COVID in Cape Town

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Two days into my South Africa trip, I started getting cold symptoms. I tested for COVID and was relieved to be negative, so I went on a safari and for a walk with rifle-carrying naturalists in the wild bush, chalking up the fatigue I was feeling to two consecutive red eye flights followed by the eight hour bus ride to Kruger National Park. A few days later, when we arrived in Cape Town, my husband was also coughing and sneezing. Our symptoms felt like a typical cold, but just to make sure, we both tested again. BINGO! For both of us, a flaming red line.

All our plans for Cape Town were now upended. We had hoped to hike on Table Mountain, visit Robben Island–where Mandela spent 25 years in prison–see the penguin colony and the Cape of Good Hope. We also were very much looking forward to observing a rehearsal of a youth choir run by a friend of my younger child’s. And I’d been hoping to spend many evenings at venues that offered the lush South African a capella music I love so much.

But now, we had to totally shift gears. Even though there are no isolation protocols in South Africa, we were determined to keep others safe. While we were glad not to be quarantined to our hotel room, since other than mild congestion, both of us felt pretty well, we didn’t want to do anything that might inadvertently infect others. So, in the heat, we put on our masks and found places we could walk to from our hotel. We rented bikes and rode along the beach, and when we were done, we sanitized the handlebars with hand-wipes. It felt like 2020 all over again, except that we were the ones everyone was supposed to be afraid of.

Meanwhile, we’re hanging onto the fantasy that perhaps we’ll test negative before we have to leave and we can do some of the things we wanted to do. It’s kind of the way I feel sometimes when I let my hopes get the better of me when I’m starting a writing project. Perhaps this will be the breakthrough book–the one that will everyone will read and love, or the poem published in the hot-shot journal. But perhaps not. When I tested again yesterday, that extra line was still flaming positive. It’s fine to dream, but even more important is to deal with what life gives you and make it work. A writing project, like a vacation, will be what it will. Despite all my leanings toward perfectionism, I feel grateful for each snippet the muse throws my way, just as I feel grateful to the bi-valent vaccine, for making my experience of this illness that we’ve feared for so long feel like not a big deal.

So, probably no music for me, this trip–other than listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo on YouTube. How long before that red line disappears? Who knows? I’ll just have to be patient, put on my mask and be happy enough to sit on an uncrowded beach and watch the sunset.

 

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Piano Patience

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As promised in the last post, more about patience–this time, on the music front. When I first came back to piano two years ago, I would constantly beat myself up mentally for not being able to play a piece well after a couple of days of practicing. Some people can fake their way through and play pretty decently just by sight-reading, but I’ve never been one of those people. I have to practice the jumps on the keyboard incessantly before I can be sure that my fingers will land in the right places. And even then, it’s never a sure thing.

What changed for me was engaging in the same process I used in writing. I’d learn a piece to the best of my ability at the current moment, then put it aside for a few weeks or months. When I came back to it, there was often a day or two where I had to ease the notes back under my fingers, but suddenly it was there, and I wasn’t thinking about the notes anymore. Instead I was thinking about the important things that differentiate “cookbook playing” from a more authentic and personal musical expression–nuance, dynamics, shading. As my fingers were finally able to fall comfortably on the notes, I had more slack to consider different ways to express the rise and fall of each phrase. Sometimes, especially with some of the technically harder pieces I’m learning, I still came across passages I couldn’t play, but I’d try as best I could to shut off the negative voices and drill some more before putting the piece away again for more simmering.

One of the first pieces I visited on my journey back to piano was Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat Song #2. This is a fairly easy piece that I first learned somewhere between fourth and sixth grade, but I still had to struggle with all the left hand jumps and the right hand trills. And even when I got the notes down again, I could never count on a foolproof, mistake-free rendition. But recently, especially as my post-collarbone fracture arm still can’t hack too much hard practicing,  I’ve pulled it out again after the third or fourth simmer, and voilà, my hands are sailing through and I can just lose myself in the bobbling waves of the canal.

