It was with deep sadness that I received the call from Rosalie Pratt’s daughter, Sandy Jones, that Rosalie had died. The loss of such a good friend and colleague was staggering, but the thought that she was released from almost constant physical suffering made it easier to bear. And how grateful I was to have had those few days with her last October. I cannot express how much I will miss her. I tried to recapture a bit of our life and travels together, and have written my own eulogy to a most unusual, accomplished, and beloved woman. (click here for file)
Author: Meg Noble Peterson Page 29 of 31
I broke my right little toe at the end of October while racing around, looking for the perfect outfit for Barry Hamilton’s and Ruth Klukoff’s wedding in St. Petersburg, Florida. And a most unusual wedding it was! I flew to Tampa with Kit Sailer, and we celebrated along with many other Summit High classmates of Barry’s and daughter Martha’s. I felt as if I’d gone back twenty-five years and was living on Badeau Ave. in Summit, NJ. But this time I was not THE MOTHER. I was just a friend. It was fun swimming in the ocean and sitting on the beach and going for a treasure hunt on the pristine island where the ceremony took place. Ruth’s Zukuki violin students provided the music in a perfect setting of sun, tropical flowers, and palm trees. The food was sensational and it wasn’t until the sun was a red ball on the horizon that we dispersed to continue the party with good conversation and margueritas. Warning: Never drink margueritas before entering a hot tub. They don’t mix!
An added plus from my Florida trip was finding Max Croft, a sensational web designer and professor of digital media at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He is responsible for the design of my site and I shall be forever grateful to him.
Several weeks later I returned to Florida to work with Max and to see Barry and Ruth once again. I also took a side trip to University Park (Sarasota) to see my old friend from music education convention days, Jane Beethoven, and enjoyed her luxurious pad. She’s still working in the field of music and publishing, dividing her time between Florida and Lugano, Switzerland. And she’s as beautiful as ever!
The month of November was spent playing in two Plainfield Symphony concerts and taking in some new shows and musicals to feed my NY theater addiction. If you’re interested, call me. I’ll tell you what to see and what NOT to see. There are some klunkers out there, too. But for $3 audience extra tickets, I can afford to take chances.
Another celebration. Daughter Cary came from Whidbey Island, WA, to officiate at her annual gingerbread house making party for neighborhood children, friends and relatives.(click here for pictures) In the evening she showed slides of her recent trip to Dharmasala, India, where she lived and worked with Tibetan refugees. It was a long and very interesting evening. My annual Christmas party. What will we do next year, Cary? No trips have been planned as yet, but I’ve just purchased a beautiful new Canon EOS digital rebel and long lenses, so I may be showing the slides next year. I finally put my film cameras to rest. But they are not forgotten or forsaken.
Cary and I were able to see two shows I highly recommend. “Souvenir,” about the relationship between the out-of-tune singer, Florence Foster Jenkins in the ’30’s and ’40’s, and her accompanist, and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” the funniest show on Broadway. As with so many actors and producers, Norbert Leo Butz, the co-lead with John Lithgow, lives in Maplewood.
The entire family is gathering at Martha’s for Christmas, and I can guarantee fireworks and lots of fun.
I did a book reading and signing at Anne Quarles’s beautiful new home in Islandia, Long Island. What a lively group of women they were! About twenty cheered me on and responded most enthusiastically. I’m forever grateful to Anne for the great dinner and the heart warming response.
A lively group of people attended a book party given for me by J. Carol Goodman in Morristown, NJ, on October 21st. I read several excerpts from Madam and answered questions. The response was truly gratifying. My thanks to Carol and to everyone who bought a book. I hope they like it as much as I enjoyed sharing it with them.
I’ve just returned from a week in Missouri. I visited my old friend, Dr. Rosalie R. Pratt, in West Plains and my friend and storyteller, Lynn Rubright, in St. Louis. Rosalie and I wrote the book, Elementary Music For All Learners, started MEH (Music Education for the Handicapped), ran five international symposia together, and traveled many times throughout Europe and behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980’s. She has always been an inspiration to me and, even though her health is deteriorating, keeps writing and editing in her field of Music/Medicine. She has also written an historical novel about Mozart and I’m encouraging her to publish it. Such courage and spirit in the face of great physical odds and constant suffering is an example to all of us who take our own good health for granted. Rosalie is one of the greats!
Lynn and Robert Rubright welcomed me to their charming home in Kirkwood, MO, and together we plotted our strategy for marketing our respective books. Believe me, it’s not as much fun as writing, but a necessary evil if you want to get your book to an audience! Lynn’s book, Mama’s Window, is reviewed on her website link. I had the privilege of watching her work with a group of third graders, who had all read the book and were eager to find out more from the author. What a lively session it was! I also spoke to them about my travels, briefly, and found the same enthusiasm and interest in the world at large that they expressed for Lynn’s characters living in the swamps of the Mississippi Delta. It’s wonderful to see the enthusiasm of these youngsters, and watch an expert, like Lynn, draw out their emotions and their observations as they learn more about the world.
What a wonderful weekend this was! I had my first book signing at Goldfinch Books in Maplewood, and the crowd was large and appreciative, buying almost all the books on hand (that is, mine…the store has plenty of others!) Laura Huemer, the owner, was celebrating her two-year anniversary of ownership and seemed especially gratified that we had such a good turn out for her occasion, as well. She had baked small cookies in the shape of yellow birds (perhaps a goldfinch?) that were gobbled up in short order. The balloons were still flying, however, when I left.
