Dear Jean,
I miss you, and wish I could have talked to you, seen that lovely smile and heard that wonderful laugh of yours one more time. Thank you for reading so many of these while you were here. Whenever you gave me positive feedback on these posts, it truly made my day. I'm sure you have much more beautiful depth to experience wherever you are, but this one's for you:
Today I taught three classes of mostly cheerful humans from literally all over the world. During the first class we learned about the history of American music in our textbook, which meant we covered country music, jazz and rock music. I guess the book wasn't big on hip-hop. I found myself explaining jazz for the second time in two weeks. Last week we had a sentence in the "reported speech" lesson that said, "I like jazz," and a guy from Ghana asked me what jazz was. I described the typical instrumentation and explained the history and complicated nature of the genre, but the epicenter of the explanation was clearly improvisation. I explained that being able to innovate and adapt while being in the moment is what sets jazz apart from other styles of music. That's exactly what the text book said today too. It talked about all of the genres and the super famous guys like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman (in a few decades they'll have Hiromi Uehara in there too!). Almost none of the students listen to jazz, which is a shame. Then again, barely anyone knew the name Bob Dylan either. Most people knew The Beatles and Elvis Presley.
That class finished at 10 am and the next one began. We reviewed all 10 chapters of our text book because we have a final exam tomorrow covering everything we have learned in the past five weeks of this course. After that they are finished, and I will likely never see most of them again, unless it happens to be in the hallway before or after they go to someone else's class. It's strange to think about how unfamiliar and cold they appeared when I began teaching them, and how much I missed my comfortable happy San Francisco class that I had left to move to New York. But now we laugh a lot and they smile, and we make jokes and pick on each other, and it's fun. Also, more importantly, I know how to teach grammar now. That wasn't big on my to do list as an artist, but since teaching pays my way in life right now, I might as well be really good at it, and grammar was my weak point. The San Francisco class didn't like learning it, so I only taught it as much as I absolutely had to. Anyway, we're going to eat after the test, and then that's it. New students on Monday. There will be a different text book at least, so I won't go crazy.
The third class began at noon, and it was the musical stories class that just began this week. It gets bigger every day. I'm up to 23 enrolled students, the largest class I've had at this school so far. I was worried the first day because there were only 8 students when we began, but they filtered in once the class began, and now there are a few new faces every day. This has also made it the most diverse class I have ever taught. I am teaching people from five different continents, and I am teaching them about stories and music. As Louis Armstrong would say, what a wonderful world.
Even better, the past two days we've been talking about baseball, because the song was "Take me out to the ball game." I began by explaining almost all of the rules to baseball, "America's past time," which not only helped explain the song but also was consistent with my school's requirement of adding supplementary cultural material to the lessons. All of those years of sports fanaticism come in handy sometimes. A lot of the students thought baseball was boring, and even though I didn't change their minds (or completely disagree), some of them admitted it was very helpful to finally know what it was about. That's the number one reason most people find most things boring: they don't understand them.
The most important aspect I emphasized about baseball is that it is a team sport. Even though I love basketball more because I think it's simply more fluid, fun, exciting, creative and athletic, it's easy to get away from the team aspect. That can be good, because you can't always count on other people to help you. Sometimes they let you down. But we can never do it all alone either. That's why I never liked golf, amongst many other reasons. Yet baseball is 100% a team sport. I mostly learned how to play by throwing a ball at a net alone by myself, but it was only fun when I finally joined a team of my peers and we played together. Everyone on the team had a job to do. My job was third base, and the next year it was short stop. I was a good batter but a better fielder. Even though I had to get the ball by myself, unless it was a fly ball, I had to throw it to somebody or it meant nothing. And I never hit a home run (I was a small guy), so if I got on base, somebody had to bat me home. The best play of my life was a double with the bases loaded that came just ten feet short of a grand slam, and all the runners scored, giving me three RBI's. The pitcher, although a few years younger, was already being groomed as the greatest athlete in our town, but I wrecked him. It was my final game in organized baseball too. And it wouldn't have been as epic if my teammates hadn't all gotten on base beforehand. And I wouldn't have known how to hit that ball if my dad hadn't taken me to the batting cage in Baltimore when I needed an escape from the hospital waiting room as my sister recovered from her surgeries.
