Jean Lewis in Memoriam

(The following is the eulogy I wrote for my Aunt, Jean Lewis, who passed away on 8/30/13.)

My wife Lynda and I, first of all want to thank you all for being here today, for being Aunt Jean’s friends, neighbors and the center of her life during her years in Oregon.  One thing she never failed to tell us each and every time we visited her at Friendsview was how fortunate she felt to be there, and how much she loved her life in this community.

But that was, as we all know, one of the themes that she said ran through her entire life: how “lucky” she was.  At some point, though, luck isn’t the right to word to describe it.  At some point, the only word that fits is blessed.  It’s a word that I know she would happily use to describe her life.

There are myriad ways we could look at Aunt Jean’s remarkable life.  A woman who went from a farm in remote Clovis, New Mexico, to study nursing at Ottawa University, to getting a Master’s degree at American Baptist Seminary of the West in Berkeley, to an illustrious career as a nurse in San Francisco, to retirement in Oregon centered around helping seniors, is worthy of note.  She started that path in the 1940’s when women were primarily expected to stay at home, which makes her a trailblazer in many respects.

I want to focus on two aspects of her life that I think animated her journey: her faith, and her desire to help others.

“Desire” may not be exactly the right word, as I think helping others was truly something she felt that she had to do, something, perhaps, that she was called to do.  Of course, every person who chooses a career in nursing does so, at least in part, because they want to help people in need.  But for Aunt Jean it went beyond that.  She threw herself into nursing, earning awards from the Chancellor of the University of California.  When her health failed in the 1980’s, she left it for awhile, but came back to nursing, earning yet more accolades.

And what did she do in retirement when she moved to McMinnville?  She co-founded the Faith in Action program and founded a program serving seniors at the United Methodist Church there, programs that still help residents today.  And when she moved to Friendsview?  She became the Floor Representative for several years.  And when she left that job?  She found a way to continue to be helpful to her friends and neighbors, one or two at a time.  And all the way to the end, she gave money to all variety of charities and causes.

I do think that, on some level, her failing health the last six months were because she knew that her days of being a care-giver were over.  While we were all a bit surprised at how quickly she slipped away from us at the end once she had decided to go into hospice, in the light of her role as caregiver from the beginning, it makes perfect sense.  Judy Elliot, mother of Mae Hara, Aunt Jean’s neighbor and friend for the last few years, was with Aunt Jean at the end.  She told me that Jean had told her that when May passed away in the spring, Jean – quote - had finished her last project – unquote.  She felt that her work here was done.

And then there was her faith: inquisitive, deep, open and loving.  One of the stories she repeated often, particularly these last few years, was how she had developed her faith from an early age, “on the farm, out on the plow, talking with God.”  Never “talking to God,” it was always “talking with God.”

And they never stopped talking to each other.  She was a Baptist in Clovis and Wichita, a Presbyterian in San Francisco, and a Methodist in Oregon.  Her greatest passion in retirement was learning, particularly about world religions.  She knew more about Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism than any other Christian I’ve ever met, and all of them informed a bright, joyous sensibility about life.  I’m sure that when she got to heaven, she and St. Peter had a tremendous conversation that is probably still going on today.

For me, I cannot begin to express what this woman meant.  She taught me to read.  As I’m sure she told many of you, she was there when I took my first steps.  She taught me to love music in a way that I hadn’t before.  And most importantly, she taught me to love, unconditionally.  She showed that love to me; she showed it to my mother (her sister) and her parents; she showed it to Tae, her partner of over thirty years; she showed it to her friends in Newberg, McMinnville, San Francisco and before.  I was an adopted child and my adoptive parents split up when I was four – Aunt Jean’s presence in my life was the rock that kept my life anchored.

I found my birth mother in 2009, and our story is one of the good reuniting stories that has enriched us both immeasurably.  Last year, Aunt Jean told me how happy she was that my mother and I had found each other, and that when she left this world, she would be glad that she would not be leaving me alone.  Again, her work here was done.

