The Depth of Friendship

Here’s a confession. Sometimes in San Francisco if I want to go to the movies with a friend, I can’t think of who to call. Yet in my travels around the country, indeed, the world, I meet with friends and am so uplifted by the depth of our conversation, connection and conviviality. People who I don’t text or e-mail very often, but the moment we’re together is the next moment of the last time we were together, be it ten months, ten years or even more.

 

For example, 50 years ago I stepped out of a car at a school in the North Carolina mountains where I came to work for six months. Anticipating my arrival, several middle school kids came up and warmly greeted me, including one 12-year old girl with a captivating smile who announced, “Hi. I’m Ralf!” 

 

In the short time we were together, Ralf and I became best buddies, laughing at the same jokes, playing music together with recorders and guitars, talking about the books we loved in the library and cracking up over one titled, “My Darling, My Hamburger.” We decided that Groundhog’s Day would be our mutual most important holiday and often over the years that followed, would wish each other a happy day when that holiday came around. 

Ralf moved around a bit after graduating 8^th grade from that school and came to San Francisco in the last semester of her senior year in high school. There we re-connected and I went on weekly walks with her bouncing a rubber ball and sharing my favorite spots in the city. She later confessed that this was a difficult time in her life and my effortless enjoyment of our time together ended up giving her some needed comfort and encouragement. 

 

In the 40 plus years that followed, I’ve seen her maybe ten times and the last time may have been as long as 8 or 9 years ago. So when I asked if I could visit her on my way to a workshop I’ll be teaching some two hours away from her Charlottesville home, she happily agreed and generously offered her house. Within the first five minutes of the car ride from the airport, it became clear what I suspected— here we were again, so instantly connected and at ease in each other’s company. We sang a few songs last night and played some piano/guitar pieces, caught up on mutual friends and let the conversation unfold naturally, as it often has when we’re together. At 63 years old, she’s one of the older people whose relationship with me began as teacher/student, but even way back then, her 12, me 21, it never felt like a formal relationship. 

 

Today we both shared our mutual love of walking in the woods and took a beautiful path that landed us at Jefferson’s Monticello. We didn’t take the tour (but will tomorrow) and the conversation naturally turned to politics and justice and race and we both discovered that the same book, Manchild in the Promised Land, opened up new understandings for both of us, revealing what the culture then was trying to hide or dismiss— and is at it again. Ralf became a 3^rd grade teacher, like me, now retired, like me, loved working with kids and trying to teach them what they actually need to know to be a functioning citizen, a decent human being and a happy person. 

 

Back at her house, two guitarists and a fiddle player came over for over two hours of jamming to old jazz tunes, me on piano, Ralf (who everyone else knows as Julie) also on guitar. The music was flowing and the air charged with the happiness of the Great American Songbook. From there, we walked to downtown and had dinner with another music teacher student of mine who I taught 20 years ago in Salzburg and her 10-year old son. The highlight was teaching the boy how to pop leaves and get an explosive sound, a unique skill I cultivated in my New Jersey childhood. Few people can do it, but he persisted and started to get it! My first disciple. Bid farewell to them and strolled down the lovely carless promenade of this impressive city, dipping into two bookstores and enjoying an ice cream on a perfect temperature summer night. 

 

Seven miles of walking later, we got back to her house, where she showed me two fantastic magic tricks, her son’s impressive culinary Youtube videos of food in Bangkok. I shared my daughter’s writing about raising children in a toxic culture and a few videos related to my jazz, Joy and Justice book due to be printed tomorrow (fingers crossed). I taught her how to play the card game King’s Corner, she brought out some of her favorite games, we went to her book shelves where she had arranged her most influential books in the order they came into her life. All of this in one day!

 

Reading, walking, teaching, music, caring about justice, deep conversation and humorous banter, alongside the memorable stories of our shared history— so many points of connection, so effortless, so satisfying. I’ve felt the same kind of instant connecting with others I see once in a blue moon—my college friend Gretchen from Maine, my Orff friend Rodrigo from Germany, Debby in Vancouver, Margie and Paul in Australia, Kofi and Prosper in Ghana. It’s a long list and forgive me if any of you on that list are reading this without seeing your name! 

