Organizer

As has been previously mentioned, Suzuki Institute week was a major pinnacle of my young life.  Also, as I have written before, one mental process I follow when I can't sleep is to move into various houses with which I am familiar.  So putting those two together in childhood, I spent some time as an imaginary Institute director.  What that really meant was, I was deeply in love with the orderliness of curriculum and the predictability of the set Institute classes, so in my mind, over and over, I divided up levels into the various groupings and scheduled rooms.  I did this to my own house, to our church, to my school,  and most notably, to the Austin Convention Center, which I had the opportunity to tour while it was under construction (but have not set foot in, since.)  

Beyond that, I have many notebooks where I meticulously planned curriculum or organized rooms for , not only institutes, but also instruments, dance, my own foreign language, math, and grade schools.  It is all so orderly and logical...and it was all dropped a few pages in for lack of ability to stay focused for the duration of the Grand Mental Plan I was enacting.

This deep interest in orderliness and orderly progression is sort of interesting to ponder, because in the physicals of real life and in my own intuitive learning journey, I was/am not specially organized or sequential - rather my process is more abundantly chaotic, intuitive-leap-prone, and passion-driven.  Fortunately I can do both with my students in my own teaching - whatever the needs are at the moment...

I have Institute planning on the mind right now as I am in the thick of putting together our in-house group workshop for the July 10th week.  This has involved rather less room scheduling, and more of: logistics for outdoor shade options, creating chamber groups, selecting repertoire, creating transcriptions,  recording of parts, planning clean up and furniture moving, and lots of emails and texts.  It only vaguely resembles the mental Institute planning of my childhood. 

Incidentally, a few years ago I was offered the chance to take over the directorship of a Suzuki Institute, and I turned it down in record time.  I know enough about the actual job to know I would not be a good fit and it might kill me in the process.  It involves beaucoup de phone calls and emails, advertising, contracts,  fundraising, institutional meetings, lots of public speaking, organizing social events, and huge amounts of problem solving on the ground.  I am better at the actual teaching and performing and find that many of the basic secretarial aspects of my own limited job are hard enough.

Homesick

A blogger I love to read recently wrote about feeling homesick while at home - having so much love in your body that it feels like you miss that place.  I understood the feeling at once, although I have never described it nor heard it described before.  Maybe it is quite common but we don't have an English word for it.

I felt this when each of my children were babies - all I could think of at times was how very much I ached to hold and love a new baby... which thing I was doing at that very moment.  It wasn't a disconnect from reality - finding that the reality did not live up to the expectation and wishing for the imagined desire to materialize.  It was more of wishing for the current good to go on repeating forever and knowing it can't and wanting it more than the laws of physics could bear.

I have felt it in certain places, too... loving them so much I miss them long before I have left them.

Mexico

Our Mexico trip was an intentional and exploratory adventure, which lasted around two weeks.  Nearly two decades after the fact I only remember certain scenes and impressions, the most important of which I will do my best to relay.

...Jared and I met at school, and it was not anything like love at first sight.  That sort of thing doesn't happen to me, and with rare exceptions, it takes a while for me to warm up to new people.  (It's not that I think them uninteresting; it's more that I have lacked both scripts for finding shared interests and the percieved safety to connect genuinely.)  There was no momentous first meeting.  You will have to know that the school was small - the entire student body numbered around three hundred music majors from high school Young Artists through doctoral and artist diploma students - the majority being in the bachelors and masters programs.  So everyone ran into everyone, and we knew most everyone's name or, at least face, pretty early on.  After several years of acquaintance in various formats, Jared and I became quite close, but I wouldn't say we were dating.  Dating seems to be an activity which has certain scripts and expectations, and while I couldn't tell you what those were exactly, they definitely didn't apply.  But I will say he seemed like a potential match, and I wanted to explore that with intention.  

At the time of this story, that intentional exploration was intellectual, rather than romantic, and it centered primarily upon questions of religious beliefs and practices and denominational loyalties.  It was a rather atypical sort of getting-to-know-each-other phase with lots of conversation and research.  Thus I found it difficult, not to mention embarrassing, to communicate much about the friendship to my family....

