As I Was Saying…

From poverty, that is. Throughout most of my adult life, I’ve had to rediscover periodically the extent to which people who have had no direct connection to poverty simply don’t get it.

Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time with an old friend who had, comparatively speaking, a privileged upbringing. I was telling him about the long multi-generational climb out of poverty that my family has worked through, but I felt that my point remained somehow elusive. Part of my story is that I have enough formal education that people often think I come from money. Finally I showed my friend the photo that accompanies a post about my experience in grad school with a book that forced me to take a hard look at where my father came from. The people in the picture are, left to right, my father, my aunt Thelma, my grandmother, my aunt Toni and my aunt Mary.

The house is the background is the place where my father grew up and where my grandparents lived until my grandfather died in 1967. During my childhood years, the house got a coat of paint and an indoor toilet. Otherwise, the place remained as it had been, right down to the slate sink in the kitchen and the braided rug my grandmother had made from scraps of fabric.

When he saw the picture, my friend grew quiet for a few minutes as he apparently considered things about me that he hadn’t known before. The implications are important. For example, I’ve never felt at home around the wealthy because they mostly bore me to madness. I don’t play golf. I don’t belong to a country club. I don’t go jetting off to Biarritz. Instead, I do my own yardwork and most home repairs. I’m a passable cook, and I always have time to talk to people. For many years, I changed the oil in my car. I often iron my own shirts. In short, I am, as my mother used to say, a person of the common clay.

Last December, just before Christmas, I joined a pickup quartet of carolers hired to sing at a holiday party hosted by some very, very wealthy folks in Scarborough. We were given only the address of the place, and the host and hostess did not introduce themselves to us. We never learned their names and were paid through a booking agent. They were apparently wary of being contacted by the likes of us.

Years ago, I probably would have been annoyed by this, but last December I found I didn’t care at all. The host gave us a quick tour of the public areas of the house, including his six-car garage, but his purpose seemed to be to demonstrate his wealth. The hostess dithered over us for a few minutes and then began to take the evening’s catering crew to task about something or other. Her purpose seemed to be to assert the privilege and power to which she felt entitled because of her social standing.

Now, I’m about the same age as the hostess, and in answering her questions about the quartet I spoke to her as an equal. After a minute or two of this, I noticed affronted regality building up in her eyes. I cut the conversation short because I didn’t want to listen to anything she might have to say to me about it.

Did I understand with whom I was dealing? No, lady. You didn’t give a name.

The invited guests, even those in their 20s, were cut from the same cloth as the host and hostess. All of them were at ease having servants around and never, ever spoke to or made eye contact with any of us lowly singers and servers.

I spent a fair amount of time talking to the servants. I stayed in school longer than most of them, but they are still my people.

I suspect that a lot of this dawned on my friend for the first time when he looked at that photo of my father.

I’ll confess it up front. This post will bore most people to the point of unconsciousness, because it’s about music at a pretty technical level. Those who are not bored will, I think, have one of two immediate responses—either “What a cool idea!” or “What a load of BS!”

Ever since I wrote the “Lenny” post, I’ve been thinking about how it is that classical musicians and jazz musicians, even when they play the same instruments, have trouble talking to each other about music and for the most part just don’t “get” each other. My own orientation is toward jazz, even though I haven’t thought of myself as a jazz player for decades.

When I was in high school, three of my friends and I put together a jazz quartet. I played alto sax. We all had connections with working jazz musicians in the area and were happily absorbing their view of and orientation to music. Jazz (except for so-called “free jazz” which I don’t don’t enjoy and spend no time thinking about) is organized around chord progressions. There are lots of conventions about how this organization happens, and even a few more or less set-in-stone rules. Except for big bands which work from carefully written arrangements, most jazz bands use what are called “lead sheets.” Here’s a picture of part of a typical lead sheet that might be given to the keyboard player.

It’s a simple thing and looks pretty much like the music folk guitarists work from, except that it’s likely to contain chords that folk musicians don’t play. It contains the melody and symbols that represent the chords that are supposed to accompany the melody, and it’s a pretty good conceptual representation of a jazz tune. Of course, there’s a huge store of shared knowledge that underlies the use of lead sheets.

