Back home, George finished his concerto. It was just as he planned—daring, razz-ma-tazz, and dazzling. 
    It was a musical kaleidoscope of America’s melting pot.
    Rhapsody in Blue is what it was named. 

                                 from The Music in George’s Head:
                      George Gershwin Creates Rhapsody in Blue
                                            written by Suzanne Slade
                                          illustrated by Stacy Innerst
                                                   Calkins Creek, 2016

    One hundred years is a long time in anyone’s book, but 1924 faded into 2024 when Baron Fenwick began his performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at the Canton Symphony on November 23.
    Paul Whiteman, a prominent band leader, commissioned the work in 1923 to be performed in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday the next year. Whiteman wanted a concerto-like piece for an all-jazz concert, but Gershwin told Whiteman that he didn’t have enough experience, enough knowledge, or enough time to complete the work. George Gershwin was 26 years old.
    Then, during his regular billiard game, Ira (Geroge’s brother) interrupted them to read from an unsigned article in the New York Tribune. It said that George was working on a jazz concerto for Whitehead’s February 12 concert. It seemed that Whitehead’s arch-rival wanted to steal the idea of an experimental concert. With that info, Whitehead convinced George to pen the piece.
    We can’t know how Gershwin sounded as the soloist at his premiere at Aeolian Hall in New York City on February 12, 1924. Gershwin hadn’t even written down the solo piano sections until after the concert was over, and it was not recorded. 
    George Gershwin played by heart. And with heart.
    Frederic D. Schwarz said that Ross Gorman, the clarinetist who played the glissando that opens the piece, meant it to be a joke for George Gershwin, but Gershwin loved it. 
    The rest is history, living history.
    Schwarz continues in his American Heritage magazine (link above) that the glissando has become as instantly recognizable as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
    By the end of 1927, the piece had been performed by Whitehead’s orchestra over 80 times. His recording sold a million copies.
    Leonard Bernstein recorded “Rhapsody in Blue” in 1959 and again in 1976. 
    And in 1984, 84 pianists clad in pale-blue tuxedos, fronted by a bevy of dancers in flowy light blue gowns and backed by an orchestra in white, performed a spectacular, if abridged, version of Gershwin’s iconic American music at the opening ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. Here’s a link to find it on YouTube.
    When Baron Fenwick took the bench of the grand piano on stage of the Canton Symphony last Saturday evening, he did so with exuberant enthusiasm, energy, and expertise, but no music. 
    Just like Gershwin, the music was in his head, too. 
    Fenwick delivered the masterpiece by heart and with heart. His standing ovation lasted several minutes while I hoped for an encore. But he left us wanting more.
    At only 29 years old, he’s won major piano competitions, played in important concert halls, and has had a concerto dedicated to him.
    While I’m not a stranger to classical music, I’m a fan and nowhere near an expert. 
    The day after my experience in Canton, I attended my grandson’s percussion performance where I was introduced to several avant-garde works by mostly young composers and traditional instruments performed in new ways. One performer used a bow to strum the pipes of her vibraphone.
    My very talented grandson played a new-to-me instrument, the water phone. It is an uncommonly-used musical instrument invented by an American, Richard Waters, in the late 1960s. It’s an idiophone, a metal instrument that produces its sound by creating resonance either by lightly striking it or bowing it. 
    Inspired by kalimbas, African thumb pianos, Waters continued experimenting by adding water to the base and was satisfied with the eerie, haunting sound his instrument produced. Nowadays, the shallow base is usually filled with water which amplifies the sound, and according to Waters, “bend[s] tones and create[s] water echoes.”  Here's a picture and a little more information.
    My grandson bowed a water phone in a piece called “Gasoline Rainbow,” composed by Adam Silverman in 2009. After the concert, I asked my grandson how he learned to play it. “Mostly by feel,” is what he told me. He’s right, of course! The thinnish bronze rods welded to the stainless steel bowl are of different lengths but not specifically tuned to a particular scale of tones. 
    Listen to a demonstration here. Scroll down to “What [does] a Waterphone sound like?”
    The grands and their parents are coming for Thanksgiving. I’m sure we won’t hear any waterphones, but I’m looking forward to listening to all the new piano pieces they’re learning. And maybe a preview or two from my younger granddaughter’s musical, Annie. 
    My older granddaughter is a violist. I’ll probably have to wait to hear her until we travel to Maryland next month.

