The Times They Are A' Changin'

There are things we’ve known our whole lives that we assumed were untouchable, as much of the reality of life as sunset and moonrise. And now they’ve changed.

I’m talking about Canada’s decision to stop making pennies. Apparently it costs more than a penny to make a penny and such logic is not up for challenge. I heard about this last summer and now the time has come. The last penny has been made and twenty years from now, children will have to look up what “a penny for your thoughts” means when Grandpa slips it into conversation. Music teachers will have to adapt the children’s game “Who has the penny?” Math books with problems about pennies, nickels, quarters and dimes will have to be re-written. The repercussions are staggering.

The next blow to the solid ground of dependable customs was the U.S. Post Office announcing it would no longer deliver mail on Saturday. No surprise that they’re struggling and instead of feeling frustrated that we’ll have to wait an extra day for the letter from our dear friend, it mostly means a day off from recycling the useless coupons, stacking bills or ignoring pleas for money from humanitarian organizations. But still. No mail on Saturday? Sacrilege!

Along these lines, San Francisco announced that Sundays will no longer mean free metered parking. The city is determined to squeeze every penny from us (well, in Canada, nickels)— no day of rest for the economy. And I’ve already noticed new parking meters with credit card swipes and complicated instructions with numbered spaces. Perhaps soon money itself will be obsolete, everything a plastic card to be swiped. Drug dealers on street corners will have little credit card machines, a candy bar bought at the corner store will need a signature.

Soon I suppose they’ll stop making telephone books and we’ll have to buy a step ladder instead of stacking them to reach something on the top shelf. And there’s already the move to stop making books themselves and CD’s and DVD’s, those physical manifestations of our need for words and tones, stories and music traded for abstract electronic bits floating around in cyberspace. Finally, there’s the move to replace real teachers with screened versions, give up the archaic practice of live people gathered in rooms having conversations and replace it with everyone plugged into their private i-Pad University.

I’d like to write a letter to someone and put on a 44 cent stamp, but I’d miss my penny change, have to pay for parking when I go out on Sunday to buy an envelope, worry that it wouldn’t arrive on time and wonder whether anyone can still read cursive. So instead I’ll just have to voice these thoughts on my cyberspace blog and hope it makes it on someone’s curriculum in Electronic U.

Hooked

The alert reader may have divined that I’m more than a little prideful to be off to the side of the mainstream. To reveal that I had a habit of watching Seinfeld re-runs and the occasional football game takes on the tone of a confession. And so here comes another one:

I’m hooked on Downton Abby.*

It took three or four shows to jump in and feel connected, but by Sunday’s show after the heart-wrenching Super Bowl, I was a believer. So much so that I went to our local Le Video store and got Season One to begin the long trek to catch up. Five shows into that and the addiction has taken root in the bloodstream. If there was only one copy of the next show at the video store, I’m sure I would commit physical violence against the person who tried to get it before me.

Like Seinfeld or a Dickens novel, the first step is to recognize the characters and get a feel for who they are and what they’re about and how they react. You have to love or hate them enough to wonder what their next move is, make little predictions and either have the satisfaction of proving correct or the surprise of watching them grow or fall from grace. (It’s not unlike the scientist making an hypothesis or a music listener imagining the next phrase of the music.) Howard Gardner might call such shows schools for developing  the interpersonal intelligence.

Then you get drawn into the threads of the plot and as I wrote back in the The Three Pillars of Literacy, we story-brained humans thrive on this kind of food. We live vicariously in an ongoing story similar to our own, but three notches higher on the drama end and easier to stomach because we’re a few steps removed. TV has always had this with the daytime soap operas which we loved to make fun of, but from The Sopranos to The Wire to Madmen to Downton Abby, it’s all the new, upgraded Days of Our Lives and General Hospital.

And then there’s the beautiful hatreds and rivalries between the characters and no matter if you’re upstairs, downstairs or out in the garden. Our fantasies of “transparent" communication and New Age togetherness would make for some poor drama. Who wants to show five seasons of people hugging each other, working out their issues with good honest talk straight from the heart in every encounter, relinquishing their positions of power to be more inclusive and fair? One of my first shocks going to Mt. Baldy Zen Center was discovering how the book image of a peaceful community was pretty far from the actual gathering of bizarre characters. Even the Roshi at a celebration talked about how when they began, this officer wouldn’t talk to that one, that one abused the other and how if people in a place devoted to nurturing peace in the heart couldn’t get along, what hope was there for the world?

