One Today (or the Forest/Tree Dilemma)

Richard Blanco performs a sound check for the inauguration (courtesy of Richard Blanco)

I love watching presidential inaugurations on television. Even if I haven’t voted for the current president, at least one day in four years I feel a sense of common purpose with our chief executive, with other elected officials, and with fellow citizens glued to the spectacle in person or over the airwaves.

I am sometimes a little petty so of course as a chanteuse I found things to criticize in some of the musical offerings during yesterday’s inauguration. (Is it now against the rules to perform a patriotic song the way it was written?)

I thought the basic theme of the president’s speech was solid, however. And I was moved to tears by Richard Blanco’s poem “One Today.”  As I age (and I age very slowly, of course), poems seem to speak to me more and more. This one invoked the many landscapes, languages, and occupations of Americans in order to draw us together as one people to visualize, name, and create our future.

It may seem odd that a poem about unity should rely on so very many individual images—of prayers, of stalks of wheat, of doors and clotheslines, of blackboards and trains and tragedies and smiles. Nevertheless, it is detail that makes life rich. So each lone image Blanco added to his poetic soup kettle made the flavor stronger and more distinctive.

I am a detail-obsessed person. One of the agents whom I approached about representing my forthcoming book about my mother felt uncomfortable with its reliance on vignettes. She told me that she would be more inclined to represent the book if I reworked it into a narrative instead of a mosaic.

I considered taking her advice but ultimately decided against it. I experience life in mosaic form. Perhaps others do not. But to me, life’s narrative isn’t clear or well structured. It shifts shape messily all the time. And it is the richer because of its shape shifting.

I am aware of the dangers of eschewing the forest for the trees. We have to have a sense of how our life is going in general in order to understand that life. Nevertheless, I will always err a little bit on the side of the trees. I can see my whole last year with my mother—indeed, her whole life—in her favorite poem (“The Owl and the Pussycat”) or a bowl of succotash or the image of her weak little body poised on top of a cardboard box trying to balance itself.

It is life’s individual moments that make us laugh, cry, feel, and connect with others—that make us feel alive.

So I stuck with the mosaic form. Thanks to Richard Blanco, I feel better today that I did. And I feel proud to be part of the mosaic he described.

Just for fun, a photo from my book. This picture could in fact sum up my mother’s life: her smile never changed.

New Year’s Fun

I may be out of focus, but I’m having fun.

Happy New Year!

The days are already getting longer, and I’m smiling a lot.

I am moving slowly but steadily into 2013. (I’ve already managed to write “2012” on two forms!)

I don’t have any resolutions per se because I was already working on lots of projects BEFORE the New Year. I will share a few of them here with you:

I am trying to get my body and my singing voice into better shape.

I am determined to FINISH my book about my mother (the first three chapters are already laid out–hooray!).

I am trying to keep better track of my finances … and to make keeping track of them easier by generating more income.

And I’m trying to enjoy every moment I can.

I have other ambitions, but those are good ones with which to start.

My family and I rang the New Year in with a bang yesterday. I had to test a recipe for molasses taffy so we invited several of my nephew Michael’s young neighbors over to help pull.

We ended up with TWELVE children in my sister-in-law Leigh’s kitchen, pulling and eating their hearts out.

Michael (left) and his friend Jackson were the first pullers available.

The recipe will appear in the book about my mother, which will be called “Pulling Taffy.” I haven’t literally pulled taffy since I was a little girl, when my mother often organized taffy pulls for my birthday.

She was a little more organized in the kitchen than I am. Despite my disorganization our crowd had fun making the candy and consuming it. And while the children pulled the grownups chatted about memories and recipes and life.

It was a lovely way to pay tribute to my mother … and to start 2013.

I wish you all good food, good company, and peace. I hope readers will let me know what THEY are planning for this year by commenting below.

Enthusiastic pullers turned into enthusiastic tasters.

I Get Along Without You Very Well

My Mother in 1939

A colleague asked me to send her a short essay about a song from the 1930s or 1940s that meant something to me. I HATE to waste essays, so I’m letting it do double duty on this blog. (I realize I have been absent for a while.) I hope to post something original to the blog soon. Meanwhile, please enjoy this little memory of my mother.

My mother, Jan Hallett Weisblat, grew up in a house in which singing was part of daily life. Her mother, Clara, thought of becoming an opera singer. (Father Bruce called Clara “the little girl with the big voice”), and everyone in the family loved to gather around the piano and sing music from Stephen Foster to the current songs on “Your Hit Parade.”

