NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 5&6 Requiem for a Recital 3/29/2020

Today should have been a day of singing.

After a great deal of planning and practicing, I was to have presented a recital in the afternoon – a pleasant little vanity I called “The Perfect Day: Songs of the Ordinary and Splendid” accompanied by my gifted friend Hannah Payne on the piano.

Instead I am here on my island.

There is music here on the island, and to be certain I can always sing through all the pieces in the concert (as I have done several hundred times) – the Bernstein and the Gershwin and the Vaughan Williams. But music can be sad and solitary when we sing it to ourselves. At some level it is always meant to be shared.

Without spoiling too many surprises (I have every intention of forcing my voice on people again when the madness ends) I had planned a message in the recital in which I now find some comfort. The program was to have been structured around what the Perfect Day might look like, starting with songs of joy and play (the Morning), then work and love (the Day). But in what might be called the third quarter of the recital, the Evening, I was going to change the tone to one of sadness and yearning. I was going to introduce the segment with a caution about the word ‘perfect’ which has never meant ‘wonderful’ or ‘all we could ever want’ as we tend to use it. ‘Perfect’ (from the Latin ‘perficio’ – ‘made thoroughly’) means ‘complete.’ It is the sum of all things, good and bad, rich and wanting. Sorrow is not a bad thing. It is merely part of the thing – as integral a part as the joy or the love.

In the wonderful song “Try to Remember” from The Fantasticks, there is a deathless lyric in the last verse: “Deep in December it’s nice to remember/ without a hurt the heart is hollow.”

When we look back on our own fires of September, we will think about this time of uncertainty and pain and maybe we will feel the blessings that filled in the emptiness after the scare had gone. And then, in relief, we will be grateful for the return of love and joy and of the sharing of song.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 4 Social Distancing 3/27/20

One of the delights of my island is the window that overlooks the street from right beside my desk. AS I write we are watching a few people doing some gardening and every so often a glistening soul will wander past at the back of the leash of a very happy and content dog. People are calm and for the most part friendly, although we can almost hear the mental effort to remember our ‘social distancing.”

I find the term “social distancing” both quaint and a little charming. It is unclear who coined it – the web merely accepts it as a given term and then goes into the dreary but important details of how to follow its tenets.

But as in all things the nuance of the phrase matters. ‘Social distancing’ is clearly distinct from ‘quarantine’ both in tis absence of negative connotations and in that it allows considerably more freedom of movement. For now, at least, we can venture out, we can visit the sun, we can shop for essentials (and whatever luxuries drugstores and groceries may hold). We can even patronize restaurants if we pick up and take out. This last allowance has the doubly satisfying effect of giving us a respite from pork n’ beans and providing some much-needed income to endangered retailers.

The only thing we cannot do is physically contact one another. We can’t stop to pet the neighbor’s cute dog. We can’t hug the old friend or shake hands with the school buddy whom we chance to meet. In our glances and our nods to one another as we pass on the quiet streets there is regret and nostalgia. But there is also recognition; an awareness that the neighbor, the friend, the stranger is there and part of the strange drama that is unfurling in our lives.

That awareness is something new. How many times have we walked down far more crowded streets without the faintest hint of togetherness? Or been in our own neighborhood where people have no time for even a nod or a sad smile.

The question about the phrase ‘social distancing’ is which word modifies which? Is it society that must be distanced? Or is it the distance that has been made more social?

[This Post was adapted from a essay originally published on Facebook the day listed above]

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 3 The Million Dollar Movie 3/26/20

My island has television and a streaming service that gives us movies to our heart’s content. There are so many movies and shows available that it is overwhelming. Sometimes, by the time I have reviewed all my options, so much time has passed that I must turn off the devices to walk the dog or make lunch or move my limbs before ossification occurs.

In my childhood things were different. That island had television as well, but there were four channels that were reliable and another two in the mysterious realm of VHF that might not come in or might broadcast from China.

One desperate fortnight we were quarantined with the German Measles. My father declared himself an essential worker (I guess as a chief of orthopaedics at a major hospital he was that) so would sneak out in the small darkness of the early morning leaving my poor mother to fend off three bored children. In my memory I was eight, my brother eleven. My sister would have been thirteen, but she was always good at closing her door with a stack of books.