But the biggest lesson this naïve seeker has learned is that such hope begins with the recognition that alongside the moments of deep communion, hard-earned love, humor, shared joy and quiet connections, human relations are all about power, betrayal, disappointment, rivalry, barbed verbal assaults and occasionally outbursts (more honest!) of physical ones. In every place, in every time, amongst any group of people thrown together in work, travel, neighborhood, what-have-you. It’s all Peyton Place and Downton Abby. No exemptions.

And then what’s fascinating are all the styles of personal warfare. There’s the gender-based approaches—Bates collars Thomas against the wall and tells him he’ll smash his face in if he doesn’t stop this crap, while the Dowager and Mrs. Crawley throw their little verbal darts laden with secret poisons. Mary and Edith forgot to read the book Siblings Without Rivalry and go after the same man as a little game of one-upwomanship. Mrs. Patmore uses Daisy as her whipping girl, while Sibyl is a living California bumper sticker performing random acts of kindness.

And then the secrets that we all carry about, that ride on our shoulder as we put on the front of being normal human beings. Mary’s bizarre encounter with the Turk, Bates' secret story that throws up a wall between him and Anna (back in Season One here) and most delightful of all, Carson, the Guru of the stiff upper lip, and his secret shame that he once sang and danced on the vaudeville stage. Horrors!

If you don’t know these people, these words don’t mean as much. But perhaps they’re enticing you to join the club and that’s another pleasure of this practice— now it is a shared story that peppers the lunchtime conversations at school of those “in the know” and creates a common point of reference. I imagine new words may creep into the vernacular— “Stop O’Briening that person!” “That was so Thomas!”

Off to the video store for the next show. And don’t even think about getting there before me!

* For those in the dark, this is a BBC series about some upper-class Brits and their downstairs servants set at a country estate in the early 1990’s. 

Cry, Sigh, Die

Intrigued by the title? Wondering if this is about the three stages of hospice care or the sequel to the bestseller Eat, Pray, Love? Well, I could take it in either of those directions, but the real story is much more mundane. It’s about spelling.

I’ve had this conversation often with my daughter Talia, who endured three years of trying to explain to first graders in Argentina how these three words could possibly rhyme. (Or should I say “righm” or “riem”?) As speakers of a logical, ordered and coherent language known as Spanish, where everything is spelled precisely how it sounds according to simple rules, they must think that English is absolutely insane. And when it comes to spelling, they’re right! (Ryte, riet, rite, rhyte?)

This came up in a little poem I was doing with 2^nd graders about Grandpa Grigg and a pig and as native speakers, they were non-plussed. Having hung out around dry, fry, fly, my, pry, sly, sky, sty, shy, spy, spry, try, why, spent time with high and nigh and their cousins, blight, flight, might, night, right, sight, tight and had their share of pie, lie, tie, weird spellings of same-sound endings is just part of their linguistic landscape.

And more to come. Add to cry, sigh, die the words buy, chai, hi, rye and any wonder why kids are so confused? Imagine them writing (wryting? wrighting?) a little story that begins “Kie goes to trie to bie some chie and marble rie on the way to see The Life of Pie…" and getting back the corrections from the teacher: "Kai goes to try to buy some Chai and marble rye on the way to the Life of Pi." Can you blame the kid if he looks at it and wonder wie why ?

Yup, English is entirely loco— a word, by the way, which could only be spelled “loco” in Spanish, but might be spelled be lowco or luoco or loughco (think row, quo, dough) in English.  I imagine this is partly due to the mutt nature of the current vernacular. Current English is so interwoven with other languages that it defies the neat and tidy patterns of its pedigree neighbors. (Or naybors, nabors, nebors).

Wryting this is making me tighred so I’m going to sine off and say “By!”

Or is it “Bye?”

Kept Back Another Year

The heart never makes progress. The brain moves from 1+1=2 to advanced calculus in measured steps, but the heart is perpetually stuck in kindergarten. How do I know this?

Because at 61 years old, I’m still moping around because my team lost the Superbowl.

P.S. I still say it was holding!

