When the symphony rocks

It's been many years since I've attended a Colorado Symphony concert. Whether it was because our symphony friends moved away or Marin Alsop moved on, I can't say. Despite the years away, everything felt familiar, at least when I initially entered Boettcher Concert Hall last night. Walking the hallway that led to the seats behind the stage brought back memories of choosing seats to watch Alsop's bravado conducting, her energetic wide sweep of arms, her bobbed head moving parallel to the music's intensity. The concert hall sat hushed during musical movements, abashed when a clap would break the reverence before the piece had actually ended.

I grew up on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. A dressed up classical music neophyte, I sat rapt as Bernstein commanded the podium, delighted to watch when he would jump a bit, swept into the music by his passion. Symphony concerts were proper affairs where you dressed in fine clothes (an unpleasant dress thing would be forced upon my young self, along with white gloves) and sat quietly, not making a fuss. And sometimes, I did make a fuss (a bit bored by a music I felt was the province of adults, the old ones), ending up for a brief period sitting on a bench outside the concert hall, watching the television version of inside.

Last night, all notions of the familiar symphony were shattered when Ozomatli took the stage with the Colorado Symphony. After I settled into a seat a bit high up overlooking the stage, the symphony members slowly took their seats, tuning up, awaiting the first violin. After he warmed up the orchestra, the evening's conductor Scott O'Neil took the stage. This felt like an evening at the symphony. But when he told the audience that he did not expect quiet and more importantly, expected people out in the aisles, dancing crazy at the symphony, I didn't know what to think. The minute Ozomatli plugged in and rhythmically pulsed the house, the place began to resemble more of a rock club. An odd dissonance as I sat watching the crowd below, dancing where silence usually sat. An odd dissonance as I listened to the couple next to me who knew all the lyrics, proud singers in a place where voice typically only echoed from the stage.

My feet started to tap, my body sway in my seat. I couldn't help it. I could not be the silent proper symphony attendee. After intermission, I moved down to the orchestra level, wanting to feel a bit more of the action. For most of the second half, I did a standing type of dance to the music at my seat, watching crowds in front swaying, waving arms, bobbing heads as they jumped up and down. There was chaos in the house, but one with a beat. At one point, O'Neil pulled different women from in front up on stage with him to dance, participating in the spirit of the evening.

Most of the instrumentalists sat in contrast, their black outfits a solemn accompaniment to their stillness. They were the evening's backup to the stars, a mere notice in the audience's attention. At the start of the evening, O'Neil asked the audience to applaud if they were hear to see Ozomatli. He noted that the evening promised that loudness and energy.

And he was right. Last night, the symphony rocked. You could smell pot, watch someone's arm shoot up into the air pulsing the beat with gestures used to scratch a hip-hop beat, and fear that the person in front of you might spill their beer backwards toward you due to too much drink and exaggerated movements. Instead of the flickers of lighters showing their satisfaction, arms waved smart phones of light. And while I'm a purist at heart, wanting the symphony to remain a sacred space, I am now a believer in that space where the new meets the classic. I refuse to succumb to the old ones.

Reset

I didn't know how much I needed to hit reset until I went here. Until I stared out into colors, breathing in pauses, I didn't begin to understand how far I'd traveled away from moments of nothingness, that space and time that brings me closer to me, and in that, closer to the world.

Outside Marion, North Carolina, nestled close to Lake James, I hit reset. When I sat the first evening in unfamiliar Asheville, eating some of the best vegetarian fare I've had in quite some time at the Laughing Seed Cafe, I could distance myself, even if for just moments, from the frenetic busyness of my semester.

Unlike other semesters (although I do have a meltdown somewhere near 2/3 completion due to that overwhelming sense of piling piles), this one has been particularly overloaded. And yes, I am the one who gave me such a mess. While there has been plenty of enjoyment in my classes, that is often shrouded by my focus on how much friggin work I do.

I hit reset sitting in Woody's Original Mountain Music on a Friday night, expecting a fantastic bluegrass jam, not an off-key mediocre music community night. Walking into the brightly lit room, I knew my people were not present in this mix of VFW Hall Senior Center Baptist Church audience. But it didn't matter since I could lose myself in operation observation, feeling a bit out of body as I watched people constantly greet each other, waving at their familiar, clapping loudly for this Friday night entertainment.

In the windy cold breezes of Lake James, hanging out on the pontoon, I smiled at fall, at turtles hanging atop a tree trunk, at a blue heron regally flapping its wings above the water. I stopped to listen, quiet away from my mind's chatter. Reset.

I left some of my constant worry about everything I need to get done while driving the roads of the Blue Ridge Parkway between Little Switzerland and Asheville. I remembered gratitude for what is and what is to come.

Oh Patience Little Grasshopper

This past week, I am reminded of just how darn difficult revision can be.

