summer school

So the unexpected thing that happened was this: I got nervous. After we unpacked here in Chicago, after the first good night's sleep post-Austria, after all the agenda items were checked off the list and vacation had begun, I got nervous. I watched the US soccer team win their group and those two tennis guys play all damn day and felt the whole time like a hamster was sitting directly on my adrenal glands. Yeah, I know, solar plexus, seat of personal power, indicator of uncertainty, und so weiter. GOT it - except that perhaps I don't exactly, as I notice my breath not quite making it down into my belly.

The other feature of yesterday was a lot of blog discussion on the nature of teaching and learning, all inspired by news of the evil super-capitalist movement in Texas that is turning student evaluations into employee evaluations. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the greatest teachers in my life and about how important it was for me to learn to turn myself over to them, even when they demanded ways of learning or behaviors that were not easy for me. Even when I disagreed. I was not naturally good at this, and now when I have a student that kicks or talks too much or contradicts me or does whatever he or she does to avoid walking a particular path, I have to smile - payback time! My way of handling this is gentler than some (I'm thinking of you, SDG. RIP and thank you for kicking me out of your studio, ya bastid - it was rough but right), but so often it's necessary to lead someone down an unexpected, undesired road. Very often. OK, always.

In trying to explain this, I've run into more than one skeptical reaction, even full dismissal. To some, such talk smells of guru worship, an abdication of personal power or responsibility. And fair enough - it's demonstrably possible to cross the line from saying yes all the time into, shall we say, over-agreement (bedding the teacher, ignoring the instincts that might keep you from physical harm). I was shocked the first time I saw a martial arts class of my husband's, where the only allowable response to the master was "yes, sir!" It violated everything in my little American heart. What if I don't want to? What if I'm too tired? What if I have a good reason?

It's just that none of us need to be taught what we already know. Fact accumulation is simpler than ever. Why do we go to teachers?

O wad some power the giftie gie us
to see oursels as other see us

Isn't that it? The shift in perspective, the chance to look from a different angle, the chance to find out what we are avoiding by announcing what we will not do? It's not that you, the student, have no idea of what you need...but you might not know it up in the front of your brain, you might not know how to find it, and hell, you might really not have the first clue.

Typing, I think of a thousand acceptances and a thousand refusals of exactly this gift, the journey out of my own head, my own comfort zone, my own well-disguised laziness, and I'm filled with gratitude for all my teachers, past and present. Today I'll go to the keyboard, get on the mat, all those things I burn to do and look to avoid. Because that's what we do. We know and we don't know, we see and we are blind, we want with all our hearts to reach to the new place and we lie back in comfort.

Watch your back, hamster.

dkz

Is Chicago, is not Chicago

Suitcases for the car, for the closet, for the shipping company. Grilled meat, pot luck, three era's worth of love. Sweat, coffee, sleepy friends in the humid dark.

(Time stopped, flowed, and twisted in a beloved's kitchen, around friends I've known since we were younger than the beloved's son.)

Breakfast tacos, gas, and slow trucks in Nacogdoches. Roots radio, short naps, and language lessons in the car. Conversation, silence, and joy on the road.

(We were taken in for the night and hosted generously by musician friends we are just beginning to know well, given a glimpse into their rich shared lives)

The laughter, the embraces, the stories. The new house, the surprising mariachi, the patio breeze.
The city in sunlight, the crowd in the park, the chocolate on the train.

(Our brother and his family, still adjusting to their new home, offer their shoulders to us in transition, and we lean as we so often have before)

Sportscenter, Johnny Cash, liar's poker. Thunderstorm, ceiling fan, couch. Sorrow, elation, peace.

dkz

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one's singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
to the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One's cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

(thank you Wallace Stevens: Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu)

dkz

where the heart is

On the plane home from Duesseldorf, I sat next to newly-minted Syracuse alum whose post-graduation trip had taken him to visit his sister in Germany. She's there on a Fulbright, the connection that started our conversation, and he's returning to an uncertain economy, job interviews, and the first undetermined period of his young life. I listened to him talk about his passion, working with emotionally troubled kids, about how his parents are teachers , about how jazzed he is that the future isn't pinned down. He was full of energy, intelligence, confidence, and kindness.

Perhaps it was the spirit of that encounter that sent me, despite my post-flight fatigue, sailing back into America. The passport control guy was chatty, too. I got a cab right away, and experienced a vintage white-knuckler down Liberty Avenue. At my destination, the driver tried to sell me a World Cup T-shirt out of the back of the cab. TR's downstairs neighbor, all 84 years of him in his shiny silver shorts and bathrobe, was unlocking the door and singing "Volare" when I came up the walk.

"Ya want me ta let ya in, dollface?"

Why yes I do.

