Happy Belated Jerome Kern Day

My 96-year old friend, Ben Lubitz, still plays piano most days at the Jewish Home, but not as much as before. His age is finally catching up with him. When I first arrived three and a half years ago and starting playing “his” piano, I was a bit nervous about stepping on his toes. He had a well-deserved reputation at the “house pianist” and I certainly didn’t want to steal his thunder. But perhaps because our styles are quite distinct and we genuinely appreciated each other’s playing, he soon welcomed me and told me many times that he loved my playing, a compliment that meant the world to me—and still does. Imagine how touched I felt when he recently began giving me gifts of some of this old piano books—one of Big Band songs, another of Jerome Kern songs.

I particularly appreciated the latter, as Jerome Kern has a special place in my heart. One of the elders and founding members of American musical theater music, he is well-respected amongst the songwriters and jazz musicians today still enjoy working their way through such classics as All the Things You Are, The Way You Look Tonight, The Song Is You, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and a host of other great tunes. My special affection comes from a book of his songs for organ that I played as a child. (I still have the book with the gold stars, penciled comments from my teacher Mrs. Lutz and those dates that sound further and further away—4/27/ ’59!!!) Without the slightest idea of how these songs would re-surface in my jazz playing so many years later, I grew to love the melodies and still today, they fall most easily under my fingers and sing most naturally in my ear. I particularly admire his intriguing bridges connecting the opening and closing A sections, never clichéd and often with an intriguing harmonic passage that find its way home through the back door.

I looked through Ben’s book and found some intriguing songs I didn’t know—How’d You Like to Spoon with Me?, Cleopatterer, Ka-lu-a, She Didn’t Say Yes, You Couldn’t Be Cuter. It was fascinating to read some details of his move from Vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood, the precise progression I’m investigating with my 8^th grade Jazz History class. I discovered he went to high school in Newark, New Jersey, two towns away from my own hometown of Roselle. He worked as a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley and made his way up through the ranks, with the usual breaks that we read retrospectively in biographies that seem pre-destined to occur (including being scheduled to take a trip on the ill-fated Lusitania and changing his mind just before boarding!). Some of his life story is told in a movie titled “Till the Clouds Roll By,” a good view on a rainy night.

At the end of the book is a 1985 letter by Ronald Reagan celebrating Kern’s centenary and proclaiming January 27^th “Jerome Kern Day.” I’ve never seen that on any calendars, but will make a note to celebrate it next year. Meanwhile, "Happy Belated Jerome Kern Day" to all! (Is there a similar day for George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin? And what about Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, etc.? If we paid attention to our own national heroes, every day would be a holiday!)

Like many of his fellow songwriters (Cole Porter excepted), he teamed with lyricists, most notably Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein. The latter wrote a moving eulogy included in the book in which he described Kern thus:

“He was alert and alive. He ‘bounced.’ He stimulated everyone. He annoyed some, never bored anyone at anytime. There was a sharp edge to everything he thought or said.” My kind of guy!

I went on to read about how and when he died. Cerebral thrombosis. November 11, 1945. And then the next sentence: “He was sixty-years old.” My age.

I haven’t taken to reading obituaries in the daily paper, but that sentence hit me over the head. And what have I done lately?

The Urban Farmer

Who fed the chickens? “I did. “

Who stacked the hay? “I did.”

Who milked the cow? “I did.”

On this fine day.

—Children’s song by Ella Jenkins

In the shift to urban culture, it has been a long time since most of us lived on a farm. In rural Ohio where I went to college, I used to bike through the farmlands and imagine some ideal pastoral existence. At least until some friend point out that I’d be working my butt off, getting up way too early in the morning to milk cows, feed chickens and stack hay, dealing with pigshit, bugs and deer in the garden, coyotes in the hen house, the loud roar of tractors, the whims of the weather, a surplus of zucchini and so on. Living on a farm wasn’t exactly Thoreau leisurely bonding with nature around Walden Pond— more relentless work and responsibility tending to all the different demands of farm life, with no vacation in sight.

