I want to write a book.
December 5, 2011 at 11:37 am | Posted in Very Long Blogs | 2 CommentsTags: aging, albums, blogging, change, chronicle, Claudia Schmidt, college, composing, connection, depression, Diane Sward Rapaport, expertise, friendships, goals, guitar, healing, healing the earth, Jon Katz, journal, Karl Paulnack, learning from mistakes, life, loss, memory, miscarriage, motherhood, music, musings, parenthood, performing, recordings, reflections, Rosalie Sorrels, singing, songwriting, thanks, vision, writing
I want to write a book. This is nothing new, actually. One of the reasons I started this blog was to practice writing – not only the process of writing regularly, which I have been doing for decades in a journal, but to practice writing to a real (as opposed to imagined) “audience”. And let me take this opportunity to extend my thanks to all of you faithful readers out there for serving as listeners! Another way this blog has been helpful is in teaching me that I can write about almost anything. As you know, I have often begun with what is immediately in front of my face, and then out comes an essay of sorts. I am fairly certain that the general fellowship of English teachers in my junior high, high school, and college years could have told me that – in fact, some probably did try to communicate it to us in patience-lacquered exasperation – but, like Dorothy, it turns out I had to discover it myself. (Chloe used to say “All BY self!” with all of the monumental, exuberant emphasis that only a two-year-old can muster, placed heartily on the middle syllable.) Unlike lucky youthful Dorothy, I had to wait until the sixth decade of my life, but as we all know, it takes what it takes!
So now I come face to face with the inevitable and obvious quandary. If I can write about anything, which you have to admit opens the gates stunningly, even alarmingly wiiiiiiiiiide open, how on earth do I go about the process of narrowing down the focus? I am pretty sure that the book of collected essays about any random thing comes later in an author’s career, probably not first. So, even though I have now trudged this little line of hopes, desires, requirements, and questions several times in the past weeks, I will walk it again below, for you, but also potentially for my own benefit. If it goes as it has lately, I might end up even a few inches beyond the boundaries of my last attempt by doing so. (Not to set myself by having lofty expectations. I am only going with my own observations. Just saying.)
One of the big questions that continues to come up whenever I run into any friend I have not seen in awhile, is whether I am still “doing music.” Yesterday I was at an annual school event that always brings people out of the woodwork. (Haha – funny phrase to use at a Waldorf school, where everything is organic and all the students from grades 5 and up take woodworking class.) So Dan and I stopped to chat with this couple and that, all parents of students who have graduated from our school, catching up on how everyone – first the now-college students or graduates, and then parents (don’t we always talk about our kids first?) – is doing. Inevitably I was asked the key question by almost everyone. Being the somewhat literal interpreter that I am, my head spins every time I hear it. “Are you still doing music?”
First of all, I will ask you, how could I NOT do music? Even during the two times in my life when I have completely quit, never to play again, I would often sit down at the piano or pull out my guitar and play for my own pleasure. Does that count as “doing” music? There’s the time I stumbled into a Romanian fiddle class which led to a Scandinavian fiddle week which led to an entire new repertoire on my “retired” violin. And then there’s the time I was just going to focus on raising my kids and nobody in my new neighborhood knew me or my previous vocation. One day a woman came to my door and said, “I hear you teach piano lessons. My twin daughters would like to study with you.” No matter how I tried to argue that, no, actually I definitely do not teach piano lessons, eventually I found myself setting up a lesson schedule for her twins and then their neighbor, and then some more kids down the street, until I was teaching three or four afternoons each week, a steady stream of neighborhood children letting themselves in the door up our driveway, an instant gang of playmates for Chloe and Rachel, as they would come early or stay after their lessons to hang out. And then there’s the time I took Chloe to the Aspen Music Festival to fill her ears and her heart, and I ended up sitting in a piano master class, stifling my own gut-wrenching sobs as I realized I had left this world decades ago and now needed to return to it.
Yes, I am still doing music. I list my present inventory: playing baroque violin in my chamber orchestra, teaching private lessons on violin, piano and recorder, directing two early music ensembles at school, taking private lessons myself on baroque and modern violin, playing music for services at my synagogue, singing for the healing services at a local hospital, and whatever pick-up performance or recording jobs I get along the way. Is that “doing” music?
Okay, yes, I’m “doing” music. But what some – not all, but some – people mean by their question is whether I am still performing as a folk musician. And herein lies my true stuck and quandarous (I know it’s not in the dictionary, but it is truly perfect in this instance so I am using it) circumstance. I left the folk circuit behind and do not intend to return to it. I can honestly say that it was a right and healthy decision, and though I do not regret it, I have to admit that I now feel called to somehow share my music again. I have felt this pull for two years or longer.
In previous decades I wrote songs about miscarriage, depression, insomnia, war, love, sexual abuse, loss, motherhood, the catch-22 of the women’s movement, and more. I have performed traditional ballads on the subjects of traitors, love triangles, murder, loss to individuals during the Civil War, the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, World War I, and other historical times; on the challenges of love – between people of two classes, forbidden love, the desperation of unwedded mothers, unrequited love, and becoming widowed. I have performed songs by other contemporary songwriters on poverty, hope, transgender love, love lost and won, ancestors…Obviously the list could go on forever. There are so many stories to tell, so many new ones to add to my repertoire, so many messages to offer, so many questions to pose and explore with my audiences.
But where is my audience? If I do not care to return to the folk world, for whom do I sing, and where?
To find an answer to this question, I have had little brainstorming sessions with friends and colleagues. I have pondered the salon setting, which I find appealing for many reasons, but have, at least up until now, come up short in the area of energy. So far I have not mustered the vitality necessary to start my own salon series, nor have I had the wherewithal, not to mention the patience, to go through all the steps to make it happen. Writing that helps me see that the synchronicity of details falling into place has not availed itself to me yet. For three years or so I worked in a trio with two musician friends, hoping that together we could rally the forces necessary to brave those elements, but we found that it provided too little income, too seldom, to justify the amount of work required at the time. I deeply miss the beauty of the music that we made together, as well as the camaraderie, and hope that someday we will be called to perform together again. And I have kept my antennae up for other possibilities to present themselves. Perhaps said antennae missed some signals, but I don’t think the universe has been streaming anything approaching an abundance of solo folk-music but non-folk-venue opportunities in my direction. So far.
