No Ice

No Ice

 

Yes, this could be my sign at the No King’s Rally tomorrow. But it actually is a new decision to always decline ice with my drink on the plane or at the restaurant. Why?

 

1)   I could treat it as a mild protest to what’s going on in our country.

2)   Chinese medicine suggests cold drinks aren’t that great for you. 

3)   But looking at all the ice in my restaurant drink and finishing it in five sips, I realized you can get almost twice as much liquid if you leave out the ice—for the same price.

4)   The poet Wendell Berry said something to the effect of “I don’t use ice in my drinks. I like them to taste the same at the end as at the beginning.”

 

I think number 3 is the strongest reason (though it occurs to me one could ask for ice on the side—that would solve both reasons 3 and 4.)

 

But number 4 can connect with the opening sentence. When ice melts into the drink, it indeed dilutes the full flavor so that it’s a different drink at the end—less itself— than it was at the beginning. And so the other ICE is trying (and for what?) to dilute the full flavor of the country’s beautifully diverse gathering of people and cultures. Goodness knows an entire culture out-sourced to generic shopping malls, chain stores and restaurants, housing developments with each house built the same, one-size-fits-all education, food stripped of its essence with artificial substitutes for natural flavors and nutrients, minds stripped of their intelligence as AI takes over, has already lost whatever character it once had. Now one more blow again restoring authenticity and the power of diversity. 

 

So next time you order your drink without ice, consider what a radical act of resistance that is!

 

50th State

50^th State

 

It’s official. As of today, in my 75^th year, I have now visited every state in the United States of America. As in actually spent at least one night in each, not just driven through. That includes giving Orff workshops in 43 of them (not North and South Dakota, West Virginia, Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire). 

 

Given the horrendous history of white supremacy in the state, it wasn’t on my MUST DO list! But given the cultural contributions of the black community, it also was. Amongst notable musicians born in the state:

 Blues artists Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Big Bill Bronzy, Willie Dixon, Charlie Musselwhite, Mose Allison,  James Cotton, Elmore James, Skip James, Albert King, B.B. King,  R &B/ rock/soul/ pop  artists Bo Diddley, Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Brittney Spears, jazz musicians Milt Hinton, Lester Young, Mulgrew Miller, Cassandra Wilson, country singers Jimmie Rodgers, Charlie Pride, Conway Twitty, Tammy Wynette and opera singer Leontyne Price. Quite an impressive list. No wonder the sign welcoming me in Mississippi was this!

The first few signs I read were promising signs offering some healing from a dark, dark history: 

      • Olive Branch

    • Independence

    • Laughter Rd. 

    • Senatobia

 

The drive from Jackson, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi was 4 hours, so 

I began by listening to a duet album with jazz pianists Chick Corea and Hiromi, a virtuoso explosion of technical fireworks that was remarkable but also dense music with little relief from its intensity. So I switched to Muddy Water’s greatest hits and that fit the situation better. After settling into my hotel, I walked to a nearby setting with two restaurants flanking an open astro-turfed park area. Eating outside, I watched kids of all ages playing together— tag, ball games, practicing a dance routine. What was particularly heartening is these small groups of children were all a mixture of black and white kids. 

 

I remember taking a trip some 15 years back to Georgia. My wife and I had lunch in a park with a public swimming pool where black and white kids swam together and an integrated group of college kids sat under trees singing songs with guitars. Knowing that such a scene would have been unlikely many decades earlier and even illegal before that, I was convinced we were finally leaving our dark, divided history behind and coming to our senses. Little did I know what lay ahead and how disturbingly difficult it is to get the cancer of institutionally manufactured hatred into remission. Without a full chemotherapeutic treatment of education combined with care, nothing changes. 

 

And yet, here was that same feeling again as kids played on the lawn together. Tomorrow I’ll present my way of teaching jazz to what I hope will be one of the more integrated groups I’ve taught and then hopefully, join a No Kings Rally. My little way of getting the treatment going to send the cancer into remission. Report to follow. 

Meanwhile, here I mark the completion of my tour of the United States. From New Jersey to Mississippi, 50 states in 75 years. It has been quite a wild ride. 

Staff Meeting

In my life as a “retired” music teacher, I’ve been blessed to continue to use my life’s skills in a dizzying variety of venues. I would be quite happy doing any one of these on a my-terms-my-schedule basis, both with and without pay as the situation calls for it. But to get to do all of them is yet a greater blessing. My list includes: 

• Singing with kids at schools.

• Teaching music classes as a resident guest music teacher at schools.

• Mentoring music teachers at schools.

• Continuing to give workshops and courses with teachers.

• Playing piano for and singing with seniors at Elder’s Homes.