But in some ways, not too different from my life in the big city. Getting up by alarm to go to school, feed the little chickens so they will offer the fertile eggs of the future, organizing six different curriculums like neatly-stacked bales of hay, coaxing the milk of spiritual nutrition from piano keys and xylophone bars. And if I’ve chosen my work well, planted the garden that suits my appetite, raised the crops that will help feed others, considered carefully where to put fences around too-many possibilities and left some land alone, why, then every day is indeed a fine day.

The song goes on as an exercise in personal pronouns. Next verse, sense of self and other—“you did.” Then gender identification—“he did,” “she did.” Sense of identity with one group as distinct from another—“they did.” And finally the grand climax of inclusiveness— “we did.” And if you are so fortunate as to be in a community where everyone has consciously chosen and crafted their farm, then the excitement is contagious and the love palpable, the world refreshed by whole groups of people working side-by-side tending with tenderness and care the crops they grow, inch by inch, row by row. Husbanding the animals they have chosen relationship with in exchange for eggs, milk, cheese, meat and bagpipe skins. Planting the fruit trees in good faith that nature's bounty will provide.

And yes, there are days when we curse the crow of the rooster, times when crops fail through no fault of our own, seasons with storms that sweep through and topple in an instant our carefully crafted work. But if we are properly humbled and grateful and accept our station in the grand scheme of things, these too can count as a fine day.

So whether on an actual farm or living in the city working in an office, most of the daily round is farmwork responding to the constant demands of raising the things we have chosen, the things that need our attention and the things we need to feed us. Having sprinkled the grain of these black-and white letters in the henhouse of my blog, I’m off to re-stack my CD’s. A day in the life of the urban farmer awaits.

Plum Blossoms, Musical Men, Canaries and More Bent Sticks

I’m loving teaching at school, but let’s face it, it really cuts into my day. Started four different blogs, but can’t seem to finish them— these kids keep showing up in my class and demanding attention. Imagine! So this entry will be potpourri of ideas worthy of development—or not.

• The Dearest Freshness

The plums came early this year. Everywhere the city is sprinkled with bursts of pink blossom announcing the first stirrings of Spring. Because Winter is never exactly harsh in San Francisco, the contrast is not as palpable as say, Maine. But still our eyes are refreshed by the beauty and our ancient connections with nature’s renewal are stirred afresh. If we’re low in our emotional temperature, feeling despondent or isolated or less than we wished to be, each plum tree is an invitation to rekindle our sense of wonder and participation in rebirth. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and after lamenting how the earth is “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” reminds us that “nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” He must have been walking under the plum blossoms in San Francisco when he wrote that.

• Your Life in Music

After meeting twice a month for 21 years, the men’s group I’m part of discussed something new—their musical autobiography. Okay, it was my idea, but it turned out to be a good one, as I asked people about their earliest memories of music, what they had in school or in the way of formal lessons, what musics they “discovered” that touched them, how did their tastes change over time, what music means to them now (we’re all 60 plus). Next time you’re with a group of friends, try having this discussion— it’s fun and revealing! In our group, some interesting patterns emerged. 

• Listening to music in childhood was a doorway into the imagination, a taste of transcendence and magic. Peter and the Wolf was a first memory for several.

• Taking music lessons was a deadly dull chore pitted against baseball and running around outdoors and most bailed the moment they could.

• Music in adolescent was a soundtrack for the hormones and a centerpiece of developing an emerging identity.

• Music in adulthood faded into the background as work, marriage and children took center stage.

• Music in retirement (or close to retirement) was an old friend welcomed back.

• All agreed with Nietzsche: “Without music, life would be an error.”

• The Canary in the Coal Mine

We had a staff meeting recently where our wonderful learning specialist, in partnership with the classroom teachers, identified kids in each grade who need extra attention and support. I felt alarmed to hear that 50% or more of the kids were on the list! What does this mean? A few possibilities:

1.     Our expectations are too high.

2.     We’re aware of issues and taking on issues that used to be swept under the rug and left entirely on the kids’ shoulders.

