All of Me

“Energy is eternal delight,” wrote visionary poet William Blake. But he might also have added (though admittedly less poetically), “That which gives us eternal delight gives us energy.” With my colleague Sofia in Spain and my colleague James about to head to New Zealand, my class schedule at school has increased dramatically. Combined with after-school teacher-training workshops and more, there is barely room for one little lentil on my very full plate.

And yet. Each thing I’m doing uses all of me, gathers together all the things I’ve taken the time to care about and think about and develop and practice, and puts them to use. Today I improvised my way into talking to 3, 4 and 5 year olds about Martin Luther King and social justice in a way that they could understand and relate to and somehow hit just the right nerve. They were listening in rapt silence as if important truths were being spoken and then sang with great passion the songs that threaded throughout the talk. Earlier, I tried to stir the anger, outrage and passion of 8^th graders so that they could bring Langston Hughes’ epic poem “Let America Be America Again” to life and we stumbled into a deep discussion about the many layers of meaning in the poem, which included me spinning the tale of my grandparents emigration from Russia at the turn of the century. I managed to get 1^st through 4^th graders intrigued about Bob Dylan’s lyrics to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and we added a new song to our protest song repertoire.

And so it went throughout the day. With three more packed days ahead culminating in the always-stirring MLK Ceremony. According to the demands of schedule and sheer number of different groups and ages to lead in song, dance, music and discussion, I should be exhausted. And maybe by Friday I will be! But mostly, as I keep re-discovering, authentic work that calls on one’s talents and interests gives a life and energy that nothing else quite does. It’s a gift beyond measure to fall into such work and have the opportunities to keep at it. I never take it for granted.

To be of use. To keep one’s passions exercised. Eternal delights that give energy. And, yes, Mr. Blake, energy is eternal delight. And, I might add, without coffee or Red Bull.

90 Is 60

Birth, copulation and death. Birth copulation and death.

That’s all the facts, when it comes to brass tacks.

Birth, copulation and death.

                                                -T.S. Eliot

This little limerick says it all. But in Korea, they add one more. They have three grand ritual ceremonies (as do most cultures) for birth, marriage and death. But the fourth is your 60^th birthday. Called Hwangap, it celebrates the completion of a cosmic cycle and one’s status as a revered elder. The children honor their parents with a feast, food, wine, music and dance.

Three years past my own non-event, I’m still waiting for the reverence from my culture. (I don’t think the AARP membership offer or senior discount at the movies counts.) But it’s also sobering to think that at this age I should be a wise elder when I’m still playing patty-cake with three-year olds as my main job, zipping around on my bike and flirting (in my mind!) with young beautiful women. But according to Wikipedia, modern medicine in Korea has upped the ante and most folks celebrate it at 70 years old. And by my calculations in the U.S., it could be that 80 is the new 60 and in some cases, even 90.

Today my mother-in-law Pam Shultz has reached 90. I lift a cup of reverence toward Michigan to celebrate! But it’s a mixed story, as she is in her 4^th week of not getting out of bed while her body and mind are slowly shutting down. She seems to be surviving on daily ice cream and wine. Today she is surrounded by two sons and a granddaughter and various friends and the report is that she still recognizes them all and has been awake in short spurts. But she clearly is edging toward the exit gate and there will be grief and sorrow and sadness for those of us left behind, no escaping that. But also gratitude for the gift of her long and fruitful life (well-expressed within her hearing at her art show a few months back) and joy that she will fly away from her failing mortal body and be released into the next world. I don’t say that casually, but after enough experience witnessing those struggling to keep their flame lit with an increasingly deformed candle, there comes that moment of relief.

Meanwhile, Pam, while you are still here with us, enjoy your family and friends and savor that glass of wine. With ice cream.

City Life

After a week of non-stop teaching, Sunday came like a desert after rush-hour Manhattan.

Space and silence and vast stretches to traverse as I pleased. And so I set to work hacking through the overgrown jungle of e-mails (yeah, I know— mixed metaphor), cleaned my desk, sorted school papers and then walked to my neighborhood farmer’s market.

