The Tenor

I love opera.  Sometimes it makes my heart beat so wildly that I expect the people around me to start shushing.  I love it when the tenor's voice strains for the high notes until it sounds thin enough to rip apart like old cloth.  That's why I wanted to see Carmen in Barcelona last fall. 

  

We didn't have tickets because they cost $225 and we are but humble farmers, but I had read somewhere that the Gran Liceu holds out a few to discount on the day of the show.  So on our way back from Gaudi's Sagrada Familia on Saturday evening, I stopped at the box office.  It was about 5:00, and the window was still closed, but there was already a lady waiting beside it on the bench. 

The lady told me she had flown in from Switzerland just to see Carmen because the Barcelona opera is the best in Europe and the tenor scheduled for that night was the season's fair young man.  Her story weakened my knees just a little, and I sank onto the bench beside her; soon, a German couple and their friend joined us there, and with the bench filled, a Spanish couple started the line up the steps toward the street.  After that, people just poured in.  A sign said to take a number, the box office would open at 7:00 p.m.  That's right; at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the queu take numbers.

Our only discomfort was that the little number dispensing machine wasn't working. Every time somebody new showed up, he came downstairs to where we were waiting, pushed the button, and got a ticket that said No Servicio.  Someone from the bench, usually the German friend, would explain that the machine was broken, the box office would open at 7:00, and we headed the line; and then she would count us off, Swiss lady number 1, me number 2, German couple 3 and 4, friend number 5, and the newcomer would go up the stairs to wait.  But every time we did that, I guess we felt a little more vulnerable because the only thing that stood between our orderly line and a crushing mob was bare naked civility.  With one little push, we could all be characters in an opera of our own. 

And sure enough, before long, the pusher arrived.  We knew her before she opened her mouth.  Something about her stood out like a boil on a baby's bottom and none of us could take our eyes off her.  She was aloof and glowering and she did not return up the stairs after we had explained about the dispenser and the line.  Instead, she just stood there at the bottom, studying our faces and surveying the room like a mechanical, shrouded lighthouse.  For what seemed a very long time, we returned the stare, but no one really moved until the German man stepped forward.

Like a tenor, he was a very large middle-aged man, and he somehow managed to get right down into the woman's face.  It began as a duet -- he ordered her up the stairs, she declined, he began to taunt her, she replied in kind -- but then the rest of us joined in for a grand, full-company number.  People jeered over the rail and shook their fists; people began to spill down toward the floor.  Over in my corner by the ticket window, I imagined a crushing melee because the woman was out of line.  I hear from time to time Americans say they don't want to go to Europe because Europe is so much like the states.  But Europe has its own character.  Although we Americans love our sports, we don't make operas like the Europeans.  We don't riot when someone steps out of line. 

But our group didn't riot that day either.  In fact, the number ended inexplicably, abruptly and silently.  The woman scanned the room as if to say, "I'll get you and your little dog, too."  And when she had seen enough, she backed onto the stairs, stooped and whirled just like in the movie, and simply melted away. 

The crowd went wild, of course.  In an opera at this point, the chorus would be singing cheerfully, turning awkwardly back and forth among themselves, patting each other on the back, and nodding their heads like church goers giving a reluctant kiss of peace.  On the stairs, people did much the same, acknowledging one another, patting themselves on the back, and when the ticket booth finally raised its shades, it jubilantly ushered the Swiss lady to the first window and me to the second.  But, jubilation notwithstanding, this last act is sad.  The ticket lady held up a seating chart and said in English -- and I paraphrase here -- that the only seats I could afford were behind posts.  A man had come into the building an hour earlier with center orchestra seats for €149 each, the internet price, and I had turned them down.  And now, the ticket lady was lifting the shell to reveal that the pea was not there.  And out I walked, empty handed.

It was Saturday night in Barcelona and I had nowhere to go.  Fred was napping at the hotel and Bill and Susan were nowhere to be found.  We were hosteled in the medieval quarter, right on Las Ramblas.  So I decided to walk.

Normally when I am feeling low, I just walk until the seratonin kicks in, but that night its little foot must have fallen asleep.  I made my way from Las Ramblas to the cathedral, stopping along the way to see the old city wall.  I read the history of Ramon Berenguer and listened for a while to a Chilean street harpist and then to a violinist.  But I had to drape my bottom lip over my arm to keep from tripping over it, and not even the historic markers cheered me up.  The narrow, winding alleys made it hard to keep up with where I was and the night chill was forming -- all of this to say that I was just turning a corner from bad to worse when I heard someone singing.