3.     Kids are in trouble. They’re the canaries in the coal mine of culture announcing that we better pay attention before things collapse.

And let’s add, “All of the above.”

Still thinking about this one.

• Fix My Kid

Montaigne’s bent stick keeps re-appearing for me (see Dead White Guys blog). I grew up believing as a kid that anything that I did wrong was my fault. Now kids are being told they’re victims and it’s always someone else’s fault. As many teachers can testify, there are a growing number of parents who think that every problem their kid faces is fixable by social engineering and that the burden of fixing it lies with the school and the teachers.

The old way had its flaws. From my point of view, bullying was too casually accepted under the shoulder-shrug of “that’s the way of the world” and that caused great harm. So we try to institute policy as a useful guideline and protective safeguard. But once policies are in place, we tend to stop thinking and lose the distinction between casual teasing or testing power relationships within the normal range of child-development. As every jail film will tell you, preying on the weak is the bully’s way of teaching the victim to stand up and the moment they do, the dynamic changes.

So between leaving it all in the kids’ world without adult support (remember Lord of the Flies?) and imagining we can fix everything for our children lies the ground of loving our children, listening to our children, offering support and clear expectations, creating social structures that lean toward justice, peace and harmony and at the same time realizing that our children have a lot to work out about how to negotiate the dynamics of power and relationship. Beyond examples of clear harm and habitual abuse, we need to leave them alone to do so, painful as it may be.

Cooking for One

My wife’s schedule allowed her to visit my daughter in Argentina and so I am alone in my house for a couple of weeks. Though I would love to see my daughter—last time was in India a year ago— I found myself quite happy to stay home. This traveling music teacher is mostly going from one room in the house to another and then  to school and back and it feels just fine. Just six weeks back at school after the Fall off, I have a rhythm going that feels important to maintain. Happy for once not to be on a plane.

But alone in my house! That’s rare. I’m a person who needs a healthy dose of solitude and mostly get it on planes and in strange motel rooms. I tend to be the one who travels and it’s rare for my wife to be gone without me, leaving me with the house to myself. 

Of course, when I was off this Fall, I had plenty of time during the day, but to have nights home alone is a different story. I get to control the lighting! Decide on the music and just how loud it can be! Eat dinner on my own time and clean up according to my rhythm! Play the piano more than usual (though I still have the neighbors to consider)!  If I want to go out to a movie, why, I just get in the car and go! No discussion as to which one or where or when. And most amazing of all, I get to leave the toilet seat up! It’s great!! We all should have time like this to remember who we are face-to-face with ourselves. 

But dinners are a little odd. I notice how cooking for one is not like half of two—there’s a different mathematical principle at work that mysteriously makes more food than two minus one would suggest. 

It also has a different feeling cooking, either not inspired to do anything particularly interesting or to do something great and feel like the pleasure of sharing it is missing. And the silence during the evening meal is a contrast to all the years of family dinners. “How was your day, Doug?” has a bit of a hollow ring when I'm both asking and answering.

I also notice, as I have sometimes in hotel rooms, how the line between solitude and loneliness is a constantly shifting border following no logic but the whims of the heart. The conversation between our need for some quiet solitary moments and shared relationship often follows “the grass is greener” model. After too much time alone, we crave company. After too much company, we crave time alone. “If only I weren’t single! If only I weren’t married!” is our opposite announcing our need of the moment—these are not long-term cure-alls for whatever we think is ailing us, just our constant search for an elusive equilibrium.  I suppose it’s how we keep moving and hopefully growing, looking for what we don’t have at the moment and if we’re wise, simultaneously grateful for what we do. 

Meanwhile, I’m hitting the stride of solitude. Got a great book (ironically titled “The Marriage Plot”), getting in shape on the piano with Bach, Schubert and the usual jazz standards, keeping this blog well-oiled, taking care of my elderly cat and throwing wild bachelor parties. (Well, not really, but just checking up to see if my wife is reading this.) I hope she’s enjoying the glaciers of Patagonia while I change the light bulbs and pay a bill or two— something she has done faithfully while I’ve traveled and I’m grateful.

