How to Succeed With an F Average








How I envy those who can captivate with a story. I mean in a conversation, like last night when we had dinner with a close friend. She obviously has different genetic material than I do regarding the ability to make interesting words come out of one's mouth.

This is very different from being able to write an interesting story.

As I sit here at the computer, remembering our cellist friend tell her stories last night, it's like remembering scenes from a movie, or like the stories happened to me, not her.

I, on the other hand, feel shy and clumsy in company. It's as though I'm playing the wrong instrument, say a cellist blowing into an oboe. I think of Gary Larson's cartoon of an elephant onstage at the piano realizing in panic that he's not a pianist, he's a flutist.

When I do say something, it's often a clumsy imitation of what I wanted to say. And I can't go back and edit, revise, like I can as I am typing to you here.

That is why I like typing out my stories and essays. It feels like I am playing the "write" instrument.

Writer Lorrie Moore answered well when she was asked "What in your childhood contributed to your becoming a writer?"

"... a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset in literary life. Not being fluent on one's feet sends one to the page, and a habit is born."

Ineptness in conversation can be a useful failing if you're interested in writing. Just as dead, decomposing plants in your garden become the humus, the soil, which allow other plants to thrive.

In her article on how to become a writer, Ms. Moore speaks of a different failure which is helpful to writers...

"First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire."

I just finished a book of poetry that took a few years. Yea! and Confetti! And I can truly say that my finesse at the small failures in life has greatly contributed. (Except for my failure at being a descent speller. That's been a bit of a drawback.)

Here is a small appetizer from the collection. . .

An Extra Closet

The corners of my home
have become
filled with filling.
I wish I could put
some of the piles
into my writings
and hide them away.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Actually though, gathering any experience will give you some grist for the mill, having something to write about is what matters. Not just the failures, a writer's successes in life and those mixed results can be useful too. Getting out of bed and trying is the thing.

Playing Hookey











I was going to write something else today but I got distracted by the faint and constant snowing. In a few hours we'll go skating at Bryant Park. It's very beautiful to skate there as the snow falls. Then we'll go to a restaurant I love nearby there that reminds me of being in Japan. I'll order tanuki (a tanuki is an animal like a raccoon, but that's just the name, there's no tanuki meat in this). Tanuki has pieces of tankatsu batter, the batter used in making tempura, in a soba or udon, warm, noodle broth. I love it.

They also have kitsune (fox) of soba or udon broth and tofu skins, which is funny because this again stirs my memory, of the simple, traditional song my son and every Japanese child hears and sings about - kobuto, kitsune, tanuki, neko. However there is no (kobuto) piglet or neko (cat) soba or udon.

How to Walk onto the Stage of Carnegie Hall Without Stage Fright










Nine and and a half years ago, in July of 2002, I cut out a couple paragraphs from a New Yorker article and taped it up on our kitchen cupboard. In it is the simple secret of how to instill confidence in your child or in a pianist who will debut at Carnegie Hall.

Never praise abilities, praise efforts.

Never tell your child, self, wife or student that she is talented, smart, or naturally gifted. Tell her, she is such a hard worker.

Never say to a pianist that he is so good at sight reading, tell him that he worked hard at sight reading and it paid off. Don't these sound similar? But no, no and no - they are polar opposites, like northern polar bears and southern penguins, we feel they are from the same region, but they live on opposite ends of the earth.

Do not tell a violinist that she has real talent, tell her that her hard work on her vibrato really paid off. This is a dangerously important distinction.

And secondly, it is better to praise small achievements than broad accomplishments. You really worked hard on this trill in the second movement; you're getting good at filling the cat bowl; I noticed how quietly you have been closing doors lately, you've been trying hard not to slam them; you're relaxing your shoulders now when you play the piano, you've put a lot into it.

If you want to walk on the stage of Carnegie Hall without stage fright, you need to start encouraging yourself way before that night. You need to make it a habit to tell yourself that you are a hard worker. Not in a magic phrase way. But find little things you worked at, notice them and encourage yourself. Surround yourself with friends who will do the same for you. "I love the way you worked on phrasing in the beginning of the slow movement, it sounds beautiful."

Here is the article snippet from my cupboard. . .

Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Columbia University, has found that people generally hold one of two fairly firm beliefs about their intelligence: they consider it either a fixed trait or something that is malleable and be developed over time. Five years ago, Dweck did a study at the University of Hong Kong, where all classes are conducted in English. She and her colleagues approached a large group of social-science students, told them their English-proficiency scores, and asked them if they wanted to take a course to improve their language skills.

One would expect all those who scored poorly to sign up for the remedial course. The University of Hong Kong is a demanding institution, and it is hard to do well in the social sciences without strong English skills.

Curiously, however, only the ones who believed in malleable intelligence expressed interest in the class. The students who believe that intelligence was a fixed trait were so concerned about appearing to be deficient that they preferred to stay at home. "Students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb," Dweck writes, "for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success."

In a similar experiment, Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer.

Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable; forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward.

They weren't naturally deceptive people, and they weren't any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate "talent." They began to define themselves by their description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. . . They'd sooner die.
-
Yes, every musician in or out of music school knows you have to practice like a little, red-tailed demon, talent alone gets you nowhere. But it is the self-encouragement of noticing our little victories, and how we talk with each other that make a difference. Are we saying, "Oh, you're so talented! You're going to go far." or "Wow! you really worked on your dynamics in that piece."?

You made it to the end of this article, you really showed determination. Keep up your good work!

What To Choose as Your One Genie Wish













This is what your parents should have chosen for you, and what you should for your son or daughter. . .

Confidence.

Occasionally, when I am in the middle of badgering my son, trying to change, inform, control, mold, teach him - I stop and ask what I am actually teaching him. Yes, I can defend every little thing I say as being important for him to learn, but. . .

What am I really teaching him?

What should I be teaching him? Well, I want him to grow into a confident person, a disciplined-on-his-own, compassionate, considerate (rather than bullying), thankful, happy, intuitive person who accomplishes great things.

If I stop and ask regarding any of these - am I teaching him these? Much of the traditional molding of a child is teaching him exactly the opposite, (you find it in both the classroom or home).

So, if I find a bottle washed up on the beach with a genie trapped inside, I would use my wish to give my son confidence.

And I can, just by putting less effort into molding him and letting him make his mistakes, work through his own challenges. Watch my son do his project exactly wrong and say nothing, or let him rebel a bit and say nothing.

There was an interview of a Japanese comedian we watched one summer in Tokyo. He was asked how he became such a success. The comedian said that when he was young, he was a very poor student. But if he would come home with a test with no answers right, his mother would exclaim, "Wow, anyone can get a 5 or 10, you got a perfect 0%. That's something." If he got one question right, she would say, "That's great, you got a 5%, let's put it on the refrigerator." No matter how poorly he did, his mother would praise his results.

The comedian says his mother gave him so much confidence that now when he gets up in front of a huge audience of people or performs on TV, he knows he will be funny and people will laugh.

I want that for my son. Don't you want that too? For yourself, your child?

There is a wonderful Jewish saying, "If you tell you child to study, he will grow up to be a person who tells his child to study. If he sees you studying, he will grow up loving to study."

We teach other lessons than what we think we teach.

(And by the way, in case some Genie is reading this essay, I hope I would get another wish or two for selfish, little me.)

A Perfectly Broken Performance









My son is learning the piano and bassoon, and last week we went to a dinner at a friends' Brooklyn home with about 15 people. Sage, at 14, is getting quite good and there was a piano in the dinning room, so he volunteered to play after the meal.

Sage sat down and began with the new Clementi piece his teacher gave him. He played with a handful of stutterings, restarting phrases he tripped on, as he tried to play this piece which he just began memorizing. But he didn't care. And it actually turned out well enough, then a nice applause followed.

My wife and I were in shock that he played the Clementi he hadn't quite mastered yet. And that he was totally unfazed by his rough playing, not unnerved or embarrassed at all.

I was even in more amazed when I realized my son had actually listened to me.

I had been explaining to Sage over and again that it's not the mistakes in a performance that matter but the quality of playing. And I had been telling him that when he performs to just enjoy it and not try to impress people with how talented he is or how perfect he has been been practicing. The performer is there to share his love of a piece with the audience, to move them with wonderful music.

He could have chosen to impress the room with his Debussy, but this Clementi Sonatina was what he was excited about, in the middle of learning. This was the music of his current heart.

I hope he carries this attitude all his life and in all his performances.

