Saint-Seans clarinet concerto, take two?
Less than an hour ago, I walked out the tinted door of the dentist's office. I am now in my classroom, during my school vacation, trying to make sense of the mess that appears to be my teaching career. Outside, the sky is pregnant and grey.

Let's put it this way: You know you're probably a bit depressed when the lulling, forgiving voice of your dental hygienist (yes, WHILE she is scraping two years' worth of tartar and other nefarious substances off your teeth); the digitally fabricated green pasture and cloudy blue sky on the computer screen mounted to the wall on your right; the Johnson's & Johnson's fluoride dental floss; even the listerine-tasting blast from the ultra-uber-hydra-super-sonic plaque taker-offer-- when this whole scene make you strangely comforted and your eyes start tearing, like at the end of E.T., after E.T. comes back to life, when he raises his beaming finger from his heart to his mouth and says, "Ouch."

What more is there to say? I felt a twinge of guilt, just a twinge, when the hygienist asked me if I flossed regularly and I answered, not skipping a beat, in the affirmative. It all depends on how one defines "regularly," right? I mean, I HAVE dental floss, and I use it when I remember to...

The "pothead dentist" (the one who pulled out my wisdom tooth two years ago, during a "consolation," twenty minutes before his lunch date) put his hand on my forehead (ghostly white under the hot lamp above my head) and told me my last wisdom tooth, the sole survivor, simply has to go. There's a small cavity inside, it's super-erupting (or something) and coming down hard on my lower jaw, it's non-functioning... this may be my April vacation field trip.

I have a tiny tiny superficial cavity on my left side, the pre-molar. It hasn't reached the enamel yet. With TLC and fluoride toothpaste and flossing (yes, REGULARLY), I might be able to handle it on my own, they say. I'll learn more about that in a couple months, I guess, on my way to the wisdom-tooth extraction.

A half hour ago, WFCR was playing Saint-Saens' clarinet concerto. Quite beautiful. I had never heard it before, but I love his bassoon sonata. They sound like two unlikely gems, don't they? Now, I'm listening to one of Mozart's flute concertos. A long long long time ago I was practicing this for a Western District High School Music Festival audition.

My classroom calls.

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They Say I Sounded Like a Therapist

So today I gave a final to one of my classes. Part of the test was an open-response questions of sorts. It related to Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.  The students have been reading the book (let me clarify-- they should have been reading the book) during the last couple weeks since break.  I first read Siddhartha this past summer, reeling away from a disappointing spring (that the word "reel" has Scottish ties is an appropriate irony here) and a bit of dread, I guess, about a year of going nowhere (which wasn't the case, thankfully [which means, ostensibly, Siddhartha is right on the money]).  I was a bit, as A might say, rudderless.  Anyway, when I got to the end of the novel, I felt a little comforted, and I had a glean of insight. (I will NOT use the word enlightenment here for obvious reasons.  And besides, I wasn't really enlightened.) 

So I feel that Siddhartha is very appropriate for seniors, or anyone at a crossroads, for that matter.   I only wish I had done a better job of presenting it this semester.   But live and learn, right?  Regardless, after the tests, a few kids came up to me and said that the prompt sounded more like a writing assignment a therapist might give a kid in treatment than part of an English exam.  I won't try to figure out if that's a strange compliment, or it's just another way of saying I'm kooky.  And maybe they're one in the same, anyway.

Here's what I wrote:

What Siddhartha says to Govinda about life:

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find…? When someone is seeking… it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose (140).

 

So to be quite frank, this quote really resonated within me not too long ago, sitting in a garden near sunset with my little dog licking his paws beside me. No, you are not as old as I am (but don't you worry; you'll get there!), and maybe your idea of excitement is not walking a sprightly dog with dandruff through the community gardens, but I found this passage to be representative of most of what's gone on in my life, and the lives of many, many people. In fact, it seems to be a universal truth that we are always looking, thinking that so long as we have a goal, we're on the right path; and if we don't have a goal, then, well, we're basically up a creek with no paddle. I guess what's interesting here is that so long as we're seeking, we're not spending any time finding.

Okay, here's the personal reflection part-- how does this connect to your life? How, in the past, or right now, do you find yourself seeking? What are the things you spend your time looking for (this can be material, emotional, spiritual…)? What do you do in order to find these things? How much time does this take up?

