My Daughter's Day

Somehow I missed National Daughter’s Day on Facebook, so I lost the opportunity to publicly admire my two daughters. And now today is my oldest daughter Kerala’s birthday. 44 years ago, my wife and I walked around our neighborhood in a little heat wave just like today, encouraging her to make her entrance. Which she eventually did, in our house accompanied by two midwives, my sister, the first-grade teacher at our school. As anyone who has birthed or attended a birth knows, it is an extraordinary experience to bring forth and/or witness new life come into being. I remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday. 

 

From the first minute to here and now, she has lived up to the miracle of a human incarnation, birthed two children herself and been fully present in the grand human comedy and tragedy, always leaning toward beauty, truth, justice, humor and an eloquent mind capable of putting much of it in words. Even as she faces her first birthday of the last 18 years or so without her husband by her side, she looks it all in the eye and says, “Bring it on. I’m here, I’m strong and I’m ready.” 

 

Of course, she’s not alone in her struggles and sitting at a bus stop bench in Rochester with my newly purchased $.99 birthday card from Walgreens, I copied over Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey” to remind her of the glory of fully owning one’s own life. (Look up the poem if you’re intrigued). It was a fitting afterthought to that workshop celebrating rhymes and poetry, the way that poetry not only tickles us with its musical alliterations and consonances and assonances and rhymes and rhythms but can deeply massage the hurting spots with its felt message. Speak the words that give clarity and definition to all our nebulous feelings swirling around so we can feel them more deeply and in so doing, soak in both the sorrow and joy, the grief and the beauty. That’s what each new baby signs up for when they take that first breath of air, what so many adults forget and just settle for getting through. 

 

As for me, I’m back home with six weeks without travel ahead. Packing away the trip, catching up on business and haircuts and such, making new lists to give some shape and definition to the weeks ahead. Today I re-visited my old friend Bach and decided to finally greet another I’ve neglected my whole life, but now want to give him a try. So I sight-read through Brahms’ Intermezzo, Opus 18 and took my first tentative steps into a new language, a new sonic territory, a new emotional landscape. Not easy, for sure, but I’m intrigued. 

 

So one more happy birthday to Kerala and a fond farewell to September, a month that has been so kind to me, so delightful, so meaningful in myriad ways. Let us see what October has in store. 

 

Pu-er Orff Schulwerk

This workshop in Rochester was a bit unusual as they booked me four years ago! I remember at the time thinking, “Really? 2024?!!” And then it came. Not something to be crossing off each day—some 1, 456 of them, more or less— like an advent calendar. But having finally arrived, it was a meaningful 4 ½ hours, made especially pleasurable by getting to dig into English rhymes and poetry. 

 

I started by reciting my favorite Yeats poem (The Son of Wandering Angus), all holding hands in a circle. Following my dictum of teaching classes with an “enticing beginning,” that certainly caught everyone’s attention. On we went to bring the music of language alive in ways neither English classes nor music classes usually do. It was a field day of rhythm and rhyme and alliteration and consonance and assonance and vivid imagery and both whimsical and profound meaning, with a bit of onomatopoeia thrown into the mix. There was syllabic awareness and homonyms and limerick poetic form and nursery rhymes. There were nonsense words poems, an old Latin text, a short personal story told in Spanish that non-Spanish speakers had to translate (and they did!), storytelling as a strategy to teach music on the Orff instruments.

 

Most delightful of all and fresh for me in recent workshop work was an activity where people spelled words in small groups using their whole bodies and then moved the words to confirm their meaning— words like grow, melt, turn, jump, hug, eat, sleep, exit, hello, park (the car). A great problem-solving activity with both aesthetic and hilarious results. 

 

Stitching it all together were my bold and unequivocal pronouncements about what I think teachers are meant to do. Things like watch the children to learn everything they need to know about what is effective, fun, musical and makes children happy, all of which gets lost in our off-task adult mania of testing, the next greatest thing and the perfect lesson. Asking what else can we do with this or how else can we do this to keep things fresh and vibrant and engaging and imaginative. Advising people to refuse the Kool-Aid about what they can or can’t say, what material they can or can’t do, whether the conversation-stopping mandate comes from either the left or the right. 

