Be like Wendell, not like Shutesbury

    With some unexpected free time after work recently, I spent a couple of hours at the Greenfield Public library. I felt a patriotic pride seeing the best of our democracy; people of all ages, races, abilities, making use of free and equal access to education and cultural enrichment. I found a chair in a sunny corner and was a few pages into a Stephen King novel when I had to move because, the apologetic librarian explained, the area is reserved for teens. May the Greenfield Public Library one day have a young adult room.
    The debate over the new Greenfield library has triggered flashbacks of the 2011 Shutesbury library war. It was a disappointment to watch fifteen years of planning end in a tie vote and forfeit of the grant that would have paid more than half the cost of the new library.  Worse than losing the library was the animosity toward it. People are still reluctant to talk about the library which had more than two thirds support until the final vote. Don’t believe them when they say it’s too expensive; taxes are a smokescreen for unwillingness to invest in municipal infrastructure or services they don’t use. In Shutesbury, people with the largest homes were the most vocal opponents.
Don’t be like Shutesbury where fist fights broke out on the playground over a library. Be like Wendell, Sunderland, Leverett, Athol, Pelham and over 250 Massachusetts towns that built or expanded their libraries with construction grants.
     Greenfield’s robust community of library supporters will no doubt funnel generosity to the library whenever we can.  Isaac Maas, pony up, leave a legacy. For the sake of your constituents get on board and help reduce the cost not by opposing, but by fundraising. Libraries lift us up and benefit the poorest the most.

Thanks for the Music Eddie

"Hadama, Hadama, princess of the Nile, when ya gonna marry me and walk me down the aisle?

Eddie "The Sheik"  Kochak loved belly dancers, and Eddie, we love you!   I sent the father of Amer-Abic music a letter in '03 thanking him  "Your music is irresistibly joyful, passionate, playful, supremely sad and pays homage to the ancient music while adding your own influence to the music of the times.  It is musically masterful.  I dance to it almost everyday".  I was delighted to receive a letter back asking if he could quote me, of course I said yes in my next letter. Emboldened by his warmth, I sent him the updated lyrics I wrote to his body negative 1950's song "Calories" which warns the girlfriend she won't get a husband if she doesn't lose some weight. I changed "Calories, calories, got to watch your calories, don't eat this, don't eat that, you are liable to get fat" to "Men are boys, men are boys, got to let them have their toys, blow up this, stomp on that, sit and drink beer and get fat". My version is a woman lamenting the shortcomings of men in the dating world. "I went to see my boyfriend found him laying on the couch, scratching, burping, farting and acting like a grouch..."   

Eddie loved it and he used the phone number I included in my letter to call and tell me.   I was tickled by the contrast of his nickname "the Sheik" to his strong Brooklyn accent “Honey,Tanx for da letta”. First I fell for his music, then I fell for the man. Encouraged by his support of my lyrics, I sang him my made up words to his song "Velerie" that I taught along with a hokey pokey type choreography in my dance classes.  "I am so glad to see you, I am so glad to see you" and he chimed in "...when are you leaving sweetheart?!..". He was playing with me while illustrating his craft of making music from the part of the brain where music bubbles up from the soul. Eddie gave me drum lessons over the phone and told me stories about traveling the country with Anthony Quinn playing Miserlou from the movie Zorba the Greek. He encouraged me in my undertaking to form the band "Shalom Habibi" because live music is better for the dancer. Eddie told me to take charge as the band leader, be confident. He said that music cheers people up and that's what it's all about. Playing for the dancer, watching, listening and treating her as part of the music is something rare and wonderful for the performers and the audience. 

