For well over forty years "Going to Cleveland" has been a family travel ritual that we undertook numerous times a year, as Tom's parents, sister, and other extended family members lived or continue to live in the suburbs contiguous to the city. Thus when we said we were "going to Cleveland" it didn't mean we were actually going to Cleveland; it meant that we were going to visit relatives who lived near, but not in, Cleveland. In truth, in all the years I'd been "going to Cleveland" the most I'd ever seen of the city ― other than one brief, ill-advised foray I vaguely recall one night around Christmas time several decades ago to take our kids ― at the time one toddler and one baby ― to see a Care Bear lights display, or something ― anyway, other than that the most I'd ever seen of downtown Cleveland, was an occasional skyline shot of the city from the car while driving from a visit with the relatives on the east side to a visit with the relatives on the west side, or vice-versa. Who knows from whence come the bees we get in our bonnets? Though I believe the particular bee that flew into mine and buzzed into my brain the desire to learn what wonders there might be just below that Cleveland skyline, arrived last May while I was staying at the Marriott Residence Inn in the Cleveland suburb of Avon, ...for the wedding of my nephew Jason and his bride Rachel (see post from 5/17/2017). Anyway, Tom and I ended up liking that Marriott so much that I suggested that we return there sometime and, as one does not stay at a hotel unless one has a reason to do so, I deduced a reason for us to go back: The hotel was close to downtown Cleveland; I'd never actually been to downtown Cleveland (except for the Care Bear lights fiasco, which I chose not to count); so why not spend a tourist weekend - actually go to Cleveland - and stay at the hotel? Time passed, summer came and went and we sort of forgot about the "Go To Cleveland" plan until I revisited it a few weeks ago and came up with the idea of going in October and calling it a birthday trip - for me - so that in case anybody asked, "Why are you going to Cleveland and staying in a hotel when you have so many relatives there?" I could just say, "It's for my birthday." So we left Columbus this past Thursday morning and stopped along the way in the Cleveland exurb (a little farther out than a suburb) of Lorain to visit Tom's 98-year-old father, Charlie, who will be 99 in November, ...at his assisted living facility, Anchor Lodge, a lovely place on Lake Erie. Then after our visit and a stop at Subway for lunch we headed for the suburb of Avon and The Marriott Residence, where we found the bright, open, multi-space lobby as neat as we'd remembered it from our last stay,
...on our way to our suite on the third floor. Our quarters included a living room, ..kitchen, ...complete with all the kitchenly accoutrements, ...bathroom,
The decor of all the rooms was pleasantly minimalist, if maybe a tad heavy on the over-stuffed pillows. Still we just tossed all the pillows onto the floor and hung out in our sweet suite until it was dinner time. For dinner we drove back to Lorain to a cute little family diner located on the lake called Chris' that we've been to several times before,
The food at Chris' is always good, ...and the prices right.
...Tom had his favorite, Lake Erie Perch, ...while I had my favorite, the faux Philly Steak Sandwich.
After dinner and a visit to the school at which Mary Jane teaches, Tom and I returned to the Marriott,
...as well as inside. Then we settled in for the night, me knowing that the following day I would ― finally ― not be "going to Cleveland," but going to Cleveland. To be continued...
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Want to lose your lunch? Want to lose your dinner and breakfast, too? If not, then don't watch this video of Donald Trump's visit to a disaster relief Center in Puerto Rico during which he gleefully tosses rolls of paper towels one by one into a crowd of Hurricane Maria survivors: https://www.youtube.co/watch?v=kEe7_zgZbuI These are disaster victims suffering the terrible devastation of their island. Their infrastructure and power grid have been destroyed. They've lost their homes, some have lost every material possession, some have lost family members. These people are in dire need of the basic necessities to survive, of food, water, clothing and shelter.
And in strolls Donald Trump, all well-fed and fresh from his long golf weekend at his private New Jersey country club, giving himself a round of applause then picking up rolls of paper towels and lobbing them at the hurricane survivors as if he were practicing basketball shots, as if this were all great fun, as if he were some pompous, pampered, puffed-up 18th Century royal out for a bit of amusement belittling the subjects. So arrogant. So degrading. So disgusting. And afterwards congratulating himself for all the "love in the room." Watching Donald Trump demean those people in that way made my stomach hurt.