The Tenor

It was a confident, soaring voice backed by an inconceivable full orchestra and chorus.  My failing spririt caught hold of it and rode it like a wave to shore. For, you see, children, miracles do happen, even to the worst of us.

There in the alley behind the ancient Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia stood a tenor. He was dressed in a baggy black shirt and pants and a bright coral jacket; he had greasy shoulder-length hair; and he was straining for the high notes until his voice tore like old cloth.  His orchestra was a little Karaoke boom box on a hand cart; his chorus was six retirees in lawn chairs.  They were reading the lyrics from cheat sheets.

I sat down on the steps to a 15th-century doorway.  The tenor sang The March of the Toreador from Carmen, La Donna a Mobile from Rigoletto, and some others I couldn't name.  Then he played an introduction to O Solo Mio on his boom box and invited us all to sing along.  I pulled out my little Olympus voice recorder and captured it.  I wish I could get the file to load here, but I'm afraid you will have to use your imagination.  And if you do, people, be generous, because it was very, very grand.

This is the chorus -- the three people standing in a row and the three people sitting upright in front of them.

Every now and then the tall man stepped out of the line and hobbled into the alley to pick up a satchel.

He passed it around the crowd for donations and then put it back where he had gotten it and returned to his place in the chorus.  I gave the tenor all the money I had with me, but it was nowhere near the 149 Euros, I owed.

The tenor was from Zaragoza, but I don't remember his name, and I have not been able to find him on the internet.  If you know him, if you see him, please tell him I mentioned him.  And, if you would, please tell him, "Thank You."

Holiday Eggs

I do most of my baking in the two weeks before Christmas, mostly sugar cookies and shortbread, but sometimes pecan chewies or a pie and once in a while a cake.  I clear out the kitchen and haul in a storehouse of sugar and flour, nuts, dyes, spices --everything but the eggs.  I don't buy eggs because we raise those here.  


Just look at this bird! If I had a hair day as

bad as hers, I might skip work, too.

I say we raise them here, but this time of year our supply can be a little iffy because our hens stop showing up for work. They are molting right now -- visibly shedding -- and there is a deep wind row of feathers beneath their roost in the chicken house. It's odd that they start just as the weather turns cold, being half-naked for most of it, but they do. In our climate, they start in mid-November and shed right through the holidays. They won't lay again until they have a bright new coat of feathers sometime in January.

Fortunately, it's just the A-Team, the mature hens, who molt.  The Junior Varsity, born last spring and still sporting brand new feathers from the summer, are on the sideline, and we call them in.  They have only been laying for a few months, so their eggs are smallish, but they pull us through. 

We have just two youngsters on the job this year and they are laying a single egg a day.  So this time of the year, we are strategizing all the time.  Shall we eat it or save it?  Shall we go ahead and make sugar cookies or save up for a coconut cake?  Can we afford to give this egg away or should we hoard it with the others?  Ah Lordy, the holidays.  I hope Santa can't see this.

And we strategize over the hens, too, buying a couple of chicks each spring just for the holiday eggs. We figure that if most of them live for seven years, as they tend to do, our flock will top out at around a dozen. And for us that's a pretty good number.
Twelve hens should give us a thriving egg business next summer. We'll have two or three dozen a week to sell, plenty for grits and eggs on the weekends, and a few left over to bake with. The new girls will keep the flock young. Their eggs will help pay for chicken feed, endow the chicken retirement fund, and give my husband a little walking around money for the Starbucks coffee he craves. That way, everybody gets what they need, and nobody gets edgy.

And, of course, the baked goods are tasty, too. Pecan chewies this year and a couple of caramel cakes -- all made with fresh, home-grown, not jumbo but big enough eggs. You have to love the holidays. Nothing says lovin' like somethin' in the oven.

Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques

Georgie Moss Lewis and my sisters Betty and Barbara.

The first thing I do every morning is go down to the kitchen and look out the window for my chickens.  There should be three black hens, three red ones, three grey striped ones, and Roy.  The Black Sex-Linked hens came to me by accident.  My usual breeds are Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques.  I like them because they are the breeds my grandmother raised. 