Lead sheets are almost always written in the treble clef. In the example here, the single flat in the key signature suggests that the tune is written in the key of either F major or D minor. The first chord (G minor) might be used in either key, but the song move to the the C7 chord and then to F major. There’s the key, “one down,” i.e., one flat—F major.

How the keyboard player actually plays the chords is left to that player’s discretion, so long as the rules and conventions are obeyed. The G minor chord is G-B♭-D. As the chord is used in the example lead sheet, jazz conventions would permit (almost insist) that the the so-called seventh of the chord (F) be added. Its also possible that the ninth of the chord (A) would be added as a “color tone.”

In a jazz piano style more or less created by Bud Powell something like 60 years ago, for example, the chord would be played as F-A-B♭-D, with no G in it at all! The bass player would probably pick up the G, and whatever instrument is playing the melody has the G covered anyway.

Anyway, a lead sheet is a pretty good conceptual representation of a jazz tune because, like a jazz tune, it “hangs” from the melody. The actual bass line doesn’t appear. Lead sheets were my musical orientation when I arrived at the University of Connecticut to major in music as a bassoonist and was first introduced to what is called “figured bass.”

Figured bass notation is very old, and it looks like the sample shown below. There is also a huge store of shard knowledge involved here, but it’s almost completely different from the the knowledge underlying a lead sheet.

Conceptually, figured bass is pretty much the opposite of a lead sheet. For one thing, it’s written in bass clef. It specifies the exact notes to be played in the the bass line, and it describes the chords, without naming them, through the numbers written below the notes. In the sample here, the key signature is two flats, and the first note is G. The numbers 5-3 below the note specify that the chord is in so-called “root” position, so that the notation describes a G chord.

The bottom note is G, the second note is a third higher (but flatted because of the key signature). The third note of the chord is a fifth higher than the first. This yields G-B♭-D, the same notes as in the Gm chord at the beginning of the sample lead sheet.

For the second chord, we find the note B♭ with the number 6 beneath it. This is shorthand that a “continuo” player would be expected to decipher. It means that the top note in the chord is a sixth higher than the bass note, a G. So, the second chord in the piece is also a Gm chord, but it is to be played in the note order B♭-D-G.

For the third chord, the note is D. The numbers below describe what is called a 7th chord in root position. The ♯ symbol is another bit of shorthand and indicates that the second note of the chord is to be raised a half-step. In its entirety, the chord is realized as D-F♯-A-C. The lead sheet would describe this as D7, and Bud Powell might have played F♯-B-C-E, a D7 with no D in it anywhere!

In a nutshell, figured bass notation sits on the bassline, and the melody doesn’t appear at all. This reflects a mindset so alien to the jazz sensibility that it should be no surprise that classical musicians and jazz players really, really don’t speak the same language.

And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed.
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

—Langston Hughes

I was about 20 years late in “discovering” Lenny Breau. Lenny was born in 1941, just five years before me, in Auburn, a small city about 30 miles from Portland where I was born. He lived in Maine until 1957, when his family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lenny was murdered in 1984, when he was living in Los Angeles. Somewhere along the way he became the finest jazz guitarist I’ve ever heard.

I first learned about Lenny in the late 1970’s, but for some reason my ears just weren’t open to him. A few years ago, I was searching online for an mp3 of the The Jamies’ 1950’s hit Summertime, Summertime. One of the “hits” my search turned up was Lenny playing the Gershwin Summertime. I played it over and over and finally tracked down and purchased the CD that it came from.

Summertime is a song I learned to play nearly 50 years ago, and I thought I knew it. I stopped playing it years ago because it had become such a cliché. Listening to Lenny, however, I felt as if I had never heard the song before. If Lenny were alive now, he’d be 67—still playing way out ahead of everybody else, still taking old standards and finding things in them that no one ever heard before, and doing it every single night.

I wish I’d gotten to know you, Lenny. You probably couldn’t have turned me into a genius like you, but I’d have made a hell of a fan.

