On Shabbat
October 29, 2010 at 12:15 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | Leave a commentTags: blogging, chronicle, classes, commandments, daughter, family, Judaism, life, motherhood, musings, neighbors, parenthood, practicing, reflections, sabbath, school, Shabbat, writing
I had the opportunity to talk with some of the seniors at our high school last week. They are studying world religions and I shared with them my experience of being Jewish and some background on Judaism. This is the fourth year I have been invited to do this, and have enjoyed it each time. The students always come up with great questions, which together with the fact that I have to pull a presentation together, turns it into a chance for me to take another look at my life as a Jew, as a woman, an American, musician, mother, daughter, friend, wife, teacher, etc.
In the midst of each year’s talk, I explain about the idea of Shabbat, the Sabbath. Their teacher pointed out that one of the ten commandments is that we should observe it. Of course, as soon as something is required, any of us who have issues with authority start to bargain with and resist. And not only is there the commandment itself, but also the list of thirty-nine acts that are prohibited on that day. Talk about a great way to stir up creative rule-bending/breaking!! So why – and in what ways – do I observe it?
Ironically it was a Christian friend of mine who first inspired me to consider the possibility. She was a neighbor of ours at the time, in a rural section of town that had first been settled as a large orchard. All the homes, built mostly between 1920 and 1940, had the feel of old farmhouses, and our neighborhood had many qualities of the quintessential old-fashioned small town. Our children (her three daughters and my two) were together often, swinging in one backyard or the other, going to a neighbor’s pool for their swimming lessons each morning, and playing house on rainy days. My friend and I were both of like minds about letting our girls be little girls for as long as possible, resisting the urge to rush into all the extra-curricular activities, and keeping our families’ lives as simple as we could. Somewhere in there she decided to make Sunday a real Sabbath, and she shared her thoughts with me.
I was at the time studying Judaism through a local chapter of the Florence Melton Adult Mini-school, which offers a marvelous two-year curriculum now available in 60 cities throughout the US, England, Canada, and Australia. My teacher, a modern day mystic, cultivated for our class a rich and deep foundation for learning. When the subject of Shabbat came up, the seeds had already been planted by my neighbor, and I decided to explore it by trying to experience it.
The traditional interpretation of the Sabbath comes from the Creation story, which tells us that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Obviously, many modern Americans in the Judeo-Christian world do not take that literally, but the idea of a day of rest is still a valuable one. Just as we need to sleep at night, we also need to plant breaks into our daily rhythm. Practices of many kinds recommend taking two to five minutes every hour to get up, whether from the desk or assembly line, take a walk around the room, do some deep breathing. We digest our meals better if we pause from what we are doing to eat them. Most studies reveal that if we work too long without a reprieve, we become less productive.
I have to admit that the very first time I heard about the Jewish Shabbat, I stepped right up onto a feminist soapbox. I was nursing Rachel, a toddler at the time, and Chloe had just turned six. As a mother of young children, I was not going to get much of a rest, and I spoke up – hotheadedly – to protest that Shabbat was perhaps more about men getting a rest than the women who really needed it. The person teaching that class was diplomatic, helping to make it a little less black-and-white than the territory into which I had leapt, but I was only a little bit consoled. Those were my reactive days, and my learning curve was steep enough that I pretty much had to put the kernel of the Shabbat concept aside. What my family did do at that point was simple (though not easy) and basic. On Friday nights we ate in the dining room instead of the kitchen, and we lit candles and said blessings over our juice and bread.
So now, two years later, I decided to see what Saturday could feel like, now that our Friday night ritual was intact. To be honest, I remember no details of the day itself. What I remember is that I reached a moment of great discomfort. I wanted to do something. DO, with a capital D. And that’s when it hit me that my life was centered around everything I was doing, and what I needed was to take a break from that by just being. This was not about what my hands were doing. I could nurse Rachel and at the same time be focused on all the things I was going to accomplish during her ensuing nap, which was what I did all week long. Or I could sit and nurse Rachel and have it be totally about nursing Rachel. I could chop carrots for dinner and be thankful that I could feed something nourishing and tasty to my family. I could breathe more deeply if all I was paying attention to in that moment was my breath.
What came to me that day was that observing the Shabbat is about taking that day to be mindful and present, and not about doing, no matter what I was in fact doing.
So last week, as I stood in front of that class of seniors, summarizing briefly my understanding of Shabbat, I found myself filled with a longing for a real Shabbat. Fast forward from those precious days with my young girls to now: Chloe away at college and Rachel a full-fledged teenager, in every sense of the word. Some Friday nights Dan, Rachel and I are actually home, and we set the dining room table for three, light the candles and say the blessings. If we are not too exhausted, we play a box game or watch a DVD after dinner and dessert. Many Fridays Rachel and I have violin classes and we get home after 7:00, to that blessed dinner, prepared and set out by Dan. Some Friday nights are centered around something that precludes our dining room altogether. Saturdays are often so busy I totally forget it is actually Shabbat.
The gift of doing things like speaking to a class at the high school and writing this blog is that it gives me the chance to take another look at something. Pulled away so gradually from the purity of my practice in those early years when the girls were young, I had completely forgotten that I can still carry the spirit of Shabbat with me, no matter the circumstances. In my own mind – and heart – I can make everything within those fully-booked Saturdays more about being there than about what I am accomplishing. I’ve had a lot of practice.
On cool calendar dates, reunions, and synchronicity
October 11, 2010 at 9:27 am | Posted in Very Long Blogs | 1 CommentTags: aging, chronicle, college, composing, cool numbers, daughter, family, friends, friendships, getting to know me, guitar, journal, life, memory, motherhood, music, music business, musings, old friends, parenthood, performing, practicing, reflections, reunions, school, songwriting, synchronicity, the mind, writing
I have always loved dates like today’s: 10/10/10. My first memory of such a date was June 6, 1966, only days before I graduated from the 6th grade, which made the day feel personally special. And in that morning’s paper was an article about twin girls who were celebrating their sixth birthday that day. I think they lived on 6th Street in their town, with a zip or area code with numerous sixes in it. I was so excited by that.