• Writing, reading, practicing piano, walking, biking, visiting friends and family, traveling.

• All of the above.

 

Now I’d like to add one more: 

• Doing music with teachers at staff meetings.

 

I’ve done this now and then, here and there, but recently, I did one in Singapore and then yesterday at a Catholic School in Jackson, Tennessee. I love it! And apparently, they do too, as they all were having such fun— laughing, giggling, thoroughly enjoying each other while learning new things about each other— and being challenged and working through it! There were six Catholic Sisters in full habit in the group and watching them play the clapping play Miss Mary Mack  so joyfully is an image I will long keep with me. 

 

At the same time that all was pure fun, embedded in the two activities were deep insights about the nature of effective teaching, inspired pedagogy, differentiated instruction, wrapping activities around the child’s nature rather than insisting they rise to the adult’s fantasy of learning, honoring and valuing children, feeling the power of vulnerability, experiencing a model of the necessary balance between repetition and variation, shifting from the comfortable answer to the next intriguing question, giving an outlet for emotional and artistic expression, connecting kids with each other, the greater community and their own inner power— shall I go on? In short, a memorable staff meeting that was not a relief from the serious business, but was the serious business itself, more deeply memorable and authentic and useful than the usual Power Point presentation or glitzy video or talk running through the cliched latest and greatest in education. So indeed, I could see traveling from school to school offering such staff meetings if all the other activities above ever dried out. 

 

I often say that I didn’t retire from my school because I was tired of teaching kids, but because I was tired of going to staff meetings! But I wouldn’t have been if they had all been like this! Anyone want to invite me?

 

A Shaggy Dog Story

After my mild vow to “like the world the way it is,” the gods decided to test me and I’m pretty sure I failed. It was one of those travel days where nothing goes as smoothly as this privileged person has come to expect that they should. Left my house at 7:30 am on my way to Memphis and Mississippi, wearing my traveling music teacher hat that still fits so well. I got to the airport with time to spare and when I got in line to board the first plane to Salt Lake City, I was in Zone 8. By the time it got to me, the announcement came that the overhead bins were full and remaining passengers had to check their luggage. Not horrible, but it does add another 30 minutes or more to the travel. But I was a bit disgruntled when I got on the plane and there was plenty of room in the overhead bins. Oh well.

 

In Salt Lake City, boarded the next plane, got settled in my seat and there came the captain’s announcement we never wish to hear. 

 

“Folks, we’re having a little technical problem here and the mechanics are looking at it, but if they can’t fix it, it looks like we’ll have to de-plane and change to another plane. “ Five minutes later. “Sorry to report that we have to de-plane. The new flight should be ready to go in an hour-and-a half or so.”

 

Not the end of the world. No pressure to get to Memphis at a specific time, as the next step upon landing was to rent a car and drive two hours or so to Jackson, Tennessee. So much tension in traveling has to do with schedules that matter— someone picking you up at the airport or work soon after you arrive or a crucial connecting flight. So I could afford to be relaxed about it. 

 

Finally arrived around 7:00 pm Memphis time, got my bag at baggage claim and walked a long, long walk to the rental car area. There was Avis, Hertz, Dollar, Enterprise, Alamo, etc. without a single person standing in line. But I had booked with Thrifty and was told they were one floor up. And there they were—with 12 people standing in line and one person to help them! Some 40 minutes later, I finally got to the window. Did all the paperwork, but my small to mid-size car was not right there on the lot, so someone went to get it. 30 minutes later, it finally arrived. 

 

So now at 8:30 pm, I was ready to do. Well, almost. I needed GPS and to do that, I needed to connect my phone to the car. The guy at the check-out kiosk tried to help me, but nothing was working. Cars were in-line behind me, so I drove over the point of no-return (the place where your tires get slashed if you go the wrong way) and started heading toward the exit. There was a woman at the next kiosk and I pulled over to see if she could get me connected. Bless her heart, she leaned in, scrolled through the options and voila! there was the map on the big screen! Started driving with the Siri voice talking to me and then out on the freeway, Siri went silent. I looked for an exit to pull over to figure it out and when I re-started the car, couldn’t get the map to appear on that screen. This was not good. 

 

Finally got to a place where I could see it on my small phone and when I saw “Proceed for 73 miles until exit 85” decided to shut off the phone for the next hour. Because on top of everything else, my battery was getting low and I didn’t see anywhere in the car I could charge it. Somewhere around 9:30, I stopped at a gas station having not eaten since noon and got a dinner of a banana and a small bag of potato chips. Turned my phone on at exit 85, made the wrong turn that put me off-route (of course) and was re-directed down scary back roads in the countryside to finally arrive at La Quinta Hotel around 10:45. Checked in a bit tired and hungry and slightly annoyed by all these little snafus, but not wholly beaten down by them. After all, I arrived alive and still in time to do my guest teaching at a school the next day. 