 

But you’re probably not, as our kinship is not based on reading what I write, but knowing in our bones how much we simply enjoy each other. So thank you, Ralf, for today’s blessing and looking forward to yet more tomorrow. 

The Green Beans Parable

At dinner last night, someone passed on the most valuable life lesson his mother taught him. Growing up in the 50’s, his mother often served those terrible canned green beans at dinner which he (justifiably) hated. It was always a struggle for his mother to get him to eat them, but because it was the 50’s and not today, she was clear about who was in charge. No promises of desserts or long discussions about the nutritive importance of vegetables (not much in those canned versions!). Just “Eat the damn beans!”

 

But the mother was compassionate enough to offer some advice which stuck with her son throughout his life. 

 

“Son,” she said. “You have two choices. You can save the beans to the end and spend the whole meal fussing and fuming about having to eventually eat them. In which case, you will ruin any pleasure you get from eating the parts of the dinner you actually enjoy. 

 

“Or you can eat them first and get it over with and spend the rest of the time having a good meal.”

 

“That really stuck with me,” he said. “Get the unpleasant things we have to do in this life out of the way first so you can savor the things you actually like to do.”

 

“Ah, that’s a good story,” I affirmed. “But there is a third choice. Your mother could actually have learned how to get fresh green beans at the market and cook them well, perhaps lightly steamed and then sautéed with olive oil and garlic.”

 

There are often more choices than we imagine. 

  

Continuity

At the half century mark (or close to it) in so many parts of my life, continuity is on my mind. Moving to San Francisco, my marriage, Zen practice, Orff practice, jazz piano practice, The San Francisco School— all these essential pillars that have held up my life and held up during  my life. 

And amongst them, almost 50 years since I first came to this cottage on Lake Michigan. A place, alongside the nearby town of Frankfort, that has barely changed in the best of ways. The land untouched by constant new development, nearby Watervale and Camp Lookout carrying on, the library, the corner drug store, various restaurants continuing on in Frankfort and most miraculously, the Garden Movie Theater still intact.

 

And so it was a special pleasure to have the movie made about The SF School and my life in Orff that included my wife and house and a little bit of jazz showing at the Garden Theater last night. And an extra pleasure to share it with my in-laws and wife’s old family friends who know me from hanging out at the beach and playing games at night and now got a peek into that other life I lived— and continue to live. 

 

As my daughter testifies in the movie, I’m not a fan of rapid change, especially imposed from without for the wrong reasons. As I say in the movie, when you’ve got a good groove going on the bandstand, you don’t suddenly switch it up because the band next door has a different one. When something is working, you stick with it and dive down deeper and let its echoes ripple out further. “Working” meaning that it is true, authentic, life-giving, filled with the dynamic energy of beauty and refreshment. That’s what the best traditions offer and yes, they need to stay open to changes with circumstance and people and place, but the best changes are incremental adjustments. 

 

Of course, continuity as a value in itself means nothing. There is nothing whatsoever to celebrate in the continuity of 400 years of slavery. That’s a horror that “worked” for some and not for others and even those who benefitted and profited did so at great loss to their own soul. Working as defined above must include everyone. 

 

So hooray for the Garden Theater and hooray for the SF School still carrying on beyond my presence (though it looks like I may be subbing there this month!) and hooray for not trying to fix what ain’t broke. (He says close to the end of the 12^th year of this blog.)

 

Onward!

The Simplicity of Eloquence

With a build-up unlike any I have witnessed that involved building a huge temporary deck sheltered by a tent, with couches, bars, trees, flowers, a stage for a band and more set up inside, some 150 people attending and fireworks at the end, the grand hoopla of my nephew’s wedding came and went and it was a grand affair. But amidst all the beautifully crafted extravagance, the real heart and soul of it was the extraordinary eloquence of the speeches. All with sincerity, humor, great stories and moments of stirring emotion.