I’m not the only one who finds things like that attractive and intriguing. Tonight Dan and Rachel and I will be attending a party. The host couple has commemorated the appropriate date for the past few years: 5/5/05, 6/6/06, etc. (As I am writing this, I just want to say that in five minutes it will be 10:10 on 10/10/10. Yes, my heartbeat accelerated just a wee bit as I typed that.) And remember when we could actually watch the numbers turning on our car speedometers turn over from 99.999 to 100,000? (Assuming your car made it that far. And let me just note here that one of our two cars still does have that old-fashioned mechanism.) And who of you knows what I mean by our golden birthday? That’s when you turn the age that is the same number as your birthday date. For me it was turning 22. Poor Rachel had to celebrate it on her 5th birthday, before she was old enough to understand it. At least the rest of us enjoyed it!
I don’t know if it was the stars and planets lining up because of this date approaching, or just coincidence (though I have to say I hardly believe in coincidence anymore), but I have intersected with three different threads from my past in the last two days. I feel a little stirred up by having so many memories and connections sparked by all three.
One was an email from someone I have not seen since Chloe was very young, I think even before Rachel was born. She was one in a circle of friends. Though the two of us were never super-close, as a group we were bonded. For me, one of the most significant ways in which she affected my path was after I had written a particular song, back in my active folk performing days. It was such a personal song that I could not imagine anyone understanding it, let alone identifying with it, which made me very reluctant to sing it in concert.
I’ll back up a little here to try to describe what it used to feel like for me to perform a new original song for the first time. Somewhere pretty early in my solo career I was practiced enough that I was never very nervous in concert. I really enjoyed the interaction I had with my audiences, and felt like I could ride that energy and have a very relaxed, fun, and also meaningful exchange with them from the stage. But performing a brand new song was nerve-wracking by nature. There was always the strong possibility of forgetting words or messing up a guitar part, as it just wasn’t completely a part of me yet. If it was a song I had recently written then there was even more heaped on top of that normal anxiety. One aspect was that it felt like I was exposing something about myself. (Usually this was justified, because I was!) This always made me feel like I was taking off all my clothes and performing naked, it was such a fragile thing to share from my heart this way. Another piece was that I was always, at that point in the life cycle of a song, totally in love with this newest piece of work, and desperately wanted everyone to share in that love. It was not unlike whipping up a self-invented delicacy and wanting everyone to feel deep rapture while eating it. And finally, there was the precedence set by my previous songs, and the fear that perhaps this one would fail to live up to a higher expectation. Rather lofty, and clearly daunting on all counts, though also clearly self-created and perpetuated.
So back to my friend and my newest song. This particular work had been forcefully ejected from me by a powerful muse, and though I kept running away from it mid-stream (literally leaving the room right in the middle of composing it, hoping to escape the painful birthing process of those verses), I was consistently marched back to the drawing table by something far stronger than my own urges, until it was finally completed. I had never experienced such a wrenching creation process. I truly felt I had written a song against my will. It took over a month before I had the courage to play it for one other person. I was attending a music conference and found a willing audience in a fellow songwriter. She sat on my hotel bed as I sang it. When I finished and looked up at her, she asked me if I would sing it again, which I did. I think she had me sing it a third time before we talked about it. Agony. But she liked it. Very much.
So finally a month later I decided to debut it at a small concert in an intimate setting. My friend, along with a few others from our circle, sat in the audience. It was her face that gave me the courage to start, execute, and finish it. And again the response was good. So it became part of my repertoire and eventually the title song of the next album, though I never would have foreseen that! And two days ago, after years of silence between us, she emailed that she had been thinking of me and listening to my music and felt like reaching out to me. It was like a little electrical jolt to see her name there on my screen after all that time. What do you say to a friend, fifteen years later? So I answered her, with a brief update, and will see what is to follow.
Earlier that same day, I had had a cup of tea with an old high school friend. Similarly, we had never been close when we were in school together, but we had gotten to know each other and had a few classes together. Though on a different schedule, as I graduated a year ahead of my class and then took time off to record and travel with my band, we graduated from our hometown university at the same time.
Three months ago I was part of a concert that deliberately featured music from three differing styles of music, held in a small art gallery. I was wearing my singer-songwriter cap for the first time in a long while. Since this performance was being given in a new location for this series, I sent out an email announcement to try to generate a little more interest, as ticket sales were slow. As a result I knew several people in the small audience. Greeting people before the show, I was very surprised and pleased to find myself saying hello to this high school friend. After living on the east coast for a few decades, she and her husband had recently moved back here, where most of her family had remained. We agreed to get together.
Circumstances being as they are, it took until late last week for that to work out. We had such a lovely quiet time together, exploring where our paths had led us through all these years, and sharing what we are navigating in the present. I am sure we will see more of each other. And she may even become my neighbor, as she and her husband are house-hunting in my neck of the woods. I came home with a little excited flutter. All these years that I have been a mother raising two kids, I have shared much with many friends, felt nurtured in several communities, and Dan and I have grown many new friendships. Somehow this single hour over a cup of red berry tea felt new, like the beginning of a fresh chapter that put me in the center instead of my children or my relationship with them. I pictured inviting this friend and her husband over for dinner, Dan cooking up a gourmet meal, and the four of us enjoying each other’s company as grown-up friends. It’s not that this hasn’t happened at all in the past 18 years (though I have to admit it hasn’t happened with great frequency!) It’s just that the image conjured itself up and it excited me with its sense of promise. That is definitely new.
