Rewind, Pause, Fast Forward

Still stuck on the cassette tape/ VHS video metaphors and then I promise I’ll move on to something else. But fresh from my visit with my grandkids, these thoughts struck. 

 

If I had a choice, I would press “pause” for 10-year-old (almost 11) Malik. Such a perfect age. The physical skills to present a worthy challenge in basketball and hike 6 or 7 miles, the intellectual skills to read to each other and discuss, the independence to make himself a bacon-egg-sandwich each morning and wash the pan and load his dish in the dishwasher, the knowledge to help me use the washing machine, the sweetness to still hug and cuddle a bit (though not quite as exuberantly affectionately as a few years younger). Again, given a choice, I would most definitely press pause and keep enjoying him at this age for many years to come. 

 

For 14-year-old Zadie, I would press “fast-forward three or four years, hopefully to a time when the one-word conversations might expand to full sentences and even paragraphs, the disappearance into her room might change to staying in her seat long after dinner’s eaten to keep talking or play a game or two, the independence to drive herself to friends’ house or athletic events, the maturity to cook a few dinners for the family and/or clean up without being asked. While still the childlike quality to dance around the house singing her favorite song. All of the above (except driving) show themselves in short snippets of “coming attractions” but you can’t depend on any of them. So yes to “fast forward.”

As for me, I would press “pause.” In the moment, still fit enough to walk 8 and more miles, bike 20 and more miles, sit zazen in half-lotus and healthy enough, with even my little complaints like the off-and-on dizziness of the last two years are mysteriously (and blessedly) gone. My teaching is at the top of my game, piano playing mostly steadily improving, writing holding steady with occasional flashes of eloquence and my lifelong “can’t do” attitude about solving mechanical or household physical problems softening to “I can figure this out”—and then I do! No one I can think of that I would cross the street if I saw them coming the other way, ongoing connections with friends, family and colleagues. So yes to “pause.” Though I would like to cheat and re-set the counter to 55 instead of 75 without erasing the last twenty years.

 

And you? What is your list of pause, rewind, fast forward?

  

Yes to the Replay Button

 

I love how you can say something with such conviction that it’s right— like yesterday’s assertion that “there is no replay button”— and then turn around and say, “Well, actually, there is.” Not in our lived life, but in our creations that last beyond our mere mortality.

 

Last night was the Academy Awards and my favorite part is always the memorials to those who have passed on. They are gone, yet there they are on the screen, forever younger and forever still with us. As we mourn the passing of Rob Reiner, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall and more, there they still are, larger than life and longer than life, on the big screen. Same with Chick Corea, Jack De Johnette, Hermeto Pascual, Bob Weir and more— play their CD’s and there they are. And so on with the poets, novelists, composers, artists. Art as a pathway to some form of immortality. 

 

Likewise, the photos of family and friends now gone that hang on our walls as a way to keep them forever with us. Also continuing to tell stories about them to others who knew them or ever some who didn’t. 

 

Alongside these blogposts, my books, The Secret Song film, the Podcast and perhaps someday, some published versions of my poems, are 26 recordings of music I made with children at The San Francisco School (one of the best kept secrets in the Orff world). After recording them at the school, James, Sofia and I would go to Duncan Street Studio to have John Blakely mix and edit them and order them and get them out into their final form as a cassette tape (14 of them) and later, a CD (12 of them). He had these photos on his wall that he never took down, so year after year, I re-visited them like old friends. And then one year (2010, to be exact), I wrote this poem, in the style of Billy Collins. 

 

IMMORTALITY

 

I am back in Duncan Street Studio

Where I have come once a year since 1987.

If I tell you that today’s date is May 26, 2010,

I’m sure you can do the math. 

 

A large computer sits where the reel-to-reel equipment once was,

but the postcards and album covers on the wall are the same. 

 

John the engineer is now 65 years old

And I am no spring chicken myself. 

But John Lennon, standing with his arms crossed, sunglasses on

and a New York City T-shirt that doesn’t need washing, hasn’t aged a bit. 

 

Neither has Smokey Robinson and his Miracles, looking out in the distance with  rosy smiles, confident in their beckoning future. 

 

Picasso is his familiar old self, with bread-dough fingers splayed across the table.

 

And speaking of fingers, Sammy Davis Jr. is stretching his out to the audience in 

ten different ways and shows no signs of getting tired.

 

I’m pleased to see that the woman revealing her ample breasts on the cover of Stag Party Special is still as voluptuous as ever.

 

It all makes me think that I should put my photo on the CD cover in hopes that someone will put it on the wall of some basement recording studio,

where some future music teacher will come back year after year and 

notice how he is aging

 

And I am not. 