I associate many songs with my mother, from silly ditties and radio jingles to dramatic operetta numbers. One song that always reminds me of her is “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

The song was published late in 1938 by Hoagy Carmichael, a composer who knew his way around a meandering melody. Its full title is “I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes).” The lyrics were based on a poem by a woman named Jane Brown; that poem was titled simply “Except Sometimes.”

Those lyrics are clever, wringing the singer’s (and the listener’s) heart through understatement. The singer says that he—my mother and I would prefer “she,” of course—is doing just fine, getting along very well without a departed lover. The important part of the song comes in the exceptions to this rule.

I get along without you very well. Of course I do.
Except when soft rains fall and drip through leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms. Of course I do.
But I get along without you very well.

The contrast between the exceptions and the statement of getting along give the song a gentle pathos.

“I Get Along Without You” became popular in 1939. In that year (or perhaps in 1940, I never heard the full story!) my little mother was dumped by one of her boyfriends, Dean Woodruff.

I never gathered that Dean was necessarily her favorite beau ever. Nevertheless, Jan was used to being the dumper, not the dumpee. And she was a huge ham; she performed frequently in amateur theatricals and liked to think of her life as a play.

After she received Dean’s “Dear Jill” letter, she always told me, she spent a month or so singing “I Get Along Without You Very Well” around the house. She would pose dramatically in the stairwell and sing a few lines. Sometimes for effect she changed the line “Of course I do” to “You bet I do.” It was sung with just a hint of bitterness.

By the time I came along, of course, Dean Woodruff was a distant memory, and my mother was enjoying life with my father. Nevertheless, she would pause from time to time to sing “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

When she performed it, she was a young girl again, living at her parents’ house before work and the war and life helped her grow up (although to tell you the truth she never completely grew up; she had a childlike qualities in 2011 when she died at 93!).

She could enjoy the pathos of the song without having to feel the pathos of her broken relationship with Dean. And she could share with me her love of music as an expressive form, as a way to unlock personal and cultural memory.

I sang it at her memorial party last summer. I took it just a bit higher than she ever did; she was an alto, and I’m a soprano. I tried to mimic her phrasing as much as possible, however. To tell you the truth, Hoagy Carmichael pretty much lays out the phrasing for the singer.

I find the song charming—lightly dramatic and whimsical yet heartfelt. Just like my mother. I get along without her very well … except sometimes.

To hear me sing “I Get Along Without You Very Well” imperfectly but with feeling, click on the “play” button below……

I Love Living in a Small Town!

Looking for a Good Meeting in Hawley, Massachusetts

Life  in Hawley, Massachusetts, pickles me Tink.

I recently became chair of our local volunteer arts council. This group, the Charlemont-Hawley Cultural Council, distributes funds once a year allocated to the towns of Charlemont and Hawley by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The grants go to projects involving the arts and the humanities, often with an educational component.

I had been a semi-active member of the council for the past few years. It often met when I was out of town, but I managed to participate by reading grant proposals and relaying my recommendations to the rest of the group.

This summer our council got an email from the state informing us that if no one volunteered to serve as chair (Mary Campbell of Charlemont, who epitomizes community spirit, had held the post as many years as she was legally able to) the council would receive no funds from the state for 2013. There was email silence for a while, and then I broke down and said I’d take on the job.

The council supports events that are important to our community, including Mohawk Trail Concerts, our local chamber-music series; many special programs in the local schools; and the Charlemont Forum, a summer lecture series on ethics and politics. It has even supported me in the past, giving me money to help publish my cookbook and write my food blog. It seemed heartless (not to mention ungrateful) not to step in.

From left to right: Joanne MacLean, Julia White, Ellen Miller, Andrea Santos, Pam Shrimpton, and Lida Forbes at last night’s meeting

The council met yesterday evening at the Hawley Town Office to discuss who would get funds in 2013. The council received more applications than it has in any other year so the process of making decisions was fascinating if occasionally frustrating. We had applications from schools, theater groups, the senior center, both towns’ historical societies, and individual artists, scholars, and musicians.