This past week, I've been sitting with an essay that I need to submit to an essay writing workshop I'm taking at The Lighthouse Writers. While I spent some time over the last six months revising and doing a bit of writing, I had not really sat with the hard work; I could always quit when it got too difficult and put the work aside.

When I started doing the final hard sitting, the digging into this revision, I promised myself that I wouldn't get up, no matter how difficult it got; I wouldn't get up until I'd done some work on the piece. And so I stared at the beginning of the essay, an opening that I knew wasn't working. I stared. Nothing. Nothing. Feeling the pressure of a looming workshop deadline, feeling the pressure of a group of writers that I never took a class with (how will I measure up), and feeling the goddamned pressure of doubting my writerly self, I decided to simply skip the beginning and work on a sentence level, measuring words and their meaning. Hard. Slow. I had forgotten that getting a few sentences right might take more than an hour.

After four hours of sitting and revising, I quit for the evening, knowing that tomorrow would bring more time to dig in and do the work. When I was on the edge of sleep for the evening, the new beginning came to me, at least a sentence of it. Rather than ignore, as I much prefer to do when sleep is luring me, I got up and scribbled a quick note. The next afternoon, when I sat again in front of the computer, I smiled at my scribbles, glad to have a way into a new start to the essay. Easier. Not so slow. And then, I got stuck again, staring at a sentence, seeing its weakness, unable to move beyond.

This is how it's gone for the last week. Sometimes, it's a fun romp through my words, able to swiftly cut parts and let go of that which is just not working. Other times, I grow impatient, wanting the essay to be done and perfect, tired of sitting in the slow work of revision. Patience. I remember.

Conversation with an old friend

"You don't look so bad after all."

She smiles back at me. She knows. It's me that forgets and needs to be reminded.

"Where you been," she asks.

"Working. Wandering. Traveling. You know, it's my summer themed Wandering Jew," I answer. I always have answers. I always have words. I just don't always want to be still with them.

"So, are we going to start digging and get to work?"

I breathe. I open the folder. I start reading the feedback on my essays, the words of da coach, fellow workshoppers, and myself.

"I can do that." I'm not sure whether I say it with my inside or outside voice, but I know that it's time to get back to work, to be more steady in my practice of craft, to intend, even if I don't always meet those intentions.

I look back at my writing goals I set at the beginning of the year and feel accomplished that half of them are completed. But I have sat too long. And most importantly, I miss the work. I miss the practice.

"Now get to work," she says.

CSA-less

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It's my first summer in many years without a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). For the past five to six years, I've developed a rhythm around my weekly pickup of vegetables, excited to see what my bin holds. I'd receive enough vegetables to last over a week, challenging me to discover uses for strangers to my regular cuisine (kohlrabi, kale, and assortment of squashes). When I got home, I'd spread all the vegetables on the kitchen counter, admiring their variety and quantity. Because of the amount I picked up each week for 26 weeks, beginning in mid June, I would usually refrain from purchasing vegetables in the grocery store (only supplementing for a little salad variety), for half the year. This helped save money since I stayed away from Whole Foods and other stores that consumed my paycheck.

The CSA, however, also contributed to some neurotic food habits--a compulsion to not waste a morsel of the veggie pickup. Pressure would mount when I peered into the refrigerator and spied the mounds of kale, chard, spinach, and lettuce threatening to wilt into an unusable state. I'd invent techniques to use and reuse, labeling myself the food conservator. I felt virtuous not wasting, but more importantly, my creative cookery side felt like it was on a weekly food challenge to create new dishes where vegetables starred.

At the end of the last season, my CSA filed for bankruptcy. Yes, I could have chosen another one, but due to a busy summer schedule of travel and less time at home, I opted to go CSA-less for a season. I needed a replacement for eating more seasonably, so have committed to regular visits to the local Farmer's Market, supporting different farms each week when I visit. I try to buy without thinking ahead of time what I'll do with the vegetables, giving me the chance to come home and stare, wondering how to use things up before they rot. And so, the other night, I prepared various dishes, using a combination of the market (beets, green onions, radishes), our garden that Nan planted (chard, spinach), and the store (tofu, cukes, olives).

While I like the freedom of choice that the Farmer's Market provides (I only choose what I'm interested in and don't have to place the undesired in the trade bin), I miss the surprise that the CSA bin holds. I miss my Sunday frenzies in the kitchen making vegetable stocks, veggie stews, and assorted other inventions, using up most of what I picked up the previous week to make sure there was room for the new pickup. I miss playing veggie detective, trying to discover the name of the veggie and its potential uses. I miss you CSA.

