The Real Story of George and the Cherry Tree

Remember the story of little Georgie Washington who was so enamored with his new hatchet that he went around hacking everything in the yard? Including his father’s beloved cherry tree. When the father demanded to know who chopped down his tree, little Georgie fessed up, “I cannot tell a lie. It was me.” And his father embraced him, saying his honesty was worth more than any tree.

Well, prepare for a disappointment. Just like Columbus as a hero and Santa and such, it turns out that it probably wasn’t true. Somebody lied. Maybe the same guy who actually did chop down that cherry tree. Who knows? It was a long time ago and their were no Instagrams to provide immediate evidence.

But with most San Francisco kids off from school this week, I have a theory. I think the story goes like this:

“George as a young teen went out to eat one night at a Chinese restaurant and fell in love with the waitress. Because mixed relationships were discouraged— someone who ate with a fork and another who ate with chopsticks— they started meeting secretly behind the cherry tree. When Lunar New Year came, George wanted to give his new love a gift. The cherry tree was in bloom, the pink blossoms were close to the coveted red colors of the Chinese New Year celebration and they both had many fond memories of their time lying under the tree. Since the florist was closed, he decided to chop down the whole tree to give it to her as a gift. He traveled 9 miles from his log cabin where he could barely read the heart-shaped candies he bought with secret messages like “B My Valentine” and delivered the tree and the candies and some Valentine fortune cookies, returned the extra penny the candy-maker had given him by mistake and went home with a full heart. (One version reports that he also did extensive research and learned how to sing” Sakura” to her until she politely told him that this was a Japanese song. Oops!)

When he got home, he overheard his father fuming about the tree and decided to get out of Dodge. So he grabbed his skis, returned to his beloved and took off for a week of glorious skiing until things cooled off. When he got home, his father had forgotten all about the tree because he had hurt his back shoveling the driveway. And then George became President.”

And that’s why this week, the SF Unified School District kids get off school for Chinese New Year, the private school kids go skiing, the Post Office is closed on President’s Day and everyone celebrates Valentine’s Day. Four-in-one!! All because of George’s secret love affair with a Chinese waitress, whose name has remained anonymous (though some conjecture she changed it to Martha and forbid all portrait painters in her house, worried that future fanatics in Alabama would stop using dollars to protest their mixed marriage.)

The end.

Awesome and Uthful

How did the martyrdom of a Christian saint in the 5^th century get connected with those little heart-shaped candies that say “B My Valentine?” (I still remember the illicit thrill I felt when I got one from Francine Badalmenti in 5^th grade!) It’s about as unlikely a connection as any holiday can have and Wikipedia seems as baffled as I am! But there was a Christian holiday in honor of St. Valentine, who was executed by those big bad Romans for performing illegal weddings for soldiers and helping persecuted Christians. There was an additional little story of how he healed the jailor’s daughter and wrote her a farewell note (the first “Valentine”) before marching off to be killed.

Apparently, Chaucer had something to do with associating him with romantic love. With the advent of the troubadours, a day set aside to write to one’s beloved was appealing. And then came the flowers and hearts and chocolates— and Hallmark.

As noted last entry, for me it’s mostly an excuse to teach and sing some songs written about love. It has proved to be a fertile theme—only some 10 million to choose from!

The highlight of my Valentine’s Day? Two cards from two students.

A first grader:

Dering to have fun

Awesome

Uthful

Graet

It warms my heart to know that "Daug" is awesome, graet and oh, so, uthful. (Truthful?) And I love “dering to have fun.” It does take some bravado to commit oneself to genuine fun.

The fifth grader:

“Your teaching is the best! I think you could make it on Broadway with your talent!”

But do Broadway stars get Valentine cards like these? I'll stick with teaching.

PS Thanks to the superior intelligence of my Facebook friends, it seems like she was aiming for "youthful." Good enough for me! The original posted below:

What? Me Sing?

So is the title of the chapter about singing in my book “Play, Sing and Dance: An Introduction to Orff Schulwerk.” In it, I freely confess that I rarely sang as a kid— in elementary school, a little “Erie Canal” here, a little “Star Spangled Banner” there, in high school, some Beatles or Rolling Stones on the car radio, singing with my friends cruising the streets for some action (“I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” the soundtrack of our failure to meet girls), in college, leaning on some basses in the chorus to get myself a free ride to Europe singing Masses by Renaissance composers Ockeghem and Dufay.

