My love for Spring probably lies in a reaction against the long, cold Midwestern winters I grew up with back home in Indiana. As a child, I loved the huge drifts of snow, of course, but by the time I hit adolescence the long months of mud, the dull barren trees, the cars gray with salt and the brown lawns lost their charm for me, I must confess. When Spring finally did arrive in Indiana, however, it came is spades. Indiana was so lush that I swear you could smell the crisp green aroma of the new leaves of the deciduous canopy that covered our town.

I have a certain affinity for trees having grown up in large old farmhouse that sat on an acre of land planted with a number of hardwoods. We had mulberry, walnut, a couple of cherry and apple, a few box elders and two types of maple. Each had its own characteristic and helped to mark the passage of the seasons. In early summer the mulberries bore their fruit which would fall off the tree and stain our feet purple as we ran on the lawn barefoot. Midsummer, the box elders would be covered with an innocent, friendly bug that was narrow and brown and outlined with a pretty shade of orange. In the fall, the walnuts would drop their great, green, tennis-ball sized spheres.

My favorite trees were the maples. They would start out the Spring by producing and dropping their seeds. These were marvels of evolutionary engineering. A elliptical seed about a quarter of an inch long was wrapped inside a long, thin rigid, veined membrane that fanned out in the shape of a feather. When the seeds fell, the feathery bit would offset the weight and it would turn into a mini-helicopter that whizzed a good distance from the parent tree. Maples were also nice, tall, straight trees with limbs spaced perfectly for climbing, and they gave me my first taste of what it was like to leave the earth and observe it from above.

One Spring, my second-to-oldest brother, Bob, came home and announced that he was going to make maple syrup. He'd seen a film about it at school and wanted to try it. Somewhere in my father's workshop, Bob found some narrow copper tubing and sawed these into lengths of about four inches. In one end, he cut a notch and then drove these into the side of a tree with a hammer. In the notch, he hung the handle of a bucket. In a few days, he had collected about a gallon of sap. He then proceeded to boil this down on the stove. Though he got less than a cupful of syrup, I found the whole episode quite exciting. It showed me that the Earth yields up quite tasty treats if you know where to look, but it also taught me that my brother was kind of cool and that it was OK to experiment. Oh, and the syrup tasted good, too.

Speaking of sap, I find the Rondo alla Turca gets my juices flowing. By now you know that I love meticulous music that has a driving rhythm. Such pieces energize me. The Rondo is actually the third movement of Mozart's Piano Sonata in A, K. 331. The title refers to the 18th century vogue for things from Eurasia, especially Turkey and Persia. I believe this was the time of Germany's first attempt at empire building and they spent a good deal of time in Anatolia, digging up and looting ancient archeological sites, like Troy and Pergamon, and bringing them back to Europe. In France Montesquieu was writing his "Lettres Persanes," which was a critique of modern society as he envisioned it would have seemed to a visiting Persian prince. Mozart even wrote an opera entitled The Abduction from the Seraglio.

The piece starts out with a quaint little tune that's played in small snatches. From there it blossoms into an energetic dance played loud and with gusto. He then takes the tune and improvises on it running it up and down the scale, changing the key, and alternating back and forth between quiet and loud. You know the piece: it's been used in any number of films whenever they want to show energy or motion because it has a "traveling" feel to it.

It certainly gets my sap running, and I hope it does yours.

Mozart Bio

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