Three Beautiful Things 03-10-2026: Driving Ed to the Doctor, Late Lunch at Capone's, Glenn Gould Plays Brahms in the Parking Lot

1.  I drove Ed to CdA for a doctor's appointment today and Ed got his questions answered about some bleeding (unrelated to his cancer treatment) and was relieved that the problem he inquired about is treatable at home. Stu came for the appointment, too, and Ed appreciated the support. 

2. After his appointment, Ed was hungry and so was I and we went to Capone's in Midtown and had a relaxing late afternoon lunch. We continued to yak it up on the drive back to Kingston and were both happy that this turned out to be positive trip with good news at the doctor's and tasty comfort food at Capone's. 

3.  Before his appointment with his doctor, Ed paid a visit to a longtime friend at Kootenai Health who has ALS (and was about to be transferred to another facility in Post Falls for more intensive care). 

I waited for Ed in the parking lot and listened to Glenn Gould play ten piano pieces by Johannes Brahms called the Intermezzi. 

I sought out the Intermezzi thanks to a poem I've posted below,  by Lisel Mueller, entitled "Romantics". 

The poem is about Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms who developed both a close musical and a deep personal relationship. Brahm's wrote three of the Intermezzi for Clara Schumann, sent them to her, and she said that these pieces brought music back to her soul. 

Lisel Mueller describes the Intermezzi as "sad and lavish in their tenderness", a key passage in Mueller's poem as she reflects on what she imagined to be the nature of Schumann and Brahm's relationship. I wanted to listen to and experience this sad and lavish tenderness while I sat alone in the Camry among scores of other vehicles in the hospital parking lot. 

Romantics

        Johannes Brahms and                                 

        Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry

“how far it went,” their tender friendship.

They wonder just what it means

when he writes he thinks of her constantly,

his guardian angel, beloved friend.

The modern biographers ask

the rude, irrelevant question

of our age, as if the event

of two bodies meshing together

establishes the degree of love,

forgetting how softly Eros walked

in the nineteenth-century, how a hand

held overlong or a gaze anchored

in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,

and nuances of address not known

in our egalitarian language

could make the redolent air

tremble and shimmer with the heat

of possibility. Each time I hear

the Intermezzi, sad

and lavish in their tenderness,

I imagine the two of them

sitting in a garden

among late-blooming roses

and dark cascades of leaves,

letting the landscape speak for them,

leaving us nothing to overhear.

-- Lisa Mueller