The Exotic Fish, My Flashlight,
and Monkey Waiters










I remember my son, Sage, getting upset only three times when he was very young. And each of these times he was quite inconsolable.

Once, we were given tropical fish and a tank. I thought the tank needed one more so I took Sage to a pet store and he picked out a fish. We brought it back in the small plastic bag you get, but when I put our new pet in the tank with the other fish, Sage cried.

He wanted to eat it. My wife took him to Citarella's to get another fish that was for eating, but Sage remained insistent on the one he and I had picked out. Not even a beautiful pink snapper could entice him.

When I first saw the movie Tampopo, I thought it was funny but too exaggerated - no one obsesses about food like they show in the movie. Then I married a Japanese girl and slowly began to realize as I frequented Japan, the movie was an understatement. The Japanese have a different relationship to food than all others and while my son was half Japanese, his tongue genes were inherited entirely from his mother.

Another time, Sage cried was when we showed him a flashlight for the first time. We sat on the bed and he put the the flashlight to my ear and looked in the other one. He was upset because he couldn't see the light through my empty head. What do you say to someone who is disappointed about such a thing?

The third time was entirely my wife's fault. We were headed to Chinatown in Yokohama. She was trying to get him excited about going to a restaurant there called something like "Monkichi." Somehow he got it in his head that it was a monkey restaurant and imagined monkeys serving us Chinese food. With such expectations, how could anyone not be disappointed? Sage cried until he fell asleep at the restaurant and missed the meal.

Never underestimate the Japanese, however. Last year we saw in the newspaper that a restaurant in Tokyo has monkeys which bring you your food.

The Composer as Performer












"I am disturbed that Gosfield doesn't place the acquisition of musical (esp. instrumental) technique at the top of her list. Ever since it became acceptable to be a "accredited" composer and not a performing musician (thanks to universities which began issuing degrees in "composition"), "composers" have given us music which is not worth the paper it is written on.

Young composers should spend more time being performing musicians and less time hatching half-brained works which the public is invariably going to hate. I liken the contempory composer to a chef who conjures up recipes without ever having set foot in a kitchen.

Having listened to "Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers" (2008) is it clear that Gosfield has a good command of the piano: young composers should aspire to the same level of proficiency. If your instrument is the computer, then please don't compose for acoustic instruments."
- Desabata. Hamburg, Germany

I deeply agree with the above idea that we composers need to aspire to master instruments.

Our greatest influence is the voice, from which in the tongue which we speak, we find our most subtle musical phrases. The next is the rhythm with which we move through life, our dance. After that are the instruments we play and lastly the ambient sounds of railroad trains, steam kettles and catbirds which inhabit our personal worlds. Somewhere in the mix, of course, are all the other compositions that have beautifully or obnoxiously invaded our ears. (My order here is quite arbitrary and may be skewed.)

The instruments we play and to the degree we master them, are frustrated by their limits, alter them, imagine them just beyond what they can do, and push and struggle against them for perfection, become our internal tools of composition. "Break your instrument," Casals.

Whether adjusting the pitch for cello notes higher or lower within a piece's harmonic and step considerations or getting a piano sound like other various instruments as did Horowitz, or altering the emphasis of notes as did Rachmaninoff for others' piano works, we learn.

Modern composers are generally strong in getting feedback from musicians as to how to stretch their instruments in new ways. If there is not first however, the deep, subtle connection to wonderful music playing of these or another instrument by the composer herself, the adjustment is only a parlor trick, an "Ah, ouuh, look at my cleverness," not something deeper.

The greatest composers were among the greatest performers. And I imagine, this will continue to be.

Advice to Young Composers











"The composers you admire didn’t get where they are by imitating others. Inspiration and influence are a far cry from imitation, so listen, observe, and then dig deeper to find your own music."
- Annie Gosfield

"I am not in any way a specialist in any kind of music. I am what might be called an ordinary, general listener. In that very limited capacity I would give one piece of advice to young musicians. Try to understand the kind of music which has given people, and still gives people real pleasure, true joy in listening. Understand then that in order to truly give something in music it might be necessary to speak in a vocabulary which most of mankind is capable of understanding and enjoying. Touch the heart and soul of human beings, and avoid empty technical achievements which even computers will not hum along with."
- Shalom Freedman, in response to an article by Annie Gosfield

In my way of thinking, the way to approach composing is to write beautiful music that touches the soul and uplifts it, encourages people to live a little higher up the chakra tree than before, be more caring and giving and thoughtful.

