What was Lost is Found

I've been finding music!

I've been unpacking at my house for over a year now. It was only a month ago that I realized why some of the boxes were such a hodge podge, and why others seemed to be so unfamiliar.

The unfamiliar ones are easy. I packed them in June and July 2005 and put them into a PODS container, where they sat for a month, and then unloaded them into my Bradley Avenue apartment "for the duration" until I found a new house. Then they were moved into the garage in June 2006, and only now am I getting to them.

The hodge podges?? On the weekend I was going to do the "final pack" of my apartment, after the furniture had been moved, and while all my "stuff" was lying around in piles, I got the news that my dad had died. Within a few hours, volunteers from the church had showed up to move all my stuff to the new house so that I could catch a plane back to Rhode Island and family.

I worked like a demon to throw things into boxes that were brought out to vans and then packed into the garage. Things were mislabeled, poorly sorted, full of numbness and shock and grieving.

And now I'm opening up to find things that I've been missing.

A box of piano music brought back many fond memories. Mrs. Liffmann, my piano teacher (as a college student) in Providence had had a huge studio of children. In her last years of teaching, I walked to her home off Hope Street once a week to work on the most elementary music. (Ah, my sonatina album!) A little funny, and embarrassing, when people heard me practicing in the rehearsal hall; but hey, "you gotta start somewhere."

I found piano music from when I studied with Debi Fishbein (now Adams). Debi was a friend, and after she finished her Bachelors degree and while pursuing her Masters in Piano Performance at Boston University, we ran a music studio together at Steinert Hall in Boston. She taught piano, I taught voice, she sometimes accompanied me, and we rehearsed together. It was a hoot. It was Studio 54, and the nightclub Studio 54 was big then. (Also Studio 54 Jeans which, we discovered, were headquartered in Boston. A fan of the jeans sent a letter to the studio, once, requesting a copy of the poster of the naked guy putting on a pair of jeans. We joked about getting out a camera and . . . )

My music is on the piano now, and bringing great joy.

I also discovered a treasured set of audiotapes from the German Democratic Republic. They were a gift from my friend Ginga Eichler on the occasion of my work as a volunteer press agent for GDR Days, which just happened to fall in October 1989 during the period in which the Wall was opened, the Council of Ministers resigned, Erich Honecker resigned and was replaced by Egon Krentz, and the old East German state prepared to implode and be overrun by the German Federal Republic.

Gisela May is one of the great interpreters of Bertolt Brecht, and I believe the recordings I have date from the mid 1970s (just after she recorded "Hallo Dolly!"). They are (she is) magnificent, full of nuance and forthright "gestus." They remind me of the time I saw Ms. May perform Mother Courage at the Theater auf dem Schiffbauerdamm around the corner from Ginga's apartment at nr. 1 Chauseestrasse.

I think that this music puts me in touch with a deep woundedness I have around being born workingclass. Well, not about being born where I was born, but my awareness of the oppression that workers experience in this culture. This awareness grew in my years at Little Flags Theater, a proletarian political theater that celebrated working people and the struggle for social change. David Jernigan, I believe, was the stage manager who said that two emotions were at work in creating workingclass characters. One was pride: overwhelming pride that everything that exists in the world happens because a worker went to work. Every crop that is harvested, every metal that is mined and smelted and fashioned in to something useful, every tree that is felled and hewn and used to build--everything that is is either given in nature or made available to us all because a worker worked. And the second emotion is rage: rage that over the years milions have died, that laborers have been forced in to chattel slavery and wage slavery, that working class kids receive inferior education and are prepared for lesser jobs, that mental work is elevated over physical labor and that leisure without labor is the most highly regarded and rewarded. These two emotions are dynamically interrelated, which can give working class culture such power, such truth.

Listening to Gisela May brings me to the Memorial Stone for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; to standing before the Memorial for the 26 Commissars in Baku; to laying flowers at the Tombs of the Unknowns in Washington DC and at the Kremlin in Moscow. To standing before Mother Jones's grave in Illinois, seeing pictures of miners and their "Mother," reading tributes by "the faithful" and even recognizing a name of a recent visitor. To my tears, yesterday, reading in the People's Weekly World that Moe Fishman is dead--not a person I new personally, but a persom I know in the movement, a comrade fallen, one who believed that another world is possible, and who was willing to go to Spain in the 1930s to make it happen. Listening to Gisela May brings me to the recent death of Laura Ross and to the heartbreaking truth of my own life, one of pride and rage, disappointment at failures but deep confidence in the ultimate course for humankind; that, through struggle, we will evolve to the next level of human existence, that we will eliminate the profound oppressions inherent in capitalism; that human history will, one day, begin.

I've been listening to Dean Stevens these past few days. "Eyes of Wonder" is, perhaps, my favorite CD--certainly it is the most played in my iTunes library. Dean is the best of the best, an incredibly smart musician with good politics and a balanced life of activism and institution building and family life and relationships of solidarity and bridge building between communities . . . His music is insightful and spiritual and his mode of operations with other musicians is one of inclusion and celebration and learning. I miss having Dean in my life. (And now he's become a hurricane attacking the Caribbean and Mexico!)

It is wonderful to see the sky not so overcast today. A luminous gray, I know the sun must be there somewhere!

Good morning.