Now off to the kitchen to make an inspired quinoa salad. Anyone want to come for dinner?

Skype Abuse

Today I had a Skype visit with my granddaughter Zadie. At 12-weeks old, she is markedly different from the precious 5-week old I got to hold and cuddle over Winter Break. More alert, smiling, babbling— though not much of it when I call. Camera shy? But still I’m so grateful to get to see her from 3,000 miles away. And for free! And legal! (We’ve come a long way from the fake credit card calls I made in Europe back in 1973!)

But as wonderful as it is to see her, I always hang up the call feeling depressed. How can you see a baby without holding her? Without lifting her in the air, bouncing her on your knee, tickling her, rubbing noses, giving raspberries on her belly, dancing with her, walking with her outside tucked in the front snuggly. It’s frustrating!! So close but so far. When it comes to grandchildren, there’s something cruel about the Skype call.

So instead of sitting and moping, I started thinking about that urge to hold and touch. Touch, along with movement and song, is one of the three languages we start speaking and responding to when we begin our time here on the planet. Up until recently (in human history), we intuitively knew all this, but things got weird when Descartes proclaimed the brain as separate from the body and the Puritans decided that the body was an evil trap for Spirit to be patiently endured until we were set free in heaven. A few centuries later, the necktie came in to cut off circulation to everything below the throat, talking heads appeared on the news programs and other bizarre aberrations of our capacity to think strangely—and wrongly—appeared. Especially when it came to child-raising and babies were left alone in cribs at night and other devices during the day away from the body of mother (or sibling, grandparent, neighbor, etc.). Then the experts came in to justify this practice.

Case in point. John B. Watson, one of the early behaviorist scientists, wrote a book in 1928 titled Psychological Care of Infant and Child in which he advised young mothers to be careful about giving their baby too much love and affection. “Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit in your lap, “ he cautioned and then in a moment of weakness added, “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight.” Someone who steals a candy bar can get thrown in jail, but someone who, however innocently, helped rob a generation of children from the touch and love they needed and deserved gets off scot free. I’m not whining here, but let’s face it, there is no justice.

Another such “innocent” disaster took place in the 1940’s when the germ theory of human contact causing disease convinced workers at an orphanage to feed and clothe their babies, but not to touch, play with, hold or handle them. The result? The infants grew sickly and weak and many died of the same diseases the policy was trying to protect them from. A psychologist sent to investigate concluded that failing to hold, stroke, sing and coo to, touch and play with babies, is fatal to infants. The most ignorant villager in the most backward village could have told us that, but we civilized folks are so clever that we were sure that science would teach us the proper way to raise children.

And ironically, now it can help as neuroscientists are investigating the necessity of touch and speech and song and play. The above stories came from a sleeper of a book written by three doctors titled A General Theory of Love. I gave it to my daughter as a Christmas present and she didn’t seem thrilled, but if she ever has the leisure to read it, will find it not only beautifully written and rich with stories mixed with essential and understandable facts, but ultimately an affirmation of what I hope she knows from her own upbringing— that love is not the luxury of poets, but the necessity of us all to reach the full promise our enlarged brains hold. The punch line—we need a culture attuned to the ways of the heart— is certainly a subject that I hold dear to the heart and have struggled in my own modest way to contribute to in my school and workshops.

And speaking of school, you know I can’t resist a constructively critical whine here. My second daughter went through a relatively enlightened teacher credential program here in San Francisco, but while she had just one hour of music training in two years of classes, she was required to attend a three-hour session by a specialist who advised these young teachers against touching children to avoid legal action.