I just started reading The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2024). According to the blurb, it’s more than a war story. It’s about sacrifice, commitment, idealism, and courage. More next time.
             Be curious! (and listen to the song in your heart)    

    When Mary was twenty-four, she made 
another amazing discovery!
This creature didn’t have legs.
Or flippers.
It had WINGS!
Mary had unearthed a prehistoric flying reptile called a pterosaur.
                   from Dinosaur Lady: The Daring Discoveries
                        of Mary Anning, the First Paleontologist
                                           words by Linda Skeers
                              pictures by Marta Álvarez Miguéns
                Sourcebooks eXplore/Sourcebooks Kids, 2020

    I thought maybe one of my kids would be fascinated by dinosaurs, then I thought maybe one of my grandkids would be, but no. I learned all about Thomas the Tank Engine, cars, mushrooms, construction vehicles, fairies, and Teletubbies, disasters at sea, and weather, but no dinosaurs.
    We read lots and lots of books, but not about dinosaurs, real or imaginary.
    So I got pretty excited when I heard about the missing link bird fossil discovered in São Paolo, Brazil in 2016, and reported on again just last week. Paleontologists have been working on this marvelously intact fossil since its discovery. 
    Because birds’ bones are so delicate, this find is extremely rare. Most bird fossils are crushed by time, and the weight of what falls on top of them practically squashes them into two dimensions. 
    Although the soft brain tissue has been lost to time, historical evidence and previous knowledge allowed scientists to piece this fossil together with “remarkable detail.” Newsweek Magazine reported that modern technology has enabled scientists to “digitally reconstruct the bird’s skull and brain…”.
    The discovery bridges the period between the Paleozoic Era, when vertebrates and land plants first appeared, the Jurrasic Period of dinosaurs, and our own modern birds.
    Navaornis hestiae, named after its discoverer William Nava, is a new species. It lived from about 15 million years before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs until tens of millions of years after the oldest pterodactyls, those bird-like dinosaurs, flew above them. 
    Luis Ciappe, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, says of the discovery, [It’s a] "relatively small bird, something the size of between a pigeon and a starling. It would have been an active flier, fully feathered.”
    Researchers CT scanned the bird’s cranial cavity to accomplish the digital reconstruction of its brain. The portion of the cerebellum that controls flight in modern birds is not very well developed in Novaornis hestiae but, Chiappe continues, “features of the inner ear are greatly expanded, suggesting it used an alternative means of coordinating balance and flight.” The cerebrum, associated with higher level cognition, “is much larger than the bird-like dinosaurs that came before and almost as large as modern birds.”
    Their presumed “cleverness” probably helped these “transitional birds” find food and shelter and encouraged the development of their social structure. It “represents a species at the midpoint along the evolutionary journey of bird cognition,” says David Field, the Strickland Curator of Ornithology at Cambridge's Museum of Zoology in the same Newsweek article.
    The study of paleontology can help us moderns understand our own physical world. Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin both demonstrated that life during common time periods is more similar than life in similar geographic areas. That is, new species develop more readily over time than across miles.
    Studying fossils, one might say, is irrelevant (or should be) in these days of fraught politics and Climate Catastrophe, but that is precisely why paleontology is crucial.
    Adapted from the PLOS blog (Public Library of Science), Paleontology helps determine 

• the evolutionary identity of living and extinct organisms
• cause-and-effect relationships (how things actually change under different conditions)
• how rare events experienced in the past shed light on what our future may hold
• the relative magnitude of change in today’s world and how best to understand it

    Figuring out a fossil’s anatomy, developing critical thinking skills, and determining cause and effect are all crucial pieces of science that transfer to many aspects of our lives. Besides, dinosaurs are cool.
    Again from PLOS, “[the] parallel between the relevance of life’s history and the relevance of our cultural history is a good one. When paleontology is reduced to cataloging the weird things that once were, it instantly becomes as irrelevant to our own time as cultural or political history would be, if it were reduced to a list of things that once happened.” (italics mine)

I’m reading The Witches of Willow Cove by Josh Roberts (Owl Hollow Press, 2020). It’s his debut about a small town, being the “new girl,” and witches. Roberts combines the Salem witch trials of the 1690s with modern girls turning that magic age, 13. Spooky without being scary and modern yet drawing on history, this one is a highly readable tale with a touch of mystery. 
                           stay curious (and learn from the past)

Hana practiced every day, just like Ojichan. And every day her brothers [complained] about the horrible noise. 
    [The day of the talent show arrived and Hana remembered Ojichan’s advice, “Do your best, dearest Hana.”]
                                   …
    “This is the sound of a mother crow calling her chicks,” she said. She placed the violin under her chin, held her bow in position and played three squawky notes.
    “This is the sound of my neighbor’s cat at night.”
                                    …
    Finally, as the last sound effect trailed away, Hana tucked her bow and her violin under her arm. “And that,” she said to the audience is how I play the violin.”
    Then she took a great big bow.
                               from Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violin
                                         written by Chieri Uegaki
                                           illustrated by Qin Leng
                                             Kids Can Press, 2014

Please note: In light of the results of last week’s election, I just signed up for BlueSky Social. After this post, I have decided to stop posting on Twitter (X). You can still find my old posts there, and I am continuing to post here on my website, www.ShariDellaPenna.com/blog, my FaceBook page, and now @sharidellapenna.bsky.social, too. I hope this is easy for you. Thanks, as always, for understanding.