Today we read a story about a woman who was the first woman to play on a professional men's baseball team. Her name was Jackie Mitchell, and she played on a minor league team, but she was such a good pitcher that the New York Yankees came to play them in an exhibition game. This was 1931, which means Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were on the Yankees. Babe Ruth is worshiped as the greatest baseball player of all time, and held the career home runs, RBI's and slugging percentage records for decades. He still holds the records for most home run and RBI single season titles during a career, and was partially responsible for the popularity explosion of baseball during the 1920's. Some consider him to be the first American sports celebrity. Meanwhile, Lou Gehrig held a long standing record for consecutive games played until Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken, Jr. broke it in 1995. That record earned him the nickname "the Iron Horse." He held the career grand slams record until this year, won the triple crown and was MVP twice. He was the first player to have his number retired by Major League Baseball. 4,000 people watched as Ruth became the first major league professional player faced by a woman. The home run king tipped his cap to her as a sign of respect, and then she struck him out with three pitches. Then Gehrig also struck out. After the game the commissioner of baseball sent Jackie a letter saying he had canceled her contract because baseball was too "strenuous" for a woman. She played in mostly show games after that, and even pitched while sitting on a donkey once. She quit after that circus farce, and never played baseball again.
Now there is a Japanese woman who wants to pitch in the major leagues with men. The discussion questions asked the students to say if they thought women should be allowed to play baseball with men in the major leagues. Keep in mind this was baseball, not all sports. Most of the students said no, but it wasn't a big majority. Many said yes, including several male students. They had to give reasons, and just about every person who was against it said that men are faster and stronger than women. Some, including women, said that although they are for equal rights and opportunities, women wouldn't be able to keep up.
Although my job wasn't to disagree with them or sway their opinion one way or another, I couldn't help myself. After all, I had just explained to them that the definition of discrimination was holding somebody back based on unfair and irrelevant measures of their worth. For example, if Jackie Mitchell could strike out the best player in the history of baseball, how do speed and strength enter into the equation? Especially given that the American League has designated hitters for pitchers, there is no reason why she couldn't hold her own. All she had to do was stand on the mound. She wouldn't even have to bat or run. Her only job was to strike out the other players. Her job wasn't even to strike out the best players ever in the history of the game, and she still did it. Nothing else is expected of a pitcher. So why can't she play? Those students sound like that simple-minded (or fearful?) commissioner of baseball that canceled her contract. Anyway, if this Japanese woman can play, what other measure matters? That's the whole method of destroying discrimination: equal opportunity for equal talent. I guess in Jackie's case she was superior talent, and that made her chauvinistic enemies fearful of her power.
After the break we learned about some new songs. A Mexican woman brought in the lyrics to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" and played the song on her iPod. I didn't know the story behind the song, but I knew some basic information about Sonny and Cher, so I shared that and then played the song. It's about the rest of the problems of the world not mattering as long as you have someone to love.
We still had twenty minutes left, so I improvised based on the first unit's theme of "Finding Lost Love," and taught them the best song I could think of.
I played "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show for them, and then explained each line to them. That meant I had to tell them about bluegrass, the south, reasons for hitchhiking and rules surrounding how to do it, New England, gambling, Bob Dylan, bouquets of flowers, pioneers going west in wagons, and similes ("Rock me mama like a southbound train"). I think some of them liked the song. I didn't tell them about my own hitchhiking experiences.
Then time was up, and I got to go home and take a nap.
Even though it was a great day of teaching, I received extremely sad news right before we learned about "I Got You Babe."
Last night my Aunt Diana's mother died. Aunt Diana is one of the kindest mothers and thoughtful listeners on the planet. Her mother was Jean Lynch, but we all called her Mimi. I was not related to her by blood, but I've known her since I was 10. She glowed with warmth, sweetness and joy every time I saw her. I really can't think of a kinder and warmer individual I have met, and I have met thousands of people.
Right before I went to India we had a family gathering, and at one point I was sitting next to her and she struck up a conversation. I told her that I was going to travel and write a book about it, and she was very encouraging and told me I would have an amazing experience. She thought the whole idea was wonderful. Then she mentioned that she was going to be in a book soon too. A reporter was doing stories about great romantic stories of how couples met, and somehow he had learned about hers. She met her husband at Grand Central Station in New York City. She was traveling with her friends, and he was in the navy, on his way somewhere. Amidst one of the most hectic and chaotic crowds in the whole city, he accidentally bumped into her so hard that she dropped her suitcase. He helped her pick it up, and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. He died years ago, but her Facebook picture is of her standing in Grand Central with a picture of him. I was about to travel in hopes of bumping into someone similar, so I liked that story a lot. Random universe, eh?