Have I mentioned how much I love my little Inner Sunset neighborhood? The bank, post office, bakeries, cafés, restaurants galore, the bar where I watched the World Series (Go Giants!), a hardware store, bookstore, video store (in your face, Netflix!), a drugstore (in your face, Walgreens!), a Starbucks (in your face, Starbu… oops! Okay, but there are other local coffee places). There are places I go to once in a blue moon— shoe store, shoe repair store, Radio Shack— and places I will never go to— Tattoo parlor, nail salon. All of this a mere five blocks from my house and in the 30 plus years I’ve been here, mostly resistant to over-gentrification and over-corporatization. (The neighborhood refused a Blockbuster and Burger King died from non-response). And now on Sundays, there’s a great Farmer’s Market where I invariably meet neighbors or school families and get some great vegetables besides.

Today I came from 2^nd Avenue and my daughter Talia came from 11^th Avenue and we met at the market at 8^th and shopped together. Then sat outside the bakery talking about her future. How lovely was that? We decided to try to make it a weekly ritual.

Home with some deep green kale and crisp pink lady apples and rustic sourdough bread and then into the car for the two-mile short jaunt to Trader Joes. Home with my new-found discovery—red pepper spread—take down the last Christmas lights from the front room, sit down and play some piano and then try something new—biking to a matinee movie! Why not?

So my wife and I set off through Golden Gate Park, closed to traffic on Sunday, whirred and whooshed and wheeled our way some 40 blocks and locked our bikes up at the rack outside the old-time Balboa Theater. Usually not confident about leaving our bikes locked up outside for so long, but it was right in front of the box office, our locks are sturdy and the neighborhood seems benign. We took a chance, paid our $7.50 Senior Discount (yeah!) and enjoyed Into the Woods. (Though I’m obligated to complain as I do about Sondheim and musical theater after 1965. The music feels like all recitative— not the kind of repetition and structure that makes for a memorable melody that you leave the theater humming. Sing a Sondheim song—go! Not easy. Gershwin, Porter, Kern, Rodgers! Well, how much time do you have?)

Now it was 6 pm and dark and we went with our bikes… well, into the woods. In the dark.

But a few streetlights and bike lights enough to illuminate the return trip back through the Park, past a few other bikers and joggers (in the dark?). Unusual to come out of a movie and hop on a bike, but I loved it!

And so this little praise piece for the leisure of Sunday and the pleasures of San Francisco city life— a place that’s walkable, bikable, busable, car ridable, with authentic neighborhoods that furnish both household needs and culinary and social pleasures.Coming into adulthood, my friends always talked starry-eyed about “life in the country” and me, too. But hey, with Golden Gate Park a half-block from my house, hiking on Mt. Tam or Pt. Reyes a mere half-hour away, the feeling of a little town just blocks from my house, the urban culture of music, lectures, plays, festivals a short N-Judah streetcar away— well, city life is just fine with me. Yes, indeed.

Salting the Water

Not to criticize my wife publicly, but she did forget to salt the water while cooking the brown rice. One spoonful and I knew there was no hope. You can douse it with heaping helpings of soy sauce or sprinkle salt atop the grains and sprinkle it yet again, but none of it will make it right. There’s something about the way the right amount of salt in the water from the beginning permeates each grain and brings out its whole flavor from within. Just a little at the right time saves on overdose after the fact.

You can guess where this is going. “Get it right the first time” is my fantasy motto for a healthy culture that raises admirable human beings. Babies with natural births bonded with the mother, held often, spoken and sung to, danced with, kids who are wanted, sheltered, fed, clothed, protected, loved, challenged, understood for the delightful beings they are at each developmental stage and patiently nudged toward the next level of maturity.

Of course, the world rarely follows such utopian agendas and most of the stuff of the human drama, the thing that makes for good books and movies, are the lucky ones who didn’t get what they needed and rose to overcome it, the people who made every mistake and finally didn’t, the ones who were lost and now were found.

Yet still our duty as parents, teachers, elders, culture-bearers is to try to get right with our children what others didn’t get right with us. In my own field, my formal music lessons were far less damaging than an alcoholic abusive parent (thankfully, didn’t have one) and gave me a few gifts (musical literacy and Bach). But still, my life’s work is to give children a music education that “gets it right the first time” and allows them to feel their musicality as natural as their speech, gives them tools to play with others as a casual, intimate and occasionally profound conversation that is a universe more musical than simply decoding symbols and pushing down the right keys to please someone else. My job is to salt the water of each music class so the full flavor is brought out.

