David's Blog We Must: January 2024

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Fun With Yellowjackets (based on the prompt: a non-human that causes you fear)

BILLIE

Welcome, everybody, to this summertime edition of “Billie and Bernie’s Subdivision Stories,” the definitive podcast about living in the suburbs. Glad you could join us. We have a fun program today; in fact, it’s about something most of us probably have never seen or heard anything like it! Last spring, you might remember, we had Dr. Feiffenberger on the show from the University, and the subject was wasps. That’s “wasps,” the common, ordinary backyard pest… well, it’s a pest because it’ll sting you if you give it half a chance. That’s how it always seems, anyway. Wasps are undesireable guests at any warm-weather outdoor gathering, which is how folks usually experience them. And though we understand that wasps are magnificent creatures in their own way, and they help to control other backyard pests, and that they’re just little insects after all, it’s their world as well as ours… really, they can be very annoying to people and pets, and persistent, and a little scary. While one sting, on your arm, or your neck, is painful…

BERNIE

Extremely painful.

BILLIE

Yes, extremely painful, but not only that. Wasps have a habit of responding quickly and in great numbers to aggression by humans—

BERNIE

Aggression that you may not even know that you’re being aggressive.

BILLIE

That’s right, they do have a short fuse, that’s for sure. What they do is, the wasp who’s in trouble sends out a kind of distress signal, which just empties the nest, in your direction, and they come after you in droves, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, depending on the size of the nest, all at once.

BERNIE

All at once, and don’t bother trying to run away, they can fly faster than you can run.

BILLIE

And that’s when it can get dangerous. But anyway, one of the last things we touched on during that podcast… it was when we were getting more theoretical, more philosophical almost…and what we were talking about was, how do wasps feel about all this, or about anything? Do they think or feel anything at all?

BERNIE

They feel nothing, I guarantee it. Sorry, but I’ve had some run-ins with bees over the years—

BILLIE

Not bees, Bernie. Wasps, remember?

BERNIE

Yeah, OK, wasps. Not bees. Not honeybees. Honeybees are all right. They make honey! They won’t bother you, and anyway they’re too busy doing an honest day’s work. If they do sting you, they can only do it once. But wasps: I really don’t like them at all. To be honest, Billie, this is a challenging show for me today. It’s all I can do to sit still. But I told you I’d see it through, so OK, here I am. Wasps just really give me the willies—

BILLIE

I know it but hold on, let me set it up for our listeners. What if, just what if, wasps have some sort of consciousness about themselves, a self-awareness… some ability to discern things, some kind of an inner life? We might think—

BERNIE

Fffff! Billie, are you kidding? An inner life? Let’s be honest here. They’re just bugs!

BILLIE

Oh, it could be, Bernie… But! Maybe not. How do we know for sure, one way or the other, until we look into it? It would kind of change things, wouldn’t it? If wasps were conscious of their own behavior? That’s why scientists do research, to find things out. What do wasps themselves know, in their little heads, and taken together in their big nest of many individuals? Are they aware? Work with me here for a second. Do they think? Do wasps think?

Now speaking of being aware, we didn’t know this at the beginning but Dr. Feiffenberger’s research group has been working for several years on a sophisticated system combining entomology—

BERNIE

That’s the study of bugs.

BILLIE

Very good, Bernie, you’ve been reading again. Yes, the study of insects. And also, radical new innovations in audio engineering, combined with automated foreign language translation software, and the result, they say, is a system that captures the utterances of wasps, and translates them into your language, making them understandable to humans, like us here in the studio, and you listening at home.

BERNIE

And making our words understandable to them. But don’t ask us how it works.

BILLIE

No, that’s the good Doctor’s department. We do know that the system in fact works. They’ve already tested it on moths, and on cockroaches. From what I gather, the moths put everyone to sleep, and the roaches were rude. Today it’ll be our turn, with a wasp that we captured this morning out in the parking lot. Pretty exciting, don’t you think? Our intern Leah was very brave. So today on the show we’re going to be doing a demonstration.

BERNIE

Oh, goody. And no, we haven’t rehearsed this. Heaven forbid.

BILLIE

Well, Dr. Feiffenberger and our producer thought it might be fun to just take a chance and see what happens.

Now, besides me in the studio, and Bernie here, we have with us a wasp we’ve decided to call Muriel. Her Latin name is Vespula alascensis, a species better known as the common yellowjacket. Muriel is on the table in front of us, just inches away, under a bell-shaped jar of clear glass. There’s a microphone inside the jar and some blockish things of black plastic on top, and all these tiny black wires running in and out and some blinking blue lights, and a small speaker. I need to say that Muriel can’t get out, and won’t get out, until we let her go tomorrow morning. Because even though I like to think she’s being a good sport about this, she’s clearly agitated, and if she could get out she might try to sting us.

BERNIE

Ya think?

BILLIE

Oh, and Muriel really is a female. The yellowjackets that you see around your yard are all likely to be females.

So let’s give it a try. Hello, Muriel!

I said, hello in there, Muriel! Can you hear me?

MURIEL

#!$7@*!!

BERNIE

Ehhh— she doesn’t sound too happy, Billie. Not that I blame her.

BILLIE

Just a second, hold on. Hello, Muriel! It’s me, Billie, and Bernie! We’re not going to hurt you! We’d just like to talk with you!

MURIEL

@!#$%&! #!&@T$! #!$7@*?!

BERNIE

I can picture this going sideways pretty fast. Tell you what, if she makes any trouble here, I’m not afraid of her. I’ll just reach right under there with this can of Raid and kick some yellowjacket butt!

BILLIE

Now, Bernie—

MURIEL

Not we kick your butt first, Bernie!

BILLIE

Wait— what was that? Muriel! Did you say something?

MURIEL

Not “you.” “We.”

BILLIE

How’s that? Not “you”?

MURIEL

Don’t call us “you.” Call us “we.” We here. We are here. Let we— let us out of this bottle!

BILLIE

Wait a minute. So, you’re not a “you”?

MURIEL

No. We are we. Listen to us why don’t you and try to get it straight.

BILLIE

OK, OK, we’re listening.

MURIEL

With us, it’s no individuals. No “you.” We are we. We live. We fly. We work. We eat. We fight. We fight and we kill, too! We no play around. You fight one of us, pretty soon all of us come join in. See how you like that.

BILLIE

Well, you’re understandably upset about being cooped up in there, but you’ll be going home early tomorrow, and in the meantime, can’t you see what a fantastic opportunity this is for you to tell us and everybody listening about yourself, in your own words? How about that?

MURIEL

f&%T$#!@k

BILLIE

Please, Muriel, let’s just try. You and I together. Just for a moment. It could be fun! OK, Muriel?

Tell us, if “we” can— um, if you all can, about your life, your daily life. All of you. I mean, “youse,” I guess…

BERNIE

Holy mackerel…

MURIEL

(takes a breath) We here long before you, OK? You understand? We here first!

All we want is meat. Protein, call it. Just like you. We don’t live so very long. Still, ours is beautiful life, under the sun. We feel its warmth. Every day we eat to stay alive, and we feed our babies. We no slouches. We stay in shape! We no get fat! You ever see a fat yellowjacket? Hmm? Can’t hear you, Bernie.

BERNIE

Not that I recall, Muriel, and let’s not get personal.

MURIEL

So. Then. We do a good job in your garden, too, we clean up bad bugs eating your flowers. If you leave your cheeseburger and soda out where we can find them, we going to go after them too. Protein. Sugar. We must eat. Just like you. Otherwise, we want nothing to do with you! All we want is to be left alone. But no. You see a couple of us, you come after us with fly-swatter, with smoke sometimes, then poison, big poison. The thanks we get. Our babies die, queen dies, nest fall apart, our home. After all that, any surprise we got short temper? We got short temper OK but we got long memory. Good for us. Not so good for you.

You! We see you, think we don’t? You live, too. You work, you eat. You mess with us, all the time. One day, you die.

BILLIE

Oh well now Muriel. You die too, don’t you? Every autumn, at least up here in the north. Isn’t that right?

MURIEL

(sniffs) We die. Yes. But not she. She sleep all winter. She wake up in the spring. She will live. She lives!

BILLIE

This is just amazing… Yes, your queen winters over, that’s true.

MURIEL

True. Yes. Very true. She lives, and so we live. We live through her. So we not die. We not die as if, gone forever.

We here long before you. We here long time after you gone. When you go, you going be gone for good. The last of you. Out with you! No queen for you, no.

You let us out of here this instant!!!

BERNIE

I’ve heard just about enough from this bug. Why, if I had a rolled-up magazine—

BILLIE

No! Now, sit down, Bernie! Muriel is our guest.

BERNIE

Billie, excuse me but why are you being such a pushover? Can’t you see she’s a pest, pure and simple?

BILLIE

I thought you were the one who didn’t want to get personal! Look, Bernie, the way I see it, this is an unbelievably historic, practically first-time-ever chance to talk one-on-one with an insect. More than that, an insect known only to most people as an annoyance. So let’s not blow it. There’s a long history of antagonism between people and yellowjackets; this is a chance for us both to get below the surface, find out more about each other. Cool off a bit, take the anger down a peg. Up to now, we’ve done most of our talking with cans of insecticide. They’ve done most of their talking with their stingers.