    I have resiliency bred into my DNA. 
    First, a little history. Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement on Russia’s eastern border in 1791 and forced the whole Jewish population to move there. Pogroms began some thirty years later. Organized by the Crown, mobs looted, burned, and murdered Jews living in small communities in the countryside. (Think Fiddler on the Roof)  
    When Nicholas I, Catherine’s grandson, came to power in 1827, he conscripted young Jewish boys, as young as twelve years old, to twenty-five years of mandatory military service. Not a typo. Twelve years old, twenty-five years of service. 
    Then, in 1881, when my gram was a baby, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. According to most accounts, the Russian government used his murder as an excuse to target the Jews even further. 
    In 1903, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a cruel and vicious document created by the Tsar’s secret police force, was published and widely distributed. It might have been the first bestselling “fake news,” and it led to the massacre and exile of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
    In 1903, in Russia, against this violent, unstable, chaotic environment, my great-grandmother had the audacity to bear a child. Three years later, Gram brought my three-year-old grandmother to find a better life here in the USA. 
    My father’s parents also grew up in the Pale of Settlement. The planet was in the midst of World War I in April 1917 when the US declared war on Germany. My dad was born a mere 3 months later in Schenectady, NY. 
    Unbeknownst to anyone, a virulent flu would be unleashed less than a year later. The flu killed more people than even the “war to end all wars.”
    Grandmothers on both branches of my family tree uprooted themselves to start over in a land of strange food, strange customs, and a strange new language.
    They did not move away from fear, anxiety, and scarcity (although they did that, too). They moved toward a chance for safety, freedom, and hard work that would lead to financial security for their families. 
    My mom and I would have a discussion sometimes when I was growing up and when I was grown. Mom was a “bootstraps” kind of woman. “People just need to gather their bootstraps and pull themselves up,” she would tell me. 
    “What if they don’t have any?” I’d counter.
    “Then they best go out and get some. Your grandparents never asked for a handout.”
    Yikes. But, on some level, I understand. They were resilient.
    To research resiliency, I listened to a TED talk given by Lucy Hone. (Look it up by typing in her name and her title: Three Secrets of Resilient People.) 
    She says her three strategies are not automatic and even though they are easy to learn, they are not always easy to implement.
    1.  Resilient people, she says understand that sh*t happens. They know that suffering is part of life, and terrible and tragic incidents happen. And they happen randomly. Resilient people don’t often ask “Why me?” That doesn’t matter. Entitled people, quite a large amount of people today, believe that good is the norm. Resilient people know the exact opposite is true.
    2.  Resilient people are really good at focusing their attention on what they can change and somehow accept what they can’t. 
    This is a vital and learnable skill of resilience. Resilient people don’t ignore the negatives, they have worked out a way of focusing on the good. Resilient people look for things to be grateful for. A recent scientific study showed that after six months, people who named three things they were grateful for each day showed a higher level of gratitude and happiness and a lower level of depression.
    Science tells us we are better off when we make an intentional, deliberate, and ongoing effort to tune into what’s good in our lives.
    3.  Resilient people ask themselves, “Is what I’m doing helping or harming me?” They ask the question many times throughout their day. By asking, we bring an intention to our decisions and give ourselves control over our decision-making.
    Resilience is not a fixed trait. In an article posted at InBrief: The Science of Resilience (find it on YouTube) we learn that our genes determine where our center of resiliency is. Optimism and pessimism are two ends of a continuum. Some of us have the propensity to be optimistic, some pessimistic.
    We all fall somewhere between the extremes. 
    Our environment and our life experiences, combined with the ways we react to them, are highly individual and highly interactive.  
    My grandmothers taught me to move toward the future. Lucy Hone reminds me to be grateful and stay conscious of my thoughts and behavior.
    She says, “It is possible to live and grieve at the same time.” 
    I say we have to.