That video says it all. References:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-helps-suffering-puerto-ricans-by-throwing-paper-towels-at-them_us_59d3db64e4b0218923e5b4f7 http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/04/politics/tillerson-trump-moron/index.html On my birthday I do not require gifts or cards. I do not require (in truth, I don't want) a party. I do not even require that others remember my birthday. However, as everyone who knows me well knows, there is one thing that I require on my birthday: Birthday cake. I must have one of those store-bought birthday cakes, vanilla only, not chocolate or marble or almond or any other variation, and my cake must be smothered in that thick, dense, hyper-sweet icing, on top of which may sit more icing flowers and swirls. And the icing has to be vanilla, too, though of course I don't mind if the trim and flowers are dyed red or yellow or pink or blue or any color on the spectrum, for that matter. But I will have cake on my birthday, if I have to go and buy it myself, which, what the heck, I always end up doing anyway, ...and which I was intending to do on my birthday yesterday before my door bell rang at about 10 am. I opened the door to see a nice-looking, smiling young lady holding a box and a card, which she handed to me, then she turned and sprinted back to the car that was parked on the street in front of my house. the box appeared to be from a bakery and on the top was a label that read, "Fate-Cakes.com"
There was no name, no clue as to who sent the box. I ran out the front door with the card in my hand and waved to the cake-delivery woman, who was just driving off. But she saw me, stopped, and rolled down her window. "Say, can you tell me who sent that Fate Cake?" I asked, "There's no name on the card." "Oh, I have no idea," the nice lady said with a smile. "Well...isn't there some way you can check?" I asked. "I'd really like to know who sent this." "If there's no name on the card then they probably wanted it to be sent anonymously," said the lady, still smiling. "Sometimes people do send them anonymously." "They do?" I asked, incredulous. "Oh, yes," the lady replied. "Huh," I said, confounded, not thinking quickly enough on my feet to say to the lady, "Well, look, nobody who knows me would send me an anonymous cake because everybody knows that I have small tolerance for big surprises, that it doesn't take a whole lot to transport me into an anxiety state, and that receiving a mystery cake would definitely do the trick. Now, please grab your phone and call the place of origin of this cake and ask whoever's in charge to look up who sent it. Who ordered it? Who paid for it? Who, who, who?!" But of course I didn't say any of that to the lady. I just stood on the side walk looking at the card and saying, "Huh," as she drove off. Then I went back inside and opened the lid of the box. Inside was the most beautiful birthday cake. I nabbed a little finger of icing. It was pure heaven on a cake. I knew that this cake was not the mischievous doing of some anonymous trickster. Somebody near and dear to me, I was sure, was out there already wondering if I'd received their gift, if it arrived in good shape, if I was delighted with it. Which I was. A lot. And so I knew it was going to be my fate to go online and look up the number of Fate Cakes, call the place, and try to find someone who could tell me who sent me this sublime work of birthday cake art. As I was about to set myself to the task my daughter called. I told her about the mystery cake and asked her if she'd sent it. She hadn't, but she suggested that I post a picture of the cake on Facebook. Chances were that whoever sent the cake would see the post and, well, a mystery cake was kind of a fun subject for a Facebook post. So I decided I'd post the cake on Facebook and contact Fate Cakes. As I was snapping shots of the cake Tom, who'd been out all morning - though he didn't leave before leaving me a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table - arrived home. I showed him the mysterious Fate Cake, and just like that the mystery was solved. "Oh, you sister called this morning while you were in the shower to wish you a happy birthday. She told me she was sending you a cake."
Now that I knew the provenance of that splendid cake, I knew that I could enjoy it with the relishment I was sure it merited. And even though it was the middle of the morning, I cut into that bad boy, forgoing the candles and singing, ...figuring that it's my birthday and I'll eat Fate Cake if I want to, with ice cream, even.