Now, what are you not finding because you're so busy seeking? How can you stop looking, and instead take a breath and glance down under your nose and find?

If you can think of a particular time in your life when you learned this, or when this idea was apparent, then write about this time.

Take time to think about this. I want 5 or 6 paragraphs, time permitting.

 

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The apartment is not on fire...
…and the dryer is working fine.

For some, these are the mile markers in a tilting blue heaven.

Quite some time ago, I began noticing that our dryer didn’t seem to be as efficient as it had been in the past. I wasn’t surprised, since it’s part of a package deal and the washer had been walking for a month or two already (we finally got THAT somewhat under control, thanks to a resigned trip to Home Depot and a rubber bottom tray purchase—the “old school” local hardware store had failed us). A heavy duty washing machine and dryer in a third floor apartment of an old Victorian house basically beg for trouble from the onset, though, don’t they? (They came with the apartment, I take no blame.)

Weeks passed, and the dryer top seemed more of a stove top. Then, the smell, like there was something smoldering in there. Not a good sign.

I am the first to admit that since I’ve never OWNED a home, I’ve had just a smidgen of experience in “home repairs.” Since Andrew wasn’t sure what was WRONG with the dryer, he didn’t know what to “fix,” and we never got around to looking into it. Since I myself had neither time nor courage to do anything, well, we stopped using the dryer as much. (And, yes. The dirty clothes assembly line was getting backed up.)

So today was a SNOW DAY. No school. This was something that was more than a gift, quite frankly. I’ve spent more time doubting my choice of profession than actually practicing my profession this week, I’m afraid to say.

Anyway, I was home while outside poured buckets of cold cotton. The papers I needed to grade were in my car, so I figured I’d try my hand at the dryer. I went on-line to check a few things (did you know that The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that in 1998, clothes dryers were associated with 15,600 fires, which resulted in 20 deaths and 370 injuries?).

I read on, making sure I wasn’t committing a holy sin or endangering our dog and landlady by unplugging and de-ducting the dryer. Then, holding my breath, I rolled up my sleeves and got to it. I unplugged the dryer (the plug and outlet were twice as big as my fist), and moved the monstrosity out of the corner of the bathroom. I swept dust and hair bands and paper clips and forgotten pennies out from under the dryer – something we/I do periodically, believe it or not! – and then went and unscrewed the exhaust duct from dryer. GROSS. Water poured out, and huge clumps of soggy lint went splat on the dirty tile floor. That was NOT a good sign.

I cleaned what I could of the foil duct, and then went to the vent opening on the wall. The fact that I didn’t feel too much of blustering cold on me with this yawning hole in the bathroom wall was explained all too clearly when I reached in and realized that it was almost totally clogged up with the wet lint, only this time half-frozen.

When the previous tenant lived here, an unassuming bird, apparently, flew in through the outside vent and got stuck somewhere in the duct. Well, Dotty made sure that wouldn’t happen again and put some wire mesh at the opening, in the vent. It certainly prevented any poor airborne creatures from coming INTO the apartment, but it also prevented some of the lint from going OUT of the apartment.

Man, it took quite some time to get all that stuff out of the wire mesh. (Take note: you can ALWAYS find uses for left over chopsticks from Chinese take-out). I cleaned it out as thoroughly as possible (piles of it!), and reconnected the duct. At both ends. (I am brilliant.)

The dryer works now. There is no burning. I just checked the clothes—they’re dry, and I’ve only been on the computer for twenty-five minutes.

Yes. This is right up there with buying that stupendous straw-braided hamper (it smells like tea leaves) from Ten Thousand Villages [fair-trade everything; check it out: http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/] two months ago. How amazing is my life?

I’m reminded by a poem I came across last year at around this same time, when I was unsuccessfully trying to clean the house and probably crying or something pathetically female like that. It’s a poem by Julianna Baggot (sp?), called “Poetry Despises Your Attempts at Domesticity.” I can’t find a copy of it on-line, but it really helped me make sense of life, for a moment, in my tilting blue heaven.

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We are fragile.
In about twenty minutes, I'll pack the dog in the car and head for Springfield. Columbus Day is a holiday for public schools, but this feels more akin to my usual state of health (mental/physical) on the infrequent "sick days" I take. I'm kind of sniffly, a bit shaky, spending too much time doing nothing and more time fretting about spending too much time doing nothing.

