The maestro lifted his baton, and Beethoven carried us away.
And me? Where was the ex-maestro while the music flowed forth?
Having never sung in the chorus on this thing, I thought I’d just go back and stand in with them. True, I don’t know any more about German than I do about orchestral scores. So what? If I could conduct it, how hard could this be?
I sang.
It was the orchestra’s finest night. The musicians were finally united. The chorus and soloists poured out a mighty sound. For a time, all of us in the hall could believe in the power of the human spirit to overcome evil. Beethoven lived. We lived. Nothing grander could be said or done at that moment in our lives. At the end, when that marbled music rumbled down the hill of the heart like a landslide, people cheered their lungs out, pounded their hands together, hugged each other, threw flowers, and wept. What a night—what a world—what a life! YES!
I have set a bad example more than once in my life.
In at least one instance, I am pleased to have done so.
For several years I ran a fairly regular route for exercise, every other day. I actually don’t run much anymore. At my age, running hard easily leads to knee, ankle, hip, and back damage—chronic problems that could interfere with dancing.
Dancing has priority.
Fortunately, I live at the bottom of a great hill. So now I march up that hill, trot a little, walk my route, and go down and back up and down several long stairways to get the blood pumping for an hour.
There was a time when my goal was to cover this three-mile route as quickly as possible. I carried a stopwatch. Focused on getting through each section just a little faster each day. Getting in shape as quickly as possible was the goal. Time and distance were the measuring rods of a successful morning. Just do it and do it and do it—better and better every day.
A stranger changed all that.
A woman whose schedule seemed to coincide with mine. She was usually somewhere on my route at the same time I was. We nodded. I was in a hurry. She was not.
A slim, gray-haired woman about my age, who wore comfortable clothes and high-tech walking shoes. She caught my eye for two reasons—she followed an erratic course, and she carried a plastic shopping bag. I wondered why.
When I stopped running and started walking, I had time to observe her more carefully. Over a couple of weeks, I put her route together as I saw her here and there. Though she marched along at a brisk pace, she always stopped to pick up trash and put it in her bag. She didn’t make a big deal out of it or go out of her way—just tended to her own path, cleaned up the world under her own feet.
Her route zigzagged uphill a block and then went level for a block and then uphill again. At the top, she sat briefly on a park bench to admire the morning sky and the mountains to the east.
Next she looped through the cemetery, around a great redwood tree, pausing to read names on tombstones.
Then across a children’s playground going up a ladder and down a slide, followed by a swing through the monkey bars.
Next through a scattered grove of tall fir trees, up the stairs to the top of a water tower, around a pond where she stopped to admire the water lilies, along an alley where she looked over a fence and into a greenhouse. Out into the park again to an open field of grass where she lay down on her back for a short time.
Then down to the Episcopal cathedral—inside briefly—and out again.
In one door of the art school next door, down a hall, and out a door at the other end of the building.
Down three long flights of stairs, under the freeway, and down to the local bakery for a cinnamon roll and cup of coffee.
One morning I joined her at her table at the bakery and introduced myself, explaining that we seemed to share the same exercise route, though I noticed she added some unexpected detours to hers.
She knew who I was, and she had also been aware of me—“the man in a hurry.” To my surprise, she had been influenced by me, seeing in my morning rush a model for the kind of life she was living but hated.
She had decided not to be like me.
The woman is a family doctor.
For years she had rushed off every morning to make rounds at the hospital and make healthful suggestions to patients that she did not act on in her own life.
She began to notice death and how fast she was running to meet hers.
“Haste does not improve the quality or quantity of life, you know,” she advised me. So I had heard.
She decided not only to tend to her physical health, but the health of her mind and soul. “I lost touch with me, somehow,” she said.
Not being a religious type or interested in cults or fads or isms, she decided that common sense would suffice for devising a new morning routine. No big conversion—no big deal—just think, then do.
To add usefulness to self-concern, she would pick up trash along her route—not try to clean up the whole neighborhood, mind you, but to do her share as she came to it.
To learn to see something new, she would go at least one block out of her way each morning as a very small adventure away from efficiency and into curiosity. That’s how she found the greenhouse in an alley, the cemetery, several great trees, a garden dedicated entirely to edible plants, and the children’s playground.
It was hard for her to explain the stop at the Episcopal cathedral. She wasn’t religious, yet there was something important about standing alone in a great room set aside to mark a relationship with the Eternal.
The art school next door to the cathedral always had a show of student work in the front hall, and she liked being near evidence of a continuing struggle for creative expression, so she always walked down that hall slowly.
What amazed her in all this was the closeness of delightful things that she had missed for so long because she was in a hurry and focused on efficient exercise.
She explained, “I think of my morning adventure as going to get the news of the day. It’s not all on the radio or in the paper, you know.”
“And don’t forget your part in this—it was because I didn’t want to be like you that I found another way.”