...oh, baby, it's gone! Do you remember that movie,"The King's Speech?"
...got totally busted by the royal higher-ups,
...even though he, using his own methods, cured the King after all the top doctors in the kingdom had failed? Which, frankly, I found to be an utterly ridiculous and and unbelievable plot invention, since: 1) Why would anybody care whether or not Geoffrey Rush had an MD when he solved the royal problem without one? 2) The doctor who recommended Geoffrey Rush to the King and Queen told them he wasn't a doctor so why was it such a big surprise? 3) Wouldn't anybody working on the King of England have been thoroughly vetted in advance? 4) I hate it when supposedly historical movies make up some fake melodrama and throw it into the story just for the sake of, well, fake melodrama. Alas, almost all historical movies do this. Which is why historical movies usually leave me feeling slightly annoyed, as did "The King's Speech." But all that being said, the Geoffrey Rush character, the speech therapist with the cred but not the diploma, was actually an epiphany for me: Change the vocation from speech therapist to piano teacher and that character was me. I, like the King's maligned speech therapist, have no formal piano teacher's training, called pedagogy ( I was a French major), nor am I even all that much of a pianist, having taken only a couple of years' worth of lessons when I was young, during which time I was an exasperating student who never practiced. I mostly figured out how to play on my own when I finally felt like learning, and I didn't really learn how to play the piano properly until my own children started taking string and piano lessons and I'd sit in and watch everything their teachers did then sit with them while they practiced to make sure they were accomplishing what their teachers required of them.
I made up funny words to the melodies to help them learn rhythms.
...and how to help them overcome the challenges. I learned what works and what doesn't from watching their teachers. I learned to tell the difference between a good teacher and a not-so-good teacher by the first lesson. I watched, worked with, and learned from my children and their instrument teachers over the course of the twenty years from when my oldest child started music lessons at age five to when my youngest stopped at age seventeen. In my early forties I finally began studying piano with the concert pianist who was teaching my daughter. It was he who, watching how I oversaw my children's music practices, suggested that I take piano students of my own and offered to mentor me in my teaching, which he does to this day. When I first started teaching I felt obligated to explain all of the above to the parents of prospective students for the sake of transparency about my lack of formal training, virtuosic piano technique and music theory; until I realized that the parents, unlike the King's cadre in the movie, didn't care. They just wanted their kids to learn to play the piano. Or, as parent so memorably put it to me: "Pedagogy, scmedagogy, can you teach her to play the piano?" Turned out that I could. Turned out that I could teach almost anybody. Kids with great natural ability. Kids with not-so-great natural ability. Kids with ADHD. Kids with small motor disabilities. In the twenty years I've been teaching I've taught three-year-old beginners, a seventy-year-old beginner, and every age of beginner in between. I've taken transfer students who were working leagues below their ability with their previous teachers and brought them up to their abillity level. I once had an elementary school teacher who came to watch one of her students who was also my student perform at my students' recital ask me, "How in the world did you ever teach that child to play like that?" And yet, in truth, I've never felt altogether comfortable calling myself a piano teacher, especially in the presence of other piano teachers. Like the King's therapist, I don't have the bonafides that "real" piano teachers have. And I certainly don't call myself a pianist. I've never really been able to play all that well. My hands and brain don't work spectacularly well together. And yet I understand how people learn to play an instrument and I know how to teach others to play well, how to count out a rhythm, how to shape a phrase, how to make a beautiful sound. And over the years I've figured out lots of possibly not pedagogically correct tricks for conquering the keys. So what, exactly, I've always wondered, does that make me? A couple of days ago the answer came to me in another epiphany in the form of a Facebook post from the organizer of the authors' event I MC'd last week (see yesterday's post). Among the pictures the organizer posted of the event was a picture of me below the words, "Author, Emcee and piano guru Patti Liszkay." Piano guru, Patti Liszkay. The moment I read the words it hit me: That's what I am. Not a pianist. Not a piano teacher. I'm a piano guru. A sort of guide to put students in touch with and show them how to express their inner pianist. Sometimes in order to discover what you are you just need to discover the words. |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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