But composers want to make something new. They believe that this is a measure of having achieved a great stature. It is.

However, one should not aim at being original. That comes naturally from the process of being great at doing what has been done before. Doing it over and over and honing your talent until one day your work actually becomes something new without that being the goal.

I don't mind being old fashioned, Bach was considered old fashioned during the years he was writing. I would rather follow him.

Composers write at the level they are at in their personal lives, they relate to that level. The music of the rapper, for example is one of aggression and survival at any cost, down at the lowest chakra level called survival. That is where many people are comfortable and rap music affirms their feelings. Other musics fit people at other levels. Much of popular music is about the ego, getting things, especially getting (or wanting or the sadness of loosing, etc.) a romantic relationship, which is on a bit higher plane than "survival." The music of Bach is from a composer who, and for an audience which, are less comfortable living on that level and more comfortable with a more advanced spiritual level.

Experimental composers mostly relate to the world which is now sadly discordant, polluted, overpopulated and at war. Of course, this shows in their music. How to make them cringe? Tell them their work is sweet and warms you.

But it is more than the world situation which creates a "modern composer."

Their writing is often a reaction to too much exposure to mediocre and saccharine sweet classical performances, often the composer's own. When a composer who is middling at best on her instrument spends hours and hours, years and years, playing his guitar or cello and it doesn't hit the quality of beauty of say, Segovia or Casals (and in fact is boring), the composer turns to something else to erase the experience of that bland music which deadens the soul.

Having to sit through some very uninspired piano music last week sent me straight to my own piano to improvise extreme discord with some resolution. If the composer has sat at her piano for years of her own tedious practice and dull piano lessons, she needs to react to that.

If the composer tries to write the exercises at music school and finds that her work is flat and dead compared to what Faure or Schubert did in their school work when they wrote their Ave Marias, what is she going to do but try something else? If the composer, realizes somewhere in her heart of hearts that in writing traditional music, she will become at best, a workaday, mediocre composer, she will turn to the avant garde. That way it feels creative and exciting and the quality of her music can't be measured against Beethoven and Haydn.

Nadia Boulanger, the most influencial music teacher of the past century taught just about everyone: Quincy Jones, Gian Carlos Menotti, Ned Rorem, Walter Piston, Astor Piazzolla, Aaron Copeland, Burt Bacharach, Leondard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim, John Adams, and two I would like to now contrast, George Gershwin and Philip Glass.

George Gershwin went to Ms. Boulanger to hone his compositional skills. She told him that while he might not understand all of technical aspects, she did not want to teach them to him because he had a quality that she did not want to ruin. She knew he would produce wonderful music.

Philip Glass also went to Ms. Boulanger in Paris to improve as a composer after studying first at Julliard. He said he wasn't very good at traditional composing so he turned to minimalism.

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it".
- C. S. Lewis

One Small Step Can Change Your Life



In Robert Maurer's book by the above title, he mentions how bestowing small rewards produces the best results.

He tells us, Japanese companies give tiny rewards for suggestions, maybe a pen for the best year's idea, as opposed to a common American practice of giving large cash rewards in proportion to the money their idea saves. Because of this, the ideas suggested are different and 90% in Japanese ideas are implemented while less 38% in American Companies. But these figures are misleading by themselves. It gets worse. You have to take into account how few employees in our country's companies offer suggestions while Japanese workers offer their companies a lot.

Last night my wife came home a bit shocked. She had some little-kid stickers. You know, "Good Job!," "Doin' Great," Super Work," that kind. Chie teaches at NYC's premier public high school, Stuyvesant. The students pride themselves on being sophisticated. She didn't expect them to gush over the stickers so much when she stuck them on their completed work sheets. These are the students who will be going into pre-med or pre-law in two years. One boy asked for it to be put on his folder instead of his paper so he could see it everyday and get inspired.

Chie ordered a slew of Pokemon stickers for the students last night.

If you think you smile to the cashier girl or a tiny tip to the young man who made your coffee this morning is unimportant, think again.

Part of why you appreciate a smaller award may be that you sense you actually deserve it. Another part may be that when the gift is small, you focus on the fact that the other person noticed you, cared.

