Red Eyes, A Niece, And A Son

I could tell you: I’m OK. I got through the eye surgery, managed to lose the prednisone drops that would spur healing, went back to the ophthalmologist, got another prescription, and then went to get it filled at the pharmacy. So that should have been easy, but guess what? The system refused to pay—which means that whoever designed the computer system that CVS uses had decreed: it was too soon to refill the prescription. So that meant either paying 90 bucks for what is the smallest bottle of eye drops visible without microscopy or going without.

Do I have to tell you what I chose?

“Dammit, Marc, spend the 90 dollars,” said Lady yesterday, as she was looking at my reddened, inflamed, I’ve-just-been-sobbing-my-ass-out-of-my-left-eye-exclusively eye. So I’ve learned: most of the time, the stuff people say to you is stuff you should listen to. Next step: a trudge back to CVS.

The pharmacist was good enough to try to get the insurance company to pay for the medicine, which meant that she spent ten minutes giving information into a machine. “Pharmacy,” she announced. “Inquiry,” she continued. “Declined,” she announced. I waited until the system had decided a person was needed; the person, obviously peering at the equivalent screen that the pharmacist had seen, gave the same answer: declined.

It would have been easy if it had just been about the 90 bucks. In fact, it was more: I was buying drops for my eyes when in fact I was suffering from drops in my life.

Consider, we are animal people, Mr. Fernández and I, and our aged cat—now requiring a special diet that of course no one but Mr. Fernández can administer—is hanging to life by a thread, or rather, by the special love between Mr. Fernández and Kitty. So we’ve had no vacation for a year.

Noise—constant noise, from the reconstruction of the street outside, and from the sculptor above. Oh, and did I mention that a piece of the balcony above us fell and was found on the sidewalk? We replaced our balcony five years ago: the upstairs neighbor has allowed hers to rot in the salt air.

What I am telling you—or trying to—is that a man can be maddened by a swarm of gnats as much as by a Cyclops. And so I bought the drops, put them in, felt relief, and went to bed, thinking that the issue had been dealt with. Had it?

Evidently not, since I woke up at three in the morning, shifted restlessly in bed for four hours, and then fell asleep as the morning radio trumpeted the morning’s bad  news. I then slept until eleven, awoke, felt guilty, felt a pain in my left side, and felt an incredible tension in my left trapezoid. It was not a muscle, what I had had between my neck and my shoulder—it was more like one of the steel cables of the Golden Gate Bridge.

My mind was busy telling myself that everything was fine; my body was screaming that it was not. So my mind decreed: time to take two extra-strength Tylenol. You—smarter than I—will know that it didn’t work.

“Hey, guess what!” said Lady, “Montalvo is back helping me in the kitchen!”

Interesting news, since I had been speaking to Lady and Naïa the day before, and had asked whether she had seen Montalvo. “Yeah,” she said, “and he was demanding his job back! But how can I give him his job back when I laid down ONE rule: don’t go into the kitchen! And twenty minutes later? I caught him walking out of the kitchen! So how can I give him his job back?”

“He’s oppositional, just like Naïa,” I tell her, since the two of them have been doing her—do I have to make clear that it’s Naïa’s, not Lady’s? though come to think of it, it’s both—homework. Well, it was a throwback to happier days, when Naïa absorbed her education while flopped on a sofa, instead of sitting at a desk. But the question was: what were three causes and effects of immigration.

This is why I can never be a teacher, since I cannot do what Lady did: search the book, come up with three causes, feed them to Naïa, and check to make sure they were regurgitated correctly onto the paper. What do I have to do? Well, my first thought was to tell a story: a man I knew was fleeing his home in the Dominican Republic, and had managed to cross the deepest waters of the Atlantic Ocean in a ten-foot wooden boat holding twenty people. In fact, the depth of the Mona Channel was the least of the problem: the fact that it was shark-infested was of more concern. So he arrived—as many, many do not—on the beach in Puerto Rico, where a man had arranged to pick him / them up, and take them forty minutes away to the Dominican part of San Juan. And was this all part of the deal? No way! It was a hundred bucks a head.

It’s a story that I, at least, find compelling. The man crowded with strangers into a boat, was he aware that going home was not an option? However long it took to straighten out his immigrant status, the likelihood that he would miss the births, the deaths, the big and the small moments that are family—well, it was almost certain he would. And how much had he paid to renounce all that? Depends—not much in my money, but several years of selling fake cigars to gullible or just worn-down tourists on the beach resorts for him. And that was, OK—if not 24 / 7, at least 12 / 7.

My problem as a teacher? Answers don’t interest me, which is why I was stopped completely when it turned out that one of the reasons for migration? Drought!

