Zadie and the Tower of Babel

I’m sitting at an Indian restaurant in Salzburg and eavesdropping on the German conversation one table over. I can’t understand a word, but always enjoy just tuning into the music of another language. They could be talking smack about a colleague or discussing the Theory of Everything, how would I know? But I do know a bit just by the tone, gesture, facial expressions. It’s probably just the usual universal small talk, but it sounds so intelligent because…well, because I can’t understand it!

I’m wishing that granddaughter Zadie was with me and I could pick her brain about what she’s thinking when she hears them. At 3 years plus, she’s just broken into the treasure vault of language where combinations of sounds mean very specific things. What would she think when she hears German? “What’s wrong with these people?” Or “Dang! I thought I was getting this language thing down. What’s this?!” Or “Why are those grown-ups talking baby talk?” Or if there were German speakers at one table, Italians at another, Japanese at another, would she be aware that each is different? Has anyone researched these questions and at what ages?

Why do we speak different languages? It all makes me think of the story of the Tower of Babel and marvel at its weirdness. According to Genesis, people build a giant tower whose “top is in the heavens” (the first skyscraper?) and God comes down to check it out. He comments, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

What?! Everyone can understand each other and they can do what they dream so let’s go down and mess it all up? And by the way, who precisely is Us? Is He talking to Mrs. God or son Jesus or a team of mischievous troublemaking lesser gods? They come down and people try to say “pass the salt, please” and to their surprise it comes out, “Pasame la sal, por favor.” So people get up indignantly from the table of their common humanity shouting “Hey, man, I can’t understand a word you’re saying!” and scatter all over the earth speaking different tongues. Then they started killing each other because one group named their spiritual force Yahweh and another Krishna and another Ogun and another The Great Spirit and so on. Nice work, God! Is that what you wanted? And then impatient gestures and loud voices were invented as obnoxious American tourists ask the bewildered natives where the nearest Starbucks is. Worst of all, countless hours are wasted in schools memorizing little dialogues and at the end of eight years of study, U.S. citizens traveling in France can barely say more than “hello, goodbye, please, thank you and how much for that beer?”

Nowhere in the Bible does it call the tower Babel, but one suggestion is that it came from a Hebrew word that means jumble. Apparently, Babylon was named accordingly, being the alleged site of that old Trump Tower. Baby’s “babble” certainly must be related to it. And out of it all came Bob Marley’s great reggae song “By the Rivers of Babylon.” Well, maybe that’s some consolation.

 Of course, I love that there’s more than one way to say “I strolled beneath the moon” and wonder whether kids growing up bi-lingual are more flexible thinkers, understanding somewhere deeply that our naming of the world is a convenient fiction not intended to freeze everything into heavy fundamentalists nouns, but navigate more skillfully down the river of thought. My Spanish and German friends who married had a daughter who at two years old was walking around looking up at la luna, der mond and the moon without apparently feeling any confusion.

While thinking about all of this walking home from the restaurant, I passed the sculpture shown below. Might this be the new Tower of Babel, with a multiplicity of musical styles emerging from each speaker? And isn’t my work to be the translator for diverse musical languages, making them mutually intelligible to each other? 

Love Letter to Salzburg

I am in love. Again. Walking two feet off the ground held in the embrace of a love without fear of betrayal or needed talks about “the relationship.” My love is unconditional for she who I love is beyond conditions. She demands nothing, she expects nothing, she withholds nothing and she gives everything. just by being herself. Her name is Salzburg.

What is this life but a series of openings and closings, awakenings and slumber, peaks and valleys? The peaks are the places we leap to when the heart bursts open or slowly saunters up a winding path and is suddenly dazzled by the view. We open to a world larger than the one we previously inhabited and everything is changed forever. Or if not forever, at least as long as we keep that fire somewhere smoldering, ready to burst into flame again, bookmark that true north point on our compass to find ourselves again.

You know what I’m talking about. That first love of your life. That first trip to Europe or Africa or the other side of the tracks. That book that carried us beyond our known world and set us down in Bhutan twenty years later. All those “firsts” that have an electrical charge and enlarged presence far greater than they will ever have again, those magical moments when everything is new and green and Spring, all buds and blossoms, all songbirds that carry away the heavy loads of our skin-bound sense-of-self and dissolve us into the surrounding world. And as firsts, so much of it happens between the ages of 10 and 30.