And then to pass on overarching visions and small details of a more complete musical—and humanistic—education to the next generation of teachers. This past week, I taught seven joyful classes a day to kids, two afternoon workshops to 20 young teachers-in-training and a full day (today) workshop to 35 teachers of all levels of experience. By any standard of work, I should have been exhausted. I wasn’t.

Well, maybe a little tired after six days straight with barely a pause. I think I can sleep in a bit tomorrow without guilt. And then enjoy an oatmeal breakfast. Properly salted, of course.

Tell It to a Preschooler

Even more than Halloween, the lead-up to Martin Luther King Day is my favorite time for singing with kids. Nothing moves me so much as the old freedom songs of the 60’s— from If I Had a Hammer to We Shall Overcome and beyond. And the kids love them too. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a four-year old with eyes closed singing Free at Last with all her heart and soul. She and her playmates have no idea what that abstract concept of freedom means nor can she imagine the harsh reality of being denied it. But they feel the spirit of the whole deal and know that something important is shouting out from every note in every song.

So this week at preschool singing time, I opened the door to that marvelous repertoire, from that exuberant One Little Step Toward Freedom to the quiet and soothing Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore and had the spontaneous idea of changing it to “Martin rowed the boat ashore” and “Rosa helped to trim the sails.” Always one to try to give background and stories to each song, I started talking about two sides of a river, one where “everyone was free to eat where they please, live where they please, work where they please and do as they please as long as they don’t hurt other people. And then on the other side of the river was the opposite, where people didn’t have that kind of freedom because…” And I stopped dead in my tracks. Because… why? What would you say? Because their skin color was different? How weird would that be for a three-year old to hear? How can their brain wrap around that? How can they make sense of something so clearly insane?

The answer? They can’t. And so, in that moment, I couldn’t either. Yeah, I know enough history to be able to try to explain it in terms of the economics of Europeans in a new world in need of cheap and free labor, in terms of priests and ministers and scientists and politicians creating the lie of racial superiority so they could sleep at night, in terms of that weird human need to be one rung up the ladder from someone else to feel important and powerful. But it’s all excuses, excuses, excuses. For that moment, it struck me to the core— this is utterly insane. I was able to try to wrap my brain around it like a preschooler might and there was simply no way to understand how human beings could do that and have it feel normal. No way to explain how people got so used to it that they simply accepted it all as “the way things are,” and went around for decades and centuries in a collective trance sanctioned in schools and churches and families and films and books and songs. 

And more sobering yet. As if it’s not enough to try to understand the depravity of 400 years of buying and selling human beings, to explain how Rutherford B. Hayes bought a disputed election by promising to end Reconstruction in 1876, which ended up supporting the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, to try to tell the story of Emmett Till without weeping in shame and horror, all the hideous mistakes and ignorance and collectively approved hatred of our (white folks’) ancestors, how does one really explain Eric Garner? “The man was allegedly illegally selling cigarettes on the street. So the policemen hired to protect American citizens choked him to death even when he repeatedly told them that he couldn’t breathe. And then the police didn’t even get in trouble.” Tell that to a preschooler.

“Oh, it’s more complicated than that,” some excuse-maker will say. But is it? I say if you can’t explain something in a way a preschooler can understand, then that something is terribly wrong.

Back to singing time. I wisely decided not to trample the preschooler's innocence and came up with some generic thing about Martin Luther King helping people row the boat across the waters to a better world, with “milk and honey on the other side.” When they get to Middle School, I’ll tell them a lot more, like the story I told my 8^th graders today of the Birmingham bombing while listening to John Coltrane’s tune Alabama and Joan Baez singing Birmingham Sunday.  These kids are starting to understand the complexity of human evil and the way economics and politics and our moral failings can cause all sorts of bad things to happen. They understand that awareness of history helps prepare them to name a better future, helps them to recognize the forces still at work today, helps them to develop the character and determination to continue the struggle for human rights.

But if you ever need a reminder of how plain wrong it all is, try explaining it all to a preschooler. 
Listen to what your explanation sounds like and then sneak away into a corner and weep.