Memorial Day

I have a bone to pick with Baba Ram Dass. As a young hippie, I swallowed his “Be Here Now” mantra whole and looked down on taking photos to record or document events. Why try to stop the flowing stream of life? Just float down the river and “be here now.”

 

What a jerk I was! The result is that I have so few photos from various years in my life that I would treasure now. Of course, it didn’t help that you actually had to have a camera and make sure you took it with you and bought film and got it developed and such. I might have had one my Dad passed on, but certainly never used it during my college years. 

 

Today is the 24^th Anniversary of the death of my Orff teacher, Avon Gillespie. How I would have loved to have shots from that first course I took with him in the Spring of 1973 at Antioch College! Or a whole class group photo! Likewise, I only have three or four poor-resolution photos from the three summers I took the Level Trainings with him, two photos from the seven National Conferences we attended together between 1976 and 1988, no photos of the two Level Training Course I taught with him at North Texas State in 1986 and 1988 and even stayed at his house during that time. What was I thinking?

 

I do have some photos that came my way through other sources and most importantly an entire 20 minute video of my Level III Orff Course with Avon (and others) in 1985. Both of those have made it into my film The Secret Song and each of the seven times I’ve seen that film, I get goosebumps when they appear and my eyes start watering. 

 

So yes, Ram Dass, the stream of Avon’s presence in my memory is still flowing despite the lack of captured images. But still, it would have been nice. 

 

(And now we’re at the opposite spectrum of no cameras with our 24/7 documentation on the cell phone. The problem now is so many photos that it’s a Herculean task to find the few that are actually meaningful. But that’s another topic.)

 

Serendipitous that this year the date of his passing fell on Memorial Day, so this my testimony to my fallen comrade who died in service to (but not because of) the war against children finding their joy and genius through the arts. Avon, you are not forgotten.