Living Fully

After the third day of my Jazz Course, with well-played music and great group spirit still echoing in my bones, I made myself a simple, delicious and nutritious dinner. Carrot cole slaw with raisins, peanuts and yogurt dressing, a fresh ear of corn and goat cheese, early girl tomato, arugula on top of rustic sourdough bread. Simple pleasures worthy of gratitude.

I then went on to my Men’s Group meeting, the first in some two months and it was sobering, to say the least. In the time I was gone, one person had spinal surgery, another a tumor in his bladder removed, another checked into the hospital when his speech was suddenly slurred, concerned that it was a stroke (it wasn’t), another’s wife also checked into the hospital for a pain near her heart. And that was just the check-in! The topic was reflection on near-death experiences and what people learned from them. Which mostly seemed to be, “Glad I didn’t die.”

What is there to learn from enhanced awareness of our mortality? Simply the renewal of a resolution to live fully, to choose the things that serve the soul, to refuse the distractions and unnecessary paperwork and unpleasant people and fill the minutes with those things that bring joy, happiness, enlarged compassion, kindness and love. Yes, the lion’s paw of mortality keeps showing its claws and one day will bring us down, but the only antidote to death is to live well and fully. It is perhaps rare to realize that everything you are doing in your life now is precisely the same as what you would do if you suddenly found out your days were numbered, but that’s precisely how I am feeling. The life I should be living is the life I am living.

Of course, I’m miserable about the political climate and still have to deal with unpleasant people in power (my daughter’s landlord!) and I’d rather not fill out my curriculum yet again on Google spreadsheet, but most of what I’m doing each day—whether teaching children, teaching adults, playing music and dancing with both, playing the piano, biking, reading good books, hoping to soon write some more good books, soon also to spend time on the Michigan lake with the family, cooking good meals— all of what I’m doing is precisely what I love to do and precisely what I need to do and hopefully exactly the kind of things the world needs. And that is a blessing.

Please pass the corn.

Salted with Tears

It has been a while since I’ve cried and I’ve missed it. After a fine, fun day with my small, but powerful jazz class, I came home and had the good sense to sit and play piano for some three hours. Bach, as always, but also Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Grieg, Handel, Mozart, Scriabin and then into the jazz repertoire and as my neighbor’s curfew approached, I revisited one of my favorite jazz ballads, Haunted Heart. And that’s when the tears began to flow.

This is a beautiful song that I introduced to my good friend Fran and she grew to love it as much as I did. And so the song delivered its message, my haunted heart thinking of my companion in singing at the Jewish Home, gone now almost two years and damn, I miss her. She was on my left side as I sat at the piano and my Mom was on my right and don’t I miss her terribly as well? Yes, I do. My Dad gone 11 years now and I miss our phone calls whenever I was about to go traveling and I’d give him a ritual goodbye call and he’s always end with “thanks for calling” and I’d say, “thanks for being there” until one day he wasn’t.

And then my sadness spread to the whole sorrowful situation my beloved country is in, run by a man with no heart and surrounded by the soul-less zombies who keep him in a place he has no right to be in. My usual response jumps between outrage and humor and some big-picture philosophical view that this too shall pass, but really, shouldn’t we all just be weeping openly in the streets every day that we have come to this? It’s a different quality of tears than the remembered love for those who have passed, but still it’s important to wholly feel the grief of all the dreams deferred and trampled and insulted and dismantled. Maybe we should have a march with no anger or funny signs or dancing to drums and instead, gather as millions in Washington and engage in some collective weeping the like of which has never been heard. Not only for all the suffering souls here and now, but a grief for all the wandering ghosts of our brutal, brutal history who we still refuse to properly grieve for and atone for our sins. Let us dine occasionally on the full measure of our sorrow and salt his necessary meal with our own tears.

Live close to tears said Albert Camus and all those who refuse to feel and are content to live in perpetual distraction, those who feed on their own greed and cruelty, those who are so afraid of life that they think tears are weakness, are about as far away from that advice as one could be and we all suffer from it. Let it flow, people! If you need help, I’ll come over to your house and play Haunted Heart for you . 

Satan's Lease

There are two things I’m having difficulty understanding these days: Human stupidity and human cruelty.

As for the first, just read the recent news about Trump’s rating in the polls. Don’t even try to explain how in the light of recent actions, his ratings have (allegedly) gone up. It’s simply beyond human comprehension.

As for the second, I state the case of my daughter’s landlord, probably a liberal San Franciscan who should know better to be better. Trying to survive against all odds the astronomical rents in this city gone haywire with housing prices—and on a teacher’s salary at that—my daughter Talia pays a whopping $1800 a month to share a flat with two roommates. With a month of travel ahead, she advertised her room to sublet and miraculously, found someone. Being the dutiful tenant she is, she let her landlord know and this woman texted back, “No subletting allowed.”

So here’s the deal. Talia has been a trustworthy tenant for four years now, always pays her rent on time, was gracious when she was ousted for one month of renovations that stretched with broken promise after broken promise to four months. If the sub-letter did anything “bad,” my daughter was well aware that she would be responsible.

