No Wisdom Here

Well, well—so here it is, the end of May and, astonishingly, nobody has asked me to give a commencement address. Isn’t that weird? Surely, surely, there has to be some school out there—for dental hygienists or nail technicians, anything, really, will do—that needs to hear my words of wisdom!

Of course, I tell you this since I have just watched Joyce DiDonato address the 109^th graduating class of Juilliard (video below). So that made me think: do I have any wisdom—wanted  or not—to give the world? Could I do as well as Joyce did, which, in a word, was excellent? After all, she covers a lot of territory in her four points, which are (and sorry to be a spoiler):

1.     You’ll never make it (that is, perfection in the arts is unattainable, so do what you do for the journey, not the destination….)

2.     The work will never end

3.      It’s not about you

4.     The world needs you

Point four, in fact, was something that I had just learned from Lucía, the lady who serves me great coffee in exchange for two dollar bills: a trade I’m always willing to make.

“You made me feel so much better last week,” said Lucía. “It was finals at the university and I was totally stressed out. So I just came and hear you play Bach suites, and I totally chilled out.”

OK—I play every day, and guess what? It’s no big thing for me, the sound of my cello is a familiar to me as the sound of my voice. So I don’t have the experience of someone never expecting to find a cellist in a darkened corner of a shop playing Bach from memory. But I frequently get comments like, “hey, that was fantastic,” or, in the case of the high school kid who drifted in and listened for twenty minutes, “hey, you play really well.”

My reaction?

Damned right I do!

There’s no vanity in it, as there would be if I had anything to do with it. Well, OK—I do have to show up, the cello does have to get stuck somewhere in front of me, and yes, I put in the famous 10,000 hours of practice that pretty much will take you where you need to go. But here’s the thing: I have had complete conversations with Lady while playing the cello and not missing a note. So somebody out there tell me: who’s playing?

(Note to Joyce—Hah! Bet YOU can’t do that!)

That, in fact, is another element of point number 2: it’s not about you. Joyce meant, I think, that we’re servants, of the listener, the play-goer, the opera fan, whoever has chosen to reward us with their time and, in some cases, their money. But I think there’s something that every one of us knows: when you’re in a flow—that magical, mystical moment when everything is happening just right—the paradoxical feeling (at least for me) is that I’m not doing anything. And I have had the feeling, by the way, while writing, as well as while playing the cello.

Today, no—flow isn’t something that I can turn on and off. Although it has to be said, it can be courted, lured, coaxed almost. The first thing to do is to decide, it’s OK to have a Piatigorsky day:

Let me explain: The famous Russian cellist played once for Casals, and how did it go?

Terrible.

And how did Casals react?

Extravagant praise and hugs.

So Piatigorsky left, thinking ‘hypocrite.’ And then, a couple of years later, the two met, and Piatigorsky asked the maestro why he had praised the terrible performance he had given.

“You played the triplets in measure 371 of the Dvorak in a way that I had never heard, never even imagined. And as an artist, I have to be grateful for and value every beautiful note or phrase. Let the others count up the mistakes, our job is to count the successes.”

(Note—the above is my, perhaps faulty, paraphrase of Casals’ actual words….)

The point? Having a day when it’s just average, whatever it is you’re doing, is perfectly OK. And that, by the way, is the open door through which flow, well, flows in.

“It’s about showing up,” I tell Montalvo, who has explained that he’s blocked, he can’t write, the muse isn’t speaking. So I tell him: this is what writing is. Then what do I do? Pound an imaginary keyboard on the table.

Montalvo is almost fatally 21 years old, which is by definition “high-risk” time. And Montalvo, having stolen a 3,000 dollar blue macaw, needs to get his act together fast, since he’s on probation, and in a drug rehabilitation program. So I’m doing adventures in paternity, which is a new one for me. So what did I tell him, what were my points of wisdom? What, in short, was my commencement address?

1.     You don’t have to fight every fight

2.     You should think before you speak

3.     You should get a schedule and stick to it, especially if you’re not working

4.     You should do something that enriches you (listening to music, exercise, whatever) the first thing in the morning

5.     If two or more people are telling you something, they’re probably right

6.     “Slow and steady” wins the race

7.     Everybody is the hero of their own life

8.     Nobody, on their deathbed, has ever said, “I wished I had worked harder:” it’s always about love and relationships

9.     That said, what you achieve and what you have are relatively unimportant

10.  If it’s a choice between doing what you “should” do and having fun, seriously think about having fun….

OK—confession: I really had to stretch for ten points. Hmm—could it be that it’s just, as well, this curious lack of invitations to give a commencement address?

