Everyday Minefields

Last week I found out that a high level administrator from the school where my sisters and I were students from 1974 to 1990, pled guilty to multiple counts of “indecent liberties,” including “abduction with intent to defile,” fancy legalese for “he was a perv.” In fact, that’s exactly what we girls referred to him as—a perv. And being 12-13, I just assumed that schools had male administrators who occasionally copped a feel, who chaperoned every single student event including dances; who regularly stuck his head into the girls’ locker room to tell us to “keep it down” while we were changing into our field hockey uniforms. This man was a fixture at the school by the time I arrived in second grade. At a school with a strict uniform, he wore his own version: a Brooks Brothers button down with preppy chinos or cords, always in some outrageous combination of colors: one leg red, one green, one yellow, one blue. At our occasional and thrilling dances, he’d be standing near the sound system, flirting with the pretty ninth grade girls, sometimes dancing with them, occasionally slow dancing with them. He was a little scary as a disciplinarian. He was larger than life. Some kids adored him. He was a loving father and husband, from all accounts. Like all of us, he was and is good and bad. What he did cannot be undone. The hurt he caused lives on. And still, I feel very sad for him and for his wife and children. I'm not writing this to pass judgment. I'm writing this because I am curious about my own strange blindness to a crime that was going on all around me.

What surprised me was how thoroughly I’d know this and how I hadn’t bothered ever to tell anyone in authority. Why? Because his perviness was wallpaper in my life. I didn’t know any different. And what’s bothering me is, of course, what else do I know and yet not know? What else is wallpaper?

At that same school, in the 6th grade, I had a woman teacher whose husband worked for the entertainment industry. It was 1979, and he'd give his teacher wife posters of the current blockbuster movies: Jaws, Star Wars, Grease, which she'd hang up on the perimeter of the upper walls of the classroom. He also gave her posters of the day's pin up girls: Farrah Fawcett in her famous wet bathing suit, Cheryl Tiegs in a yellow bikini, Bo Derek who was lauded at the time a perfect "10." As a reward to the rambunctious eleven-year-old boys, she'd hand out these posters at the end of the day for good behavior.

There's so much wrong with this picture, I don't know where to begin. "What did she give the girls?" a friend recently asked when I relayed this story. "Nothing," I said. "We always behaved." So boys behave badly, and then they get a treat for containing themselves? Girls, whose bodies are just starting to change, are presented with models (literally) of women whose bodies have been deemed "10"s, while the boys drool over them, equally longing for something they can't really have. But what I really see when I squint back at this memory is loneliness. There was a whole culture at this school that encouraged competition and judgment (discernment). We were all trying like mad to fit in, to feel OK, to understand our changing bodies, to find a kindred spirit. The grown ups, as far as I can remember, seemed remote, or else they seemed to mock us in our confusion. How dare we be so nubile and confused? Like many in my generation, I took this in. Now, as an adult, I want to take it on. I want to take over. I want to take it back.

I started a conversation on Facebook about the Upper school administrator. I included everyone I could think of, though only the girls. At first, only the people I had been close to at the time joined in. But a few days later, one girl who’d been touched spoke up. Then another, and then another. Now there’s a healthy dialogue, with all sorts of memories pinging about. We’re talking about how and if to bring up with our own children the potential dangers that might lurk in their schools. We’re talking about the sexism rampant in our culture in the late 70s and early 80s, and all that remains today despite great gains by women and girls. It’s not over. There is so much wallpaper in my own sexism, I expect to be scraping it down for years.

I am thinking about a story my daughter told me last year about a teacher who unfairly disciplined her. At the time, I thought my daughter might have been stretching the truth. I am not going to assume that ever again. I want my daughter to know that I am militantly on her side no matter what. I want her to know that she can trust me with stories about adults acting strangely.

I took a break from my work this afternoon to visit the farm where we have a share. The city was going to spray it with Round-Up, a horrible pesticide with potentially lethal ramifications for mammals. But people had banded together to protest. The mayor listened. The organic farms won, and the fields remained organic. I was alone today in the field, to lean forward, choose a sunburst orange tomato, choose another, toss away the cracked ones fill my quart to the brim. I paused to stretch my back and looked up at the sky, something I try to do every day. It’s all we have, really—the sky, the relationships we make, the tomatoes we pick. We don’t know where danger lies until it’s here in our midst. That’s why it’s dangerous. And yet, I keep thinking, “God is in the repair.” I don’t want pesticides in my tomatoes, but neither did I want my friends molested by a trusted school administrator. We don’t always get to choose. But we do get to choose to pay attention, to love our friends enough to listen deeply to their stories, to repair the damage we have done.

Beautiful Falcon Ridge 2013

My music project went well through Falcon Ridge, which was its main purpose. I played some guitar every single day, even if it was only a scale, though more often it was an old song, a new song and a Beatles tune. Truthfully, I started with the "a's" and the first "a" for some reason was "A Day in the Life." That's maybe my favorite song, so I lingered on it, learning the bass part as well as reviewing the guitar. I picked up the violin, too, and even contemplated taking some lessons. I also contacted both a guitar teacher and a piano teacher to see if they had time for me. Unfortunately, they both did, which meant it was back on me to have to admit that I didn't really have the time. Every hour seems to be accounted for. Truly,every half hour is accounted for, if you include exhorting my son to stop eating live ants off the sidewalk as the "family time"I have highlighted in my schedule. Yes, a schedule. I have a schedule with the hours of the week graphed out and highlighted with four different colors, and there is no white. I am full to the brim with lovely activities involving beloved people. There is nothing I would want to give up. And still I want more. I want piano lessons and violin lessons and guitar lessons and bass lessons, and I want to write my novel, market How to Be an Adult (it's really truly almost ready, folks), record songs, perform all over the country, take a yoga class with my kids, learn French and raise chickens. I want more time to read great novels like the one I just finished (Colum McCann's newest, TransAtlantic which was so rich and tightly woven that it made me want to quit writing). I want time to learn how to use this app called Buffer that would allow me to post more efficiently. I want to actually read my Twitter feed so I know what the heck to do with Twitter. I want more evenings where the clouds turn dark pink and the air holds the still point. I want to just sit and watch my kids play. Not even to play with them--just to watch. But I don't want to give anything up to slow down enough to do these other things.

Amelia played with us at Falcon Ridge, and she also played with her band Belle Amie, a trio of girls in their early teens (actually, not even-two of them are twelve) who blew everyone at the festival away. With us, she picked up the bass for "Jack the Giant Killer," "Back at the Fruit Tree" and "This Town Is Wrong," then swapped with her dad for the electric guitar and rocked out on "Gotta Get Over Greta." My parents drove all the way up from Virginia to see her on Friday, then drove to Long Island for my cousin Luke's wedding, then drove back to Hillsdale to see us on the main stage Sunday afternoon. We played a number of workshops, including one dedicated to the late Eric Lowen who, along with his music partner Dan Navarro, was a lifelong singer songwriter, on the trail, on the circuit. We sang "We Belong," and cried our eyes out as others shared their tributes. We were recorded singing "Which Side Are You On" by a cameraman overlooking the festival from the hillside. Below, my kids, aged 7 and almost 5, discovered their independence, and armed with a walkie talkie and some change earned from busking with their violins, discovered the joys of "shopping" in the festival vendors. Their favorite was a booth where some craftsman or woman was making bows and arrows--the arrow heads being soft pompoms. The weather was fairly kind to us, especially considering past years, and it only rained a little, never soaking the ground and turning the campsites to a mud river.

We sang "Iowa" with Dar on Friday night.

We discovered CJ Chenier at the Dance tent and kicked up our heels.

My family camped while I escaped to various local hotels in search of hot water and clean sheets, but one night after tucking my kids in, I hurried back to the main stage to see my old friends Dave Matheson and Mike Ford from the late great Moxy Fruvous. As I made my way in the dark with iphone cum flashlight, I heard their clear sharp voices as tight as ever singing Johnny Saucepan." I found a seat by the edge of the stage and drunk in their show, hanging onto every word. If ever there was a band of which I was a total abject fan, it was this one. So sweet to see them still so smart and funny and musical and relevant.