So someone please explain to me why this __________ of a woman would:

1)   Care whether another body was sleeping in that bed when she gets paid the same no matter what.

2)   Wouldn’t feel open to Talia getting some financial relief from her over-the-top rent when it has absolutely zero impact on the building or her as a landlord.

3)   Wouldn’t have some sympathy for someone trying to make it on a teacher’s salary and doing good work at that.

4)   Wouldn’t be open to at least having a conversation about it instead of refusing to answer her phone and sending texts only.

I mean really. What kind of person would do something like this and why? What would keep her from simply doing the right thing or at least enjoying the sensation of feeling generous in light of the situation? What happened to her in her life that she feels the need to be needlessly cruel, insensitive, unhelpful?

Really, Ms. Landlord, it would take so little on your part to do one decent thing and yet you refuse. And though I ask for an explanation, I really don’t want to hear your excuse. Save it for St. Peter as he sends you to your condo in the Infierno and you sign the lease for all of eternity. And I hope Satan charges you double rent.

A View from the Outside

The encounter with Ghana continues to echo on in so many ways. In one of many fascinating conversations with my friend Kofi’s brother, Prosper, I was talking about how the media had implanted its distorted view of life in Africa and asked him what images he had of life in America. He answered “Three things.”

1)   People stay inside all day long and when they leave their house, they get into their car to get to the next inside place.

2)   People go to work in small cubicles and don’t say hello to each other.

3)   If someone disagrees with you, they take out a gun and shoot you.

Well, isn’t that interesting? I told him there was a partial truth in all those perceptions—life in L.A., a scene from The Office, open carry in Texas—but at least in my San Francisco life, lots of people (including me) are out walking or riding bikes, we greet each other warmly each day in school and I never have had (knock on all available wood) anyone take out a gun in my presence.

It would be an interesting international survey to find out how the rest of the world views us and where those images came from. It wouldn’t be surprising that 95% of it would come from the shoot-‘em-up movies or TV shows or news coverage of the latest school attack more than reading Walden, Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, The Fire Next Time or the collected poems of Mary Oliver.

So this makes me wonder: What images do we export? Which do we deserve? If you had to pick five movies and five books to represent the best of who we are to show the world, what would they be? Ah, there is some food for thought.

Sorry that I’ve missed the chance to ask that question of the people I meet traveling, but not too late. Next week, folks from some 20 countries will gather at The San Francisco International Orff Course and I will ask them the same question, with a follow-up. “How has your experience actually being in America changed your view?”

That should be interesting. Stay tuned.

Million Miler

So it was my flight to Ghana that put me over the Million Mile Mark and gave me lifetime status as a VIP on United Airlines. Hooray for me! That’s a notable achievement, reaching a number that high in anything and I feel kind of proud and think I should boast about it and drop it into casual conversation. Though I’m way past the pick-up scene in bars, I’d like to imagine:

Me to attractive (and of course, intelligent and kind) woman: "Do you come here often?"

Said Woman: "Every now and then. And you?"

Me: "Well, I find it a nice place to unwind after yet another trip with my Million Mile status."

Woman: "My place or yours?"

Besides the rise in my social standing, I do genuinely appreciate the perks of Priority luggage and the lounge and economy plus seating and not paying for bags and such. It makes the chore of flying a bit more attractive for this aging man. For example, I flew from Barcelona to Montreal last night, 8 hours with no movies offered in my cramped economy seat. The flight from Montreal to San Francisco was full, so I got upgraded to Business Class. Sweet! Passed the time watching Molly Bloom and Downsizing.

But Downsizing began as a typical light comedy and then got pretty heavy about climate change and the end of the human experiment. So my Million Mile achievement turned bittersweet, part of me feeling some shame that I have taken part in excessive burning of lots of fossil fuel. Unlike fellow Million-Miler George Clooney in that movie who flew around the world firing people that no one else wanted to deal with, I like to think that I’ve used the fuel for the betterment of the world and the children in it. That I’ve traveled to places to learn from the people there, to admire their culture and let the rest of the world (especially Americans) know that there is so much more happening in places different from the wars, pestilence, famine, coups, terrorist attacks, poverty, that the news likes to report. That I’ve brought ideas and practices learned abroad back to the children I teach and spread the good news about what we’re doing well in our school to other places that hadn’t considered it. But still, excessive fossil fuel use is excessive fossil fuel use. All of which would have happened without me taking a seat on each plane, and yet, still I have contributed to the diminishment of resources.

It reminds me of that scene in the movie The Misfits where Clark Gable is capturing wild horses, something he has done his whole life and is proud of. Marilyn Monroe begs him to stop and he finally relents, sets the horse he captured free and says:

“Damn them all! They changed it. Changed it all. Smeared it all around with blood. It’s like roping a dream now. Guess I just have to find another way to be alive…”

Yep! People fly in from around the world to go to Climate Change Conferences and the irony is simply what we have to work with and live with… until we can’t. Meanwhile, happy that my bag came out sooner than others and looking forward to the next three weeks of local teaching.