Behind the Song

by K. M. Walton

  Doing this creative work, day in and day out, helped him get better. He continued making mosaics and more mosaics and still more mosaics. In the words of his wife Julia, it was “as though he had found his life.”

  Like Jadav Payeng’s seeds, each piece of glass or tile or mirror was put carefully in place by one man’s hands. These fragments would not grow into trees that would one day be a forest inhabited by wild creatures. But they would evolve into something wild in its own right. Untamed, primal images transformed whole sections of a city into works of art to dazzle the eye and confound and amuse the mind. And because there was so much of the artist evident in the art, the heart was touched as well. Worlds apart, forest and mosaic works of art stand as testament to what passion, imagination, and hard work can do.

  Isaiah Zagar continues making his mosaics every day. He calls his murals “poems” and refers to the process of making public art that will be seen by others as “a sharing of dreams.” I came across that quote long after Mark and I wrote the line, “Now people come / to walk within his dream,” not knowing that this was Isaiah’s way of envisioning his work as well. It made me think that all art is a shared dream. Isaiah cannot tell you why he makes his murals, only that he must. It is what he loves to do, day after day; it is the dream he feels compelled to share.

  Dar Williams’s songwriting retreat was five days long. After breakfast each morning, she gave us three writing prompts for the day. One was a visual prompt; another was verbal; the last was musical. The verbal prompt given on the day Mark and I were working on the final verse of “Planting Trees” was this:

  She draws a crown on me.

  We had no idea what to do with it, but we wanted to try to fit it, or a variation of it, into our song. But first we needed to know what the story of our final verse would be. It had to be about a woman, we decided, since our two real-life stories were about men. But we couldn’t come up with just the right real woman’s story, and then we thought about the story of many real women (and men) we know: the story of teachers, and how hard so many devoted teachers work each day, doing what they love but rarely knowing what minor—or major—miracles they may be creating in the individual lives they touch. The image of a crown being drawn—or placed—on a teacher’s head became a metaphor for the deep satisfaction one must feel when being given a glimpse of the miracle that may have just occurred in a breakthrough moment with a child.

  Each day in Indiana

  A woman tries to reach

  A child locked in his head

  By the limits of his speech

  When a sentence comes

  Every word he says

  Is like a jewel in a crown

  Placed on her head

  We had our final verse, but decided to make it the middle verse of the song, if for no other reason than to balance out the gender references.

  I don’t remember at what point the chorus came together. It was probably somewhere between writing the first and second verse, or the second and third. It was important to us to find the words to the chorus fairly early on, because they would tell us what the song was about. Dar calls this the “aha” moment, the moment in writing when suddenly a word or words make it clear to you why you’re writing this particular song. I think of it when I write songs or stories as the moment of connection.

  You don’t have to be a Mother Teresa

  You don’t have to die for anyone’s sins

  Just embrace what you love

  Do each day the thing that you love

  That’s how miracles begin

  It took us a while to settle on pronouns, ultimately agreeing that “you” made the most direct connection with the listener. This was a song that was not only about the people we were singing about, but the people we were singing to. We were saying to the listener: You don’t have to be Mother Teresa or Jesus to make a miracle happen. Just be yourself. Do what you love. Begin.

  We completed the song after the retreat was over, but the first time we sang it—or what we had of it at that point—was to Dar Williams in a one-on-one critique session. Singing these words to someone who had meant so much to us over so many years was an extraordinary moment. Dar’s intent listening and generous feedback made us feel that we, beginners that we still were (and are), really were songwriters. And she put a crown on our heads by saying that the word “miracle”—oddly, the word we had debated as possibly clichéd or not exactly what we meant—was the payoff of the whole song: “That’s what it’s all about!”

  Aha!

  We’ve written more songs since and have performed them along with covers of other people’s songs that we love, but it is this song that I feel most compelled to sing. It is this song that embodies for me the very thing we are writing about: doing each day the thing that we love and believing in the power of that.

  When Mark and I sing “Planting Trees,” I don’t know the effect it will have on those who are listening. When I write my words, I don’t know who will read them or what they might take from them. Perhaps you, reading these words, will think about what it is that you love, will decide that each day you need to do the thing that you love, will do something that will become a miracle for someone else. None of us knows where our passions will lead us and what miracles they might create.

  Isaiah was asked why he put so many mirrors in his work. He said it is to remind each passing observer: “Yes, it’s YOU. YOU’RE here. YOUR dreams matter too.”

  You don’t have to be Isaiah Zagar. You don’t have to be Jadav Payeng. You don’t have to teach a child or plant a tree or make art or write a song. Just embrace what YOU love. Do each day the thing that YOU love.

  That’s it. Really. That’s how miracles begin.