Some days it seems ridiculous that Katryna and I are still at this. It's been 22 years. We're in our mid forties, and we have full and busy lives even without playing the circuit and making CDs and books. A few days before Falcon Ridge, Tom took the kids to Cape Cod for a midweek vacation, timing it well because he knew that his wife would be completely unavailable to him and his children in the days leading up. Their absence was stunning in its completion. I was able to finish two songbooks for CDs we released in 2008 and 2012 as well as make great progress on my novel, my ebook and some songs I was working on. Plus I cleaned the whole house. I am not even that engaged as a mom--I don't spend a lot of time playing with my kids or taking them on adventures. And still, the time I was afforded by them being gone seemed to stretch on and on. I couldn't believe how productive I was.

This is the theme of our latest CD The Full Catastrophe. "All of our cups are overflowing/Somebody still wants to pour."

That somebody would be me. I missed them terribly and ran down to the car at 11pm the Wednesday night when they returned, carrying my five year old up to bed, lying with my seven year old as she drowsily told me about the beach. My heart ached to have missed that beach trip, to have missed seeing my kids playing with their second cousins whom I have never even met. I think about Sheryl Sandburg exhorting us to lean in, and I think also of the generation of moms who gave up careers so they could go on beach trips mid-week, and I think of Dar and Eric Lowen and the Kennedys and Ellis Paul and Dave and Mike and the community of musicians of whom I'm a part, and some days I feel more like the gave-it-up moms, and some days I feel like Sheryl Sandburg. Either way, it's my life, and I love every minute of it, even the ones where I feel like I can't breathe from the busyness. One of the last workshops we did was all Beatles. We learned "Oh! Darling," via this cool duet by Ingrid Michaelson and Brandi Carlile, and jammed with the Kennedys on all manner of other tunes, including "A Day in the Life" (so my music project totally paid off.) As I sat there with my peers, I could hear the time going by; Eric Lowen and Dave Carter remind us that we never know how long we have to savor this delectable dish called life.

I came home and sent an email back to the piano teacher. I'll start lessons in September.

My Music Project

There is something queerly liberating about starting over.

Last week, I followed Elle around her Suzuki Institute, taking notes, practicing iPhone resistance, commiserating with other parents, and mostly being in awe. In awe of the kids, of the teachers, of the parents, of the beautiful commitment that turns ADD youngsters into prodigies. (Actually, they are not at all prodigies; they are simply kids who are fluent in two languages, or becoming so, anyway.)

But what I really thought about a lot was the benefit of structure. Artists, I have found, need more structure than most. Of course we do: we are grappling with the protean forms that come from the bottomless depths of our rivers. My work as a life coach is often about teaching artists how to structure their lives so that they can both create their work and pay their bills without too much angst.

As a child (who had, instead of a Suzuki parent, a tennis champion parent), I spent many hours per day lying in bed spaced out, sitting in a desk, spaced out, even playing tennis spaced out. I was a spacey kid. I was always in my head, dreaming dreaming dreaming dreaming. When I was 13 or so, I read a biography of John Lennon in which he copped to the same crime––only instead of being apologetic, he flaunted this state as the natural, nay necessary state of being an artist.

Still, if one is to be an artist, one has to have some exterior structure going on, or one’s dreams never get written down, or painted, or danced. The stuff needs to get out of our heads somehow. And once out, it needs a container. And it’s in the journey from head to world where art meets craft, and craft needs practice.

I learned practice not from taking piano lessons. I never practiced the piano. Well, maybe the day before the lesson I might go over what the teacher told me to do the week before, but other than that, nada. I learned how to practice from playing tennis. You show up, you get run around the court, you play other kids, you do this a lot and you get better. I got very good at tennis, but when I was 14 I gave it up for the guitar.

I didn’t practice my guitar so much either, at least not in that Deep Practice way Suzuki kids do, but I did play all the frigging time. I got a job as the music teacher for the local day camp and learned about a hundred songs and played from 8:30am till 3, and then went home and spent my evenings figuring out Suzanne Vega and Neil Young songs. And then eventually I was in the band and we played more nights than not. I put in my 10,000 hours that way. (Suzuki is famous for saying "ability is knowledge plus 10,000 times.")

So the Suzuki concept of “daily” is not new to me. I learned that if you want to make growth happen you had to show up every day. I became a writer by writing three pages every day. I became a runner by running a mile or 3 every day. I became a meditator by meditating every day (badly, but still, for 15 years and counting), and I became a musician by playing every day.

As I wrote before, I am in the middle of a Happiness Project (thank you, Gretchen Rubin), and this month’s focus is Music. What I meant by this, back in April when I set my goals for each month for the next year, was that I would focus on some specific music projects in preparation for Falcon Ridge; namely writing two new songbooks to go with our most recent CDs (Rock All Day/Rock All Night, 2008 and The Full Catastrophe, 2012). But after my week at Suzuki Camp I got a new idea.

What if I put as much time and effort into my own music practice as I do with my kids’?

At this camp, there is an elective called “Fiddling.” A fabulous teacher named Sarah Michel taught the kids Irish, Old Time and Bluegrass tunes. On day 2, I asked if I could bring my own violin and try to play along. I played violin for two years, ages 8-9, and probably only ever played the A string and E string, but I do retain that muscle memory. So I played a bunch of fiddle songs and noticed how much fun I was having. Playing music with others is a lot like playing tennis or hockey: you have to be in the moment, focused on your body and hand/eye co-ordination. It’s a game. A really fun game. Good to remember.

What if, I thought, I married my Happiness Project mojo with my (ongoing) Mindfulness Project mojo with my inner musician who is, right now, kind of lost and directionless? As I posted last week, I have no idea what I am going to write next. I need to get back to being that spacey kid again. But I also need a structure.

The piece that most appealed to me about Gretchen’s Happiness Project was the Ben Franklin Virtues Chart aspect. I loves me a chart. So I have made myself monthly charts where I get to check off boxes at the end of each day. I also give myself a mood score to see if there is a correlation between number of boxes checked off and how I am feeling. (There is.) Why not do a Music Project too?

In their Suzuki lessons, my kids have a weekly practice sheet, which is a grid. They get to put stickers in the boxes when they fulfill their little tasks. On the grid: Listening, Scale, Tone, Rhythm, Technique, Review, Working Piece, Polishing Piece, Something Special. Review is the heart of the practice: here is where the new technique really gets practiced. Obviously you can’t get better at your craft when you are trying to bend your brain around a brand new piece. You improve your craft—say you are trying to learn vibrato–– on some Twinkle variation.

Last night my family sat down to dinner and I felt my heart beating hard. I swallowed and then screwed up my courage.
“Guys, I have something to tell you.” They all looked up at me over their corn cobs. I cleared my throat.
"What is Mommy’s job?"
“Musician,” they grunted.
“Yup. And how do musicians get to be better musicians?”
“Practice.”
“Right! And how often do you ever see Mommy practice?”
They looked at each other.
“Never. Right?”
They nodded.
“So I am going to practice from now on, just like you do. And when I practice, I want you guys to let me practice.”
They rolled their eyes. But they didn’t say no.
So here is my music practice:
Every day:
-I play one scale.
-I do a five minute free write on a prompt.
-I play through one Nields song (I am going chronologically. Yesterday it was "Be Nice to Me." Today, "James.")
-I play through one Beatles song, strumming the chords and singing. The next day, I play the bass part. After that, I try to learn any extra parts that are within my musical reach (like the violin part on " Am the Walrus"––but not, perhaps, the violins on "Eleanor Rigby.")

That’s it. I get ½ hour a day. I am putting it first, before exercise, before tidying, before showering. That’s how I know I mean business. I will keep you posted on my progress.

Too Many Pots on the Stove

The last thing I should be doing right now is posting a blog. So maybe that's why I need to do it.

I am navigating the world of ebooks, to self-publish my 2008 title How to Be an Adult. The first time around, I had a deal with a local publisher to format the book. This time I am trying to figure all that out myself. Also, I am trying to write songs, and learn the 3 songs I've written so far this year, in time for Falcon Ridge. And I want to publish songbooks to go with our CDs Rock All Day/Rock All Night, and with our CD The Full Catastrophe. For the latter, I have a vision to put together a collection of essays on motherhood culled from this very blog. And I am deep in revisions of The Big Idea, my novel about a family rock band.