BERNIE

Well— yeah! My point exactly! They’ve stung us. They’ve hurt us, they’ve hurt me, that’s for sure. Last time they pounced on me, I was just walking across my lawn, and next thing I know I’m in the ER. It wasn’t a good time.

BILLIE

Oh! I didn’t know it was as bad as that, Bernie. Maybe you should have sat this episode out.

BERNIE

No, no, I’m glad to be here, if only just to trot out some opposing viewpoints. Now, you take a look at this wasp.

BILLIE

Muriel.

BERNIE

Yeah, OK, “Muriel.” She and her kind spoil thousands of picnics and backyard barbeques every summer. They build nests under your roofline, in a corner of your garage that you never think to look at, in some abandoned mouse-hole in the backyard. You don’t go out trying to provoke them. You don’t even know they’re there! And all of a sudden you got ’em all around you, rocking from side to side as they line up for a shot. Ughh! Is that worth the good they do?

BILLIE

Bernie, I can tell you had a very bad time with that bunch of wasps. Now, I have to ask you. Are you sure they were really yellowjackets, like little Muriel here?

BERNIE

Yeah! You bet they were. I think so, anyway…

Well, now… wait a minute. Sheesh…

You know, come to think of it, maybe they weren’t. Maybe... to be perfectly honest, I guess they were the, whatever… the black and white ones, big guys.

MURIEL

Ah-HA!

BERNIE

You shut up!

BILLIE

Bernie! Muriel! We’re all in this conversation together!

Yes, so what you’re saying is that it was bald-faced hornets that attacked you. That’s really just another kind of native wasp, isn’t it? They’re not true hornets. And they’re not yellowjackets either. But it’s true, they’re big, and fast, and very aggressive.

MURIEL

And nasty, very nasty, those guys. Ughhhhhh!

BERNIE

Wait— so you know them? Well of course you know them. And you don’t like them either?

MURIEL

We know them, yes. Make me shiver! They way too hot for us neither. You never see us with them. No like them. They give me the willies! We stay away from them!

(draws a breath) Bernie, I just thinking. You are like me, in a way. You wary, you quick to anger, you don’t trust. You territorial. I get that. We— we admire that. We not so different from you.

We—

BILLIE

Yes, Muriel?

MURIEL

We— I sorry, Bernie. And it was the bald-faces anyway, not us, so I can’t say we sorry. But I sorry. Whoever does the attacking, it is painful and frightening. I know. It’s supposed to be. But still, you weren’t doing anything wrong, from what you say, and you were caught by surprise. No fun.

BERNIE

No, not much fun.

MURIEL

(after a pause) I sorry, Bernie. You seem like an OK guy underneath all that fussing and fuming. It shouldn’t have happened. I wish for you that it hadn’t.

BERNIE

Why, thank you, Muriel. I appreciate that.

BILLIE

Bernie, I do believe that the show is having a moment!

BERNIE

Well, you know, come on…

They’re OK, I guess, yellowjackets. Seeing as how it wasn’t Muriel’s fault. They’re beautiful, in a way. I’ll admit that. And tough, too. Let’s be fair, they’re certainly badasses! And what do they want? They’re like us, just as Muriel says. They want family close by, and sunny days to enjoy, and something to eat and to feed to their young. You know that farmers benefit from yellowjackets too, in that they help to keep agricultural pests down.

BILLIE

Bernie! You have been reading!

BERNIE

Oh, yeah. Well, sure! I wanted to come to the show prepared, right?

So, us and the yellowjackets and all the rest of the wasps, and really everything else like that, the sharks, the bears, those stinging jellyfish… when we bump into them or they bump into us, it’s not so good. As long as we don’t bump into each other then it’s OK, but when we do… It’s nobody’s fault, I guess. It’s a nice big world out there with room for everybody, but sometimes when we meet…

MURIEL

Not so good.

BERNIE

No, not so good.

BILLIE

Well, friends, we’ve got to wrap up a most unusual edition of “Subdivision Stories,” and I’m sure we’ll be having more conversations like this at another time. Be sure to join us next episode when we’re going to be talking about—

MURIEL

Billie? Bernie?

BERNIE

Yes, Muriel, what is it?

MURIEL

I— um— what time is it?

BILLIE

Time? Oh, right now as we’re recording this, it’s about seven. Seven in the evening.

MURIEL

Ah! So dusk is coming soon?

BILLIE

Uh, yes. In about an hour.

MURIEL

I think maybe you want to wait to go home. OK?

I think maybe you wait to leave for home, for another hour or so. Maybe a little bit longer. No hurry along. No rush-rush. You take you time. Just relax. Here. Indoors. With me.

BERNIE

Any special reason, Muriel?

MURIEL

Ah— um— I just— when you started the program today, I… I sent out my distress signal.

BILLIE

Oh.

BERNIE

Uh-oh.

MURIEL

So, ah— now we waiting for you. Plenty of us. Plenty, plenty. As long as the sun is still up in the sky.

I sorry, I really am. But right now all of us waiting for you two. Outside.

Like a New Broom: an essay about an early job I had

I remember Bill Rollings (pronounced Rollins), the store manager at the Muth Company and my boss. (The “Mu” in Muth was pronounced the same as it is in “music.”) Tall, respected, fair-minded, a keen observer and a master of details, it was his task to get the store through each day, keeping the employees busy and the customers happy, keeping the shelves stocked and senior management off his back. I did whatever he asked me to do. Probably in my early weeks, he would have assumed that I was a spy (uppity white college kid) sent by management (entrenched old-money white folks) to keep an eye on him and the rest of the store staff. But I wasn’t, and management never asked me to spy on anyone, and I did my best to pull my weight around the store. After I'd been there a few months, he allowed me to change some of the shelving and displays in the store to better showcase underappreciated items of our stock. After closing, the two of us would pass the time for a few minutes at the front door before he swung it open for me and locked it behind me. Bill the Gatekeeper, always the last to leave. I remember these unstructured conversations fondly, not for their content (it was just us B.S.’ing about how the day had gone) but for their ease, the way the dialogue would flow between us without tension or one-upsmanship. In his spare time, Bill made wall hangings with a distinctly African flavor out of colorful fabrics, yarns, and rope, and he brought in photos of these to show me. He also showed me photos of him and his family on vacation. He tried to reach out to me. He tried, I think, to figure me out (not the last of my bosses to do that).

****************

Early in 1974, having left my announcing job at Washington’s WGMS because of on-air anxiety, I was casting around for something to do. I was 23. By itself, my college diploma qualified me for nothing. My radio experience at college and at WGBH had gotten me the WGMS job and now that was over. My girlfriend, Maureen, had a job at NPR. The previous July, she and I had rented a small pink stucco house on North 22nd Street in Arlington. The realtor hadn’t wanted to rent to an unmarried couple, hadn’t even wanted to speak to us, but after someone at NPR made a call to her we found ourselves sitting down to sign a lease.

There was something about living in a quiet, leafy neighborhood in a pleasant Virginia suburb, where we could walk to stores and the bus, that fit for the moment what we seemed to be looking for. Like my dad, I mowed the lawn and took the trash out and took a daily paper and unclogged the gutters. We tried to raise vegetables in the hard, red-clay soil. Maureen bought cosmetics from the local Mary Kay rep. We tried to fit in. We kept a low profile and we kept the yard tidy. But we were aware that we made some of our neighbors uneasy. An unmarried couple from a northern state playing house . . . that was “different.” This was the South, fairly conservative. People probably wondered what was happening to their neighborhood.

Through NPR we were able to get passes to concerts at Wolf Trap, out in the Virginia countryside. A nice evening out, now and then. But Maureen’s pay wouldn’t cover our rent and expenses for very long — I had to find a new job.

So it was me with the Post’s classified section, along with everybody else. My degree did open some doors. Most quickly slammed shut. Later on, I realized that people in charge of hiring found it odd that an Ivy League graduate was seeking minimum-wage work in sales or in the shipping room, jobs of that kind. Wasn’t I supposed to be in law school, or med school?

At this point I remembered the posters I had made for the pop concerts my college station had sponsored. That experience had given me some knowledge of graphic-arts processes and commercial printing. And an awareness of the importance of promotion, especially self-promotion. Armed with this thin mantle of preparedness, I approached two local art-supplies outlets, one of which was in Falls Church, just to the west of where I was living. I’ve forgotten its name, but it was in a large, modern, brightly-lit building, and there was Helvetica Medium typography all over the walls and the shelves and the delivery vehicles parked outside, just like at Charrette back in Cambridge. I really wanted to work for them and in my mind we were an ideal match. In their minds we weren’t, and I wasn’t offered a job.

My second choice was the George Muth Company, which occupied an antique five-story building on New York Avenue at 14th Street, N.W., with a retail shop on the ground floor and offices and storerooms up above. Below was a basement, with rats. The company had been founded in 1865. Many generations of Muths had sold framing, drafting, and artists’ supplies out of several successively more ample quarters as the company grew until it finally settled into New York Avenue in the 1920’s. Muth’s original motto still graced its letterhead: “We supply everything but the talent.” Three blocks away was The White House, where I got off the bus from North Arlington, for my interview.