Except I've just managed to usurp a good forty-five minutes of my morning worrying about what I should WEAR, rummaging through a blasted closet full of wrinkled clothes and pacing the bathroom floor.

At 11.30, I'll be at a wake. The father of a very good friend of mine from grade school (we had lost touch and then coincidentally met again in a coffee shop not too long ago) was robbed and murdered in Colombia. I think I'm still in shock. I'm not quite sure what to expect, how to act, what to make of all this. I just can't imagine.

The other night, A and I were in South Hadley, taking the heart barnacles I used to nanny out for dinner (they inhaled) and ice cream (they hardly touched). I tucked them into bed, and H and I read a pirate book together. Before I left, upon kissing him on the forehead, I told him that I would probably dream of pirates. Well, I did. And guns. And I've had similar bad dreams on and off for a week now. There's something to be said about a night like that. There's safety in waking up.

But still.

This weekend, there were times when A and I didn't know what to do with each other. Didn't know what to do with ourselves, didn't know what to do with each other. We were out of sorts, the seemingly interminable rain wasn't really "washing" anything away (it was loitering in mud puddles and damp cold shivers), and our hiking trip had been canceled. I tried fighting off a cold that I believe, inevitably, will nonetheless consider itself invited for the next week. I was cranky, I'm sure. We were both needy. I was tired.

And throughout, this thought about 11.30 today, about two weeks ago, about a week ago when my friend from high school called to ask me the news about our friend's father. This father I remember vividly, his voice, the way he called his daughter and son in the Spanish, the full names.

About the librarian at school, who lost her husband, her best friend, this past summer. About my cousin, in the middle of a divorce. About people with bad dreams.

When I sense life's fragility, I listen to Ravel's first piano concerto, second movement. The UMASS orchestra performed it in 2001 (I played piccolo), accompanying Estela Olevsky. That has always stayed with me. The performance was the month my dog, Poco, got hit by a car and died. Everything kind of runs together when I listen to it. Memories and wishes and losses.

*****
It's 10 o'clock. I have to go.

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Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon
It is dark and quiet (save a few coughs and sniffles) in South Hadley, and the kids are asleep. I drove down to visit the kids I used to nanny. Sprout is finally curled up-- he has yet to learn how to make friends - to "play nice," shall we say? -with their black lab puppy that is probably more than half my weight by now. Needless to say, this pup is a bit too hyper and too heavy for our terrier mongrel, our terrified mongrel (and, hence, our terror of a mongrel). If Sprout were a kid, he'd be one of those boys who refuses to attend any neighborhood birthday parties because he is so painfully shy. Only after several hours of coaxing with Rocky Road ice cream straight from the pint would he even set foot in the house. Eventually, after sitting alone beneath the table for hours, he might be able to share his fire truck with the other kids.

But what I wanted to write about is Obi-Wan and his Master Qui-Gon. Yes, one of the kids is reading the Star Wars series, and we just cracked open a new book (okay, his mom got it from the used book store so, technically, it's not new): _The Apprentice: The Hidden Past_.

Naturally, Obi-Wan is the apprentice. And in this chapter, it's his thirteenth birthday, a very important birthday for a Jedi apprentice, because he is now, officially, a Padawan. Obi-Wan is excited about the birthday, which is traditionally celebrated without great ceremony, because his Master is supposed to give him something REALLY special. But he can't say anything about his birthday. I mean, that's just not COOL to do, tell OTHER people about YOUR birthday.

So Obi-Wan waits and waits all morning long, totally preoccupied during breakfast. And Qui-Gon says nothing. He's TOTALLY playing it cool. But Obi-Wan eventually HAS to say something, because Qui-Gon asks him what distractions are plaguing him (I mean, it's OBVIOUS there's something brewing in that scrawny, stormy mind of his). An apprentice is prohibited to lie to his Master, so Obi-Wan has to allude to this special something X-marks-the-spot-on-the-super-warp-zone-calendar.

Well, Obi-Wan DOES get something from his Master for his thirteenth birthday: a rock. And that's just what it is-- a rock. It doesn't have super powers, it's old (Qui-Gon found it when HE was about Obi-Wan's age, and who knows HOW old Qui-Gon is [cut me some slack, I'm new to this Star Wars series]?) and polished and red and black. And there's this beautiful imagery when the sunlight streaks through it, but we won't cover that now because that gets into literary devices. It's a rock.

