Livingston, I Presume

The two tenors

It just doesn't have that ring, does it?

I have no witty or amusing stories of personal encounters with the late, great Maestro Pavarotti. My future- husband and I once chased Jose Carreras down a Heidelberg street to get his autograph, and a college friend of mine asked Placido Domingo to sign his hand because he forgot to bring paper to the crowded stage door at the Vienna State Opera House. (Domingo's answer? An extremely dismissive, Spanish-accented "No.") Still, doesn't the world seem diminished without Luciano Pavarotti, the King of the High Cs?

I'll confess--I've never been much for tenors. (Sorry, Alex.) I was always a bad-boy-baritone kind of girl. All those brave tenor heroes and leading men were just tiresome. Give me Don Giovanni and Evgeni Onegin any day. Even so, I bought the "Three Tenors" albums and enjoyed the hell out of them. I know that a lot of people found them unseemly, and I had my laugh on the "My Way" trio, but even material on the schlocky side couldn't hide The Voice. It was a marvel.

For me, Pavarotti is one of the clearest examples out there of somebody who "had it," with "it" being that indefinable vocal quality that marks the difference between competence and talent and true greatness. It's not as if his parents had him in Kindermusik at the age of 6 months and doing Suzuki violin at 4. From all that I've read, he didn't even start studying voice until he was 19 years old. You can't create a Pavarotti. You can give a kid every advantage and all the exposure, and you might be able to guarantee competence, but you can never manufacture greatness. Frustrating, isn't it?

Certainly it was one of my principle frustrations when I studied music. I was competent enough to know that I didn't "have it" and smart enough to realize that I didn't have a chance of practicing/studying/strong-arming my way into "it". What was maybe more frustrating was encountering greatness and true talent and seeing it squandered. I went to school with a few cases like that and cursed the gods for combining amazing abilities with a lack of ambition to use it. If I had had that kind of talent--I would often say to myself--I'd be singing at the Met right now. But the two must go together. The life of a professional musician is not an easy one, and even the greatest talent in the world must have the drive to take that talent somewhere.

Thank heaven for all of us that Maestro Pavarotti had both in spades. There must be some damn musical spectacular in the works upstairs. 

Checks, no balances

According to a quiz I took on the Intertubes, I have the organizational style of a chipmunk. Which sounds cuter than "packrat", I suppose. The defining feature of my lack of organization, according to this quiz, was that I like to keep my affairs in disarray because I enjoy drama. Therefore, when I lose my keys, I create drama. Today's drama is The Case of the Missing Checkbook. It is relevant because we must pay for Montessori today, after many years of being spoiled by having the unsettling sum removed from Chip's paycheck before we ever encounter it. It is hard to write a check to the Montessori when ones checkbook has decided now would be a good time to go on walkabout.

Checks, schmecks anyway. One of the great things about living in a post-communist country is that their banking system had to start from scratch, in a way. In the olden days, people would pay bills by standing in line at the post office. (Some still do. It's mysterious.) Today, most everybody lets their money whiz about the international electronic banking system, getting their salaries deposited into their accounts, paying their rent with their mobile phone, and maintaining five separate currencies in the same account. Every time I trudge to the credit union with my mini-stack of freelancing checks to pay the mortgage in person, I feel like some kind of technological demotion has occurred. I think I entered our bank in Prague about four times, and one of those times was to open the account.

I'm not against personal service. And the credit union has great cookies in the lobby. But I could do without the whole check system, especially since the banking lobby has removed the fun of the float. Used to be you could write a check on a Friday afternoon and feel secure that it wouldn't reach your bank until Monday after you had gotten paid. Try that now and you'll be feeling the sting of the overdraft.

But writing about it isn't helping me locate the damn checkbook, so I should probably return to the good times of tearing apart my kitchen drawers and bellowing. Do you think the Montessori directress will believe me if I tell her that the check is in the mail?