Post-Bike Trail Notes: The Many Roads Not Chosen

One of my many paths not chosen was the path of classical music performance.

Riding a bike every day, all day, creates that beautiful space that dancers and other performers know well: the life right here now, in the physical body in time and place.

As the cinder of the Erie Canal Trail from Buffalo to Albany unspooled beneath my wheels the first two weeks in June, I could spin into a kind of trance state of cadence and motion. Being.

Yet at every juncture, choice and often action were required. Wayfaring signage was not always available or clear, maps not detailed enough, priorities of co-riders not the same. And at times, even with due consideration, initial choices to follow a certain route had to be remade. Sometimes a path just didn't "feel right," and a 360-degree turn was required.

Bicycling is, of course, a well-used metaphor for life. And the trip gave me time to reflect on several roads I did not take.

The first of these materialized in the first few days of the ride when we arrived in Rochester -- home to the Eastman Kodak company, inventors of the Brownie camera that popularized and democratized photography at the beginning of the 20th century; and its philanthropic offspring, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Kodak Hall, the largest performance venue at
he Eastman School of Music in downtown
Rochester, NY.

George Eastman, the inventor who founded Eastman Kodak (Kodak is not a collaborating partner but rather a name Eastman devised for his company), ascribed to the philosophy of "noblesse oblige." He stood alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie as one of the most philanthropic men of his era. He provided Kodak employees the first "stock bonus" in U.S. corporate history, and invested millions in education at MIT and in Rochester. He was the largest contributor to HBCU's in the 1920's, and a pioneer in dental and medical philanthropy.

A scientist, he also recognized the links between the creative and scientific processes, particularly through music. "There are no drawbacks to music: you can't have too much of it," he famously said.

This passion led him to establish one of the nation's most famous music conservatory programs, the Eastman School of Music, where my path nearly intersected with Eastman's vision and philanthropy for music.

I became a trumpet player at age 9 by accident: we were invited to begin in our school band program at that age, and this was the instrument found moldering in my grandmother's attic -- provenance still unknown. But I took to "blowing my own horn" like a fish to water: I love music, and I love the feeling it creates in my brain and body when I create it myself.

The trumpet is an utterly collaborative, ensemble instrument: yes, you can solo, but it is not really the instrument for living room confabs. As a wind player, I pursued first concert band, then orchestral playing, then brass quartets and quintets.

My love for it was so clear that my parents -- who had earlier told me a piano was beyond our financial reach -- broke down and sent me off to NYC with my junior high band instructor to purchase a decent instrument along the hallowed musical hall of 48th Street.

But most importantly, they hooked me up with private lessons and somehow I was charmed enough to wind up with one of the best trumpet instructors in New England: Irvin Bourque, who had previously taught at the Juillard School and who had himself studied with the famed NY Philharmonic trumpeter William Vacchiano and played for the larger-than-life conductor, Arturo Toscanini (bringing a type of "What would Toscanini do?" filter to my life!).

All more esoterica on trumpet legacy than you may need on a Monday morning.

Mr. Bourque, who dragged me willingly with him from town to town as part of the Norwich (CT) Civic Band and several brass quartet/quintet configurations, had me headed toward Eastman, at which one of my best friends, a French Horn player, matriculated the year before I was to go.

Through her, I began to understand what it meant to go to a music conservatory. Hours and hours of practice alone in a cement block practice room! What of softball, what of history, what of writing, what of lesbian bars?!

The world was too wide and enticing. It distracted me from the alluring tones of the Eastman Wind Ensemble and landed me instead -- again, almost by happenstance in the form of a high school U.S. history teacher whose sister worked in Bowdoin's Hawthorne-Longfellow Library

Ultimately, at Bowdoin, I DID spend hours and hours in that cement block practice room with my horn, as well as on stage with the college orchestra and pit bands, as well as on Bowdoin's fields and in its seminar rooms. Yet standing before the hallowed hall in Rochester fired my imagination: what a very different life mine would have been in choosing the Eastman path!

