good things keep coming my way

Besides the fact that this post was lost after half an hour of typing, good things really do keep coming my way. The Brabant Gothic church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw over de Dijle stands two blocks away from my house in grey, grimy under-renovation glory. This morning I met Wannes Vanderhoeven, who replaced Geert as choir(!) and harmony teacher at the Beiaardschool while the latter was at UC Berkeley, to work out my practice schedule on the organ. Wannes was surprisingly young, sociable, fluent in English, and astonishingly helpful. I'm free to practice during the church's opening hours whenever he and his students aren't there, and he offered to personally let me in outside of opening hours and to try to get me access to the new organ that will soon be arriving at the Mechelen Conservatorium. Like hello, can I do something for you in return...make your coffee every day, I dunno??? American churches often require us starving students to pay for our practice time, even when we know the organists...and I'm getting to practice this glorious centuries-old instrument even though I have nothing to do with the church, or Belgium, or anything really.

I thought that everything went my way at Yale with hard work because the university was designed for smart, motivated kids to make things happen (not to mention because it's funded by $40,000 per year per student). But now I show up in a foreign country, having left my pride behind and steeled myself against endless bureacracy, and doors just keep falling open. Oh, you want to study with a carillonneur who's too badass too bother teaching anymore? No problemo. Wanna record your carillon playing? Get recorded on the heaviest carillon in Europe, and the audio engineer will send you the mastered recording ASAP. You also wanna study with one of the most well-known organists in the country, and you've played a shit audition? You're in! So you have the keys for several organs in Antwerpen, but you'd rather not commute? You can practice in your glorious neighborhood cathedral, which just happens to house a couple of Peter Paul Rubens paintings, several times per week. Even: Oh, you want to miss two months of rent having not even paid your deposit in full? No worries; your landlords wave off your apologies before you can even start them. Luck follows me around, or I manufacture it in constant supply.

So I arrived at 11u00 intending to practice two hours, and left at 15u30 not remembering that I hadn't eaten lunch to barely make it to a Vlaams Radio Koor concert of vocal music by Poulenc and Milhaud. I didn't even know they had composed vocal music; in fact, I've never heard works by either performed live before. And now this wonderful choir shows up in my little town with an hour's worth of the stuff. The Bordleys were there, and they suggested some Dames,...Naakt En Gekleed destinations, which I visited before biking south along the canals to Zemst. My discoveries included the mysterious Planckendael Dierenpark and the way into the back parking lot of the train station! Never will I be without a space again. Biking home to the strains of Moby's "Love Should," I got teary-eyed in the twilight.

I didn't get much done that I was "supposed" to do, but even a day like this feels incredibly productive, just because so many incredible things happen.