Our group, composed of four members from Charlemont and three from Hawley, worked swiftly and cheerfully together to find just the right combination of recipients to receive this year’s allocation. Pam Shrimpton of Hawley noted with delight how much fun it was to go to a meeting in which she actually got to make decisions instead of listen to endless (sometimes pointless!) discussion. We all felt lucky to be able to help worthy groups and individuals.

We nibbled on a little freshly baked pumpkin bread. And we were entertained by our almost-audience for the meeting. In keeping with the state’s open-meeting law, we had posted the time and date of our proposed meeting at both town halls, noting that the public was invited to attend.

In the end, the only members of the public who seemed interested in joining us were the farm animals across the road from the Hawley Town Office. The calves mooed at us as they surveyed the flowers outside the door.

And we had to shoo several chickens away from the doorway.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Obviously, to go to a Cultural-Council meeting!

I have a feeling the Cultural Council in Boston doesn’t have nearly this much fun….

Autumn in New York

I know, I know, it’s not QUITE autumn. But I found myself humming the song “Autumn in New York” last weekend—even singing it at one point, to the huge embarrassment of my young nephew Michael!—as my family and I spent a couple of whirlwind days in the Big Apple. The whirlwind applied to the emotions involved as well as the pace of the days.

The main purpose of our sojourn in the city was to attend an auction at Sotheby’s. In April my brother David contacted the auction house about selling several items from our parents’ collection of Indian art. We were/are in need of money, and we were also a bit nervous about having a lot of art in our homes without being able to afford to insure it adequately.

Since our initial contact, we have spent a lot of time talking on the phone with the wonderful staff at Sotheby’s, saying goodbye to paintings (I will particularly miss the toy that used to hang on my wall here in Massachusetts), and working on the catalogue essay about our parents.

This toy (pictured on my wall) has now gone to a new home.

I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to be at the auction, watching paintings I had lived with all my life go out into the wider world, but David and his wife Leigh convinced me that it would be an interesting experience. So on Saturday I boarded the Megabus in Hadley, Massachusetts, and sailed down the highway toward the metropolis.

The bus ride was delightful, particularly the spectacular drive down Fifth Avenue when we finally reached the city. From my perch in the front of the bus’s upper story I could see women promenading in colorful African-inspired costumes in Harlem, crowds clustered in front of the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museums, the lush greenery of Central Park, and the lively windows of elegant department stores and boutiques.

The View from the Bus

We all stayed in a tiny suite in a hotel near Times Square; the windows seemed almost brighter at night than by day thanks to the area’s signature neon. I do love New York. It’s like a giant nightlight. On Saturday evening we ate fabulous Brazilian food.

Before dinner, however, we stopped in at the reception for Asia Week at Sotheby’s. There we saw our art in a new context. We also had the opportunity to look at exquisite Chinese scrolls, fans, and furniture that were to be offered at auction later in the week.

On Sunday morning we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’re trying very hard to convince Michael that New York is a place to absorb culture, not just shop at Nintendo World and FAO Schwartz. Being a 12-year-old boy, he was particularly taken with the displays of weapons and armor, although we did manage to sneak in a little art along the way.

Michael and David survey armor.

Sunday afternoon we saw the comedy Peter and the Starcatcher. I hadn’t seen a show in New York in years so I had convinced the family to book discount tickets in advance. When I discovered that David, Leigh, and Michael had dinner plans with friends for Sunday evening, I quickly ran to another theater and bought myself an orchestra seat (full price—ouch!) for the evening performance of An Enemy of the People. A girl can always use a little Ibsen in her life.

The auction itself, which took place on Monday afternoon, was fascinating. Most of the art was displayed via video, but a few key pieces (including a couple of ours) were brought to the auction room. Just before the auction a man in a cherry picker zoomed about the room to point spotlights at the works.

Bidders were “present” in three ways: in the room, on the other end of several phones monitored by Sotheby’s employees, and on the internet. The auctioneer, Henry, could see the web bids on a special screen in the back of the room; he was very suave and smart keeping all the different types of bids straight.

The screen at the front of the room showed a picture of the piece or pieces up for bid at the moment, along with the amount of the current bid in a variety of currencies. I was a little weepy as we said goodbye to the lovely lady pictured below, but watching the bidding distracted me from my tears.

Some of our pieces did very well, exceeding the amounts our team—Priyanka, Laurie, Jackie, and Henry—had predicted. Some attracted a little less attention (and money!) than they and we had hoped.