Jean Lewis showed that loving spirit to thousands of patients, senior citizens and anonymous recipients of her largesse throughout her life.  Most of them probably never met her, never knew what she did for them.  But their lives were better for it.  All of our lives are better for it.  

We will all miss her.  I will miss her more than anyone who has left before her.  But I will forever be grateful for the love she gave me.

In fact, I think you could say that I feel… blessed.

On Frank Pooler, Life, Love and Friendship

From David Mitchell's brilliant Cloud Atlas, which I just finished:

"If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers[e] races and creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable, and the riches of the Earth and its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.  I am not deceived.  It is the hardest of worlds to make real.  Torturous advances won over generations can be lost be the single stroke of a myopic President's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.
   A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson will inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living."

* * * *

My mentor, teacher, college choir director and friend, Frank Pooler, died two days ago.  It was 33 years ago when I first was astounded at the sounds made by his CSULB University Choir.  I joined the choir after I left my home town, and learned more about life and music from him during my six years at CSULB than I have from anyone before or since.

But our relationship didn't end when I graduated and (coincidentally, the same year) he retired.  Shortly after, he bought a computer so he could begin the process of coalescing his memoirs.  For all his gifts, he was a mess with anything technical. So he invited me over to help him learn how to use the thing.  We would usually spend an hour or so going over some basic function, and follow it up with lunch, which he always paid for.  That was my pay - lunch.

Actually, that's not true.  My pay was the time I got to spend with him.  For the ensuing years, we would meet for breakfast or lunch most every Friday unless I was out of town or he had other appointments.  Each week he would regale me with stories from his youth and news of his friends, stories I never tired of hearing, even on the 3rd or 4th time through. We continued to meet even after he had mastered his computer, and his printer, and his fax machine, and his slide scanner, and his flatbed scanner, and his LP to MP3 converter, his e-mail or YouTube; rarely did I need to help him with technical problems anymore.

We would talk about movies, politics, TV, music, friends, old CSULB acquaintances, dogs, and books.  We talked a lot about books.  He would very often begin a breakfast conversation with "I just finished 'such and so', and I have never read anything quite like it!"  He never tired of reading and learning and soaking up everything he could.  A few years ago, he bought his Kindle, and his reading went into overdrive.  He could buy a book from his bed and be reading it 10 seconds later.  He often joked that Amazon must have thought he was their favorite customer.

In one of our last breakfast meetings two months ago, I told him that I had seen the film version of Cloud Atlas, and he told me that he had loved the book.  I got the book as a Christmas present from my wife, and I told him in one of my last e-mails to him that I looked forward to talking with him about it.

* * * *

The themes of Cloud Atlas, for those who are not familiar with it, are as many and varied as the seven stories included in it's pages.  They include (but are not limited to): violence vs. virtue, reincarnation, how are deeds play out long after we are gone, love, music, corporate and individual evil, and on and on.  As I think now on how the book has hit me, I realize that the excerpt above is the part that means the most to me.  If I substitute the name Grayson (Lynda's grandson) for Jackson, or any other child that I know, I find it is exactly the force that animates my life.  This is how I want to live my life.

Frank's enduring gifts to me - the music, the discussions, the deep love and friendship we shared - are not mine alone.  Since his death, the outpouring of emotion from friends and students has been sustained and intense.  We all felt, rightly so, that Frank forever changed our lives, and are grateful for every moment we had to spend with him.  And that is probably exactly the theme in Cloud Atlas that I would most associate with him: the good and virtuous deeds you do for others in the name of love will play out for generations after you leave this Earth.  Frank embodied that like no one else I have known.

I wish I could talk to him about that today.  I want to hear him say one more time "I've never read anything like it!"

I miss you, my friend.

The Case for Being Better Humans - Part 2

I believe that the color of your skin and the accent in your voice do not matter.  If you do not speak the same language as I do, that is just as much my fault as yours.

I believe that you do not get to choose the person you fall in love with. 