 

Read a bit, got to sleep around midnight and in the middle of the night, my door opened with someone rolling their suitcase into my room. “Hello?!!” I shouted, and they said, “Oh, sorry!” and ran out. It was 2:20 in the morning. Why were they given a key that worked for my room? Are you having fun, ye gods who were testing me?

 

I let myself sleep as late as possible, 9:30 am new time (7:30 San Francisco) and went down to breakfast. All tables were empty and I asked the women there about it. She said, “Oh breakfast closes at 9:00. But come, let’s see what’s left." And there was a little cereal and toast and hard-boiled egg. She offered me some milk and asked, “2% or whole?” So up I went with my food back to my room and of course, the key didn’t work. Down the hall were some people cleaning and I asked one to let me in and she did graciously, after listening to my little complaints about the middle of night awakening, missing breakfast and such. Once I was in, she said, “Well, hope you have a nice day. Or at least a better one!”

Now this is precisely the kind of story my wife and daughters will never listen to. I wondered if it’s what people call a shaggy-dog story and looked up what precisely that means. Wikipedia defines it thus:

 

“In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.  In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending. “

 

According to this definition, the above story fails to meet those qualifications in three ways: 

 

1)   The incidents are not irrelevant, but intimately connected—all little things that shouldn’t have gone wrong in the way I expect the world to behave but did.

2)   It’s not necessarily meant to be amusing, though if artfully told, the listener can be smiling with some schadenfreudan pleasure. 

3)   It actually does have a meaningful punch line. Which is this:

 

Every single one of the people who helped me with such kindness, empathy, grace and problem-solving ability— the one who rented the car, the one who figured out the car phone connection, the one who checked me into the hotel, the one who got me breakfast, the one who let me into my locked room— was a black woman. Every. Single. One. The kind of person who has suffered so much as a black person in a white supremacist culture, as a woman in a misogynist culture, as a working class person in a corporate capitalist culture. Who would have every reason in the world to ignore me, disdain me, delight in my little problems, insult me— and instead, responded as they did. I might also add that the man in the Food Mart who sold me the banana and chips was a Middle Eastern man who greeted me with,”Hello, brother.” These are the people who have always been marginalized in this “land of the free” and the current regime is doubling down on with its foot on their neck. And now that they are also including white people who protest in the “not-in-the-good-old-boys-club” and beginning to jail, deport, murder them as well, more and more people are awakening to what’s going down and rising up. 

 

Hope you are one of them this Saturday, joining 8 to 12 million or more who have had enough. Without this punchline, my little travel story would have been just another white-privileged-guy complaining that he had to suffer inconvenience. Instead, I’m so immensely inspired by and grateful to each of these women who so graciously helped me. This shaggy dog (well, bald) determined to bark fiercely to protect our humanity. Grrrrrr!!!! 

Changing the World

 Like everyone, every day I wake and expect the world to be as I want it. I want 15 more people suddenly signed up for my Jazz Course in New Orleans. I want the Warriors to turn around their losing streak, with Steph back on the court. I want the weather to stay in the mid-70’s without a strong Spring wind. I want Ingram book distributors to sign me up and get my books easily available nation-and-world-wide. And my usual Orff book dealers to order 50 of each title at a time instead of 1 or 2 every month. I want all the music teachers I’ve trained over the years to invite me to their schools to read my book Jazz, Joy & Justice to the kids. And all the gods in heaven know I want every single one of the heinous traitors in Washington and the entire Epstein gang to get their just desserts, be removed from power and moved to prisons—and not the posh white-collar kinds. Shall I go on?

And yet. If every one of my little wishes were instantly granted, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and cancer would still wreak havoc on those I know and love, another Charlie Kirk might rise up, we would still be at the mercy of extreme weather. And I would still be addicted to the world fulfilling my every whim and desire, being disappointed or sad or outraged when it didn’t and spend my precious time left on the planet whining and complaining. 

 

By my side as I write is an anthology titled The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness and Joy, a needed reminder to step off the carousel of desire, to sit and breathe and savor. (Amidst my recent posts refusing to wait for a savior, I notice that one letter changes "savior" to "savor" and that letter is I. I feel a poem coming on!) In his introduction to the book, editor John Brehm writes: 

 

“Freedom from craving and from fixed ideas of self lets us experience the world as a friendly place…When we let go of insisting that we are who we think we are and that the world should give us exactly and only what we think we want, all things shine forth.”