So now a new thought is beginning to form. I talked it through with Dan a few days ago, and it made some sense, so I’ll try it on for size here. Thirty years ago I knew that I wanted to go out into the folk circuit, and understood that to do so I would need to make a recording – in the form of a record album, which in that era was no small venture. I was already performing locally and was developing a nice following. I had enough savvy to realize that the only way to extend it to a national level was to be heard on the radio. So I bought the wonderful book, How to Make and Sell Your Own Recording, by Diane Sward Rapaport. (Incidentally, back then it was …Your Own Record.) I studied it in minute detail for several months, and then went into action, following her protocol. In the fall of 1982, my first LP, To Meet You, was released on my own label, Propinquity Records. My first California tour was in 1983, followed by a second and third on the west coast, and then I branched out to the Midwest, New England, and the Middle Atlantic states in 1985. My second LP came out that same year, followed by a children’s tape, and a third record, and then finally I accepted a contract with an “established” label and simultaneously moved into the world of CDs. My solo career was moderately successful on a national level until I stopped touring in 1995. Perhaps someday I will write about reaching that difficult decision, but that is not part of today’s entry.
The more important piece is this: if releasing my first album enabled me to jump-start and support a thirteen-year career on the road, it makes sense that releasing a written publication could help me do the same thing in the next arena (whatever that is). The difference is that this time I feel the need to allow the journey to evolve, instead of starting, as I did thirty years ago, with a clear picture of what I want and trying to make it happen. I know that may sound backwards to some of you. So why would I say it? The picture I had back then was too narrow and I ended up never really reaching it. The biggest mistake I made in that era of my career was that I kept aiming for my original image. I now know that in any venture you have to occasionally make the time to take stock, doing an inventory of what’s working and what isn’t, asking questions like How has my life changed since I began this journey? What is the present status of the industry I chose? What changes might I consider – in my vision, my goals, my definition(s) of success, my boundaries, etc.? I now know that back then I remained too stubborn and short-sighted about what I wanted, until the only thing that could crack was myself. Which is basically what happened.
So this time I am starting from what feels to me to be a very different place: I feel called to share the gifts I have been given in my life, which include more than a guitar, lyrics, melodies, and chords. I want my music and my life experiences, together with the higher-self wisdom that has always guided my writing process, to serve a purpose, to help people. Thirty years ago I knew I wanted to establish enough of a reputation that I could more easily book gigs and expect a decent-sized audience, so I could make a living and put aside enough to pay for my next recording. In addition, whether I could have admitted it at the time or not, I had another agenda. One or two layers below the aforementioned goals, I wanted to prove my own self worth, scrambling to compensate for a great lack on the inside. I thrived for many years on the so-called “waves of love” that wafted up from the audience at my feet, and the bigger the crowd, the more I craved it the next time. By the time I left that career behind, I only knew that it wasn’t working, but I didn’t understand exactly what was wrong with it. Lessons learned through a long mid-life reassessment taught me that self worth has nothing to do with ego.
In my younger years, I thought you had to become an expert before you could do your thing in front of people, and I considered myself an expert. Again, I have no regrets. I am grateful for all the years that I worked in the music industry, and for all that I learned about music and the biz, not to mention all the friendships – and the music!! – that came from that part of my life. Certainly, I know that I am a good performer and that the songs I perform, some of my own and some from a broader repertoire, reach people. I am not saying that it’s a bad thing to aim toward expertise and excellence. What I am saying is that the term “expert” is never an absolute thing, being difficult to qualify and to measure, and it may not always be the most important attribute. I want to give myself permission to be an unabashed explorer, fraught with uncertainty and far from an authority, on another front – the amorphous part that I have yet to bring into focus. Can I stand before an audience of wanderers as a searcher myself? I believe I can. Sixteen years after leaving my folk career behind, I long to connect all the disjointed and compartmentalized pieces of my life. It is so typical of our American culture. In college you can study biology, chemistry, math, creative writing, music, etc. But where can you study – and experience – the coming together of all these? Music provides much-needed nourishment for our very cells, for our minds, for our hearts and souls. It goes beyond the words that come from our mouths, beyond the notes on the page, beyond even the notes in the air.
When I wrote about my struggles with depression, I was afraid to say the word “depression” on stage because it might seem too heavy for someone who came to the show for a night of entertainment. Now I know better. There might be someone sitting out there who needs to know that writing that song was the beginning of my turnaround. How? Because to write the song I had to put a claim on depression. I spoke from exactly where I stood, which ironically enabled me to begin to move. In an earlier blog, I wrote about being so touched by the writings of Jon Katz, who minced no words in Izzie and Lenore, his account of his own plummet into the depths (see “A question about depression, and a song,” my post of May 2, 2011.)
When I wrote about my miscarriage, I vowed to wait until I had given birth to my first child before I would perform it. Miscarriage is an experience that puts us face to face with our complete and utter lack of control, and to make up for that terrible and frightening realization, we often paint over and around it with superstition in an effort to regain some semblance of a foothold. I was afraid of another miscarriage, of my inadequacy as a woman and as a mother. Out of that fear, I refused to buy anything to prepare for Chloe’s arrival until a month before she was born, just in case I might jinx it. I finally performed the song when she was almost eight months old, in a concert with Rosalie Sorrels and Claudia Schmidt. And once I began to bring it to audiences, women began to come up after the show to share their own miscarriage stories with me. I was so moved by their accounts, and equally moved by their desire to tell someone. But once I left my career behind, I had two additional thoughts about this.
One thing that came to me was that now there were some women out there who were not sharing their stories, since I was no longer out there performing the song. The other was even more sobering. The women that came up to the stage to talk with me were only talking with me, even though they had all sat in the audience together. I began to imagine what could happen if the song served as only a jumping off place – what if I could have sung the song and then we could have had an evening of sharing our stories? We could have all served as witnesses for each other. We could have cried together and laughed together – such a greater good! We could have had a one-night fellowship of women who suffered a loss and then moved forward in our lives, experiencing the richness of the joys and sorrows that followed.
Okay, so earlier I told you that I would want to enter this new chapter of my journey without a specific picture in mind. Clearly, I lied! I do have some specific pictures. And I openly admit that I have no idea how to make them come into being! There you go – two true confessions for today’s writing. Perhaps I am being idealistic, but I do believe there is a way that I can bring my music to people in a way that brings them together, in that evening, in that very room. That is my hope. And since I cannot reach everyone in person, I am hoping that writing a book can reach out into other circles and communities, and perhaps I can later go out to them too. I would like to not only write the book but also record the songs and have the recording and the book come as a package. And the part I cannot yet envision? I am hoping that it will simply come to me as the next step, evolving naturally from the actions I take up to that point.
This feels to me like a lot of hope. The work feels daunting, but doable. I love writing. I love singing. I love performing for people, sharing the stories that go with the songs. Above all, I love feeling that connection that happens between me and my audience, through and beyond the music, and I want to find a way to extend that sense of connectedness, to weave it like a thread from each member of the audience to the others. People crave it, but they also fear it. I believe it to be a healing force, and that the world needs that kind of healing.