I believe that to deny someone legal status or rights based on the point directly above (marriage, for those who don’t get my point) is wrong, immoral, unethical, and goes against the fabric of our society’s progress towards equality.  Either we claim equality, or we do not.

I believe that a two-celled zygote is not yet a human being.  I don’t know what point the zygote goes from being a mass of cells to something that we choose to call human life, but I would bet it is someplace around viability outside the womb.  Until that point, it is not two lives we are debating but one.  And in either case, no one can stake a claim to knowing something that is a moral decision.

I don’t care whether you believe in the God of Christ, the God of Moses, the word of Allah, or the word of Buddha.  I don’t care if you call yourself a Sikh, a Hindu, a Catholic or a Lutheran.  I only care about one thing – do you treat the people you come into contact with on a daily basis with love, respect, kindness and fairness?  If so, you have my love, respect, kindness and fairness.  If you do not, or if you seek to deny anyone those four things, then you have not earned mine.

America is the greatest nation on earth.  But America is not the greatest nation it can be.  I do not believe in the notion of American exceptionalism.  In my short lifetime, I have witnessed Vietnam, Watergate, bussing and segregation, Iran-Contra, Grenada, the failed “War on Drugs”, Whitewater, impeachment for a blowjob, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, torture and Guantanamo, Katrina (and now Sandy), mortgage-backed securities and textbooks for children designed by creationists.  No nation that wants to be seriously considered the greatest nation on earth can claim that mantle without looking critically at those things and ensuring they never happen again.

America is the greatest nation on earth.  I know this when I see us sending a rover to Mars, dropping a man in freefall from low orbit, watch what Apple creates, think about Apollo 11, listen to jazz, play bluegrass, see the response to 9/11, hear the support for our troops, walk the beach in Cambria, fly over the plains of Kansas, see the love that is shared between friends and neighbors. 

I believe these two views are not exclusive; I can love my country and be critical of it at the same time.

I believe that it is possible to disagree about the basics of politics, religion or culture, but only if you and I have a respectful one-on-one discussion about it to find the sticking point.  If you feel that scripture is inerrant and that leads to our disagreement about gay marriage or abortion, that’s fine.  But let’s then have the discussion about the inerrancy of scripture instead of the one about the other two things.  Then we can have a productive discussion.

I believe that anything can be corrupted by greed or power.  Exhibits A through G: Barry Bonds, Karl Rove, Anthony Weiner, Lance Armstrong, Ted Haggard, the Catholic Church hierarchy and Richard Nixon.  I believe we should stop acting surprised when someone behaves this way.

I believe that people can act in very magnanimous and beautiful ways.  I believe we need to reward those people, especially the ones who do it for no recognition.

I believe that there is a way to be a faithful doubting Christian, but I believe most “Christians” don’t understand this.  I believe this is becoming the undoing of the Christian church.

I believe that music has the power to heal, transform and transport, and opens up the largest window we have in our lives to the eternal, to the spiritual, to God.  I don’t care how you define it, but I truly believe music is what keeps us alive.

And finally, I believe that only one thing really matters in our lives, and that is love.  Who did you love, what did you love, how deeply did you love, how freely did you give yourself to unconditional love, no matter how much it may have hurt.  The acts you committed in the service of safety, fear, your own comfort, power, avarice or greed will leave you empty at the end of your life.  The acts you committed in the name of love will leave you full.

My friends, I will not post about politics anymore on Facebook.  This is a medium that has lost its luster for me, and revealed itself to be shallow and depraving.  As I said above, if you and I can have a deep conversation about any of this, I am all ears.  I live for these conversations.

But posting photos of what Einstein said, or saying “Like if you love Jesus” or recycling the latest meme from Moveon.org or the GOP goes against the grain for me, and I can’t stomach it anymore.  I am mortified by some of the things I have seen human beings say in some of these threads, and I can’t be part of it anymore. 

I’m voting for Obama on Tuesday.  I don’t care who you vote for; just vote.  But I don’t expect my vote or an Obama win will do anything to change our country.  Only we can do that.  So I will look for other, more productive avenues to do so.