Muth was a tired old company, a dying company though I didn’t know it yet, in what turned out to be a tired old neighborhood. There was trouble, various in its severity: purse-snatching, prostitution, shoplifting, people having fistfights, people using storefronts as latrines, people passed out on the sidewalk. Next door was a “burlesque theater,” which may have once been a venue for plays, variety shows, and movies, but was now just a strip joint. The facade of the building was decorated with gaudy banners advertising the renowned strippers who would supposedly be performing that day. From late morning until past Muth’s closing time, a barker in a cap and long overcoat strode up and down the sidewalk in front of the theater, tirelessly drumming up business: “Come on in, gents! The girls are right on the stage!”

There was grime in the air, grime on the walls of the buildings and on the sidewalks, grime on your tongue. Inside the Muth building there was more grime, and shadows, and exhausted coats of paint on the walls, and lighting fixtures that were not up to the task of illuminating the interior.

My interview was with the general manager of sales, a stout, over-middle-age white gentleman in a suit and tie, paunchy and perspiring, whose name I’ve forgotten, which is too bad because he did hire me. Let’s call him Mr. Smith. All of the top management at Muth were white folks. Most of the staff and lower-level managers, at the store and at the warehouse in South Arlington, were black. Mr. Smith slouched in his heavy oak chair, as if it was too much of an effort to sit up straight, today, tomorrow, or ever. Holding in one hand the resume I had sent him a week earlier, waving it lightly back and forth, he addressed the wall over my head: “We’ve been looking for a young man of your caliber.” Mr. Smith was from somewhere in the Old Confederacy, and this came out “yaw calibuh.”

I needed to be putting money back into my depleted checking account, so I took the job without asking what they expected me to do. I had an idea that I’d be starting as a sales clerk in the retail store, but I wasn’t sure. I think now that they thought of me as a potential knight-in-shining-armor, who had come from out of nowhere to aid in their rescue, but this was never explained to me, and anyway, I was not going to be that guy.

****************

Bill Rollings’ second-in-command was Charles Hunter, very focussed, very energetic (but it was a contained energy), also detail-oriented, also fair, but a demanding boss, and not one to pass the time with me or anyone else. He would take no excuses from employees who called in sick, especially on Saturday, our busiest day, or who called in because their cat was sick. When customers came in for a certain paintbrush or tube of acrylic, having been assured by a phone salesman upstairs that we had plenty in stock, when we actually didn’t (a screw-up which happened with depressing frequency), Charles could soothe them, advising them that by next week, “hopefully we should have some in by then,” which was of course meaningless, but Charles could make it sound so reassuring.

I remember Kirk Glover, Muth's outside salesman. Kirk was Muth's Willy Loman, glassy-eyed, footsore, bent, and weary, with a sagging samples case, an air of detachment, and a tendency to philosophize. He stopped me once in the hall outside the lunchroom: “Have you ever wondered about my name? Glover. That's right, my forefathers made gloves. You see? And Kirk. That's short for Kirkland. That means the land surrounding the kirk, the church. Someone who’s living there. Or someone who’s buried there. It's Scottish. You're interested, aren't you. I can tell you are. You’re not like the rest of these yahoos here. They only know how to say ‘yep’ and ‘you-all.’ ”

A few weeks into my job at Muth, I was able to look up and notice things like the boldly-colored, form-fitting tunic that Charles typically wore around the store all day. (Like the rest of the sales staff, I wore a baggy, light-blue jacket that the company provided. It was cut somewhat like a blazer and had big white buttons on it and was, in a word, lame.) I noticed the tunic and asked Charles about it. It turned out that it had been custom-made for him by Jimmy, one of the upstairs phone salesmen, who also appeared from time to time down in the store. Jimmy liked to wear his own designs, and was one of the more sweet-natured people I ever worked with. The word for Jimmy was “flamboyant.” Later I knew that he was gay, of course, but that didn’t get talked about around the store, and I had the feeling that among the black employees it really didn't get talked about. The tunic Charles wore was such a nice tunic, a unique tunic, that I was considering asking Jimmy if he would make one for me, too. (Who knew? When you’re 23, you try things out. Anything at all might be part of your path forward.) One morning, Jimmy failed to show up for work. It shocked me to learn, some days later, that his body had been found overnight in the trunk of a car in a parking lot, somewhere in the District. He had been shot several times. Kirk, ashen-faced (but Kirk was always ashen-faced): “How little we know. How little we know.”

Most of my time at Muth, it was my job to wait on customers who walked into the store. For years, probably since its founding, there had been no such thing as self-service at the Muth store. It was considered disrespectful to the customer, to make them rummage through the displays for what they wanted. Also, self-service tended to invite shoplifting, and it turned out that Muth had plenty of that already. Even in 1974, though, this model of time-consuming, personal, one-on-one service was becoming a thing of the past. Tradition was strong at Muth, however, and management stuck with the practice. If you wanted a roll of drafting paper or a watercolor brush or a pink pencil eraser or a mat board in a certain shade, a sales clerk would wait on you, advise you (drawing upon the breadth of their knowledge) regarding the best product for your needs and price range, and get it for you. (Even though most of those items were on display in the store and within easy reach of the customers.) Then, on a large central table near the one and only cash register, the sales clerk would wrap your items in brown paper and write up your purchase, by hand, on a large, multicolored, carbonless order ticket. (This was partly for inventory control, and partly, I think, to keep the customs and methods of mid-century American retailing alive for just a little bit longer.) Then you would take your items and your ticket over to the cashier (an affable Jamaican woman named Ruby Wilson) who would ring you up. I remember the time a customer came in for three tubes of gouache, which she picked off the shelf unaided. It was a busy morning and all the clerks were occupied. When she realized that she wasn’t allowed to approach Ruby until someone had written up her order, she flung the gouache onto the order table and stormed out.

I worked at Muth five days a week, including Saturday, for over a year, though it seemed much longer. The store was closed on Sunday. Each clerk got a different weekday off to compensate for working on Saturday. Those of us with a Significant Other who had a normal five-day workweek (such as at NPR) found that we had to do all of our weekending as a couple on Sunday. It turned out that shopping meccas, museums, restaurants, and other attractions had limited hours on Sunday. Gamely we scheduled day trips to the Chesapeake Bay, Catoctin Park, the Appalachians, Harper’s Ferry, and other places but found that most of our time was spent driving out and back. We had to come into the District for our jobs, and somehow weren’t eager to spend more time there on our one day off together.

Who else comes to mind now? A genteel woman in her mid-fifties with a blond beehive hairdo, Flora Lee Muth (called “Miss Muth”) was the figurehead of the organization, the latest (and last) in the Muth family to assume leadership of the Company. Her home was an old, perhaps antebellum mansion in the Virginia countryside, the old Muth home, the kind of property with a title, like “Stonegate”; it was a name very much like that. Her home had its own letterhead, copies of which could be seen around the adminstrative offices. Miss Muth had the front office on the top floor, overlooking New York Ave., but no real power and not much to do with day-to-day operations. I was introduced to her on my first day (the lunchroom, restrooms, time clock ((for punching in and out)) and administrative offices were all located in the fifth floor). She acknowledged my presence with a thin smile and a nod of the head. I noticed that she had a habit of fussing lightly with her hair with both sets of fingers while speaking with someone. She asked me where I’d be working. When I told her I wasn’t sure yet, she cheerfully remarked, “Well! Nothing cleans like a new broom!” and walked away, still primping.

Miss Muth had a private secretary named Betty, short, stocky, alert, well-organized. She was about Miss Muth’s age; I gathered that they had been together for many years. Perhaps Betty had also been secretary to the Muth Who Had Come Before, Flora Lee’s father. One of Betty's legs was lame, which gave her a swaying gait. It was clear that she was fond of Miss Muth and would do anything for her. I was surprised, though, to see that all day long she wore the same light-blue jacket as us lowly sales clerks. Her old desk had a glass top; underneath the glass, where she could look at them while she worked, were various postcards, pictures, and photos. One was of Miss Muth. Another one was of Jesus.

I think now that the company probably tried me out in different positions for my first four or five days, trying to see where I might fit in best. My guide for this journey was the actual executive secretary, Eileen McDaniel, also in her fifties, whose “southern” accent was so different to my ears that I had trouble understanding her. “Come over this way,” she said, “I want to introduce you to Mister Flat-Head.” Mister who? I looked up and there indeed was a man in jacket and tie and glasses and an extremely level flat-top haircut. What had I gotten myself into? After a moment, I realized that Eileen had said “Whitehead” (Waat-Head), not “Flat-Head.” It was not my last such misunderstanding.

She put me to work that day helping Ed Whitehead and another salesman who processed government bids all day. This was a big part of Muth’s business, potentially. Government agencies, and there were many, sent out requests for bids incessantly. The requests came in reams of continuous paper with pale green stripes and tractor holes along the sides, bearing exhaustive specs printed using the dot-matrix process. “Tape, pressure-sensitive, adhesive, 3/4". . .” was how a very long request began for what amounted to a truckload of Scotch tape. All Muth had to do was be the low bidder, and they could take their cut of a sale and delivery that would never have to pass through the store or even the warehouse.

