The Limits of Nostalgia

What strange creatures we are! Today I went to a dentist appointment. Same dentist I’ve had since 1977, but a new location from the one I’ve gone to since 1989. And I felt nostalgic for the old place!

You have to understand that I like Bob, my dentist, and taught three of his kids. His wife Linda is my dental hygienist and for the first five minutes of every appointment, I enjoy chatting and catching up. But after that comes the pain. Sometimes the physical pain, certainly the financial pain and generally the emotional pain of paying back a bad inheritance from my parents. For though I have dutifully dental flossed since 1972 and eat a generally healthy diet, bad teeth have been my personal cross to bear. A trip through my mouth is an obstacle course of bridges and crowns and root canals and none of it was exactly my fault. 

So there should not be a single pleasant association with entering their building, walking down the long hallway, entering the inviting waiting room and then sitting in the chair looking out at a lovely view of Twin Peaks, sometimes with Linda’s dog nestled on my lap. And yes, sometimes the nitrous oxide during vigorous cleaning takes me back to the 60’s, so by no means is it all unpleasant. But generally, this home away from home was not something worth being nostalgic about.

And yet I was. The new office is a block down, Linda’s space had no window, Bob’s looked on the wall of another house and it just was weird to be with them there. I missed the old place!

But hey, that’s me. I was also unhappy when the computer fellow at school updated my operating system and some things looked just different enough that I noticed. I always survive and get through it and move on, but not casually so. 

So there you have it. Nostalgic for my old dentist office. Go figure.

Reality Check

I just spent two and a half hours with someone I despise. Not fun, but a necessary reminder. Like so many, I have been almost weirdly nostalgic for the Bush years in the face of Trumpty Dumpty’s circus. But I knew then that very bad things were happening and last night came the reminder.

I’m talking about the movie Vice. An insight into what we all knew and now confirming it—George W. wasn’t quite as clueless as D. T., but pretty close. Cheney was the Wizard behind the curtain pulling all the strings, driven by a carefully-crafted cynical vision of the world and a determination to bend it towards his self-serving and hateful plan.

From the beginning, I’ve said that the comparisons between Trump and Hitler don’t hold up because Hitler had a vision and a plan and Trump’s plan is just to confirm his pathologic view of his own ego and power. Cheney was much closer to the Hitler model, methodically shutting down checks and balances in favor of “unitary executive power” and opening the door to right-wing media, no-bid Haliburton contracts, manufacturing consent to turn 9/11 into an opportunity to get oil and so much more. All of it slyly and silently, with few people noticing. The scenes with him and his family could almost be occasionally touching, but then you must remember that some million families around the world might have been in the midst of a nice dinner when the bombs he ordered blew them to smithereens. And to the end, he showed not an ounce of remorse. Even when accidentally shooting someone on a hunting expedition. 

Trump is a pathological narcissist, but Cheney is what is called a psychopath. Four of the twenty traits of such mentally disturbed people are that they are cunning and manipulative, show lack of remorse or guilt, exhibit shallow emotional response and demonstrate callousness and lack of empathy. Watch the movie with that in mind. 

Of course, power itself seems to attract its fair share of crazy people—think Attila the Hun, Henry the 8^th, King Leopold, Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and so on. But if we are to fulfill any sense of evolution in human consciousness and human rights, we would do well to remember that in the U.S., it is we ourselves that elect these people. If schools did their job to create citizens with the ability to think, with a beating heart that can feel beyond its own needs and the capacity to see through the lies and manipulation (the way we were duped into invading Iraq, well-covered in the movie), there is hope that we can at least lean toward the Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi brand of politician. Not perfect people, but not publicly-sanctioned psychopaths. 

Go see the movie for this important reminder.

Something

The poet William Stafford’s advice to young poets: Write every day. Don’t wait until you’re inspired. Sit down pen in hand, put it to the paper and see what emerges. Some you’ll use, a lot you won’t, but it’s the act of committing and opening the door to inspiration that counts.

This blog is far from poetry, but it has been a similar kind of discipline. Though discipline doesn’t feel like quite the right word, implying some willful, teeth-gritting practice. Instead, the opportunity to post whatever is on my mind has been more like someone to daily share a beer with. It’s rarely an effort and the ideas and words just tend to flow.

When they don’t, I get a wee bit nervous that some door is starting to close that I like open. But in the case of the past few days, it has simply been the busyness and the business (one and the same) of school. There have been significant blog-worthy moments—like giving a workshop to my own colleagues and sharing some of the book I’m writing with them. A long-time colleague having a difficult open-heart surgery (opened up three times!). Getting a short letter from an old family friend (son of my parent’s friends) with black-and-white photos of him visiting my sister and I in the 1950’s and us all playing with guns. My daughter getting calls from CNN asking if she’s the one who tweeted the MAGA-Hat/ Native American video. (She wasn’t). All of it worthy for the kind of comments I habitually make.

But simply didn’t have the time or psychic space to do justice to any of it. And in 15 minutes, our annual Martin Luther King Ceremony is about to begin. 

But William Stafford would be proud. I took the time to write something, whether or not it will bring comfort, information or stimulus for greater thought. Just something.

Make America Great Again

The circus is back in town. Well, really, it never left. The latest side-show is MAGA-hatted young conservatives shouting across the great divide to Native American elders. The media is in pig-heaven as the theater of opposition ramps up yet again without a single civil word being spoken or a single coherent thought considered.

