When you’re self-employed your income is more directly connected to your initiative than is someone’s with a contract or tenure. There can be great satisfaction in having control over your own hustle, or marketing in today’s more genteel parlance.  I’m not used to having offers drop into my lap unconnected to the aforementioned hustle, but recently something did. 

The Greenwood Senior Center, a bustling place up the street from me, approached me about starting a choir for people with ESML–early stage memory loss.  I went in for an interview and found myself immediately attracted to the idea.  Getting people singing– particularly people who aren’t sure they can sing—is what I do best.

We nailed down dates and I came up with a description and some tag-lines.  I thought for a long time of what to call this choir because I thought ESML Choir lacked pizazz.  I played with the idea of immediacy, of now, the present.  Present Tense.  I didn’t like the tense part. Future Imperfect.  No, that was definitely heading the wrong way.  I finally came up with “All Present: a song circle for people with ESML.”

After that, with hundreds of songs at the ready, there wasn’t a lot to do until I knew who my singers were.   The circle filled up immediately on paper.  I had names, ages, and voices.  Most of the participants were in their 70s so that gave me a window of what music they might have in their long-term memory. 

I went through stacks of music and picked out a handful of standards like “It Had to be You” and “As Time Goes By.”  I put together a list of popular and folk songs that had repetitive phrases: “You Are My Sunshine,” “Que Sera Sera,” and “Clementine.”  I tapped a few well-known rounds. I figured out the easiest vocal keys to pitch the songs in, keeping things within the ten notes between B and D because most voices can manage that range in some octave. I got out my guitar, which I haven’t played in 15 years and started developing some callouses.

About a week before the first class, a kind of panic set in.  I felt the same sort of thing the first time I was a camp counselor and before I began student teaching in college, and certainly before I first taught watercolor painting on that damned cruise to Alaska.  My college-roommate Mary-Ellis called it “the shakes.”  “You just have the shakes,” she said in her calm, low voice before I set off for camp.  I can still remember how comforting her words sounded to me. When I tried to say them to myself the week the song circle began, though, my voice was two octaves higher and didn’t sound comforting at all. Nor did it help to shame myself as in: you are an adult and founded a community choir and have directed it for 22 years and get a hold of yourself, for god’s sake.

So ironically, there was a lot of future anxiety and nervous energy building up in the week before the first session of All Present.  The morning of the first sessions I packed up my guitar, my lists, and my music.  At the last minute, I threw in my Rodgers and Hammerstein Songbook, a tome that weighs about five pounds.  I added a huge bottle of water, throat spray and my cough drops as I was in the midst of a beastly head cold.

I met the singers.  Now I had faces. We made name tags and I chatted with them and their caregivers.  They sat and waited quietly, docilely: eight men and six women.  I didn’t know what to expect but I had come with plenty of experience in ways to help people get started singing.  I’ve had voice students —voice students—who only managed to start peeping after weeks of coaxing.  I’ve had choirs on which I had to perform the miracle of raising the dead before I could get the work-night rehearsal started.  I just had never worked with people with early stage memory loss.  I passed out song-sheets.

In fact, nobody needed them.  I started us off with “You are My Sunshine” and they just about took the roof off.  It was as though they had been holding it all in, not just while I fussed around with the name tags, but for months, for years.  They knew everything by heart and they knew verses not on the song sheets.  When we sang “Goodnight, Irene,” someone remembered the harmony line from when he had sung Barbershop and the sweetness of the sound made me tear up.  Their faces relaxed into their own nostalgia, their own associations, and their own feelings. 

I moved to the piano and we sang standards and half of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Songbook. Then I moved back to the guitar because they had already forgotten that we’d sung “Goodnight Irene,” “Daisy, Daisy” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” We sang everything a second time. For an hour and half we sang.  I couldn’t stop smiling and they gave it right back to me.  I can’t remember when I have enjoyed myself so much.

We’ve had our second session.  I think they remembered who I was and what we were doing there, but I’m not sure.  It’s hard to know what someone with early stage memory loss remembers or how they remember.  They might not remember with their memory. They might remember with their hearts. 

I’ve had a cold for two weeks.  It feels like I’ve had a cold –the same one—for three months.  In fact, since September I’ve been sick more often than I have in the last five years.  I attribute this to an influx this year of piano students under the age of ten.  They are adorable, fun, and funny but they are also like disease-carrying rats.  A friend calls them walking petri-dishes.  I now have a bottle of alcohol and a roll of paper towels at the piano so I can wipe down the keys after every lesson.  If it were possible to spray my students with disinfectant before they enter my house, I would.

Every minute I haven’t been teaching, wiping the keys or blowing oceans out of my sinus cavities, I’ve been resting.  This has meant a lot of reading and a lot of TV watching.  When I was sick as a kid and got to stay home from school, an integral part of the healing process was watching The Dick Van Dyke Show at 10:30 in the morning.  Thanks to Netflix I could have streamed Dick Van Dyke all week, but I also subscribe to Acorn, which has British imports, and I haven’t finished exploring those shows. 

Thus I embarked on 23 episodes of Trial and Retribution, a show I had never heard of until my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything made it possible for me to stream videos.  It’s a kind of British Law and Order.  It features a chain-smoking, personal-life-in-shambles Scottish DCS (male) with an Anger Management Problem and a tough, no-time-for-a-personal-life Irish DCI (female).   Written by Lydia La Plante who created Prime Suspect, it’s a show I normally wouldn’t watch because it’s too seamy for someone who wants Miss Marple like a child wants Goodnight Moon.  But I was in a stupor of sick and a heap of congestion.  It was too much trouble to pick up the remote.