I never found out where Eileen was from, but I assumed it was somewhere in the mountainous South. It seemed impertinent to ask. I came to realize that Washington was a draw for many southerners. It was common for people from southern states, even more than for people from northern and western states, to come to Washington in search of better pay and working conditions, a career, a more interesting life, a new start. Me, I had just followed my girlfriend down there.

Alice the switchboard operator. All calls to Muth came through Alice's vintage telephone switchboard, as if this were still the “Number, please” era before direct-dialing. Bill Rollings said that any time something went wrong with it, the phone company would have to comb through their ranks of repairmen to find someone old enough to know how to fix it, “one of them old dudes.” Alice was no longer middle-aged and her joints hurt. Someone remarked to me, “Alice is sorry she's gotten too old and too heavy now and can’t have any fun anymore.” She loved a good joke and had an infectious cackle and a wavy black wig. She was one of the first to go when the new owners arrived.

Hawkins the ex-trumpet player, now Muth's janitor. Once in a while he arrived for work drunk. In such a case, Alice would cover for him, phoning upstairs to Eileen that “Hawkins called in sick today,” and recruiting someone to get Hawkins off the premises in a hurry and pointed in the direction of home, where he could sleep it off and keep his job.

Dores Hedgepeth. She pronounced her name “Doris.” She was especially knowledgeable about the many kinds of paints and papers we stocked. Her hair was orange, and she kept it short. Dores was the first single mom I ever knew, and I often wondered about that, especially how hard it must have been for her to be apart from her daughter all day.

I certainly remember Gregory Taylor, a young man possibly hired when Hawkins could no longer make it to work. Gregory did a little bit of everything menial around Muth. I was always happy to see him; he brightened my day. Gregarious, funny, with a lightning-quick, adaptable mind and a trove of street-wise stories, jokes, and sayings, Gregory had once been a scholarship student at a prestigious prep school in Washington. Something happened to him back then, and suddenly he was homeless and shocked to find himself living on the street, dressed in old clothing nobody wanted. He told me about a mother and her little boy, the mother holding tight to her little boy’s hand, walking past him on a city sidewalk and giving him a wide berth. Gregory at the time would have been slumped against the outer wall of a building, a pile of dirty rags with hands and a face. The little boy turned and asked him, “Mister, are you a hobo?” “No, son. I’m not a hobo,” Gregory replied, chuckling ruefully, even then, about having that term applied to him.

Gregory had gotten some help, and now had a place to live, and a girlfriend, Carol, and this job at Muth. He and Carol were devoted to each other, but still, Gregory had misgivings. He wasn’t sure what she wanted of him, not sure whether he could deliver on it, not sure where they were headed, or where he was headed. Oh, sure, he allowed, the sex was OK, “but sometimes, you know, I get a little lonely up there.” Gregory had beliefs about what women, those “little black girls from the ghet-to,” wanted from a man. “They want a man, and they want a man who’ll treat them all right and not smack them around, and they don’t want a man to have a baby with them and then disappear.” Before I left the company, in 1975, Gregory had enlisted in the army, and I don’t think he took Carol with him.

The D.C. Metro system was being built while I was working at Muth. Many sections of the city had been torn up for the construction of the tunnels. One hot Saturday afternoon, we noticed that in the airspace above New York Ave., a cloud of yellow insects had suddenly appeared. We could see them through the store’s front door and windows. They were zamming around in an angry, disturbed way. Of course! One of the diesel shovels must have hit a big underground nest of bees. No, not bees — yellowjackets!

Holy shit! And now people were running into the store to get away from them, swatting and swearing, and a few angry yellowjackets came in with them, so we began swatting and swearing too, and ducking and scurrying around. And it was awful but somehow hysterically funny, like a scene from a movie. In strode a man in a golfer's cap; addressing no one in particular, he demanded, “Hey, man! When y’all gonna do somethin’ ’bout the Bee Situation?” I doubled over in laughter. Sure, it was a piece of shtick reminiscent of “Amos and Andy”: the comic-righteous outrage, the highfalutin language in the face of absurdity. I couldn’t help that. I hadn't heard anything that funny in a very long time, and I think I was starved for it.

We would get interesting customers coming into the store. (According to Bill Rollings, Flora Lee's father, in his day, had dubbed them “cartoons,” as in, “Say, boys, where all the cartoons at today?”) Senator Howard Baker stopped by often, to pick up supplies for Mrs. Baker, who painted. Hearing-impaired art students from Gallaudet College would come by with lists of supplies; sometimes they'd be accompanied by a classmate who could hear; sometimes they came alone, and would trying signing with us, unsuccessfully, and then would lead one of us around the store, picking things out, pantomiming when they couldn't find what they wanted. An assertive man in a suit made frequent visits to buy drafting film with a government purchase order, always announcing himself as “Foster from Agriculture.” I waited on Sam Gilliam once; he was in his forties and already famous, but still I treated him the same as everyone else, asking to see his driver’s license before I would take his check. I feel bad about it to this day, because my sticking to the rules required him to be more patient and forbearing with me, with my system, than he should have had to be.

Once a deranged man in a baseball cap wandered into the store and began having one, two, then three of the clerks fetch him things. Both Bill and Charles happened to be out that day. We didn't know the man was deranged at first, but we found out pretty soon. A colorful heap of art supplies began to grow on the wrapping table. Who was this guy? Was he really going to pay for all this stuff? As someone began dutifully to write up his order, he became agitated, wanting some of the supplies to be put back and substitutions brought out, claiming we were trying to trick him into buying something he didn't really want. This kind of thing went on for quite a while, sucking most of the air and energy out of the room, the clerks running out of patience, the man becoming increasingly upset and finally hostile. He grabbed a ballpoint pen from beside the cash register and raised it over his head, reaching way back, glaring at Ruby and shouting, “Gonna stab you right through the heart!” Then he flung the pen away and dashed out the front door, another Muth character making his exit.

I, too, made my exit that summer. Maureen and I had broken up, though we decided to stay with our rental house until the lease ran out. I wanted to go home, and I wanted a new start. Muth’s new owners, a chain of office-supplies stores called Ginn’s, swooped in and made some big changes right away and had many more in mind. They had spotted me in the lineup, and wanted my future and theirs to be intertwined. But I was through with D.C., and made my excuses. Maureen was moving into an apartment building where pets weren't allowed, and soon I was headed up I-95 in a Ryder truck with my furniture, and both of our cats.

Dilemmas, Diplomas: an essay about my time in college

The key characteristic of my years in college (1968 to 1972), the one thing that really made it special (you could say), sort of like living in a big rambling rooming house that everybody knew had been built over a sinkhole, was not:

the number of lectures sat through,
the number of term papers written,
the number of textbooks bought, and the oatmealy smell of the stacks of new books at the
   bookstore,
the number of football games attended,
the terrific number of hours spent at the radio station when I should have been studying,
the amount of dope smoked,
the number of late-evening feeds at IHOP, Ken’s, the No-Name, the How Yen Han,
feeling, on a campus of thousands, very alone,
feeling that I knew nothing, that I must be the most ignorant person on campus, in the city,
   and maybe in the entire world,
sleeping soundly through the arrival of the tactical police, who came in force at dawn,
   batons swinging, to oust the students occupying nearby University Hall.

No, it wasn’t those things, though the memories remain vivid. For me, the key characteristic was my four-year relationship with the Selective Service System, the government board that decided which men would be conscripted into the military, and when. (Things have changed. We have a volunteer military now. The SSS still exists, though, in the event the military requires mass conscription again.) Though you might hear from them infrequently, the draft board’s power over you was limitless. All men were “classified,” from the time they registered onward. (Women weren’t drafted, weren’t required to register for the draft, and thus weren’t classified.) Your classification could change. Depending on how you were classified when the military needed you, your induction could be “deferred,” temporarily or forever.

If I become a First Lieutenant
Would you put my photo on your piano?

The album “Bookends,” which included “Punky’s Dilemma,” a silly little song with a dark heart, was getting a lot of radio play in 1968. (I don’t know how Mr. Simon and Mr. Garfunkel were classified.) Men classified “1-A” were “available for service” right away, and when the need was great, as it was 1968-1971, these men soon found themselves in uniform. College students were typically classified “2-S,” denoting a man engaged full-time in a course of study at an “accredited college.” At that time, it was certainly a system based on privilege. If you were at college, you were judged to have Good Prospects, and therefore were excused from the grueling regimens of training camp, and the dirty little wars where you could be killed. A tragic waste, that would be... and a reason for Mom and Dad to change how they voted next time. If you weren’t at college, you were judged to have few Good Prospects, and were sent to wherever a bunch of over-the-hill white men in Washington decided you should go, for whatever cobbled-together reasons, because, let’s face it, you were expendable. That was the accepted norm.