My family's church in Austin would support a group of volunteers as they traveled to a specific border town in Mexico each May/June to assist in a ministry building houses with, and for, unhoused families.  This was before the heavily armed drug cartels made it too dangerous for Americans to wander about the small towns there (not to mention the Mexicans!)  My family was going just a few weeks after I finished my masters degree.  I decided to invite Jared along.  He agreed to it.

Soon, came graduation.  Everyone's families showed up.  My family, it seems, had made the "dating" assumption, while Jared's family most definitely had not.  There is an awkward photo taken of the two of us in our caps and gowns, requested by my family, of the "couple", which I did not feel very much that we were at that time. Jared's parents felt surprised by this and jumped in to take a second snapshot of the awkward pose.  There was also a restaurant lunch, organized by my family to get to know Jared's family, which thankfully my roommate was also persuaded to attend, thus lowering the pressure a notch.  I would have invited more friends, too, if I could have wrangled them.

A few weeks later, Jared flew into Austin to spend some days with my family before the caravan to the border.  I did not realize it at the time, but in retrospect, my family's proper understanding of Southern hospitality immediately put him in the "guest" category, and the rest of us in the "host" category, with all of the duties of both roles laid out according to the eminently logical observations of Miss Manners.  Which I had not read at that time.  I think it is likely that both Jared and I failed in some of those duties, as we were both oblivious.  There were also a few references to us as "the lovebirds", which made me feel very unpleasant sensations.  Despite the phrase's glaring inaccuracy,  it was ultimately forgiveable, as our friendship was not following a known template from my parents' perspective. 

Anyway, it was a nice visit in terms of not being in a hurry, going for walks, and taking field trips to see some historical and cultural things.  Then the team embarked for Mexico, where the main highway - not limited access - near our destination ran pedestrian traffic, enormous and poorly regulated cargo trucks, and everything in between, traveling at a wide variety of speeds around and through potholes big enough to swallow a small car.  My folks were worried about the scrawny, pale, vegan musician from Oregon on this Third World, dysenteried-waters labor trip in the infernal heat.  He surprised everyone by being entirely himself, which is to say, he was the first one of the dormitory residents up in the mornings, loaded group work gear on his own, and in general, did more heavy lifting, cement mixing with shovels, and cinderblock laying than anyone else, excepting the full-time laborers - of course with zero complaining- and assisted behind the scenes while eating virtually nothing but some canned beans he had procured.  I realized at that point that he could handle just about anything, and decided that despite the interdenominational squeakiness, I was probably interested in a long-term relationship.

Both of us had been invited to two dear school friends' wedding in Houston planned just around the time the Mexico trip was wrapping up, so as previously arranged,  we took my dad's car, and drove back across the border to a cousin's home in Houston, where we would stay to attend the ceremony.  Reentering the US was slightly nerve-wracking.  It hadn't occurred to me that two 20-somethings driving someone else's car apart from the rest of the group, headed to a different destination, would seem suspicious.  We were thoroughly questioned and searched.  

The subsequent traverse across the long, coastal plain took many hours; it was hot and sunny, and I was tired. At some point I dropped off my navigating duties (I was directing us from the giant book of US road maps by state) and slept for a while as Jared continued bearing northeast towards the metropolis.  When we arrived in the big, planned housing development, the cousin closest to my age took us out on a ramble through the neighborhood on scooter and on foot, where she pointed out the spot in a nearby bayou where an alligator had recently been spotted.

The following day we attended the church wedding.  The possibilities surrounding navigating a reception hadn't really crossed my mind, but as we greeted our newly wedded friends on the way out of the sanctuary, the husband pointed to the barbecue caterers set-up and said, "Eat up, there's lots of food!"  I suddenly panicked.  Eating in front of strangers, talking to strangers, and selecting morsels from a spread that was not on either of our habitual diets was too much.  I went to find a restroom as a diversion.  Then I sort of detoured and took us on an accidental tour of the church out of sight of strangers, stopping in one classroom to visit with a small pet for quite a while- perhaps a hamster or lizard - in a tank.  The thought of joining the reception was still too much, so I hauled us out on a drippingly humid walk around the neighborhood.  Jared did not mind any of this, I think. When things had pretty much died down, and many of the guests had left, I steeled my nerves, and went in to sit at one of the two remaining tables of people.  We did converse with strangers a bit in the quieter environment. I ate some cake, and we got to talk to our two newly-married friends, which was the main reason for being there.  Some years later, Jared said he was surprised by this whole incident, as he saw me as very social (true).  But he had always observed me in situations where I had a lot of personally-perceived control over the situation and was in a known place amongst known people, or... where I was faking it to the best of my abilities.  

