My 82-year-old is beating up on my 74-year-old. One day, Cocoa waited for her younger sibling in the hall and just slammed her as she walked by. Cocoa has no front claws, but Eva does. It would seem to be an uneven match in Eva's favor, but Eva got clobbered. She didn’t even try to fight back. Every time she moved, Cocoa would be there stomping on her. Eventually, Eva ran off. This happened a couple more times, and I wondered what was up. Was Eva just humoring the old girl?
Then, the other day, Eva lay in wait behind the bathroom door, peering through the spaces between the hinges, watching for her prey. Cocoa walked by and Bam! Like a bolt of lightening, her front paw shot through the opening. Right in the kisser. Guess Eva was just biding her time. She has loved playing this game ever since she was a kitten. It has almost gotten her in trouble a few times when I tried closing the pivotal door in the middle of the game. Luckily I spotted her before I squashed her.
Zsa Zsa, my 16-year-old cat, likes to join me after I have started to write in the mornings. I sit on the futon in the spare bedroom, dubbed my “writing room,” set my portable writing desk on a pillow by my right side, get out one of my trusty roller ball pens and my notebook, and begin to write. Eva, my other cat of the same age, joins me immediately, snugging down on my lap, wedged between me and the writing desk. Zsa Zsa arrives moments later and looks in wonder at my very busy lap. After a moment of hesitation, she decides to come over anyway. She climbs up on the edge of the desk and teeters slightly back until I press with my hands on the left side of the desk to level it. Then she climbs the rest of the way onto her platform and balances atop my notebook, purring madly, preventing me from further writing.
And why shouldn’t she? After all, her care and well-being are much more important than any writing career I can imagine.
When I was studying classical voice in Huntsville Alabama in the late 80’s and early 90’s, getting enough breath to sing sustained notes was always a problem. A few years later when I moved to Colorado, I joined the Sweet Adelines. The directors of our chapter and region were always insisting that we fill our bellies and then the back of our ribcages with air so that we had enough air to move about the stage while we sang. I always thought they were a bit crazy on this point. I could never get my ribcage to fill at all. Nothing moved there. How could it possibly move? So, I relied on my standard belly full, which was still not enough air to sing in sustained phrases, especially when you are swaying and doing little Sweet Adeline dance steps.
A couple years after that, a friend of mine introduced me to a friend of hers (let’s call her Trudy). Trudy was a very talented individual, having among her pursuits gaining a teaching certification in Pilates. To achieve the certification, Trudy had to take on several clients and work with them for so many hours before taking the final certification test. Trudy approached both my friend and me about becoming clients. I had just attended a yoga class with another friend to try it out, and I really liked it. I was thinking of signing up for regular yoga classes. But Pilates sounded interesting, too. I had planned to explore a new discipline to strengthen myself to protect my back for swimming, biking, and walking, not to mention doing chores. But, with a full-time job and my other hobbies, I could only do one program. Trudy was very nice, and I wanted to help her out, so I decided to try the Pilates.
Pilates requires you to learn a breathing technique similar to Yoga’s. You breathe in, pulling in the belly, and you let the breath out while sucking the belly in even further and pulling your pelvic floor into a kegel. To get enough breath to then do the Pilates exercises, you must fill your rib cage with air when breathing in, while keeping that belly in and flat, pulling in the abs. This requires a lot of practice.
One of my Pilates instructors pointed out that the breath as taught in the Pilates method is the opposite of the breath you take when singing. In singing, all support comes from pulling up the diaphragm which pushes air up through the belly and out your mouth as you sing. I thought, oh, great. Now I am going to confuse my singing practice. It has been years since I studied, but all of that body knowledge was still with me every time I sang.
After a couple of false starts (Pilates is hard, yet rewarding), I became hooked on Pilates and have now been doing it regularly for almost four years. This year I have finally felt that belly tightness (meaning the abs are working) and the air going into my ribs rather than filling my belly (which is the method of breathing that I was born with -- I don’t know about you). Yes – I discovered that my ribcage and chest are mobile thanks to connective tissue and ligaments.
I have also continued to sing, buying a Karaoke machine for my home, and conducting group sing-alongs as well as Diva nights. What I discovered is that I can now fill my ribcage with air when I take a breath to sing. I still can’t do the belly, then the ribcage (the mind-body connection just isn’t working that way for me), but I sure can fill up the ribcage first and then fill the belly up as much as I can, filling it further on subsequent breaths, and never completely expelling the air from my ribcage. As long as I can remember that I am singing and not doing Pilates, my sustaining breath should be there from now on when I need it. Not classical, perhaps, but I am more interested in jazz singing right now anyway. Move over Carmen McRae.
And all this ability sneaked up on me just because a friend introduced me to her friend! And, of course, because I continued to pursue both Pilates and singing. I didn’t know they were even related.