And even writing this, I am having trouble breathing.

I know I would be a lot more sane if I simply picked one project at a time to focus on and stopped trying to rotate the hot pans on the stove. But to let any of these projects go feels like death to me.

Add to all this a work schedule and a family schedule that's kept me extremely happy and occupied to the tune of not having a day off since Memorial Day. So on Saturday, Tom sent me to Williamstown, my ancestral home and the birthplace of my band (we got our start at the Williamstown Theatre Festival) for about 22 hours. What did I do? Sat in air conditioning and worked on all my projects. I sang through my new songs, recorded them on GarageBand for Katryna; worked on laying out How to Be an Adult and uploading it to CreateSpace; typed in a new first scene for The Big Idea; walked to the Co-op to eat dinner from their salad bar; and in the morning I went for a run to the graveyard where my grandfather and his family are buried.

Today I spent the day at Elle's Suzuki Institute, which meant I followed her around and took notes, avoided my iPhone, stretched my back a lot and listened to countless kids aged 5-14 playing a huge range of the Classical music canon. It's been beastly hot in New England––and everywhere I imagine––and no one is in an especially good mood. As I made a commitment this year to shake my bad moods, this didn't sit well with me. But the more I tried to "snap out of it," the more unpleasant I found the entire experience. And I kept asking myself, "Why am I not feeling the magic I always feel when I'm here?" Because for the past 3 years, Suzuki Camp has been one of my favorite places to be. I am usually a sucker for the whole package: the play-ins, the awesome teachers from New York, Maine and Boston, the lunches on the lawn, the antics during group class, the camaraderie of both kids and parents. But today, I was just bored and uncomfortable and sick of “Perpetual Motion.”

I'm sick of my own work too, at times. And sick of myself and my inability to pour my everything into just one project. I wish I had a boss, or a life coach, or a really tough friend, or my sister to tell me "Drop this and this and this and focus on that." I wish sometimes that someone would make me choose.

In the middle of the day, after lunch, the whole campus troops over to an old church where kids have their recitals. Over the course of a week, every kid in the camp gets a turn by him- or herself on stage to play a solo. Elle is playing something called “Gavotte from Mignon” by a composer named A. Thomas. It's cool–– and sounds the littlest bit like the theme from NPR. But today she wasn’t playing, so the two of us sat with another family, turned our programs into fans, and took turns fanning each other while we listened to the 13 or so kids get up and take their turn. Some were good, some were beginners, most had that stereotypical Suzuki Glaze in their faces that made me doubt the method way back when I thought I had a choice about my life. That was before Elle grabbed me by the hand at age 3 and dragged me to our current teacher, Emily Greene and insisted on studying the violin with her. And pretty much, until today, I haven't looked back or regretted any of it. Suzuki has given a lovely structure and flow to our lives, and I mark my days by the CD we put on for the kids to listen to in the morning, and the check boxes on their weekly assignment sheets as we go through our practice items together every day (Suzuki says, "We only practice on the days we eat.") As I listened to the kids play, I felt listless and hot and despairing. Completely uninspired. My new songs are ok, but they are all over the place. There is no core to them, nothing that links them together in any way. I can't see our next CD. I have no idea in what direction to write.

The last kid to play was a 12 or 13-year-old boy. He put a chair down on the stage and sat down with his cello. The director of the institute, who doubles as the piano accompanist, left her post; the boy began playing a movement from the sixth of Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello: the Allemande in D. He played with his eyes closed, as though he were as much a listener as a player. After a minute, I poked Elle who was busy fanning her neighbor. "Listen to this," I whispered, and she did, sitting up in her pew for the rest of the eight-minute piece. The room held the music tenderly: the bruised sentiment of a man who had recently lost his wife. I was absorbed into the music, forgetting about my own artistic woes, forgetting about my big problem about how to get out of my bad mood, forgetting the heat, forgetting the glazed faces. I rode the current of the music. And when the boy pulled that last lovely D out of his cello, I rose to my feet and applauded, tears spanking my eyes.

The rest of the day I was more present for what I love about Suzuki and this camp in particular. Elle took a fiddle class with a remarkable teacher named Sarah the Fiddler who explained to the kids that the great thing about fiddling is that when you make a mistake you get to incorporate it into your playing and figure out why it works: which is basically my modus operandi. Then there was orchestra, where the amazing Tyson somehow gets a group of kids who sound like they are each playing the “Star Spangled Banner” at a different speed to pay attention enough to him to get them, by the end of the week, to sound coherent. And he does this without ever yelling. I knew the day was a success when I told Elle it was time to go, and she narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "Is every single other kid at this whole camp going home too?" I said yes. And only then did she say, "Well, OK" and followed me out the door.

Maybe this is what being an artist in midlife is all about: moving the different pots around. Maybe it’s about doing the thing that calls you in the moment, even if different things yell at different frequencies. As I wrote a few months ago, it’s become clear to me that my mission is not, after all, to write some memorable songs that will outlive me and be sung by kids 100 years from now on the back of school busses, or whatever it is they might be driving. My mission is to have a good life and to spread around some of whatever it is I’ve been taught so that others get some of the goods as well and get a chance to live as well and joyfully as I have lived. Process over product has been my motto of late. So this evening I played with my kids. We got wet, and I picked a bouquet of flowers from my garden. And instead of working on either of my books or trying to write a new song, I wrote this post. Tomorrow I will pack our cooler and violin and music stand and we’ll go back for another day of Suzuki, and let my own projects simmer on the stove.

From How to Be an Adult: On Friendships Post-College

There’s a great Bob Dylan song called “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” It’s on his second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and it’s about that early group of friends so many of us had, in our late teens or early 20s.

. . . With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon,
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’till the early hours of the morn.

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words were told our songs were sung
Where we longed for nothin’ and were satisfied
Talking and a-jokin’ about the world outside . . .

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
That we could sit simply in that room again,
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

When I first heard this song, I was too young to have experienced this kind of deep, communal friendship, though eager to. In college I had just such a group of friends, and listened to this song as an ominous warning. We sang together in a folk band called Tangled Up in Blue (twenty singers and two acoustic guitar players: we were a sort of super-sized Peter, Paul & Mary who were unusually gifted at cracking codes). We met up at coffee shops and the campus vegetarian joint, plotted revolution, vowed to recycle and fight the bourgeois oppressors. We also vowed to keep in touch, and though we see each other at the occasional wedding, we have mostly scattered all over the world: as Bob said, “ . . . the thought never hit/ That the one road we traveled would ever shatter or split.” After I left college, this song reduced me to tears so regularly that I had to skip over it when I played the LP.

Dylan is tapping into what many of us experience when we move from our late teens to our early twenties. The adults over 25 whom I interviewed say they have stayed in touch with at most two or three friends from the first 20 years of life. What’s different about relationships in adulthood is that we are expected to maintain them for longer than a year or two. As children, it’s normal to have a different best friend every year. I maintain that as adults, it’s normal to have a rotating stable of friends too; friendships are often based on your environment, your workplace, your social activities, your common interests. As you grow and evolve and mature, these interests change. So do your friends. That doesn’t mean you don’t work to maintain those friendships that matter to you; but I have also seen many young people suffer from frustration because their college friends aren’t corresponding as consistently as they’d like. They feel let down. They feel they’re the ones who seem to be doing all the communicating. On the other hand, they might find their friend awfully clingy and needy and thus feel guilty if they spend too little time with her; resentful if they spend too much. Sometimes it takes years to figure out a good balance between good friends; to trust that the ebb and flow will just be a part of friendship, and to not freak out if months or even years go by with no communication. Look around and notice all the other friends you have made.

