The Gift That Kept on Giving

Of all of life’s mysteries, the passing of time is near the front of the line. Who could have imagined 51 years ago that I’d be back in the sacred space of the SF School music room still so joyfully teaching children? And not just any children, but some of the children of the children I once taught, the grandchildren of the teachers with whom I once taught side-by-side. And now passing in the hall some 12 other current teachers who had once been my students in those same halls. 

 

And equally notable, that some kids would still be playing one of the exact same six Orff instruments that a parent bought for the school in 1975, a generous gift that ended up creating my job. An instrument now a half-century old still helping fire the neurons, coordinate the hands, uplift the heart and connect with other players. 

 

Those six Orff instruments grew to some 50 plus barred instruments that includes professional marimbas and vibraphones, a stand-up bass, the whole family of recorders from bass to garklein, a hundred-plus percussion instruments from all corners of the world and yet more. Each having passed through the hands and hearts of students for decades, playing glorious music so expertly. With that powerful ancestry at their side, the 8^th grade kids I taught yesterday learned Sonny Rollins’ blues Sonnymoon for Two in about five minutes and took blues solos with impressive swing and musical coherence. The 6^thgraders learned a haunting Chinese folk song (Kan Ding Song) in one class, with a soothing, calming and tender accompaniment on the Orff instruments and one student playing the melody on violin. The 5-year-olds worked hard on joining their kinesthetic, visual spatial, musical and social intelligences with a pitch-perfect play-party, Bow Belinda, for their developmental stage. The 5^th graders delighted in a poetry alliteration 2-class unit that had them playing complex body percussion and speaking in canon Whether the Weather and Peter Piper, ending with an impressive Betty Botter (a 6-stanza tongue-twister epic they memorized in two classes!) orchestrated in Ionian mode for the Orff instruments. That gift of six Orff instruments by Carol Kusmierski so many years ago nurtured so many intelligences of so many students for so many years. Who could have imagined? It proved to be the gift that kept on giving and most wonderful of all, keeps on giving!

 

Music teachers, take note. When your request to buy some Orff instruments is denied by the school, ask them how much they spent on computers and how long each lasted? And if they need further convincing, have them listen to my X Is for Xylophone episode on my ABC’s podcast to understand that a xylophone is every bit as an effective tool for genuine education than a computer— if not more so! Meanwhile, off I go for my last of four glorious days subbing in this extraordinary place.  

The Comfort of Numbers

The day this Blog becomes an organ recital, someone needs to make me shut it down. But truth be told, the aging body has not been kind lately. Alongside my off and on chronic dizziness is a mysterious upper right back issue that like many such things, just came out of nowhere. Not like I lifted something too heavy and twisted the wrong way when exercising. It just appeared. A heating pad last night helped a little bit, but not quite enough. 

 

In theory I understand that happiness doesn’t come from what happens to us, but how we react to what happens to us. Still, what happens has a voice in the matter. In my case, diminishing my resilience and ability to accept with grace whatever comes my way. 

 

But I do know that walking tends to help everything. So after a short day subbing in my school and playing things from my kitchen to the rhyme Davy Dumpling with 2^nd graders, I had the good sense to get out walking in the park. Miraculously, the sun was out after a week straight of fog and that certainly helped lift my spirits. As did writing in my journal, putting the details of my pity party on a page where no one has to listen to it, in the hopes that just saying it out loud and recognizing it— “I see you! Now can you leave me alone?”—might help. After writing, I sat on a bench and finished the book The Phoenix Crown, which was not remarkable, but certainly satisfying. Then I walked a bit, played a bit of cornhole by myself in the public set on JFK Drive and came home to deal with some business matters. 

 

In this case, the business was making and sending off invoices for some of my books that three different dealers ordered.  The sun still out, playing on the leaves of the tree outside my window, my back issue and dizziness somehow taking my advice and leaving me alone for a moment, I find myself feeling great comfort in putting numbers in the Excel sheet and with my phone calculator at the other end of the house, actually adding, subtracting and multiplying them with pen and paper! Using my own brain! Imagine that! 