 

In short, firmly but gently, seriously but with a smile, reminding people about the things that keep getting left out of the conversations about teaching and education. I feel the room response as a combination of vigorous head-nodding, thought-provoking rumination, relief that someone is speaking hidden feelings or mild shell shock that I dare to say what I do. But the fact that we’ve all had the most marvelous time making great music and creating great movement, with me encouraging and affirming and celebrating them each step of the way makes it easier to hear and consider. 

 

My work is a strong cup of Pu-er tea that I know is not to everyone’s taste, especially when they think they came for Diet Coke. But like that gourmet Chinese tea, these ideas, insights and convictions were hand-picked and sun-dried, fermented and oxidized over a long time to give both exquisite flavor and tonic health benefits. As always, grateful for the opportunity to serve the drink. 

Now for an early bedtime and a 5:30 awakening to return home. 

Time's Jewel

“…O fearful meditation! where, alack,

Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

   O, none, unless this miracle have might,

   That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

-       Sonnet 65: William Shakespeare

 

Replace “black ink” with “giving Orff workshops” and these lines ring truer than true for me. It is astounding that it is a mere seven days between giving a workshop in Washington DC and about to give another here in Rochester, New York. It feels like seven weeks—or even months. The richness of each day doing the various things that help my love to shine bright indeed have forestalled time’s swift foot rushing through the days and slowed everything down. I find that travel in general can often do that but combine travel with teaching and it’s a good way to “blunt the lion’s paw” of mortality (another Shakespeare metaphor from Sonnet 19). 

 

Today’s workshop is on rhymes, poetry, literacy and music education Orff Schulwerk-style. While walking around downtown Rochester, I pulled up some of my memorized poems to consider bringing into the workshop, Sonnet 65 amongst them. I’m finding myself super-excited about the theme and realized that it’s because it’s one that I have to put to the side when teaching abroad, as I did recently in China. Works much better in the U.S., Canada, Australia or the British Isles (where I haven’t taught in quite a while) and opens up whole rooms in the house of music that I can’t visit in the same way in Hong Kong or Brazil or Spain. I’ve done a couple of 5-day courses on this in Toronto and loved getting to dig deeper into this theme, including giving homework to the students to come back with a memorized poem or two to share with the group.

 

In the midst of the conversation about weaning ourselves from phone addiction, few people talk about the strategy of memorizing poems. Just as re-training your body to crave and genuinely enjoy a good carrot or apple as much as (or more than) a bag of chips or cookies is an excellent diet plan, so can walking around working on memorizing a poem instead of looking at your phone both short-circuit the addiction and lift you up to a higher plane of consciousness. With the added benefit of the poem being instantly available to be your companion and to share with others. And back to time, listen to how a poem well-recited changes the charge in the air and brings all present into a different time zone. Like a profound piece of music, it strums our inside strings and gets our soulful nerve pathways humming with a tonic, healing vibration. 

 

Try it! 

Tiny Delights

I thought the above was the title of a charming book by Ross Gay but turns out it’s a Chinese Dim Sum cookbook. Ross Gay’s book is called “The Book of Delights” but in either case, both well express the pleasure of small moments when the world offers its tasty charm. 

 

Today’s came from the 1^st through 3^rd graders at the Crane School in Rochester, NY. A few samples: 

 

• Sincere friendly hellos from kids passing me in the hall. 

 

• A boy who shook my hand and said he had seen my movie and thought I was a nice person.

 

• A girl who stood up in the middle of the group of kids to dance while we were singing. These wonderful teachers understood that though it seemed a bit disruptive, she needed to do it and indeed, is the response every music teacher would hope for. So they simply moved her off to the side where she kept on dancing. And later she corrected me when I made a mistake in a verse to one song. Of course, I thanked her.  

 

• A girl who asked me as the end if I would see them again and when I said I didn’t think so, stuck out her lower lip in pouty sadness. 

 

• Another girl who found a scrap of paper and asked for my autograph. 

• Many kids who refused my goodbye high five and hugged me instead. 

 

• 95 happy kids singing eight of the 150 songs I could have sang with them. 