One episode began with an American FBI profiler giving a lecture in the UK.  The minute he came onscreen he seemed “off” to me.  When he was hired by the DCI to “help the police with their inquiries” into what was looking like the work of a serial killer, I knew that he himself was the killer.  I just knew it.  I wanted to see how the police would put it together.  It was a difficult episode to watch.  I felt brutalized by the end of it. I couldn’t sleep that night.  I woke up over and over, thinking I heard someone in the house.

Now watch how  I put this together with teaching.  One of my older students—not one of the petri-dishes—is a lovely high-school girl.  Sarah is sweet.  She has a charming smile, pretty eyes, and a mellifluous speaking voice.   She plays the piano with open, unabashed feeling. She brings a magical kind of energy into my house. 

We chatted briefly at the end of her last lesson.  She asked me how I was.  I told her I hadn’t slept well in two nights because of a stupid TV show.

“The minute the profiler was called in to consult about the psycho-path,” I said, “I knew he was the killer.”

Her eyes lit up. “And was he?”

“He was,” I said proudly—see how her magical energy made me feel good about being so stupid?

She suddenly burst out, “Ooh, I love the ones about the psycho-paths! Was this a true-crime?  Those are the best!  I could watch them all night!”

I looked at her animated face and bright eyes and laughed outright.  This was the last thing I expected from Sarah.  And you know what?  I’ve slept just fine ever since.

It’s been a discombobulating week, and not helped by the time change.  I particularly loathe Spring Forward. It throws me worse than Fall Back in terms of messing with my sleep.  In addition I am a morning person who counts the growing minutes of spring morning light like Scrooge counts his money.  I yearn for the Equinox like a sunflower for the sun.

I was beside myself a few years back when Congress (Congress! Spit.) changed the date of Daylight Savings from early April to the middle of March.  I was in the habit of watching the stately procession of the morning light as I had my morning tea and read my book.  Then suddenly I was plunged back into three weeks of darkness.  It was like suddenly being dropped into the dark ages, a time before electricity.  I was truly outraged.  Up at 5:30, I stood at the window wringing my hands.  The sun, the sun, where was the sun? Oh my life, my life!

Then there’s the difficulty–with both time changes– of getting a hold of the cats’ watches, changing the time, and getting them back on their ankles without them knowing.  This almost never works. 

Sunday I came home from a friend’s house at 5:00.  I am in the habit of giving the cats a little meal at 5:00, (Putzer, the Attorney says I feed them every hour and thinks she has the evidence to prove it) but I thought since their body clocks as well as their little cat watches were still at 4:00 I would have a peaceful hour before they started making demands on me and scratching my good couch.  But they whined on cue as I came in the door, all three of them, standing in the kitchen looking pointedly at their dishes and then reproachfully at me.

I walked with dignity through their midst out to the sunroom, collected my hori hori, and went outside to do some weeding. My neighbor Bill came across the street with a caulking gun. I had just finished up two weeks cat care for his little Suleiman the Magnificent and in exchange he made my bathtub and shower look brand new.   On the rare occasions when I’m out of town, Bill has afternoon duty with my cats –that would be the 5:00 feeding. So the cats know Bill as someone who occasionally feeds them in the afternoon. When he entered the house on Sunday I heard such a wail of pitiful voices that I checked to see if they were mauling him.  When he disappeared into the bathroom, the whining stopped and they all settled down to wait him (or me) out. 

That was Sunday.  Monday was the culmination of L’Affair Litter Box. I don’t know if it was connected with the time change.  It could have been Time Coincident but Not Causal.  In any case, Winston seems to have a preference for a litter box out in the old cabin that’s connected to my house by the sunroom roof.  He’s a cranky old man by now, and set in his ways.  He likes his cigarette on the front porch at about 9:00 in the evening and then he wants back in.  He likes to take a crap in peace, I guess, where he can take his time and not tense up when he hears the activity of the other two cats, me, and the stream of people that come in and out of my house every day. So he stinks it up pretty good back there but lately he has also taken to peeing outside the box—sort of the equivalent of missing the toilet.

The last time I cleaned up Winston’s outhouse, I made the ill-advised decision to pour the litter into a taller cat box, erroneously thinking that if the sides of the box were tall, he would be unable to jet his pee over the top.  Even though I have lived with several geriatric cats in my life I realize now that I’ve missed cues that Winston is developing arthritis. He has difficulty getting into a taller box.  That was probably why he started using the box in the cabin in the first place. It was easier to get into.

But seeing it from Winston’s point of view I imagine he firstly was aggrieved that he, the alpha-cat of the house, had to use the cold litter box in the unheated cabin rather than the ones in the house that have heated seats, so to speak.  Then I go and put in this outrageously tall box, making his already inconvenient situation untenable.

So there I was, the second morning of Daylight Savings Time, feeling grumpy that it felt like January again, but managing to settle in with my tea and my book to enjoy the dead of night at six in the morning. I left the bedroom door slightly ajar for the cats (everything for the cats) but not so wide that all the heat escapes.  I had just turned a page when Winston shoved into the room swinging the door wide open, and stalked over to the bookcase where he quite pointedly peed on my books. 

I leaped out of the chair and went dashing for a rag, a bucket, and the cat pee neutralizer stuff that smells like cat pee.  “Oh no, Winston, what have you done, oh Winston, how could you, my books, my books, not my books, oh, my life, my life.” I sounded like something out of Mildred Pierce.  Three copies of my memoir (99 Girdles on the Wall) and two knitting books seemed to have gotten the worst of it.  They, too, have been neutralized.

