I can’t believe that it was just a week ago that I was sitting at the Honolulu airport getting ready to fly out to California. My red-eye flight was delayed, which meant that we left after midnight and I arrived in Burbank on Monday afternoon (with a layover in San Francisco). We picked up my grandson from school, and immediately went to dinner at a restaurant of his choice, then came back to the house for birthday cake. I only spent one more night in California before flying back to Hawaii on Wednesday.

On Thursday morning I immediately drove to St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, where I went to practice and set up the organ for a funeral I was scheduled to play on Friday morning. I even taught an organ lesson in the late morning, then came back home to attend my daily Spanish conversation club. Next on the docket was St. Mark’s choir rehearsal and I went to my car only to find that the battery was dead and the car couldn’t be started! I didn’t want to deal with it then, and took an Uber to rehearsal.

The next morning I called AAA to restart the car, then drove to the Honda dealership, only two blocks away, to have a new battery installed. Their shuttle took me to St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, where I played for the funeral of Dora Kraul, aged 101, who was very active in the Episcopal Diocese for many years. The celebrant was the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese, The Rt. Rev. Robert Fitzpatrick. I guess that’s why they wanted a professional organist to play the funeral! It so happens that I am giving organ lessons to the pianist they hired, Irwin Jiang, who sat near the organ console to get some pointers on what I do to play a funeral. This is my third funeral in the last month!

Was I ever surprised to receive a text from Elizabeth Bell, from the Big Island, who was the maid of honor from my wedding to Carl Crosier in 1977, to let me know that Dora was her aunty, and it was her cousins, Dora’s children, who had made arrangements for the funeral! Small world!

Today was a typical Sunday where I play three services in two different churches — but today the St. Mark’s Choir hosted the food for the Aloha reception after Mass, so in-between services I went home to pick up the raspberry-strawberry-blueberry-mandarin orange gelatin salad I made for my contribution.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with my neighbor, Bonnie L. Moore, to do more work on the songbook of her compositions. This is a book which contains over 150 songs, which I have typeset and we are in the last stages of completion. This project has taken almost two years of transcribing, typesetting, harmonizing, and compiled into a finished book— and we’ll all be glad to have it put to bed!

This meme was sent to me today.