So it became very important to stay in college and cling to your deferment no matter what, unless you happened to be keen on going to war. You would continue to be “deferred” until you were no longer enrolled; by that time, circumstances might have changed and the military might no longer have plans to call you up.

What if you left that college midway? That big East Coast college there. The one you maybe were feeling wasn’t good enough after all, not for you. The one your proud grandmother was paying for, the one your father graduated from, the one your great-grandfather taught at. That one! Say you wanted to figure out how to transfer to some other four-year school, one that would be a better fit for you, being careful to keep your shield up, to be enrolled at all times in some actual college somewhere or other, should the draft board decide to take a peek at you. Say you needed a break from that way of living altogether, and wanted to work for a while, or travel around the country, or go back to your old bedroom under the eaves in your parents’ house and pull the covers over your head. You would lose your deferment as soon as you failed, at the beginning of any semester, to file SSS Form 109, the document that certified you were a real student. Your local draft board would immediately send you an Order to Report. I can tell you that there are few pieces of mail you can receive that are more chilling to read. In a short time, you would be off to training camp and eventually, I suppose, to Vietnam, well-known processor of young men (and women) into broken dolls, into human remains. This we all knew, in 1968, to one extent or another, because the Vietnam conflict made a stink that wrinkled your nose, all the way around here on the other side of the world.

Vietnam could be viewed as a collection of numbers games. Our success there was said to be measureable via the periodic counts of enemy fighters killed. The higher the number, the better we must be doing. And so there was pressure on the counters to count amply, to err on the lofty side. The higher-ups liked it better that way. Then there were the often-reported continually updated numbers of U.S. armed forces personnel/people in the fight, and how many more were going to be needed to “finish the job,” how the Army (especially) couldn’t be expected to “finish the job” unless this or that many more were drafted and shipped ASAP to Southeast Asia. Because of course more troops were always required, the job having turned out to be tougher than originally thought. Replacements were also constantly needed for the soldiers already there who were being wounded or killed at such a great rate.

Old Roger, draft-dodger, leaving by the basement door,
Everybody knows what he’s tippy-toein’ down there for...

Tim O’Brien, or his character, in The Things They Carried, couldn’t believe that they were going to take him, either. “The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. I remember opening up the letter, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head, a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good for this war. It couldn’t happen. A mistake maybe—a foul-up in the paperwork. I was no soldier. I hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping out. I hated dirt and tents and mosquitoes. I didn’t know a rifle from a slingshot. Beyond all this was the raw fact of terror: I did not want to die, certainly not then, not there, not in a wrong war.” His objections reflected an assumption that one’s individual character and preferences would count for something / ought to be taken into account / maybe would be considered. They wouldn’t.

My order to report arrived early in September of 1969. I had neglected (and never neglected again) to submit my Form 109 “in a timely manner,” and accordingly, my draft board pounced. The order really did say “Greeting” near the top. It spelled out very clearly where and when I was to report, and what I was to bring (practically nothing). It was clear that I probably wouldn’t be coming home again for a long time, that induction was the beginning of a long journey with an uncertain end. The time when I could move freely through the world would be coming to an end, and quickly. It was unbelievable, but very believable. Panicked, I ran to the office my college had set up to deal with students’ draft-board issues. I showed my induction order to a woman at the front desk, this woman that saved my life. “Oh, that’s nothing,” she said, barely looking up. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll just send them another 109.”

So it was working! I was staying out of the army! I was beating the System with my own system, one of Privilege! Of course, someone went in my place, if you wanted to think of it that way. (Isn’t that what people always said? Or was that only what I said?) So I was carrying guilt around in my head, guilt and fear and confusion and a lot of fuzzy thinking. And by 1971, I was growing tired of the pretense. My classes, courses, my work towards my degree, lacked meaning, direction, purpose. My grades were slipping and I couldn’t seem to stop them, couldn’t seem to care. If I flunked out, the draft would be waiting for me, and it was becoming difficult to care. If the war had continued, I would have gone. (The option of fleeing to Canada never entered my mind.) There was a draft lottery by then, a fairer system where your birthdate was randomly assigned a number from 1 to 365 (mine was 103 — another number!). Low numbers would be called up first. Number 103 was not a “safe” number when the lottery began, but by 1972 our participation in the conflict was “winding down,” and the army no longer needed as many soldiers, and weren’t taking recruits with numbers that high. The nation was sick of war, sick of arguing about the war, and, I think, realized that we could not “win” it in any real sense, and just wanted to stop the dying and get our collective ass-kicking over with.

My! So many quotations in this little piece! Well, isn’t that what a lot of college time was about? Quoting other people?

Quote other people
and cite the sources.
That way you don’t have to
join the armed forces.

While we’re at it, here’s another quote. This is a comment by someone named “Virgil,” edited by me for length and clarity (a lot more clarity than I was carrying around in my head during college), which appears below the YouTube audio of “Punky’s Dilemma.” (Go ahead, look it up and listen to it. It’s just over two minutes long, I can wait.)

“1968. A sensitive young man (me at 16 going on 17) hears this song. He is fascinated. The song is truly delightful. Beautiful even. But ya gotta understand. The world was changing. Muscle cars, miniskirts, and marijuana: the life! But they had this war going on in Vietnam. People were dying. My hometown newspaper posted photos of dead hometown boys every week. In the small city I lived in, we could see 12 to 15 faces, every week. Dead friends. We used to talk about it at lunch in the cafeteria. ‘Man, they got Jessie Ray last week, and his cousin Lawrence two weeks ago.’ Punky’s Dilemma was ALL of our dilemma at that time. You could have a good time at the municipal pool or drive-in, but you might be called up to go and die. And the line about, ‘if I become a first lieutenant, would you put my photo on your piano?’ Folks, in 1968, there were still plenty of photos of handsome young men in their uniforms who were killed in WWII, still placed carefully and dusted weekly on many a piano in my town. A lighthearted tune in style for sure, but in the vernacular of the time, a ‘heavy’ piece of music.”

Monday, January 8, 2024

About Me and Classical Music

My experience of classical music is rooted in my childhood years (fidgeting through performances at Symphony Hall in the itchy black wool pants my parents made me wear for the occasion, the BSO being Church), and in influences as recent as NPR’s Facebook post “The Top 10 Classical Albums of The Year,” which demonstrates if nothing else that composers and performers of music for the concert hall have been busy, making up new things for us to listen to. It’s not all Mozart and Beethoven anymore. Actually, it hasn’t been for a while.

Yet the following scene is still typical:

The winter concert hall is warm and well-lit, and buzzing with small-talk among the concertgoers taking their seats, or searching for their seats, or already sitting in their seats, or in someone else’s seats, having disposed of their coats and scarves as well as they can, and peering now at the fine print in the program while the members of the orchestra assemble themselves onstage. The percussionists are trying out their timpani, the violas are practicing their peskiest parts, the trumpets are galloping up and down their scales, the bassoonist is doing a last-minute run-through of an especially tricky solo, sounding like a dove cooing to itself.

The concertmaster stands and plays the concert A, and the rest of the orchestra falls into line with an upwelling of coordinated sound, literally setting the stage for what’s to come. Now the conductor strides forward from the wings, smiling broadly. She or he steps smartly to the podium, bows to the orchestra, turns and bows to the audience, right, center, and left, as the audience applauds, although no one has done anything at this point to deserve it. Facing the orchestra again, the conductor now raises the baton, waits (sometimes for many moments) for silence to descend in the theater, and now the baton falls.

It seems a timeless ritual, like a religious service. If a male, the conductor is likely dressed in a customary outfit known as white tie, or some similar attire slightly more 21st-century. The orchestra members are wearing formal clothing too, with black, gray, and slices of white predominating. Why is this? Sometimes there are classical performances in which the orchestra is dressed in casual clothing, with no adverse effect on the quality of the music, except that musicians dressed informally seem to be enjoying themselves more. Certainly the days are past where the audience would also show up in stiff traditional attire, to take “their” seats. At one time, this code of dress may have been a sign of respect towards the esteemed maestro and musicians, and to the well-known pillars of the Western symphonic canon, most of them white male Europeans. Or perhaps it was a way of signaling that whatever changes might occur in the world outside the hall, the old standards of privilege, and the privileged, would be maintained within it.

In a way, we in the audience are part of the performance too. Our job is to sit and listen, to applaud when the time is right, to enter and exit on cue, and in general to pay up, keep quiet, and behave ourselves: no talking or eating or self-grooming while the program is underway, no standing up, no shouting, no throwing things, no taking pictures, no dancing around or rushing the stage, please please please won’t you kindly refrain from Just About Everything.

The whole classical/concert experience is full of signaling. When my father was inducted into the Army in 1943, they at first wanted to put him in the signal corps; they thought that he, as a violin player, would already comprehend how abstract symbols could convey explicit instructions. (For better or worse his pre-architecture training won out, and he was placed among the combat engineers instead.)

What else can we say about classical music? For one thing, when you experience it in person, it is unamplified. No microphones for the performers, no loudspeakers stacked on the stage, no mixing board. Traditionally, it is an acoustic music, relying on instruments played by hand, and not dependent on electronics. Everything is live. Pre-recorded music and sound effects are seldom utilized. Sometimes pipe organs or electric keyboards figure into performances, and they are dependent on an electric current and some form of mechanical assistance. Mostly, though, power is only required for lighting, heating, and ventilation.