One of the most important things to me, especially in my post-college life, has been maintaining, strengthening, and just enjoying my friendships with the people I love, both near and far. I’m not always very good at it, but when I do make the effort, it almost invariably cheers me up. My friends know who I am (and, as the saying goes, like me anyway); in many cases, they’ve made me who I am. We’ve got history, a shared language of references, jokes, and memories. They are brilliant, funny, kind, and loving, and my time on this earth would be much poorer without them. So I try not to let them go easily. This means that I write to them, call them, send them emails with links to funny websites, but it also means that I don’t get upset when they don’t write back right away, or even for years. I don’t dismiss them or declare the friendship over. I know high tide is going to come again. ––Kate, age 26

The Day the Music Thrived and Why Music Education

It was one of the great pleasures of my life to see our dream of creating a pan-Northampton Public School concert/celebrations/fundraiser for YesNorthampton.org become a reality last Sunday. On June 9, musical and theatrical groups from Jackson Street, JFK and NHS along with my band, The Nields, came together at First Churches of Northampton to create a neat 90 minute (to the second!) show called The Day The Music Thrived. The amazing Expandable Brass Band did an incredible flash mob lead-up to the event, rocking the sidewalk outside the church with a “Vote Yes” song. Everyone volunteered their time and services. The event went so seamlessly because everyone gave 110%. It was Northampton at its best.


As a mother and musician, I am deeply disturbed by the proposed budget cuts, especially the ones that put the jobs of several music teachers on the chopping block. Before the concert, my outrage was purely theoretical. Though I’d witnessed my kids’ own wonderful music teacher Kim O’Connell in action, I had only heard about the legendary Claire-anne Williams, band and all-around music teacher for JFK, whose award winning Jazz band blew everyone away with a cover of “Birdland” on Sunday. I had only heard tell of the Northamptones, NHS’s signature a cappella group led by the fantastic Beau Flahive. I'd only assumed that the theatre program was fantastic. Now that I have seen these wonderful teachers in action, I feel more strongly than ever the particular potential loss rather than the theoretical. Time to remind ourselves why kids need music in the schools.

1. Music education correlates with better attention and self-control—great for kids with ADHD, Asperger’s, but also great for neurotypical kids–– to foster focus and attention, two attributes which are the bedrock for all other learning.
2. Learning music is akin to learning a language—kids who know music are essentially bilingual and can “converse” with people all over the globe.
3. It’s the one academic discipline that works both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain equally.
4. Playing an instrument increases fine motor skills.
5. Performing in front of others is a basic executive skill not generally taught.
6. Band and Chorus kids are less likely to do drugs, abuse alcohol, and become teen parents.
7. Kids who take music lessons have better spatial relations abilities
8. Kids who take music lessons have, on average, a 50 point higher SAT score.
9. Kids involved in music are less lonely. Middle school and high school years can be anxiety provoking to say the least. Putting socially anxious kids in a band or chorus where there are definite tasks, roles, goals, alleviates the anxiety and facilitates cohesion, camaraderie—all without drugs or alcohol or inappropriate sexual behavior.
10. It’s what they’ll remember, years from now, when they look back on their school experience.
So I’d ask this: rather than talking about cutting music teachers, why don’t we have more music teachers? My sister Katryna’s kids go to public school in Conway. They have music five days a week. Why shouldn’t we?
Vote YES on June 25 to preserve what we have. And then let’s roll up our sleeves to change what’s wrong systemically in Massachusetts and in the federal government; let’s rethink our whole attitude towards the arts. Let’s give our kids what they need to be the responsible, creative thinkers the 21st Century needs.



And finally--NPR covered our event! Listen: http://www.nepr.net/sites/default/files/arts-funding-noho-spot.WAV

Wild Mountain Thyme

Now that summer really is coming, here's how to play the guitar part for Wild Mountain Thyme.

Theory of Happiness #1

"Play till you feel like resting, then rest till you feel like playing. Never do anything else."-Martha Beck

I started to feel that tell-tale tickle in the back of my throat last Saturday afternoon, en route to the beach. By evening it was a full-blown sore throat; by Monday, I was intimate with the netti pot; Tuesday a cough, and today laryngitis and the beginnings of bronchitis. Up until recently, I told a certain story that went like this: I'd get every cold that came down the pike and into my house on the fingertips and lips of my two young children. I'd spend the duration (usually 2 weeks) berating myself and my immune system. The latter for being so wimpy, and the former for the usual crime: DOING TOO MUCH. (I once had a life coach who, when I complained to her about my chronic state of DOING TOO MUCH and my inability to change anything so that I could do less and be sane, suggested that I did just the right amount, and that I needed to change my attitude about what was too much. I promptly fired her.)

But I have retired from the career of beating myself up. I'm 46 now, and in some eras and cultures, that ripe age was considered elderly. Well, I won't stoop to elder abuse. Besides it's not really verifiably true that A. my usual velocity leads to B. getting run down/susceptible to viruses. Here's a kinder story: my parents both get sick with colds with great frequency, yet they are healthy, vital 70-year-olds who live life at full throttle and pack more into one day than most people pack into a year. (Well, a week.) My four aunts are the same way. Maybe it's just what happens in our particular gene pool. And really, if I can surrender to the reality of a cold and take appropriate action, it's not so bad: I cancel any activity I can cancel, and take to my bed. What's so terrible about that?

Martha Beck, whom I love, and who trained me to be a life coach, says, "Play till you feel like resting, then rest till you feel like playing. Never do anything else." It's such simple, brilliant advice. It should be noted that she uses the word "play" as someone else might use "work"––but only if one's work is the work one choses to do, the kind of work that makes one jump out of bed in the morning just because one can't wait to get to it. I am fortunate to have such work. I am always eager to get to it, even when I am sick.

It occurs to me that rather than get all mad at myself for "letting myself get sick" through my misbehaving ways of overdoing, of over working/overplaying, I should just relax and seize these little viral tornados as opportunities for rest. And that just as "play" and "rest" in her equation are clearly equal partners, so "well" and "sick" could be in my own personal lexicon. Nerissa gets sick sometimes and has to go low. Big deal. I think I am ready to let the shame that seems to go with the illness go. The shame, when I shine the light on it, seems to be a kind of Icarus shame: I was sailing too high, and the sun melted my feathers. How dare I?

So when the tickle arrived last Saturday, I just laughed, checked my watch and nodded. Yup. About due for a rest. Bring it on.

Rehearsing for The Day the Music Thrived

Beautiful banner created by Alison Wood.

Tonight we met in Conway to rehearse for Sunday's concert. Here is a portion of a video of us practicing "Georgia O."


Once again, details of the show:
Sunday June 9
First Churches of Northampton
corner of Main and Center Streets
3-4:30pm

The Day the Music Thrived

Nerissa, Emma and Sophie on Bill Newman's radio show WHMP to promote The Day the Music Thrived

This concert is happening.

THE DAY THE MUSIC THRIVED

TO SHOWCASE ART, MUSIC, THEATER & SONG TALENTS FROM NORTHAMPTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS

SUNDAY, JUNE 9 ~ 3:00-4:30 PM ~ FIRST CHURCHES, NORTHAMPTON


On March 20, nearly 200 Northampton High School students left classes and marched to downtown Northampton to protest proposed budget cuts to arts and elective courses set to take effect in September. The energy was positive, the message was clear: arts are a vital part of the Northampton public school education and cuts to the programs will negatively impact many students.

On Sunday, June 9, students from Northampton’s public elementary, middle and high schools, alongside NPS staff and faculty and parent performers, will “Sing Out!” to showcase the wealth of music, art, and theater talents at the schools, at “The Day The Music Thrived” concert and celebration. This all-ages, family friendly event at The First Churches on Main Street, from 3:00-4:30 pm, will feature performances by The Nields full band, the JFK Jazz Band, The Northamptones, NHS cast of “Alice In Wonderland,” Jackson Street Staff Ukulele Band, and an Kids & Parents all-sing of “If You Want to Sing.” Families are welcome to come early at 1:45 for the Warm-Up Jam with the Expandable Brass Band, just bring an instrument and join the fun. The event will also remind people to vote Yes on the Override, to reverse the cuts that would affect arts and other staffing and services across the Northampton Public Schools. Suggested family donation is $10-$20 at the door. For more information, visit www.YesNorthampton.org.