It took me until the middle of the afternoon to realize that this episode was most likely about my tampering with the litter box and I immediately restored the old shallow one. There are temporary plastic sheets covering all the bookcases in the house and Winston is under surveillance.

It’s Day Five of Daylight Savings Time. In another twenty days we’ll be where we would have been if Congress hadn’t decided to play Pope Gregory.

I have a regressive teaching technique I called The Points.  It’s a way of not just encouraging students to play the piano but a way of helping them to focus on matters of technique that they would otherwise most likely ignore.  That they otherwise do ignore.

It costs them nothing to have me sit there week after week saying, “Two counts on that note. Half note, two counts. See this note that’s not colored in?  Hold it long enough to say ‘Hold On.’”  But if I say, “You get a point if you remember to hold every half note in this piece for two counts,” then they’ve got stakes. Then they start mining pieces for half notes.

My new six year old student who hits the piano keys like she was swatting flies looked at first to be a hopeless case.  She was resistant to all suggestions or demonstrations.  We hadn’t even gotten to a place where I could assess if she even had sufficient small motor coordination to curve her fingers at all.  But when I said she could have a point for every song she played with her fingers curved, I saw she could shape her fingers into talons on command.

Most of my students like the point system, but occasionally I’ll get one that’s just not interested.

“No thanks,” a ten year old told me.  “But I still want to get stickers.”

Another child, a tiny six year old inspected the prize box and, in the tone of a 40 year old harried mother, said “I don’t need to have stuff like this around.”

Then there is Lacie who just turned 7.  After unveiling the point system to her, I spent ten minutes trying to focus us on her music.

“Lacie, show me what you played this week.”

“What if I play a song with my fingers curved and I sing along.  Will I get two points?”

“Yes. Let’s look at “Petite Minuet.”  Does this look familiar?”

“What if I went back and memorized all the songs I’ve already learned? Would I get points for all of those?”

“Yes. Which hand begins ‘Petite Minuet?’”

“What if I learned something that wasn’t in any of my piano books but my grandma helped me a little? Would I still get a point”

“Yes. Wait. Well, no. You only get a point if you try it without help from anyone.”

“What if I get it wrong?”

“That doesn’t matter.  We’ll fix it and then you’ll get a point for trying.”

“Just for trying?”

“Yes.  Lacie, show me your right hand number two finger?”

“What if I want to learn something by myself but she forces me to let her help and I can’t stop her, will I still get a point?”

Sigh. “Is that really going to be a problem?”

Points can be cashed in for whatever stuff you certainly do not need that I can find relatively cheaply at Archee McPhee’s, the Oriental Trading Company, Dollar Stores, and yard sales. The prize booty is stored in an old suitcase of my mother’s that’s got leather edges, brass hardware, and the kind of spring lock where you push a button and the hasp goes boi-yoi-yoing.  The body is a brown tweed pattern with a specular coffee stain that looks like the land mass of India, the Middle East, Africa, part of Greece and off to the left a bit, the U.K.  Inside it smells permanently of Dorothy Gray lipstick (Edwardian Rose).

Should you be lucky enough to be a student of mine, here’s a sampling of what the points will get you:

Devil Duckies, mini pencil-top Devil Duckies, and Devil Duckie Christmas ornaments. On sale for 5-10 points.
(Clearly these are leftover from a few years back when Devil Duckies were the rage.  My current crop of students don’t know what they are.)

Mini nail polish. 15 points.

Cocktail rings, bling, mardi gras beads. 10 points.

Fortune Telling Fish. 5 points.

Sticky eyeballs. 5 points.

Erasers and pencil grips. 1 point. (limit: 2 per lesson)

Baseball cards. 10 points.

Porcelain tchotchkes. 20 points.

Sometimes the prizes aren’t what matter.    Some students watch their points add up week after week and the points take on a meaning that I’m not privy to. But with all my students who are in The Points, the end of their lesson is signaled with the question: “Do you want to look in the prize box?”

I got interested in George Orwell because I was looking for something to listen to in the car that was not music—something to give my ears a rest.  At the library I noticed a series of lectures on disc called The World of George Orwell.   I thought, “He has a world?”  Actually we all do, but as a writer he has given us entrée into his.

In one of his earliest essays– and a small masterpiece– called A Hanging, he describes an incident from his days as a policeman in Burma.  As the prisoner is being led to his death, he steps aside to avoid a mud puddle.  In that action Orwell suddenly has a realization that they are about to take away the life of a healthy, conscious man.  “.  .  .in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.”

I loved his acknowledgement that a mind is a world. Reading Complete Essays I found George Orwell’s world refreshingly hard to classify.  I had running and unanswered questions as I read. He talks with approbation about Marx. Is he Marxist? No. Communist? No. He writes for leftist publications and talks about socialism but is he a Socialist?  Not really.  Feminist?  Hardly.  He was apparently “awkward” around women and he did not think himself attractive to women.  On the other hand he married a woman who was intelligent, independent and beautiful—as nearly every Eileen is.

He’s not any kind of an “ist.” Two consistent strains are his intense dislike of Totalitarianism and of the Catholic Church, seeing the latter as an institution of the former.  A phrase that Orwell uses a lot is “a society of free and equal human beings.”  What gets us there defies labels.  In The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius he says, “It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.” I think he didn’t go in for dead “isms.” He liked language that breathed.

I love his Englishness.  It’s an Englishness influenced from the bottom up, not the top down.  Orwell didn’t go to Oxbridge.  He lived among the homeless.  He’s English before American culture infiltrated English society so he’s writing to English people who know what it means to do physical jerks (calisthenics) or to “guy (ridicule) an official” or to “fetch up” something in his mind.  Every so often he says that someone or something is “not worth powder and shot.”