When I got back from my first big journey, she was the first person to publicly ask me about my travels. We were at a party at my uncle's house on Long Island, and I had been home for over a month. Before then everybody had greeted me with excitement, was very happy I was back safe and sound, admittedly impressed and told me they wanted to hear all about it. Even so, as a whole, I thought people would be more interested and ask more questions about what I had seen and experienced. I think most people simply didn't know what to ask or where to start, because my experience was so foreign to them. I had thought some of the older men in the family would have been interested to hear me report about our world, but they seemed to care more about talking about most of the same things they usually talked about. Then, out of nowhere, Mimi engaged me from across a circle of chairs on the patio and began asking me questions about everything. Soon her interview and my replies made us the center of attention, and the whole family was listening. She asked great questions, and gave great insight and feedback while supplementing her interest with a few of her travel experiences. While in Turkey a stranger approached her and asked her to buy silks, and she said, "I just LOVE your country!" He replied, "I love YOUR country!" My uncle joked, "And then he tried to kidnap you," and people laughed. It was an okay joke, but the kind of joke that I think hinders the world's progress of being less afraid of itself and enjoying itself more. Then again, Jean more than made up for that fearful attitude with her glowing appreciation and admiration of everyone she met. I didn't know her that well, but she seems to me to fit a common description of Walt Whitman: it's hard to believe that she ever got angry, and it's probably true that there isn't a person she ever met that she didn't like. If she did, she probably kept it to herself.
Every time I saw her after that party we always had a great discussion, and she smiled and laughed in all the right ways. She had a way of making me feel like a good person, something I feel like most of the time but sometimes gets confused when I'm traveling alone so much and facing so many complex situations. When I shared with her and she shared as well, her compliments lifted me up to the sky. As I read the many posts on her Facebook page, I'm realizing that she had a way of making most people feel the same way. I'm not surprised.
I hadn't gotten a chance to see her since returning from Japan, and I realized a few weeks ago that I might never see her again because she was in the hospital. Very often she would read my web log and comment on my Facebook page that she had enjoyed it, or would thumbs up a picture I had posted and send an encouraging message. She returned from the hospital a few weeks ago, but she was already saying that it was her time to go, and last night she finally left.
I wish I could have seen her one more time and seen that smile again. I know she would want everyone to keep smiling and believing in the goodness of their world, so that's what I will do.
Tomorrow is a new day of school. The song for the next chapter is "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers.
I miss you, and wish I could have talked to you, seen that lovely smile and heard that wonderful laugh of yours one more time. Thank you for reading so many of these while you were here. Whenever you gave me positive feedback on these posts, it truly made my day. I'm sure you have much more beautiful depth to experience wherever you are, but this one's for you:
Today I taught three classes of mostly cheerful humans from literally all over the world. During the first class we learned about the history of American music in our textbook, which meant we covered country music, jazz and rock music. I guess the book wasn't big on hip-hop. I found myself explaining jazz for the second time in two weeks. Last week we had a sentence in the "reported speech" lesson that said, "I like jazz," and a guy from Ghana asked me what jazz was. I described the typical instrumentation and explained the history and complicated nature of the genre, but the epicenter of the explanation was clearly improvisation. I explained that being able to innovate and adapt while being in the moment is what sets jazz apart from other styles of music. That's exactly what the text book said today too. It talked about all of the genres and the super famous guys like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman (in a few decades they'll have Hiromi Uehara in there too!). Almost none of the students listen to jazz, which is a shame. Then again, barely anyone knew the name Bob Dylan either. Most people knew The Beatles and Elvis Presley.
That class finished at 10 am and the next one began. We reviewed all 10 chapters of our text book because we have a final exam tomorrow covering everything we have learned in the past five weeks of this course. After that they are finished, and I will likely never see most of them again, unless it happens to be in the hallway before or after they go to someone else's class. It's strange to think about how unfamiliar and cold they appeared when I began teaching them, and how much I missed my comfortable happy San Francisco class that I had left to move to New York. But now we laugh a lot and they smile, and we make jokes and pick on each other, and it's fun. Also, more importantly, I know how to teach grammar now. That wasn't big on my to do list as an artist, but since teaching pays my way in life right now, I might as well be really good at it, and grammar was my weak point. The San Francisco class didn't like learning it, so I only taught it as much as I absolutely had to. Anyway, we're going to eat after the test, and then that's it. New students on Monday. There will be a different text book at least, so I won't go crazy.
The third class began at noon, and it was the musical stories class that just began this week. It gets bigger every day. I'm up to 23 enrolled students, the largest class I've had at this school so far. I was worried the first day because there were only 8 students when we began, but they filtered in once the class began, and now there are a few new faces every day. This has also made it the most diverse class I have ever taught. I am teaching people from five different continents, and I am teaching them about stories and music. As Louis Armstrong would say, what a wonderful world.