Then I figured it out: for hunter / gatherers, drought would be a very compelling reason to move elsewhere. But Naïa is a 12-year old girl living in Puerto Rico, so her chances of running into a tribesman hunting water buffalo? Not so great.

Well, the homework was done, so at last I could ask her what I really wanted to know: what was the difference between “affect” and “effect?” It’s every English teachers’ pet peeve. Fortunately, Naïa has excellent parrying skills.

“One is spelled with an “e” the other with an “a,” she informed me.

“Excellent,” I told her, “and what is another difference?”

“One is used in one way in a sentence, the other in another way,”

“Completely correct,” I told her, “and I wonder, in what way do you use the one and in what way do you use the other?”

“Differently,” she said.

“Naïa, put you name on your homework,” said Lady, who, though a poet, still can step into the territory of mother on occasion.

“On the top right-hand corner of the paper,” I told Naïa, since that’s what they always told me, and since they were still teaching ridiculous facts like drought spurring migration, I figured the right-hand corner thing still held as well. Who knows, maybe she would have gotten points taken off for misplaced identity?

Naïa, of course, turned her paper sideways and wrote her name down the left-hand side of the paper.

“Oppositional,” I told her.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said.

“Exactly,” I told her, and then went on to say, “and yes you do.” Then I went on to say that the 90-dollar eyes drops were working.

“Remarkable,” said Naïa, “since that’s what they’re supposed to do, right?”

Well, that meant I had to tell her what they told me, which was:

1. keep a civil tongue in your head
2. don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs

So Lady went off with Naïa to deal with the next thing—there’s always something—and I went off to play the cello—this time at the front of the store, not the back. And today, of course, I woke up feeling like hell, but cheered by the fact that Montalvo, my son, had been restored to where he should be. Lady, with perfect poetic logic, had told him absolutely NOT to step out of the kitchen!

“Lady was really firm with him, so he’s like a little puppy, told not to come out of his corner,” whispered Sunshine, after I had loudly protested that I was being ignored.

OK—I sometimes think it’s “abandon sense, all ye who enter here,” but I also think it’s excellent, because if I wanted Starbucks? Guess what—there’s one two blocks from my house.

And so Montalvo is restored, or redeemed, and the world is partially where it’s supposed to be, but it’s not, since I am listening to Brené Brown for the umpteenth time and not finding anything to write about, since who can possibly want to hear what I think about The New York Times, which is eager to tell me that the Republicans are going to install the famous pipeline and dismantle the EPA at the same time? Anybody out there? Drop me a comment, and I’ll be happy to straighten you out….

So the world is not OK, since my neck is screaming and my stomach is groaning, and all I can do is think: why do I feel so horrible? And why am I listening to Brown talk for the zillionth time about vulnerability? That’s when I see my young son playing the guitar, and when I realize—can’t I be vulnerable, too?

So he’s giving me a backrub, or rather, cutting his hands on the steel ridge that is my shoulder and then he says, “you know what gets me through? We’re an absolutely miniscule part of the universe. Think how many trillions of years old the earth is, and we live—what?—maybe eighty? Think of the enormous space in the universe, and how small our personal worlds are. All we have to do is be happy, and in the moment….”

Well, I think that’s what he said, but can I be sure? No, because I’m crying, and he asks me why, and I tell him, though it’s hard, because guess what? I’m a shame man, not a guilt man—which, if you know Brené means that I think what I have to admit is bad because I am bad, not because it is bad. And so what’s so horrible?

I want recognition.. I want to give a TED talk that will go viral and sizzle the minds of men and women, all of whom will say utterly nasty things in the comments section of YouTube, but not to worry, since I’ll pay—just as Brené does—somebody to read them for me!

“Why do you want that,” sputters Montalvo.

“Who’s the guy who wants to win the Nobel Prize,” I tell him. “And it’s great to wake up and say, ‘I don’t care what the world thinks of me,’ but guess what? I put a lot of time and a lot of energy into this, and fuck art for art’s sake!”

It’s out, it’s said. I ponder—I can feel guilty, I can feel shame, or guess what? I can just sit down and do what I do.

Which is what I’ve done….

“Love you,” I tell Montalvo, as he passes by.

“Me too,” he tells me.

Oh, and the neck?

Much better!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

       

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Six Suites by Somebody-or-Other

Well, here’s today’s question: was it Bach or Mrs. Bach who wrote the suites for solo cello—those suites that Casals championed, and about which he said, “they are the very essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music?”

Hunh?

Look, I’ve played them for about four decades, and I’ve gone through several feelings about them. Written sometime around 1720, when Bach had finally found a job that didn’t require cranking out a religious cantata every week—his archduke or prince or elector or whoever being of some protestant sect that disapproved of music—the six suites follow a basic pattern: a prelude followed by four or five dance movements.