Event listing:

THE DAY THE MUSIC THRIVED
A celebration of art, music, theater and song in the Northampton Public Schools.
Vote YES ON THE OVERRIDE to preserve it all!
Sunday, June 9
3 – 4:30 pm
The First Churches (129 Main St., Northampton, MA)
Performances by:
The Nields – full band!
JFK Jazz Band
The Northamptones
NHS cast of “Alice In Wonderland”
Jackson Street Staff Ukulele Band
Kids & Parents all-sing “If You Want to Sing”
and more!
1:45 Warm up family jam with The Expandable Brass Band – bring your instrument!
All Ages ~ Families Welcome
$10-$20 suggested donation
Proceeds to benefit Yes! Northampton’s campaign in support of the June 25 Override. A yes vote on the Override ballot will keep art, music, theater, song, and so much more strong in the Northampton Public Schools, and will preserve city services across Northampton.
www.yesnorthampton.org

Uncle Henry

On June 1st I got this crazy Idea that I should blog every day for the month. Why? Because it's the second month of my Happiness Project, and my theme is Lean In. Because I'm going to re-release How to Be an Adult as an ebook later this month. And because the last time I blogged daily (March 2009) I felt alive and connected to both my writing and my audience in a way that made me feel vital.

Why not? Because now it's June 3 and I'm only now getting to the task at hand. It's June, which I now know is tantamount to December for public school families, who don't get out of school till the end of the month (if they're lucky.) I am tired of apologizing for how busy I am. I don't want to be compulsive about good things anymore. My birthday gift to myself is to accept myself with a generous dash of humor. It's much sexier to say "I will blog every day" than to say "I will try to blog a lot." But I just turned 46, and sustainability is the new sexy.

As usual, the rules for this kind of endeavor are: process over product, progress over perfection.

As I turn 46, I am at a beach in Gloucester, MA, watching my children wade into frigid water on a sultry day--a surprise late-spring heat wave that is all too common these days. I am a beach curmudgeon, and this outing is a complete surprise to me too.

About my birthday. I have to treat myself like a princess on my birthday, for better or for worse. I try to construct the perfect day for myself: I feed myself raspberries for breakfast, I get a facial or massage, I go to my favorite restaurant for dinner; I throw a party––all this to avoid the inevitable birthday blues. But this year I got asked to sing at a friend's wedding in Boston. No problem, I thought. I'd have the party June 1. But when I broached the subject with Tom, he said, "No way are we throwing a party Saturday night and then skipping town Sunday morning. I hate leaving the house a mess to clean up later." So I sulked and pouted, then I did my Daily Mental Hygiene (DMH) and my turnarounds and came to the conclusion that he was right, and that, as usual, I can't really know what's best for me. Especially if given a choice to do more rather than less. Besides, when I let go of my great ideas about what should happen and let God/The Universe/Serendipity take over, cool things happen, as in: I end up happy at the beach. Here's how we got here:

Tuesday morning Jay asked, apropos of nothing, "Mama, where's Uncle Henry?"
Uncle Henry is my great-uncle, the last of the generation. We last saw him at Thanksgiving, 2010. So I said, "How do you know about Uncle Henry? You haven't seen him since you were two."
"You talk about him. Well, where is he?"
"Concord."
"Is he dead?"
"No!"
"How old is he?"
"I think he's 88," I said, doing the math. He was ten years younger than my grandfather.
"Wow! That's old. We should visit him."

Thursday I called my parents to find out that they'd be coming up this Saturday for Uncle Henry's funeral. He'd died Tuesday morning, they told me.

So we had a party Friday night, left a mess to clean up later, jumped in the car, met my family at the church and bid goodbye to my wonderful Uncle Henry, a cello-playing, music-loving lawyer, US Naval officer in WWII, father of Henner and Nancy, grandfather of Peter and David. During the service, Henner played a recording of one of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites: #6––Prelude. We all sat and listened, wordless, tearful. Later, at the committal, we watched as a young female navy cadet played taps. She and another female cadet respectfully folded the flag that blanketed his coffin and gave it to Nancy. I was struck by the power of the visual, the silence, the deep respect.

We hung out with my amazing family, each one of whom I wanted to talk with for hours. What a perfect birthday gift to be able to see them for this mini-reunion at the last minute.

And then we went to the beach. My curmudgeonliness melted in the sun. I even ventured into the early June waters. I lay on my back in my little beach lean-to and read. We made new friends at the Blue Shutters Inn, a gem of a place where I felt the desire to host a writing retreat.

The next morning I learned "The Wedding Song" by Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul & Mary, and at 12:30 I sang it for my friends as they lit the unity candle at their wedding. We came home Sunday evening, exhausted, to a messy house. But today it's clean.

Uncle Henry was quiet, focused, kind, with a smile that lit up a room. On our way home from the beach, we listened to the cello suite again, and I tried to think what he would think. How did my son know he'd died? Did he visit us, as the dead sometimes do as they are leaving the earth? Why us? Why not us?

Reach, Grasp, Happiness Project and My Labyrinth

I want to build a labyrinth.

This is possibly the weirdest result of reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, a book which (in case you’ve been living on Mars for the past four years) champions happiness as a goal and exhorts its readers to make their own Happiness Projects by thinking about their lives in terms of what feels good, what feels bad and what feels right.

Like the author, who was a classmate of mine, I don’t want to change much about my life. I’m pretty happy. I don’t want to move to a new city, I don’t want to switch careers, I love my husband and children. I just want to be more present to it all, to appreciate my life more fully, to be honest about who I really am and what I really like. One of Ms. Rubin’s Personal Commandments is to “Be Gretchen,” and she argues that the road to happiness is in finding what’s truly happy-making for yourself, and not worry whether or not it might impress others. Though I'd like to think of myself as "Easy People," the truth is I'm a major striver. I know for myself that what makes me happy is to feel that I am reaching a little beyond my grasp, and maybe possibly getting close.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?-Robert Browning

And so I particularly love Gretchen’s nod to Ben Franklin, he of the famous Virtue Charts. Setting about to perfect himself, he drew these up and gave himself check marks at the end of every day. He never achieved perfection, but he said by reaching, he became a better and happier man from the attempt.

My problem is, my reach exceeds my grasp in every aspect of my life, and instead of smiling and enjoying the Grasp, I frown and squint and focus on what’s just out of reach. Here’s what’s just out of reach:
My idea of where I should be in my career.
My idea of what my waistline should look like (“A waist is a terrible thing to mind.”)
My idea of how uncluttered my house should be
My idea of how all my friendships should be (much more correspondence, much more time for hanging out)
My idea of how happy I should be making everyone
My idea of how big my royalty check should be
My idea of how often I should be blogging
My idea of how beautiful and well-kept my gardens should be
My idea of how rigorous my yoga practice should be
And on and on and on.

But back to the labyrinth.

We have a generous lot for our small city—a little over half an acre. There’s a corner in the back that our catty-corner neighbor wants to buy, and in truth, we ought to sell it to him. We’ve let it go to brambles, whereas he would adopt it gratefully into his yard, a yard that seems to have a bite taken out of it—that bite being our unruly corner. But we said no because...our reach exceeds our grasp. And we can’t stand the idea of letting part of our plot go. (This attitude contributes to the stacks on stacks of unread books in our attic, the piles of paper, the storage boxes of unused clothes, the crates of LPs in our attic, basement and barn. But that’s for another post.)

Anyway, this corner of our lot, brambly though it is, has a certain charm. It’s wedged at the nexus of our two neighbors’ properties (perfect for spying), it’s a bit sunny, and there are two gorgeous cherry trees breaking into the clouds. Last year, we had some tree work done, and the fellers left the remains of the trees as neatly stacked logs, stumps cut down to stool size, and a giant pile of wood chips. I saw these raw materials and got an idea. I’d build a labyrinth with them. My writers could come to this back corner, walk the labyrinth with their muses, and end up in an Adirondack chair under one of the cherry trees where they could sit and write.

Then I realized how much hauling of wood was involved and I decided to farm out the project. I priced it with a couple of landscapers. One suggested pea gravel. One suggested a backhoe. One suggested I plant wild mountain thyme, which of course I thought was a great idea, until she priced it. Plus there’d be weeding. It was all too much. I turned my back on that untamed corner of the lot and went inside to do my inside things: write songs, play guitar, write my books and blog posts, tend to my family.