Open your hearts.  Put on some music.  Let love rule.  Because on November 7, after this is all over, nothing will have changed unless we decide it is time for it to change and do it.

The Case for Being Better Humans - Part 1

Tonight I re-watched “The Dish”, an Australian movie about the true tale of the satellite dish operators who were responsible for making sure the images from Apollo 11 were broadcast around the globe, so that everyone could see Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon.

I found myself profoundly moved by the re-watching, probably more so than I had been the first time.  (I honestly can’t even remember when I first watched it, although I think it was on a plane; it may have been on a flight to London in 2001.)  What moved me was very clear, though, and I can lay it out in three main points:

• ·      First, we lost Neil Armstrong this year.  It was easy to forget how consciousness altering that first moonwalk was to everyone who lived on the planet at the time.  I remember watching the TV as the event unfolded and stepping outside to look at the moon, and trying to reconcile what I saw on the TV with what I saw in my own eyes.  I was 5 at the time – I can’t imagine what my grandparents (who I watched it with and who lived through WWI, the Great Depression and WWII) were thinking.
• 
  
• ·      Second, I have been reading a great deal lately about the scientific approach to music, and specifically the debates that have raged through the centuries about temperament, or how to tune instruments.  What struck me most in the reading is how many great scientific minds in human history have weighed in on the topic of musical temperament: Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristotle, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton (to name just a few) all wrote treatises on music.
• 
  
• ·      Third, we are days away from an election in this country where one half of the electorate believes in things that fly in the face of scientific inquiry, logical reasoning and empirical data.  For them, global warming is a hoax, evolution is debatable, Jesus appeared in the Western Hemisphere, rape is “a gift from God” if it leads to pregnancy, and in all of the above cases it is perfectly suitable for Government intervention to ensure that viewpoint.

The people who have been reading my posts over the last years will not be surprised that I find the situation we face going into this election to be against the grain of everything that our greatest human minds have strived for.  I asked myself during “The Dish” if our great country could even be capable of mounting something like a moonwalk again.  To our credit, we have in the last year witnessed incredible images from Mars, and seen a man freefall from the highest point ever and live to tell the tale. 

But I ask, are we, in 2012, a species that believes in the scientific and logical processes that got us where we are today?  Or are we a species that succumbs to our greatest fears and superstitions?

Writing into the New Year

This is the kind of post that could come back to haunt me at some point, but I feel confident enough in it at this point that I am willing to throw it out into the universe.

The next stage of my musical and intellectual evolution involves writing, I know that. It is why I started this blog, to give me a space that was easy enough to access and public enough that I would have to force myself to write (and post) only what I can stand behind. Whether or not anybody reads is a different matter. What is important is that I go through the exercise of articulating the ideas and theorems that invade a musician's mind.

So for 2012, I am setting goals for myself: I will carve out space and time for myself to write; I have set up the home office to better accommodate it; I will wake up earlier each morning and endeavor to not do anything else before I sit down and write each morning. (Sorry, Roscoe - your walks are now at 8 a.m.) And, I am going to continue studying with W.A. Mathieu into the new year.

What I write is of lesser concern to me at this point. I need to learn (or develop) the discipline of writing something every day. It may be song lyrics, it may be prose, it may be notes on manuscript paper. But it will be something.

Last weekend, we spent some time with some dear friends in Portland. One of them had decided that she wanted to find a word to describe the way forward in the coming year. Hers was "boundaries", as in setting personal ones and expanding creative ones. Lynda, after thought, is looking for "balance" or "consistency." I originally was going with "forward", but after reflection, that seems too vague.

So for this year, it's simple. My word is simply, "WRITE."

A Church Musician Should...

Back in the day, when I was in college, the path of study for someone who wanted to be a church music director was aimed entirely at choral music. The Choral/Vocal degree was the best way to get from point A to point B. A student would study vocal pedagogy, choral repertoire and sing the choral classics, from Palestrina to Brahms. It would leave gaping holes in liturgy and theology, but that was something you could pick up later, or so it was assumed.

