Adaptation – Change – Resilience – that appears to be the order of the weekend. Not so much in me, although there’s been a lot of that in recent years, but rather in institutions which I remain part and parcel of. The ripples in society caused by the pandemic are continuing to knock against all sorts of far away shores and are continuing to cause serious issues. For everyone.
Today was the day of the annual Opera Birmingham vocal competition. It’s been going for pushing fifty years now. Young artists submit audition tapes for judging and the finalists are then invited to compete in person before a panel of judges in a concert setting. They all prepare five arias. They choose their first selection and then the judges select a second from the remainder. Pre pandemic, a large number of semifinalists were invited and heard on Saturday from which a much smaller selection of finalists were selected on the Sunday at the concert followed by dinner. With Covid having made travel more difficult and everyone’s budgets smaller, the semifinalist portion has been dispensed with and only the finalists now travel. The dinner has also shrunk with fewer patrons wishing to gather for dinners of hotel chicken in rented ballrooms. The competition has had to adapt for the times. In some ways, I rather like this more compact version better than the grander affairs of a few years ago. And, as a member of the board who has to oversee the finances of the organization, cheaper is always better these days.
The opera world is lived out of suitcases, with the exception of the Met, most opera companies in North America cannot afford to employ singers full time so it’s gig work and going from city to city or festival to festival or competition to competition. And that remains true in even the highest echelons of the art form, among the very few whose names become known outside of the niche industry by a wider public. They still have gigs, only they happen places like Covent Garden and La Scala and the Vienna Staatsoper. Tommy and I started opening our home to traveling singers in 2007 or 2008 and I’ve always kept it up. I have a decent guest room. It gives the artist someplace to stay besides a hotel with all the amenities. I’m relatively quiet and inoffensive. I get a small tax deduction from the opera for an in kind donation of housing that they don’t have to pay for. I’ve gotten to know some lovely people this way. In fifteen or so years of putting up young competition singers, I have a perfect record. Either they don’t place at all in the competition or they win first prize. I don’t let them know this in advance. I’m pleased to say the young man staying with me this weekend was the big winner. A huge bass-baritone in a slim young build of Korean heritage… he’ll have a career if he wants it.
It’s stewardship time at church. The annual pledge drive where the members are asked to pony up for the next fiscal year so we can make budget choices and keep the lights on. The UU Church of Birmingham is 70 years old. That seems rather old but when you look at churches that have been around for 150 years or so and have large 19th century endowments behind them, it’s a drop in the bucket. We more or less have to raise operating expenses for the year from current congregants. We do OK and, along the way, we’ve managed to purchase and pay for our building and land but it’s always a bit of a challenge. I’m on this board as well, and am additionally on the stewardship committee whose job it is to cajole, exhort and otherwise manhandle the congregation into making and fulfilling pledges.
The church is changing. When it was founded 70 years ago, the prime mover and shaker behind it was the then dean of the medical school who had come from Boston, where there are a lot of Unitarian churches. He had been recruiting additional faculty for health sciences from the North East and there was a nidus of New Englanders forming in 1950s Birmingham that did not have a taste for either Southern Baptist or Methodist creeds and so UUCB was born. The founding generations of the church were mainly people of intellect and high levels of education who were looking for a religious tradition that could coexist with scientific rationality and liberal social and political beliefs.
Most of the founding cadre has passed on to their reward. And times have changed and new generations with new needs have emerged. Six years ago, we called a new pastor, a dynamic young woman with energy, enthusiasm and empathy. The weekend of her initial visit was the weekend Tommy died. She was supposed to have a meeting with him about his children’s music program that week. She was also pregnant with her second child. Now, the children’s music program is coming back to life again post pandemic, that child is a rambunctious five year old, and her presence in the pulpit is leading to more and more young millennial and gen z families joining the church. Those generations don’t need staid customs and rationality. They need exuberance, and connection, and spiritual guidance in a dark and confusing time where an economy does little to help them improve and politics seems pitted against those with more open socio-political views, especially here in the Deep South. And so the church changes. And its a good thing. Most churches are losing members rapidly as younger generations revolt against dogmas of exclusion. We’re overflowing with young parents and kids and if even a fraction of them stay for the long haul, we’ll still succeed.
I teach Sunday school 3rd-5th grade a couple of times a month. I try to make it line up with the Sundays that the choir sings so that some Sundays I’m there for hours and some Sundays I can sleep in and tune in to Zoom church in my PJs if I feel like it. Most gay men of my generation have a certain trepidation regarding being involved with children’s activities. There’s too much conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia out there and Steve, Tommy and I have always had a hard and fast rule of no young people in our home without parental permission and others present. Even a whiff of impropriety will destroy a gay man’s reputation in a hot second. So I’ve always kept a bit of a distance from kids. But when I was asked to teach some years ago, I was happy to say yes. This was one institution where I knew the parents wouldn’t be speculating on ulterior motives. And we have a hard and fast rule in that church of always at least two unrelated adults present whenever there are kids. It protects everyone.
Work is changing too. Some for the better, some not so much. I should probably go into details on current changes in American health care but this post is already too long and that subject deserves a lot more than I have energy for tonight. I’ll come back to it. But I did make one decision this past week or so. I will retire from daily clinical work at the end of June 2027. That’s just over three years for UAB to figure out what they’re going to do with clinical geriatrics without me. I’ll still be around in emeritus status but I won’t be subject to the whims of administrators trying to buff up the next quarterly balance sheet anymore. Of course I still reserve the right to change my mind but that’s what it looks like now.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 