Poison into Medicine

Just saw a short interview with the great jazz pianist Herbie Hancock. He tells a story about playing with Miles Davis and a moment when he played the wrong chord in the midst of Miles’ solo. While Herbie grimaced knowing he had made such a bad sound, Miles simply shifted his solo and found the notes that made the chord sound just right. It obviously made an impression on Mr. Hancock.

And so the lifelong lesson of being able to let go of making the perfect world according to one’s image and vision and simply accept the world as it presents itself and roll with it. Making lemonade from lemons, turning poison into medicine (Mr. Hancock’s phrase). 

Of course, his notion of the “wrong chord” came from years of dedicated study and disciplined practice of playing the “right chord,” a clear vision of what sounds good and what sounds less good. (Jazz theory books sometimes semantically call bad notes “avoid notes.”) So none of this is an excuse to relax your vision and efforts to shape the world. But it is a reminder that the world is a damn stubborn place that will not always jump through your hoops and you need to develop the parallel aikido moves of moving with whatever energy presents itself. That takes both the profound study Miles Davis had to do and the spontaneous presence to listen wholly and respond accordingly.

This is much on my mind as Trump keeps escalating his Hitleresque vision, without apology and shame, releasing the demons of followers looking for an excuse to vent their own failures on the scapegoat du jour. But while Trump is violently ejecting protestors, Bernie Sanders is hosting a sing-a-long at his rally. A Facebook post showed a hat that said, “Make America kind again.” The poisonous extremities of hate speech, ignorance and lies is also releasing the medicine of caring, intelligence and daring truth-telling. I can’t remember a chord in my lifetime as jarring as these Republican “debates” and Trump rallies, but instead of stopping the music, we can shift our solos to make something beautiful out of the situation. 

Poison into medicine. Thank you, Miles Davis, for your reminder of how to help heal a broken world.

Fond Farewells

Saw the movie 45 yesterday, which proceeds at such a glacial pace that it makes Downton Abbey seem like Mission Impossible. Friends, if my life crumbles to a toddering halt where conversation is reduced to painfully slow one-liners at the level of “pass the salt,” please take me to the vet and have me put down.

But speaking of Downton Abbey, wasn’t that a fine fairy tale ending? Everyone gets married and lives happily ever after. Politically incorrect and in the real world, marriage is more the beginning of the story than the end, but hey, I was happy. Hard to say goodbye to these characters that worked their way into our hearts, even Thomas who was so skillfully redeemed and Mary who finally started to smile a bit again and poor struggling Edith finally getting her fair measure of happiness. I’ll miss them all.

And speaking of missing, had a painful farewell to my faithful car of 24 years, our Toyota Camry’89 station wagon (which we bought in ’92) with some 260,000 miles. Fed up with its first signs of decline this past Fall and committed to getting air bags, my wife finally bought our first new car, a Toyota Prius. It has a better sound system and better mileage and doesn’t shake while idling at intersections, but between being new and there being 10,000 other cars in San Francisco exactly the same (down to the light green color), it has nowhere near the character of the old station wagon.

“Does a dog have Buddha nature?” an old Zen koan and I could equally inquire “Does a car have a soul?” Well, we know it’s just a collection of metal pieces, but we drove to school every (school) day these past few decades with our children starting with them being 8 and 12 all the way to this Fall with the long-ago 8-year old in the back seat as a fellow teacher and the long-ago 12-year old driving her own children when she came to visit this December. The windows with their school stickers—San Francisco School, Lick-Wilmerding, Brown University, Tufts University—proclaiming our allegiance to education, the ski rack on top rarely used, the bike rack that fit so neatly on back, the fold-down back seat to carry Orff instruments, the dent in the side. Character.

I held on to it for awhile, negotiating street parking and such, but when I went to Australia, had to park it at a friends house in the country an hour away. When I returned, my sister went to drive it back to me and it wouldn’t start. No time in my busy schedule to try it myself or get it towed and fixed, so finally just called the car donation place and had them get it. No time to say one last goodbye. I’m sad about that.

