Manufacturing Joy

And so we began last night, an instant community of 22 teachers doing the work of manufacturing joy in the Jazz Factory. In our outlet, there is no assembly line doing repetitive tasks for mere efficiency and material profit grown from narrowing our full human promise. Instead there is the “Second Line” following our dancing feet to the infectious music in free-form exultation. There is no “one-size-fits-all” mass-produced garments to cloak the physical body, but instead the clothes tailored just right for our particular spiritual bodies. Each game, each song, each dance and piece of music is made to clothe our soul, to accent the curves, bring out the particular colors that make us look and feel good, warm us in times of cool weather and cool us when it’s hot. The currency at the check-out counter is the smile not faked for the camera, but radiating in each cell of the body. When the whistle blows to signal a break or the end of the day, it’s a saxophone riff, swingin’, soulful and each time different. Time in our factory is not a slow-dripping faucet to be endured, but the refreshing pool of water in which we wholly immerse ourselves, a return to the womb of comfort and belonging where al boundaries momentarily dissolve. 

 

Welcome to the opening session of The Jazz Course in New Orleans, 2026

 

Not a Good Time

There are times when it is wise to not reflect too deeply. Not take your emotional temperature and wonder why you you’re not having a happy Pepsi moment. Not reflect on whether you belong to the group of people you’ve been thrown together with. Not write a reflection on a Blog that should carry something of interest to others. 

 

I think when you wake-up at 3:30 am in Venice and go to sleep at the equivalent of 3:30 am the next day in New Orleans after traveling for 24 hours might be such a time. 

Somehow I’ve soldiered through the day, reuniting with my fellow jazz band folks and my New Orleans Jazz Course host, in spite of being given a moldy room in a funky dorm that made me feel ill within ten minutes and then insisting on a new room that wouldn’t be ready for another 45 minutes of so. And then the key not working and the too-cold air-conditioning not possible to shut off or make warmer. (This was all last night.)

Still, I managed to sleep somewhat, then this morning, get a desperate laundry going, walk to a market with the lads to go shopping, check out the teaching space, set it up and go over a few tunes, look for an open restaurant at 3:30 in the afternoon, check out my still-wet laundry in the dryer  and now an hour free before teaching my first session from 7:00 pm – 10:00pm. 

 

It's Father’s Day and not a good time to reflect on the gifts I received from my father, 19 years now gone from the planet. Not a good time to reflect on my own immeasurable joy in being a father (and grandfather) from day one to today, not admit my failings or celebrate the surprise of doing some things right. Not a good time to discuss the needed move from toxic male parenting to men truly learning how to nurture and care. Nor is it a good time to acknowledge the Summer Solstice, happening to fall on the same day.

 

So this is all I can manage at the moment. I still hope to call my oldest daughter who gave me a sweet little message and requested a talk for the occasion. (I spoke with my other daughter yesterday). 

 

So Happy Father’s Day and Happy Solstice to all! 

 

And now I need to check on the laundry.

  

The Blue Hat on the Security Belt

My ritual goodbye to a place I’ve just traveled to, while waiting for the third leg of my flight from Venice to New Orleans. So thanks to England for the public footpaths and beans for breakfast and flapjacks and a language I could mostly speak and learning how to enjoy mist, drizzle and rain while walking and the long, literary history from children’s books to adult ones that shaped my imaginative life

 

And goodbye to Italy, the ever-present pizzas and Tyrolean town names in Italian and German and the majesty of the Dolomites and the myriad bike paths through woods, fields, alongside rivers and highways. And the remarkable variety of memorable places I’ve been to in my traveling life—Venice, Verona, Florence, Rome, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Cinqueterra, Assissi, Bologna, Puglia, Sicily and now, the Dolomites. 

 

And hello to Newark Airport, some 20 minutes from my childhood home and the familiar New York skyline and Budweiser beer plant and American English and paying in dollars and some sense of returning home, even though it is frayed with the ambivalence of our worst overshadowing our best. Gifted a first-class seat for this last flight to New Orleans after awakening at 3:30 am in Venice. The miracle and privilege of flying and after a long, long, long line for connecting passengers and three more lines to show passports in Brussels, wondering if my patience for plane travel is waning. But after an exit row seat in Brussels with two-good movies and a good book and some needed sleep and this last first-class leg, maybe I’ll keep on flying and assuage my carbon footprint guilt with some 50 years of mostly being a vegetarian. 