There was a speech given in September of 2004 by Karl Paulnack, pianist and music division director at Boston Conservatory, the welcome address given to the incoming freshman class and their parents. It has been posted in countless blogs ever since, published in several languages, and I would strongly encourage you to read it. Here are two links:
http://www.bostonconservatory.edu/music/karl-paulnack-welcome-address
Music is not just a form of entertainment. As Professor Paulnack suggested to his audience of eager and terrified pioneers and their parents who were no doubt (based on my own experience) swirling with mixed emotions, “If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness…If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.” I want to join that fellowship and serve that higher good. I hope with all my heart that I find a way to do it.
And the subject for the book? The starting place? The direction? I know I just need to start writing some each day to see what comes. I know I will be guided, as I always have been, through the process. I’ll let you know how it’s going. Thank you again for “listening.”
The mohair shawl
November 17, 2011 at 12:36 pm | Posted in Very Long Blogs | 1 CommentTags: aging, art, artist, cancer, childhood friend, chronicle, college, crochet, dressing with a flair, friendships, grief, journal, life, loss, memory, music, musings, reflections, reunions, school, shawl, thanks, tribute, violin, waitress, writing
I haven’t written for a long time. So I promised myself I would use the old writing exercise of starting with whatever my eyes fell upon. I am sitting in Barker Hall, listening to Rachel’s weekly orchestra rehearsal, surrounded by my stuff: the bag holding our dinners and water bottles, my pack, my purse, two down jackets (it is supposed to snow tonight as we drive home and it’s COLD) and all my winter weather accessories. So what is the lucky theme for the evening and today’s blog post subject? Drum roll! A dollop of suspense. And the winner is…
My SCARF!
It’s nothing special, actually. I got it two or three years ago when Sierra Trading Post ran one of its specials (this occurs almost daily, but somehow it always feels like an extra bargain – call me a sucker). It is half silk, half cashmere, hence the key word: warm. But also another key, yet less desirable word: itchy. Around my neck. What makes me continue to wear it is its versatility, and of course the previously mentioned and most important quality. It is a thin and pleasantly drapey woven fabric, and though I think of it as a scarf, it actually has the dimensions of a shawl. I have worn it in many a chilly room over the past two winters, around my neck, around my shoulders and torso, or over my legs as a lap blanket.
Pause buttons “on”. Please do not worry. I am already as bored as you are. Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge my gratitude to you for having enough faith in me to have hung in this far! Let me also tell you that the reason I chose this topic was twofold. Number one, as a writer, I wanted to keep the bargain I had made with myself, and literally the place my glance landed was on the fringe of said scarf. Number two, and from here on, more relevantly, the instant I contemplated the subject of “scarf”, my mind jumped to a significant shawl from my early twenties, a gift from a significant friend, and amazingly, almost a twin to a gift from a different friend the same year.
It was back in the years when I was still oblivious to being Jewish and was celebrating Christmas. Most importantly, I was enjoying the holiday in a new way because I was earning enough money to buy some nice presents for people. I don’t know which was the more fun – the selection process, proudly spending my own hard-earned money, or actually handing each over to its intended recipient. And of course, I was on the receiving end at the same time.
This particular year – I must have been nineteen or in my early twenties – I don’t remember much aside from these two gifts. As I said before, the shawls were almost identical. Both were made of mohair. One is a little on the orange side of red, and the other leans more toward the fuchsia side. The pinker one was woven, and sold in an artisan collection. The rust one was also handmade, but by my friend herself, crocheted, I think.
One interesting detail is that up until then, I had never, ever worn a shawl, not once in my entire life. When I opened the first (I do not recall in what order they came to me), I remember being surprised by it. Of course I expressed my thanks (and I hope I was gracious.) But somewhere in there I remember a twinge of discomfort. Something on the order of “Oh! Does this go with who I am?” There was a lick of fear being fanned as I laid eyes on this gift, as if I was being asked, invited almost, to explore a new flavor of personality within myself. I had a vague image of the kind of person who would wear a shawl, and I did not think of myself as that kind of a person.
I was able to put these thoughts aside until the second friend presented me with the second, eerily similar gift. Let us hope that I was just as polite, just as gracious in my thanks. But now you know that I was socked with a second dose of this discomfiting stirring. Was my understanding of myself somehow askew? “This is not who I am!” I wanted to announce, as not just one, but two of my close friends chose to give me the same uncharacteristic, lovely, and somehow intimate gift.
As I was wont to do back then, I chose the rigid and narrow way. I put the shawls away and never wore them. I was about to write “and never touched them” but that would not be accurate. I did touch them. Every so often I would pull one or the other – or both – off the shelf and say to myself, “So-and-so GAVE this to me.” It is difficult to express to you all the meaning in that phrase. What I can tell you is that it meant a great deal to me that both friends went out of their way to pick out/hand-make this shawl. I felt somehow caressed or cared for by both friends. Even if I never wore either one, I felt warmer, as if I understood that both friends could see something in me that needed the warmth, the holding, and the beauty.
It was my friend Mary Jean who had crocheted the burnt orange, using a variegated yarn with mohair and maybe some other fibers spun together. We had first met when we were nine years old, in a beginning violin class in a summer music program. Mary was learning to play not only the violin but the flute as well, a fact which impressed all of us no end. I’m not sure how she worked out the logistics of attending both classes, and I do believe that eventually flute won out. I had not known Mary before, but my best friend from school knew her from church, which made her all the more significant to me (even if the dual instruments status hadn’t already won my admiration.)
Mary and I attended different elementary schools, went on to attend different junior high schools, and continued to run into each other at summer music events. We came together in high school and though we had some of the same friends and occasionally hung out in the same crowd, we were headed in different directions. Mary was a gifted art student, and I was continuing along a musical path. She must have been in the audience for some of my shows with my band, as I know she enjoyed my music. (And by the way, it was one of my bandmates who was later to give me the other shawl.) But all through those years we were not close friends.
Finally, after my band had split up and we were both college students, Mary and I both got a job at the same restaurant. We started off bussing tables, being too young at first to wait tables in a place that served liquor. We both served as hostesses, greeting customers and seating them at their tables, later we both trained as cashiers, and then, once twenty-one, we continued up the ranks into waitress and cocktail waitress, where the real money was.