But if there’s one lesson in living so long, it’s the art of saying goodbye. 41 years at the same school means 41 Junes bidding farewells to our graduates, their parents, all the teachers who move on. So many people who you think “How can I go on without……?” and you feel the full sorrow of the change and then discover that you do go on and life continues to unfold without that particular presence. And now others have come to take that place, others who you again will say goodbye to. And the punch line is not to adapt some cool detachment and stop caring, but to care yet more deeply and say your goodbye properly. Then wake up the next morning and carry on. 

So Downton Abbey, old faithful Toyota, Ben from the Jewish Home, thanks for all you have given to me. It has been a joyful ride and now I come to the next turn in the road. In my Prius.

And the Angels Sing

The last two weeks, I’ve gone four times to the Jewish Home. Last Friday, my friend Scott came to play his always fabulous jazz trumpet with me and on Saturday, I took folks from my jazz workshop. Then yesterday went with my 4^th grade class (in eight years of playing there and bringing all sorts of people, my friend Fran called that the absolute highlight.).

Today I arrived early for the reception following the Memorial Service of one of the Home’s most beloved residents—Ben Lubitz. He was a Holocaust survivor who arrived with his wife in 2002. She died one year later and he remained, his only consolation the chance to play the grand piano there each and every day. By the time I arrived in 2008, he was the in-house piano player and I was cautious about playing for my Mom on “his” piano. But he very generously invited me to do so and we struck up a mutual admiration society. Every summer when I brought my jazz class to perform, I made sure that Ben played a few numbers. (I particularly remember the year I turned 59 and he turned 95— we got a kick out of our reverse ages).

Somewhere around two years ago, it was increasingly difficult for Ben to play. After all, he was 98! I encouraged him and helped him sometimes get in position, but finally he had to give it up. He gave me one of his books of Big-Band Music and signed it, officially handing over a mantle of sorts to me. Of course, every time I came to play, I made sure to greet him and he often came to listen. But last Friday when I came with Scott, I heard he was close to death. When I came back the next day, he was gone. At 100 years old—plus seven months.

On the way home, I felt the tears come and while listening to a beautiful Adagio by Bizet, had a strong image of him flying free of this century-old body, free of the pained remembrance of the Holocaust, free to re-unite with his wife on the other side. It was a comforting image and I hope it’s true.

So today, I opened my session playing various classical pieces in his honor, some of which he had played and some of which were just right to set the tone of loving remembrance. After Bach’s Arioso, I played the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria and somewhere about halfway through, heard this angelic voice singing the melody, gaining in strength and climbing with resolve to the high notes. At first I thought I was imagining it, but once it was clear that it was real, I peeked over the piano and there was a new resident, 89-year old Florence (as I later found out) singing with such clarity and beauty. Did you ever see that scene in the movie The Shawshank Redemption where a Mozart aria is played over the loudspeaker of a prison and all these hardened criminals stop in their tracks and listen as if their lives depended on it? That was the feeling in that room today, as all the people present were feeling the angels descending and gracing us all with such unexpected beauty.

And if Ben needed an extra breath of wind to send him winging to his loved ones, I believe he got it.

Singin' in the Rain

Gene Kelly would have been proud of my 4^th graders. We walked a mile from The San Francisco School to the Jewish Home for the Aged and yes, we were singin’ in the rain. Every step of the way. Gene sloshed through puddles because his heart was overflowing with love for the Debbie Reynolds character, but these kids were just filled with the exuberance of life and hey, why not sing while we walk? Just because.

And then we arrived and sang again, mostly the same songs, but now with me at the piano. Classics from the Great American Songbook: Side by Side; Sunnyside of the Street; When You're Smiling; My Favorite Things; High Hopes; Pick Yourself Up; Pennies from Heaven; Ja Da; Mares Eat Oats; Five Foot Two; Let's Get Away From It All; Chattanooga Choo-choo for starters. Then a few songs from the 1890's, folk songs and such. Some 25 elders so amazed that the kids knew all these songs and all the words to them (without any written lyrics), so delighted to see the kids, to hear them sing, to watch them dance and juggle and do gymnastics and play trumpet, to shake their hand at the end and chat with them across an 80 to 100 year divide.