If you read the bent stick metaphor in my last posting, you can’t find a better example of two disastrously bent sticks than the story of touching children in school. First was corporal punishment (remember my blog a year ago? Caning banned in Korea—last year!) and stories of sexual abuse hidden in a cloak of secrecy. Not only in the school, but in the home and culture as well. Nothing could be more damaging than a child publicly shamed with physical punishment and privately shamed with sexual abuse in a wider culture that refused to talk about and acknowledge it. And so the law stepped in and created Child Protective Services with a worthy aim in mind— no more secrecy and those who are abusive must face consequences and treatment. All well and good.

But then the stick bent in the other direction to the point where young teachers are advised to never touch children of any age. So instead of isolated incidents of abuse perpetrated on the few, now there is an institutional abuse of all by depriving children of the need for touch. One might argue that they still can be lovingly touched at home and I hope that is true, but a climate of fear of touch permeates everywhere and an education without loving touch is barely an education at all. It’s fine for these young teachers to know the law and the wiggle-room it allows ( in reality, most teachers still do hug children and pat them on their back), but after the 10-minute legal talk, they should spend the next few hours in company with grandmothers and neuroscientists to study how vitally important touch is.

And if touch (and movement and song) is vital at the beginning of life, it becomes an urgent necessity again at the end of life. So many visits with my mother these days are just sitting in silence holding hands in the garden, interrupted by occasional outbursts of kisses. Along with some songs, this is just what the doctor ordered.

And by the way, it’s pretty important in the middle of life as well! So after reading this, go over to the nearest person and give them a hug. With their permission, of course.

PS A word about that grandmother/neuroscientist training class. It shouldn’t be on Skype.

Dead White Guys

We humans rarely get it right. We set in motion weird notions of relationship where some have the power and privilege and the rest are subservient to it with few choices beyond obey or resist. When enough resist and those with power are overthrown, the new folks take over and anything good that grew in that former swamp of relationship is thrown out as well. As the philosopher Montaigne said, “To straighten a bent stick, we first have to bend it the other way.” Maybe. But if you don’t release it, it will just stay bent in the other direction. (And even when it is straight, what’s so great about a straight stick? Montaigne needed to work on his metaphor a little more.) And so back and forth we go.

Dead White Males, the holders of so much privilege  (well, at least while they were alive. Is their hierarchy in Heaven?) have been held in low esteem in the past few decades. Universities have revised their syllabi and for young hip intellectuals and advocates for social justice, anything that comes from the pen of the DWM is suspect, dismissed, re-interpreted in the light of revisionist and deconstructionist theory.

And I myself have participated in this, shouting “Amen” to Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over, Beethoven,” loving to tell the stories of Horowitz and Rubinstein coming to hear Art Tatum play jazz piano, habitually including Zora Neale Hurston, Emily Dickinson, Basho, in any list I make of writers, Thornton Dial and Gee’s Bend quilters in lists of artists, Charlie Parker, Tito Puente and Ravi Shankar in lists of musicians and always putting the Nicholas Brothers before Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in my list of tap dancers to help enlarge our notions of the playing field. (I showed my 8^th graders Fred and Gene dancing in the song The Babbit and the Bromide and then a clip of the Nicholas Brothers from the film Down Argentine Way. The kids were outspoken as to who were the more vibrant dancers and outraged that the former were more well known. Two more dead white males shot down and I helped load the pistol!)

There is no question that so many have suffered—and continue to suffer— from a culture of selective inclusion. And not just the people excluded. The whole culture misses out on the possibility of being refreshed by extraordinary people who were denied a leg up to share their gifts more widely. Wouldn’t the world have enjoyed two Mozarts, both Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl? Could it have encouraged Clara Schumann a bit more than it did without taking a single note away from Robert? Wouldn’t we be uplifted to hear music from the countless remarkable musicians in cultures worldwide whose names we will never know? Wouldn’t it have been fantastic if the Nicholas Brothers had made as many films as Fred Astaire? Well, we don’t get to re-write history and instead of whining (still February, after all!), we can be grateful for those we do know and remember to keep the choices and opportunities open so that the next genius of any class, race or gender can refresh us with her or his work.