The third brush with my past came yesterday afternoon in the form of a get-together to remember a recently passed co-worker and friend. I spent my college years working in a local restaurant. My fellow waiters, bartenders and managers were some of the most intelligent, creative and fun people I have ever known, and many after-hours were spent in each others’ company during those years. The restaurant business often attracts people who are on their way to something, and this group was no exception. In our midst were future doctors, lawyers, artists, scientists, mountain climbers, dancers, actors, writers, poets, teachers, and many more. Our beloved manager died last month of cancer. His mother and his brothers celebrated his life – and what would have been his 64th birthday – at his mother’s house, serving the same food we dished up when we all worked together.
It is always such a bittersweet thing, these gatherings. I cannot help but find myself thinking, “Why couldn’t we have had this party while he was still here?” And yet I do not want to diminish the gift of having had that time yesterday with these people who all cared deeply for this sweet man we all called a friend. It was a treat to find out what everyone has been doing all these years, to see how well everyone is aging, who remembers what, and who is still connected to whom. There were, of course many people missing from our circle, some due to other commitments and some because we have lost touch.
Okay. So now it’s time for true confessions. I came home with my mind swirling. Even today I am calming down from the dizzying effects of over-stimulation. As fondly as I remember those years, they were also some of the most despondent in my life, fraught with uncertainty about myself in the world, desperately lonely even when I was surrounded by people, trying hard to be someone I wasn’t, and being hit over the head repeatedly with the lesson that I could only be myself, yet refusing to learn it until decades later. All of the unhelpful and hopeless tapes that were helplessly recorded in my subconscious back then have been trying to pull themselves back into the forefront (wherever the forefront of my sub-conscious could be) since last night, and my very grey matter is tired, all the way to the tips of my just-as-grey hairs.
Sitting here writing this, I also find myself pulling something else together. A few days ago, after a hard day of teaching beginning violinists, I asked the universe to offer the guidance of a few clearer signposts. (Interesting. I had to correct my mistyped word “soundposts.”) Everyone at the party, my out-of-the-blue email, and my tea date, everyone asked me if I’m still doing music. Yes. But what music did they mean? The last each of these people knew me, I was a folksinger, not a violinist in a baroque orchestra, taking and teaching private lessons.
Just this week I picked up the guitar, for the first time in quite awhile, and a new thought began to come forth. There is no extra energy or time in my life these days to set up a solo folk concert and do all that is necessary to publicize it. Could I put a show together and show up and do it? Absolutely, with pleasure. But performing is not just giving a concert to an audience. In fact, that part, which is the most rewarding and fun, is in many ways the easiest part. So now it suddenly came to me: what if I were to pick one song and work on it, at my own pace, up to performance/recording level? And then I could employ our little digital camcorder and post it on Facebook or YouTube, or both, and let my friends know about it, just to be able to connect to people with my music in some way. It’s not that I have no desire to play the very music around which my entire life revolved for all those years, now in my present tense. It’s that while I was resting from it, and raising my children, the world – and in particular the folk industry – continued to evolve, and I cannot step back into it without a major commitment on a lot of levels. It would be hard to do it in a micro or fractional way. This is the first inspiration I have had to move back out into the public as a soloist, just a little bit.
Just last week I read an article about a singer who goes into corporate settings and rallies these business people in meetings to sing together! Not surprisingly, it has helped co-workers deal with conflicts, stuck energy, and many other challenges in the workplace. Just before I left the stage and the touring circuit, this was an idea I had had, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to pull it together and market it. Reading about this woman rekindled that question – could I work with local companies? I would love to provide some inspiration to grown-ups who do not have enough music in their lives.
So here I sit, my mind reeling with questions. For my own sake (and to contribute to your possible boredom or at least overwhelm) I will try to articulate them. The big one: what am I being called to do? (This might be an appropriate place to mention that last week I went to the library and checked out a book about finding and following your calling. What attracted me to this book six days ago?) A smaller and more immediate one: can I quiet the noise in my head and find some stillness? It is out of that stillness that I am usually able to identify something to do just right now, in the short run.
So with that I will close for today. First, I will do the mundane and necessary thing that string players must do often, which is to clip my nails so I can practice. And then I will practice. And after lunch I will lie down and breathe, and do my best to let everything fall away for a short time. I have a lecture and a concert to attend – as an audience member and friend of the performer – and then a 10/10/10 party to attend. With dear friends I have known for decades and care very much about. Hmmm. Recurring theme a la mode.
10,000 times and counting
October 6, 2010 at 10:10 pm | Posted in Short Blogs | 4 CommentsTags: daughter, Dr. Suzuki, excellence, family, Malcolm Gladwell, memory, motherhood, music, musings, parenthood, piano, practicing, reflections, teaching, violin
I was working with a piano student this afternoon, going over a passage that challenged her fingers a little. “Just practice this section about a million times!” was my prescription. We laughed. And suddenly I remembered how, years ago, our family explored what it is to do something a million times.
We were driving in the car and someone must have said something about a million – maybe it was Chloe wondering what it was like to have a million of something she wanted, or perhaps a character from one of our books-on-tape said something about a million. I will have to ask Chloe, because she may remember. (Rachel was too young at the time.) Anyway, we set about figuring out how long it would take to count to a million. I have to admit that the math was way beyond our two daughters at the time, but it was a fun exercise nevertheless. I have no memory of even a wild estimate. But I do remember that we had to time ourselves counting pretty far in order to come up with a guess. And of course it is way faster to say “one” and “fourteen” and even “seven hundred twenty-three” than it is to say “eight hundred seventy-six thousand five hundred eighty-one,” and there are definitely more of the latter than of the former. So we had to take that into account, and somehow we arrived at our version of an answer.
Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, who developed the Suzuki pedagogy for violin, said that knowledge alone does not equal ability. “Knowledge plus 10,000 times,” he claimed, is what produces ability. Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers says that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to develop extraordinary ability. So though my recommendation to my student is obviously an exaggeration (and goodness knows how long it would have taken her to follow it to the letter – but I’m not going to go there!) it is more on track than off.