Apparently, the rupee isn’t doing well vis-à-vis the dollar at the moment. So Sotheby’s had trouble finding bidders for the centerpiece of the collection, a large canvas by the late M.F. Husain.

We talked to Priyanka about it just before the auction and decided that we didn’t want to lower its minimum price too much. We are fond of the painting, which my father acquired in the early 1970s because the artist wanted it to go to a good home and didn’t want to sell it to anyone else.

In the end it will come home to us, as will a couple of other pieces that didn’t meet their minimum bids. We’re actually thrilled about this. We could have used a little more money. Who couldn’t? I’m still trying to figure out how I’ll pay all my bills going forward. But we also love the art, both for itself and as a link to our late parents.

This large piece will return to David and Leigh’s house.

Happily, that link actually grew stronger through the process of consigning the rest of the art for sale. Leigh and David threw themselves into the task of doing research on the art and our parents’ reasons for collecting, and I wrote the essay about Jan and Abe that opens the catalogue. The photo below, which we found while going through boxes of old papers, illustrated the essay. We think it was taken around 1960.

Jackie, who did the rest of the writing for the catalogue, told us that she, Laurie, and Priyanka fell in love with the photo when I sent it in. (They all watch Mad Men and love the 1960s.) She ran into Priyanka’s office with the image and said, “Meet the Weisblats!”

Left to right: Laurie, Priyanka, and Jackie in front of one of our (former) paintings by Ram Kumar

As I wrote the essay and my siblings and I edited it together, we gleaned new information about our parents. I now actually know what my father did for a living … more or less. (When asked in my youth, I always responded that his profession consisted of talking on the telephone.)

We have a renewed appreciation for their energy, their openness to new experiences, and the ways in which they reached out to people all over the world.

And of course we appreciate their taste in amassing such a lovely collection of art … and in producing such a wonderful family. They were with us in spirit at Sotheby’s, and much of their art will continue to adorn our walls for years to come.

The Heath Fair and the Creative Process

I participated in a book reading/signing over the weekend at the annual agricultural fair in Heath, Massachusetts.

The Heath Fair is my favorite fair in the world. One can walk through the entire thing, from the exhibit hall to the grandstand for tractor and animal pulls, in 20 minutes … although generally it takes much longer to walk through it since one has to stop to look at wares for sale, buy something to nibble on, check out the animals and the children’s games, and talk to the people passing by.

(The Heath Fair is like our local general store. It’s impossible to go there without running into people one knows.)

Composer Alice Parker and I, the Divas of Hawley, were scheduled to discuss our writing around midday on Sunday. The local-author tent in which we appeared was organized by Jack Estes and Betsy Kovacs, who run a small press called Pleasure Boat Studio from their homes in Heath and New York City.

The discussion crystallized some thoughts I had been having about the nature of creativity.

I recently read Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works. Lehrer talks about the ways in which individual brains and groups of people work most creatively. His book has been recalled by the publisher in recent weeks because the author got a bit too “creative” himself and made up quotations from Bob Dylan. (I have never been able to understand the suicidal impulses that lead some journalists to exaggerate their reporting in this fashion.) Nevertheless, Lehrer’s writing helped me understand the ways in which I work.

His “individual brain” section indicated that there are two particularly fertile ways in which brains can come up with new ideas. One is by just working and working and working and working away at a problem. The other, ironically, is by letting go of worry, letting go of conscious thought, and daydreaming. Somehow when one does this, he argues, the brain can make totally new connections that shed light on the problem at hand.

I realized as I read the book that I indulge in both of these modes when I’m writing something important to me. I outline and make lists and write and rewrite. When I’m really stuck, however, I lie down, close my eyes, and let my brain drift. Frequently, a moment of insight occurs during these drowsy moments.

Our discussion helped me hone that realization … and apply it to singing as well as writing.

Alice read a passage from her book The Anatomy of Melody, in which she described the process by which Ella Fitzgerald might have approached a song by George Gershwin. Alice’s point was that Fitzgerald was truer to Gershwin when she left the written music behind and interpreted a song than she would have been had she just sung the notes “as written.” In fact, Alice suggested, a song doesn’t really exist “as written”; it is dead until a singer breathes life into it.

The next author to speak after us was religious historian and philosopher Jim Carse. Jim talked about (among other things!) the ways in which he learned to write, think and talk by NOT thinking. The trick, he explained, was to think and think and think and do lots of research and then stop thinking and forget all the research.