On a similar note, I've seen that homeless beggars here in Manhattan are often more thankful for the fact that someone cared than the coins put in their paper cups.

Why Does Intuition Want to Spoil My Wonderfully Logical Plans?











Let's say you want to be a rich and famous novelist.

You have it all planned out:

1. get a writing job at the local newspaper;
2. come up with a brilliant story idea;
3. write novel;
4. find an agent who gets your book published;
5. tour the country for signings;
6. have novel made into blockbuster movie;
7. win Nobel Prize for literature;
8. retire to the South of France.

You get step one and two checked off. Great!

Then one balmy Tuesday in October comes along. Your "Intuition?" tells you to call in sick and enjoy some golf. You call your friend Alfie and meet him at the North Fork Country Club. Your boss runs into you at the 19th hole and you get fired from your terrific job at the Suffolk Times.

Back to step zero.

Now, the only lousy work you can find is scraping barnacles off boat bottoms at the Greenport Yacht and Shipbuilding Company. You get depressed as the weeks drag by.

Then you start noticing that the strange characters who work with you each have their interesting quirks and histories. Your novel starts to percolate. You can't wait to get home each night and type away. And Danny, the old man who's been painting the names on yachts, his daughter is a top literary agent. You meet her at her Danny's retirement party and she takes interest in your writing.

Your logical mind says, "Well, why didn't you tell me that we were supposed to write about the characters in the shipyard? And that you were planning to meet an agent through one of them?"

"Why?"

Well, your intuition isn't interested in wasting time talking to your logical mind. It speaks a different language. I haven't figured out if its Medieval French or Pre-Cyrillic Russian, but I know it's something I can't translate just yet.

Besides, your intuition only deals with the next step. It only will tell you the next thing to do.

This is important, this is why I actually wrote this entry. Your intuition only deals with the next step. It will only tell you the very next thing to do and will sometimes wait years until you do it.

It won't not nag and hound you like your mother did when you were 14, to clean up your room. It will just whisper. Sometimes just once and if you don't listen, you miss out, you file the thought away, you forget about it. Or if you keep pestering your inner feelings instead of taking the next small step, you might get to hear the wrong answer you wanted to hear all along.

If you want to hear your intuition, you need to blindly take the step it is telling you. Afterwards, you may stumble into what to do after that, or your intuition may speak to you again.

I like to think of life as a maze. Your logical mind tells you that you want to go a certain way. It knows the cheese you want is to the north. But you will sometimes will have to go east or southwest as you follow the maze path. You have to if you want to eventually get to your goal, your cheese at the end of the maze.

It can be frustrating, your mind is shouting "the cheese is thataway" and your gut is yelling, "I don't care, this is the next step in the maze." They can sound be like two brothers, 8 and 9, fighting over that last jelly doughnut.

And it takes courage - what if your gut feeling is wrong?

At one point in my life, I studied from Stuart Wilde. He said that, "Your logical thinking isn't right all the time, so don't expect you intuition to be either." You will make some mistakes. When you follow you intuition, do your taxes, or paint the name on a boat, you will make mastakes.

It will take practice and mistakes to know when it really is your intuition speaking.

I don't like writing articles like this for one reason. Too much theory, too much thinking. All the words in 180 books can matter less than one bumbling, tiny attempt to do something. My gentle reader, just make some small, clumsy attempt to do what your gut is saying and I will feel today's writing was worth it.

(Oh, man! I was going to have oatmeal for breakfast. Now that I wrote about jelly doughnuts, It ain't gonna happen.)

A Chinese Yom Kippur?



Well, there is a Chinese New Year and a Jewish New Year. This year I had a Chinese Yom Kippur.

Sort of. . .

There is an old Chinese New Year custom is to go out to the street and break one of your dinner plates. Any bad luck which was slated for coming year is transferred to this loss of a plate.

Now, when the Jewish new year starts, G-d pencils in what will be allotted you for that year - marriage, how much money you will make, a broken foot, a trip to The Great Wall of China.

But He gives you a second chance. If you get nervous and feel that things might not go too well in the next 12 months, you can be comforted in knowing this. . . He watches to see if you made changes in yourself during the few days after the new year. If you did, He gets out his eraser and then pens in your new destiny on the 10th day, Yom Kippur. You get a new this year's karma.