 

 

No Replay Button

In my growing collection of inspired posts on social media by eloquent people who I’ve never heard of, one by LaTosha Brown really caught my attention. Here is one of many inspired paragraphs:

 

There is no stillness anywhere in the universe. Which means there is no going back. Not because we don’t want to. But because IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. The place we were doesn’t exist anymore as somewhere we can return to. Even trying to recreate what was once requires us doing something new to get there. The universe genuinely does not have a reverse gear. Our galaxy never crosses the same point again in our universe. Ever. 

 

This scientific response to the toxic MAGA fantasy is part of the point. But there’s also a general human truth here that we all have to face. One place it shows itself most clearly is in the raising of children. If you have one, you know exactly what she means when she says “The universe doesn’t have a reverse gear. There is no replay button.” If you don’t have children, you were one yourself, so you can look at this from that angle.

 

So after five days with my grandchildren, ages 14 and 10, I feel this incontrovertible truth yet again. Having just spent a week in Tokyo with Zadie, the elder, I was prepared for the American teenage playbook. One-word answers to questions, hibernating in her room, picking and choosing when to make an appearance and be at least mildly sociable. Luckily, there are still breakthroughs of her innocent, sweet, exuberant and childlike self— like her jumping up from our Rummy 500 game, phone in hand playing some music and her singing and dancing along without a twinge of self-consciousness. Yeah!

 

Meanwhile, Malik at 10 years old is just below the border of the upcoming revolution in the body, heart and mind known as puberty. We connect effortlessly with basketball (both playing and watching), card games, reading to each other and more. Yesterday, I bought him a bike (he had one that was stolen a few months ago) and we had fun biking around the neighborhood. 

 

Yet all too soon, his voice will drop and he'll grow a mustache and friends will far outweigh grandparents in importance and that’s just the way of the world. My job is simply to enjoy who he is now knowing it will change, to accept and even look forward to some of the new ways to be together in those changes to come.

 

How often we wish we could stop time, but on it relentlessly marches! Press the pause button on a relationship when all was new and fresh and vibrating with love, all polka-dots and moonbeams. An age when our kids ran to the door screaming “Mommy’s home! Daddy’s home!” and jumping into our arms.  When they cuddle and cozied up to us and looked at us with such loving eyes, convinced we could do no wrong. On a time in our country when government served the people with life-affirming and life-protecting programs, when the arts were thriving in the culture, when schools were alive with experimental ideas and teachers trusted to follow their inspired intuition, where we waited in line outside the movie theater for the next artistic film that would rock our world. 

But the universe will not have it. There is no going back. So we have no choice but to follow the changes of constantly shifting and redefined relationships, be they between people, institutions or governments.  And to remember that alongside our wistful resistance is the pleasure of new doors opened. Like the moment when Malik finally grows tall enough to finally beat me in one-on-one basketball. That Zadie will mature to the point of understanding how much we have loved her in each and every phrase and independently seek to spend our precious remaining time together. And of course, my fervent hopes that a nation will awaken to benevolent future rather than a fantasized nostalgic past. 

 

And so we go on…  

On the Porch

One of many, many things I admire about my older daughter is her ritual of taking time each night to sit on the front porch. A beer in hand, a heat lamp on and wrapped in cozy blankets when it’s cold, a shady spot when it’s hot, this is her routine no matter what else is happening in her life. Of course, it’s an age-old tradition, especially for families whose house actually had front porches. Such a wonderful idea, either before or after dinner, to just take a moment and let the day settle, to decompress and just exhale into the approaching night. 

 

It's at once a strategy for solitude and sociability. If the neighbors walk by, why, of course, it’s proper to say hi and exchange a few words. Even occasionally invite them to join you. Just a simple way to just say, “Here we both are, alive at the end of another day and preparing ourselves to face—or revel in— another.” 

 

I didn’t have a front porch growing up in New Jersey, but I did have a front stoop and as a teen, spent many a twilight sitting on my steps with my cat Zorro purring on my lap. Neighbors did pass by and I greeted them. (Imagine that!! A teenager saying “Hi.!”) Of course, this was mostly a summer pastime and there was the extra bonus of fireflies lighting up the night. 

 

But I’ve never had a front porch in all my adult California homes. I did have back decks and when the weather permitted, we’d eat out there and occasionally just sit to greet the approaching night. But facing matters and it’s not as sociable with no one passing by on the sidewalk. 