 

Add this to the normally shy 4-year old who asked me at the end of my D.C. workshop if she could play Miss Mary Mack with me and came with her parents for the lunch afterwards and hugged me spontaneously many times. 

 

• Rick Layton’s dog Bella who from the moment we met seemed excited to see me and kept clamoring for my attention, something Rick thought was a little unusual. 

 

Without any effort on my part—except a lifetime of keeping my own inner child alive— young kids (and one dog) somehow feel connected to some vibe that radiates out to them and we’re immediately old friends. Like my Pokemon card friend from Macau (remember him?), it’s an ongoing bestowal of the Honorary Doctorates I treasure the most. 

Tomorrow will be the adults who will perhaps unleash their own inner child, but many first having to break through their notions of adulthood seared into their brain. Even when they feel the unbridled joy of spontaneous play, some part of them still distrusts that and wonders, “But what about the curriculum?!”

 

The Odyssey Revisited

Unlike Odysseus going from one disaster to another, the Siren song I followed in the next day of this East Coast Odyssey didn’t lure me to crash on the rocks but led me to the doorstep of one of my favorite Orff teachers, Ms. Judith Thomas. Fourteen years my elder, she is of the same generation as my teacher Avon Gillespie and in fact, it was Avon who brought us together in Dallas when I taught my first Level I in 1986. Every time we’ve met in the last twenty years, she delights in telling the story of my asking her when she observed a class I taught in that course how she liked it and was met with a grand dramatic pause. Followed by “Get thee to Salzburg.” Meaning, “You have more work to do, young man.”

 

Four years later, I took her advice, not as a student, but as a teacher in the International Symposium and the Orff Institute Summer Course. My path was more learning on the job than more formal study and it suited me well. She witnessed much of that path as we presented at various Conferences at the same time and continued to offer both critique and praise. Two days from now will be her 87^th birthday, so she’s mostly stepped out of the ring, but still, I delighted in having time to talk with her about our mutual passion. Filling in gaps in our separate histories, telling delightful stories about the many people we knew and know in common, continuing the ongoing discussion of this work is and what it yet might be. 

 

Though our styles are different, I’ve always admired her work greatly. Her sharp sharp intellect, boundless imagination, delightful sense of humor, clever and poetic way with words, artistic skills, especially with cartoons, unrelenting curiosity, care for children and more make her the one-of-a-kind teacher she is. She often wrote to me about various piano concerts she gives, but I never actually sat down and listened to her play. 

 

So here in her home in upper New York State, where I had never been before, I had the chance to sit next to her on the piano bench and butcher some Brahms duets. Brahms has always been a yawning gap in my playing and the few times I’ve tried, the notes just didn’t seem to fit my fingers’ preferred pathways. Here was a duet I had never heard and in B major and it was not a happy combination. Then we tried some piano reductions of some of Orff’s Carmina Burana and here we both struggled with mastering the rhythms that had always sounded simple enough but in fact, were quite complex. Some 10 times, we tried to end on the same final chord at the same time and failed each time. But had so much fun trying! 

 

Finally I suggested we each play separately and she played a gorgeous Brahms Intermezzo with great feeling and mastery, followed by a tasteful version of Polka Dots and Moonbeams. I followed with the aria to the Goldberg Variations and version of Tea for Two and we both ended being members of a Mutual Admiration Society. 

 

Between the music, the talk, a phone call to our mutual friend Mary Shamrock (Judith’s age and also an Avon connection), a delicious eggplant parmesan meal, it just couldn’t have been better. Some more similar connections the next morning and off I went for my final 4 hour drive to return my rental car at the Rochester Airport.

 

Now settled in my Rochester Hotel, preparing for three guests classes tomorrow morning for kids from 1^st to 3^rd grade and then the music teacher Orff Workshop on Saturday. None of this makes for grand drama a la Homer’s version. The blessing of going from one delight to another might not make an interesting story to read, but does make for a lovely story to live. My reunion with Penelope doesn’t need a 20-year exile, but happens every morning and I’m spared from having to massacre the suitors taking over the house. 

I’ll take it. 