NOTE: I ask all of you who work or have worked in the field of education to read this post all the way to the end if you start to read it at all. You won’t know where I’m headed with this until the last paragraph. The story I’m about to tell is about me and my own experience in trying to do a job for which I had astonishingly little aptitude. It’s not about education or America’s public schools in general.

The worst year of my life was the school year 1974-75, the year I spent as a high school English teacher. I’m not sure anyone has ever lived who was less suited to high school teaching than I. I wonder about a few things to this day:

• How I ever thought teaching high school was a good idea for me;
• How anyone, having talked to me about high school, could have hired me as a teacher;
• How I ever made it through that long, long year; and
• How, 20 years later, I could have thought I might try to go back for more—although that’s a story for another day.

The fundamental problem, which should have been obvious to me from the beginning, was that I had hated high school as a student. Hated it, and not just a little. I hated it with stomach-churning resentment so strong that just entering the building would sometimes make me physically ill.

Nonetheless I somehow thought that on the other side of the desk, my outlook and attitude would change. I was an intern (what used to be called a “student teacher”) during my last semester of college in the spring of 1968. Student teaching was a lot of work, but it was pretty much a given that, having completed it, you would end up with an A for 12 college credits. I ended up with a C for those 12 credits. So much for the old GPA. In truth, the C was probably a gift.

If I hadn’t figured out any other way that I was barking up the wrong tree that whole semester, I might have known on the day I stood at the window with the school’s principal as we looked out on the student smoking area. My generation had gone wild during the years I was in college. The generation of our parents wasn’t prepared to accept or even acknowledge the extent of the change that had occurred. So, when I saw one kid pass a wad of bills to another kid who passed back a brown paper package, I knew I was witnessing a drug deal. I turned to the principal and asked him what the school was doing about its obvious drug problem.

The principal was incensed and huffily told me that there were no drugs in his high school, thank you very much. Right, I thought. I later learned that by 1971 that school (with the same principal) was videotaping these transactions so that parents could be called in to watch. There was really no other way to get parents’ attention, because in those days parental instinct went along these lines: “You’re accusing my kid of using drugs? I’ll have your damn job for this!”

I daresay that if the principal remembered me at all by that time he was settling down parents by showing them videotapes (”So, Mr. Smith, why do you think that lunch bag is worth $40?”) it was only to recall that I had been insolent and insubordinate. Hell, I probably had been.

What always wound me up about high schools is their nearly obsessive devotion to conventional thought, expression and behavior. Such devotion, I think, is the reason why school administrators so often get it wrong when dealing with students who behave unconventionally. Hardly a year goes by, for example, without media picking up a story about students who have been expelled for what they’ve written in a student newspaper (e.g., support for gay student rights) or said in class (e.g., opposition to a war) or worn to school (e.g., armbands for whatever cause). Sometimes the same brand of idiocy gets a teacher fired for teaching. Anna Quindlen tells such a story in the current issue of Newsweek.

By the time I ended up teaching high school in the fall of 1974, I had done four years in the military and completed an M.A. The job was there, and I really had nothing else to do with myself. I figured it couldn’t be any more unpleasant than the military, but I hadn’t figured on the squirmy relentlessness of the kids. I also hadn’t figured on the cynical sloth of the English department chairman, the bullying stupidity of one assistant principal, the exhausted resignation of the other, and the flat-footed authoritarianism of the principal (a career changer who, when under pressure, seemed to think he was still a cop).

Certain moments of irony weren’t lost on me, however, despite my unhappiness. I was, for example, required to teach The Catcher in the Rye, a book of which the mere possession 10 or 12 years before had netted me a finger-pointing lecture on morality.

The short version of the story of my year as a teacher is that five minutes into home room on the first day, I knew I had made a horrific mistake. I white-knuckled it through the remaining 179 days of the school year, and left without regret when it was over. By way of specifics, I got through the year by drinking too much, taking too many “sick and tired” days, doing the minimum possible amount of work, and whining like a two-year-old.

What has stayed with me from that year, however, is a small collection of good stories and a bottomless admiration for those who teach well.