So honoring my daughter’s tradition, here I am with my cold IPA beer, Malik indoors working on his 50-page novel about his cats and Zadie doing some inexplicable mathematical designs on her computer using words I barely comprehend (vertice?). After three days of non-stop rain, the sun came out in time for Malik’s morning soccer game and wasn’t that a pleasure? (The sun, that is. The game was okay, but after holding steady behind 2-1 for most of the game, the other team scored four goals in the last two minutes!). 

 

Malik quickly got over it, because I decided to pay for 60% of a new bike as an early birthday present. Portland always impressed me the way kids left their bikes out on their front lawns and Malik did so as well until someone stole it. (So much for the Portland paradise.) So he has been bikeless for some months and I decided it was the perfect time to get him one. And I did! When we got home, we rode together a bit around the neighborhood (me on Zadie’s bike). 

 

The sun is setting and I’m about to take them for a farewell dinner. Mom comes home tomorrow and I go back to San Francisco’s apparently perfect weather. So off tonight to the Kennedy School restaurant, a delightful place I actually stayed in once! It’s a converted elementary school, the hotel rooms are old classrooms with blackboards and cloak closets intact, the old cafeteria is a restaurant, the old auditorium is a movie theater. Delightful!

 

And to prove my point, a neighbor kid rode over on his bike to see if Malik is home and they’re off around the block on their own, like 10-year-olds should be able to be. No neighbors walking by, but I’m savoring my beer and the dying rays of the sun. It is such a simple thing to enjoy the gift of a human life and such a maddening thing when so many make it so difficult. And for what?

 

Maybe Congress should end each day on the front porch together, sitting with people they’ve been arguing with, enjoying a cold beer or soda water and chatting with the citizens passing by. Why not?

 

PS Just to be clear, there are many, many things I admire about my younger daughter as well. But she didn’t make it into this piece for one simple reason— she doesn’t have a front porch!

New Age Siri

I’ve come to learn Portland fairly well after years of visiting the grandkids, but needed a little help for the precise directions to Trader Joes. I called on Siri and at one point, she gave me a direction that I doubted. “Siri, what are you doing?” I shouted and she answered, 

 

“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to respond to that.”

 

I forget what I said next, but her response was: 

 

“Tell me about your hopes and dreams.”

 

What?!! How had we crossed into this next level of relationship? Curious as to these new conversations, I asked, “Who’s your best friend?” and without a moment’s hesitation, she answered, “That would be you.”

 

Okay, this was getting creepy. Later, I was telling the story to granddaughter Zadie and my phone was at the other end of the room. When I mentioned that part about “Who’s your best friend?” a voice came out 20 feet away, 

 

“I’d like to think I’m everyone’s best friend.”

 

First of all, I had not pressed the Siri button. Why is she listening in on our conversations uninvited? Second, first I’m her best friend and now she’s jilted me for ‘everyone.” So I shot back: “What’s wrong with me?”

 

Her answer? “To me, you’re perfect. “

 

Siri is one New-Age girlfriend. So affirming in her responses, wanting to know my hopes and dreams and doing her best to dispel my self-doubts by affirming my perfection. It makes me wonder if there are any Old Testament or Puritan Siris with very different responses.

 

“You have ignored my direction to turn left! Whosever disobeys my commandments shall burn in hellfire. I will set my face against you and you shall be smitten before your enemies.”

 

“You ask if I’m your friend? Who could befriend a miserable sinner such as you!”

 

 "I see you looking out the window into the next lane. Keep your eyes straight ahead on the path to righteousness and do not covet your neighbor’s car!”

 

Perhaps the supportive, gentle Siri is a sign that as a culture, we are leaning into being nice and affirming. But like everything these days, we’ve outsourced our emotional support to machines. Siri has no shoulder I can put my head on in moments of despair, no knowledge of the darkness in my heart, no hopes and dreams of her own that she can share with me. 

 

So Siri, let me be clear. Stay in your lane— literally and metaphorically— and stick to giving me dependable directions. And stop listening to my conversations with real people!

 

PS To paraphrase various comedians, “I am not making this up! All these Siri responses really happened!”

 

The Mallet Murders

My publishing woes continue. Someone discovered that an online company was selling my books without my permission and without paying me any money. An Orff book dealer that has sold my books for over 20 years told me the younger generation doesn’t buy my books because they don’t like to think or read. Someone offered to promote my books at book fairs for a guaranteed (read NOT) explosion in sales, for a mere $2500 fee. 