The day before Yom Kippur, my desk computer died. I was upset and then realized, well it is the new year and I probably deserved worse in this coming year so this is a kindness, a softening of my karma sentence.

Years ago, a rabbi told me that when you repent, G-d may lessen the serious consequences of your wrong actions. He said, "Maybe instead, a cup of coffee you buy will be cold" or maybe your computer will break like a dropped dish.

My Cello













My meditation teacher of years ago told us that when you meditate with a question the answer may not come to you then, but rather the next day. You might be walking down the street and what's written on the side of the truck that almost ran you down might tell you the answer. Or you might be just sitting having coffee and the answer comes. You'll know. The answer is usually so simple and obvious, you might want to laugh at yourself for missing it before.

For some months I had a real problem regarding my cello. The other day I briefly thought on it before meditating and expected no solution and found none then. I forgot about it until the next day when the solution just slipped into my mind. It was so simple and obvious. Duh!

And when I actually followed through on this, the solution was severely better than I thought it would be. My wife was a bit shocked with the results and my son impressed also, (though until now I didn't mention the meditation to anyone).

Rocky III, Err... I Mean The Three Rockys



I watched Rocky III for the first time some nights ago. The music running through the film was "Eye of the Tiger" by the rock group, Survivor, a great choice.

The "Eye of the Tiger" is an interesting concept in martial arts. It is when a fighter goes to the next level of perception while in the ring. His view shifts from the view of fighting someone across from him to a birds-eye view. The fighter looks down at both himself and his opponent. It is as if you were playing a video game and your view point changed to over your head.

But the movie didn't deal with the actual point-of-view shift. I first read of the phenomenon when the New York Times covered a scientific study of it over a decade ago.

What the study didn't say was how it comes about.

Enter Charlie Campanelli, the boxer. He was, when I met him, in his 90's and had been for many years both retired and a consultant to all the big name boxers. He was what your would call "A real character" and he looked exactly like Rocky's trainer, played by Burgess Meredith, maybe just older and somehow harder, rock like.

He would preach to Muhammed Ali, or some other boxer, not to look at the opponent's hands. Look at his feet. You can't throw a decent left punch unless your left foot starts to the rear. Of course, same with the right.

I realized that when you do this, you start to shift your viewpoint to overhead.

Everyone listened to Mr. Campanelli except for one boxer, Rocky Marciano. He didn't have to. He was so enormously strong that he would just punch the opponents arms until that opponent couldn't hold them up any more to defend himself. Then came the knockout.

How strong was Marciano? Well, to illustrate. It takes a lot of energy out of you to throw punches and it will tire you out. Ali defeated the hard punching Foreman by his rope-a-dope method of leaning on the ropes and letting Foreman punch at his body for four bells. Then Ali knocked out the tired Foreman in the fifth.

Marciano must have been strong. Charlie Campanelli said he was. Campanelli also said some other interesting things when my friend Howie asked him at two different times, "Who's the greatest fighter in the world?"

The first time he said that the greatest fighter was someone who never stepped into the ring. Yoda said the flip of the coin with "Great Warrior... Wars don't make one great." (I just quoted Yoda?)

The second time he chided Howie, "You can't tell how strong someone is by looking at him. He could be the world's greatest fighter."

Well, I didn't think so. He was pointing at this skinny guy, me. But Campanelli was right, you can't tell.

If you were counting, what happened to the third Rocky in my title? Someone once sent me a postcard of Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was funny, Stallone and Bullwinkle. I'll leave you with that.

What I Write



Three times in these past few days, I was asked what I wrote. And I didn't have an good answer.

Now, If someone button-holes me and wants to know, I will say "Potatoes."

I guess you could say I write about potatoes as much as anything.

I write to make magical rings and dragons as real as unwashed potatoes.

I write to make wooden chairs and a sack of potatoes as interesting as what the last ice dragon is hiding in her broken hand.

I write to show how the smallest acts (like sweeping the floor and peeling some potatoes for a poor, old neighbor) can change the history of nations.

I grew up surrounded by potato farms and beaches. It's good for a writer to have a deep sense of the common, muddy world before he goes and tries to make his own paper world or tries to explain the complexities of the one we live in.

There is a certain writer I admire because she wanted to describe what a certain poison tasted like, so. . . she tasted a bit. As a writer you need to know this, or what rotting potatoes smell like, or what the hundred different night noises in Harlem mean.