The Three Pillars of Literacy

Without a novel to enter before the day is done, my life feels just a little bit emptier. I suppose I’ve been reading novels just about my whole life, from Dick and Jane to Dickens and the search for the next story is constant. Luckily, authors keep writing, publishers keep publishing and there’s no dearth of stories to be told.

What do I look for in a novel? Plot, for one. Many a fine author has me wandering around pleasant scenes where nothing much is happening and my only motivation to turn the page is to hope that someone will mysteriously disappear and leave me to wonder why. A plot that leads me to the edge of wanting to know what will happen next is one of the things that makes me look forward to the nightly read, picking up the next thread of the story. Some of my favorite authors are masters of the unfolding story— like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Others may be short on substance (Agatha Christie and Dan Brown, for example), but can give me sufficient pleasure with plot alone.

Then there’s characters. I have to care about them. Not necessarily like them, but be interested enough that I want to hang out with them. Settings and eras contribute as well. I like armchair traveling to another time and place, but am also a sucker for American novels covering the 50’s to today, with references to events, places and situations I’ve lived through. (For example, The Brothers K, The Power of Their Singing, The Marriage Plot, The Adventures of the Thunderbolt Kid.)

Finally, there’s the writing itself. I love being wrapped up in a good writer’s way of saying things, his or her rhythm, cadence, turn of phrase, grammar and syntax. Little Bee by Chris Cleave is an example of a story that was brutally difficult, with situations and images I’d rather not carry around with me, but with writing so exquisite that it elevated horror to beauty. It’s the same kind of pleasure I get from the touch, phrasing and harmonies of favorite jazz piano players. Doesn’t matter what the song is or plot or characters, it’s the sound alone that touches me.

The icing on the cake is a compatability with the author’s way of seeing the world, from politics to taste to humanitarian concerns. Philosophy married with plot, character, settings and style. That’s the mother lode of novel writing and reading.

Then non-fiction. Ever since discovering Joseph Campbell in the late 1980’s, someone who came to wisdom through a practice of reading 9 hours a day for five years, I’ve kept up a steady diet of intriguing non-fiction, often in waves of subject matter. The whole family of “ologies”— anthropology, mythology, sociology, psychology, technology, musicology, ethnomusicology, ecology and beyond. And etymology— the suffix “ology” means a branch of knowledge and how fascinating it has been to climb each part of the enormous tree of what we know and what interests us. Add to the above readings on neuroscience, education, history, spirituality, philosophy, politics, linguistics, music, jazz history and biography and humor and you have a pretty good idea of my library and my love for ideas. Story touches the heart, ideas light up the mind and both make me grateful that I went to school and entered whole universes through the magic of the printed word.

The third pillar of literacy’s exquisite gifts is poetry, the literary form that awakens the soul. An essay is about something, but a poem is the thing itself— or as near to it as you can get. Poetry is not every day fare for me, I dip in and out like a lake in different seasons. If I’m cold, its wintry waters are often too bracing for my taste. But when the borders of skin relax in the warmth of a sunny season in my life, nothing is more refreshing than to enter those waters of sensous sound. I’ve heard it said that only two things that we experience light up the whole brain and they are deeply connected— poetry and music. The hush in a room when a good poem is being recited is akin to Casals playing the Bach Cello Suites.

I’ve liked reading poetry ever since I discovered Whitman and e.e.cummings as a teenager, but it is only in the last decade that I began memorizing poetry and taking it off the page into a spoken, declaimed and gestured art form and that has made all the difference. I now have the power to change and charge the energy in a room with a simple combination of condensed words that bring things to a halt. I did it recently when I recited Langston Hughes long poem “Let America Be America Again” on Martin Luther King day. If you can bring 90 Middle School students to a pindrop silence for seven minutes, you know you’re on to something!

Fiction, non-fiction and poetry—the three pillars of literacy, food for the heart, mind and soul. Constant companions my whole life long and in the years to come. Thanks to the ancient Sumerians, Greeks, Medieval monks, Johannes Gutenburg and the long illustrious legacy of people who lived their lives and chose to tell about it in print.

P.S. On a lovely Sunday afternoon, trying to decide whether to read Dostoyevsky, Alfred North Whitehead or W.B. Yeats— or go watch the Superbowl. No contest. Go Niners!!!

