The Owners of the Two Half Chickens



I have just one small story from when my family was in the old country. And while one small story does not make much of anything (anymore than one chicken bone in water makes a soup), it means a lot to me because it is something that is mine, the oldest thing that I know that is part of what made me, me.

• The old country is Poland. I had only one grandmother. One grandmother and one Bachi. My father's mother who lived with us in my early years was Bachi to me (and even her children called her that). When my cousin Barbara couldn't pronounce Babchi, meaning grandma in Polish, our Babchi's middle b was dropped and she came to be called Bachi, which now to me is also kiss in Italian. It just meant my dad's mom then. I miss my Bachi, but after maybe thirty years, I can still stop and let myself remember her specific kisses, the touch, her smell. It's funny the things that are chosen for us to remember. And I think I could still pick her hands and thin arms out of a lineup. This is her story I now tell, Connie's. To her friends, she was Connie.

Connie and her neighbor in the village pooled their few kopecks together and bought a chicken. I don't know what kind or if they gave it a name. They would take turns with the egg their chicken would lay most mornings. The neighbor would get it one day, Connie the next.

Once, for almost two weeks, the were no eggs and the neighbor kept accusing Connie of sneaking all the eggs for herself. Connie protested her innocence. Then chicken started laying again but the bitterness of the owners of the two half chickens didn't abate.

Soon after the hen was seen with a clutch of little chicks trailing her. The mystery was solved and the neighbor bought a dozen eggs for Connie as an apology.

I apologise that I have no more stories from the old country. Maybe that's why I read so hungrily the Issac Baschevis Singer stories of Poland. My wife and I have especially loved for many years his stories of the inhabitants of Chelm, who, in all his humorous stories of them, were schelmiels, wonderful fools.

A couple weeks ago my wife found out that two of her favorite students had ancestors who hailed from Chem. We had thought it was a mythical place. Now we are delighted that somewhere in Poland, our favorite old world village actually existed and maybe still does.

I have heard of immigrants who kept keys to their old country homes or something else, candlesticks maybe, and then they passed them down to their children. I am not jealous of them, I have this. A good story is one of the best things to have.

Hiroshima

Two weeks ago my thirteen year old son visited Hiroshima for the first time. The same day he arrived there by Shinkansen train from Tokyo, I saw a beautiful hardcover book on a street vendor's table for only four dollars. It was John Hershey's Hiroshima, which was one of the first serious books, the first I remember, that I read. I borrowed it from the local Cutchogue library. I have looked over many used books in stores and on the street over the years and would have noticed this volume before. But not until that day did I see it.

I am quite skeptical when it comes to coincidences and intuition, but these things seem to occur at an interesting frequency. I saw another book last week about how we overestimate the importance of coincidences with our minds. I believe we do. Yet there must be something going on even though I was trained by my Christian upbringing to believe in these things in the abstract but not live among them.

After years of schooling where I was told to not speak when I wanted; not eat when I felt like it; wait when I felt the need to relieve myself in the rest room; not to play or socialize when I felt like it; to concentrate when I wanted to rest; to do math when I felt like doing art; to read science when I wanted to study math; to be with dull, bitter teachers I wanted to get away from. . . I, like most Americans, learned to shut up what I felt inside.

Tell me, if you refuse to go the bathroom when your insides scream 'I have to go now,' how are you going to hear a more subtle, quiet message of intuition? I was trained to be counterintuitive for years and years.

Now, I don't know why I found Hershey's book when I did. I don't have to know but I can enjoy the event.

Why intuition you say, I thought you were talking about coincidence. Because intuition is to me, when you listen to your inner self, and some coincidence follows. Though you don't always have to sit down for 45 minutes and ask hmmmm. . . what are you saying, Miss Inner Self? Though sometimes that is what you might want to do.

I recently found out that John Hershey wrote another interesting small book called A Single Pebble, a story of an American engineer who travels the Yangtze to find places to put dams. Now, 50 years later, it is even more poignant with the the damming they are doing to that river. But while this is a touching, tender story, there is another story about Hiroshima and a single pebble that I would like to share, a true story.

A boy and his friends, perhaps it was his sister, were walking in Hiroshima near the end of the war and the boy stopped to pick up a small stone that caught his eye. There was a brilliant flash of light which burnt his friends, but the boy was shielded by a low cement wall as he bent down for his stone; and he lived.

(Atomic bombs can be configured to do different types of damage, only killing people and having the radiation dissipate quickly or giving off little radiation but doing much physical, heat damage or producing radiation that will stay a long time like in Chernobyl. So that is why this is possible.)