I should preface this by saying that I had no intention of going into church music when I graduated. My first goal was a studio guitarist, but when I graduated, 'college professor' seemed more likely. I flirted with film scoring, playing in a touring folk band and writing educational materials, before church music kind of fell in my lap. At the age of 43, I took my first and only class in Reform Theology, along with 24 Sunday school teachers from the deep South. It was all I needed to add to my knowledge base for the job.

But everything I truly needed to know about church music I never learned in college. Or in a classroom with a bunch of Sunday school teachers. I learned it in the cross-pollination of subjects I experienced while writing film scores, writing educational materials, or touring in a folk band. What I learned is that the demands of a church musician require the ability to see the connection between an infinitely diverse panoply of topics.

For starters, the traditional "church choir director" role is gone, or is going away. In it's place, anyone who wants to have a serious church musician post is going to have to be conversant in choral, orchestral, handbell, rock, jazz and folk music. An ability to play piano is still a must, as is the ability to play guitar, sub for your bassist when he's sick, communicate violin bowings and flute embouchures, and sit down at the drum set when your praise band needs it. You'll have to be able to arrange hymns for children's choirs, write out orchestral scores, explain what a m7(b5b9) chord means to the guitar player, and help your organist work out a continuo part.

In addition, it will be helpful if you know the difference between a dynamic and a condenser microphone, know how to set-up EQ at the sound board and record a saxophone, and what to watch for in a contract for a touring musician. You may be required to set up an art show, a film series, a book group and organize your choir's tour to Spain.

Oh, and you need to know how to direct a choir. ...and do it well.

The glaring deficiencies of my college education were apparent to me early on, so none of this came as a surprise to me when I started my job at Grace First. I had long bemoaned the fact that anyone could be allowed to graduate with a bachelors and a masters degree and never have anybody explain the terms "performing rights organization," "royalty," or what a musician's union actually did. (I'm still not sure I know that last one.)

But what saved me was the fact that I dabbled in all of those things I mentioned earlier. Booking a choir tour was easy because I've booked my own. Recording CDs with my band helped me understand how to record the church band, and how to maneuver our digital sound board. I had been playing handbells for years before I first started directing a group. Teaching in a classroom gave me the tools I needed to be able to explain Handel's Messiah to my choir.

The key is, I did as much as I could and learned everything I possibly could. Not having a focus meant that there were times I never reached the top of a given field of music; for instance, I never became a full-time studio musician.

I think a lot of people today wait around trying to figure out their career path, waiting to "find their bliss." I've learned that you don't find your bliss by waiting for it to come to you. You find it by doing as many things as you possibly can.

And you become a good church musician by learning and doing as many things as you possibly can.

Pride - comma - in the name of love

U2 had a hit song twenty years ago called "Pride in the Name of Love", which was loosely based on Martin Luther King. It's a great song, one I've always loved.

But today I want to add punctuation to it: Pride, in the name of love.

I've watched Lynda worked over the last few years I've known her, and felt the love (obviously), and felt the pride. The pride comes up when she tells her story, when people understand what she's overcome and what she's retained or learned from it.

Today I added the comma.

I realized that the pride I feel for her (or more accurately, the pride I feel being married to her - let alone even knowing her), is because what she does is create love where it didn't exist before. Or maybe..., not "didn't exist", but "wasn't evident." She sees a need, and creates the means for peoples' natural propensity for loving and caring to come forth.

Think about it: what she did today (or last year, at the first Taste at the Point), was create the opportunity for hundreds or people to care for those in our midst who are hurting or in pain.

A 72 year old woman with breast cancer that has now had it reappear in her pelvic bone was there today, brought by her daughter who read about in the paper. She was connected with the support groups that were there, that will give her counseling. If you forget the thousands of dollars that were raised to day that will go to women in need, you can know that today was all worth it, if only because of that 72 year old woman.

So, yes, I am proud of this woman - who is currently sitting behind me on the couch, eating dessert bars. But I am proud of her for what she does in the name of love.