 

Of course, I will do everything in my power to try to change the world by “being the change I want to see in the world.” I will keep lobbying for music in the schools, keep training music teachers to make their teaching worthy of the kids, keep voting, keep marching on the streets (this Saturday!), keep reading about what has been so terribly wrong in our history to be sufficiently prepared to steer things toward what has been right. But alongside the deep desire to change the world is the deep wisdom to accept the world. It’s a both/and proposition and not an easy rope to walk across and keep your balance. 

 

This entire post inspired by this simple and thought-provoking poem by a poet named A.R. Ammons. The title Old Geezer attracted my attention and then this surprising poem: 

 

The quickest

way

to change

 

the

world

is to

 

like it

the

way it

 

is. 

 

And sometimes I do. 

 

 

Message from Wordsworth

Yet again, I can’t help but feel that the life I wish us all to lead is not some future fantasy, but happening right here, right now, in so many ways. Another sunny San Francisco day and in the little green patch of park down the street from me, kids and neighbors I know are flying kites and a large group of young folk, men, women, black, brown and white, are playing a hilarious kickball game one-handed with a can of beer in the other hand. As noted in my “A Happy Little Story” blog, so many folks of all ages spending their days together outdoors playing games, viewing the cherry blossoms, eating great food, browsing in the local bookstore, biking to the ocean, gathering on blankets spread out amidst the flowers. It is easy to forget the horrors we’re inflicting upon each other shown in the daily news— and for what? 

 

So it was both depressing and affirming to be reminded that this dynamic has been at play throughout human history. In the midst of savoring the beauty of a day almost three centuries ago, the poet William Wordsworth expressed his confusion that we would choose to create hell in the midst of heaven. 

 

Lines Written in Early Spring

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

 

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

 

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

 

The birds around me hopped and played,

Their thoughts I cannot measure:—

But the least motion which they made

It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

 

The budding twigs spread out their fan,

To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

 

If this belief from heaven be sent,

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

Indeed. 

 

Spring Is Here

Many people I know pay some attention to the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice, but does anyone pay any attention to the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox? Well, it just happened on March 20/21 and nobody said boo. Nothing on any of my printed calendars or online calendars, no Facebook posts, no “Happy Spring!” shouted out by passing strangers. And isn’t that a little strange? Except for T.S. Eliot’s nod to April as “the cruelest month,” most people are big fans of Springtime.

 

And why not? The cherry tree and almond trees, the rhododendron and forsythia bushes, the wisteria vines and bougainvillea, the daffodils and tulips, the wildflowers are all a’bloom. The trees are dressing themselves again in green, the robins are returning from warmer climes, the red-wing blackbirds are singing and resurrection and rebirth are in the air, independent of any Easter story or dogma. The animals are mating and the eros puts a little spring in our steps (double meaning) as we're beholding the glory of beautiful bodies in shorts and dresses. 

 

So many English and American poets have sung Spring’s praises. A short list in chronological order:

•  Thomas Nashe’s Spring, The Sweet Spring

• William Shakespeare’s Spring and Sonnet 97 (From you I have been absent in the Spring)

•  William Blake’s To Spring and Spring

•  William Wordsworth’s Lines Written in Early Spring and Daffodils (also titled I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud)

• Robert Browning’s Pippa’s Song

• Emily Dickinson’s A Light Exists in Spring and Dear March…Come in

• AE Housman’s Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now. 

• e.e.cummings In Just Spring

• Langston Hughes An Earth Song

• Mary Oliver Spring

 

Then there’s more praise from various songs in The Great American Songbook. How many do you know?

 

• Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most

• Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year

• Just Spring

• They Say It’s Spring

• It Might As Well Be Spring

• Some Other Spring

• Suddenly It’s Spring

• Younger than Springtime

• You Must Believe in Spring

·      April in Paris

·      April Showers

·      I’ll Remember April

·      One Morning in May

 

May I suggest a little homework for the belatedly celebrate the Vernal Equinox? Check out the above poems—and you don’t have to dig up your old poetry anthologies from high school that you probably threw out anyway. Enter any of the titles online and “Voila!” And for the songs, go to Spotify or Pandora or what have you, and Boom! there they are! Or see them live (some of them) on Youtube.  Performed by many different artists, so I’ll just suggest a few renditions: 

 

• Blossom Dearie singing They Say It’s Spring and It Might As Well Be Spring

• Billie Holiday singing Some Other Spring

• Ella Fitzgerald singing April in Paris

• Frank Sinatra I’ll Remember April

• Tony Bennet singing (accompanied by Bill Evans) You Must Believe in Spring

 

Happy homework! Happy Spring!

 

PS Extra credit if you check out all the Japanese haiku about Spring.

PSS Extra extra credit if you go out for a walk to behold the flowers and write your own poem or compose your own song!