It makes me wonder how many hours I have actually put into violin or piano over the course of my lifetime. And what else have I repeated enough times to be able to put it in the category of expertise? What internal tapes have I replayed that many times? What knee-jerk reactions? And what have I cultivated, as opposed to enacting by default?
I will have to get back to you on this one.
Dance: a family history
October 3, 2010 at 9:52 am | Posted in Long Blogs | 2 CommentsTags: camp, chronicle, college, contra dance, dance, daughter, family, folk dance, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, grandparents, guitar, High Peak, Irish step dance, journal, life, Mayim, memory, motherhood, music, Oaxaca, parenthood, Pete Seeger, play party games, reflections, square dance, top hat
I have not sat in this room for years. Rachel is in her Irish stepdancing class and has to leave early today, so rather than just dropping her off I am sitting in the waiting area for an hour until we have to go. It brings back such memories. Chloe started taking classes here ten years ago, and for the next several years I spent every Tuesday afternoon from around 4:30 to 6:00 in this room. Eventually Chloe and Rachel became such advanced dancers that they were in class for three hours at a time so I could go home during class. In recent years I began using that time to teach lessons. And for the last two years Chloe drove the two of them there and back. So I have not had occasion to sit on this couch (yes, it actually is the same couch) until today’s exception to the norm.
Dancing goes way back in my family. As a teenager, my mother was a contra dancer in New York City in the 1940s. As a matter of fact, she can be seen in a segment of the movie “To Hear Your Banjo Play” with Pete Seeger, filmed in 1947. (See the YouTube video posted below. The dancers come on around 12:30, and my mother can be seen close up at 14:16-17 on the right side of the frame.) A few years later, as a classroom teacher my mother taught her students “play party games” – songs with dances to go with them – and years later, once I had joined the family fold and we had moved out west, my mother occasionally taught those dance-songs to my girl scout troop and at birthday parties. And, once we settled in our new home, my parents signed up for a square dance class (contra dance was hard to find in our community at that time), and met many people who became lifelong family friends.
In my teens I spent two summers in Oaxaca, Mexico. My grandparents on my father’s side had run a summer camp called High Peak in the Catskill Mountains of New York. When my grandfather’s health was beginning to decline, around the time I was coming into the world, they decided to retire to a warmer clime and chose Oaxaca because it reminded my grandfather of his birthplace in Salonica, Turkey (now Thessaloniki, Greece.) Finding almost immediately that they missed running a summer program, they started a smaller version, a kind of culture camp, the year I was born, with a group of fifteen girls in their early teens. There they lived for eight weeks at my grandparents’ place, which held several small buildings inside their gates, amid gardens and courtyards. It was a success and they continued every summer. My grandfather died just before my fifth birthday, and then my great-aunt (my grandfather’s sister) joined my grandmother as she continued to steward a small group of American teenage girls. I am so blessed to have shared those two summers with my grandmother, my great-aunt and fifteen other girls from all over the United States.
One of the very first days I was there, someone put on some music one afternoon and everyone began to dance. It was an Israeli dance, Mayim. I had never heard it before, but I was charmed by both the dancing and the fact that everyone seemed to know how it went! (It being decades before I “came out” as a Jew, it had not yet dawned on me that almost all of the girls who attended my grandmother’s camp were Jewish.) I followed along until I learned it. It was fun! And not so unfamiliar, having learned my mother’s play party games. Over the next several weeks, we learned several regional Oaxacan dances and attended a centuries old annual dance festival where we watched those dances, and many more, performed by native dancers in their traditional costumes. We rounded out our repertoire with some more Israeli dances, and a couple of evening parties where we danced to rock and roll hits.
It was also in Oaxaca that I first learned to play the guitar. My grandmother bought me a classical guitar in Mexico City, made in a local factory. It cost $24 and I fell in love with it almost instantly. Several of my campmates in Oaxaca already played, and they taught me what they knew. I figured out more songs on my own and in turn taught those to my friends. Throughout the summer we performed together at schools in the city of Oaxaca and in neighboring villages, both Oaxacan and American songs. That $24 guitar planted a seed for a very tall and strong tree, as it eventually led to my decades-long career in folk music, beginning with my homeboys band in the early 1970s.
One pivotal Sunday night in July, 1972, my band was playing, as usual, at our regular home gig. We had built over the year prior a huge local following, and I often saw familiar faces in the crowd. During a break that night I recognized an old high school friend and went to greet him. He had never been able to come to our show, he told me, because he usually spent Sunday evenings doing Israeli folk dancing. And on Friday nights (when we had a regular gig in another town) he always went to international folk dancing. But two nights earlier, at a party after folk dancing, he had accidentally walked into a plate glass door and sliced open his chin. Because of the stitches he had to take a few days off from dancing, so he came to see me sing. As annoying as I had found this friend during our high school years together, he now seemed, mysteriously, infinitely more interesting. Coincidentally, so did the idea of folk dancing. And it turned out there were Monday night sessions in town.
You might not be too surprised to hear that I went the very next week. A little bit into the evening my old friend Mayim was played on the record player, and that pretty much clinched my desire to become a regular at the Monday night dance. My high school friend and I did do the dance of romance for awhile, and then he went off to college. I stayed in town and became an avid (Dan and I now use the word “rabid”) folk dancer. I spent the next twelve years participating in many different recreational and performance groups, even including a five-month gig as a musician for a folk dance ensemble performing at the Epcot Center at Disneyworld.
In the meantime, a glimpse into Dan’s childhood. He was lucky enough to take a social dance class when he was in 6th and 7th grade, and it stuck. As a young adult he developed a love for Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies, bought himself a set of tails at a thrift store, and dreamed of sweeping some girl off her feet, just like Fred did with Ginger Rogers and Gene did with Leslie Caron. After grad school, when he moved east (close to my neck of the woods) for his first grown-up job, an acquaintance mentioned a local folk dancing group to him. After another invitation or two, he tried it out. Within a year he was attending workshops, teaching dances to recreational groups, and even co-directing a new performance ensemble. His name began to be mentioned among my friends, a few towns south. It took about two more years before we met at the Friday night international folk dancing that I now attended regularly, since my band had long since split up.