 

Top of the line were the vows spoken under the huppah by my nephew Eren and his now wife Maya. Both were poetic far beyond my expectations and spoken directly from the heart. Later were speeches by moms and dads, Eren’s sister and his aunt, my wife Karen. Again, all that’s needed to surpass cliché is to speak what you know, what you love, what you live. Doesn’t matter how cleverly you put sentences together. But because I write every day and she rarely does, Karen gave me the raw material and I put it together in the speech she read. Of course, not knowing the people referred to here, the reader here might not be interested, but still I hope it evokes a model of how to speak one’s love not only for people, but place. 

 

Welcome to “The cottage!” I’m Karen Shultz Goodkin, Eren’s aunt, Barclay’s sister. I’ve been asked to say a bit about this beautiful place to help you understand why Eren and Maya chose this as the place to begin a committed lifetime together. 

 

The best place to start is to bring Eren’s grandparents Pam and Ted Shultz into this gathering. How they would have loved to be here to witness this moment. I’m sure they’re smiling somewhere, not only in delight and amazement that their little grandson stands here as a grown man with a bride at his side, but that the whole thing is happening here in this place they loved so much. On this land where they built this cottage in 1974, next to their best friends Mark and Joan Wehmeyer who built theirs two years later. So many years spent walking this beach looking for Petoskeys stones, climbing the Sugar Bowl or Baldy, canoeing to Watervale for breakfast, cooling often in these refreshing waters on the hot summer days, sitting on the deck, drink in hand, watching yet another gorgeous sunset. 

 

And sharing it all not only with the Wehmeyers, but so many friends and family members—Pam and Ted’s parents and Pam’s sisters and all the Prudens and other nieces and nephews and yet more, invited to join them in paradise. Each summer, reconnecting with their children John, Barclay, Karen and soon Doug and Lori and then a new generation of grandchildren— first Kerala, Talia and then, in 1991, the fourth Shultz male with the initials EBS makes his appearance—Eren Barclay Shultz. A lot of pressure on those tiny shoulders to carry the lineage forward— especially the art of fly fishing—and we all can testify that he did not disappoint.

 

Not that his early years weren’t challenging. Much of his views of the cottage came through the window of the Volvo where he was sent for a time-out. One year, he spent a week at nearby Camp Lookout, but it might as well been Siberia. He spent the whole time looking longingly at the path that led back to the cottage, a five minute walk away. But in between his activities of pulling legs off frogs and torturing his little sister Zoey (the 4^th and last grandchild of Pam and Ted), he would spend hours fishing with Pop-pop Ted, berry-picking with Grandma Pam, joining in the family frolics at the beach. This place seeped into his soul, as it has for so many of us.

 

I have loved watching Eren grow from the mischievous boy to an energetic, resourceful, visionary young man who shakes life by it shoulders and moves from project to project with such intelligence, skills and determination to make things happen. He is a doer, who follows every idea with a trip to Costco or order from Amazon and gets busy making things happen. From making a deck in his San Francisco apartment deck into an outdoor dining area with a large table, benches, planter boxes filled with vegetables and a heat lamp to making an outdoor kitchen in his Sonoma County place, building a chicken coop, selling eggs and cooking chickens whose necks his own hands had wrung, ordering a tiny house that was later delivered to his current work in Washington, where he is putting together a new business that involves frozen fish and transportation. It’s hard to keep up with it all!

 

And then during Covid, he and Maya sheltered right here— and the cottage has never been the same! In came the Internet, new chairs for the deck, a retaining wall, new pots and pans in the kitchen and sharp knives that can actually cut a tomato— it’s a long, long list.

 

How perfect that this is the place where we get together to celebrate this momentous occasion, here where three generations have gathered, where unlikely romances involving cousins and best friends have blossomed (Steve and Pam, Roy and Suzie), where so many friends and family members have frolicked for some 50 years. Look around you. We are all together to witness and welcome this next memorable chapter in our shared story, this formal joining of two beloved people who have already loved each other for nine years. But not just us. The ore boats have come to peek in, the waves are applauding and if we’re lucky, the bald eagle will soar overhead and give its blessing. All of this. 