My grandparents have been gone for more than 40 years now, but when I was a child they had a farm in Tennessee.  Their white frame house stood on a piece of high ground with cotton fields in front and pasture behind.  It had a fireplace in the living room and a hand pump just outside the back door.  It had a concrete front porch, a single bedroom, and a kitchen with cold running water.  When my sisters and I were infants, our parents used to bath us in the sink.  When we grew too big for that, they heated water on the stove to fill a tin basin on the floor.  I can remember sitting in that tub surrounded by family going about their business.  My baths were public and drafty, but to their credit, they were better than running to the outhouse in rain.

The house was surrounded by cotton fields.

The chicken house stood behind the house, near the storage shed and the milking barn.  Other than the space for these buildings and their yards, and for the garden and pasture, my grandparents planted every foot of their land in cotton.  Growing crops occupied their lives; it bound them to the soil and the seasons.  My grandparents' farm was not like mine.  It did not have tractors or pet sitters.  It did not have  hay delivered.  My grandparents did not name their chickens or give their roosters away. 

In the year when my father was dying of lung cancer, we talked about his upbringing.  "We didn't have nothing," he said.  "We never had nothing."  But as I remember it, my grandparents had quite a bit.  For one thing, they were healthy and, I couldn't help noticing even as a seven-year-old, inordinately handsome.  For another, they liked each other.  They smiled a lot and their eyes crinkled, and they had four doting sons who visited often and sent money when they couldn't.

My father Jim Lewis and his father Noel.

But good looks and good cheer don't necessarily put food on the table and the money must not have gone far.  In a climate that ranges from 10 inches of snow to 100+ degrees, my grandparents never lived in a house with insulation, they never had an indoor toilet or a telephone, never owned a car or a home.  Until they moved to my father's farm, they had been tenent farmers.  Their last house, in Mississippi, had only a deep well on the back porch -- that's right, the kind you dip water out of with a bucket, and the porch was built right over it -- and when it went dry, my grandfather hauled water on foot from the neighborhood store, a mile up the road, on the highway.  That was in 1966, and he was almost 80 years old.

It's no wonder their lifestyle has passed away.  And no wonder chickens are not always welcome these days, reminders as they are of such times.  I'm glad for the comforts I have and for the ease my animals share.  But I am also glad for the people and places I loved as a child and grateful for the memories.  And for my Rhode Island Reds and Dominiques who keep them alive.

The Automatic Chicken Door -- How To

My automatic chicken door has been up and running for four months now, and so far, knock on wood, it has been as faithful as a postman.  It is built of scrap wood and Lucite and runs on the little Add-A-Motor D20 Chicken Coop Motor from Smarthome.com.  In case you are contemplating a new door for your chicks, here's how I built it.

I used:

(2) 2x4 boards, 36 inches long
(2) 2x4 boards, 12 inches long
(1) sheet of PGLA .220 Lucite (a competitor of Plexiglas), 12"x18"
(1) strip of aluminum slatwall insert, 3' long
(1) screw hook, to attach the string to the door
(1) handful of nails
(1) Add-A-Motor D20 Chicken Coop Motor
(1) lamp timer

All that cost about $120, which was more than I wanted to spend, but after letting my birds in and out every day for 12 years, I decided it was worth the money.  Of the total, about $20 went for construction materials, and the rest paid for the motor.  In the time since I bought them, the materials have gone up in price and the motor has come down, but the bottom line is about the same.  

 Some doors are at ground level. Mine is elevated, with a ramp for access, and my chickens love it. I put rungs on the ramp at chicken footstep intervals, about 3 inches apart. The rungs are closer together than I expected them to be; I just kept adding until my birds stopped sliding.
 

My door was complicated by being framed inside an existing screen door. Your door, started from scratch, would be simpler to install. In either case, the design consists of three parts: the framed doorway, the sliding door itself, and the motor.

The doorway is 12" wide and 18" high, just big enough for my Rhode Island Red rooster Roy to get through if he ducks his head a little. You can check the best fit for your birds by putting ruler marks on a post or wall of your coop or leaning a yardstick against it and measuring your birds as they walk by. 


Roy stands 24" from comb to claw.  You can see the black mark on the post behind him.

A string attaches the motor to the Plexiglas.