We still don’t agree on which dance we first did together. It was either a waltz or a Swedish hambo. But we do remember our first conversation, which went as follows:
Me: “I heard you moved away.”
Dan: “I did. But I came back.”
Me: “Oh.”
Romantic, huh?
Okay, it took a few months, but we did eventually get together (obviously). He took me to many Fred Astaire movies, where he half-thrilled, half-(well more than half) embarrassed me by waltzing me up the aisle after the movie on more than one occasion. I bought him a collapsible antique top hat for his birthday, the kind that opens by itself with a snap of the wrist. We developed lifelong (so far!) friendships with many fellow dance fiends, including some of the people my parents met at their square dance class in the 1960s. Small world, good people.
So it isn’t hard to make the leap to when Chloe was three and we took her to a festival where she first beheld an Irish stepdance performance. She turned to Dan and proclaimed, “I want to do that!!” Being on the shy side, she was seven before she had the courage to sign up for a class (which meant attending without a mom or dad to hold her hand). She took to it easily. After her first year we moved her to a different dance school led by a teacher who has since become a life mentor for her. Which is what first brought us into this very room. Sometime in the following months Rachel began to imitate Chloe’s practiced steps and we enrolled her in class at age five. The two of them have performed and competed for all these years.
Until now. The way the Irish stepdance world works, you join a school and learn their own choreographed steps. If you move away, to college, for example, you would have to leave your own school to join another, and begin the arduous process of learning all new steps, and then you would “belong” to that school instead. Chloe saw it coming, even two or three years ago. During her senior year she enjoyed participating in class and at a few competitions, but felt violin moving into first place, especially in terms of focus and time commitment. Her last hurrah was dancing the lead part in a dance drama, which competed at the western regional and the national competition, where they placed, respectively, first and third, much to everyone’s delight. Over the summer she helped teach classes and worked part-time in the office at her dance school, cherishing the time she got to spend with her beloved teacher. She is friends on Facebook with her dance chums, wants to hear the results of each competition, and hopes to perform in some St. Patrick’s Day shows when she comes home for spring break in March. But that chapter in her life is coming to a close, at least in the foreseeable future.
And for Rachel? I know things have to feel different for her with Chloe gone. This Saturday morning she is scheduled to go to her first local competition after taking a year off from solo events. She enjoys performing more than competing but feels some peer pressure to remain in the swing of things. It evolved over time for Chloe, and I’m sure it will unfold for Rachel as she moves forward. I feel confident that they both will stay connected with their dance friends just as their parents and grandparents have before them. The world of folk dance is full of very good people. And who knows? Maybe Dan and I will start contra dancing some day.
The nature of moving forward
September 27, 2010 at 9:46 am | Posted in Long Blogs | 1 CommentTags: blogging, chronicle, college, daughter, family, journal, lap top, life, motherhood, moths, orchestra, parenthood, reflections, time, writing
There is a moth frantically dive-bombing the walls and lights in the kitchen tonight. As desperate as it sounds to my ears, perhaps every moth making a beeline (haha) from one lumen to the next is actually filled with carefree abandon. But here we are, in the final days of September, and it hit 90 or higher today and a summer insect is careening through my house like it’s June.
Chloe has been a college student for exactly one month.
I have rarely in my adult life had a busier month, and am relieved to be able to say that the crush of too-much-at-once is behind me. I would try to enumerate it all here, but that’s not really why I am writing tonight. I am writing tonight to explain why I did not write yesterday, as I had intended to do – and actually did do. Until the computer challenged me and I retreated.
One of the factors that has contributed to my busyness is that I now spend Monday evenings taking Rachel to an orchestra rehearsal 45 minutes away (each way). We go straight from school at 3:10 so that she can have a snack and short homework session before her violin lesson, fit in another study break and a hasty bite for supper, and then orchestra from 6:00 to 8:45. We finally return home a little after 9:30. Once the snow season starts, we will get home even later some weeks. It’s a very long day for her, and for me as well.
After the first four Mondays, it dawned on me that I could use the time during her rehearsals to write my weekly report to the parents of my students, and also to write my blog. If only I had a laptop. I casually mentioned this to Dan last Tuesday, and, computer geek that he is (I assure you it is his own term for himself – in my opinion he is much too well-adjusted socially to be considered a geek) he was willing, even eager, to find me a refurbished model. Eager, indeed. I had myself a “new” laptop before the end of the week. Dan loaded the necessary software and virus protection onto it and presented it to me after lunch Thursday. Cool!
It happened to be one of my “orchestra weeks” during which my baroque chamber group – this time our concerts involved thirteen performers – spends three days rehearsing for a weekend of local concerts. This means that I spend several days floating from one rehearsal to whatever classes and lessons I am able to teach to a quick meal and back to the next rehearsal – happy, usually more than a little stressed, and definitely stretched in terms of time and energy. So it wasn’t until yesterday, the second concert day, that I actually had a little uncommitted time.
It was a beautiful day outside. Sunny, clear, a little breeze, and that little touch of autumn that starts to make itself evident in those days when the sunlight takes on more of a slant. Since I had spent most of the week inside, I decided I would take advantage of the perfect weather. I went out in our backyard and settled myself onto a patio chair, a little giddy with the romantic image of working on MY laptop, which I placed before me, small 21st century altar on the picnic table. Dan was mowing the lawn and Bella was merrily cavorting between the flying bits of grass and the bees she loves to chase around the raspberry bushes.