I want to stop here to make something clear. Lest it seem that I am headed in the direction of romanticizing an old friendship, I should inform you that in many ways Mary Jean drove me crazy. We became roommates for some period of time, I can’t remember how long, and I thought I would end up doing something mean, she was so annoying so often. She would greet me every single time with great flourish and waving arms, crying delightedly, “Carla, Carla!” Never, never did she say my name once. (Look, now she’s even got me doing it, just thinking about her.) I was a moody person back then, and her effusiveness made me dizzy, and I do not mean that in a good way.
But in some ways she was so very good for dark, moody, lost me. I remember one day we went to the big city together, 45 minutes away, and visited, among other places, the art museum. I had never quite seen art the way she helped me see it that day. And for our excursion I borrowed a piece of clothing from her, a skirt, that somehow made me feel beautiful in a way I had never before felt. Fashionable, attractive, and graceful. I suddenly realized I could feel like that all the time if I could dress – and see myself – with a little more flair. As I just now wrote that, it makes me wonder if that was before or after I had received the shawl from her.
We also talked occasionally, that kind of girlfriend talk that just happens if you are there for the right kind of opening in the right kind of moment. She was caring and loving, and there was an air of a certain kind of wistful sweetness all through her that almost made you want to cry. She was quite beautiful. And her artwork was beautiful, with a flourish. You could almost get drunk on Mary Jean. And then you got sobered back up by the quirks that could drive you to distraction.
She ended up marrying someone I didn’t know well, a waiter at the restaurant where we worked. We drifted apart. I don’t know how long they remained married, and then they ended up divorcing. A few years passed. The next time I saw her was at our tenth high school reunion, so we were both 28.
She arrived on the arm of a new husband named Scott, a sweetheart of a guy. And with some news. She took me aside to tell me that she had spent the last year battling lung cancer. She had been sick in the winter, thought it was bronchitis since that was going around until one night she had trouble breathing and began to cough up blood. Scott took her to the ER. She told me that she spent that night in the hospital certain that she would die before morning. But she didn’t. Then came months of treatment. Her hair, which looked like regular Mary to me, was gone – this was a wig. It was good news for the time being, as she was in remission. She and Scott were living in California, and had come to town just for the reunion.
For the next year we continued to stay in touch, through letters and an occasional phone call. The cancer returned. She returned to chemo, which sickened and weakened her. It was her artwork that motivated her to get out of bed some days, and she poured herself into it, as much of herself as there was left. I wrote to her late that winter to tell her that I was going to be driving to California in June. One morning in early spring the phone rang. It was Mary.
“When are you coming?” she asked. I gave her the exact date. She hesitated. “I don’t know if I’ll still be here.” My mind spun. Here? Where was she planning to go? It took a moment for the meaning of her words to sink in. We talked for a few more minutes, though I have no recollection of what we said in that part of the conversation, and then she told me she needed to hang up so she could rest. Breathing took immense effort.
At the end of phone conversations, there are all the normal ways of saying good-by, but suddenly none of them seemed adequate. I was 29 or 30 years old and had never had to deal with anything like this before. “Mary,” I said, “I don’t know what to say.”
“I know. And it’s okay.”
And it was. Suddenly annoying and crazy Mary was the wisest person in the world, and it was safe to be exactly how I was in that moment. I felt a great sense of comfort in the face of such utterly cracked-open-honest permission to admit my helplessness. The conversation closed and I hung up the phone, feeling strangely calm. One minute later the phone rang again. “Carla? I believe I might still be here. Call when you get close.”
The night before I was to arrive, I called her number from my motel room. Her husband answered. He spoke to me as if I already knew, and once again my mind reeled until I grasped the meaning of his words. She had urged him to go for a walk the day before. He left her with the hospice caretaker, and while he was out, she was able to let go. The hospice worker told him that often a person cannot bear to give up while surrounded by loved ones, an understanding that offered comfort to him when he came back and was flooded with remorse for having abandoned her. As he talked, I had the sense that he just needed to tell it all to someone, and I was certainly glad to be that someone. But I was also filled with regret that I had come that close to seeing her and then missed by only two days.
Two or three winters ago, some 35 years after Mary crocheted me the shawl, I took it from my closet shelf and put it on. After that, on various occasions, I rotated the other one into my wardrobe, and began to let the Sierra Trading Post scarf slip down around my shoulders. I even added a fourth to my collection, imported from Spain (purchased at a huge bargain from STP.) I don’t know what possessed me, or why, but it suddenly felt just right to wrap myself in the folds of a shawl. I now dress with more of a flair, and find that I like feeling fashionable and attractive. I can still hear Mary’s voice calling me, “Carla, Carla!” These many years later, it makes me laugh instead of gritting my teeth. I can still see her smile. And I am forever grateful for each of the gifts that she gave me, grateful that her life touched mine, and especially grateful for that moment of raw and perfect honesty on the phone, and how deeply connected I felt to her in that crystallized point of time. It is my hope that I can offer that kind of safety and some touch of beauty and sweetness to my friends, at least occasionally, and that I can be honest and true with my fellows in the grittiest, most basic way, when it really counts. Thank you, thank you, Mary Jean.
Ambivalence, weaning, and a death grip
March 10, 2011 at 9:23 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | Leave a commentTags: acceptance, ambivalence, breastfeeding, choices, chronicle, daughter, decision making, family, journal, letting go, life, memory, motherhood, musings, pain, paradox, parenthood, reflections, tug of war, weaning
I am so right-in-the-middle of figuring something out, and hoping I can articulate it here. I guess it’s obvious I am going to attempt it!
I just got off the phone with a friend, someone who knows me very well and has been there for me through many years of my journey. We were talking about ambivalence and how troublesome it can be. Ambivalence. I know it doesn’t sound nearly as bad as a lot of other things, but when I get stuck there it’s not a pretty picture.
The first time I remember someone using this word in reference to me was when I was weaning Chloe at fourteen months of age, under doctor’s orders. Nursing Chloe was by then a joy, but it had begun with great difficulty. With hindsight and acquired-on-the-job wisdom, I now understand that she had something called by the benign name of “nipple confusion” combined with another sanitized understatement called “failure to latch on properly.” In plain English, most likely because the hospital gave her a bottle and a pacifier on her massively impressionable first day, she spent the first eight weeks of her life outside the womb mashing my almost instantly wounded and enfeebled nipples, and I was in perpetual agony, re-initiated anew at every feeding.
Happily, our perseverance paid off, and around the time she turned two months there was a turning point. From then on, the process reached a level of infinitely greater comfort on my part, and we began to experience, several times a day, that mutually blissful state of milk intoxication that most nursing mothers reach if they stick with it. But as the year progressed, I began to have some health problems, and, among other things, was losing too much weight too fast. With the weight went any semblance of stamina that I might have had. If I couldn’t fit in a two- or three-hour nap each day I was completely wasted. Finally my friends and family members asked me to consider weaning Chloe. I refused. It was a hard-won battle and now it was working fine. Until the wake-up call when my doctor finally told me he agreed with my loved ones.