 

 

My recovery from the collarbone injury has also taught me a lot about patience. I generally have about 15 good practice minutes under my belt before my arms start to ache, which has meant that learning Chopin’s Nocturne No. 19 in E Minor, a new piece I love and have never played before is taking forever. I can practice one or two phrases at a time, and then I’m tired. And the next day when I go back to the I phrases I thought I learned, I realize they’re still far from smooth. But slowly, this, too, will change. After all, a month ago, I couldn’t even raise my left arm to the height of the piano bench. I’m not one for aphorisms, but whoever said patience was a virtue knows something I’m still learning.

 

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Patience

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“All we need is just a little patience…”
Guns & Roses

One of my resolutions for 2023 is to cultivate more patience in my life. It’s the same resolution I had for 2022, and 2021, and 2020, and the number one thing on my self-improvement list that has come up during the Jewish holidays as well.

I’m not sure if my innate lean toward impatience is a part of my New York City upbringing, where any long line or red light is considered an insult to our existence; or if it’s something in my own psyche that ignites my anger spark when I don’t get what I’m seeking quickly enough.

Over the years, I’ve learned to be Zen about physical long lines, though I still feel my insides quickly reaching boil when I spend too much time on hold. Maybe it’s the tacky music or the endless repetition of the vapid robot voice telling me how sorry they are for making me wait. Let’s just say that by the time I get a live person on the phone, I’m not my best self. On bad days, I’m deliberately channeling my inner bitch.

 

But despite not yet being perfect on the patience scale, I’m extremely patient about the writing process. Yes, I admit to falling in love with a poem five minutes after I’ve drafted it and having to hold back my urge to immediately send it out everywhere, but for the most part, I enjoy the simmering process. For poetry, that means putting the poem away for a while so I can revise it with fresh eyes–over and over again.

And patience is even more important for the longer process of writing stories, essays, and full-length books. When I’m working on a longer prose project, I try not to think about when it will be done. Instead, I set a daily habit of diving in, writing for as long as I have the energy or the time, then putting the work away for tomorrow, where I often start by reviewing and revising whatever I’ve written the day before. Then when a draft is completed, I put that away for a weeks or months before starting the whole process over again. It can sometimes take years before I finally decide something is “finished,” or at least ready to send out to journals, or agents, or small presses.

And after I send things out, I wait again. Often for a VERY LONG TIME. Yes, it tries my patience, but I try to just get onto the next project, rather than thinking too much about what’s out to market.

I have a lot more to say about patience, but I’m determined to keep these posts short and sweet, so the rest will have to wait for another time. Meanwhile, I’ll try to be patient as I wait for thoughts and reactions. 🙂

 

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Taking Stock of 2022–Part II: Submissions

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“Dear Sir or Madam would you read my book. It took me years to write, will you take a look…” —The Beatles, Paperback Writer

 

2022 was the first full year I had no teaching responsibilities, which meant more time for writing and more time for submitting my work to journals. Many writers I know would rather scrub toilets than submit their work, but I’ve generally liked the “submissions” process, a word that really should be reframed (as one of my mentors pointed out) as “offering” your work to others, rather than submitting to anything or anyone.

Why do so many writers hate submitting? Because it sets us up for rejection. Most literary journals reject at least 80-90% of what’s offered to them. And the top journals accept less than 1%. A rejection can easily be (mis)interpreted by our inner critic and societal expectations as a message that you are a bad writer. But really, this isn’t about you. Having been a reader for journals and residency applications, I’ve seen a lot of good work that gets passed over, simply because there’s so much of it. The process of winnowing down to find the best fit for a particular venue can be excruciating. So rather than thinking of rejection as being a condemnation of my work or my writing abilities, I think of it more like playing the lottery or entering a raffle. Likely, I’m not going to win, but occasionally, I do… and that’s lovely.

I’ve also made it a point not to let any rejection bother me for more than 10 minutes. Well… occasionally 15, if the rejection’s accompanied by a snarky letter (which is rare, but has happened). And that is a very good New Year’s resolution to have. A second one might be a goal to accumulate 100 rejections in 2023.

