Welcome to my more or less annual post consisting of nothing but whatever’s on my mind on June 18. The most notable feature of the 2024 edition, I think, is the feeling — lost for five years — of composing it from home. True, it’s (as they say) “only a rental,” but it is indeed a house, in a place where we have chosen to live.

(Technically, 2023 was our first June 18th here, but you will search in vain for a 2023 edition of this series… because there wasn’t one. We’d flown back across the country last year, for a wedding.)

About that Spotify playlist: I vaguely remember, sometime in the 1970s, deciding that I needed to “get” classical music — become more familiar with it, if not exactly, y’know, conversant with it. To that point, I was vaguely familiar only with Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, along with fragments like Brahms’s lullaby and so on; I suppose you could also throw in Gershwin and Copland, but I wanted to “get” pre-20th classical music. And I have no idea why I settled on Mahler. His music hadn’t been recommended to me by anyone I remember, and I hadn’t encountered it in the soundtrack of a film or other media context…

Anyhow, Mahler it was.

I could not tell you even back then (when I must have seen the album jacket a hundred times) nor later (ditto, cassette-tape and CD labels) which recordings of the First Symphony I listened to so many times, at home or in the car. I vaguely remember that the first album — by whoever performed it — was on the Deutsche Grammaphon label; I base this on the near-certainty that I wanted to impress myself with an “authoritative” actual-by-gods-real-German investment, as if I had any idea what I meant by that.

It wasn’t the Boston Symphony, though. And Seiji Ozawa wasn’t conducting. But this will more than suffice for today.

(Aside: I just discovered I also featured the second movement of the “Titan” symphony in a post back in 2019.)

I don’t talk much here about my experience of getting, well, old. When I do get into it with family and friends, it’s in what we might call a commiserative context: “Can you believe I’m/we’re over 70 now? And boy, do I ache when I get out of bed in the morning. And my hearing’s observably worse. And I need new glasses. Don’t even ask about my teeth. And what about all those whippersnappers cavorting on my lawn?!?” That sort of thing.

The one thing we don’t talk about (even kiddingly) is, well, The Thing. The one inescapable fact of life, after being born in the first place (both events more or less out of our control): the, y’know… terminus.

I’m not sure I’d even know how to talk about it, or why it should feel so off-limits as a topic — given, especially, how much and how thoroughly we — all those friends and family — have talked about every single other Big Event in all our lives. (I’ve always loved that I can talk with these folks about “anything.” And that’s true. Except for this.)

Now, the practicalities of death: oh yeah, we’ve discussed those (before moving hurriedly on to lighter matters, like major surgery). We talk about wills and estate planning, end-of-life directives and do-not-resuscitate forms, and so on. We talk about those things, I think, mostly because we have to: they necessarily involve other people (people about whom we generally care very, very much). Those are difficult but loving discussions.

But that’s not the sort of thing my mind is nudging up against at the moment. I’m thinking, more, about death as a personal thing: my death. What will it be like, to die? Will I know that it’s happening, before it happens, and if so, how soon before? What will I leave undone — what pieces will I have inadvertently left behind for others to pick up? (Because there are always unpicked-up pieces, aren’t there?)

Oh, I’m not morbid. I don’t want to think about such matters; a common trope in the media might be “good deaths,” but I doubt that many deaths at all — no matter how peaceful and pain-free for the dying — leave behind 100% nice and tidy lives for others involved.

I have been very, very fortunate to have had few deaths in my own family and among my dearest friends. I’ve lost my grandparents and dad; two friends from my younger days died way too early, but not, y’know, violently. On the other hand, I know this leaves me woefully unprepared to deal with the deaths — however peaceful and “good” or otherwise — of all these other people I’ve been close to my whole life. I don’t want to hurt them by being the first of our circle to die, but on the other hand I’m terrified of not being the first. (It’s weird to be thinking about this at all, I know.)

Enough of that. It’s just on my mind today, and, well, on most days anymore.

Edit to add: 100% coincidentally, I just now learned — while following up on a very old blog post — of an app called WeCroak. (That’s the logo at the left.) Says the Web site:

The WeCroak app is inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.

Each day, we’ll send you five invitations to stop and think about death. Our invitations come at random times and at any moment, just like death. When they come, you can open the app to reveal a quote about death from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker.

We encourage you to take one moment for contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation. We believe that a regular practice of contemplating mortality helps us accept what we must, let go of things that don’t matter and honor the things that do.

How about that? Unfortunately, it’s not available for my phone’s version of Android, but you might be interested (even if not in your 70s)!

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One of my favorite “followees” over on Instagram is one whose handle there identifies her as ceegee_cgn — AKA Claudia, based in Cologne, Germany. Otherwise, I know only that she occasionally visits other cities around western continental Europe: Paris, Düsseldorf, Köln, Marseilles, and so on, with what seems to be an annual or semi-annual jaunt to Ibiza. Because I’ve asked her, I know that she shoots not with a “real” camera, but with an iPhone (“for me,” she says, “still the best way to catch moments while travelling”).

Okay, that’s not all I know about her. I know about her principally that she has an exquisite eye for geometry, especially the geometry of structures — and for the ways that people interact (often unconsciously) with the structures in whose presence they find themselves. Like most frequent photographers, she has favorite subjects which she returns to regularly, but she always finds a little something just so — just right, just different enough — to imbue the shot with one-of-a-kind authenticity. Her photos are almost exclusively in black-and-white, sometimes only B&W, with no shades of gray at all, and she generally follows the original Instagram format restriction (square pix only — exceptions for the rare portrait-format video clips). In a given caption, you’ll find little specific information: lots of general-purpose hashtags (#bw_lightandshadow, etc.)… which might be frustrating for some. But — for me — the dearth of information paradoxically adds weight to her reverence for the sheer beauty of form, for two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional geometry: girders, windows, railway stations, sidewalks, stairways… all boiled down to straight lines, circles, graceful loops and whorls, all the myriad fingerprints of civilization.

I thought I’d close today’s (this year’s) “Potpourri” post with a tiny gallery of some of Claudia’s work (the last one, a rare color shot). I’ve been following her for years, but the ten photos here go back only to 2022 or so.

My thanks to her for her permission to grace this space with a selection of her work. I greatly admire it, and am delighted to feature it in this post.

And with that, I’ll bring this yearly installment to a close. I hope you (whoever you are) are, like me, continuing to find reasons to be happy as well as, uh, excruciatingly aware of the passage of time. Cling to the good stuff, note but give no particular weight to the bad, and perhaps we’ll find ourselves crossing paths again next year, hmm?