  PLANTING TREES

  © 2014 JAMES HOWE & MARK DAVIS / OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS

  Each day in India

  A man walks alone

  For forty years he’s planted trees

  Where none before have grown

  With sticks and seeds

  He farms gray sand

  Now elephants roam a forest

  Born from one man’s hands

  Each day in Indiana

  A woman tries to reach

  A child locked in his head

  By the limits of his speech

  When a sentence comes

  Every word he says

  Is like a jewel in a crown

  Placed on her head

  You don’t have to be a Mother Teresa

  You don’t have to die for anyone’s sins

  Just embrace what you love

  Do each day the thing that you love

  That’s how miracles begin

  Each day in Philadelphia

  A man takes broken glass

  Making art of what he finds

  To heal his broken past

  Now people come

  To walk within his dream

  And know in their hearts

  The man who was redeemed

  You don’t have to be a Mother Teresa

  You don’t have to die for anyone’s sins

  Just embrace what you love

  Do each day the thing that you love

  That’s how miracles begin

  To hear “Planting Trees” and to learn more about Old Dogs New Tricks, Jadav Payeng, KarmaTube, Isaiah Zagar, Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, and Dar Williams, visit jameshowe.com.

  James Howe (left) and Mark Davis

  Photo © Paul Harris

  James Howe is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than ninety books for young readers, including the popular Bunnicula and Pinky and Rex series. He writes for a wide range of ages, from picture books to young adult fiction. His novel The Misfits inspired national No Name-Calling Week (nonamecallingweek.org). James lives in New York state with his husban
d, Mark Davis, with whom he collaborates on writing and performing music as Old Dogs New Tricks. Visit the author at jameshowe.com.

  THE OPPOSITE OF ORDINARY

  A PERSONAL ESSAY INSPIRED BY LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S AND STEPHEN SONDHEIM’S “SOMEWHERE (THERE’S A PLACE FOR US)”

  By Beth Kephart

  When the beautiful Kate Walton included me in this lovely series, there was only ever one choice. I skated as a kid, and skating shaped so much about how I see the world and how I hear language. This particular song from West Side Story defines my childhood. It is my origin story.

  —Beth Kephart

  Can I take a picture? Here. I’ll take a picture.

  See? Robinson Recording Laboratories. 1015 Chestnut Street. Philadelphia, PA. 33.3 RPM. It’s all right there. It’s hidden in the grooves. The soundtrack to my art of yearning.

  We need a platter and a spindle and a needle. We need an ice-skating rink and a temperature like snow. We need my mother and father in the ice-rink stands and me in the shimmer of a turquoise costume with a bib of white pearls, hovering over newly sharpened blades. We need the blinding glare of overhead fluorescents, rouge high on the cheeks of pretty girls, spectacles low on the noses of the judges who are dressed in down and fur, and one singular coach.

  We need, I guess, a lot of things. Don’t put that needle down.

  We’ll wait until I learn to skate on a frozen pond in Boston during a year of temporary exile from our Wilmington, Delaware, home. My father was getting a new degree from MIT. My mother and the rest of us were fighting the meringue of towering snow. One day, a diversion, we were driven to a sun-stunned pond. I strapped on skates. I soared.

  I thought I soared.

  I wore a thick Ace bandage on my wrist, thanks to the calamitous accident of the summer before—a snap on the chain of a swing I’d pumped high, a long flight through the air, a shattering against the ground. I wore the bulk of winter things. I noticed the twigs and the bugs and the gashes in the ice, the general direction of the accomplished, the far-off edge where no one was, and that’s where I went. To the edge of no one. For the rest of that winter I, the righteous eight-year-old, claimed the no-one edge. I let skating and its rhythms fill the hollows of my bones.

  It was all I needed.

  When we returned to Wilmington, I haunted the public sessions of Sunday afternoons at the real rink down the road. I went around on the fringes in the counterclockwise with the crowds, and then, when the loudspeaker man interrupted the carousel music to say that it was time to change direction, I changed my direction.

  I missed the no-one edge.

  One day, when I was listening to the music in my bones and not that carousel sound, when I was speeding up and slowing down to express the song of me, when I was throwing myself toward myself and growing dizzy with the blur, the hometown skating queen left her perch up in the rink’s balcony, where she’d been waiting for the public to go home. I’d seen her up there. Maybe we’d all seen her up there. With that celebrity gleam and those deer-sized eyes and that slick of black hair and that infinite slenderness and grace. I’d seen her up there, alone, and then I saw her stand and head toward the stairs, then disappear, and then there she was, rink level, with her white skates on, her leg warmers, her skating jacket, stepping out onto the ice. Glissading toward me. Asking (you couldn’t forget it), Did I want to learn?

  The stutter of surprise. The Yes, I want to learn.

  She was sixteen to my ten. She took my one good hand and led me to the rink’s now-emptying center. (Step aside, awe says.) She showcased the jumps she thought I might learn. She leapt from her right foot and landed on her left, the opposite of ordinary in a sport of left-to-righters. This way, this way, this way, her movements said—almost soundless, pure heraldic—and now it was my turn. Waltz jump. Toe-loop. Something in between. I did what she did, a minor version, in my thick pants and my thick coat, my arm wrapped up like a mummy.

  No one but the two of us, and my heart up in my throat.