Okay, so any thirteen year old in his right mind would be pretty damn disappointed by this, right? Probably any thirteen year old Padawan, for that matter. And so, well, Obi-Wan is kind of sour: "Now he realized that the only thing Qui-Gon had ever truly given him was a rock."

***

So that's the story line so far. And, since it's the first chapter of the book, I'm assuming that this rock is going to have some significance. It is an image to be remembered. We will probably find some deep extended metaphor when we get to the middle of the book...

For some reason, I'm intrigued by the story (Okay, really, believe me-- during my junior year of high school I DID read _Anna Karenina_). Stroking off sweat-crusted bangs from the small wrinkled forehead beside me, I read part of the chapter aloud and found my 31-year old self strangely drawn to it.

Here's a closing note: "On his or her thirteenth birthday, each Padawan must take quiet time for reflection. Both good and bad memories must be consulted and meditated on." It's a fantastic ritual, and A and I try to do this often. Certainly every year. Sometimes, we have to break it down to DAYS.

On that note, I've got to hit the sack.

(Yes, you have just read a high school English teacher's [she even has an MFA] bastardized literary criticism of Jude Watson's _Jedi Apprentice_. And I stand by it.)

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Bird Prophet and Country Music
My user name came from composer Olivier Messaien (1908-1992), a French organist, composer, and, in a sense, ornithologist who wrote for a variety of instruments and was married to a brilliant pianist. He was known as "The Bird Prophet" because of his fascination with and knowledge of birdsong. Many of his pieces have transcribed bird songs woven into them. "Oiseaux Exotique" is an orchestral piece that is based on birdsong. My fascination with Messiaen is multitudinous. First, as a flute player, I struggled with Messiaen's "Le Merle Noire" for quite a long time. It's got these crazy thirty-second note passages covering several ranges, double-tonguing and accents, these pockets of clicking and singing and calling. I never mastered it, but I was mesmerized nonetheless.

As an MFA student at the time, trying to be a poet, I always came back to the "wounded bird" voice (which was soon to be countered by the lonely tiger voice). No matter how hard I tried, I always got a bird somewhere in my poem. So I felt akin to this amazing French man who wrote songs about birds. Who wrote the songs of birds.

I just found out that Messaien had something called "synaesthesia," a mixing of senses. Messaien saw colors in music. He, in a sense, "heard" colors. This explains a book I checked out of the library years ago but never read. It was "Music and Color" and was, ostensibly, an interview with Messiaen. The fact that color could be music, or music color-- that's also fascinating. I like to believe I might possess some of that ability.

I'm forgetting to add his politics. But I'll save that for another entry (and anyway, we all know who the political one is in this marriage). I also never got to country music. I was going to pull a Shelley and write my own version of "A Defense..."

But my VERY pregnant sister is calling. I will visit her, bring a movie to watch as she lies on her side for the fourth hour of the late morning and drinks the second gallon of water. Samuel, oh Samuel. We're waiting for you to arrive.

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What is your passion?
In school today, we had a guest writer and reader. It is part of our Local Authors Project we're working on this year. It's funded partly through the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as from the various towns in our school district. We've invited five local authors to come and speak - give two readings and two workshops for the students - at various times throughout the semester.

I could go on about the grant, and maybe I should, so that I can figure it out myself, but what's on my mind has less to do with the grant and more to do with the messages and questions that have swarmed my brain during the past two visits.

Today, we had Marty Dobrow come to read some of his work, and to talk to the students about his views on journalism, among other things. Marty Dobrow, it turns out, was once a high school English teacher (I'll tell you, the longer I'm in the field the more it seems as if EVERYONE used to be a high school English teacher). He got the "writing bug," as he calls it, and began writing locally, for the Hampshire Gazette. He then turned his focus a little further on the horizon, and he has since written for some national sports magazines, as well as published a book about the UMASS basketball team. He currently teaches journalism at Springfield College, and he is a correspondent for the Boston Globe (mainly following the UMASS basketball team).