At 24 years old, I had my first official job as music teacher at The San Francisco School and was in charge of something called Singing Time. Armed with my three chords on the guitar and an Alan Lomax book of folk songs, I set to work to fill the 20 minutes daily with something that was reasonably enjoyable for both the kids and myself. Very little in my background prepared me for that task, but that was part of the job description and there was no choice but to step up to it.

So here I was yesterday, 40 years into the same job at the same school with the same commitment to daily singing, sitting in front of the 100 1^st through 5^th graders with my banjo and guitar at my side and piano close by and 20 music teachers from Sacramento who were visiting the program for the day. We had been singing love songs in honor of Valentine’s Day and it was time to review them. So off we went—You Are My Sunshine, Honey You Can’t Love One, Froggy Went A’courtin’, Red River Valley, Down in the Valley, On Top of Old Smokey, The Riddle Song, The Water Is Wide, Love Is Something If You Give It Away, Tony Chestnut, De Lanterna Na Mao (Brazil), Choucounne (Haiti), Jamaica Farewell, Skinnamarink, A You’re Adorable, Five Foot Two. Beautiful singing, seamless transitions from one song to the next, good feeling for all styles, all words memorized, 99% full participation (how I want to name the delinquent! But discretion prevails.), perfect endings and why did that clock have to tell us to stop?! We were just getting warmed-up! Had another fifty love songs under our belt waiting for the kids’ voices to keep them alive and happy.

After a Chinese Lion Dance interlude by the 6^th grade, my guests and I drove up to the Jewish Home for the Aged and put in another glorious hour-plus of non-stop singing through the Great American Songbook, with delightful detours to a Mozart aria from one of the guests and Home on the Range, the one song everyone knew the lyrics to. The air was charged with beauty and communion and healing sounds and all from the power of the human voice combined with poetry, memory and 88 piano keys as the earth from which we flew. And so this young man in his 60’s who barely sang as a child finds song at the center of his life. Who could have predicted?

And yes, I still suffer from the faulty wiring of unattended neuron connections as a child. I’ve worked hard to improve, but more often than I like, I feel the cobbled-together neurocircuitry of my musical brain fraying like duct tape losing its stick and envy those who hear pitches clearly in their head and have an effortless direct connection to their voice. But passion, love and a fearless plunge into the steps and leaps of each melody help me at least be a good enough faker to kick-start any song and then let the group take over.

Here’s hoping that you sing to your beloved on Valentine’s Day. And every day of your life. 

Rigor and Vigor

What is the big difference between kids and grown-ups? Well, take your pick. My pick today is “energy!” Kids are overflowing with life’s abundant energy, running from one place to another just because. The last time I ran was to try to catch a bus and I was sore for three days afterwards. And missed the bus.

Out in the forest or woods or fields or villages, kids run free like wild horses and it’s all just fine. But put them inside a school building and things start to get weird. “No running in the halls” makes sense given confined space with crowds of bi-peds, but sitting at desks for hours is profoundly natural for all human beings— and especially children. It’s cruel and unusual punishment and why punish children for being themselves?

Is kids’ energy sometimes difficult for adults to handle? If anyone wonders, just ride in a car for three hours with them. (Again, confined space!) So it’s safe to say that parents and teachers and coaches and such need to find a way to maintain their own mental health without murdering the spirit of children. We want kids to feel the full measure of their vigor and we want to find a way for us to enjoy it, for us grown-ups to be inspired and infected by it and reminded to keep our own alive and well.

Enter the arts. The arts are the wild fields through which the child’s natural exuberance can roam freely, leap about with the full force of the imagination and the full energy of their expressive bodies. The arts are the places where the unbridled enthusiasm is given a bridle and saddle so that we can ride the horse of our passion and not be trampled by it. So yes, a bit of taming is in order, but get astride a horse and you feel its wild energy vibrating beneath you, ready to trot, gallop, leap, canter, walk, with you directing the raw impulses.