OK—so that’s a pattern that Bach followed in the partitas for solo violin. So why should anyone think that it was the second wife of Johann Sebastian Bach who had written the cello suites? Because that’s what Martin Jarvis, a Welshman teaching in Australia, is claiming.

His first assertion I agree with: there’s something not quite right about the suites. Here’s how The New Yorker puts it, “He reports that when he was studying the works in his youth he had the nagging sense that they differed from other music by Bach.” And what’s the difference?

Well, to me, the cello suites are a lot less interesting, less complicated, less sophisticated than the solo violin works. Want a comparison? Check out the two sarabandes below—one for violin, the other for cello. And it may be that the—for me—excessively slow tempo of the cello sarabande dooms it to sound plain and unimpressive, but I think there’s something else. If J. S. Bach did write the piece, he wasn’t having his best day.

And I know—that damn Prelude to the G Major suite makes it onto a lot of “top ten classical music” lists, but to me? It’s a snore, which is why I spent years paying it at a breakneck pace, and trying to emphasize the essential chordal nature of the piece. Why? Because there’s absolutely nothing else going on….

As you can see in the third clip, Jarvis isn’t afraid of suggesting some rather dark stuff about Papa Bach. His first wife—did she commit suicide because Bach was fooling around with Anna Magdalena, who would become his second wife, and the presumed composer of the cello suites? And why was Bach ordered to get married, but refused a church wedding? Oh, and then why did the two children of wife number one burn the love letters and day books of Bach and Anna Magdalena?

Beyond all of this, is there any serious evidence that Anna Magdalena, not Johann Sebastian, wrote the cello suites? Well, the only manuscript we have is one written by Anna Magdalena, and the traditional belief is that she was merely a copyist. We do have, however, the violin partitas in J. S. Bach’s hand. And then we have “forensic” evidence: here’s the Independent on the subject:

Forensic analysis of her manuscript handwriting shows that it did not have the “slowness or heaviness” usually attributed to someone who is simply copying but the quick, uncertain hand of a creator.

Numerous corrections to scores written in her hand, signal that she had been composing the works all along.

In the Independent, the cellist Julian Lloyd Weber makes a good point—Anna Magdalena, who was a singer but not, apparently, trained as a string player—had her hands full. From the same source:

Anna Magdalena ran a busy and stressful household. She was pregnant every year from 1723 to 1737, bearing 13 children, seven of whom died in youth. The couple also raised the surviving children from Bach’s first marriage.

In fact, people were quite a bit less fussy about attribution in the baroque era, when Bach, for example, borrowed from Vivaldi and other composers. And however much I love Bist du bei Mir, which everybody thinks is by Bach, I know that it was really written by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. So? It’s still a beautiful piece….

Will we ever know if Anna Magdalena, and not Johann Sebastian, Bach wrote the cello suites? Probably not. But it is true that there are very few female composers, which started me to thinking: Who was the first female composer? Well, I figured it would be Hildegard of Bingen, in the 12^th century, but guess what? There’s the little case of Sappho, born six hundred years before Christ.

Lastly, it has to be said that I am as guilty of sexism as all the rest. I play the suites virtually every day, since it’s what cellists do. I’ve made my piece with them: I neither think they are masterworks nor rubbish. My beef, mostly, is that for them to be effective, we have to give up, give in, and recognize that baroque performance practice has a lot—if not everything—to help us put them across. But how have I been sexist?

By assuming that the suites are lesser music than the other music Bach wrote, and therefore have to be by his wife. No one, by the way, has suggested the opposite—that all of the manuscripts we have in Bach’s hand are simply copies of Anna Magdalena’s work. And however much the idea that Mrs. Bach was a composer, the idea that Mr. Bach was the copyist?

Revolutionary!   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Healing Without Recovery

It’s the day after the hurricane, which came, swirled above my life, threated mass destruction and death, and left, leaving no scars but the tiniest one in my left eye, and greatly improving the landscape. How was it all for you? A normal Tuesday.

It was a minor procedure—nothing like the old days, when having a cataract removed was a one-week affair of lying in bed, patch shielding the afflicted eye, and nurses guarding you around the clock. I would have hated it, and yet, I miss it. Recuperation, recovery of sight, should be marked by something more than a discharge from an ambulatory clinic an hour or so after light and clarity were reclaimed. Nor should it be I putting in the sacred drops, the potent elixirs, the magic potions into the knived or lasered eye, but rather virgins dressed in white, their nursing caps pinned firmly to their hair, their appearance marked by the swish of their starched dresses.

And so I have spent two days progressively seeing more and more. The black of the words on my computer screen, for example, is a revelation: before, they had appeared as my face does in the morning mirror, after my shower. Now, each letter snaps out at me, screaming, demanding to be seen.