So what was initially a benign visit from a friendly sports guy became a pivotal point for critical thinking. He STOPPED teaching so he could write. He couldn't NOT write. And yet, after he tried writing FULL TIME for a while, he realized that that, too, was taking a toll on his psyche-- the stories ate him up, he said. He couldn't sleep.

So he teaches at Springfield College. He also follows sports teams all over. (Oh, yes. In his spare time he also raises two kids, I guess). He travels the US to catch up with small town pitchers like Brad Baker, a somewhat local kid from Leyden who has spent five years bouncing from team to team, spot to spot-- getting married to his high school sweetheart in the meantime, moving from Massachusetts to Florida to Alabama to California to, I think, Arizona, to... (I got the whole A, AA, AAA lesson but would embarrass myself horrendously if I tried to work it into my writing here, so I'll feign TOTAL ignorance just to be safe).

So Brad Baker's wife is in Bernardston now, trying to make a living and hoping to relocate, for a second time, to be with her husband. She had gotten herself through GCC and made the trip to Alabama, only to hear Brad had been transferred to California (I think). So she's back home now.

So here are the things I'm thinking. Brad Baker has fought his whole damn life to make his dream come true. (Yes, it's that sappy. It's that trite. It's that pat. Really.) He hasn't given up. Marty predicts success. His wife has stood by him, but has lived miles and miles away.

Marty Dobrow gave up teaching. He writes. He travels. He has two kids. I don't know if he has a wife, but I'm imagining so. His passion is in the stories you learn from your mailman, the guy who wears a tattered Red Sox cap and whose father died before the Sox won the World Series this past fall, the guy who - twenty years ago - allowed his young son to listen to the ball games well beyond bedtime so long as the crackly radio was quiet enough so mom wouldn't hear. Marty Dobrow is, in a sense, famous. He also has fought to live out his dream, or to scratch what was itching, so to speak.

Dobrow's parting message to the students had to do with passion. Not the physical lust the kids promise one another, pushed up against the lockers two minutes after the bell rings, but a different kind of passion. An itch, a calling, something that makes life more than a humdrum journey back and forth from work until retirement. He told the students that many people are in the work force twice as long as they're in school, and that it's important to ENJOY what they do.

So what is my passion? What do I enjoy doing? Is teaching really what I want to do? Is it time management that prohibits me from doing anything else with my time? Am I being too self-critical? I had a few dribbling epiphanies:

1. Asking myself these questions (especially the first two) within forty-eight hours of school vacation is probably NOT very productive. I'm working strictly with my reptilian brain right now.

2. If I don't automatically answer that I DON'T like teaching, then maybe I'm okay for now.

3. I itch all over. And that's because, really, I have dry skin.

I am not known for my writing. I am not made famous through my teaching. I have yet to come up with something so innovative in my classroom that stars collide and I am all of a sudden Teacher of the Year, or Teacher of the Millennium, or whathaveyou (and by the way, I have my doubts about the actual merit of the Teacher of the Year title. A teacher at the school has recently won one of those awards, and I've heard of some nightmarish experiences in her classroom!). And perhaps I never will amount to anything but a high school teacher. With a few kids - who liked Whitman in the first place - remembering to yawp every once in a while.

Teaching is not a job that lends itself to instant gratification. And I have to be okay with that before I can move on in this profession. Writers, artists in general, often strive for recognition, for an audience, for worth or praise or something else. Something stratospherical and yet strangely inward. I can say this personally because I, at times, have considered myself active in the arts.

One of the few things I remember about Ken Burns' coverage of Louis Armstrong in his _Jazz_ series is his commemoration of "Satchmo"s wife, the woman who "kept house"-- who FOUND house, really. I have an image of her doing everything but actually raising the roof of the place she found for her and Louis in Queens. In fact, I think she bought the house in his absence. She was the woman who made it theirs, who waited patiently until Satchmo returned home weary from a tour. Maybe she used to be a high school English teacher, too. Maybe that's what teachers do-- building something inhabitable.

And yet, where would we be without the music?

My mother once told me that she didn't go on to become a concert pianist or a professional organist because she "wanted a life." Because she wanted a family. She is certainly a musician in her own right - she performs in concerts, she accompanies, she teaches, she subs at various churches - but she is a mother and a wife and a director of fine arts. How does she do it? Why did she do it? What can I ever strive to be?

I don't know what I intended when I began writing this. But I suppose I now intend to close.

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