 

For a brief moment, I wondered if I should have been an accountant instead of a music teacher. Whole days just me and numbers and spreadsheets. Numbers with their calm dispassion. No rolling around on the floor like a couple of the 2^nd graders today or refusal to listen to my simple direction from a 6^th grader, no squawks or squeaks of hyper delight or dismay. Just the reliable 25 that reliably becomes 30 when you add 5 or 5 when you divide by 5. The satisfaction of multiplying the number of books ordered by the price of each book, then adding them all together, then multiplying times .60% (my share of the profits) and seeing if the final number matches the one on the Purchase Order and —lo and behold! It does! That’s all it takes to sit back in satisfaction and think, “Life is sweet! Everything works! Everything makes sense!”

 

Perhaps as an accountant, I’d eventually miss a few hugs, the uplift of music grandly played, the funny perceptions of lively kids. But for today, it was just what the doctor ordered. 

Heigh Ho Heigh Ho

 

Today I stepped out the door at the ungodly (for retired folks) hour of 8:15 am singing “Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work I go.” (You elders might remember it from the Disney Snow White cartoon.) It was true! I was off to work again, back at the old school where I worked for so long. Four days subbing for my colleague James while he was taking care of family matters back East. 

 

The first thing I noticed was the pleasure of planning my classes. Get a general outline in mind and once the wheels are spinning, happily receiving inspiring variations of the plan before I ever stepped foot into the music room. I imagine this is how Bach or Mozart or Charlie Parker or Miles Davis felt as a little musical motif alights in their brain and they start spinning off variations of it. The human act of creation, in any field, gives a different feeling to the day, a different engagement in the mind, a different spring in the body’s step. 

 

Next was the delight of being around children again. I walked through the preschool door and was surprised that the 5-year-olds erupted in their rock-star-sighting “Doug!! It’s Doug!!! Hi Doug!!!” Surprised because though I had done a few classes with them last Spring when they were 4, I didn’t expect them to actually remember me. Not only my name, but they started singing the song to the game that I had played with them and indeed, planned to play again! 

 

Then came the class itself. All well and good, and in fact necessary, to have each detail of the class planned, but the real deal is how you wrap it around each child’s unique and quirky character, how you respond to their response. How quickly I learn who needs immediate re-directing and how, who instantly attracts my attention by the quality of their expression, who I might miss if I didn’t attend more carefully. If the class plan is the bones, the actual class is the living tissue of the muscles and nerve cells and what keeps you as alert as a jazz musician moving through the changes.

 

The 5^th grade was particularly satisfying as I had the challenge of 24 kids for 90 minutes and after some speech pieces in canon highlighting the power of poetry’s alliteration and some equally complex body percussion, I began my plan of having them memorize the whole 12 lines of "Betty Botter" who "bought some butter." The idea of six groups of four kids each memorizing just two lines each was a good one. I intended to move the whole show to the xylophones with some composition in Dorian mode, when listening to the energy of one group practicing their lines, took a sharp left turn to a blues version and each group make up little hip riffs using the B words. Yeah! A bit of chaos and more than the average music teacher can handle, but I’m well practiced in it and they were actually on task. By the end, we tried to join the 6 ideas together and it was a good start! The kind of surprise a teacher comfortable with improvisation and flexible to the impulses of the moment enjoys. 

 

So off I’ll go again tomorrow singing the Seven Dwarf’s song (should I say “vertically challenged?”) and getting to meet the 2^nd graders. Retirement is great!

Our 30th President

On the way to high school in my junior year, I drove past a billboard every day that read: “Calvin Coolidge was our 30^th President.” Huh? I couldn’t figure out what it was about until someone finally enlightened me. Apparently, they were testing to see the impact of billboards— or of that particular placing of a billboard— and would call people up who lived in the area and ask, “Who was our 30^thPresident?” Would never work today with people cheating on their phones, but back then, it was a logical experiment.

 

Of course, no one every called me up and asked me. Sometimes I imagined some mugger assaulting me and me pleading for mercy and my assailant making me a deal. “If you answer my question, I’ll let you go. Who was our 30^th President?” But it never happened and so I just let that factoid lie dormant in the dark recesses of my neural connections for the next 60 years, never once thinking about it again. 

 

Until today. 

 

Continuing my father’s legacy, I was working on my daily Crostic puzzle and clue number T was: The 30^th President. Bam! I didn’t even need to count the 8 spaces. I knew it. Instantly.