My Shaggy Dog Story

 

For all this long-time feud I’ve had with electronic culture taking over humanistic culture, I’ve been quite grateful for Siri and Google maps on this trip. There is some pleasure in figuring out routes on paper maps and following directions a friend has given you, but also quite relaxing to just let Google maps take you away. I’m quite content to trust it and be wholly obedient, doing whatever it tells me. 

 

I arrived late afternoon at the Carriage House near the Pingry School, my alma mater where I was to talk the next day. Once settled in, I set off in search of some dinner and decided to just go down one road and see what I could find. Some three miles away, I found a lovely little pizza place and that was enough. After dinner, I hoped to find a banana and a little milk for the granola I had with me for tomorrow’s breakfast. Set off down another road and found a Quick Mart which had the milk, but not a piece of fruit to be seen. The clerk pointed me down a road toward a place that might have it and off I went for about three miles before I figured it might have been the wrong road.

 

So back to the Quick Mart and down another road and things weren’t looking promising until a big shopping center loomed up. I took a left turn that I thought would bring me to the parking lot, but instead dumped me on a highway without a nearby exit in sight. All of this is the darkness of night without a moon and not the best driving conditions for an old guy.

 

So I leaned on Siri to direct me back to Pingry and she announced, “Proceed for 5 miles and then take this exit.” Aargh! Nothing to do but follow. But when I finally arrived there and got off that exit, she said, “Proceed on this road for 39 miles." WTF??!!!!!

 

Luckily, I remember that there is another Pingry Campus in Short Hills and that was probably where she was taking me. “Siri, Siri, Pingry School, MARTINSVILLE!!!!” I shouted and said, “That will add another 45 minutes.” 

What?!!! Then figured out that she had combined the two trips and took that as a stop on the way. The good news was that as she directed me down some back roads, I stumbled on a wonderful market and was able to get the banana after all. I believe I can say that I have never worked so hard to buy a banana.

 

So that’s my shaggy dog story.

 

PS After writing that last sentence, I wondered, “What exactly does a shaggy dog story mean?” and got this answer from Wiki:

 

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. 

 

Yep. This qualifies!

  

Rolling Along

 

“ Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along…”

 

And so I passed the night in Delaware. It now officially qualifies as a state I’ve visited. Drove a few more miles down the road to where the beaches are and ate a hefty omelet with impressive hash browns sitting outside a block from the beach. Then walked to the beach, rolled up my pants and let the waters of the Atlantic Ocean wash over my feet. A little baptismal blessing from the first ocean I ever set foot in as a child. 

 

At breakfast, the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” sounded over the speakers and it well described the feeling of the breakfast place in this seaside town. Then Bob Dylan came on:

 

“How does it feel? To be on your own? With no direction home? Like a complete unknown? Like a Rolling Stone.”

 

And my answer: “GREAT!!” Loving this road trip and the balance between the solitude in the car and walking the beach and the social pleasure of visiting friends and the sense of being useful and exercising my passion for teaching. 

Just merrily rolling along, from one delight to another. 

 

Now in a lovely Carriage House in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, looking out over tree-lined fields and leaves with a hint of color. Finding a place to eat and after dinner, preparing and polishing my talk I'll give at my old high school tomorrow morning. Stay tuned. 

 

The Call of the Open Road

 

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

 

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road…

-       Walt Whitman

-        

Driving through and around Washington DC, lush green grass and trees on both sides of the road, with a tinge of Autumn color on its way, an aging body at the wheel with an 17-year-old heart, the road before me feeling like the world before me with all its alluring promise, I touched on feelings somewhat buried in my busy, working, e-mail writing, phone-checking life. Old welcome friends reminding me of what was and still might be.

 

Maybe it’s being back East, the place where I actually came of age at 17 years old. Back to the time and place when I considered the world needed some saving, but also was inviting some savoring. The full weight of the task ahead was just a sliver of a guess and graced me with a lightness that would later grow heavier. At 17 years old, I felt that Thoreauvian delight wandering around the woods in Watchung Reservation and later, Glen Helen next to my college. I felt another kind of pleasure answering Whitman’s call of the open road, armed with a scruffy army backpack and my thumb. I certainly savored the various soundtracks both accompanying life’s beckoning invitations, those troubadours of the late 60’s and early 70’s singing it all alive. Now I can hear them again on Spotify with a Bluetooth phone connection instead of the radio or an 8-track player in the car. 