I’m reading Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby (Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2021). It is very readable, clear, and concise. My “history lesson” came from Ms. Tishby. 
   Be curious! (Take time to grieve. Then, take stock and act.)

munch, crunch, munch, munch, crunch, gulp.
They ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate
until all the popcorn was gone.
Later that night, Mama and Papa Bear came home. 
“Wake up!” they said. “We brought you a present.”
“What is it?” asked Sam.
“Popcorn,” they replied.
                                                       from Popcorn
                             written and illustrated by Frank Asch
                                       Parents Magazine Press, 1979

    Everyone who knows me knows Halloween is not my favorite holiday. I mentioned costumes a little bit last week. I didn’t make my kids’ costumes, but I’m not a Scrooge, so to speak! I used to buy candy. Of course, I bought the kind I liked best, chocolate, what else? But I’d get in Weight Watcher trouble with all the leftovers. Seemed a shame to toss something so delicious, but I didn’t want to wreak havoc with my daughters’ dental health (or my weight). 
    So I took the candy to work.
    Leftovers became a perpetual problem until I thought outside the chocolate box.
    One year I gave the trick-or-treaters pencils, unsharpened of course, for safety’s sake. As you probably guessed, that was not my greatest idea ever.
    The next year I gave the kids those tiny cans of Play-Doh. That was better, but some of the leftovers dried out before my girls finished playing with them. 
    Then I thought the kids might like something longer lasting than a Twix or Laffy-Taffy, or even Play-Doh. I went to the bank and turned a ten-dollar bill into a couple of rolls of nickels. 
    The kids were happy and for once, I liked the leftovers. I increased the “treats” gradually until this year, I gave my trick-or-treaters each a one-dollar bill. Full disclosure, I usually only get a few kids. The number was three this year, so even though the seventeen dollar bills are bulky in my wallet, I don’t mind. 
    I solved my problem, but still think (dream) about the chocolate. 
    Cocoa prices are in extreme fluctuation right now largely due to the effects of the current El Niño weather pattern. A recent report by Luker Chocolate notes “[t]he high temperatures and low humidity are especially negatively impacting Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together supply about 70% of the world’s cocoa supply.” 
    Luker Chocolate is a Fair Trade company. They strive to support their growers by compensating them equitably. They are proud of their sustainability. The company works with farmers and community members to raise awareness about their own environment. Their action involves direct intervention to prevent deforestation, protect water sources, and promote agroforestry designs. 
    But in most of the chocolate industry, child labor is heavily exploited. According to Deutsche Welle, a German-owned public international broadcaster, “child labor remains a problem in cocoa farming.”  Despite decades of promises to curtail child labor, a new study shows it has actually increased. 
    In Ivory Coast and Ghana about 1,600,000 children work in the industry. “On every second cocoa farm there, children as young as five have to pitch in instead of going to school.” Because they are small and can get to hard-to-reach areas, children are used for the most dangerous work, weeding and harvesting with machetes.
    Mars, Nestle, and many other chocolatiers worldwide, have been promising for over 20 years to end the worst forms of child labor. 
    They keep missing their goals. 
    A revised target in 2010 announced a reduction of child labor by 70% by 2020. Missed again. Richard Scobey, president of the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) and industry spokesman, claims the goal was too ambitious. 
    The same DW article states, “Cocoa fetches a little over $2,000.00 per pound, which is half the price it fetched in 1970.” 
    For each $1.09 spent on chocolate, about 14 cents goes to the farmers. Chocolate manufacturers receive 42 cents, and retailers (including the taxes they collect) garner 51 cents.
    In 2023, Ghana and Ivory Coast got together and required buyers to pay a premium of about $400/ton. Scoby said, “[t]his [increase] will generate $1.2 billion in additional revenue for cocoa farmers.”
    Whether the farmers actually realize a living wage remains to be seen. Today, the average cocoa farmer in Ivory Coast earns 78 cents/day. The living wage is $2.51.
    To help alleviate the problem, try clicking on the good trade. It’s a list of 11 Fair Trade chocolate companies with their links. Endangered Species Chocolate is sold at Target.
    I solved my trick-or-treat leftovers problem with some leftover dollar bills. At least in the short term, my problem is solved. 
    Chocolate is a different story. Fair Trade chocolate is more expensive. That’s a given. But it is better for the environment and hopefully better for children and the farmers. It might be better for my waistline, too. After all, if it needs to cost more, which it does, I’ll need to buy less. 
    Maybe I’ll eat less, too.

I’m reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House, 2008). This winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is a loosely connected group of short stories revolving around a retired schoolteacher in a fictional town in Maine. Olive appears, but not always as the main character, in each chapter’s vignette. Altogether, it’s a sad story of the mundane yet simple joys and sorrows everyone experiences, the lyrical language sings brightly in beautiful contrast.  
                                   Be curious! (and trade fairly)