He has lovely descriptions for Americans whose DVRs hunt PBS: “.  .  .the beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant.  The crowds in the big towns with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners.  .  .the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labor Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings.  .  .  .It is a culture.  .  .somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes.  Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as a living creature.”

Then he turns over the stone: “.  .  .it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons.  It has rich relations that have to be kow-towed to and poor relations that are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income.”(The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.)

The essays are full of nuanced observations, and dry, throwaway, funny lines.  Make yourself a pot of tea (as per the Orwell essay A Nice Cup of Tea) and read on:

Politicians and politics.  Insert whatever name you want:

*“.  .  .I saw in Picture Post some stills of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.”  (As I Please 6, 1944)

*In a prosperous country.  .  .left wing politics are always partly humbug.  There can be no real reconstruction that would not lead to at least a temporary drop in the.  .  .standard of life, which is another way of saying that the majority of left-wing politicians and publicists are people who earn their living by demanding something they don’t genuinely want.  (Review of Union Now by Clarence K. Streit, 1939)

*Mr B. is not the most effective of the many guns now firing the counter-attack of the conservative party—indeed he is less like a gun than a home-made mortar with a strong tendency to blow up.  .  . (As I Please 29, 1944)

*Monomania is not interesting.  .  .no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorizing effect. (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)

 In the Midst of World War II:

*Racialism is.  .  .a way of pushing exploitation beyond the point that is normally possible, by pretending that the exploited are not human beings.

*Hitler is only the ghost of our own past rising against us. He stands for the extension and perpetuation of our own methods, just at the moment when we are beginning to be ashamed of them.

*I thought of a rather cruel trick I one played on a wasp.  He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half.  He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus.  Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.  It is the same with modern man.  The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period during which he did not notice it.

*Marx’s famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a different meaning subtly but appreciatively different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say.  .  .that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said it is something people create for themselves, to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’  What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine guns?”(Notes on the Way, 1940)

 *Why is the goose-step not used in England?.  .  . Military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.

 *Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage sentences.   .   .that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in.  .  .

* In the years between 1920 and 1940 it (the decay of the British ruling class) was happening with the speed of a chemical reaction.  .  .a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden and Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent.  As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt.  He was simply a hole in the air.

*The British ruling class could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end.  .  .Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible.

*.  .  .the naked democracy of the swimming pool. (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941)

*A column about how shortages and rationing had democratized clothes, he goes on about men’s evening dress: 

“.  .  .hedged around with all kinds of petty conventions, which you could only disregard at the price of being made to feel uncomfortable.  .  .to have two studs in your shirt front when other people were only wearing one, even to have too broad or too narrow a stripe of braid down your trouser leg was enough to make you into an outcast. (Banish this Uniform 1945)

 *Anti-Semitism is simply not the doctrine of a grown up person. (As I Please 9, 1944)

 Dickens and Kipling:

*Kipling is a jingo imperialist; he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.  It is better to start by admitting that, and then try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly. (Rudyard Kipling, 1942)

*Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.

 *All art is propaganda.

*What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.  Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one.

*Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in a revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at.  There is always room for one more custard pie.  (Charles Dickens, 1940)

Language

*twice-breathed air in the movies  (As I Please 8, 1944)

*‘Tain’t Gonna Rain No More’ (1924)and ‘Show Me the Way to go Home’ (1925).  .  .went ‘round the world like an influenza epidemic. (Songs We Used to Sing, 1946)

*The butter ration is only just visible without a microscope (As I Please 19, 1944)

*Gazelles are almost the only animal alive that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. (Marrakech, 1939)

*Re: ‘Endless use of ready-made metaphors’: This filthy stew of words.  .  .” (As I Please 16, 1944)

*Re:Book reviewers: These wretches churned forth their praise—masterpiece, brilliant, unforgettable and so forth– like so many mechanical pianos.  (As I Please 28, 1944)

*Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the Unconscious, poetry that aimed at being nonsense.  .  .does not seem to have been common.  (Nonsense Poetry: The Lear Omnibus, 1945)

As They Tickle Me (unclassifiable quotations)

 *Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible toward the nearest suitable patch of water.  .  .

.  .  .at this period after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.

I mention the spawning of toads because it is one of the phenomena of Spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from the poets. (Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, 1946)

 *“If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue, almost instinctively.” (But Are We Really Ruder? No. 1946)

 *“Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.” (Can Socialists Be Happy? 1943)

 *(He takes on the high rate of deaths due to speeding with a long list of why it’s difficult to get people to slow down.  Then he says:)“In other words we value speed more highly than we value human life.  Then why not say so instead of every few years having one of these hypocritical campaigns (at present it is Keep Death off the Road).  .  . in the full knowledge that while our roads remain as they are, and present speeds are kept up, the slaughter will continue?” (As I Please 60, 1946)

 *.  .  .those who really have to deal with nature have no cause to be in love with it.  On the East Anglia coast the older cottages for the fishermen are built with their backs to the sea.  The sea is simply an enemy from the fisherman’s point of view.” (Review of The Way of a Countryman by Sir William Beach Thomas March, 1944)

*Except for the few surviving commons, the high roads, the lands of the National Trust, a certain number of parks, and the sea shore below high- tide mark, every square inch of England is owned by a few thousand families.  These people are just about as useful as so many tapeworms. (As I Please 38, 1944)

*.  .  .the cotton-wool with which the B.B.C. stuffs its speakers’ mouths makes any real discussion of theological problems impossible.  .  .(As I Please 46, 1944)

*A thing is funny when.  .  .it upsets the established order.  Every joke is a tiny revolution.  (Funny, but not Vulgar, 1945)

Final lines

*“So progress persists—or at any rate, it was persisting until recently.” (Review of My Life: The Autobiography of Havelock Ellis)

I was going to subtitle this post “The essays of George Orwell” but then no one would read it.  I’m afraid it would have the same result as something Orwell says in Poetry and the Microphone: “Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word ‘poetry’ would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose.”  I know that I would have skipped over such a sub-title until a month or so ago when I read the essay Such, Such Were the Joys.