We serve our fellow men—and women—unexpectedly.
Even by being a bad example.
One of the wisest men I know, Alexander Papderos, is the director of the Orthodox Academy of Crete. Unfortunately for me, he lives ten time zones and thousands of miles away from Seattle. Even when we are together, we are separated by the subtleties of language. His English is far better than my Greek, but we both are seriously limited by lack of common cultural experience. We get by in English on most mundane topics, but when we reach for deeper understandings, we must be careful, lest we assume we are communicating when in fact we are not.
As 1992 became 1993, we spent the New Year holidays together. For all the romantic images a summer trip to Greece may suggest, the island of Crete in winter is a cold, windy, rainy place. A time to sit indoors by an olive-wood fire, drink raki and retsina, eat pork sausage with fresh bread soaked in new-pressed olive oil, and talk late into the night of weighty matters.
One evening we spoke of marriage.
In Crete the custom of arranged marriage continues. Even when a marriage is not initiated by a family, the wisdom of family experience is brought to bear in a way Americans would find anachronistic.
The Cretans think romance is nice enough when it happens, but it is not a particularly good basis for marriage.
Papaderos had stumbled over a concept he had found in Western literature. “Making love.” It confused him. “What is this making love?”
I explained that it was a popular euphemism for having sex—going to bed, getting laid—whether married or not.
He replied that for Cretans, “making love” is a serious notion summarizing the process of marriage and family. When two families agree that a son and a daughter would suit one another, it is expected that over time the man and woman will work at becoming compatible partners in the
same spirit one might work at achieving competence in a life’s vocation. This is making love.
Time and experience—mistakes and difficulties—are all part of the equation whose sum is a lasting relationship. Love is not something you fall into. Love and marriage are “made.”
Thus, in Cretan terms, when a married couple have been overheard arguing or fighting, the Cretans smile knowingly and say, “Ah, they are making love.”
During this same winter trip, Papaderos took my wife and me along as guests in the home of a Greek family on New Year’s Day. Though I hate to admit it, I am a closet football fan, and this was the first time in memory I could not be spending the day watching representatives of American universities struggle to resolve the great human crisis of who is Number One. Nor would I be in touch with the professional-football run-up to the Super Bowl. I was vaguely anxious.
My youth and early manhood were permanently affected by Vince Lombardi, the coach of the legendary Green Bay Packers football team. Lombardi was about winning. Fair and square and by the rules—but winning. Winners worked harder and smarter. Winners were never wimps—when knocked down, they got up again. Winners played tough in the face of adversity, injury, and pain. Winners played hurt.
These thoughts floated in my mind as I coped with the unfamiliar traditions of a Cretan New Year meal. The old customs of the mountain villages prevailed. Instead of the Anglo-American whole roasted pig with an apple in its mouth, the Cretans celebrate with boiled sheep’s heads. Yes.
Skinned, simmered, and served with eyeballs intact, the head is split, and the brains are scooped out with a spoon. The tongues are sliced and eaten like pâté. These delicacies are savored by the grandparents and other senior members of the family, but not by the younger generation of Greeks.
I watched the grandmother as she ate.
Eighty-eight years old. Blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and shriveled by time and a hard life. She helped herself to each dish as it passed her way. She ate carefully, thoughtfully, and with undisguised pleasure.
I knew that she had survived mountain life, two world wars, the Greek civil war, and the repressions of the Dictatorship of the Colonels in the 1970s. Her husband was taken into the army. She did not hear from him for almost seven years. Her village was leveled by the Nazis, and she was imprisoned and beaten. For two years she had lived in caves, eating roots and rabbits to stay alive. No home, no job, no income, no medical care or insurance, no retirement plan or Social Security. She had lived without electricity, running water, even without fire at times in her life.
At the end of the meal, she challenged the “children” at the other end of the table to a singing contest. The “children” were men and women of middle age—her nieces and nephews, cousins, and in-laws. She and her equally ancient husband began the keening drone of a Cretan mountain song. It works like this: The challenger makes up a four-line rhyming verse, then everyone sings the common chorus, then someone from the opposing team makes up a four-line verse responding to the verse of the challenger, and again the chorus, and so on. It’s a can-you-top-this contest in song. Extemporaneous and fast, it ends when one team or another cannot come up with the verse without missing a beat. Not easy.
The old lady sang her opponents into exhaustion. She literally left them speechless. Her last verse contained a hope that this coming year would be even better than the last, and who knows, if the rest of them lived as well as she, they might be able to keep up with her in a singing contest, though she doubted it. They doubted it, too. And so did I.
Never mind the bowl games. This New Year’s Day I had seen a winner.
If Lombardi had a backfield with her kind of stuff, the Green Bay Packers would still be winning. The lady was a champ. A winner of a lifetime contest. She had faithfully played her part despite injuries and sorrows.