I collect stories of stones. One of the important hidden motifs of the Hebrew Scriptures is that of the Even Shetiah, the moving stone. If you have any stone stories, please share them with me.

And the lantern boats in the picture are sailed on the Hiroshima water each summer to not forget the tragedy and perhaps, help deal with it.

I don't think my son was there for the lantern boats but maybe one day he and I will go see them together. For me it will be complicated, my father was a navigator on an airplane which bombed Japan, though he was not on the Enola Gay, the one that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; my wife's parents were in Tokyo at the time, being bombed by planes with conventional bombs.

If I do make it, I will look for a stone to carry in my pocket.

The Perfect Sunday Morning Service

As a musician, I love playing both carefully composed works and my improvisations; I love playing squirreled away within my own apartment or out in the wide world.

In central park there are three large lawns : the Sheep Meadow where, years ago, sheep actually kept the grass short; the Great Lawn where Simon and Garfunkle, the N.Y. Philharmonic and many other famous groups perform; and the North Field at whose edge I sat and played recorder this Sunday morning, watching the first stray players trickle onto the baseball fields.

I moved to the handball courts when my hill was taken over by a cacophony of dog owners, the courts just a few strides away. Stepping on the courts, I remembered practicing tennis here on another morning last year with two young raccoons shyly peering out of the near garbage can as my audience.

At the court, I played again but stopped when I thought I heard church bells. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. In the middle court there is a high chain link fence dividing two lines of courts and when I played my recorder there, the fence resonated. The actual sound was like the fuzzy after-peal of church bells sans the percussive knock or a loud glass harmonica.

If I have to attend a Sunday morning worship service, this is how I like it: Bach's music and improvised tunes, soft pealing sounds in the background, gorgeous woodsy setting, no preaching, no husband or kids dragged there when they'd rather be still under the covers or getting ready for the beach.

I have to report that 100% of the congregants (me, the only one) were thrilled to be attending.

I mentioned "Bach's music and improvised tunes." Of interesting musical note, I read a book on Bach's Art of the Fugue yesterday. It mentioned that while Bach improvised freely, when he then took those improvisations to paper, he would then adjust them to musically flawless, technically correct works.

This goes along with my thinking that music writing is a two part process, the first part being a freely created tune, often inspired by half remembered melodies now with new twists; infused the remembered rhythmic feel of a dance, a heartbeat; animated by birdsong (which that morning I heard and played with); laughter, which I personally believe (though I never heard anyone else say this), was the persistent basis of Mozart's melodies; or in one case (Harold Arlen, "Over the Rainbow"), kindled by the whistling for his dog.

The second part being the sometimes wonderful developments, patterns and clever teasings reworked into the piece.

In a review last week in the NY Times, Bernard Holland explained...

Countries with powerful popular cultures don’t produce many fugues. Abstraction and formal design have a hard time competing with musical impulses that seem to grow out of the ground, especially when the country is Spain and the melding of European and North African music remains so strong.

Folk cultures and popular music genres have no time for fugues, their musicians are busy playing melodies. Makes sense.

Bach, spent more of his energy on development, borrowing (stealing away for us?) tunes he found, including one song from Martin Luther (for which arrangement, two days ago, my son just finished studying the four recorder parts, SATB). "Serious" composers develop songs they find. Aaron Copeland's famously took the Shaker's It's a Joy to Be Simple and did hardly anything to it.

Of course, composers do love to make their own tunes. When improvising, I find myself focusing on a melody and its variations, while at the same time focusing on its development, progression and its interweaving with other melodies. It's like having two parts of your brain converse with each other, each speaking at the same time and it's you in each case being the speaker and listener.

When I do this, I see that multitasking the brain is deliciously addicting and must reluctantly admit I can't criticize my son for playing two demanding video games (and typing away like a demon to talk to other online gameplayers) at once, while watching a movie on the screen and listening to music, and researching stuff on the internet in between. I'd like to criticize but I can't.

But no matter how complicated the composition gets, its the tune, that short story of what happens to notes and harmonies, that matters.

People want to hear pretty, unforced melodies which feel like they grew out of the ground, whether played by popular musicians or reworked in classical style; whether they were created centuries ago like Greensleeves or improvised on the spot; in a concert hall or in a chance encounter in a park.

A pretty tune is like an cute girl. You want to spend time with her.

Pineapple triplets

Dear reader, I hope this story of my childlike attempts will encourage you even if you are not studying the cello as I am.