I opened with a paragraph about the splinters emanating from the rough wood of the table, moved from there to Bella’s bee habit, and was just segueing into yesterday’s theme – no small feat, it had taken me so many weeks to be ready to actually put words to paper – when my new ally, my dear refurb, abruptly interrupted with an alarming announcement that something very serious was happening and it was forced to abort all present activities in order to protect itself.
Barely three paragraphs into my fragile beginning, my words were erased.
It’s not that it had taken that much time to write them. It’s not even that it was that good. But in that shattering moment (not quite the blue screen of death, but those big white words on the black screen are a little scary – just saying) I was demoralized. The universe doesn’t want me to write? FINE! I cursed the very laptop I had been worshipping only moments before. I made an angry and upset show of closing it down, Dan all the while instructing me that I need to use the computer some more so we can see if it happens again. HAPPENS AGAIN? I’m going to pour my heart out onto its soulless – not to mention conscienceless – keys again, JUST TO FIND OUT IF IT IS FUNCTIONING PROPERLY? Which by the way I just expect it to do because THAT’S ITS ONLY JOB AND PURPOSE IN LIFE!
I’m calmer now. It didn’t even take me that long to regain my normal heart and breathing rates. Dan expressed his sympathy for what I lost and I thanked him for showing me that he has much more of a heart than the machine that provides most of our income, as grateful as I am for that. My higher self knew that I would find a new starting place and compose a new set of paragraphs, and still be able to post a blog within a day or two. And in the meantime Dan identified a few outdated “device drivers” that may have contributed to the crash. He is replacing each one with a newer version. For my part, I will employ the “save” function sometime during the first paragraph from now on, instead of being so cavalier as to trust a mere hard drive with words that often do not come easily. Lessons learned, little harm done.
By the way, in case you are curious as to the theme of the lost essay, it was this. For those of you who remember how it felt to go from two to three, from a coupledom to a threesome – how suddenly it hit you that life would never again be the same – exactly, word for word, the phrase that our houseguests, a couple with a one-year-old angel boy – used oh so casually during a mealtime conversation on Wednesday – that is exactly and precisely what Dan and Rachel and I are experiencing. But this time there is no fanfare. No shower with gifts. No sweet bundle to caress. I can no more retrieve the days behind me than recover the lost words on my screen. So instead I offer these. And we all continue forward, since we cannot go back.
Neither can the moth. I found it this morning, nestled in the pages of one of Rachel’s violin books for its final rest.
The school of leavings
September 4, 2010 at 10:39 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | 2 CommentsTags: daughter, family, grief, journal, life, miscarriage, motherhood, musings, parenthood, reflections, rite of passage, school
I played music for a bat mitzvah service this morning, a very sweet occasion. At the very end, right before the closing song, a passage written by Albert Einstein in 1954 was read:
“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”
An optical delusion of consciousness. What a powerful and apt term! I sat through the whole service teary-eyed and choked up – rites of passage always do that to me anyway, no doubt enhanced today by the freshness of Chloe’s leaving – and those words showed up as a lifeline, a rope to grab hold of to lead me out of my soggy puddle. What is my life – your life, anybody’s life – but a meandering path of leavings, and of moving forward even when we want to hold on?
The day Dan and I began to try to conceive, I was thunderstruck by the realization that we had stepped onto the escalator of letting go. Could we control whether or not we hit the jackpot (so to speak) this ovulatory cycle? Never. We had no say over any of it, speed nor date of conception, the nature of the pregnancy, the first miscarriage, the grieving process, how many months more of trying for the next, the nature of the next pregnancy… Obviously, I could go on for years with this list. And once Chloe was born, and later Rachel, I had no control over the next set of variables. Each step of developmental progress was another departure – from my body, from our arms and laps, from babyhood and soft sweet cheeks and wide open eyes and clinging, eager hands and ramrod posture and adorable outfits to everything that comes with every single stage of growing up. I had pictured parenthood as the act of welcoming someone into the world. What a surprise to learn I had it backwards! Our children were welcoming us to a whole new curriculum of lessons to be learned.
I know I have not been the best of students in that school, though neither have I been the worst. When I could not go by my own experience, I looked for others who could teach me. I learned about being a gentle parent from three unlikely couples, namely, the parents of Frances and Gloria, in all the Priscilla Mary Warner children’s books; of Arthur and D. W., in the PBS series inspired by author Marc Brown; and of Ramona in Beverly Cleary’s classics. They were great models for me in the area of love, patience, maturity, and understanding. But their stories show little to nothing of the slow parade of good-byes that lie ahead. Like Dorothy in the land of Oz, I had to find them for myself.
They did not come on the expected days, like the first morning of kindergarten or even the first time Chloe drove Rachel to their dance school and Dan and I were left waving on the porch, the air oddly sucked out of our lungs. I felt it more when Chloe would come home from a play date a little farther away from my understanding, a new cockiness in her voice. Or when Rachel suddenly didn’t need a good-night kiss and hug anymore. Then who am I? What am I now?
If I am first and foremost the one who brought them into the world and sustained them with the milk my body produced for them, I stand alone and separate, as Einstein observed. But if I remember that I too navigated my path away from my mother and father into the world that was awaiting me, they join me as two more children in a long line, and we join all families. All mothers and fathers were once children, following the drive to leave their parents, forever moving forward. I can now turn with compassion toward my own parents, who must have grieved my moving out at age 19, though I didn’t notice at the time. It was not my job to notice them! I was joining the world – for myself, I thought at the time. Now I know better. The baby bird leaves the nest and flies off, to grow big enough to build another. It is the way of the universe. I will never know whether the mother and father bird shed tiny tears in their abandoned circle of twigs, but I know it is the same set of impulses, even if I use words to try to understand it all, and they do not ponder but only act.
I am thankful to be swept up in the fast and fierce winds that meet my face as I hurtle helplessly forward in time. It is comforting to me to be part of the very nature of things. That in itself frees me (for the moment) from the prison of separateness and personal agenda. And by the way, Einstein wrote that magnificent paragraph the year I was born.