Classical music is old school. Much of the repertoire has been around for over a century, and it is not going the way of the dodo anytime soon. Your Google news feed is not apt to tempt you with something like “Hot New Trends That’ll Change Your Mind About Symphonies.” Tradition here is strong. Hip and chic are not.

Classical music sounds expansive. It is meant to make an impression on you. It is meant to be a statement on the part of the composer and on the part of the performers. Classical music is often monumental, heroic-sounding, thrilling, thought-provoking, intelligent, demanding, requiring a commitment from you.

Classical music, in person, is a visual experience. You are watching music being made, by an ensemble of fairly ordinary-looking people, using devices that are constructed wholly or in part out of natural or handcrafted materials. The brasses glitter, the double basses shine, the bows of the violins rise and fall in rhythmic waves, the percussionist’s hovering, marshmallow-tipped mallets strike with precision, as they have for centuries. The conductor makes a choreography of the music, striking the time, gesticulating, stabbing, chopping, dragging the sound forth, in a strange, fixed-foot interpretive dance.

Classical music is planned music. With the exception of the soloists’ cadenzas, improvisation is not a factor in a performance. The composer’s score serves as the reliable map to guide the musicians through the maze. (I am always impressed with people who can pick up some sheet music, look at it, and begin to hum the melody or the harmony in the right tempo and the right key. Never could figure out how they did that. I am a slow reader in the English language to begin with, and a musical score is another language entirely, in which Latin letterforms are pushed to the margins. A typical score is a dizzying sight, and sometimes resembles dead carpenter ants flattened on the page.)

Classical music, if performed competently, is delivered to you complete and highly polished, with your 100% satisfaction in mind. Mostly, you only need to sit still and listen, though that can be more challenging than it sounds.

Classical music is virtually limitless and can lead you anywhere. In time, you could find yourself listening to something like the Ramayana monkey chant (www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6EFGuXEowk).

Over the years, I learned to call the kind of classical music I enjoyed “programmatic.” You’re probably aware that this type of composition is intended evoke mental images of languid summer afternoons, or battles, or birdsong, or fauns, or the ocean, or thunderstorms. The kind of classical music that tended to put me to sleep is called “abstract.” Here, musical ideas are to be explored (and then explored some more, and then explored at even greater length), but you’ll only be reminded of birdsong by accident.

You can ignore classical music. Even if you like it, you can turn your back on it and walk away from it for a while, maybe a long while. If you don’t like it, if you consider it to be dull and square and stuffy and elitist, you can easily avoid it, and never have to experience it.

Classical music is serious. People take a scholarly approach to it. So, then, you have to know what you’re talking about if you undertake to discuss any aspect of it with someone. And you have to know not mispronounce the names of the performers, the compositions, or the composers and the cities they hail from. You have to expect to sit through music that you might find boring: lengthy works for solo piano, pieces for duos or trios or quartets or quintets or sextets or septets or octets or nonets that strike you as tedious, music without strong or memorable or hummable themes. Works from the 20th and 21st centuries that seem bizarre.

Then there is the ponderous music of Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Rachmaninoff, that you may find, after sampling it, learning a bit more about it, and finally sitting through some of it, to be exhausting, impenetrable, beyond your reach, a waste of your time.

So, here’s a suburban middle-of-the-road fella’s conception of classical music: give me Respighi, Sibelius, Copland, Mussorgsky, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky (even the chamber suite “L’Histoire du Soldat”; Stravinsky makes you listen.) And not so much your Mozart, your Haydn, Schubert, Schumann; they make me nod off at concerts. Give me Alan Hovhaness. Yes, him. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeXEP7VzQqo). And Arvo Pärt too, why not. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp2oxWdRMuk)

At my college station, about a third of the programming over the course of any week was classical. During orgy period (the four weeks during winter and spring exams) the normal schedule would be suspended and the station would switch to all-day, all-night operation. Extended “orgies” of recorded music would be broadcast, and were intended to keep undergrads company as they stayed up very late and woke up very early to cram for exams and finish up those overdue term papers. There were rock and jazz and folk music orgies, but the memorable ones were the classical orgies. For example, there was, during my time, a 40-hour Mozart orgy (or was it 60?), during which no single work was played more than once. The DJ, or “orgiast,” attempted to one-man (that is, to do both the announcing and the engineering from the control room, where the recordings were put on the air; normally, a classical program would be staffed with one announcer and one engineer, who would do their work from two separate rooms, but this was exam time and staffing was thin); however, this staffer became incoherent after about 35 on-air hours straight, and subs had to be called in to finish the orgy. There was a 56-hour Tchaikovsky orgy, 48 hours of Bach, 50 hours of Beethoven.

I did several such orgies, starting with a four-hour Sibelius orgy. (Growing up in the home I did, you knew about Jean Sibelius. My parents had a turntable-amplifier system and a collection of maybe 75 LPs. My father would drop the tone arm on Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony and conduct the final movement, waving his arms around the living room with his eyes shut, and with special attention to the six separate emphatic chords that conclude the piece. I think Sibelius’ Fifth spoke to him of how an individual’s dauntless striving can help him overcome life’s impediments. Or something.) In the station library I had found a boxed set of all seven Sibelius symphonies recorded by the Japan Philharmonic under Akeo Watanabe. Several of them happened to be the shortest performances available, and I, thinking how this would enable me to squeeze more Sibelius into the time allowed, was going to play all seven by the Japan Phil, in order, interspersed with other works. It was a tidy plan but a silly one. Whatever the Japan Phil’s strengths, it was doubtful that theirs would be the best performances of every one of the symphonies. Before air time, the station program director suggested that instead I ought to play the best performance of each symphony, rather than the shortest, since ultimately that would be a better listening experience for the radio audience. I attempted to do as he asked, but I could only guess at whose Second Symphony was better, whose Fifth. I sure didn’t know. I’m certain that there were phone calls to the station from Cambridge-area audiophiles who were affronted by the choices I made.

Another time, I was one-manning a program and, between announcing breaks, a more senior station member turned up on some errand or other. He stopped in to listen to a few measures of the music coming out of the monitors, a Beethoven piano sonata. Turning towards me briefly he asked, “The Arrau?”, meaning pianist Claudio Arrau. It wasn’t really a question. He knew just by listening for a few moments whose performance it was, and he wanted me to know that he knew. More signaling.

I realized later how much affectation went along with just about everything, in my college days. I studied, but I was not really a student. My radio voice was authoritative, but I was not really an authority on classical music, or any other kind of music. And though it later provided me with employment for a time, I chose not to commit to the disembodied life of a radio personality.

And now, back to the concert hall. After the final finale, unless the concert has been a complete disaster, and sometimes even then, the audience explodes with applause, and then rises (in a now-ritualized practice some disdain as ovation inflation) and claps with increased gusto, and now the conductor, having departed, comes back onstage, beaming, and brings the soloists too, and the conductor has key members of the orchestra stand, one by one, and the audience claps even louder, remembering that clarinet solo, and that place where the second violins did something special, though they can’t recall exactly what. Then the conductor and soloists leave again and the applause ebbs away a bit, then they come back once more and the applause rises again. This may go on for some time. But everyone tries to avoid what might be called the applause vacuum, where the applause peters out before the conductor and soloists have quit the stage for good, forcing them to make their way through the back rows of the orchestra in an uncomfortable silence.

Now the trance-state is broken. It’s OK to yawn, to cough, to clear your throat. You rummage for your coat and hat; you have to leave now, you may not stay. The theater doors swing open, and cold air rushes in as the concertgoers make their way outside. There is some chatter about that piece, or how well the orchestra scaled that particular summit, but mostly the talk seems to be about where are we going for dinner, and who are we meeting up with where and when, or how bracing it feels to be suddenly outdoors. Our own small-talk isn’t up to the task of deconstructing the concert we’ve just heard.

MORE LOOSE ENDS

There was classical music in my parents’ collection that I liked (that is, as a child I liked listening to certain recordings of certain pieces, over and over). I remember “Pictures at an Exhibition” (Bernstein, New York Philharmonic), and Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” which I was not allowed to play at my college station because it was considered too “pops,” too low-brow. I remember “Bolero” (Munch, Boston Symphony, the only recording of it I’m aware of where the trombones at the end don’t sound ridiculous). I was not allowed to play that at my college station either; too well-worn, a “warhorse.” And a little red translucent 45rpm disk containing Tchaikovsky’s stirring “Marche Slave,” which I played and played and played until it wore out. (Same deal at my college station: nix on that too, a warhorse.)

Was this a proper early grounding in the classics? No. There was no music from the Renaissance or Baroque periods, no opera, little chamber music, nothing more “modern” than the Ravel. Essentially, our home library of LPs was my father’s homage to his own mother and her father, for whom the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky, Symphony Hall, and the canon of 19th-century European big-symphony music (plus whatever “modern” music Koussevitsky championed... if it was OK with him, it was OK with them) were considered to be sacred... the be-all and end-all, the highest quality music imaginable. And, not knowing any better, I fell into line with that view.