Before reading Such, Such Were the Joys, my image of Orwell was of a rather shadowy and paranoid individual whose insistence on saying unpopular things made him seem somewhat of a crank.  But this lively, poignant, sad and funny memoir of life in St Cyprian’s boarding school contrasts with his 1984, a book so stark that it scared me when I read it in high school. I never want to read it again. Yet Little Eric Blair, (his real name) who even then was developing one of the sharpest, most extraordinary minds of the century, being mistreated and misunderstood broke my heart.

He describes a beating that went on for so long it frightened and astonished him.  He recalls that it didn’t hurt, however, because “fright and shame seemed to have anesthetized me.”  He cried partly “because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”

From all that I can make out, the adult Eric Blair was a bit of a crank, but he was cranky about a lot of the things I am cranky about so that’s just lovable.  He was also funny, imaginative and curious, qualities that I admire and prize.  All my friends are required to have at least two out of the three.  He saw not just two but several sides, and then the layers to ideas.  He picked through issues like he picked through items in junk shops.  He said the things that everyone else subconsciously knew but no one wanted to admit to. And he has some of the greatest first lines I have ever read.

He left St Cyprian’s on a scholarship to Eton.  From there he did not do the expected, that is, go to Oxford or Cambridge.  He joined the police force in Burma.  Upon his return to England five years later, he lived with the homeless for years and eventually wrote the book, Down and Out in Paris and London under his pseudonym.  He got married.  He studied the poor and working classes in northern England and wrote about them in The Road to Wigan Pier.  By now Big Brother was beginning to watch George Orwell.  What agitating was he doing up there in Lancashire?  MI-5 probably started what would become a big, fat file on him. The day after he sent in his manuscript, he and his wife Eileen left for Spain and joined the Spanish Civil War.  He was wounded.  The two of them escaped back to England.

When the Second World War began percolating, Orwell got a job with the BBC, which he hated.  He hated office politics and pretensions. He hated having a boss.  He hated censorship. He lasted two years.  He wrote essays for various publications and created his own column for the periodical,Tribune.  Reading his wartime essays enhances the experience of watching Foyles’s War.  Orwell already had me with Such, Such Were the Joys, but the name of his newspaper column made him my comrade.  He called it As I Please.  The topics are diverse, but even within one column he writes about whatever is on his mind, and there is always more than one thing on his mind.  In his first As I Please he transcribes a conversation in a tobacconist’s shop, comments on who has legal jurisdiction when Americans who have lately over-run the country are involved, has a paragraph about Fascism, and refers to a 19^th century novel by one Mark Rutherford in reference to London slums.

There are 80 As I Please columns, numbered, not titled because they don’t have one central topic. Here are my notes to remind me what it was I enjoyed most in some of the columns: the honor’s list, short stories, anti-semitism, flying saints, Joyce, political language, fascism, war revenge, newspapers, women’s make-up, I.A. Richard’s poetry experiment, C.S. Lewis, children’s toys, executions, writer’s magazines, Tories, shopkeepers, propaganda, popular songs, Fairchild Family children’s book, dead metaphors. 

In other published essays he writes in depth about Dickens, Kipling, the English people, the Spanish Civil War, socialism and fascism.  He writes about poking around junk shops, how to make a proper cup of tea, Tolstoy’s sour grapes in regards to Shakespeare, and titillating comic post cards.  He gets cranky about the degradation of language.  T.S. Eliot, Thackeray, and Marx come up a lot.  He writes book reviews that I enjoyed even if I had never heard of the book and wasn’t interested in reading it. In short I will read anything Orwell wrote (except 1984 for a second time) even if I am not particularly interested in the subject because he writes so well. I’ll get interested in the subject.

To finish out the biography, Eric and Eileen adopted a baby boy in 1944.  Eileen died unexpectedly from the anesthetic in an operation in 1945.  1984 was published in 1949, and Eric Blair died in 1950 at the age of 47. 

I have a huge list of Orwell quotations that made me either snicker, marvel, or sit up and think but I will save those for the next post and begin here with some of his first lines:

*As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later. (Marrakech, 1939) 

*Dickens is one of those writers who is well worth stealing. (Charles Dickens, 1940)

*In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. (Shooting an Elephant, 1936)

*As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941)

*The time was when I used to say that what the English climate needed was a minor operation, comparable to the removal of tonsils in a human being.  Just cut out January and February, and we should have nothing to complain about. (Bad Climates are Best, 1946)

*This trip was a failure, as the object of it was to get into prison, and I did not, in fact get more than forty eight hours in custody.  .  . (Clink, 1932)

*The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of the “Daily Mail” reporters whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm.  (Spilling the Spanish Beans, 1937)

*When Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer appeared in 1935, it was greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. (Inside the Whale, 1940)

*It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his work. (Rudyard Kipling, 1942)

*In peacetime, it is unusual for foreign visitors to this country to notice the existence of the English people. (The English People, 1947)

*Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. (Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, 1944)

*Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian’s.  .  .  I began wetting the bed. (Such, Such Were the Joys,1948)

Previously on this blog, my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything had fixed my wireless connection (without my interference because I was asked to leave the house) and had cabled my computer up to the TV with the cable that she bought (so as to get the correct one on the first try.) I can now stream videos from the tens of thousands that are out there. 