My La Leche League leaders helped me strategize the weaning, and with the loving support of my friend Karen, who had raised (and breastfed) four children, I came up with a plan and moved forward in earnest. The basic concept was to eliminate one feeding a day for the first week, another the second week, and so on. Chloe was an every-so-often-when-we-feel-like-it drinker, so it meant we had several weeks of stepping down ahead of us, a fact I found immensely comforting. This was not going to be anything close to cold turkey for either of us.
All was going well until a few weeks into it, I hit a major stumbling block. First, allow me to back up a little. When my doctor, a naturopath whose own children had been breastfed, told me he thought I should wean Chloe for the sake of my own health, I found myself backed up against a wall I had never wanted to know existed. To save myself I had to deny my own child??? This was not an acceptable choice for me to be facing, and yet it was up to me to make it. Everyone around me was encouraging me to do one thing and my heart was strenuously insisting on the opposite. It seemed irreconcilable, a literal deadlock.
As I stumbled around on the battleground, weaving on my feet, a kernel of clarity slowly emerged amid the dust. What the situation was calling for was for me to take an honest look at the status quo. It was literally taking too much out of me to nourish my sturdy and thriving child. Even with a lengthy rest each day, I was still declining. I had to admit that I trusted my doctor, a man who was not prone to portioning out advice. I was also willing to admit that I had very little perspective and was in a weakened state, both of which make it hard to reach an important decision alone. This meant, I eventually reasoned, that I had to turn to other people to help me. And there they all were, telling me from their hearts what they felt I needed to do. And – here’s the important part – the moment I consented, I felt myself beginning to recover. It was reaching the decision, not the physical act of weaning, that caused the tide to start to turn.
So now back to the bump in my road. We were already down to a few nursings a day when I suddenly reared back on myself, questioning the decision I had made a few weeks earlier. I spun out into an agonizing place, second-guessing and cross-examining myself at every turn. I was miserable and anxious, so afraid I was damaging and abandoning my tiny daughter. In the process, I was making everyone around me equally miserable, including poor Chloe. I do not remember how long I stayed in that place. What I do remember is when, gently, my friend Karen said to me, “I think your ambivalence is harder on Chloe than the actual weaning.” With that single and insightful observation, everything snapped back into focus. Just as making the decision had given me an immediate sense of greater well-being, the self-torture – the thoughts themselves – had inflicted pain, on me and everyone else. We resumed the weaning process. As bittersweet as it is, it was indeed the road to health.
I have recently begun a practice of asking for the gift of acceptance each morning. The universe, in its infinite wisdom, is teaching me that, in order to accept something, I first have to be willing to see it and acknowledge that it’s there. Closed eyes and ears, distraction, disassociating, etc. are all forms of denial, at the opposite end of the spectrum from accepting what is, just as it is. My prayer has already begun to be answered. I am experiencing more fully the exact place in which I have delivered myself, much of each day, and it is not all pleasant. My body is in pain. Standing in the self-created and inequitable courtroom that is my mind, I now find myself facing the same kind of choice I was looking at almost eighteen years ago, though the characters in this scene are different ones. Down to the way my breath moves in and out of my lungs and the blood flows through my arteries and veins, down to my very cells, I am courting the same impossible question: Do I hold on or do I let go? When one has been holding on for dear life for one’s entire life, letting go requires the peeling off of decades of fists, fingers, fingernails, and all manner of strangleholds, each of which has worn the deep grooves of familiarity, strengthened by belief. I can truthfully say that I have already decided that I must release my hold, as I have seen the laughable futility of my death grip, not to mention the damage in its wake. My mind is willing, and my heart has been swayed in that direction, but my body has no idea how to do it differently. My sense is that the physical pain I am experiencing is that of the rope in this internal tug of war.
So after my phone conversation, in which my friend pointed out that it is my ambivalence that is causing my pain, I felt something come together. (I know what you’re thinking, by the way. I just told you that my mind is already made up, which does not sound like ambivalence. And you are right. In the big picture, I am actually somewhat clear. It’s in the individual actions that I am still frozen up – shall I do this or that? Go with xx or stay home? Practice or meditate? Is it okay that I said no to that person and yes to someone else? Can I actually say what I want, even if it isn’t what the other person wants? I think you get the picture. Okay, back to my integration moment.) Here is what my friend, this dear person who has honored my path for almost two decades, reflected to me: I am already on the path, taking the action. Remember a few weeks ago, when I wanted someone to grant me permission to do what I already knew I needed to do? It was my own permission I was waiting for.
I just looked up the word “ambivalence” in the dictionary. Oxford Pocket Dictionary (it would take some pocket to hold this one) says: “1. the coexistence in one person’s mind of opposing feelings…in a single context. 2. Uncertainty over a course of action or decision.” I hold on even as I let go. I pull back even as I move forward. I am afraid of receiving the very thing I want most. We live in paradox. It is not only entirely possible, but almost always true that we have conflicting feelings along the way, even when there is no question of what we must do. Thank goodness we have each other when the way can be so hard to find. Even when it’s obvious.
Valentines Day, the blob on the screen, and growing up
February 21, 2011 at 3:35 pm | Posted in Very Long Blogs | Leave a commentTags: aging, career, chronicle, college, daughter, family, journal, life, loss, memory, motherhood, music, musings, orchestra, parenthood, reflections, school, seasons in our lives, sitting in the audience, Valentines day, violin
It is Valentine’s Day. I am actually wearing red, coincidentally or unintentionally (whichever way you want to think of it), but don’t tell anyone I didn’t plan it. We sent Chloe a care package on Friday – two homemade cards (one from Rachel and one from me), a store-bought funny card (from all of us), and a bag of Lindor chocolate truffles. Not that we have any special family connection with this holiday. It’s just that Chloe’s roommate always decorates their room in a season- or holiday-appropriate way, and I didn’t want Chloe to feel – left out? Forgotten? Perhaps I am merely (desperately?) grasping at any opportunity to do something special for her, now that she is away.
I am sitting in the sanctuary of a church. It is Monday evening, time for Rachel’s weekly orchestra rehearsal. This is what they are calling the “dress” rehearsal, though the students are not required to wear their concert black. The performance is Wednesday night. In it they are premiering a piece by a local Grammy-winning composer, and he is here tonight. He and their normal director are taking turns conducting and listening from the hall. It is a beautiful piece, and we are so excited that Rachel gets to play it, as only the first few chairs in each section were selected for this work.