Oh, and did I mention that the floor is back to having black and grey tiles, and that grout appears between them? Previously, it had just been grey….

So sight has returned, and I rejoice, and yet… Something is missing. Yes, it’s wonderful that modern medicine has found a way to put a 450$ lens into my left eye in a procedure that lasted only fifteen minutes. Yes, it is wonderful that I walked into the surgery, and wobbled home from it afterward. And certainly, it’s wonderful to hear the doctor say, “no restrictions,” meaning that I could go back to work, go back to playing the cello, go on with my normal routine.

Wonderful—or is it? Because today, I’m tired, listless, a little over-caffeinated but feeling lazy. Yes, the weather—it’s been raining for three days—doesn’t much help. But there’s something else.

I feel gypped. I went through a long period in which I was losing my sight incrementally. This document, for example, is being written at 200% amplification, not the 100% that I used in the past, and always assumed I would use forever. I have had several prolonged fights with an excellent insurance company—excellent except that it had no ophthalmologists on the island. So that involved calling California, and having multiple conversations, all variations of this theme:

Insurance Lady: Marc, you absolutely covered by the plan!

Marc: OK, but my doctor would like to know how much the plan will pay for the procedure…

Insurance Lady: We’ll pay 100 percent!

Marc: Yes, but 100% percent of what?

Insurance Lady: 100% percent of our usual and customary fees!

Marc: And what is that, exactly.

Insurance Lady: 100%!

Marc: but 100% of what? If the doctor charges 10 million bucks for the operation, will you pay 100% of that?

Insurance Lady: Oh no, 100% of our usual and customary fees.

Marc: Ahh, and what is your usual and customary fee for a cataract operation?

Insurance Lady: Well, we can’t tell you that.

Marc: Why not? What am I supposed to tell my doctor?

Insurance Lady: Tell him you are 100% covered! 

It went on for weeks, during which it developed that if they actually told me what they were willing to pay the doctor—what their “usual and customary fee” was—that would amount to a “preauthorization,” which they utterly could not do. So I dithered with the insurance company, during which time life became dimmer and dimmer. It got to the point where I could no longer read the numbers on my cell phone. And then, blessedly, because of the court case Windsor, the company Raf worked for decided it wasn’t going to be in the business of deciding who was married where.

Because it was obviously going to be a Human Resources nightmare—especially for little companies like Walmart, with over a million employees in the United States, and even if you could figure out who was married where, and who was working where, and what that state’s policy was…well, what happens when you transfer that excellent gay manager from Massachusetts to turn around that region in Alabama? Because that health insurance for his or her spouse is a major part of the compensation package.

And so all three components were at last in alignment: we had the blind eye, the surgeon who could unblind the eye, and the company who would pay for it. What didn’t we have?

Well, trawling as I do for things to write about, I came upon Brené Brown talking about vulnerability. That resonated, since lying on a stretcher, moving from slot number three, seeing patient number one get wheeled off, moving to slot number two, only to see the new slot number one get wheeled of, only to arrive at slot number one? Meaning that in twenty minutes it will be your turn to entrust your eye to an essential stranger—though you have looked him up on line, and peered at his board certifications and wondered: were they real, or were they purchased for five cereal box coupons and fifty dollars?

Your mind, in short, knows perfectly well: everything will be OK. Your body, however, is telling you: there’s still time, get the hell OFF this stretcher! You can still write. You’re not walking into too many walls, yet. You can get it done later.

That, Dr. Brown, is vulnerability.

Then I pursued Dr. Brown onto another show, with Jonathan Fields, who has The Good Life Project. And that’s when I broke my vows to Brené, and listened to Fields talking to Sara Gottlieb about biohacking your hormones and reclaiming your life.

So I was fifteen minutes in, when I got the strangest feeling: something is completely disordered. After months of growing progressively blind, a surgeon in less than half an hour has restored my sight, and after one day I can go back to my life. Which should have meant that I could go back to teaching my classes at the island’s biggest bank. I should have stopped writing. I should have stopped worrying about the debacle that was the midterm elections. So where should I have been?

Flat on my back in a hospital bed, with the blinds carefully drawn to shield against the harmful, blinding light, with doctors appearing carefully to peer into my eyes, and with nurses gently, oh so gently, turning me to my side, so that they could give my nightly backrub.

We have perfected medicine so much that we have eliminated a crucial component of healing, and that is recuperation. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s non-productive. But I wonder if, indeed, it is. I spent one day recovering from the morning’s surgery. The next day I was listless, irritable, and completely unproductive.

Today, I have to worry about biohacking my hormones, and it might be a good thing to do. I definitely should check into it. But I’m too tired—not in body but in spirit. Know where I really want to be?

…in bed!