But yesterday I spent in company with a bunch of dead white guys named Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Ravel and got up from the piano with my mind clearer, body refreshed and heart more open than when I sat down. I couldn’t help but think “Damn! Those guys could write!” And again, in a world dominated by the notion of music history beginning with Palestrina when Western harmony began to develop, I’ve done my part to celebrate the beauties of a musical world so much larger than Europe between 1600 and 1900—the vast repertoire of music in the pentatonic scale, modes with drones, African polyrhythms, gamelan forms, the complexity of Indian rhymes and melodies and so much more. West Africa drum choirs put Bach in rhythmic kindergarten, Indian ragas put Schubert in melodic preschool and the Balinese gamelan angklung shows Western composers that they can do much more with 4-notes than they ever dreamed possible.

But none of it negates the Western genius of functional harmony—it just puts it in balance with the particular genius of other musical cultures. But genius it is to create a system of harmonic tensions and releases that pluck the strings of our hearts with so many subtle shades and gradations of feeling. And to take musical ideas through so many variations of harmonic accompaniment, different textures, related themes reveals a mind at the height of intelligence. Western classical music may seem so-two-hundred-years-ago, but its intricate structures and harmonic variations will help build a sophisticated mind and nuanced heart in any player or listener willing to do the work.

So friends, while opening the doors to the riches of all artists and thinkers, let’s not slam the door in the face of Socrates, Shakespeare, Goethe, Brahms, Dickens, Whitman, Bill Evans and others. We needn’t exclude Dead White Males in order to widen the circle of inclusion. Of course, I have a vested interest in this since, worthy of remembrance or not, I myself will be a DWM some day. Please don't hold it against me. 

High Anxiety and Button-Up Pants

Like everyone in San Francisco, I can tell you where I was when the earthquake of ’89 struck. On the couch, to be exact, reading a magazine and then out the back door as fast as I could. My kids were outside and were starting to run upstairs toward the house when I shooed them back into the yard. My youngest (5 at the time) was crying and I was trying to soothe her and then realized she was upset because I had knocked her rice cake out of her hand. We slept in the more solid back of the house that night, woken up several times by the after-shocks.

Though mild compared to other natural disasters—we had little physical damage and none of us were hurt— I felt a profound psychological shift. The idiomatic expression “it really shook me up ” was an apt description. The solid ground I had walked on so dependably for years suddenly was undependable and unpredictable, a precariously balanced tectonic plate that could open up under my feet without a moment’s notice. I had begun studying the Bulgarian bagpipe at the time, a powerful instrument with a repertoire of quirky, uneven rhythms that shakes me out of complacency when things get too dull or comfortable. But after the earthquake, I couldn’t play it for some six months. I needed calm, quiet, soothing music in a square 4/4 time that would lead me back to trust and predictability, more harps and glockenspiels than bagpipes and screaming jazz horns.

Cultural shifts sometimes have that quality of earthquakes, with changes happening faster than we can assimilate them. “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?” sang Bob Dylan decades ago and it was part of his role as an artist to be the antennae of the culture and announce not only that “The Times They Are A-Changing,” but give some hints as to precisely how they were changing and needed to change. That’s often the role of the artists in the culture, to open up the conversations needed in this particular time and this particular place and invite Mr. Jones into the conversation.

What is the conversation we need here and now, not only in the U.S., but worldwide as well? That could be quite a list, with climate change, population and the end to ethnic rivalry near the top. But I would suggest that in addition to noting how the times they are a-changing, we need to pay attention to the rate of change itself. For if one thing sets us apart from all other times in human history, it is the ever-increasing rate of change spurred by technologic shifts. Human history is like a ball bouncing that decreases its height with each successive bounce, getting smaller and smaller and faster and faster.