For people who aren’t sure what streaming means, here’s an easy way to understand this formidable power: movies and television programs are out there in the atmosphere.  When you stream, you divert one of them into your computer. When your computer is cabled up to your television, you can watch them on the big screen.  All that’s left is to be savvy about how to find the best resolution for the best price, preferentially nothing. I can’t explain resolution because I don’t know what it means.  That’s where I am.

In any case, last week was a busy one and I conscientiously went about my work, piously pronouncing that I would only use my new capability in the evening when I finished teaching, answered all my e-mails and when my checking account balanced.  Sunday night after watching bits of a few things from You Tube, I changed my Netflix account from discs only to streaming.  I filled up My List.  Then I went to bed.

Monday when I emerged from my reading time (which continues to be an inviolable two hours) the computer was at my desk.  I did some writing, some busy work, some practicing, some fussing about this and that, and played a word in Scrabble.  I wandered into the kitchen around eleven thinking I needed some elevenses.  I picked apart a pomegranate.  As it was shooting and spitting juice all over the wall, ceiling and floor, I remembered Netflix. Maybe I’ll just watch something for a half hour, I thought. I hooked up the computer to the HMDI cable (I don’t know what that means either.) For the rest of the day I watched:

The Lady Vanishes
Cottage to Let
All Over the Town
Two episodes Law and Order Criminal Intent
One episode Everybody Loves Raymond
One episode Midsomer Murders

All of which I have already seen with the exception of All Over the Town.  And in the case of Everybody Loves Raymond, I own the disc.  It’s in the other room.

I emailed Gwen: “This is like having a box of chocolates that I don’t have to share.  I can take a bite of one and if I don’t feel like eating that particular one just then, I can put it back.”

She replied: “I wish I could say that one gets tired of even chocolates.”

I emailed Gwen the next day: “Poirot. Season One.”

That was pretty much all anyone heard from me on Tuesday except for the students I saw that day.  My hairline is spontaneously growing little curls like Miss Lemon’s.

Wednesday was Law and Order Criminal Intent Day.

Thursday was more old English movies: Encore, English Without Tears, Black Orchid, Millions Like Us.

Every evening when I started to feel almost sick with satiety, I moved the computer back to my desk so that’s where it would be in the morning.  Friday I was so sleepy, I just left it by the couch, all hooked up and ready to stream.  That was a mistake.  Everything I do in life, I do better between the hours of 5:30 AM and 12 PM: thinking, reading, concentrating, warming up my voice, playing the piano, painting, writing, and even exercising. I peak out at noon.  I can’t afford to lose those precious 6 ½ hours to 130 episodes of a little Belgian dandy clipping his waxed moustache. 

Saturday night The Gwen was open so I took my Macallan across the street and Gwen and I finished watching Parade’s End together.

Gwen said, “I was afraid that when you could stream movies, you wouldn’t want to come over anymore.”

I said, “I thought when you were so eager to get me hooked up, you were trying to get rid of me.”

Aww.

My new student Alexis is six years old, directive– bossy actually–and bright.  She walks into the house in high-heeled sandals, and swathed in layers of leggings, dresses, and sweaters.  She comes into the house talking about the dog she saw on the way to my house.  She tells me what she has done in the week past. She tells me what we are going to do today at her lesson. 

 We sit together at the piano and I try to find a way into her energy so as to match it, and divert it to a place we can inhabit together.  She is just learning to read middle C and treble G.  We manage to get past the dreary business of playing middle C 18 times so as to experience it in quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes (crotchet, minim, breve to my British friends.  To my American readers, isn’t that interesting that all this time on the other side of the world people have been calling quarter notes crotchets?) We manage to locate treble G.  I turn the page.  Finally something mildly interesting: playing C and G together. 

 “Oh, this is fun,” I say.

 I show her how to play C and G with her thumb and pinkie.  She tries it.

 “How is that fun?” she demands.

 “Busted,” I think. “Well, listen.  It sounds like a car horn,” I say.

 I play C and G together over and over. Honk, honk, honk. I honk it an octave higher.

 “This sounds even more like a car horn,” I say.

 Alex tries it.  She listens.  “No, it sounds more like a car horn down here.”

 She’s intrigued.  Temporarily.

Alexis plays the keys like she’s swatting flies.  I’ve never seen anything quite like it.  She appears resistant to the suggestion of any other technique. She’s going to flail on those keys until she decides it would work better to soften her fingers a little.  I’ll be waiting for her.

I am familiar with the insistence of doing it my way.  I have it.  My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything has it.  All the really interesting people have it.  Gwen has lately acquired a halo so it isn’t just Alexis that floats my mind across the street to her.  It’s the persistent glow emanating from her house.

A couple of months ago, Gwen got a huge flat screen TV, which I like to call The Plasma to differentiate it from her old flat TV screen, which she gave to me.  Just up and gave it to me.  Our mutual handyman, Matt carried it into my living room and hooked it up.  He moved the large CRT television that Gwen had also given me from the front room into the bedroom, and took the tiny TV that had belonged to my father out to the street.  I put a free sign on it and it was gone in 12 hours.  Now I have what feels like a movie theater screen in my house and what feels like a sister rather than a neighbor across the street.

After Matt had hooked everything up, Gwen swept in with the remote, eager to show me all its features.  Well, maybe not eager.  Gwen and I have different styles.  Gwen is used to doing, not talking about what she’s doing.  I am used to fumbling, whining, figuring out what I can on my own, and finally formulating one or two questions to get the rest of the information I need. And I am highly susceptible to over-stimulation and too much information at one time.  We have learned over the years to divert our energies to places that we can inhabit together.

