Bookends

Here’s the truth. If Harvard University offered me an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Music Education, I wouldn’t refuse it. If Wynton Marsalis asked me to head his Lincoln Center Jazz Education for kids program, I’d consider moving to New York. If the Secret Song film won an Oscar for Best Documentary, I’d buy my plane ticked for L.A. to attend the ceremonies. And if my ABC’’s of Education book made the New York Times bestseller list, I’d be mightily pleased. But as my 3-year old student Bella said when I tried to describe to the preschool how to sing a tricky song, “Doug, that ain’t gonna happen.”

 

What did happen and moved me so deeply was singing the old jazz standards at the Jewish Home for the Aged yesterday and noticing a new resident mouthing the words with a look on her face that announced, “Thank you for bringing me home.” Again, the Harvard Degree would be a dopamime rush of public acknowledgment about what I think is important, but that hour spent with this woman and all the others is the real deal, the actual living in the supreme importance of music’s power to articulate the full range of our joy and sorrow, our love requited and unrequited, our power, our spirit, our soul.

 

I carry inside me another image of a 4-year-old in Preschool Singing, eyes shut, body swaying, singing out with her whole being “Free at last, free at last…” with such joy and abandonment. She had no idea of the song’s history or what freedom means and yet, she felt the song’s power enter her and knew in her bones that something important was taking place. The details would come later—for now just the song spoke for itself.

 

So here are the bookends of a life lived with hope and promise, disappointment and forgiveness, possibility and wisdom. A four-year- old singing herself forward into her life to come and a 94- year- old singing back to her life that has been. Music by our side at the beginning, music by our side at the end. No trophy on the mantelpiece can top that.