If I was the Native American elder and —miracle of miracles—there was an opportunity to dialogue with those hatted folks, I’d say: “Let’s talk about that word “again.” I dare you to name a year when America was truly great. Meaning living up to its promise of liberty and justice for all. Name a single year when every American citizen was judged solely by the content of their character, where any one was welcome to visit or live in any neighborhood, when schools gave equal opportunity to all. You know the list. But now, name the year.”

Didn’t think you could. But I can. The year was 1491. And all the years before that. It wasn’t perfect. There was tribal warfare, but there wasn’t genocide. People would move from one location to another based on weather or food, but not because someone else re-located them to a virtually unlivable place. There was occasional drought and pestilence and fires, but there wasn’t anything called climate change. And if you could measure the environmental impact people made on the land back then over a hundred years time, it would probably be 1% of one day in downtown Los Angeles. I’d say that all makes America pretty great way back then.”

Now, young man, you seem to be all for this wall and against criminal immigrants. You want to keep them out and deport the ones that are here. Is that correct? Yes? I thought so.”

So, now, please give me your hat and get off my land. You, sir, are an illegal immigrant with a proven criminal record and my people and I are the only ones qualified to say, ‘Make America Great Again.’ It was nice talking with you.”

Did you get that, Fox News?

Late Bloomer

I was nobody special in high school. Not the captain of the football team or student council president or valedictorian. In college, I wasn’t the hip jazz pianist nor the political rabble-rouser nor the spiritual yogi nor the brooding poet. And certainly not the hot womanizer. So I sometimes wonder how people saw me back then or remembered me.

In Puerto Rico, I connected with another music teacher who I had taught for three months back in 1971. He was a high school student at this alternative public high school called Shanti and I was an Antioch College intern teaching there briefly. Our meeting got me looking back into scrapbooks from that era and I found a letter written about me from the principal of Shanti to my Antioch advisor. He wrote:

Doug Goodkin is a young guy doing lots of growing and addressing himself most seriously to the tasks of learning, helping and loving. He has strong intellectual, personal and social commitments. He has rare integrity and a strong sense of fairness. He’s the kind of guy who ought to be working with kids.

I am reminded of Browning’s words in his poem Rabbi Ben Ezra:

Come along, grow old with me

My best is yet to be.

Well, isn’t that interesting? The things I still care about—integrity, fairness, intellectual commitment, learning, helping and loving—apparently were in place almost 50 years ago in some kind of seed form. I’ve always felt like I’m a late bloomer, the flower of my efforts taking a long, long time to blossom. But of course the seed would have needed to be in place before any of that could happen. I love that he predicted my life of working with kids and I believe he has passed on, so I can’t have the satisfaction of finding him and letting him know his insights were spot on. (Still, thank you, Gene Mulcahey!)

Today I’ll give one of the most challenging workshops of my career. In honor of my AOSA Distinguished Service Award, I’ll be presenting to my own colleagues at The SF School. One of the requested themes is my own path to Lifelong Learning and re-reading this letter is well-timed. Each year for the last ten years or so, I’ve felt like I’m at the top of my game and teaching better than ever before. And I can say the same for piano, meditation, writing, even biking. The dedication to daily practice indeed has reaped it’s half-inch of progress each day until suddenly I discover myself a couple of miles down the road. So the invocation of the closing poem still rings true for me 48 years after working at the Shanti School—“Come grow old with me. My best is yet to be.”

Politics and Poetry

Without care, this Blog could become the Mary Oliver Fan Club site! But in honor of this marvelous writer, and while it’s fresh, at least two more of some 50 poems I’d love to share.

If you know her work, you’re aware that she probably writes less about people and the human world than any other poet, living or dead. So when she does slip in a poem about politics, for example, you stand up and pay attention. It’s not that she doesn’t care. More that she made the choice of placing the center of her life elsewhere, into the reliable world of Nature’s bounty, even with its storms and death and expected and unexpected terrors.  Consider this poem from her book Red Bird:

Not This, Not That

Nor anything,

Not the eastern wind whose other name

    Is rain,

Nor the burning heats of the dunes

   At the crown of summer,

Nor the ticks, that new, ferocious populace,

Nor the President who loves blood,

Nor the governmental agencies that love money,

Will alter

My love for you, my friends and my beloved,

Or for you, oh ghosts of Emerson and Whitman

Or for you, oh blue sky of a summer morning,

That makes me roll in a barrel of gratitude

   Down hills,

Of for you, oldest of friends; hope;

Or for you, newest of friends: faith;

Or for you, silliest and dearest of surprises, my

Own life.

On the opposite page is another, yet more political poem, published in 2008 (before Obama’s election), that doesn’t console at the end with love, hope and faith and describes so perfectly part of who we have been as a country and never more disastrously than today.

Of the Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death

And adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

for the few and cared little for the penury of the

many. We will be known as a culture that taught

and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke

little if at all about the quality of life for

people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All

the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

commodity. And they will say that this structure

was held together politically, which it was, and

they will say also that our politics was no more

than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of

the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

How we need poets to tell the truth!

Sleep

A twelve-day marathon of non-stop music teaching

And now it’s Sunday.

I could have slept late, but I didn’t.

At 6am, the sentences were swirling about to be placed

in the book that has waited patiently,

neglected amidst all the comings and goings.

If I stayed under the covers,

they would leave, never to come back.

So here I am, sleep still beckoning in its foggy way.

But the bright screen awaits the black shapes that speak

of the twelve days I have just lived,

hoping to guide others foolish enough to disturb their own sleep

by dancing down this beckoning path.