The owners and operators of and lobbyists for those nasty coal-burning factories and power plants in the midwest just can’t seem to hold onto the idea that prevailing winds in North America blow from west to east.

This self-righteous amnesia enables them to remain enthusiastically innocent of the fact that the crap the coal burners discharge from their tall, tall smokestacks usually ends up in the air we breathe in the northeast. This is on my mind because we are enjoying a spell of it here in Maine right now.

Whenever our Congressional delegation tries to raise awareness of the prevailing wind (a phenomenon the ancients knew well) midwestern senators, representatives and assorted bloviators are shocked, shocked they tell us. Why, they’ve never heard of such a thing! Surely it can’t be true! Who would manipulate the EPA for purposes so nefarious? Immediate action is called for. We need to…form a committee to look into it.

Later, perhaps years later, copies of such a committee’s report would be used as toilet tissue in the cloaking room.

By means of this political two-step, hang-wringing public concern coupled with cold-eyed indifference as a matter of policy, the northeast has been short-changed on the benefits of the Clean Air Act ever since its inception.

Imagine the outcry if Maine’s seafood processing industry, as a matter of entrenched public policy, began flying its wastewater, heads, tails, shells, skins and guts to Ohio and airdropping them indiscriminately there.

Good morning, Akron! Kersplat!

Hellooooooooooo, Cleveland! Sploosh!

If a protest arose, our senators and representatives would have a ready response: who would manipulate the FAA for purposes so nefarious?

Anyway, have a nice day, Ohio. I imagine the skies are clear there. Not so much here—although this lobster is tasty.

If you have a mistake purchase or two tucked away somewhere in the back of a closet or a box in the attic, you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you. We’ve just spent a couple of days looking at every single mistake purchase we own. Most were pretty easy to deal with, once we got started. Most have already gone to Goodwill, and a few are headed for a consignment shop. But I have one item I still don’t know what to do with.

It’s my L.L. Bean Flying Tiger leather jacket. I was supposed to look cool as hell in the thing. I tried my best to convince myself I looked cool, but in the end there was no way around the hard truth. What I looked like was somebody trying to be Indiana Jones for Halloween who’d lost his damn hat. I wore the Flying Tiger about four times, and I will never wear it again.

As a jacket it is neither warm nor comfortable. I wasn’t happy when I wore it, but on those occasions I didn’t want to take it off either because I was afraid someone would steal it. Here’s the dilemma: if you followed that link above, you know what the Flying Tiger cost. Yikes. It is theoretically valuable but, in reality, may be worth next to nothing. Such jackets are all over eBay, $39.99 and up.

For now, unworn and unloved, the jacket ties up closet space while I, dog-like, chase the same old philosophical tail: Do I own the jacket, or does the jacket own me?

You might feel a little discomfort here…
—Thor Miller, M.D.

Donna’s comment yesterday about breaking a toe reminded me of my own broken toe story from 40 years ago.

As a newlywed in 1968, I worked for about six months at the A&P warehouse that was located on Kennebec Street here in Portland. Here I was, a new college graduate, joining the Teamster’s Union for an entry-level job lifting and lugging. But the whole idea of the job was for me earn a few dollars while I waited for the day when I would leave home for Air Force basic training.

Most people don’t know about the A&P anymore. The full name of the company was (and I guess still is) The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. The company’s days of continent-spanning dominance of the grocery business are over, I think, but the A&P basically invented the supermarket.

The Portland warehouse supplied stores over a wide area, and my job was in the meat department. In October, with the approach of Thanksgiving, we started dealing with frozen turkeys, lots and lots of frozen turkeys. The turkeys arrived by truck and by train. The big warehouse freezer was filled with them, and still they kept coming.

One day I was assigned to work in a freight car filled with frozen turkeys packed two to the carton. The cartons were stacked seven feet high in the freight car, and unloading them involved handling each carton individually. The work was hard and repetitive. After a while, I fell into a mindless rhythm: reach up and grip a carton; turn and place the carton on a handcart; repeat until the handcart is fully loaded; wheel the handcart out of the freight car and stack the cartons on a wooden pallet; wheel the handcart back into the freight car; begin again.