I did get better at it. But sometimes I think, what I know about classical music plus $5 would get me a coffee and a cruller at Dunkin’s. Classical music: it’s this thing where you’re sitting around listening to it and then you can’t wait to turn it off. Bartok? Scriabin? Stockhausen? Forget it! Turn it off! Turn that crap off!

You can see it right here; my requirements and therefore my knowledge were simple, and they remain stubbornly so. I like these composers (but not everything they ever wrote, not by any means), and my preferences are almost solely guided by ear, not affected by what each composer was attempting to achieve, or how this or that piece fit in with their larger portfolio of work.

I did not understand how music was composed or performed, and played no instrument myself. I did sing in a large chorus in my freshman year at college, and was privileged to be part of a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at a packed house in Sanders Theater, but mostly fell away from the hard work of singing serious music in public after that. I never grew to liking opera, was never bitten by the Ring Cycle bug. Some of my fellow announcers at school were fanatics about Wagner; it seemed to be something that went hand-in-hand with being an educated person, so I made an effort to learn the names of the operas and their proper order in the cycle. It seemed better to fit in, or at least to appear to fit in.

It’s amazing to me now how little I know, and how small my world still is. How did other people become who they were supposed to become? Where did they find the time?

Blues: an exercise in writing about fruit

Fat, dark-skinned blueberries, some nearly the diameter of a dime, have become a common year-round sight at my supermarket. They are fine, just fine, and like all blueberries they are good to eat as is or cooked. They freeze well, and you can also grow them in your garden if you want, although you’ll need to take good care of them, and you’ll need to put up netting to protect them from birds, rabbits, chipmunks, and all the rest. Your homegrown berries will be luscious though, the store-bought ones a little less so, I think, but all in all they’re very nice.

But they’re not the blueberries I remember. The little blueberries I remember grew out on the windswept “moors” of Nantucket.

In New England, blueberries come in two main varieties, highbush and lowbush. Lowbush blueberries tend to be small, each about the size of a pea. (They won’t be winning any contests for berry size, but that’s not the point of them anyway.) According to the University of Maine, where they know about these things, lowbush plants are not themselves planted, but “inhabit” areas of thin soil on uplands and glacial outwash plains that are unsuitable for other crops. That is, not only do they predate you and me, but you have to take them where you find them and nowhere else. The berries are the right color, not the deep blue typical of the supermarket sort but a strong, appealing medium-blue, a blue with some violet in it, really a blue like no other. The skin is dry, not shiny. Scattered lowbush berries grow in the shady woods behind my house, but the animals usually get the few fruits that ripen.

Highbush blueberries are shrubs that lend themselves more readily to cultivation. The berries have a lengthy shelf life; they show up at the market in all seasons, a long way from where they were grown. But then: a berry plantation called Gundy’s, about two miles from my house, offers highbush berries in late July and early August that, confusingly, are not dark-skinned but the color of lowbush berries instead. At the check-in table you say hello to the Gundys, Ernie and Trudy, who have run this farm for many years and perhaps are growing tired of it. At least, Trudy seems to be. When asked what their adult children are up to, Trudy mentions a daughter who’s settled in Vermont. “It is nice,” Trudy declares. “I’d be up there too,” she continues, waving a hand towards her fields, “if it wasn’t for the berries.”

When I’m at Gundy’s I am not on Nantucket but in my own community, seeing folks that I might know (“Hey, how ya doin’? How’s the picking?”). I feel a sense of dislocation. I’m standing, not stooping, to pick the berries. The air doesn’t smell of salt, and no gulls cry overhead, and the sea is very far away. And I’m not 7 anymore, so there’s that as well.

Let’s touch on this one point and then move along: the Nantucket of my childhood is gone and never coming back. Even while the island has become a popular and pricey vacation spot, and continues to experience a building boom, the land itself is slipping into the sea, while the essence of the place, as I see it, has been crowded out. How do I feel about that? I feel lucky that I knew it when not so many people went there. I feel sad that it has changed so much. I am sorry that people are loving it to death. I am sorry that the seas are rising. I’ll miss it when it goes. Which is a way of saying something else, too, without coming right out and saying it.

We were not summer residents. Our family of five went there for a week or two for about ten summers, starting in 1956 or whenever it was that Ned graduated from diapers. One summer, my folks decided to live large and rented a cottage for a whole three weeks. That turned out to be too long for our family, even if it hadn’t rained for most of our stay, which it did. And there were flying ants aplenty in the cottage, who were enjoying their holiday and wanted to share their good times with us.

Doggedly we went to the beach anyway, because that’s what we did. Around noon, it would be Surfside, down on the southern shore, where the breakers rolled in from the wild Atlantic hour after hour. We would bob among the tall waves, take foolish chances with them, and, when it was time to come in, run like crazy up the beach with the white water and the undertow tugging at our feet. Later in the afternoon we would shift to the Jetties, on the north side near town, with calmer waters we could actually swim in without the risk of getting pummeled by the waves or dragged out by the riptides.

Paved roads connected the two, but my dad liked to take the longer route from Surfside, a narrow dirt byway that went eastward along the shoreline before turning north towards the airport, where the pavement resumed. The road functioned as a shortcut through the moors between the beach and the airport, though not too many used it, and it wasn’t on the map. My dad bounced us along the rutted track, tossing up clouds of dust, looking for his special place. While the road had no name we knew of, for us, here, the moors did: Blueberry Heaven. As we left the shore behind and swung in closer to the main runway, we could see small single-engine planes come buzzing in from over the beach and touch down a few hundred feet away. Once in a while the four-engine DC-6’s of Northeast Airlines would come lumbering in from the big cities. “Tourists,” we sniffed, we who came to the island by sea and knew where the number-one blueberry-picking place was.

My father would pull off the road and we would tumble out with pails, buckets, and old milk cartons, spread out among the low, brushy plants that covered the moors in every direction, and start picking. We would stay until we’d collected enough, then we’d move over to the swimming beach, sometimes stopping for a while at the airport terminal to watch the planes up close.

These were strictly lowbush blueberries, clustered together or scattered among the bayberry, bearberry, grasses, and wildflowers. They came up only to our ankles. You had to bend over pretty far to pick them, or squat, or alternate between the two. As we each found places to pick where we wouldn’t bump into each another, we felt a kind of gentle simplicity (or simple-mindedness) settle over us. We felt the stickiness of the salt on our skin. If it was sunny, we felt the glare and the heat. The salt wind passed among us, arising off the water, and we could just hear the big waves in the distance, booming ashore. There was nobody else around.

Sweet berries and salty air. For a little while, that’s all there was to it. For a little while, it was all there needed to be.

I felt at peace out there in the berry patch. I think we all did. No one had put these bushes here, they just grew there on their own, had been growing there, for a very long time. Somebody owned all of this, but they were far away, probably, and anyhow they weren’t doing anything with it (yet). There were no fences, no “No Trespassing” signs, no one charging admission. Because it was always summer when we were there, my memories are mostly warm and blissful, a child’s mostly flawless daydream. There were no rules, except for please don’t drop any (but of course we were going to drop a few), and please don’t squish them (but of course we were going to squish a few), and please be sure to wash them off before you eat them (which of course we did, except when we didn’t). We were allowed to take all that we could carry. I guess we must have felt that this part of the moors belonged to us, in a way.

One afternoon at Blueberry Heaven, I took a picture of my father with my Kodak Brownie. In the photo he is standing facing me and holding his bucket tilted towards the camera, proudly showing off how many berries he’s already gathered. The moors are behind him, and above everything is the pale blue of the sky descending towards the sharp blue line of the horizon. He is wearing a boatneck long-sleeved beach shirt, and he is grinning from ear to ear.

My dad has been gone more than ten years, so I can’t ask him, but I believe these visits to the berry patch in the fifties and sixties were not his first visits. I think that he spent some time here in 1936, to be exact, a 14-year-old delightedly picking berries and watching planes and going swimming and enjoying the summer. That year, he and his mother and his older brother had come out to Nantucket for an extended break from their life in New Hampshire. Over the years, in his remembering it and selectively recounting it, this experience turned into a wholly pleasant memory of the island in summer, and became the reason our own family went there for our vacations, instead of, say, the Rhode Island shore or the Vineyard or the Cape. We kids didn’t ask him about it back then; something about it told us not to. But there were faint clues here and there.

I believe that they came out to the island, my grandmother and her two boys, after her marriage went to pieces in a not-very-private way, and she packed up and got the hell out of Peterborough, partly just to get away and partly because the gossiping in that insular town had become unbearable to her. Nantucket was truly a far-away place back then, nobody knew them there, and summer lodgings in the thirties were not very expensive.

These lowbush blueberries on the back road to the airport, they required some care in picking. You seized each one gently between your thumb and forefinger, comprehending well the advantage of having an opposable thumb. Each berry was tethered to its tiny branch just enough so as not to blow away in the wind or wash down in the rain. You had to be careful to grip it lightly and give it just enough of a tug. Each berry was a near-perfect orb, almost weightless. The first ones you dropped into your pail went “plonk” when they hit bottom.