My mother had housework to do, leaving us boys to our own devices but unable to even leave the house to shoot baskets of play whiffle ball. We grabbed what comfort and amusement we could from the small television set in the den upstairs.

The afternoon was taken by soap operas (our house once appeared in the windows of the set of As The World Turns) which were of no interest to us. It was not baseball season. But there were movies – well, movie it turned out. There was a program called Million Dollar Movie which coupled an old film with a call-in lottery. It was on from one to four every afternoon.

All would have been great, my brother and I being film buffs, if they did not show the same movie every day for the whole week. The first week it was “Once Upon a Time”, a Cary Grant movie about a dancing caterpillar. The next week it was Grant this time fighting Nazi spies in a comedy called “Once Upon a Honeymoon.” We watched them repeatedly and religiously. I still have long portions of those two movies memorized even though I have seen neither in almost fifty years.

There is comfort in the ordinary sometimes. As thrilling as it is to have choice upon choice, sometimes knowing that the same movie will be on at the same time is the kind of structure we need.

If you have a chance, look for those movies. They feature Cary Grant at his best (although the caterpillar movie is a bit far-fetched). If you do spend a few hours with old Cary, tell him Keith and David say hello.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 2 A Month of Sundays 3/25/20

After what feels like months of rain the sky has finally cleared. My Echo Show is no longer reporting an interminable flood watch. We are finally seeing the sun.

Outside the window, there are the occasional dog walkers and a Prime truck or two, but even the leaf blowers have stilled their cacophonous mating call. As my dog and I step out blinking in the light, it strikes me that the day feels most like a Sunday.

It remains unclear how long the sheltering order will last, but the vagaries of the weather notwithstanding, we are possibly looking at a proverbial “month of Sundays” such as this one. 

The idiom “a Month of Sundays” is as problematic as they come, because we cannot fully understand the mindset of the ones who first uttered it. The first known usage of the phrase was in a 1759 book entitled “The life and real adventures of Hamilton Murray. Written by himself. In three volumes.” (The punctuation is from the original edition and I love it! Mr. Murray seems so proud of his three volumes.) The fact that this book was obscure even at the time it was written implies that Mr. Murray did not coin the phrase. No Cervantes was he. The expression may have been ‘ala mode’ or already ancient. We will never know.

I have seen the term used to denote ‘an impossibly long time,’ inferring a literal passel of thirty Sundays (or thirty weeks of duration). In other usages it denotes tedium; one dreary day following another, since Sunday in the 1750s was a day folks were forbidden from anything fun.

In more recent parlance, the phrase has taken on a happier connotation, possibly because of the invention in 1881 of the Ice Cream Sundae (and hence the inevitable advertising tie-in of a Month of Sundaes). Sundays now are a day of family and of rest. They are pancake breakfasts and communal dinners. They are the absence of traffic or the need to shave. What could be bad about having a month of them?

I wish for all of us that our spell of Sundays (whatever the eventual length) remains a period of peace and calm. There will be time to catch up with the rat race later. For now, let us step into the sun and enjoy the quietude.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 1 3/24/20

Beyond the actual order to shelter, nothing should be mandatory in a time of duress. There should be no imposed deadlines or production levels except those goals we choose for ourselves (unless you are working from home or in remote learning, both of which we can write about later). As such, far be it from me to add to a “must-see” list or a “must-read” list.

I say it, but I think we would all benefit from using a small sliver of our time for reading or rereading certain classics. We might all read a bit of the Bible (our favorite stories, perhaps, or something lyrical like Song of Songs). We could sprinkle in a bit of Shakespeare (Lear seems a little heavy – maybe As You Like It or Two Gentlemen of Verona). A short story or two might suit our restless spirits (Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” or a smattering of Damon Runyon?). Maybe a big box book like Michener or Dumas will soothe our soul.

There is one book I would strongly recommend in any setting, but especially in this moment of enforced isolation. In 1943, French airman Antoine de Saint-Exupery published his slender book The Little Prince. The plot is simple – an airman crash lands in the Sahara Desert where he encounters a young boy who has come down to earth from his own planet where he lives alone and tends a beloved flower. They journey across the desert to rescue (of a sort) while the Prince tells the tale of his journey to Earth. The book is gentle, tender, sad and inspiring all in one. It is also short enough that we might be able to complete it in one healthy sheltering binge.