 

Maya, we are so happy that Eren found you, a powerful, intelligent woman with your own can-do confidence, deep caring about this world and power to make things happen. And Eren, I think you’ve already figured out that this project cannot be realized through a trip to the hardware store or lumberyard and building with hammer and nails. This requires a different kind of building— of trust, humility, of honest communication, of walking together the thorny path of love and marriage. And Maya, remember that if Eren ever falls short, there’s always the time-out in the Volvo to set  him straight. 

 

Kayaking to Brunch

I was fortunate to have a mild commute in my four decades of teaching. No freeways, no bridges to cross, no maddening traffic jams or two-hours or more round-trip travel. Instead, it was mostly around 20 minutes on city streets. Sometimes, there was a back-up on a few streets with the clock ticking until my first class and the tension mounting. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, there was a scramble for parking at school due to street cleaning and generally some competition for the six spots in our small parking lot, first-come, first-serve. (I always thought my status of elder in the school community might have earned me my own parking spot, but no one else ever agreed.)

 

So though I had a mild taste of the stress and anxiety most commuters face (often soothed a bit by listening to music or later, an Audible book in my car), it was nothing compared to what most people in the work force experience. Starting the day already stressed out before settling into the day of work ahead and then repeating it at the other end, anxious to get home and kick off your shoes. All of this includes those taking public transportation, beholden to bus and subway schedules and crowded conditions. The things we put ourselves through! Why?

 

All of which made it yet more sweet to have a unique experience of kayaking to a brunch hosting by some friends back at the Michigan lakes. In my day, I have biked to class in Salzburg (heavenly), ferried to lunch with my parents in Larkspur, walked to a friend’s house for dinner in San Francisco— but kayaking to brunch in Michigan was a first!

 

And how lovely. The calm glass surface of the lake, the warming sun rising over the waters, the rhythmic strokes of the paddle, at one with the awakening world. Some 20 minutes to reach the other shore, pull the kayak onto the small beach, a short walk through the woods and the table set with huevos rancheros awaiting. One could get spoiled.

 

After some cornhole and a walk on the big lake’s beach, we kayaked back to get dressed for the long-anticipated wedding tonight. Parking will be tight, so briefly considered kayaking back across in my tux. Wouldn’t that be a sight! 

 

But I think not.

The Wheels on the Bus

It’s September and I’m back up north in Michigan. A month I’ve never experienced here in almost a half-century of visits. A new perspective, as we’re renting a house on the other side of the back lake instead of staying in the family place on the front lake. That place is occupied by my nephew on my wife’s side preparing for his wedding tomorrow. Quite an event that involved building an enormous temporary deck with a tent overhead to hold some 150 guests. July was a family reunion on my wife’s father’s side, now cousins from the mother’s side are converging. Including family friends from her childhood, one of whom we honored today at her retirement luncheon. 

 

Back in San Francisco, three kids I taught and their father who worked at the school are grieving for the passing of a beautiful wife/mother who beat cancer once and then it came back. My nephew on my sister’s side is meeting his new role as father of his son just born, while simultaneously being a new husband and a step-dad to three other kids. 

 

Birth. Marriage. Retirement. Death. All in the space of a short few weeks. The wheels of the bus going round and round, round and round, all through the town. The doors of the bus open and shut, one comes in, one goes out. And here I am and here you are, blessed to still be here to witness it all.

 

The sun begins its descent over Lower Herring Lake, these waters that have welcomed me for so long, Never changing amidst the ebb and flow and yet ever changing. The trees bordering the lake silent witnesses to it all, part of the ongoing growth and decay at their own slower pace. One aging man tapping away at this computer, his newly-arrived daughter getting dressed for the evening festivities. Time to get back on the bus. 

 

Five Views of Retirement

 Five Views of Retirement

 

(To be read out loud)

 

·     What will I do today?

 

·     What will I do today?

 

·     What will I  do today?

 

·     What will I do today?

 

·     What will I do today?