#music

#musiceducation

#EastmanSchool

#trumpet

#newblogpost

Our Longing for Home Along the Highways of New Ideas

We are all migrants on this continent,  even many of our First Nation peoples whose following of natural food ways resulted in the creation of winter and summer camps.

As White immigrants who arrived here fleeing persecution, poverty, and oppression and seeking something better, we tend to think of ourselves as exceptional and ahistorical -- a country full of "firsts" -- while at the same time being obsessed with the concept of "home."

Yet the internet, that glorious, fast, invisible tool that sends information, our thoughts, and visual depictions of our lives flying around the globe, is by no means the first highway of new ideas in the U.S.

That badge of honor MIGHT be said to belong to the Erie Canal, opened in 1825. 

This new super highway was quickly flooded with those headed west, as it was a relatively flat and quick route that avoided crossing the Appalachian Mountains. It is said that more migrants and immigrants used the Canal to move into and across the western frontier than any other means.

Among those headed north and west in the mid-19th century were many escaped slaves, as well as others who just didn't "fit" where they were -- the queers, the radicals, those who wanted something other than the Puritan, male, patriarchal state.

The Underrground Railroad ran strongly along the canal with critical junctions in Syracuse, Rochester, and Niagara as gateways to Canada. These cities became known for their abolitionists, who also fomented other radical, social justice oriented movements -- including Utopianism, Mormonism, and Feminism. Enveloping all of these movements was the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival that was so strong in western and central NY along the Canal that it became known as the "Burned-Over Diistrict." Without access to many trained clergy, individual laypeople created an evangelical air of "extravagant excitement" -- leaving the impression in many others that religion was a mere delusion -- all seeking the path to "go home" to the Lord.

Among those who had his beginnings along the canal was L. Frank Baum, noted author of The Wizard of Oz and a large number of fantasy books, born in Chittenango in 1856. A small, family-run museum alongside the canal exemplifies our obsession with Oz, Dorothy, the Wizard, the Witches, and of course the yellow brick road.

The scene I best remember from the cherished movie version of this book is at the end, when we are back in black and white from our Technicolor fantasy and Dorothy is waking up in bed surrounded by family and farmhands -- all of whom had become characters in her fever dream. "There's no place like home," she is chanting/mumbling as she awakens from her unconscious. There's no place like home.

As an adopted person and in spite of my wonderful adoptive family, I too am a person who will always be yearning "to go home." But as so many have said - from German-Jewish refugee philosopher Hannah Arendt, who spoke of the need of the persecuted Jewish people to carry their libraries with them, in their heads, as they fled pogrom after pogrom; to current musicologist and musician Rhiannen Giddens, who speaks of the power of music to allow us to carry our ancestral homes in Africa and the Middle East within us as we flee and fly -- the only homes we have are those we carry within us.

One more reason for raising readers, writers, musicians and artists, and for developing rich, complex arts and cultural sensibilities in our selves and our communities.

#arts #culture #eriecanaltrail #bikeride #Oz #home #community

God’s Country

Day 4 of cycling the Erie Canal Bikeway found us in Palmyra, southeast of Rochester, about 100 miles and a third of the way along the Canal.

If that name rings a bell for you, it may be because you are aware of enough American religious history to know that Palmyra -- named for a village in what is now Syria -- is where Joseph Smith found the golden tablets from which he translated and printed the Book of Mormon. At the end of today's 28 miles, we participated in a guided tour of the local print shop which took on the massive job of publishing 5000 copies using 1830 technology from two new, 19-year-old female missionaries whose delight in the book's creation and meaning was palpably contagious.