Jim Carse at the Heath Fair (Courtesy of Betsy Kovacs)

Alice asked me how I learn a song. I explained that I start with the notes on the page—or, if I’m lucky, with a tape recording of the melody. Once I get the melody running through my head, however, I let go of the notes and start playing with them. I act them out and feel them.

“A song is emotion,” I said. “If you’re not feeling it, if you’re just thinking it, it doesn’t mean anything.”

Some days I’m a little profound. (And some days I’m a little immodest.)

Today as I remember our discussion I feel lucky … to have meaningful work to do that involves my mind and heart, to have creative people to listen to and work with, and to live in a community that offers events like the Heath Fair.

I hope I never stop learning … or enjoying country pastimes.

For more details on the Heath Fair, including photos of the fair in general and author links, visit this post by the wonderful Pat Leuchtman, another author who appeared at the writers’ booth!

The Divas of Hawley

Sports and the Single Girl

My onscreen Wii persona. We both wear glasses to help with our depth perception … although OF COURSE I take mine off when the machine weighs me!

How do you get better at something for which you have very little aptitude?

Slowly.

I have always been a klutz at sports. One of my legs was slightly misshapen when I was very small (I have very early recollections of wearing a brace), and although it was more or less fixed the two legs don’t always work together very well.

Of course, the doctors warned me that I was supposed to wear nothing but lace-up, supportive shoes for the rest of my life to keep my legs in line. But I’m a sucker for high-heeled mules, ballet slippers, and clogs so I haven’t paid any attention to those warnings since I was eight and bullied my parents into buying me my first pair of heels. (I was only allowed to wear them for dress up at home, but I adored them. They were red!)

I made my legs and balance worse a few years back by slipping on the ice TWICE in the same winter and banging my right knee both times.

In addition to the leg issue, I have poor depth perception (my glasses help a little but don’t solve the problem) and pathetic hand-eye coordination.

The only game I played with any skill in my youth was tennis. The racket was big enough to give me a good chance of hitting the ball even if I couldn’t see exactly where the darn thing was. I wasn’t a great tennis player, but I had fun. Ironically, I mastered the form well enough so that in high school I taught tennis to the other girls in my physical-education class. My pupils could beat me at the game almost immediately, but teaching them gratified me nonetheless.

In general in my adult life my sports of choice—if one doesn’t count bridge as a sport, which I really think one should!—have been walking with the dog and swimming. I don’t do either very quickly, but they keep me moving and breathing. Let’s call them physical activities rather than sports.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been a good summer for either activity. My little dog finds it too hot to walk. Since her car accident last year she walks even more slowly than I do when I manage to get her out onto the street. (I’m the slowest human walker I know.)

And my usual swimming hole, the Dam down the road at Singing Brook Farm, was hit hard by Hurricane Irene at the end of last summer. We hope it will be fixed in time for next year, but the process of getting the proper permits to do anything in a waterway is cumbersome and lengthy. So swimming more than a couple of strokes is out.

With fewer walks and fewer swims I have hauled out the Wii fitness program I purchased a couple of years ago.

The Wii can drive me nuts. It loves to weigh me (never my favorite activity) and to administer little tests that allegedly determine my “Wii Fit Age.” Depending on the tests the machine chooses, that age can vary by as much as 30 years. I have learned to ignore it.

Many of the tasks the Wii prescribes to correct my balance and hone my coordination remind me of the difficulties of my youth. I gave up skiing after a few tries because it was almost impossible for me to move smoothly on the snow. And skating … well, the last time I went roller skating I spent more time on the floor of the rink than on my feet. My roommate informed me that the black-and-blue marks made me look as though I had a REALLY abusive boyfriend.

Still, I keep at the tasks. Each day I get ever so slightly better. Most of the time the Wii still tells me that I’m “unbalanced,” not precisely an adjective a girl likes to use to describe herself. My scores are improving bit by bit, however, and in some of the games I have graduated from “unbalanced” to “amateur.”

Despite its critical tone the Wii is easier to handle than some of the classes I took in my youth, in which I had to watch everyone else get better while I stayed the same. (I took beginning ballet for years, with no hope of graduating to toe work.) I can work at my own pace with no competition but myself. And I can try again … and again … and again until I more or less get the hang of the tasks at hand.

I’ll never be a candidate for the Olympics. I am learning to learn, however. And that’s an activity I can enjoy.