No Champagne for the Bunny

It may be that even two cups of coffee consumed in over three hours of wakefulness have been insufficient. Because why am I tying the dream I had last night of my mother and father around the body and life of Maya Angelou, who died yesterday?

It happens so rarely, or maybe it happens and then I forget, but this morning Jack was overseeing a seminar of super-powerful, rich (they tend to go together) people—all of whom (sorry, but here it is) wanted to meet me—held at 4341 Bagley Parkway, Madison, Wisconsin.

Not heard of it? Well, it was the family home, the house I grew up in, and it had had a remarkable transformation—terraces, pools, waterfalls, men smoking expensive cigars and bejeweled women sipping champagne. It also had my mother, who was in a hospital bed in a snow bank out in the front yard. I went out to talk to her, since my brother Johnny had given her a toy bunny, and told her it was from me.

Somehow, she was still in her hospital bed but in the driveway, which was up a steep hill. I saw the bunny and chatted briefly with my mother, who decided to get out of bed. At this point, I had my legs tangled in the side rails, and Franny—my mother—was crawling over the head of the bed. Desperate to get free and to help her, I could not; and my mother fell to the pavement and rocked on her hands and knees on the concrete.

Lady comes in, just now, to the café where I am writing this.

“Marc, don’t disappear on me! I gotta talk to you!”

“Oh my God, I’m in trouble.”

The two Russians at the table next to me laugh.

“OK, guys, you gotta protect me…” I tell them.

“Don’t vorry, ve vill protect you!”

Ah, central casting came through!

Lady sits in front of me.

“Treat me right,” I tell her, “’cause I got the Russian mafia on my side….”

The guys speak some Russian to her—obviously warning her to go light.

Maybe I’m thinking of my mother because my brother had sent me a Kindle, since he prefers to go low tech, and isn’t vexed by the termites that have attacked and in many cases destroyed my books. And why is it, by the way, that the termites have exactly the same taste I do, which means that they happily munch away at precisely and only the same books that I will later want to return and devour?

Lady comes back, after having gone off to do some business, and we sit to talk for a few moments. I ask her about Angelou, and Lady tells me: she never met her, but she did meet her nephew, who bought one of Lady’s books, and then asked her to dedicate it to Angelou.

“My hands were shaking,” reports Lady.

We talk for a bit, about how many people didn’t like Angelou, how some felt that she had an artificial, almost pompous way of speaking.

“That was just the way black ladies spoke, in those days,” says Lady. “My aunt still speaks that way, and my mother did as well.” Lady’s mother was one shade lighter than Angelou.

So we talk, Lady and I, and she tells me—there’s no one out there to take Angelou’s place, no one waiting in the wings.

“It’s not the loss of the person, it’s the loss of the thought, the way she thought. Everything was a poem, even her last tweet on Twitter. And she spoke for everybody. She was the reason I went into poetry, the reason a lot of people went into poetry. All of a sudden, a black woman could write poetry.”

Or a white woman, in the case of my mother, who turned to poetry several months before my father died, and whose last poem—falling down the rabbit’s hole—was so unbearably sad that no one has been able to read it since.

She kept studying trees in winter, wanting to know how trees exploded in golds, russets, browns, at the end of autumn, before willingly shedding them, getting schooled in loss, welcoming each leaf as it floats off in the crisp fall air. It settles on the grass like the feather on the voice of God; the tree now ever so slightly freer than it was a moment ago.

“She was never able to use the Kindle I bought for her,” I told Jeanne, my sister-in-law yesterday. “And she felt so guilty that it had cost almost $500, and I wouldn’t let her pay me back, and so she tried and tried, and her eyes were so bad, and she couldn’t see, and anyway, the device was a nightmare. Every button was too small, and you couldn’t adjust the size of the text, and oh God, at the end she couldn’t even get the toaster to make toast for her, those last days. Everything got too complicated, and she was just sitting in her chair, as the leaves fell from her limbs, and she got free enough to crawl, at long last, to crawl out from over the head of her bed, and join my father, in the house with the fountains and the terraces and the rich men and the bejeweled women and the men with their cigars.”

