Let me expand your imagination a little further, my fellow possessor of a deep and potentially alluring voice, and let me ease the conflict in your heart over your own actions this week. By the time you turned the computer back on to check on certain people, had the storm passed?"

"Yes ... the conversation had moved on to other things, and it was assumed I had not had time to read back."

"Let me share something with you: people are always having 'Would it not be wonderful if So-and-So would ... ?' It is a compliment, Frau Mathews, to your lifetime of work, that you come up in such conversations ... but it is a light compliment, a fleeting thought in the mind of the one making it, although you take all such things quite seriously because to you, a wish is a thing that you may manifest creatively in the next moment and give it an existence in fact as a new essay, story, song, fractal art piece, book, lesson plan, strategy in community work.

"Wishes are serious business to major creatives ... but to people not as developed yet, a wish is a wish that maybe someone else will embody ... but if not, it will be succeeded by another wish, soon enough."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Just wait a minute -- the magnitude of what you are saying is staggering."

"It is a gift for you to unwrap," he purred. "I will hand you the edge of the ribbon: every human born is in the image of the Creator in the sense of being able to have an idea and work to make it exist in the world, but ... ."

"So many of us lose that along the way," I said, "and although the impulse is forever there, we think someone else will have to make things happen."

"And since you are not inclined to be a messiah or a dictator, what have you chosen to do?"

"Get out of the way after providing tools and let people figure out how to create solutions for themselves on non-critical matters so they can grow and learn what to do in bigger matters."

"I told you that you knew what to do, in a moment in history in which evil people are doing the exact opposite, aggrandizing to themselves the power that people think they cannot use in their own lives to build what they need. This, Frau Mathews, is how people created in the image of God are made into helpless pawns -- they were not born so, but they are conditioned to believe that they are essentially powerless and someone else must and will fulfill their dreams. All manner of evil is thus consented to in this way -- you can do anything to an individual or society of people who think they can do no better than what you create for them.

"But you see, Frau Mathews, you love the people you are with, enough not to unleash the anger that you felt, enough not to play savior on a matter that really concerns none of you directly. You let them realize that and move on, and eventually you will be able to participate in matters more germane again. They do not recognize what it cost you to know what you know and to grow as you have grown so you by example and by direct education helped them not be in the 5,000 themselves. What is not understood cannot always be explained, but it can be forgiven."

"Why do I hear 'Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,' echoing around this whole thought?"

"Because I am just the echo of the One Who calls you, Frau Mathews. I persist in saying: you already know what to do."

After a little while, we got up and walked on in the warm sunshine as I considered what he had said.

He was quiet, and looked over at me periodically in concern ... that was a lot he had handed me to consider, but he was quiet and let me think until we had come to another lovely place to sit.

I put my head down into my arms on the table for a moment, overcome with weariness ... the burden of "being the bigger person," since age 16 ...

"Let me expand your imagination even further, Frau Mathews. You have conflict in your heart because you love the people, but their ideas don't fit you, still. There is a way to answer that meets the necessary balance. To 'I was just thinking it would be great if you would ... ?' one may always answer, 'You know, I thank you but I can't take that on right now -- but in the future, if you have an opening for X or are willing to support me doing Y with you, I can make myself available.'

"Wait a minute -- you are still massively glowing up -- so you took my gentle suggestion to maybe power down and put in a whole different idea -- you didn't even bother to say no -- you just redirected the whole conversation!"

"You know that I don't have trouble with anyone, Frau Mathews, and I do not make an exception even for you," he purred, "even though I am exceptionally gentle with you, and also am fully aware that you are the most likely to tell me off in two languages ... ."

I needed that laugh, and did he ever provide!

"The secret, mein Blumenkind, is this: human beings fear and suffer greatly from being rejected, so since we know, we can always take that sting out. Yes, it requires more maturity and energy, but I speak as one person who loves deeply to another: it is a hardship at times, but it is the only path forward in love. We do not hurt people needlessly when there is another way."

"But then, consider: silence is not always a hard no. Those whom you left behind in 2022 understood that you left a door open in your heart just because you did not say no, and in 2023 and 2024, those growing and wanting better and also wanting again to be friends with you came through that open door and were welcomed."

He looked at me with grave gentleness and spoke in the same depth.

"You are a stubborn woman in love, Frau Mathews. You fought me last spring about keeping that door open ... you would not hear of there being no hope that those you loved could not also be with you wherever you were going. As much as you had suffered at some of their hands, you still dug in your heels ... and when they called in pain in October, you still turned around to help ... and then realized you would have to leave again ... and still left that door open for those who did at last make it through in December and through this winter."

He paused a moment, then sighed.

"Now, Frau Mathews, you know what the cost is for not being willing to shut that door on everyone. Yet it is said of the One Who called you: 'Having loved His own, He loved them unto the end.' Yet only for Judas was there an end, because Judas chose it, and was dismissed to his choice not in anger, but in divine sorrow. So, you are stubborn, Frau Mathews, in what may yet be a costly way ... but I cannot say that you are wrong. I cannot, for you follow the heart of Him Who called you, and in Whom you are called, and no one may gainsay that."

We sat there a long time, and then turned not quite around, but went back up toward the bus stop through the wooded hill above the Fuchsia Dell on the southern side.

