Listening with pleasure

Sue and I love the Oregon Symphony and go as often as we can. There is usually a pre-show concert in the public mezzanine just before the big concert begins, and today it was a local high school choir with a marvelous director/accompanist (see Extra) singing Morten Lauridsen songs. The audience for the pre-show stands around informally, and I made this photo of a woman who was lost in the beauty of their sound. 

The concert featured an incredibly difficult piece by Astor Piazzolla, played by Simone Porter, who cavorted her way through it while playing the violin in ways we’ve never heard it played before. There’s a Youtube “trailer” of the piece (just one and a half minutes) played by the soloist we heard the last time we went to hear the symphony.

It was a day of many text messages from my family, as my half-sister Julie flew from her home in Missouri to Florida to hold the hand of our half-brother Jacob, institutionalized since he was seven, with autism and birth injuries. Julie, who was adopted in infancy, works with people with developmental disabilities and was shocked after doing her DNA to learn that she has a half-brother with the very issues she trained to support. It was the DNA that informed us of our relationship, as she and I are both daughters of the same man, born 24 years apart. He had five legitimate children in addition to the two of us, and Jacob is one of those five. Our father was a very busy man. Neither of us ever met him, but he changed both our mothers’ lives.

Julie had a message on Friday from Jacob’s advocate, saying he was near death. As it turns out, he isn’t near death at all but needs nursing care, which the institution is not providing, so Julie is trying to take guardianship of him so she can transfer him to one of the care facilities where she works. This is proving to be complicated, but it’s a remarkable coincidence that she is a professional in the field, and if anyone can negotiate those hurdles, it is Julie.