We’re trapped, always, in the side rails when we attend the deathbed of a loved one. Others can come or go, bring trays of food or toy bunnies, but we who love are trapped in and not in that bed, as we watch without hope of movement or rescue the one, last, desperate journey, and the fall that inevitably accompanies it, and the crash, and the splintering of bones, and then the last leaf has fallen and…

…we get up, again, and confront a bunny who may not stay in a box, but may, some spring day, decide to leap in a garden, or into a book, which will be read by grandmothers to little girls.

I know that, now….

My question?

Will I join them—Maya and Lady and my mother and Jack—in the house with the overflowing terraces, amid the light and warmth and comfort?

“We got to find a reason to celebrate with that champagne you bought, after we finally got the air conditioning fixed,” said Lady, a few days ago.

Lady—we just have!

Let Us Now Praise Alfred Deller

What is it about them; why do have such an effect on people? Well, consider the words of one of the best countertenors singing today:

"There's always this fascination about the countertenor voice. But I've never really understood what that is, because I'm doing it every day – it's my voice. Yet when we sing, people cry and we get love letters. You get used to that." He turns to Jaroussky. "But I experienced, for the first time, what other people feel when I heard your recording Opium. I got goosebumps. For the first time in my life – I'm serious, Philippe – I thought, 'A-ha! This is why people are so fascinated by our voices.'"

The speaker is Andreas Scholl, and the Jaroussky he is talking to is Philippe Jaroussky, eleven years his junior and an absolute knockout as a singer.

And the countertenor voice? Well, it’s something of a mystery: most people believe that it’s produced as a kind of falsetto, but it turns out that, in the lower register, some notes can be produced naturally in what’s known as “chest voice.” (Full disclosure—I have only the dimmest idea of what this is, and a better blogger would look it up and report it to you. And why don’t I know more than the fact that singers feel that, when singing in “head voice,” they’re using their heads as resonance chambers? Mainly because there’s still a lot we don’t know, though apparently the whole physiology of singing has increased a lot over the last twenty years. So singers, while the rest of us are busy getting off to work and raising the children, spend lots of hours debating whether countertenors are male sopranos, male altos, or falsettoists. Oh, and by the way, you really, really, don’t want to get into the debate, so if you meet a high-voiced male singer at a party—rare, but it might happen—don’t call him a countertenor, or anything else. Otherwise, you’ll be lectured to for the rest of the night about vocal production.)

At any rate, there’s no question that the countertenor is a particularly lovely voice. But the mystery is that we have it at all, since but for one man, Alfred Deller, we might not have it at all.

Deller, born in 1912, championed the countertenor voice, and was instrumental in championing what has come to be called “historically informed performance” practice. And that would be? Well, it goes from using the “correct” instrument of the time (a harpsichord, not a piano; a theorbo, not a guitar) to correct tuning (our modern tuning is much higher than early music, and anybody who has played a cello tuned half a step lower—I think you can guess whom I mean—knows that the instrument responds wonderfully) to proper articulation and performance technique. Supposedly, all this leads to hearing music the way that the composer would have wanted / would have heard it.

So Deller was out there when nobody else was, and at a time when men were singing like women? I’ve always wondered about the beard that Deller wore all his life, even at that point when facial hair was tantamount to declaring yourself a Communist. And there’s that famous quote of the French woman who said: "Monsieur, vous êtes eunuque"—to which Deller replied, "I think you mean 'unique,' madam."

So Deller took what was once a dying tradition, and kept it going. But he did more—he knew an amazing number of the best composers in Britain at the time; Benjamin Britten wrote the part of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for him.

But the best thing? Deller was also instrumental in championing Baroque opera, which previously nobody had done much about. So everybody knew a Handel aria or two—think of the famous Largo that you learned on the piano, also known as “Ombra mai fu”—but nobody had heard the full opera (in this case, Serse, of 1738). But soon, we were hearing them again, as well as a lot of other music. And so, more and more male singers began to consider becoming countertenors, instead of tenors.

That’s what happened to Jaroussky—he started out life as a tenor, and then, out of curiosity, his voice teacher asked him what his falsetto (damn, what did I just say?) sounded like. And he turned out to be nimbler and more beautiful in that range of his voice.