  She tilted her head to one side. She showed me again what she had meant about the bend in the knee and the arrangement of shoulders and the placement of the blade on the ice. Bend. Up. Down. Glide. Arms out for balance. I tried again. She taught again. Finally she vaguely nodded. Pushed back and back and left me to it—on the edge of no one, in the opposite of ordinary.

  I’m not sure we ever spoke again. I rather doubt we did. But I’d been baptized—a right-foot-to-left skater. I’d been instructed by the queen. I would forever be persuaded by her unconventional moves. I’d jump her way. Spin her way. Cut my footwork in her corners. She was different and she’d seen my difference and she’d said different was okay.

  The song played even louder in my bones.

  Looking back on it now, I don’t know how my parents could afford the serial events of afterwards. How the public sessions became group lessons became private appointments with coaches. How the nature of my obsession and its increasing demands were perpetually managed. My parents were not rich, and each one of us was busy, but I was given this. I was acknowledged for what I was becoming. This girl who zoomed and jumped and spun on the edge and in the wrong direction. This girl with a body made of song.

  My mother found a Butterick pattern and Singer-adapted it with genius, so that I might have clothes to wear to that rink of left-foot-to-right-foot skaters. She cut dresses out of flannel, put buttons on the sleeves, ran a rickrack braid in flying Vs where all the other girls wore sequins. She sat in the bleachers and watched, and my dad came, too, when he could, and they bought me real skates, and paid for the blades to be sharpened, and waited for me because I was always late, because my favorite time on the ice was when the Zamboni appeared and the rest of the skaters vanished.

  Just one more jump, please.

  Just one more jump. In the wrong direction. By myself.

  When I was thirteen, my family moved to Pennsylvania to be nearer to my father’s job, but I wouldn’t leave the skating behind. With resources they never complained about expending, my parents fit me in to a brand-new rink, the Philadelphia Skating and Humane Society. The ice emitted fog in the early hours. Windows let in the early sun. The cold was trapped by a parabolic roof. There were no barricades. The ice had a smell. The coffee shop sold hot chocolate. There were photographs of the Schuylkill River, where this skating club had first been born as a search-and-rescue operation.

  Skating as a search, and as a rescue.

  A frozen river.

  Predawn and after school, I was there. On the weekends, in my rickrack dresses. In the locker rooms, on the ice, skating toward and away from me, leaping into chasms. More and more, I was the opposite of ordinary at a time when ordinary has its privileges, when ordinary is the ticket in, when cool is everything that I wasn’t—this girl with the homemade style and the fluffy hair and the left hand wrapped like a mummy and the father who dropped her off at school after an early-morning bliss of ice and the song that only she could hear inside her bones. This girl who felt most safe on the edge of no one, and who mostly lived at that address.

  You know how it is: Time goes by. We are zigged and zagged by our own limits. The double lutz is landed but the double axel eludes us. The camel spin bobbles instead of whirls. The layback makes us dizzy. We work harder, we skate fiercer, we leap higher, we circle and circle with our opposite way of doing things, and finally, we want the music we feel inside of us to be the music that transcends us, the music that emerges, with us.

  For us?

  I was sixteen. There was a competition looming. One day at the rink, my coach showed up with songs. Three separate pieces she’d thought to weave together as one—a competition medley. Listen, she said, and as I stood there by the machine on that quiet afternoon, as the sun floated white through the rink’s square windows, “Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us)” from West Side Story began to play. “Somewhere” sung by the instr
uments alone.

  It was as if everything that had been thrumming within my bones since my blades first sliced a frozen Boston pond had been unstoppered. It was as if the parabolic air of the Philadelphia Skating and Humane Society was fogging up with the interior of me. “Somewhere” is a yearning song born of a Romeo and Juliet ache remade as the tale of two New York City gangs—and cruelly separated lovers. It’s a place for us song. A lyric that makes displacement visible and gives hope hope. It’s music that takes you right out there, to the edge of yourself, and it hurts so very much, and the hurt is the most beautiful hurt you’ve ever felt. The hurt is you.

  It was my song now. “Somewhere.”

  Now put that needle down.

  Now play that record cut at the Robinson Laboratories in Philadelphia that has been protected, for decades now, by an oversized plastic sleeve. Put the needle down and see me as I am, standing on my mark, an awkward sweet sixteen, my parents in the bleachers—somewhere, out there. I wear a turquoise dress and a bib of pearls and an Ace bandage tucked inside one sleeve. I wear thick, flesh-colored tights, one knee already dark from a warm-up fall. I am the song and I am about to be revealed and I am frantic with nerves, clotted, shivery, and the ice seems suddenly and altogether much too fresh and my blades are either too sharp or too dull and it is possible that I’ll forget to breathe.

  Put that needle down and let me breathe.

  I don’t remember all of it, but I remember this: I started late. The opening melody began and I stayed stuck and then, jolted, I unfroze. I was a beat behind and another beat behind, but I got myself back on track—gathering speed on a curve of backward crossovers, landing my axel, singling a double flip, scratching out a toe-pick landing. I was skating, but I was skating terrified, until, at last, the Mexican music stopped and “Somewhere” began, and the struggle was done. I became utter, if you can please know what I mean.