 

Ready to put my teacher hat on again and that includes the literal blue cap that my colleague James publicly gifted me with two years ago in the NOLA Jazz Course. It would  have been lost on the Security belt without me noticing if some kind woman hadn’t alerted me that it had fallen off. Affirming my belief that angels are everywhere.

Again, Juneteenth

On this day, exactly one year ago, I posted this on Facebook.

 

“And so a farewell toast to Europe with my favorite Austrian beer. Six memorable weeks in the Dordognes, Paris, London, Oxford, the Cotswolds, Vienna, Salzburg, Linz and now the Munich Airport. A grand pleasure to meet old friends and make new ones, to bike, hike and wander and also to teach, to feel touched by the exquisite aesthetics of these European cities, the beautiful countryside, the uplift of art and architecture and cultivated cuisine, the kindness of strangers and shared concern with just about everyone I met about the unravelling of the world and the shared commitment to help stitch it back together. 

 

Tomorrow it’s off to Ghana and a different kind of uplift from extraordinary music, dance and song and the exuberant welcomes the Orff Afrique students always feel. On this Juneteenth day, the Civil War is raging again back home, but I’m here to report that healing forces are everywhere. A toast to what has been and to what will come.”

 

And here I am again on the exact same day one year later, bidding farewell to a marvelous four weeks in London, the Yorkshire Dales, the Dolomites, now on the way to my Jazz Course in New Orleans and “a different kind of uplift from extraordinary music, dance and song.” The Civil War still raging as before, if not more so, and the healing forces still at work trying to contain and ultimately oust the traitors to democracy, intelligence and just plain human decency. Amidst all the beauty that walked and rode with me through each day here in Europe, that lurking shadow is never far away. 

 

So on this Juneteenth day commemorating the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War in 1865 (over 160 years ago!), let’s re-commit to actually ending the Civil War. To emancipate our enslavement to injustice, immorality, ignorance, greed and hatred. To walk together on this great, green earth in awe of its natural beauty and our own natural beauty, toasting to friends with an end-of-a-delicious-meal limoncello gifted by a smiling waiter.

Limoncello Toast

And so we come to the end. Our last day of biking, 45 miles in relentless hot sun with 30 seconds of relief in a cool, cool tunnel. Alongside the river, next to the freeway, up into the hills, gravel paths through the woods, beauty before us, beauty behind us, beauty all around us. Back to the same hotel in Toblauch where we started the ride and a final group meal at the same restaurant we had eaten at with a salad bar and of course, 25 different kinds of pizza. A ritual appreciation of each person’s unique contribution to the group venture, recalling some fun and memorable moments—law-abiding Heide ignoring a pedestrian red light, watching the Spurs-Knicks highlights with Gerri and Dennis, Pam dancing with a waiter while I played jazz piano, Terry, Karen and I discovering those three little villages with astounding murals. Then came the phones-out photo-sharing options and a final limoncello toast to what has mostly been a lovely 10 days together.

 

Early this morning, Terry got up to take a train to meet two friends for four more days in this area, Heide took a train to return to her home in Germany, the rest of us have a final day of hanging out, strolling about until the 4 o’clock bus takes us to the airport hotel and we go to the airport the next morning. Karen to San Francisco, Pam to Michigan, Gerri and Dennis to their daughter’s house in Brooklyn, me to New Orleans to begin teaching my Jazz Course. 

At dinner, we also talked about possible places for a next-year’s bike trip, from Albania to New Zealand to Portugal-Spain, so even with two of us about to turn 80 this year and the youngest at 72, we’re still hoping for more of the same. But always looking at “how can we make this even better?,” the group agreed on two things and I have one more of my own.

 

1)   This was the most rigorous ride with three days of 40, 45 and 50 mile rides. Good for the marathon body, but most agreed that distances should be shorter. Especially so we can relax about getting to the hotel by dinner and take some more leisurely time along the way to visit little sites or stop to take photos and identify—and smell—the flowers.

 

2)   Related to that, we agreed without much thought or discussion to not feel rushed in the morning. Our bags always had to be down to the desk by 9:00 am, but we often didn’t leave until 9:30 or 10:00. On the last day, we left at 9:00 and the quality of the early morning air and the sun not yet blazing hot made me think, “Why not leave earlier each day? 7:30 or 8:00, so we can enjoy that morning freshness and relax about the time. Save our “leisure time” for an afternoon at the hotel after we arrive." Most agreed that would have been a good idea.