Gwen pushed buttons on the remote and showed me, talking in half sentences, how I could find the menu and change the picture to wide or panoramic screen.  I grabbed the remote one inch before I tipped into overload.

“OK,” I said. “Let me try.”

I pushed buttons.

“No, not that one,” Gwen said.  “You have to.  .  . here, give it back.”

“No, let me do this.”

“But you’re not doing what I said.”

Right there something crystallized.  Something about me I had never thought about. “Gwen,” I recall that I spoke slowly as the realization was dawning.  “That’s what I do.  I do the opposite of what you say and I fumble around until I get to whatever you said to do.  That’s how I learn.”

Gwen acquired sister status when she gave me the TV.  She got the halo a few days ago when she got my wireless connection to finally work. She emailed me: “Is there a time you are going to be out of the way for fifteen minutes so I can do this?”

That made me smile.  I try to “help” when Gwen’s doing things for me.  I don’t know whether the impulse comes from guilt or gratitude for her generosity.  I do know that “help” doesn’t help:  “What’s that icon there?  Maybe that’s what you need.  Try that link. That sounds like what you’re looking for. What’s that thing for?  Can I make you a cup of tea?”

So I gave Gwen a wide berth and she achieved a wireless connection for me.  Last night she brought an HDMI cable over and showed me how to hook it up so I can throw my computer screen up on the flat screen.  There was the home page of my web site on the television. Really, it’s like living across the street from a magician!

Now I can stream videos.  I can catch up to my friends Susan and Mike, not to mention Gwen, and probably everyone else in the world who incidentally also own Smart phones, and who get to watch all kinds of things I can only hope to see once or twice a week if I can get the disc from Netflix or the library.  As I relax after all this excitment, I am grateful–not for the first time–for my neighbor, and I’m really curious about what shoes Alexis will have on next week.

In an effort to prolong the aura of my recent thirty hours in Portland I am writing up notes made over a bowl of beef stew in the Heathman Hotel restaurant.  My former piano student Anna got me a rate at the hotel “where service is still an art” through her work at Rubicon International with the condition that I leave an autographed copy of my book 99 Girdles on the Wall in their famous library.

I took the train.  Four lovely hours to think, to read and write, and to gaze out the window at a ghostly gray January day.  Before I learned to paint I hadn’t the eye to distinguish the gray of Puget Sound’s water from the gray of the mountains, the sky and the clouds.  There was a subtle palette out there, which set off the stark black etches of bare trees and along with the rhythm of the train, invited meditation and reflection.

At Vancouver, thirty eight kids from Camas climbed aboard and filled up the car behind me.  They were on their way to Sacramento with their projects for a Brainy Kids Convention: one boy had a trebuchet; a girl had a presentation about genetics.  Within thirty seconds the chaperons were making sure their charges weren’t bothering me.

I took a taxi to the Heathman Hotel where the amenities in my room were tastefully hidden in black boxes that blended in with the furniture.  It took more than the usual amount of exploring to locate all the free stuff in back of the mini-bar and the four dollar KitKats.  I explored the hotel and went for a walk before Anna got off work and whisked us both up Alder Street to the Multnomah Whisk(e)y Library.  Yes, that is the spelling.  You can’t imagine the venom generated over the controversy around how the word is spelled.  The Scottish and the Canadian spelling is whisky.  In Ireland and the U.S., it’s whiskey.  Here’s a comment from Britain on a NY Times blog post about whiskey:

“I cannot pass over the unforgivable use by a serious writer on wines and spirits of ‘whiskey’ to refer to Scotch whisky. I am afraid I found the constant misspelling of the product made your article quite unreadable. . .”

Solomon would have spelled it like the Multnomah Whisk(e)y Library has chosen to.

We entered a dark passageway and climbed some stairs to the faint sounds of Louis Armstrong.  The music exploded when the door to the library opened onto a high-ceilinged roomed lined with bottles that sparkled and gleamed in communion with the huge chandelier.  Three or four ladders on wheels rolled back and forth in aide of procuring bottles. I was nearly sick right there. Equipped with diaries to document our exploration of whisky, we sank into two deep leather armchairs.  

After long deliberation of the book-length menu, and with some tutelage from Anna and Tom, the curator, I chose three “half-pours:” Laphroaig (Triple-Wood was my only note, I don’t remember the age or anything else a connoisseur would want to know), Bruichladdich (Peat Project), and Bunnahabhain (12 year).  I tasted them in that order but if I had it to do again, I would have reversed it, and ended with Laphroaig because its finish lasts about three days. 

Anna had Glendronach (12 year, sherry cask) and Talisker (10 year) and went wild over the Talisker.  When Anna was 14 her family made a tour of the Isle of Skye where Talisker is distilled.  There she first tasted whisky, which she predictably thought was about the nastiest stuff imaginable.  What a different ten years make!

Multnomah Whisk(e)y Library

I stayed up past my bedtime, got over-stimulated, and was not able to fall asleep til about three in the morning.  Anna collected me at 10:00 for coffee at a café called Case Study.  We explored Martinottis’ Café and Delicatessen, one of the few places in Portland Anna does not personally know.  Charming and European, it also had the look of having not slept all night but in its case, it was due to the calm after the Christmas storms.

We split up, Anna to her tutoring commitment and me to continue being a tourist.  I got caught in a downpour which dis-oriented me.  I kept walking and thinking I would get somewhere warm and dry. But when the rain stopped, I found myself in a park that looked both familiar and a place out of a different world.  I stood dripping until I realized it was both.  “It’s that place,” I thought. “That place where I–.”  But couldn’t think what that place was. Finally it focused.  Sheet Music Service of Portland used to be here.  I had made a pilgrim’s detour on the way to the Oregon coast in the 1980s just to visit the store that was, along with Johnson and West in Seattle, a holy site for the classical musician. 