I was especially flattered by customers who weren’t previous acquaintances, but who had read Madam and come in to have me sign it. Men as well as woman thanked me for broadening their view of the world and inspiring them to ”take off and see what was around the next corner.”
Watch for the article in this week’s News Record. Jeff Cummins talked with me at length after the book signing, asking me a great many probing questions about why I travel as I do and what I’ve learned about my life during these various world trips. He did a lot of digging and I’m eager to see what he writes.
I’ve just returned from a glorious three weeks in Sweden and Norway, where the scenery is to die for–mountains, rivers, waterfalls at every turn–and cities exude old world charm, “old” meaning 12th century. It was my first experience with a digital camera, so I went a little crazy, knowing I could erase with ease. But it also allows me to show you a few of the highlights and a few of the interesting people who crossed my path.
After visiting another stave church and being escorted around by an erudite Englishman, we boarded a series of buses, until we arrived at Sogndal, where we transferred to yet another bus for Bricksdal, the home of the famous Bricksdalsbreen (breen means glacier). Getting there took us through scenery so intense and so varied that we finally stopped exclaiming and just sat there awestruck. Roaring rivers, waterfalls cascading into fjords and sometimes down the sides of cliffs onto the bus, tunnels, narrow winding roads inching higher and higher, and blue-green lakes formed by glacial runoff.
In Bricksdal we took a cabin close to a turbulent river. Dinner was incredible, as was the clientele, many of whom were climbers who would tackle the glacier the next day. I felt like a wimp, but climbing ice is not something I crave or even like. However, the serpentine walk to the glacier, past dense forests and glacial falls I could appreciate.
We explored the cave-like areas under the broad, graceful lip of the ice and listened to the cracking sounds and falling rocks that are part of a living, moving glacier. I didn’t realize that over this entire area is the biggest glacier in Europe, and the Bricksdalsbreen is only one tongue of the massive Jostedalsbreen. We sighted one other—the Melkevollbreen.
The day was spent exploring and the evening in good conversation as we sat by the fire with the river thundering a few feet away. I would have been happy to stay here a week, and regretted it when we left early in the morning to catch the bus for Oslo in the small town of Stryn.(click here for pictures)
I regret not having time before leaving for Myanmar to post the last two days of my trip in Sweden, spent in Uppsala with my old friend, Alf Gabrielsson, a retired professor of music psychology at the University of Uppsala. The experience was so rich and the exploration of this old town and its surroundings so intense that it cannot be done quickly. Watch for the tour and the photos upon my return.
Our day began at 9:45 AM with the famous train ride up to Myrdal to see an enormous waterfall. I remembered that I had taken this same trip with Lynn Rubright in 1983. On the way we saw some outstanding waterfalls with a free fall of 500 ft. or more. Then we slowly chugged upward, overlooking a deep valley, until we arrived at 2500 ft. I saw the usual red houses with wooden roof tiles laid in a teardrop pattern.
We changed trains and headed for Voss, going down to 150 ft. Voss is a lovely town with centuries old churches and an ancient cross from 1000 AD on a grass mound behind the post office. I also came upon a plaque in honor of Knut Rockne, the football coach at Nore Dame in the 30’s. I took a picture for my soon-to-be-son-in-law, Gary Shippy. He’s a proud Notre Dame graduate (is there any other kind?).
It started to rain, so we ducked into a nearby café where I decided on the Norwegian “special.” Holy calories, Bat Man! A huge, fatty lunch arrived on the arm of a blond Viking. Fried potato/wheat balls, a kind of mashed turnip swimming in butter, a fat sausage, and lamb shanks garnished with bacon bits. But Gullvi’s BLT was even bigger! Fortified, we waddled off to our next bus ride, which began with a famous mile of highway boasting 13 hairpin turns. It was very narrow and amazing how the driver negotiated each turn. And it was scary! Needless to say, there were numerous waterfalls along the way. It would take more superlatives than I know to describe the beauty of the landscape that unfolded on this trip. It started to rain gently as we got to a level area and from behind the mountains came a stunning rainbow covering the entire sky. It ended in one of the man lakes we passed. I tried, but failed to get a photo, but the scene will remain in my mind forever.
It was 6:15 when we arrived in Godvagen and boarded the ferry which took us on the Naroy fjord, the narrowest branch of the Sognefjord. What we saw from our perch on the upper deck was a microcosm of every type of Norwegian scenery, from tiny churches and villages along a green coast to shining slabs of rock and high, rounded hills rising directly from the water’s edge. We watched the changing panorama, frustrated because it was just too vast and too high to capture on film. We froze as we watched the sun set and the sky become black, a perfect backdrop for a surfeit of stars. I was glad for my Peruvian hat and mittens.
By 9 we had reached the small town of Kaupanger. We were taken to our pensione, a charming white clapboard house owned by a widow who specialized in growing every conceivable variety of flower. The place was a riot of color. The young couple who picked us up graciously let us stop at an old stave church close by and wander through the cemetery, before taking us to a Shell station where we could buy some bread, ham, and cheese for dinner. How incongruous! The next morning we were thrilled to see the inside of the same church, along with several other stave churches in this part of Norway.(click here for pictures)