I’m working, as you know, on doing less, on striving to be that Easy Person (or Easier, anyway). It’s killing me, but I really am doing less. To wit: Jay and I rode bikes to Elle’s pick up, and instead of spending the rest of the afternoon at the Y, we hung out at the playground where I made a new friend. Then we bike-ambled home through the park, doing an extra loop or two, breathing in the flowering trees. Ah, but a woman should bike with her kids and smell the flowers, or what’s a May for? We got home, and for once I didn’t have everything written out in a little chart to follow. So I took my bike back to the barn and ventured around the corner to appraise the dreaded brambles. I noticed a stack of old pallets that had once served as a makeshift wall for our gigantic compost heap. I was seized with a desire to build, the way my kids descend on a pile of Legos. I dragged them one at a time over to the brambles and lay them down, making a rough bridge. But there were rusty nails in the crates, and so I pulled them up, using them as a fence to give the area some definition. I propped them up with the logs and the tree stumps.


Then I attacked the woodchips with a kid-sized snow shovel. Shovelful by shovelful, I shook them out, lining the path with a seemingly never-ending supply of bricks I found scattered around the property, and the limbs of the felled trees. I varied the path with some leftover slate from our new mudroom floor, and some leftover tiles from our kitchen walls, and soon there was a walkway around the Adirondack chair, a rough circular pattern, hardly a labyrinth at all; more like a moat around the island of chair.


“Process not product” is my motto of late, and the labyrinth is hardly a thing of beauty (not to mention, as I did mention, not a labyrinth). What interested me was the feeling in me the hauling aroused. I felt like a kid, breathlessly pacing our property for bricks and sticks and logs and stumps, for rocks and slate and woodchips. I felt overtaken with a frenzy of creation, the desire—who knew it could be so strong?—of making order out of chaos. And when I took a break to sit in that chair in the center and admire my handiwork, I felt like Alexander the Great surveying my vast empire. And just for a second or two, I was there in full appreciation of my grasp.
This is the sweet spot, isn’t it? This is why I run writing workshops where writers work on first draft material. I am obsessed with that creative spark, as I am obsessed with the raw materials that go into those first drafts. The irony is not lost on me that my great creation (labyrinth) would not have been possible had we not been such pathetic cluttery slobs who had left all sorts of debris around the property. In a way, my fervor contributed to a great clutter clearing: there is nary an extra brick or stone anywhere save in the northeast corner of our lot now. But had there been no mess, there would be no work of art. As artists, of course, we need both the mess AND the inclination to order it.

Light in the Darkness

Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.
- Victor Lebow, 1955

Today is Earth Day, and when I woke up this morning, my back spoke to me. "Nerissa," it intoned." Get thee to a yoga class. You cannot spend another day hunched over your MacBook. I refuse." So my poor, chronically rounded and abused back and I went to Yoga Sanctuary where my favorite yoga teacher in the world, Sara Rose, was teaching us balancing poses so that we could better deal with all the crap life throws at us in mid April. On the way up the stairs, I noticed a flyer that said Annie Leonard was speaking at UMass tonight. I'd loved her video Story of Stuff (which my friend Sarah Getz sent me back in 2007) so much, I'd referenced it and her in my first edition of How to Be an Adult. Maybe Elle and Jay would be old enough now to get something out of it.

In class, Sara said, "Aren't you glad you have a yoga practice? When the world goes crazy, you have something to come back to, to lean into, to sustain you."

I immediately thought, yes, and that is why I am a musician. Music does that for me. It's the ground of my being. It's what I come back to over and over again.

I am seeing another kind of light at the end of the tunnel. For the past year and a half, I have been working on a second edition to my 2008 book How to Be an Adult, which came out on Mercy House Books and Collective Copies (our local, independent print shop-turned-book-publisher.) Almost right way I'd wanted to make the book an ebook to cut costs to consumers. But I got sidetracked by having a second child and that music career thing. Some other stuff happened (another book, another couple of CDs and a DVD, kindergarten, Suzuki violin) and so it's taken me till now to finish my last edits. On Wednesday the book went to my editor, who says she can have it back to me by mid-May. I am hoping for an early June release. There will be an ebook version and also a new hard copy (paperback) version. I also plan to post excerpts weekly right here, so stay tuned.

It's been hard to be quiet, to be away from this blog while I hustled to get my book done. So much has happened this spring, this week, this month. It feels wrong not to write about Boston, about the bruises we all feel. As with Sandy Hook, the bombing felt too close, almost, to even talk about. It shakes us, leaves us unmoored to see how very close the gap is between self and other, when something like this happens so close to home. Some of can and do, like the wonderful Anne Lamott); some of us would rather deflect our grief elsewhere. I've felt myself welling up over my kids' rapid growth spurts, probably to not have to think about the sweet 8-year-old whose front teeth were just growing in, whose face smiled out at me in digital images wherever I turned last week. Every April, I gird myself mid-month for something like this to happen (why? I wrote about that here in 2011.) Life is expensive, and April is all about the big gamble that is birth. Birth comes at a cost. Life is risky. Easter and Passover both remind us of this paradox, as does Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring."

One of the sobering things about revising my book is to see how far I've strayed from those ideals of my early 20s which somehow lasted through my early forties. Maybe it was because I was in a rock band, and then a touring folkie, and a denizen of Northampton and a latecomer to motherhood, but I hung on to my vision of being a downwardly mobile artist who lived outside the system for a good long time. Re-reading my own book has made me wistful for that lifestyle where I could spend 80% of my income on Whole Foods and not worry about saving for my kids' college education, let alone buying them a new plastic gizmo every time they filled a marble jar for good behavior. As I look around my crowded and cluttered house, full of no=longer-used toys, I wonder, how did I get here? As I set up my laptop on the dining room table so the whole family could gather round to see Annie's Story of Stuff, I was horrified by how many of her wonderful examples applied to me, how fully I have become the consumer at the center of her linear march of doom. She parses the journey from Extraction to Production to Distribution to Consumption to Disposal. There's a Golden Arrow between the train cars of Distribution and Consumption, (which is the nexus Victor Lebow talks about in the quotation above.) That Golden Arrow is increasingly where I find myself these days. I buy a new iPhone every time my contract is up. I have twenty-five shoulder bags up in the attic. Every couple of years I “need” a new bag. Most ironically, I lust for a new Prius. My eyes follow my neighbors' curvy little cars all over town. My kids, whom I've roped into my campaign, can spot them by ear, now and squeal every time they see OR hear one. I say it's because of the gas mileage, and I reason that to get one would be good for the environment. But the truth is, even though Tom's truck gets about 8 miles to the gallon, he bikes to work every day and drives the truck at most couple times a week, and just for short distances. Which would use more resources? To keep on as we are, or to buy a whole new vehicle?

The day after the bombing, we had been scheduled to go to Cambridge with our kids. We were going to ride the T and see the ducks and the swan boat in the public garden. Instead, we went to the dinosaur museum in Amherst and rode our bikes on the bike path and had our cousins over for a campfire complete with marshmallows and singing and the spring's first case of poison ivy. As the moon rose and the sun set, I pulled out my guitar and we all sang "Hey Jude," the older kids huddled together in my soft guitar case, and four-year-old Jay playing along on his collection of tambourines and wooden blocks. We sang a few songs, but the kids wanted "Hey Jude" again. Paul McCartney's song of comfort to his young friend Julian Lennon on the occasion of his parents' divorcing reached easily through the decades and comforted us, as we channeled it through guitar and voices (and tambourines. And really loud screeches).

Our happiness as a nation has diminished since 1955, says Annie somewhere in the middle of the Story of Stuff, because even though we now have way more stuff than we used to have, we don't have the time to use it. We don't sit around and talk to our neighbors, laugh around the kitchen table, jam around the campfire. But last Tuesday, we did. The smoke rose and so did our voices, filling the space between birth and death, between you and me, between known and unknown. In the face of Boston, in the aftermath of Earth Day and my own and our collective shame at the state of the world, it can be hard to keep on hoping for a better world. In my own little microcosm, it can be hard to believe that my poor old body can ever get straightened out again; it's been hunched over keyboards, guitars and babies for way too long. But what is the alternative? William Sloane Coffin says hope is "a matter of the soul, not about the circumstances of one's life." It's all about that light in the darkness. The darkness is so much more vast than that wee little light. But all one needs to see a little is a wee little light. So I will go back to my yoga, my boring daily stretches. I will go back to circling the house before bed to make sure all electrical appliances are unplugged and taking their own rest. I will restrain my consumer impulses. And I won't forget to pick up my guitar when I start to lose hope. Better yet, I'll find some under-20s and sing with them.