 

3)   My suggestion, which I would need agreement with beforehand, is to consciously put the damn phones away more. One of our group is seriously addicted and hardly ever had a moment (except riding) when his head was not down looking at the phone and it infected the whole group, I believe. So at least some phoneless meals and again, more thought to asking people for directions rather than depend on Google maps. 

 

Thanks to my wife for beginning this way of being in the world. She gave herself a retirement gift in the Spring of 2017 with her first trip down the Danube to Vienna, then again in 2018 with a Bavarian excursion. I joined her in 2019 in Sweden, the pandemic closed it all down for two years and in 2022, I joined again for a most memorable trip to Puglia, Italy. 2023 I was busy and she went to the Netherlands, 2024 was Slovenia, 2025 was the Dordognes in France and this, my 5^th, was, of course, the Dolomites. Karen is the only one of the group has done all eight, but Terry, Gerri, Dennis and I, alongside other friends who have done three or four, make up the groups that have ranged from four to eight people. I’ve loved traveling throughout Europe (indeed the world) following the opportunities for teaching Orff workshops, but these rides bring me into territory I never would have explored. And gratefully so. 

 

So the day before us, a walk planned to the hut where Gustav Mahler composed and one last day surrounded by these marvelous mountains. I raise my limoncello drink to toast to it all. 

Money Matters

Those on the side of the evolution of human consciousness and social justice have named the obstacles to our development with words that mostly people understand—racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.. Since the first step in dismantling any toxic practices is giving them names that identify them, allow people to recognize them when they see them at work, this is vital to any movement forward. Yet more and more, I feel that behind them all is another colossal flaw in the human psyche fed by our politics, social structures and values and driving the whole show. Because we haven’t yet agreed on a name that gathers up everything about how it does its damaging work, it remains a somewhat invisible force. 

 

“Greed” is one possibility, but that is too personal and doesn’t account for the systemic qualities. “Capitalism” comes closer as defined an “economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit” (Wikipedia) but is too specific and wasn’t in place when Columbus began wreaking havoc in the West Indies enslaving indigenous people to bring him gold or the entire slave trade started. (Remember, racism was largely created by economics married to priests and scientists inventing the notion of White Supremacy so slaveholders could sleep easily at night.) We are in dire need of something that fits easily with Patriarchy, White Supremacy and … ?

 

Three examples of how it works in the United States. Once we name it and recognize it, we have the possibility of dismantling/ transforming it. The first is from my daughter Kerala’s recent piece on Substack about how our country makes parenting so difficult. She opens with a quote from another Substack writer:

 

Having raised kids for 18 years in the United States and the past 5 years in The Netherlands, I feel qualified to assert that discussing a problematic “culture of parenting” in the USA is a frivolous, misleading, and irrelevant focus that does nothing but deflect from the real problem, which is that America hates people.

 

KERALA’S COMMENT: Her essay primarily focuses on the structural and institutional differences between The Netherlands and the United States that contribute to different outcomes in our parents and children. Scandinavian parents “are not better people,” she says. “They live in societies with better policies.”

 

Among these are free healthcare for children, schools not funded by local property taxes, universal pensions, labor rights, government stipends for each child, childcare subsidies, unlimited paid sick days, paid leave to recover from burnout, and “daddy day,” which “allows fathers to take a weekly half or full day off work, paid in full or at 70%, to spend with their kids.”

The United States isn’t different because we lack some of these things. We lack ALL of these things. Every. Single. Last. One.

 

Then there are these excerpts from a Facebook post by Oliver Kornetzge in which he claims (rightly, I believe) that what’s going down now in Washington is not to the side of a once functioning democracy, but at the center of who we’ve always been: 

 

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.

 

Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single fucking thing that addresses a single goddamn item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and in some cases died trying.

 

Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.

 

A bitter pill to swallow indeed. And parallel to that is a glorious history of resistance and a long list of those who refused those choices. That’s important to remember as well. 

