Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The Boomer Chronicles

The Boomer Chronicles

I’ve Met Some Very Cool People This Summer

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 06:16 AM PDT

I’ve been getting around this summer and have met some very cool people. Here they are:

Melinda Wagner. I went to the Monadnock Music Festival to see my violin teacher perform chamber music. There, I met a woman named Melinda Wagner, 53, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of one of the pieces my violin teacher played (“Pan Journal”). Wagner’s “Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion,” commissioned by Paul Lustig Dunkel and the Westchester Philharmonic, was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the only flute concerto to date to win the award). I got to sit in on a rehearsal of Wagner’s harp and strings number, and listened as the musicians and Wagner parsed the music to an intense degree.

Sherpas. Yep, real-live Sherpas from Nepal. (The pic above shows the Sherpa family I met, along with some of my relatives.) Most people familiar with Sherpas think of them as the porters who help adventure travelers get to the top of Mt. Everest. Pasang Sherpa and his family are friends of my sister’s. Pasang has climbed to the top of Mt. Everest five times. I couldn’t resist grilling him over lunch about his former work in Nepal. He also told me how he grew up in a village that’s miles and miles from anything else. There is no electricity. Everything is bartered. Everyone’s last name is Sherpa. I can’t imagine how he and his wife made the transition from a Nepal mountain village to life in a small Connecticut town. They work factory jobs and don’t make much money. They have two really cute and very bright sons.
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