And so each art form combines a natural vigor with a disciplined rigor. There are scales to be mastered and techniques to be learned and sacrifices to be made to achieve higher levels of expression and control. This is the place where the adult leads the child, showing in their own accomplishment what’s at the end of such delayed gratification.

The sad fact is that schools forever (read Dickens) have tried to beat the child out of the child or damp that vigorous energy down in all sorts of ways. And the results? Well, walk into a school and see how well we have succeeded. Kids whose bodies are dull and unexpressive and voices flat and monotone and emotion dry— at least in the presence of adults. So even Arts in the schools can feel dull and flat, drama teachers exhorting children, those most feeling of creatures, to feel, art teachers encouraging kids to draw beyond the edges of their imagination, music teachers reminding kids that they have bodies that are necessary to the performance. It’s weird. We put them to sleep and then wonder why we can’t awaken them again.

And so a word to schools and teachers. Share your passion and vigor with the kids, enjoy and invite their passion and vigor. At the same time, demand focus and rigor, help kids move from raw impulses to coherent expression. The full range of kids’ energy expressed and celebrated as Rigor and Vigor dance together.  Yeah!

Trickle-Up Theory

I hated my high school. It was an all-boys private Country Day School for Young Gentlemen where we wore jacket and ties and called our teachers “sir.” The seniors were trained to be neo-fascists who gave “restrictions” to underclassman for Study Hall misbehavior. Five restrictions and you had to come in for an hour on Saturday mornings to copy mindlessly for an hour from boring books and then throw it all away. (Okay, Peter Cowan, I recognize you were a victim of the system and do forgive you.). It was a good ole boys club and I wasn’t one of the good ole boys nor did I want to be.

But I felt like I deserved equal treatment and carried around bitterness for a long time that sports records and victories were always announced at lunch by the Headmaster, who somehow conveniently forgot to announce mine— I shattered the existing pole valut recorder by three inches! And in my senior year, I entered the Public Speaking Contest and again, no winner was announced. When I asked why, I was told that none of the speeches were good enough to merit it. “Hey, it’s a contest. They might have been bad, but you have to pick the best of the bad!” But apparently they didn’t. I’ve finally let go of my anger, but let’s just say that their alumni fundraising has suffered without my significant contribution.

Why am I talking about this? Because yesterday I visited an impressive school that had the poster below in every classroom. Besides actively working on numbers 7 and 10, it reminded me of a line from my high school speech that said something to the effect of:

“If we can practice for hours a day to make more foul shots, master a piece of music or do better on the math test, why can’t we practice being more loving and fulfilled human beings?”

And that’s exactly what the Toolbox Project is trying to do. Now it’s easy to be cynical and say that no mere posters and fantasies of social engineering are going to create the human beings we would like to be. We are not machines nor mechanical creations that can be assembled correctly. We are a complex tangled mess of emotion and patterns of psyche at the mercy of our genes and families and cultures and the whole catastrophe of random experience that twists and turns us and has us obsessing about a failed pole vault announcement for decades.

And yet, as I suggested in my failed high school speech, there are tools that can help us build bridges between the disconnected parts of ourselves, between our ignorance and understanding, between our fear of the other and our empathy and compassion. It’s worthy work to name them out loud, to help children learn how to use such tools and suggest that we can indeed be more than helpless puppets pulled by circumstance and reptilian responses. We will constantly fall short, but at least we’ll have a clear notion of the higher plateau we’re aiming for and some tools as to how to ascend and regain our footing.

I’m painfully aware that there are five different essays here and I’m desparately in need of a topic sentence that follows the title. But I’m on a team to evaluate the Arts Programs at this school (ah! The Arts! Lots of great tools there for human health and happiness!) and am late for breakfast. But here’s the title thought:

My first reaction reading this chart below was this—“Has Congress seen this?” In a healthy culture, the height of achievement and the wisdom comes from the top down, from the elders to the youth. And yet it seems like the most intelligent and heartful work these days is being done in elementary and preschools. If only we could trickle it up to Congress and Fox news pundits and prison wardens and corporate workplaces (some of that last actually happening). Maybe we adults could finally get some of the missing pieces in our own failed school toolboxes and be just a bit better than we are. One can only hope.