She played hurt—every day of her life.
Football is only a game.
When the dinner was over, the old lady went into the kitchen, insisting on helping with the dishes. She came to the kitchen door with a bag of garbage and barked at her husband of sixty years. He groaned up out of his chair to do his duty, and she barked at him some more and he groaned back some more.
“What’s going on?” I asked Papaderos.
“It seems her husband did not eat all of his salad and was singing off-key,” he explained. “They are still making love—it takes forever.”
I met a man who lives in a kind of existential angst. He is obsessed with television news programs. This version of the news of the world convinces him the end of the world is coming.
However, he is confused at the moment. There’s some good news lately. And he was convinced an event called the “Harmonic Convergence” was going to bring life as we know it to a halt. Five years ago, on August 16, 1987, the materialistic world was to have self-destructed. Taking a cue from a cycle of the Mayan calendar, an alignment of nine planets in the solar system, Aztec and Hopi and Cherokee prophecies, and the intuition of several important contemporary spiritual gurus, the prediction had been made. Several hundred thousand people believed it—great gatherings were held at important “power centers” in the western United States.
The motto of that cosmic event was, “When the light hits, the dark gets tough.” I don’t quite get it, but apparently a lot of people did.
The Harmonic Convergence signaled a five-year period of disaster, along with the collapse of industrial civilization. By now the worst should have happened. He was kind of looking forward to it.
He’s stuck now. Disappointed. The end has not come. He doesn’t know which way to turn or what to do. He wasn’t prepared for things to start looking up.
But suppose—just suppose—he is indeed in tune with Harmonic Convergence and the Great Conclusion—he and all the other doomsday sayers?
When I consider such a thing, I think of Lot’s wife.
Remember? In the Bible. Genesis, Chapter 19.
Jehovah decided to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their wicked ways. End of their world. But he spared the life of a man named Lot, his wife, and two daughters. They were good folks. Jehovah told them to run for their lives to the mountains and, above all, “Do Not Look Back.”
As they ran for it, Lot’s wife paused and looked back, anyhow.
We don’t know her name. We only know what she did. She looked back.
And Jehovah punished her by turning her into a pillar of salt.
Now I’ve known that story since I was a kid, and I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now and I don’t know anybody who does. Or I should say, I don’t understand the part about Jehovah turning her into a pillar of salt for looking back. What I do understand is her looking back. I would have looked back, too.
My guess is many of us would have turned around to see where we came from for the same reasons—curiosity, nostalgia, and compassion. And above all, regret. How sad that the only way for Jehovah to handle human failure was by unredeeming destruction. The Deity doesn’t come off too well here or set much of an example, frankly.
But there’s truth here.
Science confirms the spirit of this story. Sure enough, some fine day this planet will fall into the sun and be no more. Every last thing we’ve done, are doing, and will do—extinguished. Kaput. Finished.
The same is true for us as individuals—one day all of us will cease to be.
But to run from the inevitable isn’t always our way. To turn, out of our own free will, and face the facts as a matter of human curiosity, and as a matter of connection with all that lives—good and bad—that is more often our way.
I do not know her name, but Lot’s wife is a relative of mine.
And “Ye are the salt of the earth” is a compliment.
We have lived on a houseboat for several years, my wife and I, which may sound like a romantically bohemian style of life to some. Up close it might seem more realistically as though we are living in a floating (or sinking) slum.
This aquatic trailer court makes for tight community. Our lives overlap. This is village life. And we are literally connected to one another in that we share the same fragile water lines and power lines, and the same eccentric sewer system, and are moored to the same wobbly pilings. We haul our garbage to the same Dumpster at the head of the dock. Any breakdown in what comes or goes quickly affects us all. And the breakdowns make for some hilarious middle-of-the-night fire drills of the run-and-shout-and-mill-about variety. This closeness also means that we hear and see much of what goes on inside our houses and inside our families.
Why would people want to live like this? We, too, wonder that at times. You do have to have an unconventional view of housing requirements, I admit. And you don’t get into this by accident. It’s a very deliberate choice and a deliberate way to live.
It has its advantages, however. Help and company are always close by. The milk or beer or wine or bread you forgot at the store is always available next door. Tools and parts are handy, as is advice. In August, it’s like going away to adult summer camp—only you’re at home.
This floating village life appeals to me. I like living up close to these people. I compare my life to theirs. I learn from them and am enriched by gifts they never realize they give.
Like sunlight tea, for instance.
The lady next door is a nurse-practitioner, a very high order of professional nurse. Her specialty is oncology—working with cancer patients. She knows a lot about death and dying. She leads an intensely busy life. Works part time and goes to school part time, raises two small children and a husband in the small space of a houseboat. On the dock she maintains a flower garden in boxes and pots, and ashore she has a serious vegetable garden. It’s exhausting at times to observe the pace of her life. I avoid watching her when she’s in high gear.
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