 

Back then, all was promise and possibility. Now the lines on my face and sags of the flesh are imprinted with so many lived stories of how it all actually turned out. Two ends of the same journey of saving and savoring and both with their own particular delights. Still gratefully healthy and free, much less of the world before me, much more of it behind me, but also when fully in the moment now, it doesn’t matter. Certainly less whimpering and complaining and querulous criticisms— well, plenty of the latter, but less attachment to them. Still vulnerable to mood shifts when good fortune passes me by, but stronger conviction that I am my own good fortune and that’s the only thing I can control. I can’t let the Trump sign I saw at the Delaware border bring me down, nor should I count on the Harris-Walz landslide prediction I saw online be the thing that lifts me up. (Though both are understandably of concern!)

 

Today I get back in my blue Kia and head toward my old high school to give a talk tomorrow, another bringing together of my 17-year-old self with this 73-year-old guy. It is a marvelous world. Hail to retirement!

A Gathering of the Tribes

What a rich time these past two days have been! Out to breakfast with my host Tom Pierre in a Silver Spring neighborhood rich with black-owned, black-run, black-staffed, black-attended restaurants and stores and how refreshing it all was! Such warmth and humor and infectious social energy that makes me feel right at home even if my skin color suggests otherwise. 

 

Then to the hotel room to attend an online celebration of 100 years of Orff Schulwerk. The Guntherschule in Munich was where it all began in 1924 and there were some 95 people attending a historical presentation of photos, recordings and stories. I knew almost every one of those 95 folks tuning in from Thailand, Hong Kong, Iran, Greece, Germany, Czech Republic, Canada, the U.S. and more. A different kind of diverse tribal gathering and rich in a different way. 

Then back to the black community as Tom dropped me off at The African American Museum of History and Culture. Again, so many micro-connections with the packed house of black museum-goers—nods, smiles, greetings— and so many invisible connections with the athletes, musicians, social justice crusaders filling the walls and screens of this remarkable museum, re-showing footage that I had seen the first time growing up—Cassius Clay becoming Mohammed Ali, Willie Mays, Bill Russell, the Harlem Globetrotters, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin and Malcolm, Tommy Smith’s and John Carlos’ raised fist at the 1968 Olympics and so much more. A few new insights— folks like Paul Robeson and Jessie Owens having their moments of being adored and revered and then thrown out on the garbage heap of systemic racism’s back yard. A picture of Bobby McFerrin’s Dad as the first black male opera singer to sing at the Met. And so on. 

 

That "so on" included three more floors below ground level, but I was overwhelmed and just had to save it for another day. So I grabbed an Uber to take me to National Airport to pick up my rental car and the serendipitous themes continued—the driver was from Ghana! He was impressed I guess which ethnic group he belonged to based on where he was from specifically—Accra and the Ga people—and we had a delightful conversation. In your face, driverless cars!! I don't know what it is that connects me to black culture, but no need to analyze. It just is. 

 

Rental car in hand, I went on to Annapolis to visit my old colleague/ friend Rick Layton and his wife (also an Orff colleague) Jacqui Shrader. Rick and I were brought together in 1986 by our mutual teacher Avon Gillespie and taught in the same course for some 34 years, even longer meeting every year at Conferences. A lot of delightful history between us and the three of us enjoyed sharing some of the old stories, telling some new ones about our Orff buddies, enjoying Jacqui’s delicious chicken enchiladas and bonding (me) with their dog Bella. A little lifetime spent in the home tribe of our chosen work and passion. 

 

That was quite a day, feeling like four different little lifetimes in a 15 hour span.

 

And the next, today, continued the same. Off the next morning to Alexandria where I met Inga, a German-born more recent acquaintance who is a lone crusader trying to bring the gifts of Orff into her Montessori world. She took my online Jazz Course several years back, invited me to present at a Montessori Conference in Florida and then came to Orff Afrique in Ghana. Every time I sit down and talk with her, I learn something else astonishing. She used to be an accomplished athlete (I believe running) in Germany, also a dancer, she met Duke Ellington on a plane and visited him at his home in New York and was a lifelong friend of Ginger Rogers! All these astonishing facts came out in conversations as little matter-of-fact anecdotes! So while savoring a muesli breakfast with intriguing side drinks at Zen Press Juice in Old Town, we had yet another stimulating conversation (no new revelations). 