Even better, the past two days we've been talking about baseball, because the song was "Take me out to the ball game." I began by explaining almost all of the rules to baseball, "America's past time," which not only helped explain the song but also was consistent with my school's requirement of adding supplementary cultural material to the lessons. All of those years of sports fanaticism come in handy sometimes. A lot of the students thought baseball was boring, and even though I didn't change their minds (or completely disagree), some of them admitted it was very helpful to finally know what it was about. That's the number one reason most people find most things boring: they don't understand them.
The most important aspect I emphasized about baseball is that it is a team sport. Even though I love basketball more because I think it's simply more fluid, fun, exciting, creative and athletic, it's easy to get away from the team aspect. That can be good, because you can't always count on other people to help you. Sometimes they let you down. But we can never do it all alone either. That's why I never liked golf, amongst many other reasons. Yet baseball is 100% a team sport. I mostly learned how to play by throwing a ball at a net alone by myself, but it was only fun when I finally joined a team of my peers and we played together. Everyone on the team had a job to do. My job was third base, and the next year it was short stop. I was a good batter but a better fielder. Even though I had to get the ball by myself, unless it was a fly ball, I had to throw it to somebody or it meant nothing. And I never hit a home run (I was a small guy), so if I got on base, somebody had to bat me home. The best play of my life was a double with the bases loaded that came just ten feet short of a grand slam, and all the runners scored, giving me three RBI's. The pitcher, although a few years younger, was already being groomed as the greatest athlete in our town, but I wrecked him. It was my final game in organized baseball too. And it wouldn't have been as epic if my teammates hadn't all gotten on base beforehand. And I wouldn't have known how to hit that ball if my dad hadn't taken me to the batting cage in Baltimore when I needed an escape from the hospital waiting room as my sister recovered from her surgeries.
Today we read a story about a woman who was the first woman to play on a professional men's baseball team. Her name was Jackie Mitchell, and she played on a minor league team, but she was such a good pitcher that the New York Yankees came to play them in an exhibition game. This was 1931, which means Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were on the Yankees. Babe Ruth is worshiped as the greatest baseball player of all time, and held the career home runs, RBI's and slugging percentage records for decades. He still holds the records for most home run and RBI single season titles during a career, and was partially responsible for the popularity explosion of baseball during the 1920's. Some consider him to be the first American sports celebrity. Meanwhile, Lou Gehrig held a long standing record for consecutive games played until Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken, Jr. broke it in 1995. That record earned him the nickname "the Iron Horse." He held the career grand slams record until this year, won the triple crown and was MVP twice. He was the first player to have his number retired by Major League Baseball. 4,000 people watched as Ruth became the first major league professional player faced by a woman. The home run king tipped his cap to her as a sign of respect, and then she struck him out with three pitches. Then Gehrig also struck out. After the game the commissioner of baseball sent Jackie a letter saying he had canceled her contract because baseball was too "strenuous" for a woman. She played in mostly show games after that, and even pitched while sitting on a donkey once. She quit after that circus farce, and never played baseball again.
Now there is a Japanese woman who wants to pitch in the major leagues with men. The discussion questions asked the students to say if they thought women should be allowed to play baseball with men in the major leagues. Keep in mind this was baseball, not all sports. Most of the students said no, but it wasn't a big majority. Many said yes, including several male students. They had to give reasons, and just about every person who was against it said that men are faster and stronger than women. Some, including women, said that although they are for equal rights and opportunities, women wouldn't be able to keep up.
Although my job wasn't to disagree with them or sway their opinion one way or another, I couldn't help myself. After all, I had just explained to them that the definition of discrimination was holding somebody back based on unfair and irrelevant measures of their worth. For example, if Jackie Mitchell could strike out the best player in the history of baseball, how do speed and strength enter into the equation? Especially given that the American League has designated hitters for pitchers, there is no reason why she couldn't hold her own. All she had to do was stand on the mound. She wouldn't even have to bat or run. Her only job was to strike out the other players. Her job wasn't even to strike out the best players ever in the history of the game, and she still did it. Nothing else is expected of a pitcher. So why can't she play? Those students sound like that simple-minded (or fearful?) commissioner of baseball that canceled her contract. Anyway, if this Japanese woman can play, what other measure matters? That's the whole method of destroying discrimination: equal opportunity for equal talent. I guess in Jackie's case she was superior talent, and that made her chauvinistic enemies fearful of her power.