It may be simple numbers, but I suspect not. Because as you can hear in the two clips below, the countertenor voice has really…well, improved. With Deller, and his son Mark, also a countertenor, the tone is a bit thin, reedy, and forced. But with Jaroussky and Scholl? Well, here’s what one person had to say, in the comment section of the Purcell clip below:

As a countertenor myself, I have a deep respect and appreciation for Deller. That being said, I'm glad that we've moved to a fuller, richer tone. I've never been all that enamoured of his singing. Still, we've got so many good countertenors today, and we couldn't have done it without pioneers like Deller.

I think that’s just. But I’ll say, as well, that Deller’s recordings of English folksongs have a magical quality that other singers—such as Scholl—may not have. It may simply be the long, long tradition that Deller inherited. Or it may be that the listener knows—that’s Deller, not a superb but still German modern countertenor. My vote?

There’s something about the sparseness, the simplicity of Deller’s voice that makes it ideal for folksong. Short of being, very late at night, on the English moors and hearing the song sung though the windows of a candlelit cottage—you couldn’t hear it better!

Doña Georgina Bids Farewell

Right, so I had some really important things to say about the situation in the Muslim world, since I had spent the weekend busily figuring out what was wrong with the 1.2 or 1.4—don’t remember and don’t care—billion people who practice the religion.

And what’s wrong, you ask? Well, according to the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji, the problem with Islam is the Muslims, who…

…but wait, let Manji speak for herself, since—as someone once said of Rachel Maddow—she couldn’t look stupid if she spend a month trying. Click on the clip below. Oh, and by the way, better have the fire extinguisher handy, ‘cause those sparks really fly….

Right, then I had to worry about “Islam—A Religion of Peace or Violence?.” So there Christopher Hitchens was—do I have to tell what side he was taking?—butting heads with Tariq Ramadan at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. The problem? Hitchens I understood completely, but Ramadan? Well, I guess you gotta be religious to get it….

So that meant that I had to watch a documentary about Islam, during which I learned that the only reason we have this thing is that Mohammed spent 22 years going into trances, much of the time alone in a cave. He then came down and dictated the whole thing to his buddies, all illiterate, so what did they do? They memorized it, and then, a couple decades after the death of Mohammed, the third Caliph—or somebody or other—decided it should be written down. So there was a great to-do, and versions were checked against each other, and there had to be two eyewitnesses, and now we have the Koran, WHICH IS THE ABSOLUTE AND FINAL WORD OF GOD. See?

In fact, so immersed was I in the Muslim world that I had gone into the website of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), since Manji had mentioned that the imams, contrary to what one sheik averred, had not been quick to denounce the September 11 attacks: they had to be pressured into it. And since the sheik, Ibrahim Mogra, was connected to the MCB, it was definitely time to look into that. Oh, and the MCB describes itself thus, on its website:

The Muslim Council of Britain is one of the UK's largest and most diverse Muslim umbrella organisation with over 500 affiliated national, regional and local organisations, mosques, charities and schools.   

There is, of course, nothing about the Nigerian group Boko Haram, which abducted close to three hundred schoolgirls over a month ago. But I did find this ringing denunciation, which all of you out there should take to heart:

The Muslim Council of Britain condemns in the strongest terms the act of violating a place of worship by the recently formed extreme far right, anti-Muslim group, Britain First. The most recent incident occurred at midday yesterday, where the emboldened action by three middle aged men and woman entered one of the largest Islamic institutions in the country, wearing their shoes and trampling on prayer surfaces to carry out their misguided propaganda. This has left many members of the community angered and disappointed with the inability of the government and the authorities to curtail this type of thuggish behaviour.

Guys? You really shouldn’t make it so easy….

OK—it’s clear, I realized, that these girls are never going to see their families again, and why not? Because the Muslim world either doesn’t want to or is too craven to speak up.

OK—so what about men? What would happen if all of the world’s men—except for the 1.2-billion-divided-by-two Muslims—stood up and said that real men didn’t do this to their daughters, their wives, or their mothers.

Well, when the going gets tough, Marc makes a tee shirt, so here it is:

Pretty cool, hunh? Wow, that would put the fear of Allah into those bastards!

So I was scratching a hole quite deeply into my head thinking about all this, when Mr. Fernández called, proposing a trip to the beach. And I realized: a trip to the beach would do more for me than I could do for the 300 schoolgirls, or even the 1.2 billion Muslims. So off we went.