 

Next I drove 20 minutes down the road to Falls Church, Virginia to have lunch with my cousin Grace and her husband Marty, both of whom I hadn’t seen in 12 years. Their son Daniel, who I knew as a baby, later went to his wedding and now he’s 52, came as well for a delicious Japanese meal and we caught up, climbing up and down the family trees and swinging from the branches. Grace, Marty and I walked back to their house via a lovely wooded pathway and looked through some of the old scrapbooks. It was an important re-connection and yet another tribe of homecoming, this one from blood and shared memories from over 70 years. 

 

Back in the car and on my way to Rehobeth Beach, Delaware, where I booked a hotel for the practical reason of needing to be a bit closer to my next stop of New Jersey and the silly reason of wanting to claim that I had spent time in Delaware, a place I had only driven through and so couldn’t count it as a state I actually visited. Now I can and it’s number 48. This January, I’ll hit 49 when I teach a workshop in Little Rock, Arkansas and I was supposed to teach in Mississippi last July, but the course was cancelled. If they invite me back to try again and the numbers are good, I’ll have hit all 50. Whoop-de-doo.

 

I opted for cheap over charm, so I’m in the Rodeway Suites on Strip Mall, Anywhere, USA, about 10 minutes from the actual beach which I’ll visit tomorrow. Set out to look for food and found a little Falafel place that looked more homey then the chains in the mall and in fact, was both cheap ($9.99 for falafel) and delicious. So both the cuisine adventures—from Soul Food to Mexican to New Age Zen Juice to Japanese to Middle Eastern— and the weaving together of my various tribes continues and it is all so happy. Whoever thought (or thinks) it’s a good idea to shut down diversity?!!! That we should claim one identity only? 

 

And so yet another day that felt like a lifetime and such a blessing to connect and re-connect with the marvelous people I’ve been privileged to meet. Let us see what tomorrow brings. 

Meant to Be

It was not an auspicious beginning to my workshop. No dongles worked with my computer to show the short Powerpoint I had created and there was not enough room on my thumbdrive to load it onto another computer. I had planned various pieces to be played on Orff instruments, but people failed to bring enough—for 50 people, there were only about five. I had various movement and line dance activities planned and one of the participants was in a wheelchair. What to do?

 

No choice but to begin. My work is rarely dependent upon Powerpoint, so I could let that go. One of the hosts ran to her school to get more instruments and the lovely man in the wheelchair figured out, as I suspected he would, how to accommodate himself to the activities. Once I stood in that sacred circle holding hands, I returned to my heavenly home and off we went. 

 

The President of this Orff Chapter in Washington DC is a black man and my friend Tom Pierre. We have been together in Orff courses I’ve taught in Ghana, New Orleans, Spain, San Francisco, Carmel Valley and shared various Conferences in the U.S. where he taught and I, so happily, was his student. Thanks to him, there were various black music teachers on the Chapter Board and some 15 in the workshop, unusual (sadly) for the American Orff culture. 

He and a colleague Cierra who presented a short opening experience read various statements about the African view of education as beginning in the body, heart and Soul. She offered a quote to the effect that “we cannot continue to be consumers/ beneficiaries of African-American music without understandings its history and origins.” Exactly the point of my Jazz, Joy & Justice  book and exactly the way I taught the body percussion Juba in the workshop. We were wholly aligned in our vision to bring cultural awareness and social justice issues into Orff training where they have rarely been, them from the inside and me as an ally from the outside. This was not business as usual and I was thrilled. 

 

And then there were all the series of small and big serendipitous events that suggested invisible hands guiding and applauding us all. The black man at the host school who welcomed us was named Avon, the name of my first and most important Orff mentor, also a black man. I had never met anyone with the same name and he said that he also had never heard of anyone else with that name. 