Good News on the Way

Happy Groundhog’s Day! Some 40 years ago,  a 12-year old student, Julie Pred, and I decided it was our favorite holiday and have sent each other greetings every year since. Truth be told, I rarely follow the whole shadow thing, but it’s just fun to claim a quirky holiday. February also boasts Valentine’s Day (and various ritual classes and songs with the kids at school around love), my wife’s birthday and the birthdays of my two dear colleagues, James and Sofia, a President’s Day long weekend, the riches of Black History month and an occasional leap year. Lots going on in the year’s shortest month!

But for all of my San Francisco life, February is the time when the plum blossoms bloom, the first heralds of Spring even as so many in the more northern climes are still shoveling their driveways and slogging through slush to work. We have a small family ritual of walking up to Edgewood Terrace when the blossoms hit their peak, an entire street planted with plum trees and quite a glorious sight.

There is also a plum outside my music room window, another visible from our home deck and one in our yard. This morning I looked at its bare branches and saw the first little blossom. And lo and behold, it sprouted a poem! I have my own private collection of my poetry and occasionally read some in public, but it had been a long time since I had written one. It was an auspicious surprise and along with going to a concert tonight at the new SF Jazz Center, another sign that February looks promising. And so here’s the poem.

The Plum Tree in February

The twined bare branches against the grey sky,

a twisted prayer pointing upwards.

All is winter in the plum tree,

a mere remembrance of a

former red-leaved splendor.

Hidden in the tangle

is a single pink blossom,

a scout sent out ahead bearing

the good news:

“The bloom will soon be here.

Soon these stark branches

will be aflame in pink blossoms 
singing their Hallelujah to Spring.”

Perhaps this is my work also.

To be the lone pink blossom

announcing the glory to come. 

Mutual Admiration

February is off to a good start. It began with an 8^th grade class that played the heck out of a Monk tune, almost performance-ready in three classes. The focus of this particular group is extraordinary, not the usual swimming upstream against constant kid movement, chatter and xylophone tinkering while I’m talking and the result is that they learn quickly and it sticks. After the last note, I blew them a kiss and said, “You are one remarkable group of kids. With this music behind you, go forth into the day in peace and beauty!” One of them lingered a bit after class and said, in all sincerity, “Thank you. That was really fun.”

Later I had a class of 25 preschoolers playing a stirring version of Roses Are Red on frog woodblocks, triangles and conga drums. A five-year old turned to me on the way out the door and said, “You’re a great music teacher!!” “Why, thank you, “ I replied. “And you’re a great music student!”

And there was the perfect balance between the elder affirming the child for his effort and accomplishment and the child recognizing that it’s proper to also thank the teacher. I grew up in the “children should be seen and not heard” style of child-raising and yes, some sense of being seen by a few key adults occasionally came my way, but it certainly was not high on the adults’ “to-do list.” And so I devoted my life to a school where the children reigned supreme, called us teachers by our first names (and still do), where we didn’t (and still mostly don’t) even have a teacher’s faculty room. I can report back that children indeed feel known and seen and heard and honored and appreciated in our school and ultimately look back at it all with gratitude. Hooray for that! But a little more gratitude and respect for the teacher at each step along the way wouldn’t be a bad thing. In fact, it would be a wonderful thing.

I’m mostly in the camp that respect for the elder is something that is organically grown and earned by the teacher’s relationship with each child. Going through the mere gestures of respect often becomes routine and insincere. But respect is also a cultural value, a practice, an etiquette and something that adults need to inculcate in the children we raise. We certainly could do a better job at my school.

Just yesterday, a middle school class came in and sat on the risers as they do at the beginning of class. Now granted, 8:15 am does not show the 13-year old at his or her peak, but still, when I said “Good morning” to the group, I got a few random samples of a mumbled “good morning” with a hardly a moving lip in sight and no eye contact. So I told them how in many places I travel, the class stands up when the teacher enters and gives an energetic group unison, “Good morning!” to the teacher. So I suggested we try it for practice. I walked out the door and re-entered and they said “Good morning, Mr. Goodkin!” Of course, it was all in play, but may I freely confess? I loved it! It felt great!

Mutual respect and admiration. It's a good idea, easy to say, hard to come by. If you have it in your school, let me in on the secret.