 

So a shout-out to those billboard makers. I had to wait six decades, but thanks to you, when the moment came, I was prepared. 

 

PS For you readers, I suggest putting up that fact up on a sign in your office or home or workplace or on a neighborhood bulletin board. One never knows when someone will need it.

Don Juan's Advice

After seven weeks without teaching, it’s time to re-start that slightly rusty engine as I return to my school while my forever colleague is away for a week. That must be why I had a dream about teaching Middle Schoolers, who came into the class and sat apart in two groups and one of them said, “You think you’re going to teach us and bring us together? We hate each other!”

 

I calmly replied, “Did you ever hear of the teachings of Don Juan?”

 

“Yeah!” shouted one of the guys. “He was that cool womanizer who could seduce any woman he wanted! Lord Byron wrote an epic poem about him and Mozart told his story in Don Giovanni! You’re going to share his secrets with us? Cool!!”

 

(Remember, this was a dream. Of course, no American middle schooler on earth would know about Lord Byron and Mozart, never mind Don Juan himself!)

 

“No!” I replied, “Not that Don Juan. This one was a Mexican Yaqui Indian sorcerer and Carlos Castaneda, the author of the book, apprenticed with him to become a shaman.”

 

“Oh yeah! I heard about that! He was going on all these mind-altering trips using peyote and mushrooms and stuff. Did you bring some for us?”

 

“Sorry to disappoint you, but the teaching I’m referring to has nothing to do with drugs or sex. “

 

“Damn!” a few shouted in unison. “We thought this was gonna be fun!”

 

“Well, it will be, but first you have to understood what I felt was one of the most important lessons Don Juan taught. By the way, it later turned out the author made most of this up and it actually never happened and it’s not clear if he ever meet a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. I felt a little ripped off when I heard that years after the book was published. But none of that diminished the power of that sentence I read.”

 

By now, all the kids were on the edge of their chair in anticipation. (Remember, this was a dream. In real life, they’d probably be slumped and murmuring “Whatever.”)

 

“Here it is,” I pressed on. “You can make yourself happy or miserable—the work is the same.”  So you can choose to keep hating each other, thinking that your group is cool and the other are all losers, or you can consider that you all have something valuable to give to the group and each of you has a shining jewel hidden inside of you that can bring light into the room. The amount of energy you spend either dismissing or accepting other people is the same, but the result is quite different. One brings misery, the other happiness. So choose wisely.

 

And keeping in mind once more that this is a dream, all the kids came together into a circle and we started music class. 

Leaving the Camera Behind

 

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

                                                            Wendell Berry: The Vacation

 

When I went to Europe for the first time with the Antioch College Choir, I was a card-carrying hippy in my last year of college (1973). I followed the mantra “Be here now” and dismissed the old-fashioned notion of bringing a camera on the trip. I did record those travels faithfully in my journal, which is actually a much more meaningful way to document experience. But years later, I sorely regretted not having a single photo of the trip. Luckily, a fellow student took some photos and posted them on a Website, so I there are maybe five photos with me in them that help me say with certainty: “This happened. And I was there.”

 

This on my mind at the last day of Flower Piano. By now, I hope you have a picture in your mind of some 12 pianos spread out around the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park and people pretty much crowded around each one listening to someone play. I imagine many travel around to at least half, if not all of the 12 pianos and hear some 30 to 40 people playing. (The ones that don’t have a scheduled show at any moment are open to the public and people take turns, usually playing one to three pieces.) 

 

Everything about this is wonderful. On the weekend, the crowds seem to have tripled and there were literally thousands of people milling about, cold fog be damned, listening to the music. The last band I heard was a great swing band and looking around me, some people were dancing, some sitting on blankets with food, some standing before strolling on. Again, except for a little sunshine, it couldn’t be better. 

 

Are you picturing a “but…” coming? Good guess! And here it is.

 

At any one piano, it seems like over half the crowd has their phones up videoing the player. Now imagine having listened to some 30 or 40 people playing three or more pieces each and you have 100 videos captured on your phone. So my two questions are this:

 

1)   When is anyone going to ever watch these again? How much time do you have? If you decide to delete some, you still have to watch some of each and how long will that take? And how many will you keep and why and again, when are you ever going to listen to them again? And why would you, when you can probably hear the same piece played much better by someone on Youtube? If your friend was playing, okay, I get it, but that certainly couldn’t have been the case as I looked around at all the phones in the air.