And I’ve woken up, today, to the startling news that our local power company didn’t have the money, last Friday, to buy fuel to make electricity? Why? Because the Justice Department raided the purchasing department on Friday, seizing records and looking for irregularities. And then the banks got nervous and revoked the line of credit. So that meant that they had to scamper around and transfer 60 million bucks to pay off the debt. Oh, and here’s more interesting news:

“Claro que no les podemos pagar a los suplidores, si entre el gobierno y las corporaciones públicas nos debe casi $300 millones”, manifestó el ambientalista. “La misma gente que anda criticando la Autoridad es la que la ha llevado a la quiebra”.

(“Of course we can’t pay our suppliers, when the government and the public corporations owe us almost $300 million,” stated the environmentalist. “The same people who are running around criticizing the Authority are those who have brought it to bankruptcy.”)

‘It’s too much,’ I think. ‘I absolutely cannot be responsible for 1.2 billion people who are driving all the rest of us crazy because they believe something dreamed up in a cave in Saudi Arabia, and I can’t be responsible for the power company, which didn’t have the money to buy fuel, despite the fact that the electric bill comes in at 400$ a month, and anyway, it’s the start of the week, and if I’m feeling this way today, how am I going to be on Friday?’

So I turn the page and get this:

Yup, Puerto Rico strikes again! Because one of our zany habits, much beloved by some, sniffed at by the humorless, is to have wakes—called in Spanish velorios—with the dead displayed in various and characteristic positions. And this charming lady—who had wanted to be waked wearing skates, but settled for her wedding dress instead—is doña Georgina Chevroni Lloren; the funeral was yesterday,

It all started with El Para’o, or the standing one, who had bragged to his enemies that they would never see him lying down. So what did he do—OK, what did he instruct be done—after he got eleven bullets shot into him? Take a look!

This image, by the way, I lifted from an article called “Dead Men Standing….”

That’s when it hit me, since we had joked about all this in those days when I was pretending to teach English at Wal-Mart.

“Yes, I intend to be waked in this very room,” I would assure the students, “in fact, in this very chair!”

“You do, Marc?” The students would lean in and peer into my eyes.

“Absolutely, I intend to die with my boots still firmly planted in the fertile fields of Wal-Mart! Others may retire, but mine is a passion, not merely a career. I may very well die in this room, but if not, I’ll certainly be waked in this room! And one day, however many decades it will be, you’ll walk in and see me….”

Here I would raise my hand with my index finger pointed to the board, and then…

…freeze!

Ahh, readers, life had other plans—it so often does. So what to do?

I run over to the other shop, where Lady is busy blow-drying a casita, and sit patiently, thinking, as I wait—shouldn’t I be doing something serious? Doesn’t the Great American Novel still wait to be born? Would Hemingway or Tolstoy have wasted his time this way?

At last the house is dry, packed, and given to the tourists—it’s time to show Lady the print edition of El Nuevo Día.

“Just in the event, “ I start, and Lady gets it immediately. She begins slapping my knees with the paper, and then puts it over her head as she roars with laughter.

“It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in Puerto Rico,” I tell Lady, who has just told me that Georgina has gone viral; she’s sitting all over the web.

“You think it’s true that García Márquez said ‘they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico?’” I ask Lady. I’ve looked it up a thousand times….

Lady pauses, and then comes up the answer…

“…well, it’s either true or it should be true….”

Good enough for me!  

Jus' Misbehavin'

It was another day in the café, and this time’s annoyance, for Lady,—owner and house painter—were the religious people.

“Can you believe it? They wanted me to customize a house, by putting this piece of scripture around the door. So I had to figure out—how to place the words for maximum effect, visually, but also for the meaning of the text. And it took me an hour or so, and I finally got what was the best design. So now they just called me, and they don’t like it; they say it looks too crowded. Oh, and guess what? It’s too crowded, but they want me to ADD more text! Can you believe that?”

“Working with the public...” I say, “It ain’t easy….”

“Right, and now they’re over at the other store, and there’s poor David, who’s half-atheist, and they’re grilling him about what church he goes to. So he tells them—he doesn’t go to church, which did to them what the red cape does to the bull. So they’re telling him there’s only one path to salvation, and David has to start stuffing his face with food, even though he’s not hungry, so as not to be able to talk. So now I have to go rescue David, and deal with the religious people, and change their little house, by adding more text which will make it—somehow—less crowded.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Lady brightened.