Hit the ground pausing.
August 31, 2010 at 3:52 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | 1 CommentTags: chronicle, college, daughter, family, journal, life, motherhood, musings, parenthood, reflections, rite of passage, thanks, update
In the years that I used to be a touring folksinger, I bonded intimately with the expression “hit the ground running.” I would usually be working on several projects at once right up until we packed up the car to go, and then we would drive cross country for two days, or three, or even four, to our designated geographic region of the month. Upon arrival, I often had only hours before entering the first concert venue to open the performing portion of the trip. We always tried to fill as many days as we could with gigs, as down time is generally not too attractive during a tour. After the last gig, we would turn around and start the trek home, and once home, I invariably had commitments almost right away. It became a lifestyle. I am married to a “do” kind of person, we are both self-employed, and there is always something begging for my time, and for his.
For the past year and a half much of my energy has revolved around all the steps toward Chloe going to college. Each campus visit required an inventory of detailed planning: flight, accommodations, and rental car reservations; schedule particulars, both on our end and those of the school; signing up for a campus tour, for which we encountered different hoops to jump through for each school; setting up a violin lesson with a professor; and often many more. The application process provided a new and exhilarating ride to say the least. Preparing for auditions involved providing support for Chloe’s musical efforts as well as all the travel logisitics. And auditions themselves were nerve-racking for everyone in the generally vicinity. (I wish you could measure the quality and quantity of energy circulating through a conservatory on audition day.) Waiting for acceptance packets (or, in contrast, the dreaded rejection letters) to arrive in the mail was its own frontier to navigate. Then the month-long big decision, which led us back to more campus visits (see earlier in this paragraph…) And after that, the transition period between everything-being-about-getting-ready-for-college and Being There and Saying Good-bye.
Dan and I drove home as fast as we could. Six hours the first day (we left campus at 4:30 in the afternoon, after the last parent session, entitled “Letting Go”), fourteen hours the second day, and four the third. In one sense I followed my old protocol. I had Sunday afternoon and evening to catch up on email, put my teaching schedule together and contact all my students, and respond to last minute fall-semester questions, not to mention catching up with Rachel after the days apart. And on Monday I made announcements to three middle school classes, taught my first two violin classes and took Rachel to her lesson and orchestra rehearsal. Busy, busy, busy.
On another level, I feel as if I am walking through a different kind of atmosphere from the one I left last week. It feels thicker and heavier to walk through. Breathing can be challenging for a moment here and there. Time is ticking by in a new silence I had never noticed before. I am passing through a threshold I had not expected to be encountering. Raw is the best word to describe this new place. I know it is also filled with promise. The path that led to Chloe’s entrance into our family fold was one that multiplied the expansion of my universe exponentially, internally as well as externally. So it should be no surprise to me that her first step of departure from this nest would send me gear-shifting into the next catapult. I will not lie and tell you that I am eager. But I am willing, and I am as ready as you can ever be, if only by virtue of the fact that I am able to put it into words for you this afternoon. Thank you all for receiving it, and thereby standing witness for me.
Minivans, rental cars and a two-by-four promise
August 21, 2010 at 10:59 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | 2 CommentsTags: car mechanic, chronicle, college, daughter, family, journal, life, minivans, on the road, parenthood, reflections, rental cars, the family car, travel
Eight years ago this fall, we decided to buy a minivan. Dan and I were slightly horrified when we began to consider taking this drastic step, coming from decades of Subarus with only a couple of exceptions. Of course, Chloe being ten and Rachel six at the time, they were delirious with excitement at the prospect of a new car, even if it turned out to be a new old car. We knew we were facing at least ten, probably closer to twelve, more years of carpools and field trips, and we hoped at the time to have some family road trips ahead of us also. So we swallowed our pride, compromised our pre-parenthood-era values, started the tedious and mind numbing process of car shopping, and ended up with a Mazda MPV, getting a deal on a 2002 model at the end of that year. It’s beige, by the way. (Aren’t they all?) After we figured out how to find it in a parking lot, we became accustomed (or at least resigned) to our new identities as minivan owners.
The carpools and field trips turned out to be accurate predictions. The family road trips? Once a year we drive 70 miles to the south for a dance competition. Kidding aside, we have taken only two substantial trips in the minivan. Flying almost always ended up the preferred choice for two self-employed parents who missed out on too much income by taking the time to drive.
I do not know why, but when it came time to figure out how to get Chloe to college, we all pretty much assumed we would drive there. She will be taking a lot of living stuff, like bedding, towels, suitcases of clothes, jackets, boots, books, lamp, electric fan, wastebasket, etc. Plus she has her violin and her guitar. We figured we could ship most of it and fly, but there was something kind of – I don’t know – quintessential? – about taking to the highway to get to college. I figure if all three of us pictured it that way, it was probably meant to be. Rachel doesn’t really care either way, since she will be staying in town with a school friend.
Dan and I had planned to take the car in for an oil change and general road-trip check, thinking one week ahead would be about right. However, last weekend, as we were driving to my mother’s house for a farewell dinner, the “check engine” light came on. The car was driving fine, so we made it to our dinner and back home, and Dan took it to our mechanic, Gary, the next morning. It turned out to be the PCV valve. (That’s Positive Crankcase Ventilation, in case you care.) Commonplace, we were told, no big deal. And while they had the car there, they changed the oil and checked everything else, to their satisfaction. We had it home later in the day. Whew! We all expressed our relief that that had happened while we were still at home. Except I have to admit that it planted a teeny tiny little seed of discomfort in my mind, like a nagging itch. That night before I went to bed I sat down briefly at the computer and visited the Travelocity site, oh soooo casually. Rental cars, mostly. Also Amtrak, just to check. Dan took a little extra time to come to bed that night. When he came in he just mentioned that he found one really good deal on a Hertz full-size car. We agreed that it wouldn’t hurt to reserve it.