TR gave me The Best Roast Chicken Ever along with the secret for making it, and I was deeply asleep before nine.

What a welcome, what a great conspiracy of circumstance as only NYC can provide! Now, watching the sun rise over Astoria, I am still buoyed by that swell of joy that started in the international terminal yesterday. I'm HOME. And the beautiful part is that I can't really say where home is. It is and always will be in this noisy, roiling city, but it's also, unbelievably, in Houston. It's on a variety of family guest beds, rooms we have been welcomed into for so many years that the "guest" part doesn't apply. It's in Northfield and St. Paul and Lake Orion, and now on the Glasergasse. It will be in our Mazda 3, starting at about 5 am on Saturday morning.

Volare...whoa.

dkz

die heil'ge deutsche Kunst

As I sat tonight waiting for the Artemis Quartet to play, I heard three different people near me gossiping about where I work. Now, I haven't met everybody at the Staatsoper yet, but I don't think these were colleagues. They seemed like good, concert-going citizens of Wien, and  the opera a normal part of evening conversation. It was sobering! It doesn't take long for the whole city to be talking.  Der Rosenkavalier's world still lives, it seems, and Vienna remains a strange combination of sophisticated city and schwätziges Dorf. Cosima Wagner famously remarked that it would never be a true city of the world, a Weltstadt. She wasn't exactly charming herself, but she had a decent claim to an appreciation of elegance...ironically...

Today featured small-minded moments (one lecture and one lie courtesy of the unpleasant hotel manager, and one bald insult and one unbelievable serving of hubris at work) along with momentous events, some personal (we got our sweet apartment in the Glasergasse, and I survived four meetings in German) and some much larger (I nearly passed out from the beauty of the Phillies' playing of the prelude to Tannhäuser, and I got to look at Gustav Mahler's wierd, miniature travel piano). At one point, I was summoned, and had a conversation I will always remember. 

Then, tonight, in the Mozart-Saal of the Konzerthaus, I saw from afar a cellist I performed with 20 years ago. We played a memorable night in Bonn which ended with beer and political conversation, this shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. We didn't keep in touch. He and his colleagues played Beethoven op. 127, and in the slow movement time did that tricky thing where it stops and goes in all directions at the same time. The quartet played, in all senses of that word, like they were breathing, like ancient children. The people around me were just like people at other concerts, some sleepy and some rapt and some quietly conducting, some coughing and some sighing. At the end, we wouldn't stop applauding.

Speaking of Cosima Wagner, the Konzerthaus is emblazoned with a quote of her husband's, from Meistersinger:

Ehrt euren deutschen Meistern
Dann bannt ihr gute Geistern 

Let most of it crumble to dust. The art remains, it remains, it remains.

dkz

Close call

Yesterday evening, the end of a long week, was a weird salad of satisfaction and sorrow. Wonderful conversations with husband (who is finishing an important stonework goal on our house) and with sister and nephew (who reported on a new piano and their plans to visit Vienna) brought me joy even as they underlined the distance I'm choosing to put between myself and home. When will I see that beautiful Texas house again? What about the growing nieces and nephews, my siblings, my parents, my friends?

I went out to the Internet cafe, watched some World Cup, made a blog entry and answered mail, and went back to the hotel. Celebrating football fans sang far into the night. This morning, underslept and sad, I thought about canceling the two appointments I had made. One was a professional thing which could easily be handled over the phone, and one was a lovely new acquaintance, an expat who would have totally understood the situation.

But I didn't.

I didn't, and so I didn't miss the train ride into the bucolic small town, and I didn't miss watching the blue-green foothills getting taller. I didn't miss the great homemade coffee or the friendly Weimaraner. I didn't miss the mind-blowing room with more than two dozen harpischords and fortepianos in various states of restoration, and I didn't miss the chance to play them, and I didn't miss looking at the beautiful antique furniture and finding out where to hunt for it. I didn't miss the adorable restaurant (that opened in a former butcher's whose name was Tomasch and so the new owners simply changed the letters around on the sign and named their place "Stomach") and I didn't miss the yellow gazpacho and the asparagus torte and the brilliant conversation. I didn't miss the gelato or the several miles of walking through the cooler but still sunny streets.

There is so much that I do miss, and will. But I'm so, so glad that I got up this morning and opened the door.

dkz

strange

I'm down the street from the hotel in the internet cafe with the weak signal.
I'm eating potato wedges and drinking mineral water.
Pouring rain is cooling Vienna down.
The cafe is full of English speakers watching the England/USA World Cup match.
The strangers who speak my language are screaming, laughing, drinking, and doing the wave.
I'm Skype-texting with my sister in Minnesota.
I'm writing, "this is lonely and fantastic all at the same time."

dkz