 

I always name my three 8^th grade students who taught me the Steppin’ patterns I still share. Back when they taught me some 15 years ago, I invited them to teach at a workshop and paid them accordingly. Opening Facebook that morning, I found that it was the birthday of one of them, Tanisha Wills! I wished her Happy Birthday and thanked her again, letting her know that her gift to me still echoed on. (While feeling a little sheepish that I hadn’t learned some 50 more patterns! The four she and Jasmine Gittens and Autumn Green taught me are just so dynamic and learnable  though!)

 

I decided to end the workshop in this election year by reciting by memory Langston Hughes’ extraordinary poem Let America Be America Again.  All sat with closed eyes to let the images and histories and truths uttered ignite their imagination, intrigue their mind, stir their heart. At the end, with crossed arms and hands joined, we sang America the Beautiful and the day was done.

 

But not quite. The greatest serendipitous event was soon to come. Tom had chosen an intriguing restaurant to gather with the board for lunch. It’s called Busboys and Poets and is both a restaurant and a bookstore. While eating lunch, I found out that the name came from a busboy many years back at this site who dropped some of his poems in front of poet named Vachel Lindsay. Suitably impressed, Lindsay helped him launch his career as a poet. 

 

That busboy? LANGSTON HUGHES!!! (Keep in mind that Tom had no idea I was going to recite that poem. It appeared a random choice, but I think other forces were at work). On the walls were photos and drawing of the Peacemakers and on the bookshelves were all the books the far Right is trying to ban. But most stunning was walking into another room and there was a mural in which the top portion had the opening stanza to the poem I had just shared! "Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be…" I got the people from my table to walk into the room and all stood slightly stunned. One commented, “I guess this day was meant to be.”

 

Indeed it was. 

 

The Way of the World

In a recent interview with a fellow Orff teacher, I was asked this intriguing question about AOSA (American Orff Schulwerk Association), the national organization to which we both belong.

 

What has AOSA meant to you as an educator and a person?

 

This interview will soon be made public to AOSA members, so I wondered if I should temper my response. Yet in my new incarnation as an elder, I mostly stop worrying about being politic for fear I might offend someone or close doors to professional opportunities and simply tell the truth as I feel it. So my honest answer was:

 

Most importantly, it provided a home for all this to happen—the Level trainings, the workshops, the annual the Conferences, the Orff Echo magazine. None of this life of getting trained and training teachers could have happened without it. It’s a home with a family feeling—outsiders always comment how friendly and open everyone is, how inclusive the act of music-making and dance is. Someone you might admire from a distance, someone you dislike, someone with a dubious political hat on, could turn out to be your partner in the evening folk dance or in your small group making up a body percussion piece in the workshop. Music doesn’t solve human conflict but puts in a larger perspective and can help heal it in small doses. That’s what a healthy home with a family feeling can offer.

 

Yet it’s also a home with a family’s dysfunction. At different times and in different ways, I’ve at once felt like the ignored or misunderstood kid, the rebellious teenager, the rejected job applicant, the betrayed husband, the beloved father, the weird uncle, the respected grandfather, the in-law and the outlaw. Over a beer, what stories I could tell! And I suspect that all my colleagues in AOSA have their own such stories to tell. It’s just the way of the world whenever and wherever  human beings gather. 

 

But in the end, AOSA is the home in the way that Robert Frost says it in his poem The Death of the Hired Man: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’

 

I could have written the same about The San Francisco School where I worked for 45 years, about the Men’s Group I’ve been in for 34 years, about my own family in its various incarnations starting 73 years ago. Two things are comforting and redeeming:

 

1)   I am not alone. This is a universal experience in families, workplaces, organizations and not my personal problem. Gather a random group of people together and go through that list again (misunderstood kid, rebellious teenager, etc.) and let the stories pour out! Again, it’s simply the way of the world.

 

2)   If the family/ organization/ community is authentic, has a heart, aims for belonging and connection and mutual celebration of life’s joys and sorrows, all the disappointment and betrayal can—and will— be forgiven. The mantra of “We’re in this together” applies to all of it. The fall from grace, the rising to our best selves, the muck and the mountaintop. 

 

That’s when genuine gratitude swallows any bitterness. Thanks to AOSA, The San Francisco School, the Men’s Group and my beautiful family, for all of it.