What Do You Remember About Music?

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of holding a baby just 10 days old. It was mid afternoon, and I was guessing her poor mama hadn't really slept since the birth. Elle and I took turns cuddling the baby, while my friend crept upstairs for a much needed nap. After a few minutes, the baby began fussing. I picked her up, walked around the room, sang our version of "Hush Little Baby." Still gritchy. I switched to "All the Pretty Horsies" and did a gentle canter-y gait. More fussing. Then I started in on Ledbelly's "Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie." The baby pulled her head off my shoulder (strong baby!) and stared at me as if in disbelief. She stopped crying and listened as I sang. When her mother came downstairs fifteen minutes later, I told her what had happened.

"No wonder," said her mother. "We played that song and sang that song many times while she was in the womb, and since birth."

I'd certainly heard of this happening--baby recognizing pre-womb music post-womb--and in fact, we wrote about this phenomenon in our book All Together Singing in the Kitchen: Creative Ways to Make and Listen to Music as a Family. But I'd never witnessed it so directly. (Well, maybe I did. Maybe it happened with my own kids, but I was so sleep deprived then, I have no recollection.)

Today in Jay's Suzuki class the teacher had the four-year-old pre-twinklers form a circle. She played "pass the Twinkle," playing the first line of "Mississippi Stop Stop" to the child on her left, who in turn, wordlessly passed it on to the child on his left, and so on, around the circle. "Isn't it amazing," she said. "How you all knew what to do, and could do it without even saying any words. Music is a language we can all understand."

Plans for SOS-SOA are looking up. Emails are circulating. I am making phone calls, juggling schedules, refining our focus. Meanwhile, doing a lot of thinking about the role of music in our children's lives. Why fight to keep music in the schools?
-it's a language we all share.
-it cuts through reason and goes right to the heart.
-when I look back on my own school memories, so many of them have to do with music class, performing, practicing an instrument. Maybe that's just because I am a musician, but I can't imagine growing up without all the music I had.
-it unites a group of disperate kids
-it's the only academic discipline that is equally left-brained and right-brained

What about you? What do you remember about music education growing up?

For more about music education, visit the National Association for Music Education.

SOS-SOA-Save Our Schools-Save Our Arts

photo c/o Sarah Buttenweiser. Read her always wonderful, insightful and inspiring blog, "Standing in the Shadows."

Time for Spring, time for budget cuts. Time for Big Ideas.

As I posted earlier, we're facing a huge budget deficit in the school system here in Northampton (endemic in Massachusetts because of a combination of Prop 2 1/2 and some crazy formula they made 30 years ago). The proposed cuts are heartbreaking: $1.2 million all together, including bussing, many classroom teachers including our dear almost-family member Ms. Mc, many teachers in the high school and middle school, and of course, arts and music teachers at the middle school and high school. Katryna and I want to fight it. Of all the issues near and dear to our hearts, this is number one. We are who we are as artists, musicians and people because of the music teachers we had in our own school systems.

Tuesday I attended a meeting at the middle school (JFK in Florence). They were expecting 30 people on a snowy night after a snow day. Instead they got over 175. Peter Kocut, our state rep, laid out clearly for all of us the need to increase our state taxes. (No hard sell with me. I think it's ridiculous how little we pay and how much we get, but that's another story. And I do know that not everyone can afford higher taxes. But a lot of people can, and I am all for a progressive tax code. If everyone in Northampton paid $320, we'd cover the budget deficit.)

Peter Kocut spoke at great length about how we got here, why we have the deficit, how he is working hard to get legislative change, but it'll be two years if he's successful before we have the money to restore the cuts. And if we don't take action now, there will be more cuts.

Since 2000 we've had to cut and cut and cut. There is not too much more to cut.

A 13-year-old girl stood up and said, "I hear what you're saying. But the thing is, I want to know how to save our band teacher's job. She's the best teacher we've ever had. And I want my little brother to get to have her when he's at JFK middle school. What can we do? How can we help?"

Right. Blah blah blah. How do we get our teachers to stay?

If anyone with a heart could see these kids imploring us adults to let them keep their band teacher, they'd find it impossible to refuse them. I'd personally give all my savings to keep our teachers at Jackson Street whose jobs are on the cutting board. But it doesn't work that way. If we do private fund raising, the taxpayers will think the problem is solved. And I don't believe our public schools should be funded by private fundraising. What about schools in poorer communities that can't fundraise as effectively?

It was strongly suggested at the meeting that an override would be necessary again.
A JFK teacher stood up. "In 2009 we were in a similar place. And we were in a recession. Everyone said the override couldn't pass. We got 60% of the vote, and we saved our teachers from being cut. We can do it again."

"And your job," said our city councilwoman Pamela Schwartz to the 13-year-olds. "Is to spread the word. Tell your neighbors. Tell all the adults you see. Get out there and lobby!"

Who could I lobby? I thought as I sat there feeling helpless. Who cares the most about arts and music in the schools? Besides the students? HooteNanny moms and dads and grandparents! I whispered as much to my friend Liz. "We should do a benefit to raise awareness." She pointed over to the middle schoolers. "Well, be sure to include those kids!"

So as soon as the meeting was adjourned, I made my way over to the group of middle schoolers. I explained who I was and how I had access to about 300 local moms and dads. "Let's put on a show!" I said (basically). My friend Lucien, a high school freshman at NHS overheard. "I can get a group from the high school," he offered. Our longtime publicist, Michaela O'Brien is a parent of two boys in the school system. She immediately offered to help, too.

So here's the vision: Katryna and I do a benefit--proceeds go towards helping publicize the override. Also onstage with us are the JFK Jazz Band and groups TBD from Northampton High School. I'd also love to have the Jackson Street Faculty Ukulele group and maybe one other performance by JSS or another school. All the schools. Let's celebrate our young musicians in this town that's so well-known for music and arts.
We need:
-a location (NHS? First Churches? Helen Hills Hills? Center for the Arts?)
-a date (late April, early May--we're having a hard time finding a date due to so many moving pieces)
-a sound system and someone to run it
-some volunteers to collect money, help set up and clean up
-the teachers of the school groups on board
-to reach out to the Gazette, RSI, FCR, other media

Will you help us? Do you want to join a discussion to make SOS-SOA happen? Please email me at Nerissand@gmail.com or respond to this blog with your contact information.

Speak Up for the Arts and Music in our Schools, part 1

[From the Jackson Street School Music Assembly 2012]
A friend just sent me a copy of the proposed budget cuts for the Northampton school districts. I went through them all, and I am heartbroken. I feel so strongly that we need to speak up and raise awareness about these cuts. If our wonderful schools lose all these teachers and programs and services, they will not be as strong. I think we should talk about how weakening our schools affects real estate, an issue that even folks who are out of the school-age era care about. If our schools cease to be a draw, the values of our homes will fall. Educating our young people is a direct investment in the future of Northampton. Of course, as a parent, I feel there's no better use for our tax dollars. I am sure many feel the same, whether or not they have children in the public school system. But we have to talk to our friends and neighbors about this. I am hoping for another override.

I had the pleasure of attending Jackson Street School's annual music assembly. I was moved to tears by the efforts of the music teacher, the passion of the teachers who supported their students and the whole event, the strength of the principal, Gwen Agna and the gorgeousness of the student body who sang a song written for the United Nations called "United," bespeaking a multinational, multiethnic world. The kids sang music from Ireland, India, Mexico and Ghana. At times, they were accompanied by a faculty ukulele band. Music is such a powerful force that unites a community like no other, and it breaks my heart to see potential cuts in music, arts and drama (to name a tiny few of these cuts) on the table at the Middle School and High School level.

Please, if there is anything you can do to raise awareness about these cuts, speak up. This is our community; these are our kids. They will grow up, go out in the world and eventually run it themselves. We all want maximum love and nurturing for them during these crucial years. May they not be shoved into overcrowded classrooms. May we not take away their arts and music and theatre and PE. My hope is our town is better than that.