I had a better than average year for submissions in 2022:
–24 journals/anthologies accepted 28 poems. 48 poetry submissions were rejected; 42 are pending.
–Fiction was more typical. I submitted short stories to 31 journals. 1 was accepted, 25 rejected, 5 pending.
–For essays, I had 1 acceptance, 9 rejections, and 4 pending.

And most exciting, my fourth book, Immigrants, a short-story collection was accepted after accumulating only 15 rejections!

So, adding up the numbers, while I’m delighted about 27 acceptances, I only got 97 rejections in 2022. Hope I do better in 2023.

 

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Taking Stock of 2022–Part I: Won’t Get Fooled Again

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“An artist needs to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.”–Romare Beardon

Ten days into 2022, I lost my brother, Danny–an unexpected death due to an imploded port. The malfunction had scheduled for repair, but that had been delayed due to COVID (one of many statistics that would not be included in the pandemic’s path of destruction). Beset with mental illness from the age of 15, which was later accompanied by a host of physical problems, Danny’s life was not easy and neither was our relationship. Yet, as teens, we bonded over baseball and rock music. I’d play the guitar and we’d sing together. Danny would ask me to listen as he turned the amp on high and belted along with The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” As his illness became worse, he got more delusional about being a rock star, his stubborn insistence occasionally edging on violence when my parents tried to curtail the raucous sound from being blasted out into the neighborhood.

When I think of what I “absorbed” this year, this sad life event from early January continues to stand out despite its countering with one of my happiest life events: the birth in September of my grandchild, Manu. Both have inspired a lot of writing, and watching the awe and wonder with which Manu approaches the world fills me with a poignancy hard to describe without resorting to clichés about both the preciousness and fragility of life, and how one of the most healing things we can do for grief (at least for me) is to continue to practice gratitude and look forward, even as we continue to struggle to make sense of the cracks in our past.

Meanwhile, the echoes of Won’t Get Fooled Again continue to resonate as a backdrop on my musings, as in the song I can feel both the anger at the state of the world and (despite the sarcasm) the hope of better tomorrows that don’t need to be mere delusions. I say this after reading about the Governor of Texas sending busloads of migrants to the Vice President’s House in subfreezing weather on Christmas Eve–an anti-nativity story if there ever was one. However one feels about the situation at our borders, it’s this kind of deliberate cruelty that triggers my anger at both sides of the government for “fooling us” into thinking that they care. And yet, I hang on to the hope of better tomorrows, reflected in the many people who are on the streets, helping migrants and other unhoused people who are stranded in the cold.

I’m determined not to get fooled (or worse, despondent) in 2023. Out of grief comes hope, the awe of new discovery, and the determination to work for a better world.

 

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Critique: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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I recently came across a social media post from someone who talked about the difficulty of being asked to critique poetry that in his words, “isn’t very good.” The writer didn’t want to make people feel bad by being honest, and yet he felt strongly that standards for “good art” shouldn’t be compromised. He tried to resolve the issue by comparing the situation to music. No one would expect to give a concert after their first three violin lessons, he rationalized. So perhaps I can make up some cards that say things like, “take a course, learn what a cliché is, learn what triteness is, and read some really good poems. Take your time. You’re not going to get it in a week.”

 

As a Suzuki parent, I’ve witnessed many beginner violin concerts featuring cute little kids with not too many more than three weeks of violin lessons scratching their way through Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. No one expects the audience to have a great musical experience hearing them; yet, this teaches these children early on that they have a voice and what they are saying through their music matters enough for people to listen to them despite their flaws and inexperience. This is an important lesson not only for the children, but for everyone in our goal-oriented society. Our all-or-nothing approach when it comes to fame and accomplishment minimizes the personal sharing of one’s art on whatever “level” it’s at, and amplifies only those who reach the highest bars of success, causing many to quit and abandon their own artistic voices when they realize they’re never going to reach that level.

