Metamorphosism

Putting the grim back into pilgrim

Another weekend like this last one and I'll have to hire Francis Strand to ghostwrite posts for me. Like,

The Wife, the Pharmacist and I had some delicious penne with porcini mushrooms before visiting the nuns at Maria Langegg. Then, on Monday, Beta and I went to Salzburg where we met the Cellist and had antipasti with her at the Triangel before she snuck us into the opera dress-rehearsal through the stage-door, where we rubbed elbows with the Famous Conductor before all driving back to our house (minus the Conductor) in the middle of the night, where I got the best cello lesson of my life.

But, I'm not Francis.

One-sentence version: Penne good, had a vision, nuns less scary than imagined, antipasti okay, opera very, very good, cellist marvelous.

That's not really a real sentence, though, is it.

I'll do it in chronological, yet stream-of-consciousness, order. Saturday and Sunday Alpha, a friend and I walked from the monastery in Göttweig to the abbey at Melk. Most of the way, anyway. I thought I would lose a lot of weight, but I didn't.

Have you ever heard of St. James? That's my father's name. James, I mean, not Saint James. There is this church at Santiago de Compostela dedicated to him, no idea why the Spanish would dedicate a church to my dad, and in the middle ages that was a popular pilgrimage in Europe, walking to that church. The trail from eastern Europe passed thru Austria. The trail in Spain is over 700 km long. Not sure how long it is in Austria. They just renovated (marked?) a 50 km stretch between Göttweig and Melk a year or so ago, and that's the bit we walked on the weekend.

The guide (a brochure, not a person) said 6 hours the first day, 6 the second. Don't know where they got those figures. Not from fucking walking the trail, that's for bloody sure. The first day it took us 8 hours to walk from Göttweig to a monastery in Maria Langegg even though we skipped lunch seeing as how the only inn on that stretch of the trail was closed that Saturday. Nothing but granola bars and water, man. Which is of course appropriate for a pilgrimage. There turned out to be a restaurant next to the monastery, with a very good cook, so we rewarded ourselves richly with goodies such as the aforementioned penne and some nice wine before checking in to the monastery (we all dosed ourselves liberally with breath-freshening spray before facing the nuns).

A friendly young nun assigned Alpha and me the St. Francis of Assisi room. Our friend got the some-saint-I'd-never-heard-of-before room. Simple, spare little rooms, like you'd expect.

The nuns at that place were so nice I largely got over my sororophobia or whatever an irrational fear of nuns would be called. Nice and friendly, but still with that steely glint in their eyes that makes you want not to piss them off.

Breakfast the next morning was like, A pharmacist, a nun and a marketing manager walk into a dining room. Alpha, our pharmacist friend and the nun needed about five minutes to 1)invent a cosmetic product (herbal salve for tired, sore pilgrims) and 2)devise an entire marketing and distribution strategy.

It was awesome.

Then we continued hiking. There are these spiritual exercise things here and there on the trail, ten in all on this stretch. They consist of little columns inscribed in German and English with exercises invented by Paolo Coelho, internationally best-selling author. Some struck us as a bit odd. The jury is out on Mr. Coelho. I respect his spiritual journey, but ever since I read Rumi and recognized a story Coelho padded a bit into his international best seller the Alchemist he's fallen in my regard.

But there was this one exercise we did, I won't go into detail but it ended up with me having a vision of sorts that gave me the message, "Let go."

So the whole second day I was thinking about letting go, and have been ever since.

When I wasn't thinking about sitting down and taking a rest. Or soaking in a hot bath. Or having a beer, or a joint. Lots of up and down on that trail, man. We got really sore. Some of us complained. It got cloudy. About five miles from the end, it started to thunder and our friend began to hitchhike. The first car was a black Mercedes SUV driven by an elderly couple. She waved at them and they stopped and gave us a ride. Amazingly simple. That's how cute this friend is. They were out driving around, looking at churches and seemed happy to have a load of pilgrims.

"Sometimes you have to transcend your principles," our friend said.

As soon as we got in the car, it began to rain heavily, making us feel smart for our decision rather than flaky.

We had something to eat in Melk and drove home.

So there was that last weekend. Let go. Then on Monday Beta and I drove to Salzburg which is crawling with tuxedos and evening dresses and silk dirndls there for the Festspiele, and where big silver Audis cut you off in traffic all the time because Audi is a sponsor and apparently that's good advertisement to cut people off in traffic. We were there to see Mitridate, which has gotten good reviews, deservedly it turns out. Beta and I are friends with someone in the band, who got us into the dress rehearsal.

In fact, we also got to see the final rehearsal prior to the dress rehearsal, too, which had the advantage that we were already sitting in the best seats in the house when they let in the rest of the audience for the dress rehearsal. We were sitting there, when we heard this noise in the background, you know? Like rain on a tin roof. Like sitting in Carlsbad cavern watching the bats return at dusk. The pitter-patter of hundreds of pork hooves drawing closer and finally pouring in and scrambling for the good seats. Not that bats have pork hooves. Some people got good seats, some missed out. You know how it is. Sorry, Charlie. Some climbed over rows of seats to get where they wanted to go, tuxedo be damned. And Beta and I sat there thinking, Peasants, show some class. Riff-raff.

Beta and I enjoyed the bug-eyed Mozarts a lot. We kidnapped our musician friend, who managed to keep me awake on the 3 hour drive home, which would have been about 5 minutes shorter had I not exited one exit too soon, then missed the right exit and exited at the next exit. But only five minutes, big deal. We got home around 3 in the morning, talked until 4 and I was up at like 5 to go to work. That was a silly day, believe me.

We made a lot of letting go jokes because after I'd mentioned my vision to our friend, and how when I got home from our hike I'd cracked "The Artist's Way" to a random page and she was talking about "letting go", and all these other funny coincidences started happening until it started to get old, as these things sometimes do. It was like, enough already, subconscious! I get it already!

Then I got the cello lesson, and learned that playing an instrument is a lot about letting go, too. What isn't, right.