When I was a senior in high school, I was invited to the senior awards ceremony. Along with all my friends, so it was no big deal; it was the ceremony for awarding all sorts of different scholarships that the students had received that year. Some people got money, some just got certificates, but my friends all received the same award; they were presidential scholars or something like that, and I think they got a hundred dollars each. Many of the awards were from private funds or organizations. So we sit through this whole evening (we were sitting in rows on the stage, and I was way in the back), all my friends got their awards, lots of other people got theirs for writing some essay about what it’s like to be the victim of prejudice or whatever, and I’m sitting there in the back wondering why I showed up, since it didn’t look like I was getting anything at all. Well, I’d just about given up on receiving an award for anything academic, and I knew I hadn't submitted any essays, so when I finally received an award, and it was from the entire art department of the high school, I barely knew what to do with myself.

There was really nothing artistic that I didn’t have a hand in (with the exception of string ensembles), and yet, I really never thought anyone had noticed, as I myself had never thought anything of it. It was what I did. For me, it was about building a toolbox. I didn’t have any special message in my art, but what I did have was an arsenal of expressive means.

College was a strikingly similar experience, in a way. I learned how to do a great many things – from delivering a monologue to selectively toning a fiber-based print – but in some cases, my professors were angered because they couldn’t hear me in the work. They thought I wasn’t to be found there, because my voice didn’t ring through. And I don’t argue that fact; my voice was not in evidence – but my hand was. Perhaps I’m just an aesthete or a formalist or even just a craftsperson, but I put my spirit into the effort of making something lovely. To make a beautiful object is one of the greatest achievements to which I aspire. Maybe that’s why I put so much effort into making my home attractive.

This didn’t got at all where I thought it would, but I’ve figured out some of my theory on art. I may not have anything to say, but that’s all right. And if I do ever wind up with some statement that I need to unleash upon the world, I’ll damn well know how to deliver it.

I’ve been remembering some friends that I knew from high school. Mostly people I was in marching band with, and how we didn’t think very much of the ones who wanted to be music teachers. But the reason for this was that we had never really had any good music teachers.

The marching band director also taught the beginners, back in the 5th grade, and honestly, I think he was more suited to the ten-year-olds. He had taught the marching band for years but had only managed to usurp the high school concert band and select band the year that I moved up to the school. The old concert/select director had been a saxophone/clarinetist and was often spoken of as the greatest band director of all time; he was allegedly forced into retirement, for some reason. The marching band director was a tuba player, by trade. As we said then, “’Nuff said.”

At the junior high, the band director was a clarinetist, and a very good one. And he knew his stuff about every other instrument, too, but he really never had the patience for the age group that he dealt with. For the generally well-behaved and attentive students (especially clarinetists), he was marvelous and an excellent instructor during private lessons. But during class, when the drummers and saxophone players reinforced all stereotypes about drummers and saxophone players, he couldn’t quite keep control. All told, not such a great music teacher.

In middle school, the band teacher was another tuba player. You’d think that would be enough said, but I’ll have to add that there was nothing wrong with him, and he picked good music, but he just didn’t make any sort of impression on me.

One of the girls that planned to study music ed. was a singer as well as a trombone player, and I know from my scant experience with her that the choir director was phenomenal. The boy, Colin, was a clarinetist first and a low brass player second, and one of those strange people whose actions always surprise you, even though you should have long since begun to expect the unexpected. So when he declared that he was attending the marching band director’s alma mater to study music, we were all slightly stunned and then said to ourselves, “hmm…I guess maybe that does make sense.” But I do think that he had had a number of private lessons with outside instructors who must have been better musical inspiration than what the rest of us had been subjected to.

So, when I examine any tentative plans I might have to become a music teacher along with my musical instruction history, it becomes clear why it took me such a long time to figure it out. The instruction I received during my college years in university choir, in select ensembles, and in my first piano class showed me, by example, what teaching music can be and how it can positively affect the students. When I came across some slightly sub-par music teachers, I knew them for what they were: examples of what not to do. And when I began to instruct my own musical ensemble, during junior year, I had good examples to work from and bad examples to keep me from being the kind of director I hated.

I am thankful to every one of you.

I would like, if I may, to relate a thought experiment that I observed over the summer. It was given by an ethics professor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Buzz Lightyear, and it went as follows.