I have performed with my orchestra and with various other chamber groups numerous times in this room, and I do not often get to sit out in the pews. Never did I think, six years ago in my first concert here, that in a few years I would be watching Rachel play in such a prestigious group. Nor did I at that time picture Chloe at music school. And 1,300 miles away.
Before Chloe was born, I was active as a touring solo folksinger. Dan booked my concerts and traveled with me, leaving his computer training and consulting assignments behind each time we went out on the road. I took a few months off during my pregnancy and then when Chloe was four or five months old, we hit the road anew. She traveled to countless places with us during the first two years of her life, and let me take this opportunity to mention what a super nomad she was – eager and bright-eyed for every leg of every trip, and forever good-natured. Anyway, once she turned two, not only was it suddenly more expensive to take her with us, it had also become increasingly costly to me in terms of energy and focus. As she became more affected by the changes in her surroundings, it was harder on her, and therefore on Dan and me, which made it challenging to balance everyone’s needs while we toured. So I went out there by myself for just over one year more, leaving Dan and Chloe behind at home for each of my four- or five-day trips, twice a month, until I could no longer find enough of a reward so far afield to lure me away from the bosom of my family. When Chloe was three and a half I gave up traveling and became a stay-at-home mom, doing whatever gigs I could find close to home.
One month after my final tour, I went to Chloe’s nursery school to watch the children in their special Christmas holiday performance. They got up on their little platform, two inches above floor height, and Chloe, who had never given me even a clue as to her thoughts about my being a performer, turned to me from her place up on the “stage” and said, “Mama, now it’s MY turn to be up here!” As they launched into their first song, I observed several of the children gazing blankly around the room, mouths open with wonder at what was going on, utterly oblivious to the fact that they were performing. In the meantime, Chloe and a small handful of others were singing their hearts out, clearly, spiritedly and confidently, fully cognizant of the attention their adorable selves were garnering.
(Note: Lest you be misled by this quintessentially cute scenario, allow me to bring you back down to earth by informing you that Chloe had at that time almost no sense of pitch. It filled me with dread and alarm to think that I had actually hatched a tone-deaf child, and for all her early years I did my best to not discourage her vocal efforts with my clenched teeth and too-bright smile. My anxiety was relieved around the time she turned eight, as by then she had finally settled into a reliable and well-tuned relationship between her ears and her vocal cords, thank goodness. Until then I had not realized that for some children, developing a sense of pitch is a developmental thing.)
Chloe is now not only playing in her college orchestra as well as the designated string quartet of the music department, and working on solo repertoire with her private teacher, but also was accepted into the women’s chorus for this semester. Next week they will be performing Handel’s Messiah. At Christmas, when all the choruses and the orchestra put on the annual holiday concert, it was live-streamed for those parents who live too far away to show up for every performance. Dan and Rachel and I were way more excited to watch it than I would have expected, especially once we saw that the visual quality was disappointingly far from sharp. “That blob has to be Chloe!!” we assured each other in front of our long-distance computer screen. And we were right, of course. Family members can always tell.
Rachel’s orchestra has just begun the opening theme of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, one of the most lovely melodies out there. In waves, I find myself overcome with emotion as I listen. First of all, music is a personal thing, somehow intimate even in a giant hall (which this is not). When it is delivered in performance it feels as if it has been handed To You, even as you sit among five others, or hundreds or thousands of others. And the intimacy extends to the others in the room, as you are all receiving it together. There is that level of it, enhanced in this case of course by the fact that it is my kid up there!
Then there is the piece that is just particular to my family and our experience of performances. We all have almost always been there for each other’s special events. Dan has been there for close to every concert I have ever given, with the exception of that dreadful year when he stayed home with Chloe while I was still touring. Chloe and Rachel stayed with a sitter for a few years, and then began to come to my shows with Dan, even if they fell asleep during the show. Once I joined the baroque orchestra, not only have they come for almost every single performance (even coming night after night when we have a multi-night run), they generally sit right up there in the front row. My fellow musicians have come to expect them to be there, and have missed their shining faces on the few occasions when they have either missed the concert or been banished to a seat farther from the stage.
So this year presented me with this multi-faceted loss as well. We don’t get to be there for Chloe’s shows, and she doesn’t get to be here for mine or for Rachel’s. Maybe that doesn’t sound like such a big deal. My words don’t carry the charge that I feel about it. This is part of how we live together. It’s part of how we know each other. We eat together, we talk, we listen to each other practicing and we are there for each other’s performances, cheering each other on – and enjoying it.
When I played at Carnegie Recital Hall back in 1980, I don’t think it ever dawned on my parents to fly out for the concert, nor did that possibility occur to me. Since both of them were from New York and had many friends and family members who still lived there, they simply wrote to everyone they could think of to tell them I was coming. And my fan club definitely showed up, stand-ins for my parents, who waited excitedly back home for the reports of the event. I think they may have sent flowers, but I can’t remember for sure. And my aunt went with me to the Russian Teahouse and a long string of other places after the show, as we celebrated well into the night and then some. Expectations have definitely changed over the past thirty years, as has the world of travel. While Dan and Rachel and I cannot possibly fly out for every show Chloe is in, we certainly plan to be in the audience for the big ones. I don’t know how we will distinguish between those that are important and those that aren’t, but I assume we’ll figure that out.
Nobody tells you, when you hold your precious little newborn, that this is going to be only one season in your life. Let me try to explain this from my own point of view. There was the season of my own childhood. The season of college and young adulthood. The mating season that resulted in marriage, those early years with Dan that were filled with music and travel, the wrestling with career and dreams of starting a family, which took time to sort out and clarify. Then there was the season of early parenthood, mixed in with the loss of Dan’s parents. And then all the decisions that come with that phase: school, activities, priorities, the forming of new traditions. Somehow my view of that season was often blurred by and partly merged into the recollection of my own growing up. And in a way, “growing up” came to feel like a permanent state to me. After all, my parents remained my parents even after I was technically an adult. Maybe because that felt permanent to me, I took up with the idea that the tangle and closeness that is the nature of raising children would be, similarly, without end.
Of course, everyone tells me that it would drive Dan and me absolutely crazy, off the deep end, if our kids stayed with us forever, and I believe them! Isn’t it amazing how we humans can want two opposing things at the same time? In the early years, I wanted Chloe and Rachel to remain forever small, adorable and snuggly, imbued with that kind of worship that only the young bestow upon their doting parents. And at the same time, I can remember how crazy-making it was to have them on my skin every waking (and, often, non-waking) moment. I remember saying to Chloe as a baby, “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” Of course I want them both to grow into adulthood and find their respective paths. And I want some sunset years with Dan, bookends to our early years together. And I want Chloe and Rachel here with us because that is what feels complete now.
