It Goes On

“Why am I here?” is a quote I often use at the beginning of workshops to remind participants of their intentions in giving up a Saturday or week of summer vacation to further train themselves in their profession. But it’s a great question to ask all the time wherever you are. The staff meeting. The party you agreed to go to. The shopping mall. 

 

And so having taken all the trouble to rent a car, free up a couple of extra days and arrange to come to my old alma mater, it’s good for me to ask “Why?” As mentioned, part of it was to visit my old friend Liz who I haven’t seen for many years. But just as I find it meaningful to re-connect with people I knew way-back-when, so do I have the same feeling for places. I love the feeling of my changed self with my unchanged soul walking the same paths that I used to, feeling embraced by the place as if it were an old lover. In fact, Antioch and its surroundings often appear in my dreams as one of many sites that always have me awaken feeling spiritually renewed. (My old house in New Jersey, Mt. Baldy Zen Center, a village in Kerala, India, a house on Castro St. where my wife Karen and I first lived, are some of the others.) So any time I come within striking distance of Yellow Springs, Ohio, I usually make it a point to visit.

 

Having visited some 10 to 15 times since I graduated in 1973 and the last visit in 2019, I was aware that the Antioch I knew when I first arrived 56 (!!!) years ago was long gone and some of it literally so. My first dorm (Mills) and my last (Presidents) were both razed and now the Student Union, site of the cafeteria, snack shop, Antioch Inn restaurant and the front stoop where we danced every Saturday night, is completely empty and scheduled to be torn down. Kelly Hall, the place where I once spontaneously played Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor on the organ before the Midnight Movie and heard concerts by Cecil Taylor and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, never recovered from flood damage. It’s still standing but empty. Many of the other buildings—North and South Hall, Corry and Birch Hall, MacGregor Hall, the Science Building, the gym (now the town “Wellness Center”), the Art and Sculpture Building and the library are all still there, but at 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, not a single one except the library had any lights on. And most disturbing, in my hour walk through this intimate campus, I never passed a single human being! Not a student, not a teacher, not a maintenance person, not an admin, person. Zero. Zilch. Nada. 

 

Back in my day, the campus was abuzz with some thousand students playing frisbee on the lawn, sitting under trees with guitars, walking to and from classes. It was a living organism, vibrant, bustling, thriving. Now it feels like the mere shell of its former self, lying inert on the table plugged into life-support systems without a flicker of consciousness. The buildings are there but it’s a literal ghost town. 

 

The occasion feels like it needs some ritual attention. Places and institutions come and go and that’s the natural order of life. But loss at any level deserves some acknowledgment. There’s a sadness there. It’s happened to me before and I believe it happens to all of us. That sense that “you can’t go home again.” Or you can but expect that much will be unrecognizable. Trees, stores, empty lots all gone and changed. (In my case, I literally can’t go home again as my New Jersey childhood home was destroyed in Hurricane Sandy many years back. I’ve gone back to my town since then and there were the houses of my childhood friends, Ricky, Billy and George— but not mine.) 

 

Even if the buildings are intact, the people are different and sometimes the feeling of the place. I still love returning to the Orff Institut in Salzburg and everything in that entire city feels as it was when I first came there 35 years ago. But the feeling inside that building is quite different from its heyday. The number of authentic Orff teachers has dwindled considerably and its magnetic presence as an international center for this dynamic music ed approach notably diminished. 

 

Not so The San Francisco School, where my old music room is more or less the same and still alive with fabulous music and dance carried on by my forever colleagues James and Sofia, the classes still bustling with happy children and teachers doing fabulous things. Yes, some of the physical spaces and teachers and almost half of the children since I left five years ago are different, but the spirit feels alive and well. Quite a contrast to my Antioch experience today.

 

But either way, life goes on. Tomorrow I will roam about Glen Helen, the 1,000 acre nature reserve and here I expect more continuity. Different squirrels, birds and bugs, but how would I know? Life going on.