I ended up back at the Heathman with two bottles of Scotch–one for me and one for Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything– from the Tenth Avenue Liquor Store,conveniently located around the corner so it could be my last stop before catching the train.  But first there was the ordeal of wrapping the bottles up in my pajamas in the luggage room of the hotel, and then repacking my entire bag in the ladies’ lounge where I wasn’t under surveillance by the hotel staff.

Anna met me at the train station to say goodbye. I feel so lucky to have had a student who grew up to be not only an articulate, reflective, funny, and beautiful woman, but she also has become my friend.  There’s an affinity I didn’t see coming when she was a shy twelve year old sitting at my piano and I was in the middle of the psycho-analysis that would finally bring peace and clarity to my life. This weekend as I listened to her and watched her, I felt nostalgia for the enthusiasm and energy of being young. The complexity of Anna’s life is layered with primary colors, not with values of grey and the black etches of trees seen from a train window.

It was lovely to be in the company of primary colors.  And I need to start watching Portlandia.

Finally this story can be told.  It should be said at once that the whole business is anti-climactic, but I am going ahead with it.  It begins shortly after Thanksgiving Day when Gwen my neighbor who knows something about just about everything and I were planning our Christmas debauchery, to include a movie, a chicken, mince pie and whiskey.

It was the movie that was under deliberation.  I mentioned a movie I had seen in the 1960s on television that had stayed with me.  For the past ten years I have periodically checked to see if it was available on DVD.  It’s a 1950s English film called The Holly and the Ivy, starring Ralph Richardson (who steals every scene he’s in), Celia Johnson, Margaret Leighton, and a very young baby-faced Denholm Elliot who at the beginning of the movie is denied 48 hours leave to go home for Christmas and I personally think that is why he always played such embittered characters in later life.  It was that beastly sergeant-major.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  All I remembered about the movie from the 60s was that it was Christmasy, English village-y, (fake)snowy, and that one of the daughters was a bad girl, something I would have liked to have been in my teens, but couldn’t pull off.  I found some obscure references to the movie and sent the links to Gwen who did the advanced research that only Gwen can do.  She actually found it available from a little business in California that called itself Santa Flicks, and that apparently guaranteed your Christmas movie.  She ordered it!

Five days before Christmas, it hadn’t arrived.

“Did you tell them we wanted it for Christmas?” I asked Gwen.

 “Yes, I said it was our Christmas entertainment.”

 “But did you tell them this was our dying sister’s last Christmas?”

 “You know I can’t lie.”

By the 22^th Gwen and I were signing our e-mails “Fingers crossed.” To no avail.  The movie didn’t come on the 23^rd.  It didn’t come on the 24^th.  On Christmas Day I made Gwen find Dylan Thomas reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” on YouTube.  Not the version with Denholm Elliot.  As noted above, he isn’t convincing as a warm sort.

On Dec. 26 Gwen sent an email to Santa Flicks that was so strongly worded for a person from Wisconsin that out of respect for her privacy, not to mention her image, I won’t reproduce it.  But the gist of it was she wanted to know what the hell had happened to The Disc as we now began calling it, Christmas being completely over with.

Santa Flicks came back with the tracking number and the information that the order was shipped with Two-Day service.  The tracking information revealed that The Disc had gone out on Christmas Eve with the expectation that it would arrive on what, Christmas Day?  That would be Santa Service, and neither of us has a chimney.  Maybe that’s why it wasn’t delivered.  Actually I have a chimney, but it’s for a wood stove that’s very small.  The model is called The Leprechaun.  Room for one elf with a DVD.

The tracking information also revealed that The Disc had traveled from Encino to Santa Clarita, California, then to Washington where it had been processed in Federal Way, had been sorted in Seattle, and had turned around gone south to Kent.  For those readers who don’t know the geography of the west coast, the travels of The Disc describes a shepherd’s crook: it made a long journey north to within a few miles of Gwen’s address, looped around and went south.

On Dec 28 there began a series of late afternoon e-mails between Gwen and me. Let me set this up: The mail truck sorts mail at Gwen’s hoity-toity secure group mail box at the end of the block.  It cruises by my house and delivers mail to everyone on the south side of my street, loops back and delivers my mail.  When I see the truck go by my house I know that Gwen’s mail has been delivered and that I have five minutes to mail a letter from my box. 

Dec 28
Elena: Mail’s here.

Gwen: Nothing. 

Dec 30
Elena: Mail’s here

Gwen: I checked. Not there. It’s either heading back to Encino to be re-shipped north or it’s in some eternal loop.

Dec 31
Elena: Mail’s here.

Gwen: I just checked tracking. The Disc is back in L.A.  Santa Flicks has shipped a new one as a first class package.

Jan 2
Elena: Mail’s here.

(This time the routine was varied by the excitement of my actually seeing Gwen trek out to her mailbox a few minutes after getting my e-mail.)

Gwen: Nope

Elena: I suppose you checked to make sure they had the correct address, maybe even the correct city?

Gwen: Long ago.

Jan 3:
Elena: Mail’s here

Gwen: It’s HERE!  It says Fragile and Rush all over its padded package.  That probably held it up a few days. I think it makes people want to stomp on it.  But I won’t watch it til you have time to enjoy it with me.

Elena: 6:30 tonight?

So we finally saw our Christmas movie.  I had too much Scotch, dozed off and missed the part where the bad girl is forgiven.