Thanks to McDonalds

 

Many years back, I had the great pleasure of teaching in Finland. I arrived in Helsinki and they gave me a room in the Conservatory Sibelius Academy.  My first night, a taxi came with a somewhat famous Danish Orff teacher, Minna Ronnefeld, who had studied directly with Gunild Keetman, Orff’s brilliant colleague. Off we went to the opera to see Verdi’s Othello.  I enjoyed it and just had to giggle at the supertitles with the long Finnish words that took up the whole little screen. Afterwards, Ms. Ronnefeld gave her erudite opinion about all these details of the opera, the way educated Europeans do, and all I could honestly say was “That was interesting.” But I faked my way through, nodding my head to each of her points. 

She put me in a cab closed to midnight and the cab dropped me off at Sibelius Academy. I went to enter the large building to go to my room— and the door was locked. I tried other doors—all locked. I looked for bells and knocked loudly and even shouted up at the building, but all was dark inside and no response. Meanwhile, it was March in Finland and freezing cold. This was not good. I pictured them finding me the next morning frozen at the doorstep.

 

Then I remembered that maybe a half-mile down the road, we had passed a McDonalds that was open. I walked back there and never was I so happy to step inside a place I had refused to enter most of my adult life. (Even as a teenager, I preferred Burger King.) Of course, all of this was long before cell phones and texting and maybe even e-mail, but either I miraculously I had my hosts’ Soili Perkio’s phone number or the McDonalds worker I spoke to was able to find her number. In either case, she miraculously answered her phone at 12:30 am and told me, “Oops! I forgot to tell you the code you need to enter the building. Sorry about that!” I dutifully wrote it down and to thank the worker, ordered some French fries. It seemed like the right time to break my vow never to support McDonalds. And it was!

 

I told this story to some students at lunchtime the other day. Another day, the subject of It’s Its, the San Francisco treat of ice cream between two cookies covered in chocolate, came up. Why am I telling this story?

 

No secret that yesterday was my birthday. My colleague James so expertly and cleverly got the group in morning gathering singing in 3-part harmony and then overlaying it with the Happy Birthday song. One of many advantages of having my birthday here is that that song is light years more tuneful with 90 music teachers than out-of-tune waiters singing at a restaurant. But there was more to come. 

 

I taught my first two classes, so happy to be doing what I was born to do on the day commemorating that birth and at the end of the second class with half of my 33 students, the other half arriving bearing gifts and another song. On a giant tray were 34 It’s Its!! After we all had eaten dessert before lunch, another student took me by his side and said, “We want you to stay healthy in all situations, so we bought you a special emergency kit.” And took out a McDonald’s bag with chicken McNuggets and French fries. People, it doesn’t get any better than that. 

 

After my afternoon class, I did my annual ritual swim of one lap per year (luckily a small pool) and remembering who I was and significant events from each year while swimming. (I have two pretty interesting stories from when I was five that are worthy of sharing sometime!) I then drove to Carmel to search out a house called Hawk Tower that the poet Robinson Jeffers built with his own hands many years back. It figures into the book I’m reading titled Typewriter Beach and all these years coming down here, I never had heard of it. From there, I took a short stroll on Carmel Beach and dipped my feet into the icy waters of the Pacific. A lovely moment of solitude and connection with the elements, while pelicans flocked overhead. 

 

Back for dinner and my annual lecture, which was a re-visit of the talk I gave for my 70^th birthday in the same room five years ago. (I will re-post it here in the next day or so.) I felt wholly present in that talk in a powerful way and ended it on the dot of the allotted hour. I was hoping for a musical jam session afterwards, but my colleagues invited me back to the hotel for a cake and we ended up laughing uproariously at the stories of past and present events the way that we can. Such a fine group of people!!

 

And that is how I commenced my 75^th year on the planet.

The It's It.

Emergency Kit