 

2)   Theoretically, you can still listen attentively with your hand up in the air with the phone in it. But I suspect, like Wendell Berry’s vacationer, that some part of you feels like you don’t have to listen that hard because, hey, you can always watch it later. I suspect it steals a bit of your motivation and ability to be wholly present, to “be here now” and really savor the sounds floating up into the redwoods, cushioned by all the surrounding greenery and enjoyed in company with a hundred living begins gathered up in the music’s arms. 

 

As noted in the next entry, one of those videos opened up a wonderful conversation, but I’m sure that’s the exception rather than the rule. 

 

And so the Aesopian moral, of which I need reminders as much as anyone. Some kind of documentation, be it a photo or video, is natural to our species that lives in the moment and reflects on it, sometimes all at once. But not all documentation is created equal—a journal entry, a poem, a piece of art, a song, even a dance, to preserve an occasion uses so much more of us than a machine can ever grant. By creating something artful inspired by the moment, you are re-creating the beauty and memorability of the moment. And some things are best remembered in the neural folds of our own memory, to be shared over dinners with the friends who were there or told around campfires. 

 

None of this cancels the sincere wonderfulness of this 10-day event. But it is food for thought. To be chewed over on a picnic blanket on the grass listening to a hot swing band. 

Public Education

I was 60 years old before I finally relented and called myself a musician. Someone who could play well enough that listeners would be drawn into the new experience of time that music gifts to us, to be lifted into that world where everything makes sense and brings some sense of remembered beauty and comfort to our perpetually troubled souls. I’m no virtuoso roaming the keyboard like Steph Curry on a fast break, but somehow I’m able to dig into the center of a note or a chord or a melody and follow it to the next needed note, whether improvising or reading a score. And when playing with others, good enough to notice the calls and responses and participate in the conversation. 

 

Another point in my favor is the range of the music I like to play— a wide variety of jazz standards spanning some five decades, jazz tunes ranging from Ragtime to New Orleans style to swing to bebop to cool to bossa nova and a touch of Latin jazz, notable classical pieces from Bach to Debussy and even some old chestnut folk songs from spirituals to Appalachian old-time music to cowboy songs and beyond. And most of it memorized so I don’t have to thumb through books or i-Pads and much of it including improvisation to keep it fresh and in the moment.

 

On top of that, my teacher self is omnipresent and allows me to be both relaxed in my comfort zone and to connect with the audience with my Music Jeopardy questions or charming stories about the music or composer, education side-by-side with letting the music speak for itself. The 45 years of doing this daily with the kids I taught, the 18 years with the elders at The Jewish Home have far surpassed the 10,000 hours needed to master any craft and teaching/ performing (or performing/ teaching) is indeed a craft that benefits from such practice. When I play like I have the last few days and feel the audience respond, it brings me satisfaction that indeed I have made some progress and all those hours not only paid off from the pleasure I felt in the practicing, but in allowing me to connect with others and bring a few drops of happiness to a thirsty world. 

 

And so yesterday, there was a sizeable audience at each of the two pianos I played and in contrast to the Jewish Home, I noticed that many of the people under 45 or so didn’t recognize old jazz classics like Tea for Two, Bye Bye Blackbird, Embraceable You, Ain’t Misbehavin’ and certainly didn’t know the words to sing along. I tried to help them, feeding them the lines while I was playing and a few gave it a try. I also noticed they hadn’t seemed to hear of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller or Jerome Kern. Most recognized Scott Joplin and many George Gershwin, but that was about it. The one thing I thought I could count on was them recognizing and singing along to Over the Rainbow—and they did. 

 

Today is the last day of Flower Piano and let’s see who knows Sunnnyside of the Street, I Got Rhythm, Autumn Leaves, Blue Moon, On the Street Where You Live, The Girl from Ipanema and such. Given the weather, perhaps my first tune should be Gershwin’s A Foggy Day. And I wonder how many know I Left My Heart in San Francisco? We shall see. And I’ll do my part to educate the public while having some fun.