You are participating in an experiment. You are seated at a table in a room with another person of the same age, race, gender, social class, whatever, as yourself. For all intents and purposes, they might as well be you. You have no feelings or prejudices towards them whatsoever, and you have never met the person before.
The experiment goes like this. You are given a hundred dollars. It is your job to split that hundred dollars between yourself and the other person in any way you choose. The catch is that if the other person is not satisfied with the way you split the money, they can call the whole deal off and you both walk away empty-handed. How do you split the money?

Second question. If you were the other person in this experiment, how much of the hundred dollars would you settle for?

Now what if it was a thousand dollars instead of a hundred? Same two questions.

Your response to the question of how you would split the money only tells us a little about your generosity and how much you think you can get away with. The question of how much money you would settle for before you were willing to walk away from it all is quite revealing. Some people say they’d settle for a dollar, cause hey, it’s a dollar more than they had before, and if they were the one splitting the money, they’d try to take all of it, too. But some people think, “Why should I have only a dollar when the other person gets 99? That’s not fair at all, and I’m going to let them know just what I think of that be seeing to it that they don’t get any money. Serves them right.”

Say the person tries to split the money sixty-forty with you getting forty. Well, maybe you still don’t think that’s fair, but still, it’s forty dollars. Tough call. If you give up those forty dollars just so that the other person gets screwed out of their sixty, what do you gain by it? Will they change their outlook on life and become kinder people? Not likely. Are you doing it for the pleasure of seeing their unhappiness? Not really. So what you have the opportunity to purchase with those forty dollars or however many dollars is fairness – knowing that what happened was right. Forty dollars was an acceptable price for you to pay for justice.


The point of this is putting a price tag on something intangible. I don’t think at the time I experienced this lecture I had any idea how valuable it would be. Buzz Lightyear to the rescue.

Finding her was like finding a part of myself that, for eighteen years, I had never known was missing. It was a wonderful surprise. People have left my life before…people who were important to me, but in time, the space they left behind filled with other people and pursuits. With her, it’s different. Even now, two years after she left me and this city for Costa Rica and the misty coasts of California, there is still a place for her, the edges healed over like an ear piercing or a belly button – proof of an event that fundamentally altered what once was. This space determinedly refuses to be filled, even at times when there is no room anyplace else in my life, as if since her, everyone I have met is simply passing through.

I think that maybe she is my match in the collective unconscious. It’s not that we always agreed, though we did think alike. The truth is more that we were perfect complements.

She didn’t know it then, but she was headed for more snow. I expect, though I can’t say from experience, that snow in Philadelphia is very different from snow in the mountains of Arizona. Where she came from, she was never long out of sight of the ocean, and the weather was always that perfect sixty-two degrees and dry that allowed her to spend the whole year barefoot and in cable-knit sweaters. She saw the city differently than I did. To her, it was a quarry of concrete boxes holding prisoners who were there by virtue of their own inertia. When I looked, as I sometimes did, I saw shining glass towers or houses, centuries old, many wanting from years of neglect, but all of it with so much potential! She was more realistic than I was, at the time, or maybe the contrast between cedars and asphalt was just too much, but either way, she recoiled.

She drew back until nothing in the city could touch her, including we who wanted to reach out to her, and eventually she had to go. I think he and I had always known that she was seeking something from the world. She would go wherever she had to go to find it, or maybe she just liked the going.

I think she knows that we have this. It’s something I could imagine myself imagining, granting unwarranted importance to one individual in my lifetime – my very own “one that got away” – but, I don’t think it’s just me. We talk hardly ever, though I expect that as she climbs a mountain to get to class today while the shadows are still long in the west, she may think of me…knowing that I think of her.

Life has become deceptively simple. Soon the rhythm of work, rest, and sleep will be natural to me, more entirely than ever before. I work on the 21st floor, and it is grey. The printer is next to the window, and I stand waiting for ink to make numbers to make sense, but the blinds have been shut for the last three days.

Walking (and the acquisition of ever more belongings) has become the highlight of my days. I walk to the bus or the dirty retro subway that is somehow less revolting than the dirty newer subway. I walk to shops, I walk to the bank, I walk to my front door.

I desperately miss cutting my own hair.

I miss trees, and the real smell of morning, and never knowing what new adventure the day will hold.

I want my girls back.

This life is not full enough to make me happy.