The easiest beast to draw is a fantastical one, like a dragon, rather than, say a horse. We have a Da Vinci drawing of a dragon, and it is terrific study because his idea was to patch together different real animal parts to make a new whole, a dragon. The imagined, if done well, is not something new, but a delicious variation of the mundane.

You have to first know your common russets and yellow finns, whether you write of them for a cookbook or you tell a tale of gnomes sneaking off with enchanted tubers. You have to know how your common goat and lion are sinewed together to create a dragon real as that bowl of steaming, buttered potatoes with dill sitting on the table before you.

Well, I don't actually write much about potatoes. But I write about potatoes, if you get my drift.

Missing One House Cat



Last month, we would occassionaly see this small creature run across the floor. And for weeks, when I woke up, I would have to light a candle, open doors and windows and wait for the little fellow's smell to disapate.

We were afraid. Would he (she?) bite? Would the smell get worse, what of diseases? Would he invite his in-laws and cousins to move in?

I finally had to get rid of the rat. I went to the hardware store on Broadway and bought some sticky traps and a snap traps. I was reluctant because I really didn't want to hurt it. If I bought a humane trap, the animal control people would kill it anyway.

A house cat could have helped, but my wife has a strong allergy.

In the store, when I was standing in the aisle trying to decide between sticky traps and snap traps a young woman stopped by me and looked at me. I said that we have a rat and have to get rid of it. She said, "Do you have to kill it?"

I said the kitchen stunk from it and it could bring disease.

"Well," she replied, "It is just one rat and there are millions of them."

"No," I replied, "It's a creature and it has a life and feelings. I wish I didn't have to kill it."

When I went home and set the traps, I was still reluctant so I said to the rat, (though I was guessing it wasn't nearby), "Mr. rat, I don't want to kill you. Look, I am setting some traps, please go live somewhere else."

I checked the traps the next morning and they were untouched. But there was no smell either. I figured he would return the next morning. But no, It has been six weeks and he is gone.

Afterwards, I was reminded of a story I read decades ago from the Babylonian Talmud about a rabbi and nest of mice.

Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi was a perfect tzaddik, yet he suffered great pain. How did it begin? Through a deed of his. He was walking through the marketplace when a calf being led to the slaughter ran to him and hid under his cloak. He told the calf, "Go. For this you were created."

That is when his troubles began. An angel who witnessed the incident argued that since Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi had no compassion for an innocent animal's suffering, why shouldn't he have some suffering too.

And it ended through another deed. The rabbi's maid was sweeping the floor and found a nest of mice beneath the boards. She began to sweep them away, when he stopped her. "It is written," he said, "that His compassion is upon all of His works." That is when his suffering ceased.

My "plague of rodent" ended when I felt sorry for him. I wish all our problems could be solved so easily.

Yesterday, I had another dilema with an animal. Outside Barnes and Noble, some animal shelter had puppies and kittens up for adoption and I fell for a felix domesticus. I asked my wife if there was no way we could get it. My wife found him cute too, but unfortunately... her allergy. The answer was no.

I stayed out until dinner and when I returned, I found a large cat lying against our door and mewing plaintively.

I didn't want to disturb the cat and went to knock on the door of a new neighbor to see if it was their pet. Then I heard people calling and found out the cat belonged to apartment directly above us and wanted to get back home but couldn't figure out the right floor.

But her timing was impeccible.

The Worth of a Writer



We writers can make this mistake - valuing our writing in how many pages we finish. Beat this...

"Barn burnt down, now I can see the moon."
- Masahide

Or this tiny story from a conversation with the Japanese lady who sat next to me at Lynn Harrell's concert on Saturday (he is a great cellist and my teacher's teacher)...

"My one daugher played the violin and the other played the cello, the best was my son on the violin. But my son became too busy for the violin when he went into medical engineering. He told me that he felt his identity was gone. He had time to build a Model T Ford from scratch, but the violin takes a different kind of effort."

Harrell talked about Shubert before his last encore that night...

"When he was one of the pallbearers at Beethoven's funeral, little did Shubert know that he would only have a year to reign over classical music. He died the next year at only 31. In that year, he wrote great music, but if he only wrote this one little piece, it would have been enough..."

Don't number words, my friend.

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.