"I will put this to you another way, Frau Mathews. Most people's ideas are shaped by their impression of the world: cold, hard, uncaring, and dominated by scarcity, so when something good comes along, it is necessary to get everything out of it because no more may ever come along. But you and I both know that there is more here than meets the eye ... the world itself even in common grace is abundant, and manifests a deep level of fundamental care from its Creator, Love Himself. And, as a Christian, you may add to that all the infinite riches of special grace, in Christ, available to the entire world for those who believe.

"The question is how available do we make ourselves to these any and all of these realities so that they may shape our ideas? Your ideas are different for the same reason you know that Jerome Hines, Martti Talvela, and myself, in that order, passed over things another bass might rush to, and left a legacy of love -- or, say, Eric Hollaway or Kevin Maynor or Morris Robinson on the living African American bass side, a Marian Anderson or Mahalia Jackson or Kathleen Ferrier among contraltos, or Bach, or Bruckner, or your own ancestors who created the Negro Spiritual. All of us have in common that we made ourselves available to learn, grow, and walk as we are called -- and shut down the majority of the world's distractions.

"So then let me expand your imagination even further, Frau Mathews. When anyone has a request of you, even if based on an idea not well-considered, this need not be an occasion for internal or personal conflict, but an opportunity if you see: they are reaching for the light you reflect, and you have an occasion to introduce common or special grace into the situation! Understand the power you have been endowed with to make every interaction a moment of shared grace unless there is implacable hostility coming at you."

"O thou good and faithful echo ... 'be at peace with all men, so far as it lies with you.'"

"There it is, mein Blumenkind. You see, you do know."

"The challenge is to sort things out," I said. "There are some people who mean well but have bad ideas and can take suggestion and even correction and do something with it, and then there are so many variations of not appropriate, and not ready."

"Hmmmmmm ... I remember an old story from childhood days ... 'A sower went forth to sow ...'"

I smiled.

"You've got me there," I said. "Four soils, and only one was ready, but the sower's responsibility is just to sow the seed, for as it is said later, 'one plants, another waters, and God gives the increase.'"

"'Some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, some a hundredfold,' he quoted the end of the parable. "How did it feel, Frau Mathews, for so many of your twenty-something students to have come found you on Sunday, and for them to show you all that fruit you planted, and offer you the opportunity to plant more with them, not just for them?"

I was instantly in tears of joy, and could not utter a word in English or German, but just took his ethereal handkerchief and put my face in it while lifting my other hand toward Heaven in gratitude that my heart could speak but my mouth could not at the moment utter ... but when it could, it was quite a while before I could remember I was in conversation on Earth, even though I would have fallen right out had he not been there to steady me!

Of course he had found another bench...

... with a view to enjoy while he waited ...

"Oh, I am so sorry -- vergib mir, bitte!" I said.

"I understand, Frau Mathews," he said after a long time of me recovering. "To be overcome with love and joy for those students who are bearing such fruit before one's eyes -- my latter years offered me many such occasions, but you are having these moments in your early middle years because you started so much earlier!

"For you see, the only thing we have to do is sow good seed, on every occasion, and the rest is taken care of. We do not have to do the sorting, although that great poet, Maya Angelou, did say, 'When people show you who they are, believe them,' and long before that, He Who called you said, 'Do not cast your pearls before swine, lest they turn and rend you,' and also, 'By their fruits, you shall know them.' You are very good at blocking those who show themselves trifling ... and even a short silence can be effective to allow for growth.

"I will expand your imagination even further, Frau Mathews ... your gentle silence might allow those who actually have the vision for the 5,000 to see that they are the ones called to that work and are also capable ... and if you have the energy, you can practice saying, "No, that's not for me at this time, BUT, you know, you have some amazing solutions already available!"

He then laughed.

"Past a certain age," he said, "when most men wonder if their hour on the stage draws near to the end, do you know what the best thing is beside one's own phone ringing constantly for requests is?"

"What?"

"Your students and younger friends' phones ringing constantly because of your ringing recommendations, so you can rest and save energy for the things you really want to do!

"I sang once as Admiral Morosus, who is relieved in the end not to try to redo that time of life when he could keep up with a young bride: the music of the stage is beautiful, but it is even more beautiful when it is over, so nephew and his future young bride go off to prepared for wedded bliss, and he gets a nap!"

That is what happens at the end of Strauss's Die Schweigsame Frau, in the scene covered by "Wie schön ist doch die Musik" -- that is the nature of the happy ending!

"Now you are but 44, Frau Mathews ... but you want this ... ."

" ... so, you may consider looking at little-considered requests also as occasions to encourage those making them to step into their power so they do not feel the only hope is to appropriate yours."

"That is a lot to think about," I said, "but being able to apply it would be like living in a whole new world."

"Or at least a new season! You know, it is the first day of spring, mein Blumenkind. What shall bud out and bloom for you now, now that this good seed has been shown into your fertile mind and tender heart?"

He laughed gently.

"I am just a little excited for you, Frau Mathews ... just a little ... and my birthday is just two weeks away ... mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!"

I was rolling again, laughing!

"The only problem is, after I get you home today, I am singing in the Music Concourse -- my first actual spring recital there, and with me in this mood ... they are not going to be ready, but, life, especially in spring, is full of surprises!"