At some point in the middle of the day, I pulled a defective carton from the top of the stack in the freight car. One of the bottom flaps came loose, and a 22-pound frozen bird slipped out. The turkey fell like a cannonball, and the frozen stump of its neck landed directly on the toe of my shoe.

Now, this is the reason people who work in places like warehouses are supposed to wear steel-toed boots, but I couldn’t afford to buy such boots.

When the turkey hit my foot, it hurt like hell. I immediately began to wonder if something was wrong, but I kept working. I could feel some swelling inside my shoe, but I didn’t take the shoe off to have a look because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to put it back on.

That fear proved to be well-placed. By mid-afternoon, I could no longer walk on the foot. I left work early, limped to my car, and drove home. At home, I took my shoe off. There was clearly no putting it on again.

Through the rest of the afternoon, my strategy for dealing with the toe was basically to sit and hope for the best. By early evening, I had to admit the strategy was ineffective. Marge called Dr. Miller, the family doctor I had always gone to, and he agreed to see me if I could get to his office.

Dr. Miller looked at my foot and quickly determined that the bones of my big toe were broken in three places. He explained that the pain I was experiencing came from pressure building up beneath the toenail. He said the pressure had to be relieved or else the pain would be worse and worse.

By this point I felt I was ready to agree to just about anything, particularly since I thought I had a good idea of what was going to happen. My assumption was that I’d get a shot of some sort of local anesthetic and that the doctor would drill through the nail (or perhaps melt through it with a heated needle).

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Dr. Miller, nearing retirement in those days, spent most of his career practicing medicine in an era that calibrated pain from broken bones differently. The ragged end of a snapped femur protruding through the skin; that was pain. A woman having twins who suffered sacral fractures 48 hours into unmedicated labor; that was pain. A broken toe? Not so much.

So, for me there was no local anesthetic. There was also no drill or needle. Instead, Dr. Miller stood the point of a scalpel on my toenail. Slowly, slowly he turned the scalpel so that the blade would eventually scrape its way through the toenail. “You might feel a little discomfort here,” he said.

When this sort of thing happens in a cowboy movie, the victim gets a shot or two of whiskey and then something to bite down on. Once again, I got neither. I sat on Dr. Miller’s examination table, gripping the edge of it so hard I was practically tearing off the upholstery.

The twisting scalpel went on and on and on. After a minute or two of it, I began fantasizing that my hands were around the good doctor’s neck. In my dream state, I choked the life out of him until he confessed himself to be a quack and a sadist.

After three or four minutes, I could no longer sustain fantasy. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. My goal became simply to remain conscious and to resist the urge to shriek at the top of my lungs. I no longer cared what happened and was perfectly at home with the notion that death might overtake me at any moment. What a relief it would be…

Finally, the scalpel made its way through the toenail. I felt a moment of truly amazing pain and saw a tiny spurt of watery-looking blood. Then the doctor bound up the wound he had inflicted.

I missed a few days of work, but the toe slowly and steadily healed. At Thanksgiving, Marge’s mom served a 22-pound turkey she had bought frozen at the A&P. I ate with relish, convinced that I was wreaking vengeance on THE ONE.

For a long time afterward the toe I broke was flatter than its counterpart, and for about 25 years its occasional twinge predicted changes in the weather.

Now, astonishingly, I can’t tell or even remember which foot was involved.

Today I am 62. This is the age my father was when he retired. He basically sat around the house and drank endless cups of coffee while playing solitaire. I’ve followed his lead in many things (no one is more surprised about that than I am) but not here. For one thing, it is impossible for me to think of myself as “retired” (see any number of my previous posts).

I have, however, put my feet up today. I’ve spent a lot of time with friends, I took a lovely nap, and I haven’t crossed one damn thing off the “to do” list. This evening I’ll rehearse with the a cappella group I belong to, but now I find myself so paralyzed with sloth that I can’t even write a decent length blog post…

I would never have called myself a Carlin fan, but I was surprisingly affected by today’s news that he is dead. His classic “Seven Dirty Words” routine was a cultural contact point that worked across the last two or three generations.