Two days later Rachel and I were on our way to the dentist when the “check engine” light came back on. (I hate that seemingly benign little symbol in the dashboard – in an anemic shade of orange, no less.) We phoned Dan, who made another appointment with Gary. This time it turned out to be an oxygen sensor. Rather than replace the part, Gary suggested we just clean out the fuel injectors. His car guys poured a special potion into the tank, instructed Dan to get a half-tank of gas, and then to fill it with gas when it got down to a quarter-tank. The “check engine” light was off when the car came back home. Gary said we will eventually have to have a new sensor put in, but that in the meantime there is nothing to worry about.
That evening, only to explore a little further, Dan and I returned to the Hertz website. We discovered that we could find an even better deal on a mid-size at another location in town. It began to sound very attractive to us to rent a car. This would save our van from the wear and tear. It would feel less risky to drive a newer car. Maybe the gas mileage would be better. Surely a mid-size or standard car would hold all of the stuff Chloe is hauling with her. And think how comfortable and quiet the trip would be! We basked in a newly found sense of security and well-being. We planned when we would pick it up and turn it back in. This could work!
To add the proverbial fuel to our fire (so to speak) that detestable little warning light came back on the next day. Trying to remain reasonable, Dan pointed out that we had only driven a little bit with the cleaner swimming in its warm bath of gasoline, and the fuel injectors were probably still a little clogged. And we talked about how once the little warning light comes on, it won’t go off unless the mechanic clears the car computer, even if the injectors are completely cleared out, and really, this is a minor problem. Creating an artificial deadline for ourselves, (probably just to be done with it) we sat down to make the official decision about the rental car. Chloe confessed that she loves our minivan and really, really wants to make the drive to college in it. We pointed out to each other that any car could break down on a road trip. Renting a newer car is no guarantee. The minivan is as comfortable to ride in as any car can be for a long trip, and it has both a cassette player and a CD player. And the clincher: Gary said the car is totally fine, we can take it on the highway with his blessing, AND if we do have any trouble on the road, I have his permission “to hit him upside the head with a two-by-four when we get home.” It’s not a guarantee, of course, but it’s pretty close to one. (Not that I like hitting people. Or that I could lift the two-by-four high enough to use it in such an untraditional manner. It’s just the intent of it that is supposed to reassure me, and I hear the heartfelt caring behind the words. After all, Gary has kids of his own. And he has an art gallery in the front of his car repair shop, for goodness sake.) And if Chloe wants to hold on to anything from home as long as she can, and all other things are declared equal, so be it. It was decided. The Mazda is going to college. And then Dan and I will drive it back home together. Together alone, but that’s another post.
The “check engine” light came on, stayed on for a day, and then went off all by itself.
Yesterday Dan went to the tire place to have the tires checked and rotated. It turned out the tread was just a little too thin. So several hours and 497 dollars later, our minivan now has a new set of “shoes”. Dinner was pretty late, as it was apparently very busy at the tire place. Maybe lots of other people are leaving for college next week, too. Though I would bet their PCV valves and oxygen sensors are just fine. Just saying.
On transition
August 16, 2010 at 10:32 pm | Posted in Short Blogs | 4 CommentsTags: autumn, change, chronicle, college, daughter, fall, family, journal, labor pains, life, motherhood, musings, parenthood, reflections, school, transition
Chloe and Rachel are out for the evening, tie-dying and dining with friends, so it is quiet here. I have a violin lesson tomorrow morning and I want to get some more practice time in tonight, but thought I would write just a little bit first.
The weather was cooler this morning, giving us a hint of fall, bittersweet. I love the crisp air, the deepening colors of autumn, the new shade of blue in the sky, but with this prelude a little part of me begins to pull in, bracing for what’s to come. My acupuncturist speaks of this transition time as the fifth season, deserving of its own mark on the calendar. What would we call it? Threshold? Bridge?
Perhaps in truth every day is a transition. We awake with expectations of what it may bring, and are almost always surprised by something before we yield to the night. It is so easy to ride our time on the ship of complacency, believing that the details we enter on our digital daybooks are the important ones. When Chloe and Rachel were little, I was reminded of what really matters a hundred times each day, startled out of the mundane by those young and unconditioned voices. Now our teenagers look up at the family calendar to see what’s coming as often as they open their eyes to see what’s here.
As long as I can remember every August into September has carried the promise of something new. Even after I had graduated from college, I started something in the fall. I took classes in weaving, yoga, Pilates, Jewish history. I took on new students of my own, settling into a rhythm so different from that of the warm summer months. For years I prepared for and embarked on a fall tour, traversing both familiar and unfamiliar territory each time. A couple of times, Dan and I went backpacking in September, feeling even more keenly the chill of earlier sunsets.
Once our children began attending school, August held a new meaning for them. And through the years our family has navigated the path from relaxed breakfasts to rushed, from shorts to sweatshirts, from evenings of leisure to assignments and requirements, with mixed reviews. The older they grew, the more complicated the mire of gains and losses that came with this passage, with Dan’s and my feelings adding to the tangle.
This year we are all more careful and less sure. Every meal together is a little more poignant, every silence loaded. The floor of Chloe’s room is filling with boxes and packages. The contents of her closet grow a little leaner, as she selects what goes with her, what gets handed over to Rachel or me, what gets given away. We are all too, too busy, though maybe the distractions are at least a partial salvation. One week from tonight Rachel will be rehearsing with one orchestra or another (depending on this weekend’s audition results) and Chloe and I will be finishing the last of the packing.
I go up and down every day now, excited with the ripeness of possibility and promise one minute, devastated in the next by the visceral awareness of Chloe’s pending departure. As much as I detest the quiet in our home this evening, it is allowing me to breathe through this new brand of labor pains. I can hardly believe I will make it through the next contraction, but I do. And I make it through the next, and the next as well. It’s transition. ‘Tis the season.
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