The door is a Lucite panel that runs up and down in aluminum tracks.  Lucite, Plexiglas, Masonite, and tin (not wood) are ideal materials because they are strong, lightweight, and waterproof and will slide without sticking.  Up-and-down doors are more common than models that open from side to side and smaller doors are preferable to larger ones.  Four pounds seems to be all a little motor can lift, and doors with shorter sides have less opportunity to bind against the frame. 

The motor sits inside the coop and above the door frame.  It works like a fishing reel, spinning first one way and then the other to raise and lower the door on a string.  The lamp timer controls the schedule.

Aluminum slatwall inserts hold the Lucite in place and guide it up and down.  They are tacked to the insides of the door frame and they look like this:



           

Aluminum Slatwall Inserts guide the Plexiglas.


I used scrap wood to frame my doorway and bought the rest of my materials from Lowe’s Home Improvement Store.  Lowe's sells the Lucite in 18” X 24” sheets and the aluminum slatwall inserts in 6’ strips.  I had the store cut both in half for me, so what I took home was two 18” X12” panels of Lucite and two 3' strips of slatwall.  If I had bought the wood there, I suppose they would have cut that, too.  My timer is just a standard $4 lamp timer, also from Lowe's.



All I had to do when I got home was (using an existing entry into the chicken house):

1. Nail the aluminum slatwall to a wide edge of the longer 2x4s.  The nail will go right through the metal; just be sure it is flush and straight and that you don't bend the metal; 
2. Nail one side board into place;
3. Insert a Plexiglas panel into the track and the other side board, slide it up and down to make sure the fit is secure but not binding, and nail the second side board into place.  Then, with the Plexiglas inserted, nail the bottom sill into place to hold it.  And finally, nail the top board in place.  It was very, very easy.

The closed door sits in a groove for added security.

I am particularly pleased with the bottom sill of the doorway.  I grooved it to deter raccoons from poking their little claws underneath the closed door and trying to lift it.

I used the remaining half of my Lucite sheet to cover the top of the opening in my door. I tacked it tightly against the tracks as a permanent cover, but that was necessary only because I started with an opening that was twice as tall as I wanted in the first place. If you are starting from scratch, cut an opening exactly the size you need and be done with it.  Share the extra Lucite with a friend.

Although the framing went well, the motor is a different story.  I started with a motor that was too complicated for me and wasted quite a bit of time before I finally gave up on it and found a simpler one that I could install, adjust, and maintain by myself.

The first motor was the DIY model described on Chris and Keri's Blog.  I liked it because it was inexpensive and hand-made and clever, but in retrospect, Oh My God, What was I thinking?!  Chris and Keri's motor is a mass of electrical wiring and limit switches and a jerry-rigged screwdriver with a soldered circuit board that I don't even begin to understand.  Look at Chris and Keri's material list carefully.  If you don't recognize the parts or know what they're for or how they work, possibly this motor is not the best choice for you either, Grasshopper.

                            Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
                            Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
                            Master Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
                            Caine: No.
                            Master Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
                            Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
                            Master Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
                                                                              Pilot episode of Kung Fu (1972)

My friend Keith built Chris and Keri's motor for me; all I had to do was make it work.  But I had immediate problems with the limit switches, which I never got the hang of, and after I had fiddled with the screwdriver for a while, it stopped working, too.  The underlying problem was that I could not hear the grasshopper of the assembly which was at my feet.  Although Chris and Keri's design is a boon to those with better ears, my destiny lay with a factory-built model and a warranty.

Add-a-Motor Chicken Coop Motor Model D20

 I got on the internet and bought the Add-a-Motor Chicken Coop Motor Model D20.  On the negative side, it's made in China, it cost me almost $100 (although another company sells it cheaper now), and it’s not the hand-made gift my friend Keith made for me.   On the positive, it arrived in 2 days, it’s small and manageable (it looks like a big white thermostat, with all the parts inside where I don't even have to see them), it has a warranty, and its optional accessories include attachments for battery and solar backup. What’s more, it came with simple, thorough, idiot-proof instructions that make me feel not actually competent, but still very warm and fuzzy indeed.

It took me the better part of a day to wire and install an electrical receptacle in the chicken house and it took all of the following morning for me to digest the instructions and install the motor, scrounge up a timer, set it, plug it in, and test it.  But that night at 8:30 sharp, a gentle whir announced the door was closing, and the next morning my birds were outside and on the job before I was.  The machine is a Godsend.