Deanna Witkowsi - Pianist and Composer

In this new year, I am picturing the Pittsburgh friends who were digging my solo on the blues in the above video as being with me in my New York apartment as I finish my Mary Lou Williams book manuscript. Cheering me on right alongside them is an is 84-year-old prophet named Anna with whom I’m becoming reacquainted.

Here’s something I wrote a few days ago on how I found her:

12/30/19: At this end of 2019 on the sixth day in the octave of Christmas (yes, octave like the twelve notes between C and C on a piano!), I am thinking about a woman named Anna. She only came to mind because she was in my morning reading, the gospel for today. Anna is described as a “prophetess” (I hate it when this “-ess” suffix is added to any word deemed as masculine!), and she’s really old. I’d always imagined her with a wizened face and always thought that her butt must hurt because she’d spent years sitting inside the temple fasting and praying (and somehow in my mind she is always sitting while doing these things).

I also thought of Anna this way because St. Luke says that she is “advanced in years, having lived seven years with her husband…and then as a widow until she was eighty-four.” I guess I thought that Anna had sat in a dark cave of a temple for decades.

But today, I saw this woman differently. I saw the phrase that said that Anna’s husband died after only seven years of marriage. And that she was still a widow at the ripe old age of 84. What had happened in between?

Earlier this morning, I fought my body’s wishes to stay in bed, waking at 7 am to check in with my 6:30 am writers’ group (I woke up late). I’ve been staying in my mom’s basement for the last ten days taking an extended sort-of-holiday to make a bigger dent on my Mary Lou Williams book and to celebrate Christmas with family. In this basement, I keep reminding myself of writer Anne Lamott’s mantra to take my writing- to take everything- “bird by bird” (or, as I heard in a screening of Frozen II that I watched with my family two days ago, to “do the next right thing”).

I consciously whispered Lamott’s “keep pushin’” phrase to myself as I started highlighting what felt like every other sentence in a Word doc of one of my book chapters that needs major edits (and also needs to be finished yesterday). After an hour of becoming more and more anxious that I’ll never get everything done in time, I grumpily muttered “bird by bird” and went upstairs to make breakfast.

Returning to the basement on my granola break, I closed the worrying document and opened the daily readings email from the USCCB (the Catholic bishops who decide a lot of stuff), hoping to find something to quell my fear and frustration. And I read about Anna. Why hadn’t I really seen her before? Continue reading →