We did end up getting married two years later, of course, and things had turned more romantic by then, at least from my quirky perspective.   My dad was in town when it was,  I believe our seventh wedding anniversary,  and he offered to babysit Anne so that we could go on a date.  We went walking in our favorite, wild neighborhood park, and I collected seed stalks from a variety of summer-dried grasses while chattering non-stop.  This event didn't seem to be sufficiently romantic from my dad's perspective, so he took us out to dinner at an Indian restaurant.  It is a pattern, though.  Any time we have been able to procure child care for an anniversary date, we have gone on a hike.

Scattered Remains

I am reading Lewis's Space Triology right now.  I would say "again," but I am not sure.  I have been very attached to Lewis's writings at certain points, and I am positive that I started the Trilogy decades ago with the intention to master the whole thing... but I don't seem to remember enough of the story on the current reading to justify a claim to former completion.  

I find it easy to get distracted from processes, even processes I love deeply, if they require much sustained, complex thought. It is sort of an enigma to me, because I simultaneously cannot seem to turn off the constant stream of unbidden, involuntary, complex thought. Despite my extreme bookworming and very advanced reading skills as a child after the age of seven, many books which I started and professed a deep love for, were left unfinished, and my brain yearned to complete the cycle.

Since I have lately -in the last year, anyway- discovered I can focus on audio books while walking (occasionally pausing to photograph items of interest or to take notes on related or unrelated topics or to look something up in google-land), I have found myself closing those long-open loops.  I am finishing books and series I started and got sidetracked on in elementary school, and I am re-reading books I loved and had always intended to revisit.  It feels a lot like coming home.

...My life is littered with grand ideas, frequently missing the ability to pace a follow-through to a satisfactory conclusion, unless, of course, there is a real-world deadline.  In those cases I find last-minute inspiration and focus I knew I had hidden somewhere in my psyche, and meet deadlines head on.  Papers due, performances looming,  moving trucks arriving - these time-bound loci, when they draw near, truly clarify the steps to be taken, which had seemed before hazy, indistinct, and overwhelming.  It's like the point of no return holds up a giant magnifying glass to the time surrounding, and what needs to be done suddenly comes into giant, sharp relief, along with the sustained energy to do it.  I wonder if it is anything like approaching the event horizon of a black hole.

Many other grand ideas which don't belong to that sudden precipice, which magnifies time, fall by the wayside.  Many of these grand ideas were, and are, really important to me in some way, and the open loop is still running in the background, the circuit waiting to be closed.  Thankfully, the unread books have found a way forward.

Driving Miss Daisy

 Somewhere around 15 or 16 years ago, when we were living in Rochester, I got a really strong hankering mid-week, to teach someone to drive. It was out of the blue, and I wonder if it had anything to do with all the teenagers I knew at the time as a violin/viola teacher... I worked it out in my mind that the first driving lessons would happen in the old cemetary, with its quiet, hilly, winding roads, non-existent traffic, and very little chance of killing anyone who wasn't already dead.

During the church service that very Saturday, a single woman a few years older than me stood up during the sharing of praise and concerns and said she was praying to find a way to learn to drive. I knew as soon as she spoke that this was no coincidence, and after the service I went and told her that I was her teacher. For the next year or so, Sunday mornings were our driving lessons, and the two of us became good friends. We did, indeed, start out in the cemetary, and later progressed to higher stakes locations. We also sometimes went to hear the service, first, at the big, old, historical Episcopal church with the Baroque organ next door to my building before we went out driving. In the end, she got her license, her auto-mechanic father fixed her up a car, and I met her mother and auntie and sister and nephew and cousins and saw into a whole other way of being, as they were, further back, of Jamaican extraction.

Nearly a decade later in Kent, I taught my younger Afghan neighbor friend to drive, also on Sunday mornings, while the husbands were collectively able to be with the kids.