I can still remember the last time Rachel fell asleep on my lap, two or three years ago maybe, at the concert of a friend. It was a Sunday afternoon, those sleepy after-lunch hours of the day, and she leaned on me, and then when I looked down into her face, she was asleep. I sat there in the concert, tears streaming silently down my cheeks because I was fully aware that it was likely to be the last time that would ever happen. The end of an era. She may still be my baby, but she is definitely not a baby anymore.
In less than four months, we will attend her 8th grade “continuation” – in every way a graduation, even though, yes, she is continuing on into high school. Chloe will be home for the summer by then, and will be sitting in the audience with Dan and me. It’s not that our times together are all behind us, and, God willing, we will certainly be in each other’s audiences for many years to come. I am seeing that these four years are indeed an extended transition into something else that might also be considered a transition into something further on down the line. Maybe each stop along the way in life is more of a transition than a station. I am beginning to think so. May the valentines and bouquets and phone calls say it as loudly and clearly as applause and smiling countenances, in both directions. And may we all ride the continuing surf, sometimes lulling and sometimes tumultuous, of transformation.
Bittersweet as the pies bake
November 24, 2010 at 10:09 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | Leave a commentTags: aging, chronicle, college, daughter, family, journal, life, memory, musings, reflections
I am in the middle of pie fixings, Dan rolling out the dough for the crust. My good friend Doug Berch’s CD is coming to us through the kitchen speakers. Chloe, freshly (one hour) home for Thanksgiving break, is ensconced with Rachel in one bedroom or the other, admiring Rachel’s recent happy Goodwill purchase (a prom dress or concerto dress, whichever comes first). Bella the dog is enjoying her bone in the girls’ company. All is right in the world. In this house.
My aunt, at age 80, moved here from New York City, where she had lived all of her life except for her college years. She was married sometime in the late 1940s or early ‘50s, a brief union that ended in an annulment. This past summer, on July 4, she celebrated her 84th birthday with a sandwich and a cupcake that Dan and I brought to her senior citizen apartment house. As we dined together at the picnic table, she commented that her mother, my maternal grandmother, died at the age of 84.
I called her today to see if I could convince her to join the four of us, along with my mother and brother, for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. She is as low as I have ever heard her. In all the complaints she has spewed out during these past four years of living here – the noisy college students outside her apartment, the thumping on her ceiling and/or walls, the lousy care when she was recuperating from a broken hip and wrist after a fall, how her newly claimed home town can’t hold a candle to the Big Apple – never have I heard one word about not feeling well. Until today’s phone call.
A woman in her apartment building took her own life two weeks ago. To my aunt, who is suffering from a chronic and worsening respiratory condition, it was a stark tolling of what lies ahead for her. What can she look forward to but the same four walls within which she has found a peaceful refuge, an increasing struggle to take each breath, and an occasional trip downstairs to visit “the ladies” or across town to the doctor’s office.
I do not believe she is lonely. Having chosen to live alone, I am fairly certain she has been content that way. I believe she is beginning to let go of her attachments here. And though it saddens me to think about it, I cannot blame her. I have watched her these last few months coming to grips with the disease that evidenced itself shortly after she settled here. “I didn’t expect this,” and “I’m still getting used to all this,” her succinct hints at how she feels about her body betraying her.
Betraying us all! I was so looking forward to trips together to the art museum, the movies, lunch and tea together. When I was a child she would visit us once a year, staying with us for about three weeks. My father would drive us to the train station – she was afraid of flying – and we would get to go ON THE TRAIN and see her sleeper compartment, truly a highlight of her visits. I loved her voice, her New York accent, the leather brace on her left arm from a serious car accident during her college years, and her straight dark hair. I would sit and watch her unpack her suitcase, fascinated by the amazing versatile manner in which she used her right hand, which often had to do double duty, and by the scars on her leg where they had to take bone to try to save her damaged limb. As plain as she always was in the areas of fashion and self-expression, I found her glamorous.
I have not seen her as much as I thought I would, these past four years. She definitely prefers solitude. She has had little or no interest in going out together. We mostly talk on the phone, and sometimes I visit her or take her to my mother’s house for a holiday or birthday. Tomorrow after lunch I will call her and see if she feels like she is up to a family Thanksgiving dinner. If not, then Dan, Chloe, Rachel and I will pay a short visit to her on the way to my mother’s. Either way, it will brighten her to see my two teens, reminding her of me when I was that age. I hope my presence can offer a little comfort, even if it cannot help her lungs take in more air. Not touchy-feely, she probably wouldn’t let me hold her hand, so we will chat and she will reminisce a little and ask Chloe a few questions about college and then not listen to the answers.
I know I need to enjoy what we have now, and I will. The passing of my father taught me to listen differently – she is beginning to speak a new language, sprinkled with hints and clues. I will do my best to atune my ear and hear with my heart and my intuition.
May we all take in whatever blessings avail themselves to us during this holiday of gratitude, and may we spread them as we receive them. Speaking for myself, they are all around, even when it’s hard to distinguish them through the tears.
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.
Insurance cards, faulty memories, and the muse
August 3, 2010 at 4:56 pm | Posted in Long Blogs | 3 CommentsTags: daughter, family, journal, life, memory, motherhood, music, music lessons, musings, parenthood, practicing, reflections, the mind, violin
The mystery arose late last week. We were approaching the deadline to submit health forms to the medical clinic at Chloe’s college. In addition, we were asked to photocopy her insurance card and then fax all three pages to them. When I was Chloe’s age I used to love to fill out forms, but let us just say that she does not take after me in that respect. Simply put, there was procrastination – and not just on her part. I have to admit to having evolved to the point where I do not relish them anymore either. And Dan was busy with other things. Finally, two days before the deadline and hours before Chloe was to leave for the weekend, we hunkered down and with my guidance, she completed the task. I went to my wallet to pull out her insurance card, and discovered it was not in its designated slot.
Surprisingly, and with startling synchronicity, I had just gone through the same kind of sequence with Rachel earlier that same day, and with the same results. Rachel had been invited to join a school friend and her family on a road trip to the west coast, and we thought it would make sense to send her with at least a photocopy of her insurance card. As you have now guessed, when I went to my wallet said card was not there.
Hmmm.
So we backtracked. When was the last time I had seen either card? It was the week prior, when Rachel had gone with a different friend for a three-day outing (she has been quite the social butterfly and traveler this summer) and the friend’s mother had suggested she take the card with her, just in case. So I emailed said mother (I’ll call her Ursula) and asked her if she could return the card.