The reason The Little Prince speaks so eloquently to us now is that along his journey, the boy stops at a range of planets, each populated by a single resident. Among others, he encounters a King with no subjects, a vain man with no admirers, a lamplighter with no one to benefit from his light and so forth. Each planet denizen has a role to play but no context in which to play it. It is only on Earth where he meets the airman that the Prince finds someone who seems lost at first, but with enough direction to help the Prince reach his own goal, to return home. It is the sharing of purpose that propels both the Prince and his airman.

It might be easy during social distancing to identify ourselves as the various planet dwellers. There may be comfort in establishing and playing a role whether for anyone else’s benefit or not. But these kings and inventors and drunkards and lamplighters are not the heroes of the book. They are mere anecdotes along the journey. The true story lies with those who shape their purposes together.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 0 The Beginning 3/23/20

It took some time to catch us up, but Dallas begins shelter-in-place tonight at midnight. When public gatherings were restricted this time last week, we commemorated it with one last restaurant meal (Chinese if you must know). I’m not sure how to mark this milestone, since the city has been enisled for a while anyway.

Humans are complicated. I am loath to disagree with the great poet and preacher John Donne who declaimed that no one “is an island,” but in reality, we are all islands separated by varying degrees of what today’s lexicon calls Social Distancing. Most humans have the Lone Wolf capacity. It is not always voluntary nor salutary, but it is always just below the surface. Society has had far too much practice in isolation in this century, starting with the response to the 9/11 attacks, up through the myriad contagions until we reach today, which I doubt is the apogee but might just be the highwater mark (at least to date).

One key is for all of us to recall that we are not alone in our isolation. This oxymoronic condition can serve as comfort during this “long, dark teatime of the soul” (to quote Douglas Adams) in several ways. Even without being in contact, the weight of others’ presence can help allay the loneliness. What’s more, we are certainly in a golden age of remote communication. With Skype or Zoom or any of the amazing outreach applications in existence today, we may not even have the luxury of privacy in isolation. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, empathy is a great sharer of experience. If we can only try to spare a thought for others in similar (or worse) plights then we might just be lifted from our solitary confinement.

All of this will pass, but not without scars. The way we frame these days of distancing will tell how thick and tough the scarring may be.

Be healthy and reach out to me whenever you need to.

Keith

The Year Football Became Basketball: A Rant

There is an old joke regarding soccer. They say it is a game that has 22 people run around for 90 minutes and then Germany wins.

College football in the age of the so-called definitive play-off system has rewritten the joke. The sport is one where hundreds of teams play 12 or 13 games and Alabama plays for the National Championship. I admit that most of this dominance is testimony to the awesome machine that is Crimson Tide football. I do not want to detract from their skill or their éclat in any way. And during those seasons where they finish as they should, on top of their conference, winners of their championship game and ranked among the top four then by all means they deserve their place at the table.

Nor do I want to suggest that this year’s Alabama squad is not one of the very best teams in college football. Their defensive victory over Clemson was comprehensive. If they can do the same to Georgia then perhaps they deserve the National Championship. But there is no scenario where you can convince me that they deserve to be playing there.

The regular season must stand for something. But the third and fourth seeded teams are playing for the title. Conference championship must stand for something. But one of the final teams did not even make their conference championship. Why insist that the regular season be played at all, except as a money maker for the schools. Schedule eleven fluff opponents plus a couple of rivalry games to keep the fan base happy and then choose four teams by reputation to play in the play-off. No, three teams, for one of those spots is already etched in stone for the foreseeable future.

College basketball has both suffered and benefited from inclusiveness over the years. Teams are hampered or unfairly helped by position on pre-season polls. Losses are weighted differently by the reputation of the school. Who cares about a February game against a mid-pack opponent when you know your conference will get four or six teams into the dance? Who cares about a conference tournament when even a first-round upset can’t knock the front-runner out of their high seed at the NCAA? The Tournament is a separate season and has diminished the regular season to a mere speck of light.

College football is at risk of becoming college basketball when a team that does not win its conference, does not even play in its conference championship and finishes ranked outside the top four in all but the Play-off poll is playing for the National Championship. The games mean something. Rivalries mean something. Conferences mean something. I think the Play-off committee needs to look up the word “definitive.” Spoiler: the definition does not include the word Alabama.