“Hey, why don’t you come with me? You could give me cover!”

“I’d probably misbehave,” I said. “With few exceptions, I can’t deal with heavily religious people. I make the Jehovah Witnesses crazy every time I pass them on the street—which is about seven times daily, they’re everywhere—by shouting my heartiest ¡Buenos días! followed by soy ateo. It makes them crazy….”

Soy ateo—I’m an atheist.

“Right,” said Lady, “OK, it would probably be a violation of fire code, or something, to have you guys together in the store. Pity, though….”

Well, I had been occupying myself with Jessye Norman for most of the morning, and was ready to take a break. First, though, it was time to check in on Naïa, to find what she had gotten up to.

“What is this, a siege mentality?,” I asked, since Naïa was sitting on a couch surrounded by six plastic chairs placed in a semicircle.

‘I don’t know what that is,” said Naïa.

I keep forgetting she’s twelve.

Well, I guessed right, because in fact Naïa was fortifying herself—and her dragon—from an imminent attack from her archenemy—for the purpose of this game—Alexia, also equipped with a dragon.

“Excellent idea,” I tell Naïa, “and putting the red pillows on the seats of the chairs will make, as you rightly pointed out, a standing-on-the-chairs attack less likely to succeed. But I can identify six gaping areas of vulnerability….”

“Don’t tell her,” said Naïa.

“I already knew,” said Alexia, who obviously didn’t.

An hour later, I came back to discover an additional six chairs, which had been placed on their backs, with the seats covering the space between the legs of the chairs in front of them.

Then I went to the grocery store, and, while waiting in line, thought, ‘well, why not?’ 

So I headed off to the other store, and gave Lady no chance to greet me.

“Excuse me, is your name Lady?”

“Last time I checked!”

“You don’t know me,” I said, “but they told me at the café that I could find you here. And that’s…”

I glance down at the casita, the little plaster house that Lady has painted, complete with the offending scripture.

“WOW, is that beautiful,” I exclaim. “That’s LOVELY! Did you do that? That’s incredible. And what’s the verse around the door?”

“Luke 17:4,” or some such thing, says Lady, who begins to rattle it off to me.

I’m nodding my head all the time.

“I know it well,” I breathe, my voice sopping with earnestness. “Ah, that verse has been with me in my darkest hours! How often, in moments of spiritual desolation, in the very darkest night of the soul, in those moments of spiritual anguish, when I most questioned the path that I had taken, that very verse accompanied me—nay, rescued me—from spiritual oblivion.”    

I pause to take a breath….

“It’s a masterpiece,” I tell Lady. “An unbelievable piece of work. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have seen it.”

Lady has recovered.

“Thanks,” she says, “I like it myself….”

Right, so I dash off, after fictitiously getting permission to play my cello at the café—“would it be ok…..?”—and having glanced at a very confused, as well as religious, woman.

An hour later, I’m playing Bach, after first noting that the siege has been lifted, or maybe the dragons have been banished—anyway, the forts are gone and the chairs are back to being chairs. So I work my way through G Major, get through d Minor, and then am in the prelude of the C Major when it happens.

A two-year old toddles in, looking intently at me, her round face framed by blonde curls. The Gerber people completely screwed up when they passed over this kid for the one on their bottles, and a note to any Renaissance painters out there…

…you’re seriously going to have to reconsider how you’re painting your cherubim.

So she watches me, intently, and that’s permitted, since part of what I do, pretentiously speaking, is audience building. And who doesn’t like little girls? So, she stares, and then begins to…

…pee.

All right, that’s a first, so what to do? Well, I take my cello to the bathroom—another first—and grab some paper towels. Then I go back to the little girl, who has taken off her little panties and is trying to mop the floor with them.

“No te preocupes”, I tell the little girl. “Pero ¿dónde está tu mamá?”

Don’t worry, but where’s your mom?

A woman appears, and says something I don’t get. Then Gaby, from the café, appears with some little red flip-flops. Next, Elizabeth appears, and she gets the mop. At this point, the girl has vanished.

“That lady shouldn’t have that child,” says Elizabeth. “She can’t take care of her, she’s retarded or crazy or something.”

