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Recipe for Nostalgia

August 29, 2013 — 8 Comments

Take one elementary school class, add 49 years. Shake; don’t stir. Meet in the building where you attended elementary school and Jr. high, and sip slowly.

I study history, but my own personal past has not been investigated. I only have so much time to find all the facts about my ancestors, so biographical content has never crossed my mind. This week I am digging into it. I am on a quest to remember/discover my childhood, which was pretty idyllic. I grew up walking a block and a half to my school, playing in giant gangs of kids in my neighborhood. We went to swimming pools at country clubs in the summer, but we had a neighborhood of full time sports (wiffle ball) , games, dramatic productions, and parties..not unlike Spanky and Our Gang, I looked at the hill in my old side yard where we went sledding. It is much smaller that I could have imagined.. the entire yard has shrunk. It doesn’t look like it would hold big games of red rover, but I know that it did. I also had an archery target and a basketball backboard in the back yard. The prop we used most often was the player piano.

Both my next door neighbors and our family had player pianos in the basement. Our basement playroom was huge with the piano and a big bar. My parents partied heavily down there. Most of the time it was used for my piano practice or my play room. My mom supplied a giant box of dress up clothing of all kinds behind the bar in the laundry room. The kids would put on shows for each other, and sometimes for the parents, by dressing in the costumes and singing. The parents sat down at a lower level in the yard, and we would enter from stage right, behind the house. We had sort of an Ed Sullivan variety approach, with someone announcing the acts. One of our favorites (and very popular with the adults) was “Heart of My Heart”. We had a pantomime that was very corny. We did it all the time, so I can still do it after more than 50 years. I called my childhood neighbor, Peggy Jo, and sang it to her on the phone. It made me cry because the song sums up the whole deal. “Friends were dearer then”

Ishvara-Pranidhana

November 16, 2012 — 2 Comments

PSO at Heinz Hall

Last year I was very lucky to see the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra perform Handel’s Messiah as a fully staged opera. Everything about it was remarkable, even the serendipity of finding an excellent seat the day of the performance by just noticing the box office while I was on a walk. I grew up in Pittsburgh, but the Heinz Hall was new to me. Syria Mosque where I saw them in the 1960’s was gone like Forbes Field. In the lobby there was a great display about the life of Handel and the composition of the Messiah. He signed it SDG, in other words, he gave full credit to God for the music. I had seen this phrase before. It was written in German (those incredibly fancy letters you can’t read) on the outside of the school in Langweis, Switzerland, a small alpine village where my friend Steffi Burger lives. I love all that writing on the outside of old Swiss buildings, including hex signs to protect the contents of the buildings. They declare their faith and ask for protection in bold ( but hard to read) statements. I had some trouble with the reading, but was sure God was involved (most of them are about God and work) so I asked my friend, who also could not read it. We asked Walter Engle, whose family had crossed the Davos pass with their cows to settle the area centuries ago. He informed us that it said all glory to God (SDG).

School in Langweis

The protestant reformation was very into this idea and that is why it landed on the wall of the school. I relate it to the Niyama, or internal practice, of surrender to God as it is written in Sanskrit, Ishvara-Pranidhana. Apparently Handel went into a kind of trance and did speed composition under the heavy influence of spirit when he wrote the Messiah, signed it SDG and everyone knew what he meant. Bach was into this also. In yoga practice Ishvara is about trusting the divine flow, not so different from thy will be done. I wonder if by being a big student of linguistics I have stumbled upon the lowest common denominator of all religions. Surrender to God.