   I had to meet him in person and knowing he wasn't getting any younger, I didn't want to wait too long like I did with George Abdo. In October of 2006, I brought my husband and boys to the Atlantic Antic in Brooklyn where Eddie was featured with his Amer-Abic ensemble. Eddie said he wasn’t feeling well and it started as a damp cold morning but soon the music and the dancing brought sunshine to our hearts and the sky as well. Spanning 10 blocks of Atlantic Avenue, from 4th Avenue in Boerum Hill all the way to Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights, the Atlantic Antic is New York's number one street festival, featuring an array of foods from around the world, from baklava and funnel cake. Ten live musical stages offer free performances all day, featuring blues, rock, country, R&B, jazz, music for kids, and of course belly-dancing. When a bearded man wearing a black and white Kefiyah scarf on his head  shouted "Eddie, play some real Arab music" Eddie looked at the man, put his palms out in a conciliatory gesture explaining kindly and with resolve  "I just make music to make people happy". Eddie is the father of Amer-Abic music which combines traditional middle eastern rhythms and melodies with American style music from big band, through rock n roll, jazz and modern sounds. While he didn't invent rap music he certainly freestyled in rhyming brag style  "they came from land and they came from sea. they came today to listen to me"

His lyrics don't work in a post 9/11 world, but back in the day, Eddie could carry it off without offense because he was the American dream representing post war optimism of 1950's America where cultures were blending and Shish kabob was all the rage.

   ”Damascus and Beirut, you don’t need too much loot.  Cairo and Bagdad, things are never bad.. just join the happy mob and go for the shishkabob”

The son of immigrants from Aleppo, Syria, with one foot in his culture of origin while celebrating the freedom of the American melting pot, his music transmits only benevolent intent. 

 There is a scene in Zorba about dancing, not as an act of joy but of expression, communication and survival "It was the dancing When my little boy Dimitri died…and everybody was crying… Me, I got up and I danced. They said, "Zorba is mad." But it was the dancing — only the dancing that stopped the pain". Zorba describes a bar scene in which he and a Russian take turns through the night dancing their life stories because they don't understand each others language. In the morning they know each other completely.

Music is not frivolous. Music is medicine.

When I was looking to start a Middle Eastern Band, I took my friend Samar's suggestion and called her father, Jamil Nimri, a master oud player in Jordan who was now a widower refugee. He didn't speak much English and it was awkward the first time we played together but by the end of the session I watched him perk up like a drooping flower given water. We loved the same music and laughed at the same jokes. For several years until he died, we played together every week and performed at festivals, schools and cultural events.

When Dhiya, a refugee from Iraq joined us and after playing together for several months told the story of terrorist thugs bursting into the nightclub where he was playing and cutting him with a knife held to his throat, I didn't understand the words and even Jamil had a hard time following his dialect and translating in broken English. I didn't need to understand the words to understand the horror, pain and grief.  

   Relating to one another through a shared joy that music brings was the gift Eddie brought to the world and perhaps the only hope for peace. Rest in Peace Sheik.

Miserlou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4s2FasSy50

Hemlock Hospice

  

My mom was my best friend, my biggest fan and my home base. From the first day of my life to the last day of hers, the more I needed her, the more she was there. When the time came, as her health proxy, I carried out her directive and helped her over the fence. Consistent with her character and in the manner of Socrates and Cleopatra, Lois Sylvia Speckter Traub could not defeat death but chose the time of her deliverance, depriving Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma of reveling in corporeal indignities as it claimed final victory. She passed through me on her way out just as surely as I passed through her on my way into this world, blessing me with what she said were the two most important things a mother can give a child, love and independence.

After she died in 2000 I was carrying a rock sack full of grief as my husband Frank and I built our new house in Shutesbury, Ma, and moved in with our boys Teryn who was eight and Dante who had just turned two. Sometimes it was all I could do to get through the day. I would pack husband and boys off to work and school, then lay on the plywood floor of the studio office playroom and cry great, big, terrifying spasms of sobs. An acupressurist and counselor, I recognized depression when I no longer found joy even in the things I loved the most. My mom’s words bubbled up from deep inside me “you’re a mother now Kar, you’ve got to pull yourself together” so I found myself a grief counselor who listened and who helped me develop coping tools like meditation.  When it hurt too much to think, I gave my thoughts to a tree.  When Frank had cleared the land to build our house, we brought the birch and maple logs to the mill in Leverett and turned them into the flooring of the main living areas . We selectively cut trees to maximize winter sun and summer shade but left the giant hemlock we called “the mama tree” in spite of the forester’s warning that the tree was, like all hemlocks of the northeast, doomed to die from the boring insect called the Wooly Adelgid.  The mama tree offered solace as the symbol of nature’s majesty and mystery.