Maybe I no longer have the nerves to teach new drivers, and if our kids learn, they will have to look elsewhere...

Assumptions

A few days ago I was with the two little kids at the playground across the street.  Laurel was off bike-riding the paths, and I was sitting on the ground near Lazarus, who was walking circles around a tree while counting.  Another small girl arrived with her mother.  After a while, the girl and I conversed about not touching her toys, my knitting project, and rainbows.  Before all that, her first communication within my earshot was to point out Lazarus to her mother and ask if it was a girl.  The mother took a cursory glance, and replied,"Yes, Riley, it's a girl."  The child must have asked because she was getting mixed signals.  The parent, however, quickly jumped to a conclusion

This sort of mis-labeling happens every single time we are in public, strictly due to Lazarus's long, beautiful ponytail.  No one pays attention to his extremely "boy" clothes, none of which are remotely pink or ruffly, but are covered in the likes of robots, dinosaurs, and Minecraft creepers.  The long hair is his own choice.  After some early conversations in which he wondered why people think long hair means girl and short hair means boy, he no longer appears to notice these misidentifications or care two figs.  I occasionally correct people if they are attempting repeatedly to communicate with him according to their own terms, but in an instance such as the aforementioned Riley, I just ignore it, for better or for worse.

The day before the Riley incident, I was at a different playground down the hill with the two younger kids, and they were enjoying this intriguing carousel-type installation.  At some point they both climbed onto the central pole, which is stationary and has a small platform for hand grips.  They asked me to spin the carousel around them, because Lazarus was working out what it was like to simulate the feeling of having it rotate backwards.  (The only time this boy is not in motion is when he is carefully observing something and analytically onboarding data.)  

Two small brothers joined us.  One helped me push the carousel from the outside, and the other was experimenting with getting on and off while the carousel was moving.  Despite my small helper, I modulated the speed of the spin to accommodate the safety of the even smaller child.

After a few minutes,  their caregiver appeared. (I believe it was their mother after collecting visual and auditory data, but I can't say for sure.) She stood on the opposite side of the carousel from me and started talking to her boys.  "Hey boys, do you see the girls?"  (referencing Lazarus and Laurel).  "Say hi to the girls!"

...Then to me: "What cute girls!" 

("Thanks.")

 "You can really tell the difference between boys and girls!" (*pointing to the assembled small people*)

(*awkward social laughter*)  

I didn't ask her what she meant, as she was already physically moving away and didn't seem like she was looking for more than small talk.  I think, based on the activities of the four children in the thirty seconds she saw (but maybe did not really observe) them was that her two boys were physically active and my two "girls" were sitting quietly.

I do get annoyed when people fail to notice glaring details, act on a big guess derived from a snippet of the story, and make assumptions.  But mostly I am reminded for myself to really observe others carefully, to let people speak for themselves with their words and visuals, and to see each relationship as its own being.  It is easy to estimate really wrong about others' ideas, motives, and concerns and to rely on stereotypes.

Turning Point

 When I was 2 1/2, a fellow church choirist invited my mother to hear her daughter's piano recital. My mother was quite shocked, as the friend's daughter was only a few months older than me. Thus, our many-generations-musical family met the Suzuki Method, originally called "Mother Tongue Method" or "Talent Education", by its muse.

Quick primer for those not in the loop... Shinichi Suzuki (1898-1998) a Japanese man with a giant heart, fell in love with the violin. He was a student of children, as well, very young children especially, and was intrigued by how children learn their native language. He worked for the rest of his life to discover how to harness that natural learning to teach the violin, then later many other subjects, both musical and otherwise. American teachers who heard his violin student tour groups in the late 1960s and 1970s were absolutely blown away by the demonstrated talent and started making pilgrimages to Matsumoto to study his methods. (I personally know several of these people.) As a result, string teaching inspired by this great-hearted man, tirelessly trying out new ideas for bettering his pupils, has become pretty common in the US (though often not achieving his beautiful results). I am a trained Suzuki teacher myself, though sadly it did not involve study in Matsumoto, as Dr. Suzuki was no longer alive when I began that part of my teaching journey.