 

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn what a cliché is and work to avoid triteness in our writing. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep practicing our music and try to get better. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read great poems or listen to musicians we admire. I’m all for studying great writers and musicians and being wowed by them. I’d just like to see a more permeable playing field instead of a high fence between those who have it (and are therefore defined as “good”) and those who don’t (defined as “bad”). Why can’t we feel joy in praising the ambition of a poem, even if its execution might reflect the poet’s inexperience? Or—even better—praise the one true line or phrase that leaps over that fence and truly sings?

 

In teaching violin to children, Dr. Suzuki’s philosophy is to fix one thing at a time. One week (or for as long as it takes) you focus only on bow hold; the next on phrasing, etc. We should be that gentle to each other in writing—giving criticism that doesn’t overwhelm and overload, and which will help the writer on their path—whether that be to take one step further toward writing great poems, or to simply process what they can’t easily express in other ways. And instead of telling writers their poetry is “bad” or too far from the high bar of poets we all admire, we can simply say, “I hear you! Your voice matters.”

 

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Manu and the Pachelbel Canon

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About a week ago, my daughter was walking Baby Manu around, humming the Pachelbel Canon. I started improvising the second melody line and soon we were switching back and forth, not paying too much attention to exactly what we were doing, but it didn’t matter. We were both having fun and Manu was transfixed. I noticed that even at a few days old, he responded strongly to music, and that singing could be as effective as motion in calming him. Since I’m still recovering from my broken collar bone and can’t walk the baby around yet, singing has been my go-to in trying to subvert that fussy time where he’s needing (but not quite able) to go down for a nap, or waiting those few crucial moments for his Mom to be ready for his next feeding. It doesn’t really matter what I sing, and often I just make up on-the-spot raps about Manu’s moment du jour, tapping his foot or hand to keep the rhythm. No matter what I do, he’s usually pleasantly distracted, and lately, he’s beginning to smile and laugh. It’s great to have an appreciative and responsive audience.

Of course in our family, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the enjoyment of music from future expectations. At only ten weeks old, Manu’s already been praised for conducting the tinny version of the Pachelbel Canon that accompanies the rocking of his baby swing, reaching his hand longingly at the piano when his mother plays with the baby on her lap, and responding with an interest that seems to go far beyond his developmental age to a violin solo. “He’s the sixth generation,” my mother exclaims proudly, as she forwards the video to the relatives in our extended musical family.

And when I see a picture like this, I realize that yes, I would feel joy in watching my grandchild learn the piano–or any musical instrument–but not out of any need to perpetuate the generations of my family’s musicality. Only because music is a heartbeat within us that, like any creative pursuit, amplifies our inner knowing and makes us more attuned to everything around us.

 

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Autumn Leaves

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This wonderful video of Nat King Cole singing Autumn Leaves was one of the final prompts for 30 Poems in November, last week. This is one of my favorite old jazz standards, though it’s something of an ear worm. For days afterwards the song stayed in my head, especially after I found and played not just one, but two videos that adopted Autumn Leaves to different classical styles. Of course, that made me want to rush to the piano and see what I could do with Autumn Leaves, which was still an impossibility with my broken clavicle.

But yesterday the orthopedist gave me the green light to start playing again (as long as I “let pain be my guide”–a loaded statement if there ever was one.) To make sure I didn’t overdo it, I set my timer for ten minutes and made sure to keep the left hand bass-line simple–not to play it like Rachmaninoff, or even like Beethoven. There was still a lot to explore in improvising, far more than my ear dared do. I stuck with the basics, not like the walk we took today in the woods, where map-less, we ended up on a different part of the road about half a mile from the car–a fairly typical experience when the unmarked trail is just too seductive not to follow it. I’d like to do more improvisations without a map and not be so worried about where I might end up.

Autumn is brilliant in New England in October–pure eye candy, as you can see in this picture. But in November, and often in early December, as well, the prevailing theme is brown. Chilly and cold.

Yet there’s a subtle beauty to the season, we just have to take a little more time to find it. Poem #29  touched on the varying shades of November: ochre, rust, mauve, sienna, even if at times the month feels like treading shadows. Today, a foggy rain is covering the farm. The autumn leaves, all raked up, are in the shed, eventually to be mixed into the compost to nurture spring’s new growth.

 

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