I admire Carlin because he apparently never considered anything like retirement. He was up on stage “tellin’ it like it is” right to the end.

Some of his material seemed a bit obvious to me, but it had a way of speaking truth to power, as the saying goes. That made it important even when it was a little silly. Carlin had a kind of perpetual hippie sensibility that I never shared, but his name is one that I’ve known for 40 years. And now it isn’t attached to anyone living.

There is also the fact that Carlin was only 71. That’s right, I just said “only” 71. Sure, that’s past the Biblical three score and ten, and I’ll admit that until quite recently 70-anything sounded old to me. The thing is, I turn 62 tomorrow. Carlin was something like 9½ years older than I am right now. It’s hard for me to jam the old man hat on Carlin’s head if I’m not ready to wear it myself.

And I’m not ready.

The joke a few years ago was that “60 is the new 40.” Utter nonsense, of course. Nonetheless, 60 isn’t old any more. And if that’s the case, 70 isn’t all that old any more. So the world has lost a very funny, not-all-that-old man.

We’ll miss you, George, but they can’t censor you now.

I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarets don’t smell bad.
Their hats fit.
They really believe that they won the war.
They don’t believe in Literature.
They think Art has been exaggerated.
But they are wonderful on ice skates.
A few of them are very rich.
But when they are rich they buy more horses
Than motor cars.

—Ernest Hemingway

I didn’t know that Ernest Hemingway ever turned his hand to poetry, and on the basis of this I’m still not sure he ever succeeded at it. Nevertheless, for everyone who lives in Maine, coming to terms with Canada is a central fact of life. We border only one state, after all, but two Canadian provinces, French-speaking Quebec and English-speaking New Brunswick.

For most of my life Maine and its Canadian neighbors have gotten along reasonably well, and the border has been, as government officials now say, “porous.” I remember family trips 50 years ago to visit relatives in Fort Kent, where we crossed the St. John River into Clair, New Brunswick, with little ceremony. My uncle Carl was on a first-name basis with border guards on both sides.

People tried to maintain that same neighborliness along the border in the aftermath of 9/11, but our government just wouldn’t have it. Poor Michel Jalbert, a Canadian hunter, crossed a border-spanning driveway in order to fill up his gas tank at lower U.S. prices. He had his deer rifle with him, and U.S. border guards went ballistic. Jalbert was jailed and held for more than a month until a suitable plea arrangement could be worked out in U.S. District Court in Bangor. The story got considerable ink in Canada but was effectively buried here in the U.S.

My own closest brush with Canada was when Marge and I were newlyweds. It was 1968, and I had just graduated from college. My draft notice arrived days after the wedding. Marge’s father was born in New Brunswick and retained lifelong Canadian citizenship, although he lived in Maine from infancy.

This fact, as Marge and I understood the law, gave her the opportunity to declare Canadian citizenship. Like practically every other college student in America at the time, we were opposed to the Vietnam War. Her citizenship option would have given us the right to go to Canada legally, to live there legally. But somehow I couldn’t do it.

God knows, I was frightened enough of what might happen to me in the military. And I really did believe that the war was wrong. But a piece of family history stood in the way. During World War II, my father had tried to enlist. In those days, he was a great bull of a man, physically powerful and bursting with vitality. He had, however, suffered from asthma as a child That was all the military needed to hear.

He was classified 4-F: physically unfit to serve. I remember hearing him tell the story of those war years when he walked to work every day (to save rationed gas) and passed by the wives and girlfriends and mothers and sisters of servicemen. In every face, he saw the same question: why aren’t you there?

The story didn’t mean much to me when I was a boy, but by 1968 I felt that I understood it. I tried to imagine myself in Canada, but all my mind’s eye could see was my father—still going to work every day, still avoiding the faces that now said, “Your son is a draft dodger.” Whatever my problems with him were in those days, I couldn’t do that do him—or to myself.

I joined the Air Force and spent four more or less uneventful years of stateside duty maintaining aircraft survival equipment. Marge and I visited Montreal a couple of time in the 1970’s, but we haven’t been there since. This past January marked the 35th anniversary of my discharge from the military.