...I was enrolled in Suzuki piano lessons shortly after my third birthday, and my mother carefully studied her lessons both from our teacher and from books written by Dr. Suzuki himself. One of the main ingredients for musical success was the teacher and parent working together to create an immersive and enriching environment to nurture the child. My mother did ALL the recommended things, and behold, all three of us children developed lots of musical ability.  

One of the projects which Dr. Suzuki developed to help educate the young people of Japan was to host an annual summer school for a week or two. Young students and their parents from all over the country would come together and enjoy classes and concerts and playing common repertoire together. Many such summer institutes run in the US now, and I teach at some.  

In my young years, I attended Suzuki summer workshops with my parents in Wisconsin, Florida, and Tennessee, as a piano student. The most wonderful experince, though, arrived after my second year of violin study. We had the opportunity to attend several summers at the week-long Fort Worth Suzuki Institute, held in the music building at Texas Christian University. We would stay in a nearby dorm on the small, grassy campus dotted with shade trees, and attend a daily masterclass, technique class, repertoire class, orchestra rehearsal, and chamber music coaching. Plus there were student recitals and concerts, a faculty performance, practice time, organized social gatherings, and free time spent socializing with other musical kids. The marvelous intensity of this pinnacle week is deserving of the phrase: "She thought she had died and gone to heaven." The focus, inspiration, and excitement of my own experience there was magical, and I knew that if music school was anything like this, I had no choice but to make that my life's goal. I was obsessively propelled in that direction with great purpose, while still in elementary school. In the end, music school was much like Suzuki Institute week, except moreso, and I am so glad that was my path.

File Drawers

 I have likened the emotions work of the brain to a huge filing drawer.  When one encounters new grief, for example, the brain's librarian seems to open the "grief" file and fling all the clippings around.  Then the brain looks through this newly scattered mess and becomes sad, not just about the new grief, but about several of the old ones which have landed prominently.  The same seems to be true when a new "joy" or "confusion" or "envy" or "embarrassment" lands.  The files are sorted by the emotion they contain and get opened and scattered together.  I am not afraid of feelings.  They are not always easy to indentify, often worth marinating in, and from a more scientific perspective, signals - but to what is not always clear.

Anyway, this file drawer is the idea I lit upon probably fifteen years ago when a dear elderly friend of mine was in touch by phone repeatedly after her brother was found murdered.  Many, many old griefs and fears surfaced for my friend (and frankly, for me, too.)  It was the stuff of nightmares. 

Another part of the filing system idea, and maybe this comes from Calvin and Hobbes (the cartoon, not the philosophers, though the cartoon was quite philosophical, as well) is that dreams are a sort of rifling around and clean up by the librarian.  Maybe there was a surprise during the day and a new "surprise" clipping fell to the floor.  The librarian picks it up to file it, and the surprise file is opened, during which time, other "surprise" items are viewed haphazardly by the dreamer and are stirred into the stewpot of the private picture show.

I don't pretend to know what dreams are about and am not into assigning deep meaning to most of them, but I also can't write them off as unimportant.   They seem to be, from a biological perspective, an essential part of mammalian brain function, and I feel kind of oddly that religion has sometimes written them off as meddling from the devil or seen them as the result of indigestion from poor eating habits.

That said, when I have experienced dreams with repeated story lines, I think that the librarian is trying to tell me something.

For many years (and still, occasionally), I had really uncomfortable dreams involving being forced to use public bathing and toilet facilities without walls or curtains, in crowded places, with onlookers.  I think I have sorted out the themes in that gruesome storyline pretty well and gotten the librarian's message.

But there is another dream I have been experiencing repeatedly in the last year or two, which I can't quite make heads or tails of.  The details vary, but the story is the same.  I am in Aspen for the summer.  Aspen summers, for me, signify natural beauty, incredible musical inspiration,  learning and taking in as much as possible, fresh mountain air, hours of self-directed, focused, exploratory practice, and musical community.  And... in these dreams, I am missing out on all of these things.  I have not managed to take the orchestra audition to join rehearsals, I have not managed to practice or go to any lessons, I have not gone on any hikes, I have not attended any concerts.  I don't even know what I have been up to, but the summer is almost over, and I am in a brain fog, and I am really wanting to at least say hello to Paul Kantor (my violin teacher) and see some favorite spots in town before it is too late.

There you have it.  That's all I know.