“Some asshole got that poor girl pregnant,” says the normally pacific Jorge; it’s the first time I’ve heard him swear. “I see her pushing her daughter in the stroller down the middle of the street, right in front of the Hacienda building. And the traffic is totally backed up behind her….”

“That’s horrible,” I said, “shouldn’t we report?”

“Don’t know,” said Jorge. “They’ll come and take the child away, but where will they put her?”

“You know what she did when I told her ‘no?’ She was about to sweep some ceramic houses off the counter, so I bent down and told her ‘no’—firmly but gently. And then guess what?”

Elizabeth puts down the mop and begins slapping both sides of her face with both hands, saying ‘NO’ with each blow.

“That’s what her mother is doing to her,” say Raf, when I tell him hours later.

‘Life is so damned unfair,’ I think. ‘There’s Naïa, whose one worry is of a dragon snatching, and then there’s this little girl, and can you imagine—if she’s pissing on the floor in a café—what her house looks and smells like? And there are two people—Edwin and the woman I don’t like—who are homeless, and sleeping in the most comfortable corners of the café they can find, probably because they’re up all night. And then there’s Elizabeth, who hasn’t gotten child support for months, and who decided it was too much trouble….’

‘And the worst of it? It’s all around us, and we go blind to it. Remember that study of people walking past their closest relatives, who were dressed up as street people? There’s so much out there that we’ve trained ourselves not to see, and everyone knows this woman can’t take care of her child, but we all do nothing, which is the most heartbreaking thing of all.’

‘It’s some screwy world,’ I think, ‘Raf and I can’t even get married in Puerto Rico, much less have a child, but this woman? Not a problem—she can have as many children as she wants. So it’s a question: a cherub walks into my life, pisses on the floor, and what to do—report it to the Departamento de la Familia or not?’

I learned a long time ago: I have more questions than answers, and that’s the way it should be.

But I wish I had the answer to this question….

Two Villains and a Goddess

All right, I’ll give you Wikipedia’s assessment of Jessye Norman:

Jessye Mae Norman (born September 15, 1945) is an American Grammy award-winning contemporary opera singer and recitalist, and is a successful performer of classical music.

Yeah? Here’s mine:

The lady is a goddess.

A goddess who, in my case, manifested herself through the radio one day, when I was perhaps 21 and she was in her mid-thirties. She had been living in London and, in that period of her life, she was not singing opera. In fact, between 1975 to 1980 she didn’t sing opera. Born in 1945, she would have been 30 at the beginning of this—I’m sure—self-imposed exile. Thus, these were her prime years.

Norman is a singer who had the luck to have a strong education, as well as a strong will. After going to the Marian Anderson Competition in Philadelphia at age 16, she met her future teacher, Carolyn Grant, at Howard University. Grant was so impressed that she took Norman to the dean, who arranged for a full tuition scholarship.

“I know, it sounds like a fairy tale,” Norman says in one part of the interview below. But the point is that it’s not. Because consider this fact, again drawn from Wikipedia:

Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia, to Silas Norman, an insurance salesman, and Janie King-Norman, a schoolteacher.

An insurance salesman and a teacher? What that tells me is that the family wasn’t poor, but that it wasn’t rolling in riches, either. And with five children in the house, there probably wasn’t much money to spare. At one point, Norman tells the story of being given her own private radio—no sharing with her brothers!—so that she could listen to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. Oh, and she had to clean her room, so on days when it was Wagner, wow, the room really got clean!

What else did she have? She had teachers in her racially segregated school who knew that she was listening to opera, and who let her talk on Monday mornings for 15 minutes about what she had heard. She remembers the names of those teachers, who must have been extraordinary, and also remembers the principal of the high school. That guy decided that the whole school should donate their lunch money to Norman for one day, so she’d have something to spend on her trip to Philadelphia. So the kids donated the money, and the Board of Education gave lunch free that day.

Why do it? Well, if you’ve chipped in your 75 cents that day, you own a piece of Jessye Norman—or at least a part of her trip. And it was on that trip that her teacher, who was accompanying her (in both senses, since she was at the piano for the competition) decided to see if there was anyone at Howard who might her Norman sing.

To say that Norman had a glittering career is somewhat like saying that Warren Buffet is getting by, financially. True, I don’t think she ever conquered the Opera House in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin (every town, no matter how small, had one…) but everywhere else? She came, she conquered.