Anthropology talks about Neanderthals as developing over a couple of million years. Homo sapiens came in around 200,000 years ago and not much changed for at least 165,000 years. Then some 35,000 years ago comes the first evidence of cave paintings, that major leap in evolution when the artists appeared in the culture. Now change is measured in blocks of 10,000 years at a time until writing begins to appear and now the accelerating rate of change is measures in thousand year chunks. During the Dark Ages, ain’t much happening of note for a few hundred years at a time and then comes the explosion of culture in the Middle Ages, led by—guess who?—the artists and writers and composers and cultural shifts is measured in centuries. By the time of the next big technological explosion, the printing press in the 15^th century, it’s reduced to some 50-year blocks. And so it continues until the next series of explosions—photographs, recordings, radio,  films, TV and now the 20^th century (in the U.S.) is parceled out in decades—the Roarin’ 20’s the Depression 30’s, the War Years, the conservative 50’s, the turbulent 60’s and so on.

Can you feel that ball bounce getting smaller? By 2000, the personal computer, cell phone, I-Pod, I-Tunes, Facebook, YouTube and beyond accelerated the rate of change yet again. A computer two-years old is virtually obsolete—or at least needs some serious upgrading.

And then the coup-de-grace. Some three months ago, I bought a pair of new jeans at the Gap. After losing weight (see The Doug Diet), I needed a new pair with a smaller waist. Back I went and was so thrilled to see the exact same pair one size smaller. But with one change—instead of a zipper, it had buttons for the fly. What?!!! Buttons?!!! So I went to one of the 20-something saleswomen and pleaded with her to find a pair with zippers. She looked it up and of course, they only came now with buttons. She suggested I wait a couple of months until the zippers came back.

Now according to Wikipedia, zippers trounced buttons on pants starting in the 1930’s. To quote: “In the 1930s, a sales campaign began for children's clothing featuring zippers. The campaign praised zippers for promoting self-reliance in young children by making it possible for them to dress in self-help clothing. The zipper beat the button in 1937 in the "Battle of the Fly", and designers raved over zippers in men's trousers. declaring the zipper the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men." Among the zippered fly's many virtues was that it would exclude "The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray."

So why this nostalgic return to the 30’s? And whatever happened to choice? And is the rate of dependable predictability now down to months?

And so the challenge of our times. With the rate of change faster than it has ever been, we need to pay attention to its impact on the psyche. High predictability, the state of most cultures over a few hundred thousand years, means low stress and anxiety. Kids growing up in a fishing villages or farm lands pretty much know they’re going to fish and farm. The parents are relaxed about their upbringing and add arranged marriages to the mix and everybody is more or less secure in the feeling that all will be well. But low predictability because of rapid changes creates high stress and anxiety. Parents are wondering, “Will my kid find a job? Find a life partner? Will I myself keep my job or be outsourced to Asia or replaced by a robot?”

I first heard of this formula from Rob Evans, the author of “Family Matters,” explaining why parents were more anxious about their children than ever before and how that creates a new dynamic in schools. Parents who feel powerless in the rapidly shifting ground under their feet, the constant tremors and minor earthquakes that characterize the rate of change we’re all experiencing, will try to find some corner of control and power and teachers are feeling that today. It helps to understand why and re-direct the conversation. This formula—High Predicability, Low Anxiety. Low Predictability, High Anxiety— also helps to understand the epidemic return to Fundamentalism, the nostalgia for former times, the fantasies of the Tea Party and more. It times of great change and low predictably, we naturally want to cling to something that appears solid, no matter how false that perception is.

And here’s the good news. If we can meet the challenge of the unknown, we will have stumbled into the Buddhist truth of impermanence and have the possibility of re-arranging our lives to meet it. Alan Watts wrote a while back about “The Wisdom of Insecurity,” advising us from a Zen perspective to go with the flow of the unknown by being more wholly in the present and training ourselves to respond intelligently and compassionately with each new situation. “Low predictability” is actually the state of mind of the artist at the mercy of the Muse—all creative acts carry a quality of unpredictability. But ironically, the best way to meet that is a habitual practice routine that is dependable and ritual-like in its predictable practice.

As always, an interesting conversation that’s just beginning with no time to finish. I have to go pee and it’s going to take me a while to deal with these buttons.