To see the proposed cuts, go here.

Apple Products Anonymous

I've figured out one sure sweet pleasure. On occasional Mondays, I unplug my new Hofner bass, pack it up and drive into town with my Beatles scores and head down to a basement cubicle at Downtown Sounds, our town's remarkable little music store. Here I find my teacher, Doug, a 60 something lap steel genius. The two of us choose a Beatles song; he plays guitar and I, with my now mandatory reading glasses, stick my face deep into the Beatles tome and pick out the tablature for the bass line. We started with "Help!" and stalled at "With a Little Help from my Friends"--too hard. We backtracked to "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which has a juicy little chromatic bass riff (after "I think you'll understand...nier nier nier nier neet..."), "Hey Bulldog," "Lady Madonna," "Eight Days a Week." And today I learned that totally wild "Come Together" part, complete with bass slide at the 12th fret. I figured I was ready to try again on "With a Little Help." I stuck my nose back in the book, but quickly found I didn't need to. I found the melodic line sitting neatly in my memory, and I was, with all those other songs behind me, able to find the notes myself on the bass. Progress!

It's March 4 today--my mother-in-law would have had her 83rd birthday. She's been gone now almost 3 years, and today is one of those heavy days where my internal organs all feel constricted and hard as iron. The wind blew with surprising ferocity as I left Downtown Sounds, and the elation from the bass playing blew away down the street. Perhaps to counter this, I bought a new iPhone 5 and gave my 4 to Tom, which necessitated a lot of stupid wasted minutes reprogramming, trying to remember passwords, and surrendering to our daughter who begged to play on the AT&T store's iPad.

I've been in a funk about technology, noticing how addicted we all are to our various devices. I want to throw them all away, even my brand new iPhone, which already strikes me as a disappointment, and go back to communicating through smoke signals and tin cans with string.

It's probably good that I am already done with my new iPhone. As addictions go, this one must be pretty weak if it's already lost all its pull. But still, I need it, just as I need the morning's coffee or risk a killer headache. Gone is that sharp awake feeling I had when I was a caffeine virgin. Now I just drink to maintain the dull high. The tremendous thrill from opening that crisp rectangular box and tremblingly raising the tiny piece of technological perfection to my eyes was obscured by the annoying reality of having to buy all new cables for the damn thing. But then I thought, "Ooooo! A trip to the Apple Store! Maybe I should get the new iPad mini!"

Tom says I need to join APA: Apple Products Anonymous.

February Album Writing Month was a half success. Meaning for the first half of the month I worked on my songwriting, and for the second half I completely abandoned it. I did accumulate what Katryna has termed song "starts"--the way one "starts" plants in March--tiny green dots in a black soil landscape nestled in trays on your window seat. That's what I have, and I don't even have the requisite 14. But mid-month I was seized with a desire to bring to completion a project I've wanted to do since 2010: a revision/new edition and ebook version of How to Be an Adult (2008, Mercy House). I went to Kripalu for President's weekend and spent an entire 48 hours with my face bent over my computer and print-outs. So much for a relaxing yoga retreat. But work--when it's cranking, when I'm really writing, when it's all flow--is actually relaxing for me in the same way that playing Paul McCartney bass lines is relaxing for me (or so I believe, anyway). I left Kripalu invigorated, and moved immediately into a solo parent stint with both kids (and Katryna and her kids) in Florida. This I had no illusions about: I knew a trip to Florida without my husband would be more like boot camp than a proverbial day at the beach, and as I've shared here before, I am not really much of a beach gal. I don't like to swim, am cold unless the water is warmer than my body temp, and I don't know how to just sit back and chill. Like many of my artist friends, I don't really know how to play. I can be playful; I can laugh; I can make others laugh. But sometimes I have to work at it. Forgetting how to play is not conducive to songwriting.

I decided I would treat this trip as the meditation retreat I should have had at Kripalu (the kind of meditation retreat where they don't let you read or write. NOT the kind of meditation retreat where you sit for 15 minutes and then they have some wise American Buddhist, who has written several best sellers that teeter somewhere between spirituality and self-help, talk at length about her funny adventures in India as a 20 something.) No, my meditation retreat would be the kind where I had to be present and awake and iPhone-free for as much as possible.

I did pretty well, actually. It helped that Katryna was with me and that she has given up her iPhone for Lent. We supported each other in our efforts to put down the drug. And our kids got into the act too. "No cell phones!" They'd moan if they caught us reaching for the cigarette-pack-sized thing. And cigarettes are a good metaphor. At the airport on our way home, our flights were delayed. The entire airport was full of people bent in that tell-tale position over their devices, lit weirdly by tiny screens. It was all very 1960s Mad Men where everyone in any context is lighting up. Only we light up with fluorescence, not fire.

I have no idea what kinds of songs I should be writing. I'm at a complete loss. Partly this is because sometime in early February Jay (who is now four and a half) discovered the Nields' back catalogue and has been spinning the disks 24/7. He became obsessed with my ex-husband David and pelted Tom and me with questions about him (he still doesn't know that David was my husband once, or what it means that David's last name is Nields--a name Jay shares with him. He is more interested in the fact that we had 3 Daves in our band.) But hearing our old music ad nauseum (and I really mean ad nauseum) has made it hard to write. Mostly because I think the old stuff is pretty good, and I'm reminded that I've said a lot already. Is there anything more to say? Right now, what seems to need saying is that 20 somethings should know how to cook brussel sprouts, and that it's harder than it used to be to qualify for a mortgage; and that they should know that if they have a dream for their future, they should go for it, but to be prepared for the eventuality that it might end up looking very different from what they imagine.

In my little ministers' Bible study last week, we looked at Luke 13:1-9, which talks about how bad things happen to good people, and how it has nothing to do with God's love for them. God isn't punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. We all know this at some level, even as we worry about our karma. The passage underlined for me the importance of being useful. Jesus is saying no way does God doesn't cause bad things to happen. But Bad Things are our wake up call to realize that life isn't about what we can get out of it (which is my orientation, by the way. Part of me always believed that bumper sticker from the 80s that says "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." Hence the iPhone obsession.)

Life is sucky when we orient that way, though. It tastes like yesterday's coffee after awhile. Life is much sweeter when we see what we can put into it, what we have to give. The CD that I most like hearing (and the one Jay has most recently discovered) is our 2007 release Sister Holler. Those songs were written to order for my sister and my parents and the new church Tom and I had joined. Those songs have always struck me as useful. I'm not saying there's no use in our older songs (and I'm not even saying art has to be useful! On the contrary! Is there any use in "With a Little Help From My Friends?" "Come Together?" well, actually, yes, a ton of use. Was it useful that today I played?) But there's a part of me that just wishes I had that album still to write. Or that I could write a neat sequel.

I completely forgot to register Jay for kindergarten. As I was putting dinner on the table and about to sit down with Tom, he reminded me about it. I threw down my napkin, dashed out of the house and jumped in the car, and as I drove to the school as the sun was setting, I thought, "I'm afraid I'll never write another good song again. I'm afraid I'll never do anything useful ever again. I'll probably spend the rest of my life never doing anything of note, just being me." Once again, the sky, all mottled and purple and blue, glowing with the backlit sun, seemed to say, "So? Do you think I love you because you're a songwriter? Don't you think I've loved you ever since you were a tiny baby, just like you loved your own little babies? If you never did anything, I'd still love you just as much as I do now. I've always been in your thrall. Do you think you have to accomplish anything more to be loved? Do you think you have to accomplish anything ever to be loved?"

Grace, I thought. Amazing grace. Right. And I breathed a few breaths and made it to registration on time. And then, as soon as I was back in my car: Yeah, yeah. But what am I going to write next?

Sanity comes in tiny postage-stamp-sized windows: God doesn't care what we accomplish. God just cares about how we treat other people. And, I suspect, the way we communicate all this to God is through play. I have been here many times before, this place of creative despair. I always get my answer. "Let your children teach you how to play," my friend Jane said. So I came home to dinner. My son was standing on the small playtable by the window, DJing at our Bose as usual, air-guitaring to "Jack the Giant Killer." So I grabbed a spoon and sang along.