After the break we learned about some new songs. A Mexican woman brought in the lyrics to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" and played the song on her iPod. I didn't know the story behind the song, but I knew some basic information about Sonny and Cher, so I shared that and then played the song. It's about the rest of the problems of the world not mattering as long as you have someone to love.
We still had twenty minutes left, so I improvised based on the first unit's theme of "Finding Lost Love," and taught them the best song I could think of.
I played "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show for them, and then explained each line to them. That meant I had to tell them about bluegrass, the south, reasons for hitchhiking and rules surrounding how to do it, New England, gambling, Bob Dylan, bouquets of flowers, pioneers going west in wagons, and similes ("Rock me mama like a southbound train"). I think some of them liked the song. I didn't tell them about my own hitchhiking experiences.
Then time was up, and I got to go home and take a nap.
Even though it was a great day of teaching, I received extremely sad news right before we learned about "I Got You Babe."
Last night my Aunt Diana's mother died. Aunt Diana is one of the kindest mothers and thoughtful listeners on the planet. Her mother was Jean Lynch, but we all called her Mimi. I was not related to her by blood, but I've known her since I was 10. She glowed with warmth, sweetness and joy every time I saw her. I really can't think of a kinder and warmer individual I have met, and I have met thousands of people.
Right before I went to India we had a family gathering, and at one point I was sitting next to her and she struck up a conversation. I told her that I was going to travel and write a book about it, and she was very encouraging and told me I would have an amazing experience. She thought the whole idea was wonderful. Then she mentioned that she was going to be in a book soon too. A reporter was doing stories about great romantic stories of how couples met, and somehow he had learned about hers. She met her husband at Grand Central Station in New York City. She was traveling with her friends, and he was in the navy, on his way somewhere. Amidst one of the most hectic and chaotic crowds in the whole city, he accidentally bumped into her so hard that she dropped her suitcase. He helped her pick it up, and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. He died years ago, but her Facebook picture is of her standing in Grand Central with a picture of him. I was about to travel in hopes of bumping into someone similar, so I liked that story a lot. Random universe, eh?
When I got back from my first big journey, she was the first person to publicly ask me about my travels. We were at a party at my uncle's house on Long Island, and I had been home for over a month. Before then everybody had greeted me with excitement, was very happy I was back safe and sound, admittedly impressed and told me they wanted to hear all about it. Even so, as a whole, I thought people would be more interested and ask more questions about what I had seen and experienced. I think most people simply didn't know what to ask or where to start, because my experience was so foreign to them. I had thought some of the older men in the family would have been interested to hear me report about our world, but they seemed to care more about talking about most of the same things they usually talked about. Then, out of nowhere, Mimi engaged me from across a circle of chairs on the patio and began asking me questions about everything. Soon her interview and my replies made us the center of attention, and the whole family was listening. She asked great questions, and gave great insight and feedback while supplementing her interest with a few of her travel experiences. While in Turkey a stranger approached her and asked her to buy silks, and she said, "I just LOVE your country!" He replied, "I love YOUR country!" My uncle joked, "And then he tried to kidnap you," and people laughed. It was an okay joke, but the kind of joke that I think hinders the world's progress of being less afraid of itself and enjoying itself more. Then again, Jean more than made up for that fearful attitude with her glowing appreciation and admiration of everyone she met. I didn't know her that well, but she seems to me to fit a common description of Walt Whitman: it's hard to believe that she ever got angry, and it's probably true that there isn't a person she ever met that she didn't like. If she did, she probably kept it to herself.
Every time I saw her after that party we always had a great discussion, and she smiled and laughed in all the right ways. She had a way of making me feel like a good person, something I feel like most of the time but sometimes gets confused when I'm traveling alone so much and facing so many complex situations. When I shared with her and she shared as well, her compliments lifted me up to the sky. As I read the many posts on her Facebook page, I'm realizing that she had a way of making most people feel the same way. I'm not surprised.
I hadn't gotten a chance to see her since returning from Japan, and I realized a few weeks ago that I might never see her again because she was in the hospital. Very often she would read my web log and comment on my Facebook page that she had enjoyed it, or would thumbs up a picture I had posted and send an encouraging message. She returned from the hospital a few weeks ago, but she was already saying that it was her time to go, and last night she finally left.
I wish I could have seen her one more time and seen that smile again. I know she would want everyone to keep smiling and believing in the goodness of their world, so that's what I will do.
Tomorrow is a new day of school. The song for the next chapter is "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers.
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