 When my dad died of old age in 2010; painlessly, loving family gathered around him, winding down like a clock as he had hoped, I was wrong thinking I could bypass the grief. Mortality is a buzzkill. Grief touches past griefs and has a life of its own in each situation and person.  I imagine just as we have valves that regulate the flow of the food we digest, that humans have a grief sphincter which opens to allow the amount that can be handled in that moment; too much can drown a person and squeezing too tight can cause an explosion.  Denial has its place in allowing a grieving person to get out of bed, eat breakfast and take a shower. 

 Now the hemlocks are dying. Every one of them. I see them dying along the roads I drive and step over them when I'm walking in the forest. The mama tree is dying. I didn't believe it until I saw it happening. Frank and I attended a presentation by the Harvard Forest at the Athol Public Library called “Hemlock Hospice”, a collaboration of art and science addressing the coming end of the stately icon of the northeast.  Like many of the people there, we were hoping to learn from the experts what we can do to save our trees. We should have known from the title and from our experience that hospice is for the living left behind not the dying who cannot be saved. As I watch the hemlocks lose their needles and then their life, uprooted, dropping one by one, I am reminded of every person I have known and loved who has died and remember to live. 

I’m glad we chose to let the mama tree live even though it means watching it slowly die. 

All summer long I hear the chainsaw of my neighbor to the west and I think of Angelina Jolie's breasts. Like Angelina, Jim made the decision to cut preemptively.  The trees, unlike Angelina's breasts, will be milled into sheds sold by the man in the parking lot across from the Stop and Shop in Greenfield. When I am tending my garden and I hear the chainsaw go silent, I wait for the resounding crack, whoosh and thud that reverberates in my roots along with all the trees in the forest as another giant falls. Sometimes I have to go in the house and lay down with the covers over my head.

 I would prefer not be an expert at grief, but grief is love and intimacy and part of being alive. Channeling grief into something meaningful, even beautiful, is the best I can do. One foot in front of the other until one day there is some new joy taking up the real estate where sad had dwelled so long.

If it's true the goddess is returning then I see her in what is left behind, revealed. When the hemlocks are gone there will be more light in the forest, more sunshine in winter and a view to the east where I came from.

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Boston Globe December 11, 2017  Renée Loth

Hemlock Hospice is an Elegy for the dying New England Hemlock Forest

http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/sites/harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/files/media/121117-BostonGlobe-HemlockHospiceElegy.pdf 

“It’s a cultural touchstone for New England; Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost wrote some of their most famous poems about the familiar woodland sentry. And the hemlock is a marker for climate change — the canary in the forest. The adelgid can’t survive if temperatures reach about 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit; Petersham, near the Quabbin Reservoir, used to see those temperatures in winter, but Ellison says it hasn’t been that cold for at least 10 years. “We speak of invasive species as if they have agency,” he says

Borden, who has a degree from Harvard in landscape architecture, the Hemlock Hospice is a way to build awareness of forest ecology, even if he can’t stop the ravaging. “It’s end-of life care not just for the thing that’s dying, but for the living,” he said. The idea is to “not be overwhelmed by fear and to learn something from the loss"

How to get through the day

Exercise your love muscle

Count your blessings

Call a friend

Go for a walk

Pet your cat, hug your dog, kid, partner

Smile at a stranger

Visit someone at a hospital or nursing home

Listen to, dance to, make music

Paint, draw, write

Read something funny

Sit by the water

Look at the sky

Save despair for the end