Soon you had a small mound of blue in there, a blond boy’s just-right color. Blue like my eyes, kind of, blue like the clothing I looked best in, blue like the ultramarine paint I still splash across canvas and paper, the color that stands out for me in a multicolored world.

So my dad was re-creating a happy part of his childhood, in taking us out there. A happy part, with a shadowy side to it. In some circles this is known as a frozen need, a deep longing from the past that can never be assuaged here in the present, though people do try. I can’t complain. It’s a pleasure to forage for berries in the wild. The activity and the berries themselves cost us almost nothing, just a little effort, out there in the seemingly limitless moors, the breezy moors, the sometimes chilly and foggy moors, where gray mists occasionally closed in around us without warning.

My dad was also hoping to foster happy childhood memories for us, too. But the troubling reasons his mother had run away to sea with her boys remained buried and untalked-about. Happy and Unhappy worked their way across the moors side by side, bent over at the waist and edging forward through the berry fields, swaying slightly with skinny arms extended, like children pretending to be elephants. When you stood up straight to stretch your back, you could just see the Atlantic off to the south, and the endless horizon where there were few boats to be seen, ever. The lonely sea. The cold, vast, impossibly deep and lonely blue sea.

Dancing: an essay from 2020

“So they called at the inn
for a room to dance
and who but they danced merrily —
and the very best dancer among them all
was Old John Webb who was just set free.”

“The Escape of Old John Webb” was on the Kingston Trio’s 1960 album “String Along,” which I listened to countless times. It is one of approximately 98 million songs that mention dancing, and, like dancing, it is clever and lively and a bit obscure. When it came out, it sparked controversy (of course it did), because the Trio (as I understand it) had a habit of taking old ballads from England or wherever, changing a few things around, and claiming credit for the resulting “new” songs. Some people didn’t like that.

At least when your feet dance the cha-cha, you don’t have to pay royalties to anyone (though if you want some music to dance to, you do).

Dancing back in the days of Old John Webb did sound like fun, in a way. Yet it seems odd that when Old John manages to regain his freedom, he celebrates, not by shooting off fireworks or something, but by moving across the floor in a series of formal, socially-acceptable patterns. Pretty tame, there, Old John! Is that really the best you can do?

My own history with dancing is characterized by experiences ranging from elated abandon to acute embarrassment. I’m going to sketch in just a few of them here. (I should add that I’m talking about dancing in which I was a participant. Dancing in which I was not, that would include Alwin Nikolais, Pilobolus, Alvin Ailey ((but no ballet, no, no)), plus numerous step dancers, morris dancers, swing dancers, and practitioners of Appalachian clogging. That’s for another day.)

•   Let’s begin with Mrs. Ferguson’s after-school dance class. In my town, parents who wanted to expose their eighth-graders to the social graces signed them up for “Fergie’s.” When you heard that your folks were sending you to her dance class, you knew that there was no getting out of it. Mrs. Ferguson was an institution. For years she had been running beginners’ classes for large groups of maturing schoolchildren in the spacious and high-ceilinged grand ballroom of the Maugus Club. The Maugus was usually open only to members-and-their-guests, so this was one of the few ways to see it from the inside. Mrs. Ferguson, it was said, hailed from a tony neighborhood in an old-money part of Boston. On the dance floor, she stood with extreme good posture, tall and broadshouldered on tiny feet, resembling a plumb bob. She was a solitary and commanding presence, the center of our uneasy attention, imparting instruction in dance, with dollops of deportment, while we, fidgeting in our churchy clothes, sat as quietly as we could on hard chairs around the perimeter of the room. We stared at her, trying hard to listen. Because maybe something about this would turn out to be really important, who could tell? In that respect, it was very much like church. Mrs. Ferguson did not solicit questions from her pupils. There was simply the teaching, the rituals, and, on your part, the accepting, the doing-or-dying. That was dance, then: a beautiful potential, which could become the wondrous creation it deserved to be, only if everyone kept their mouths shut and strictly followed the rules, of which there were many.

We had to learn and never forget how to do many proper things: invite a young lady to be our dancing partner (a girl you might have thrown a snowball at the previous winter), how to hold our partner in standard ballroom dance position (“facing partner, slightly offset to the left, lower bodies together, upper bodies apart, both looking left; the man’s right hand is just below her left shoulder blade and her left hand is on his upper right arm”). We boys stood close enough to our partners to sense that girls, too, perspired. For many of us, learning to dance was a tough climb, partly because the boys were expected to lead. First we had to summon the energy and presence of mind, then we had to hold that energy in check. Some of the boys suffered bouts of bashfulness; I saw one of Fergie’s assistants grab one of these boys and shake him hard by the shoulder. “Now, do it!” How could they be expected to turn him into a little gentleman if they didn’t first cleanse him of his bashfulness?

The dances we learned were basic and few: the waltz, beginning with one session devoted entirely to mastering the box step; the foxtrot; the cha-cha; and the lindy. There was a ray of hope in the lindy, because it was clear you could dance it to rock ‘n’ roll, as Fergie’s assistants demonstrated for us. The lindy was fun, and I would try to get better at it, many years later.

•    Multiple ballroom-dance tune-ups in my 20’s and 30’s, to get me ready for this or that wedding reception. Or at least make it so that I wouldn’t be watching my own feet most of the time. When the rubber hit the road, though, I usually forgot everything I’d learned.

I was to be an usher at my older brother’s wedding in 1970, and it was explained to me that I would be paired up with one of the bridesmaids, and would be expected to dance with her at the reception, alone and in full view of the hundreds of assembled guests. To wow them with my style and aplomb, you see. This demanded a private lesson, at a small studio down by the railroad tracks, a setting not at all like the Maugus ballroom. I had no girlfriend at the time, so they supplied a practice-partner for me, a pretty teenager in a black leotard and leggings and a short skirt in a bright red plaid. As soon as we went into dance position, I suddenly felt very warm and my mind went blank. I don’t know what I learned, but I forgot it as soon as I learned it, maybe before.

Then there was Madame Rosa. Before Annie and I got married in 1984, we felt that another tune-up was needed. (The need to dance in ballroom style kept cropping up! Like crabgrass!) We chose Madame Rosa’s out of the phone book because we could walk there from our apartment. Her studio, with walls covered in red flocked velour, was in the turret of an immense Victorian. Within it stood the great mound of Rosa herself, once a lithe dancer of note, many years before, now covered in a long gown that matched her walls. Annie and I stood in dance position, but so far apart (the better to see our feet) that Rosa was moved to exclaim, “My goodness! Have you two just met?” She did teach us one thing that stuck: in the waltz, when your weight went onto your left foot, say, you had the option of turning your head slightly to the left and glancing away to the far corners of the room. Then doing it with your right. It extended the form of the dance, making the two of you appear more graceful, and really, we needed all the help we could get.

•   The loose and sometimes drunken boogeying of my college years, and the decades that followed. This was emancipation: to think that there could be dancing where you didn’t need to know any steps, didn’t need to lead, could change partners freely or dance by yourself or sit down to rest at any time. When they put a Grateful Dead jam on the stereo and cranked up the volume, or the Stones’ “Some Girls,” or Toots and the Maytals, you were going to jump out on whatever dance floor there was, and do what came naturally. Naturally!

Later, the rising popularity of disco put pressure on us free-form dancers to, once again, take a partner in dance position and execute rehearsed and exact steps out on the floor. I took a pass.

•    Contras and squares. When you marry a fan of folk dancing, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself at a contradance or square dance. The music sure is sweet but you’re not allowed to sit off to the side and listen to it. You’re there to dance, so, up on your feet everybody! Nor are you allowed to rely on your more experienced partner; in the course of the evening, the caller will invite you, not to say pressure you, to “now thank this partner and go find another one.” Yikes! They said this was supposed to be fun!

In a contradance, all the available dancers pair up, with the individuals in each pair facing each another, forming two long straight lines down the length of the hall. The music starts, the caller calls, and the convolutions ensue. The patterns of the choreography repeat, and are fashioned so that a couple will end up traveling the length of the set to its bottom, where the two dancers trade places and get ready to enjoy the dance anew, now from the point of view of traveling up the set. Got it? The caller stops giving detailed directions after a few minutes, and the dance goes off on its own like a living thing. Beautiful! But: in the event of a misstep, contradances are difficult to stop and reset. If you, the easily-flustered beginning contradancer, turn left, say, instead of right, or forget to cross over, or happen to sneeze and lose a beat or two, not only are you lost, but so is the whole set you’re in, and the lines crumble. Embarrassing!

That’s why I will always prefer a square over a contra. In a square dance, the four couples that make up each square, though they may go through all kinds of steps of varying complexity, will always wind up back where they started. So if anyone gets lost, the square can regroup and start over within a few measures of music. Safety dance!

Need I add that no adventures in dancing such as these will be happening this week, or this month, or possibly at all, this pandemic year. Aside from taking lessons online, or practicing at home with or without family members, or watching performances on TV or other devices, dancing has ceased. This is remarkable.