Confessions of an AP Reader

Every year in early June, I subject myself to a week plus of what I label white collar factory work. I bemoan its predictability, kvetch about the horrible food that is my board for the week, and basically curse my lot in life for the 8 days I set my alarm to 6:25 to be on time for my 8am-5:30pm job. At the end of each year's reading, I swear it will be my last, that I cannot possibly tolerate another 8 plus days of staring at messy handwriting offering interpretations of an argumentative prompt. Despite all of this, I return each year.

There is a tedium to the day that cannot be avoided. I am assigned to score one of the essays from May's English Language Advanced Placement exam. I wake extra early so that I can sit in bed and drink tasteless watered down hotel coffee, pretending with my roommate that today must certainly be my optional day off. Over the years, my roomie (a friend of more than 17 years) and I have perfected a hotel cooking system that allows us to avoid the lines and crowds of AP readers partaking of breakfast--fake eggs, greasy bacon/sausage, a few cereals, Yoplait yogurt, and other assorted ideas of morning fare. We procure yogurts and packaged oatmeal to cook for breakfasts. I have mastered a quick conversion of the coffeepot to a hot water dispenser, all within 30 minutes of waking. All this helps me savor the moments before I become one of the mass.

I enter the convention room and take my seat at the assigned table, bubble in the number that identifies me as a reader, the same one I have used for the last nine years, the only marker that separates me from everyone else in a chair at a table in a very large room. As the week progresses, the temperature in the room gets colder and colder, a clear strategy to keep fatigued readers from falling into an awake sleep. It is a predictable day of reading, scoring, 15 minute break. More reading, scoring, and an hour lunch break. An afternoon of reading, scoring, 15 minute break. Exhaustion when we are given the signal for dismissal. In each work day, I am more focused on a task, more obedient, more submissive to a group thinkspeak than is normal for me. It is the job, and in this job, I submit.

When I took the exam more than thirty years ago, I never imagined that I would have any lasting relationship with its pressure and measure of college level writing skills. Yet, due to that exam, I never took a college composition course, scoring high enough to place out of freshman level writing. And this very exam that continues to mark the anxiety of high school juniors in early May, now occupies a little over a week of my time.

During this week, I read hundreds and hundreds of responses to a provocative prompt (Question 3, the argument). I learn how students view positions by Aristotle, Plato, and Sartre, and I am reminded how articulate and pensive some young writers can be. Despite the tedium of a repetitive task, the monotony of hearing similar arguments and forcing myself to view the ideas as fresh and new, and the fact that there is a cumulative tiring when I work numerous hours in a row, I am not just relieved when the reading ends. The sentiments that these writers convey about priorities in the world, about the dangers of a materialistic culture, give me hope for the future.

When mistakes don't matter

On the edge of the end of the semester, I am fully in a place where I'm celebrating what students are achieving rather than noting their mistakes, weaknesses, challenges, or whatever neutralish term I assign to the things I focus on that fall short of my assignment. Despite the hurried aspect of trying to get done, the end of the semester is when I enjoy reading their assignments, watching their presentations, and learning exactly what they have learned.

Mistakes don't matter when the literary magazine class has given me and my colleague, their project managers, as we prefer to refer to ourselves, the title in the masthead as Editor & Chief. We kind of like our new sense of selves, and thus, in future literary magazine classes, I imagine that Paul and I will introduce ourselves as the editor and chief. A pun is born that will carry forward.

At times I believe I should record myself at the end of the semester, a reminder that when I grow tired and a wee bit jaded (which fortunately is not often), I need to remember to celebrate student successes. Because it is during those moments that I am so grateful for the cool ass job I have.

At the end of the semester, I finally allow myself time to reflect, even if I profess I am so stressed because I have no time. It's like I can't help that voice inside that sees the rest ahead, that knows that I have worked so hard and am ready to just shake it all off, that voice that keeps reminding me of all the wonders I have experienced this semester.

• I had a student I've known for a couple of years come out to me as trans, watching his face feel finally complete and relieved at being able to take a step into the body and being he sees himself as.
• I watched a group of students who have spent most of the year hanging out in the GLBT Resource Center, shooting the shit, talking some nasty sometimes, laughing, hugging each other every day when they leave and sometimes enter, articulately convey to the school's President and Vice President of Student Success their needs regarding a new GLBT Resource Center. They were passionate, approachable, genuine, and made an impression--on the administrators They left their impression lingering on me.
• I stood in front of a literary magazine class with my colleague and told the students at the start of the semester that in 15 or so weeks, they would produce a literary magazine from start to finish. When we broke down all the work, they looked daunted, not believing this could be. When they opened the boxes of the printed journals yesterday, they looked so proud at what they had accomplished, as a team, on their own. Tomorrow we celebrate with a publication party and an open mic.
• And I anticipate tomorrow, when I get to watch groups of students put on dramatic presentations of plays they've remixed, showing me through their scripts and performance that they understand elements of drama, celebrating all their learning. Not paying attention to any mistakes.