As school starts once again...

I have to be honest. I don't always look forward to the beginning of a new semester. I am rarely prepared in time. I need a few more days to finish building online course materials. I always seem to need a few more weeks to practice before school begins taking up time. I hate seeing all the traffic return to town. The first few weeks of a semester are particularly crowded -- upperclassmen moving back to town, freshmen moving into town, everyone getting used to schedules and parking woes, and the summer residents who are still here. The streets are overcrowded, mostly with people who don't know how or don't care how they drive. But Boone is a bustling place, full of life and cooling weather. And I love my students, and I enjoy visiting with them again as they hang out in the hallway outside my office and begin sharing ideas with each other once again.

This time around, I need school in my life, and I'm looking forward to trying some new things as a teacher and performer. The start of this new semester is about to give me a solidity I have been lacking since this past spring. It has been a year of loss. In four months, I experienced the loss of my mother Judi Bell, my classmate and friend David S. Kirby, my undergraduate organ professor H. Max Smith, and a catastrophic publicity failure for my new recording Music City Mixture (to be narrated in a forthcoming blog post, not yet written). But this year I also gained some things: tenure, a summer full of rich travel experiences, some extra time with my sister Talana, and my father Donald's handsome chocolate brown 1970 Lincoln Mark III. As long as I live, his spirit will live in that car. And I am energized by all that.

So bring on the last-minute lecture planning, the recitals on the road, the lunches with students, the dealing with people who haven't done their homework, and the scheduling snafus in the concert hall. It's a new day, and my new buzzphrase will be, "Be the master of your own mess."