Biking through the lush farmland here, it is easy to feel its inspiration as a source of revelation. From giant black walnut trees whose thick, low arms reach out in broad embraces to hummingbirds sheltering in visible nests and an orchestra of songbirds to the sheep and lambs roaming the verdant hillsides, it is easy here to feel the abundance, generosity, and awe-inspiring beauty that is creation. How blessed we all are, however we choose to make sense of our place in cosmology.

Smith was a determined and highly successful religious visionary, and the first and only home-grown American one. Mormonism is very particularly American in its belief in America and this nation, its citizens and Constitution as exceptional and chosen peoples. These beliefs, as much as the revelatory beauty of the world surrounding Joseph Smith, continue to inspire millions around the world to follow the Book of Mormon and Smith's other published teachings.

Gratitude: On Receiving Bowdoin College’s Common Good Award

President Rose, Trustees, members of the Alumni Council and McKeen Center for the Common Good, fellow honored guests, friends, family, classmates, collaborators and co-conspirators.

It is with stunned humility that I stand before you today and gratefully accept Bowdoin’s Common Good Award.

When this winter I received a FedEx envelope from the College delivered to our island address, I was gripped by a familiar fear.

The College had finally uncovered some bill I’d not paid!

This is comical in retrospect – I graduated 39 years ago. I know the College finance department is much more efficient than that…

Yet my instinctive fear points to who I am, where I come from, and the ambivalent relationship I’ve had to the College for much of my life – all of which make this award that much more meaningful to me.

I am deeply moved by, and grateful for, the College’s recognition of my lifelong passion for the arts, and of their power in my work in cultural and economic community development  in Maine. In particular, in our more isolated rural areas and with our young people. Work I have undertaken, in large part, as a way of returning to the State the great privilege of the excellent education I received here. And everywhere I go in this expansive state, I am awed by the number of Bowdoin alum I encounter serving the common good. It does seem as if the beautiful Offer of the College works deeply in us. With so very many deserving of this recognition, I am especially humbled by  this award, one I look forward to sharing with my many peers in service.

Having my my work recognized and amplified in this, the 50^th anniversary year of women at Bowdoin, is a huge honor and a tribute not only to me but to the many women who’ve worked collectively over these 50 years to make so much change possible.

I love the word common. I am proud to be as common as they get.

I am a queer, working class activist  whose heritage is only two and three generations deep on this continent. My grandparents had sixth and eighth grade educations; my parents were awarded high school diplomas; and it was hoped for if not expected that I would take the next step, to college.

An important part of being common is being PREVALENT: there are many of us. We are not exceptional, and that’s a good thing.

Yet there were not many of me when I arrived at Bowdoin in 1979. My family was always deeply uncomfortable when visiting. I and several of those here today, and many more, quickly learned to create commonality across differences to collectively battle our shared oppressions –boarding school students to financial aid kids, CIS gender to queer, black women to white women.

My best work and biggest successes have always occurred in the creation of these commons – the free, open, public spaces shared by all – and their communities. I am honored to have been one small part of the greater collectives that launched Bowdoin’s Women’s Resource Center, now the Center for Sexuality, Women, and Gender; that created Opera House Arts and restored the historic Stonington Opera House; that is currently forming the Cultural Alliance of Maine to strengthen the state’s commitment to its important indigenous, immigrant, and local cultures.

Every time we come together, for any reason – a meeting, a movie, a musical performance, church - we create new community: unique gatherings of commoners. From each community, we learn something. From each, we are able to launch collective action for healing, for hope, to advance our common good.

Our work is not done. Too much violence, and great and painful inequities, continue to exist and threaten to divide us. And so I will leave you with this. In 1980, one of the first books we purchased for the Women’s Resource Center was lesbian poet Judy Grahn’s The Common Woman Poems. In it she wrote a verse that appeared on many of our walls and T-shirts for years to come, a poster of which has since wound up in the Library of Congress. “A common woman is as common as a loaf of bread,” Grahn wrote.

“And she will rise.”

Let us keep rising. Let us commoners keep gathering in the commons.

Thank you.