But I had a second chance when I came to Salzburg in 2003 for six weeks teaching my first “Special Course” at the Orff Institute. I lived in a farmhouse in the small village of Anif and every day, walked the 45 minutes or biked the 20 minutes through winding wooded paths under the watchful eyes of the surrounding mountains. The ears serenaded by distant church bells, the legs pumping needed exercise, the eyes drinking in beauty, the lungs welcoming draughts of fresh air, the nose filled with the scent of wild onions, the heart opening and opening and opening yet again. Quite the opposite of the stressful freeway commute!

Each day, I stopped to greet the lions in the zoo by the path, careened through Hellbrun Park, pedaled down Hellbrun Allee where Julie Andrews skipped so gleefully and now I knew why. Arrived at the Orff Institut to teach the very classes I was born to teach, lingered in the nearby park for a 2- hour picnic lunch in company with the students, taught a bit more, biked into the Old Town or the New Town or along the roaring Salzach River. Then the reverse commute with the moon rising over Untersberg Mountain, the day’s joys carried on my back, returning to the solitude of my cozy room without laptop or e-mail. Just a delicious book or tasty journal writing to finish the day—and then up the next morning to do it all over again.

I was 52 years old. And felt like a 22-year-old just starting out in a new life. The exquisite architecture of the old town enveloped me in a historical past, the groundbreaking work at the Institute sowed seeds for a glorious future and the omnipresent trees and fields and hills and mountains and river and ponds put me in the center of a timeless present. Never before or since have I felt such a perfect balance of work and leisure, of exercise and rest, of community and solitude, of the old and the new, of the beauty of the natural world and the beauty of the well-wrought city, .

Today, with three hours between my last afternoon class and my first evening one, I had the good sense to get out into the sun and warming weather and walk the old path back to Anif. The lion cage at the edge of the zoo is now a gorilla cage, but beyond that, not a single thing on the path has changed. I walked transported, recalling all those old feelings of those notable six weeks. Salzburg threw everything it had at me back then— biking home at night in sleet and rain, restaurants closed and eating a dinner of Pringles from a local gas station, feeling frustrated trying to communicate with my landlady about my desperate need for laundry, but none of it made a dent, it was all a part of the grand adventure. And yes, sometimes the people I passed seemed a bit too grim in comparison with the beauty of their surroundings and occasionally I thought about the ghosts still lingering from the Nazi horrors, but mostly I felt only enchantment and excitement and adventure and love and a sense of deep belonging. I was a little boy exploring new places, I was a teenager smitten by puppy love, I was a young adult dazzled by the beckoning world and the unlimited possibilities of who I might be and what I might accomplish. And today, at 63 years old, I could feel it all stirring to life again.

And it is glorious. 

From Spring to Winter

The return to the traveling music teacher began at 1:30 this afternoon as I boarded the flight to Frankfort, Germany. Six months of solid work at my school behind me, seven weeks of traveling and teaching ahead, first East to Europe, then West to Southeast Asia with a 24 hour re-fuel in-between back in San Francisco. I write from the Youth Hostel in Salzburg where the mechanical clock says 7 pm and my body’s clock says “Huh?”

Always bizarre to think back that the day began on a warm Spring day in San Francisco with a walk to the Farmer’s Market and now I’m plunged into a rainy winter evening in Salzburg. Not only is body time disoriented, but the ancient self that started to awaken and blossom with the flowers takes two giant steps backward into the last clutches of winter. No daffodils here dare raise their heads, any snow flurries are the real deal and not plum blossoms blowing off in a Spring breeze. People walk by clutching their jackets and bent down against the cold, no slow sauntering welcoming birds back from down South. Here in Central Europe beneath the Austrian Alps, it will be at least another six weeks or so before folks start to re-awaken with the earth. And even then, cautiously for at least another month.

But a mere three weeks from now, this traveler will leap from Winter to Summer, travel with lighter suitcases and step off the plane in Malaysia straight into the heat of July in March. Here is something new under the sun— none of our ancestors for the entire history of humankind minus the last 75 years or so of flying ever experienced such instant shift of seasons. Florida before, say 1950, was inhabited by Florideans, not folks from New York or Minnesota boarding the plane to dodge the next blizzard and retreat to their Winter’s Summer home.

And so this body in canon with itself, this psyche with the back foot in Spring and the front foot in Winter, takes off into downtown Salzburg to search out dinner. This home away from home welcoming me back as it has year after year for 25 years. The Schloss castle dependably perched on the hill in city’s center, the snow-capped peaks of Untersberg Mountain looking down on me, the rushing Salzsach River still hurrying to nowhere, just going about their business and not wondering why I still don’t speak German. The 39-year old who first came here like a pilgrim to the Orff Institut Mecca not so different from the 63-year old who returns yet again except for a quarter century of experiences proving that the path has been a worthy one, indeed, an extraordinary one. It has called forth every ounce of talent, passion, intelligence and love I could dig up and rewarded it many times over with the extraordinary breakthroughs of ordinary people, the ordinary promises of extraordinary people.