 

But the biggest affirmation of the above, the surprising revelation of how these forces have always been working at the core of our being like a tapeworm unseen inside of us eating away at our sense of decency, justice and ability to care for each other, comes from a visiting Englishmen visiting as long ago as 1844. His name was Charles Dickens and here is his extraordinary passage from his novel Martin Chuzzlewit:

 

“It was rather barren of interest, to say the truth; and the greater part of it may be summed up in one word. Dollars. All their cares, hopes, joys, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars. Whatever the chance contributions that fell into the slow cauldron of their talk, they made the gruel thick and slab with dollars. Men were weighed by their dollars, measures gauged by their dollars; life was auctioneered, appraised, put up, and knocked down for its dollars. The next respectable thing to dollars was any venture having their attainment for its end. The more of that worthless ballast, honour and fair-dealing, which any man cast overboard from the ship of his Good Name and Good Intent, the more ample stowage-room he had for dollars. Make commerce one huge lie and mighty theft. Deface the banner of the nation for an idle rag; pollute it star by star; and cut out stripe by stripe as from the arm of a degraded soldier. Do anything for dollars!”    Martin Chuzzlewit: 1844

 

And indeed, that is what we have done and continue to do. It’s no secret that Musk, Bezos and their cronies are pulling the strings of the politicians and have been for a long time. So let’s find a name for this unchecked greed, this profit over people, this “do anything for dollars” sickness that is eating away at both our souls and our social systems. 

 

And as a teacher, I always suggest beginning with the children. Teach them that it should be a crime to be a billionaire, hoarding an unfair share of resources and if someone is, at least they should pay an enormous amount of taxes (50%? 75%) to give back to the common good. To recognize when “follow the money” is at play in every dubious decision. (It almost always is.)

 

My tiny little whisper in the roar of unchecked capitalism and greed? Changing the words to the song I’ve always sung to the children Que Será. Instead of the child asking, “Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?”, already chasing after the wrong dreams, my new version is simply: 

 

“Will I be caring? Will I be kind?”

 

 I hope they will. I hope we all will. 

 

PS As for the title, I used “Matters” as a noun. But as a verb it also has its place. Ask anyone suffering from the lack of sufficient funds to buy food, pay rent, afford health care and it’s obvious it matters indeed. But as the Irish say, “After a full belly, it’s all poetry.” 

It Could Have Been Worse

Day six of biking began with a trip to the Archeological Museum in Bolzano, mostly about “Otzi the Iceman,” a 5,000-year-old mummy found in a glacier in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991. Hundreds of scientists weighed in on his age and clothing and tools, including discovering that he was probably murdered by an arrow in his back. (Louise Penny, Anthony Horowitz, Laura Lippman and others have a book awaiting them!). 

 

Then a late-morning departure, ritually begun as always gathered in a circle with hands in the center like a basketball team and then shouting, “Day 6!” A promising beginning to the day that had a less promising end.

Out to the third day of a path that mostly followed the river, so no need to stop so often to consult maps. It struck me that it often felt like traveling through tunnels of sound—the drone of the river on one side and the drone of the highway on the other. Or in more musical moments, the non-stop birds on either side and above. I’ve often thought of birds as singing in the mornings and evenings, but the birds here are at it all day long and delightfully so. And then there’s always the song of the wind. 

 

It was a shorter day (hence, the luxury of late morning departure) and as we entered the Medieval town of Klausen/ Chiusa, we treated ourselves to an ice cream stop. We walked our bikes slowly through the town as we headed out, enjoying its considerable charm. Terry parked his bike for a moment and it fell down and the fender was scraping the tire. Dennis (an engineer by profession) had his little tools and was able to fix it. Earlier at a stop, Karen had fallen down and later, Dennis had. The day before, Pam did as well. All minor, but these proved to be bad omens. For a mere 4 kilometers out of town, Gerri didn’t notice a curb and was thrown from her bike. A similar thing had happened three years ago in Slovenia and she emerged with bad bruises, but was able to carry on. This time she was holding her shoulder like something was more seriously wrong. 

 

I managed to find some people who were able to call a taxi and the taxi was a van of sorts that could actually fit Gerri and husband Dennis’s bikes. The driver took the bikes to the hotel and Gerri and Dennis to the hospital, where an X-ray revealed a broken clavicle. Gerri emerged with her right arm in a sling (and fortunately, she’s left-handed) and a three-week prognosis for healing. Both she and Dennis were able to join us for dinner in our new stop in the charming town of Brixen and they seemed in okay spirits.She clearly can’t ride the last leg tomorrow, but the company van will take her and her bike to our last town, so all in all, it could have been worse. And she enjoyed it when I told them the old Yiddish folk tale with the punchline, “Remember. No matter how bad things might seem, it could have been worse.”

 

Gerri then told us the details of being at the hospital and the most astounding revelation was that though she had Kaiser and could get reimbursed for all charges, there were none! The hospital wasn’t the slightest bit interested in getting money from Kaiser. Health care was simply free (obviously paid for by the tax structure) for all, foreigners included. 

 

Which brings us to the next reflection. What the hell is wrong with the United States?!!!!!!!