I want to tell you about Pineapple Triplets. First off, musical triplets are fitting in three notes where you would normally count two notes.

The easiest way to do triplets was suggested in Arnold Steinhardt's book, Violin Dreams...

When playing a whole note, play it to the word... Pear.
When playing a half note, play it to the word... Ap ple.
When playing a quarter note, say to yourself... Wa ter mel on.
And what is the word for triplets?... Pine ap ple.

Each syllable so easily directs one to play one of the notes. It's like having a little conductor in the brain, (Hormunculous' cousin?).

I was having trouble reading through some Scriabin (And as I am meeting with his great-grandson, the pianist, Elisha Abas, felt I should be playing a bit of the composer's music).

The music piece has dotted triplets (wouldn't it be neater if it was spelled trippplets?). And dotted triplets are more complicated than triplets; making one of normal length; one, half-length; and one triplet of one and a half-length.

Yesterday, I had asked my teacher to play the Scriabin through and then forgot what it sounded like this evening. She additionally told me how to approach the dotted triplets, explaining the process of learning to play them accurately: get the regular triplets down first, then adjust them.

But when I sat down to practice, I remembered Pear, apple, pineapple, watermelon.

I found I could easily lengthen and shorten the appropriate syllables in Pineapple once I got Pine ap ple into my head, I could adjust as my teacher said. But I didn't even have to play them or think them through as regular triplets first, they just easily came out perfect.

It was so easy and struggle-less. It was like playing the simplest tune.

Now I know why I was trying to convince my wife to buy a pineapple earlier in the day, when we went shopping, a purchase I have made three or four times in my entire life...

My inner self was trying to get me to remember about and use pineapple triplets.

And that pineapple tastes great, ask my son.

photo links:
willtooke
RaeA
jwlphotography

A Quality of Laughter

I am thinking of taking a yoga class. And yoga is not my cup of tea; if I find out it will take too much time to get there or it's at an inconvenient time, forget it.

What is attracting me to this yoga class is that it's laughing yoga; and besides being the best medicine, it sounds like fun. Doesn't it?

Years ago, I worked at the farm in eastern Long Island. It was just behind our house; I could just roll out of bed and be there. At the farm's fruit stand this one summer, worked a girl who was quite cute. She had a short haircut, dark eyes and an unbelievably warm, inviting laugh.

When I told her how much I liked her laugh, she told me that I should hear her sister.

The summer passed, the fruit season ended and when the other "summer people" left, she moved to Vermont to live with her laughing sister.

Well, the story could have ended here but I decided to take a car trip to see her, my longest then except for the one to Buffalo and Niagara Falls to see my brother in college.

I felt like the racing car hero in A Man and a Woman who drove across France to spend a short night with his love. It was winter, there was snow, I drove on highways voted the most scenic in America. The trip was a joy.

Beside having a great time in Vermont, I met the sister and heard her laugh. It was shear beauty. One of her college professors had told her she laughed chromatically. Yes, it hit half notes up and down with gentle timbre. I wish you could hear it, just once. Clean as a child laughing on a lazy afternoon, it was.

In a couple days my laugh had changed too. It was like picking up an accent. But I returned home and after a while, like a borrowed Southern drawl on Brooklyn streets, my quality of laughter melted away.

Now, if the laughing sister were teaching this yoga class, or even in it, I would so sign up, even if it were way up in Vermont. I want to laugh like that again. click these photos to visit their home sites.

(The photo of the pretty, young woman is not the girl I knew but a stunt double).

A Joyful, Noisy Thursday

Yesterday, there were two new entries to my son's calendar.

He had heard a car alarm repeating "Thursday, Thursday." (Yes, it was Thursday.)

Windshield wipers, washing mashines, and old refrigerators seem to whisper in our language and dialect, occasionally, deliciously. This was Sage's first encounter with"speaking machines" and it had made me wonder at the time, why he remained blankly on the top step of his cello teacher's brownstone instead of following me in.

Later inside, it happened to be the first time he played a double stop on the cello (a chord, two notes at once). Usually I don't pen-in these such small, delicate events, rather days like when he learned to ride a bike or when he first arrived in Tokyo and met his grandmother there.

I keep track of new things that pop up in Sage's life and put them in calendar form. A decade from now, when he graduates college (or whatever), I'll present the calendar to him and then each January of his life he can see that the 3rd was his first piano recital and each February, that the 27th was when he met a close friend. I hope this will later make for a life of mini-celebrations and smiles.

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