A Day in the Life

• Begin the day miraculously finishing the online Ghana visa.   

• Bus and walk to Children’s Day School. It's May and still cold!

• Help four 6th grade small groups improve their compositions for their concert tomorrow.

• Set all the instruments in place for the concert today— correct mallets on each one, tune 15 ukeleles and three guitars, set chairs, etc.

• Help direct fifty 5^th graders performing my piece Humpty Dump, coming speech, song, Steppin’ Body Percussion, blues solos on piano, guitar and marimba, movement and dramatic vignettes. Accompany 25 of them performing and singing Sweet Sue, the jazz standard I taught them and arranged. 

• Run out of the concert to meet the cab that was promised precisely at 2:45 and wasn’t there and called the cab company who (of course!) only gave me 5 voice mail options, not one of which was “Where the hell is the cab?” Checked Uber as a back-up, but wouldn’t arrive until 3:30 and I had to be on time for my 3:00 pm class at SF State 15 minutes away. Cab miraculously shows up and we both yell at each other for a while before realizing that the computer screwed up (of course). Get to my class at 3:07.

• Teach my two-hour Jazz History class to seniors (ie. people my age or even younger!) and get to spend two glorious(and heart-wrenching) hours with Billie Holiday. Cried in front of the class reading one of her quotes.

• Walk home the 6 miles to my house to make dinner. (Grilled cheese, corn and salad.)

• Meet my co-teacher at Yancey’s Bar in my hood to watch the Warrior’s beat the Lakers and keep hope alive that they might make it to the next round of the playoffs. 

• Go home to watch the final of 24 Episodes of Broadchurch, a series we had watched at the beginning of the pandemic and blissfully forgot the details of the plot. The delightful relationship between D.C. Hardy and “Miller!”, the tightly wound and expertly unspooled mystery plot that was a through line through three Seasons, the depravity of men’s sexuality (aargh!), the depth of humanity in people struggling with grief, violation, evil, confusion— truly, a masterpiece and I’ll miss it.

• Check my steps for the day (7.6 miles) and get into bed to read The Library Book by Susan Orlean. Learn that public libraries outnumber McDonalds (over 17,000 libraries in the U.S.)  and are used by over 300 million Americans.

• Go to sleep.

Well, wasn’t that an interesting day!