And then we reluctantly pulled ourselves away and out into a rather heavy rain, with promises of the bus coming in five minutes. Come it did, but too full for us to get on. “Don’t worry, there’s another four minutes behind" said the bus driver. So we waited again, 22 kids huddled under a few umbrellas, many kids bareheaded and soaked through and me determined to be more aggressive getting them on the next bus.

Which might have worked had the bus not PASSED US BY WITHOUT STOPPING! Already late for our school return, no choice but to walk the mile back and no sign of the rain relenting. Resourceful kids grabbed plastic tubs from a curbside recycling bin to use as umbrellas, one desperate boy found a bush to pee behind, the puddles at the intersections were rising higher by the second and kids were practicing their leaps. 

But everyone kept their good humor and why not? It’s just rain and wasn’t that singing fine?

Same Old Same Old

I’ve mentioned Bryan Stevenson several times now, but if you’re wondering about him, run out and get his book “Just Mercy.” This book, along with Michael Moore’s new film “Where to Invade Next,” have led me to one irrefutable conclusion:

Things are so much worse than I thought.

Being around kids day in and day out, I’m always leaning far to the side of hope, accentuating the positive and celebrating the great distance we’ve come from the “good old days” that were so bad, so horrific, so unbearable, so sorrow-laden for so many in this country—especially if you were a person of color, a worker in a factory, a woman, a homosexual. But between the above book and the above film, I see that so much is the same old same old. Consider:

• 1865: 13^th Amendment passed and slavery was officially abolished. But after a brief period of rising status of black folks, Reconstruction ended (through a deal behind closed doors in Washington), the Ku Klux Klan began its campaign of terrorism, lynchings began.

• 1890: Jim Crow segregation laws wreaked havoc with the possibility of equal rights and various strategies to keeps blacks from voting—poll taxes, literacy tests, residence requirements, physical threats and more, were in effect.

• 1954: Supreme Court ends school segregation with Brown vs. Board of Education.

• 1964: Civil Rights Act signed into law outlawing discrimination in many areas. 14^th Amendment guaranteed citizens equal protection under the law, 15^th Amendment protected Voting Rights.

• 1967: Supreme Court declared interracial marriage legal.

Marriage, voting rights, equal protection, education— by 1970, you can see the moral arc of the American universe slowly bending towards justice.

And yet. In 1971, Nixon begins his War on Drugs and treats it as a criminal offense rather than a mental health issue (like alcohol abuse is). Michael Moore’s movie shows impressive results in Portugal and other places were drug addiction is de-criminalized, but the result in the U.S. was a huge increase in the prison population and the population that suffered most were black folks living in urban areas where drugs were both a Mafia-business and a personal survival strategy to endure racism and poverty. As a result, the prison population that was around 300,000 in the early 1970’s is now 2.3 million people! And one in three black male babies (of which my grandson is one) can expect to be incarcerated if the system continues like this! Money spent on jails and prisons has grown from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today.

Michael Moore’s movie, Bryan Stevenson’s book and particularly the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander reveal a chilling portrait of the new system of segregation, voter-suppression and a type of slavery. Instead of working in the fields, black prisoners are making products for companies like Victoria’s Secret at slave-wages. Former prisoners have had their voting rights taken away, assuring the good-old boy system of protecting white privilege in places where blacks make up a significant part of the population. And a significant number of incarcerated blacks got thrown in jail by all-white juries, insufficient evidence and a rigged system. Not to mention the epidemic of young black men murdered by policeman who get off scot-free. So much for progress in voting rights, equal protection, education.

In short, it’s one thing to work against individual ignorance and prejudice, but these are purposeful, political and systematic government-approved forces doing everything in their power to keep blacks under the white privileged or supremacist thumbs. And worst of all, it’s working. And it’s mostly invisible— so many good-hearted people are wholly ignorant of these forces as work.

As I said. It’s so much worse than I thought.

My friends, there is so much work ahead. Let us not rest content with progress. Keep alert, speak out, educate (yourself and others), keep your heart open even though it breaks just reading the story of Walter McMillian (in Just Mercy). Pick your corner of injustice and dig in.

Either that or let’s just all move to Europe.