Ursula’s response appeared a little later: “I never had her insurance card.” What? Dan and I remembered the conversation clearly. I emailed back, telling her as much. (Nicely.) Later she emailed back, admitting that maybe she needed to check her purse again, and promised to get back to us afterward.
In the meantime, I was tracing our steps through recent weeks to remember when we had last used Chloe’s card. That was also no problem to recall. Two days before she and Rachel flew to Florida for a dance competition, I finally took her to the doctor to check out the two-plus-year-old pain in the ball of her foot, which turned out to be a stress fracture. (Another story, perhaps a future post.) She was new to that doctor’s clinic, so we had had to give her card at the front desk to allow the receptionist to photocopy it for their files. Had it been returned to me? I was pretty sure I remembered putting it back in my wallet.
As I reviewed the sequence of those days, I asked Chloe, “We didn’t send the insurance cards to Orlando with you and Rachel, did we?” She was sure we had not bothered, and I agreed. I had no memory whatsoever of handing them to anyone – either Chloe or their friends’ parents – as we met up with their fellow travelers at the airport. The trip was only for two days, and she hadn’t wanted to be responsible for carrying them. Dan concurred.
Another email from Ursula appeared: “I was thinking. Maybe the card looks like my insurance card and I missed seeing it. I’ll get back to you after I check again.”
A little perplexed, I called the clinic where Chloe’s foot was examined and explained the nature of my plight to the woman at the front desk. She was exceedingly sweet and very helpful. We spent ten minutes on the phone while she checked through the pile of abandoned insurance cards tucked away in a special corner of her drawer. Apparently this is not an unusual occurrence. Not finding it there, she continued to chat pleasantly with me as she combed every possible nook and cranny that might hold an unclaimed card. And when she failed to uncover it she was truly apologetic. I left my phone number with her just in case and said good-by to my new friend.
Ursula’s update appeared on the screen: “I searched my purse and didn’t find it. Sorry.”
Okay.
Dan ordered a new set of cards from our insurance company and we decided to wait another two days to fax Chloe’s health forms, just in case the old card turned up. By this time, my mind resembled the ball on the green and white table.
On one side of the net: Ping! “Am I going nuts?…”
Other side: Pong! “What a weird coincidence that both cards are missing at the same time…”
Ping! “I could swear I remember giving the card to Ursula…”
Pong! “I can’t believe we lost two cards in two different places in the same week…”
Chloe left for the weekend. Dan and I joined my mother for dinner in a noisy restaurant on the edge of town. We were waiting for Rachel’s call from some hotel in Las Vegas. Yes, my 13-year-old was spending the night in a resort casino hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Dan’s phone was on digital roam and Rachel was taking forever to call. By my admittedly long-distance reckoning, they should have arrived at the hotel hours ago. As we ordered and then dined, the image of the crash on I-15 was beginning to sketch itself in my mind. And of course, they don’t have Rachel’s health insurance card so they won’t know who they are treating in the emergency room. Assuming they are willing to treat her seeing as she has no card. I kept all this to myself so as not to worry Dan and my mother. Finally Dan’s phone rang.
Dan cupped his hands over his cell phone and his other ear. It was clearly not Rachel on the other end. At the end of a short conversation he chuckled lightly. “Okay, thanks for letting us know!” Probably not the ER.
It turns out Chloe’s cousin was aimlessly sifting through the contents of Chloe’s wallet sometime between dinner and the Shakespeare play. Hidden way in the back, stuffed safely in the midst of various gift cards from graduation two months ago, were the wayward health insurance cards.
(Rachel finally called us at home much later. They had indeed arrived hours before, but went swimming in the hotel pool before calling.)
What I find the most fascinating about this story is how none of us could piece together a complete memory of actually taking the insurance cards out of my wallet and handing them to Chloe who then stuffed them into hers. Dan and I remembered the conversation with Ursula, but not the upshot. And Ursula in turn began to doubt not only her memory but even the tangible hands-on search through her purse. Chloe and Dan and I could remember discussing whether to send the cards with Chloe, but not one of us had even a vague recall of the actual decision. And the receptionist at the medical center, who had no reason to remember the details of Chloe’s card – for all I know she wasn’t even working the day we came in – was totally open to the possibility that it was floating around there somewhere. It happens.
Dan is currently reading Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph T. Hallinan. From the little he has told me about it, it is the perfect companion to this episode, examining what we do and do not remember, and how we tweak our actual memories to fit our view of the present. I plan to read it when he is done, as I find the implications staggering. What does this tell us about eyewitnesses in a court case? Just a few weeks ago Chloe’s senior class did a production of “Twelve Angry Men” (it included women, of course, but I just don’t like the ring of “Twelve Angry Jurors” so I’m holding to the old, though gender-biased, title) and I wondered all the way through it, Would I be able to remember anything clearly enough to testify under oath? I don’t think so. Even as I am telling all of this to you I am very likely committing errors in the sequence, timing, and what people said, felt, and did. The gist is only as true as I can make it.*
And in the context of music, how well do I remember what my teachers told me to practice? How accurate is my understanding of their appraisals of my musicianship and skills? How well do I hear myself play? One of my teachers demonstrated for me that, while playing out of tune with terrible tone sounds – not surprisingly – terrible, playing out of tune with gorgeous tone sounds amazingly tolerable, even passing for, well, playing in tune. I’m obviously not campaigning for inaccurate pitch, but there is a kernel here that is immensely helpful to my paralyzingly perfectionistic self, and it goes something like the following.
Can I make a bargain with myself to practice all the ingredients – fingerings, shifting, articulation, phrasing, vibrato, dynamics, expression, etc. – and then let go of the belief that I need to micro-manage the performance? Can I apply the perfectionism selectively and use it “mostly/only” during practice sessions? In other words, if I do my homework long, hard, and well enough during the practicing and rehearsing, can’t I trust the muse to sprinkle a little magic on the stage the night of the concert? Assuming one is a good musician, how much of the performance is “fact” and how much is “illusion”? Is it really all about a million tiny details, or is the music greater than the sum of all its parts? I really do know the answer to that question.
I can now see that I always relied on the magic of the muse throughout the decades of my folk career, and she always proved herself to be reliable. So apparently I have piled all the perfectionism into the arena of classical music. Perhaps the learning curve that lies before me (or am I already ascending?) is to tear down the wall between those two worlds. I wonder who built the wall in the first place.
*With two disclaimers. Number one is that Chloe claims she did not procrastinate. She needed my help and I was busy, which is totally true. Number two is that after Dan read the above, he reminded me that we actually photocopied his insurance card and Rachel took that with her to the west coast. Here’s what’s perfect about this one: I have no memory of it!
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