 

But hey, it’s bad form to just whine and complain. So I’ve decided to take action. What sells? Any book with “Paris” in the title. Any book about the resistance in World War II. Any murder mystery. Any book with good recipes in it. Any book with impossible hardship and trauma overcome. Any Manual for Dummies.” So the next books I write will be things like these:

 

1). The Orff Underground in Paris: Three years after the debut of his work Carmina Burana, Carl Orff comes to Paris to conduct it. During the rehearsal, the Germans invade and occupy France. Here he must face a life-changing choice: collaborate with his fellow Germans or go underground and join the resistance? Oh Fortuna! He spins the Wheel of Fortune and where it stops…

 

2) The Mallet Murders: Renowned sleuth GWK (alias, Gunild “The Weaver” Keetman) is confronted with a series of brutal murders and discovers in each case a most unusual murder weapon— a bass xylophone mallet. Dodging bullets from glocks and surveillance by drones, GKK uses elemental analysis while sitting at her loom, connecting all the threads to uncover a nefarious gang  known as the Kodaly Killers. Can she discern their ostinato pattern of death in time? While the bells chime “Ding Dong, Digi-Digi Dong,” the disappearance of the last victim’s cat provides the missing clue. 

 

3) The Frigian Cookbook. After her triumph in Scandinavia, Babette comes to Germany to continue to release people’s frozen erotic libidos through food. Follow her as she unleashes love with the Mixsaladian concoctions, her Piala Modes, her Gin and Penta Tonic mixed drinks. Recipes included.

 

4) My Awful Orffull Life: Orffaned at a young age, Maya Lex must overcome the ancestral trauma in her genes bequeathed by her father Lex Luthor. In her grueling journey through drone addiction, obsession with heavy metal-alophone music, her unsuccessful attempt to save her lover Tommy from drowning in the pond, we follow her down the Polonaise path as she spirals down to the dark pit of Fortune’s broken wheel.  In a harrowing scene in which, injected with pentathol-tonic, the truth of her defection to Dal’s crows to help her fly free is revealed. We finally see some signs of redemption when Maya joins a group dancing to Streetsong. But is it too late?

 

5) Music Teaching for Dummies: Finally, a method that guarantees that you can teach without ever having to think or even know a quaver* from a crotchet. Buy our success-guaranteed video series so you’ll never have to finger a recorder, sing a song, execute a dance step or plan a lesson. Just click on the link and spend your class shopping online while the kids are wholly entertained. 

 

·      Any similarity with the company Quaver is purely accidental. All lessons have been generated by me with a little help from AI after teaching actual kids for two weeks and deciding the machine can do it better.

 

Well, folks, what do you think? Five books that should catapult me into the John Grisham stratosphere. Then I’ll start my new company: “How to Publish Books and Make a Million Without Knowing a Damn Thing About Anything.”

 

Pre-orders now accepted. 

 

 

 

The Numbers Game

 I reposted the last post on Facebook to try to reach a wider audience and so far, 24 people have liked it. Meanwhile, the stats on this Blog say 14,519 people have read it, one of the higher numbers I’ve seen. Any artist naturally wants as many people as possible to consider her/his work, be it a book, a poem, a post, a painting, a performance, what have you. It’s a lot of work to create something and yet more to put it out in public, so yes, knowing it reaches people feels like a natural part of the cycle, a completing of a loop. And having made the effort, yes, there is a satisfaction in knowing that large numbers of people have seen/heard/ read your work and are considering what you offered. 

 

But at the end of the day, so what is it’s 24 or 14,000? It doesn’t change my experience of the day. I had one person who I know make some thoughtful comments on the post that actually inspired another post and that was indeed more satisfying and real then 14,000 anonymous readers. And who knows? Perhaps 13,900 of them were bots. 

 

I suppose I should count myself lucky that while I have a modest amount of ambition and a mild lust to be known (for what I believe are the right reasons), the center of my work is mostly with 20 to 50 kids or teachers at a time in real time. I have written more about this music education work than most any other colleague I know and again, I hope it touches other teachers and helps them reach their students with more joy and musical satisfaction. But all my writing is just a description of the marvelous banquet of the teaching itself and some recipes that help pass on some of the tasty dishes. But it’s not the meal itself. 

 

These days, I’m writing much more about the larger issues behind the work, the humanitarian promise I’m trying to nurture and draw attention to and celebrate. I’m posting here and on Facebook in hopes that my words bring solace and comfort in distressing times, hope and light in dark times, determination and courage in fearful times and some necessary information that helps people see the larger perspective of what’s going down in the greater world of culture and politics. So yes, the numbers here feel like they could matter, reaching 14,000 voters instead of 24. But it’s not in my control.

 

Meanwhile, I’ve just arrived in Portland to be with my grandkids while Mom is at a Conference. So I’ll turn my attention to the numbers that truly matter— the Rummy 500 score in our card game!