Now let’s see if I can still decipher German menus. Bitte.

A Day to Remember

One of the more dubious claims one can publicly state: “I was a good parent.” Why? Because your children are out there somewhere and might read it. But I do believe that my wife Karen and I were (are) reasonably good parents and one of the things we did best was birthday parties. I always thought we should publish our work in a book and get rich and famous, but alas, we never did.

But the parties were original, if nothing else. There was the preschool version with a piñata and “fishing in Talia’s Ocean”— a big painted piece of cardboard behind which I was crouched attaching party favors to the “hook.” Then daughter Kerala’s 5^th grade birthday with a “cocktail party” at our house, kids dressed up in elegant clothes with fake moustaches sipping Shirley Temple’s with little umbrellas and dancing to Fred Astaire singing “Cheek to Cheek.” Followed by a limousine ride to one of her friend’s house who shared the same birth date. Then Talia’s Middle School memorable Vertigo party— driving around San Francisco in two cars with walkie talkies (1996—pre-cell phones) and filming scenes (with a big clunky borrowed video camera) from Hitchcock’s film on location, watching it back at home and then the real film. And on into high school, dropping 16-year old Kerala and her friends off at the trail to the West Point Inn on Mt. Tam, where they hiked alone to this marvelous Inn and spent the night without a parent in sight. You get the idea.

So for my wife’s 65^th birthday yesterday, it seemed a good time to bring back the imaginative birthday party. Talia, she and I (Kerala’s up in Portland) created a scavenger hunt in the Presidio, invited 25 people from different eras of Karen’s life, divided into teams and had ourselves a walloping good time. Events included asking practicing golfers if one of us could try our hand, getting strangers into group photos with sunglasses and hat to see if the other team can find “Where’s Waldo,” getting kids at a playground to sing Happy Birthday to Karen, building rock sculptures on fence posts, climbing trees and my personal favorite, singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to match the beat of the flashing lighthouse light on distant Alcatraz. All of the above documented on cell phone cameras.

From there to a Burmese restaurant for a scrumptious lunch, sharing the photos, sipping sangria and of course, the mandatory candles and cake. Karen gave a lovely talk acknowledging her first birthday without a parent to call and thanking all for being willing to play and hike and eat and drink and talk together to share the occasion.

By now, it was 3:30 pm and the day was young! A few hours of rest and then off to the Fairmount Hotel’s Venetian Room to hear—Judy Collins! Singing Sondheim. She’s 76, looks great, sings great and put together a fine show mixing Mae West jokes with her autobiography and Sondheim’s biography. Truth be told, I’ve never loved the latter’s music—and truth be told, the evening didn’t change my mind. I hold him responsible for creating long-ling melodies that no one leaves the theater singing (a couple of exceptions) and breaking the connection between Broadway Musicals and jazz. Well, of course that’s stupid. He just reflected the times and there was also Tim Rice and others on that new musical bandwagon. Broadway and jazz had a great long run, roughly 1925 to 1965 (Coltrane’s My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music one of the last tunes in that long 40-year marriage). It was time for something else from both sides of the line.

But why is Judy Collins singing Broadway tunes? Didn’t come as a total surprise, because I found some CD’s of her working that repertoire. And her autobiography made it clear that these songs were in her blood. Still, she mixed some of her old folk standards in last night’s show—Someday Soon, Chelsea Morning, Both Sides Now, My Father Always Promised Us and you could feel the excitement in the room as all the white-headed audience members slipped back to their youth. (Wait! I was one of them!) Each in a nostalgic bubble remembering that old girlfriend/boyfriend or group of friends huddled around the stereo singing along with Judy. The soundtrack of the times.

It felt like a perfect end to a special day, but it wasn’t quite over yet. Driving home, some five minutes away from the house, our trusty old 260,000 mile ’89 Toyota Camry suddenly shut off, lights and engine. Pulled over, called Triple A and waited for them to confirm it was the alternator and a mere jumpstart would not hold. So we get towed to a nearby AAA garage. The driver had trouble opening it and offered to take it to another garage and leave us there to walk home. Which we did, just slightly wondering what would stop him from just taking off with our car since we don’t have any of his information. Hmm. But really, who would want it?

Our old Toyota still (hopefully) chugging along, our old friends still hiking up hills and willing to play silly games, Judy Collins still singing in her ‘70’s, my wife an official Senior Citizen, it was a day to celebrate longevity, youthful spirit and the pleasure of “keeping on keeping on.”

Onward!