And she’s a wonderful example of someone who is intelligent and articulate: two increasingly receding qualities. And why are they receding? Because, more and more, we’re slashing arts education.

I hate to say this…no wait, that’s the problem: we’re always apologizing, feeling bad for suggesting that the chorus and the band are just as important as the football team. Anybody out there seen the TV series Glee? Then you’ll know what neck is first put under the guillotine, when it’s time to start cutting.

I worked in corporate America—improbable, I know, but there it is. And I can tell you: most musicians can think circles around businessmen. Why? Because spending hours at a keyboard gives you discipline, for one thing. But there’s something else: it’s not just me saying that musicians have an edge. Google “cognitive effects music” and you get this, from Boston College and Harvard Medical School:

ABSTRACT: Research has revealed structural and functional differences in the brains of adult instrumental musicians compared to those of matched non- musician controls, with intensity/duration of instrumental training and practice being important predictors of these differences.

I told you—it was not a fairy tale, the glittering life that Norman has lead. It’s a tale of a community who had no idea that there wasn’t money for the band or the chorus, of teachers that gave up their time and money to take a 16-year old to Philadelphia, to a principal who knows that there’s a talent in his or her school, and knows that he has to get the school behind her.

And how many lives did Norman change or affect? What was the return on the investment that all those people poured into her, those people poorer, mostly, than we are, but who could still afford to give what we cannot?

Well, in my life, Norman started what would be a lifelong love of the human voice. I was in my twenties, and I didn’t—like many instrumentalists—like singers. They were artificial, I thought—all high C’s, no musicianship.

What do I listen to, now? Almost all vocal or choral music—I can’t remember the last time I heard a cello concerto. And here it has to be said, I have learned much more from the singers I have heard than the cello teachers I have paid. And when I hear most instrumentalists play, I can almost always tell who has listened to singers, and who has not. Singers, you see, have this problem or gift—they have to breathe. Cellists don’t, but should.

But that’s hardly the most important thing. I discovered a world of music that did more than give me pleasure. I lost my mother, my job, and my mind in a two-year period a couple of years ago. And what music accompanied me, as I lived through those days? Schubert’s great song cycle: Die Winterreise.

I said it accompanied me, but it was more than that. In some ways, the work was informing my journey, and I was spiraling down, down, down—being pulled by that music, but ultimately being saved by it as well. I took the winter’s journey, as some of us must, and got through the village and met the hurdy-gurdy man and started off. Schubert both defined and clarified that process.

I got to Jessye Norman two nights ago, after the opera, since I had seen the encore performance of the Met’s performance of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. The performance was a four-hour, bottomless bottle of champagne, so I came home and wondered: could I buy a DVD of the opera, in order to play it for Ilia, my mother-in-law who’s caring for an ailing husband, and who often cannot get away? So I checked the Met’s gift shop, online, and yes, there it was. And what else was there? Jessye Norman’s autobiography, which came out days ago.

And so I spent the morning looking at the clip below, and doing a bit of compare and contrast—remember that from high school? Because I had been seeing on Thursday—before the opera—a documentary about the Koch brothers, those guys who have found the way to buy the government, and who are also finding ways to buy the educational system. It’s breathtaking, in fact, the scope of their ambition.

Both clips are long—who but a blogger has the time to listen? So I’ll paraphrase—with considerably less eloquence than Norman’s unscripted remarks—what Norman says about the American dream. She said—and I have tears in my eyes as I write this—that it’s the knowledge and acknowledgment that government has the obligation to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to live and, especially, to thrive. And don’t trot out that dusty line about the bootstraps, because you know what? Some people don’t have boots.

Norman was one of those people—a black girl in the Jim Crow South whose parents were struggling. Her parents, could they afford to go to the opera, much less sip champagne afterwards? Or put it this way—could they afford to go hear their child sing? I don’t know: but my strong feeling is no.

I wish that the people who are decimating public education and cutting off aid programs and perpetrating this myth of the undeserving poor would get it: it’s terrible fiscal policy. Nobody gave Norman the career she had—she worked and struggled and took risks and succeeded, gloriously.

But she also had resources that—increasingly—people want to take away. She didn’t want and never needed a “handout.”

She needed a foundation.

What kid doesn’t?