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Yesterday Tom and I once again made our way out to the bus stop
...to make our way downtown where we caught the Megabus to Chicago.  Now, I don't ride the COTA bus often - the last time I took the bus was in September when we went to visit see Claire and Miguel (see 9/26/2014 post ) - but this time I was impressed by something that I hadn't noticed before when riding the city bus: that when people exited the bus they called "Thank you" to the driver. It was a little thing, but a nice thing, like holding the door (see post from 9/11/2014). So I guess that's what we do in Columbus: we hold the door and we say "thank you" to the driver when we exit the bus. On our way downtown we had to change buses once at the corner of Broad and Hamilton in Whitehall - where that really good thrift store is (see post from 12/9/2014) - and I got into a conversation with a woman who'd been on our bus and was changing at the same stop as we were. She was doing the bike & bus thing - the COTA buses have a rack at the front of the bus to store a few bicycles - and I complemented her on riding her bike and keeping in shape. The woman, who was maybe a few years younger than me, told me that she was biking and busing because the engine of her car was shot and she couldn't yet afford to have it fixed. She was on her way to work cleaning houses in Bexley, an affluent Columbus suburb close to downtown. She was friendly and upbeat in spite of her troubles and she took a photo of Tom and me at the bus stop.  When our bus arrived, as we were boarding a young man who was walking down the street past the bus stop pointed to the bench and called, "Hey, is this y'all's bag?" Turned out that the biking lady had left her bag on the bus stop bench and the young man had alerted her. She thanked him profusely. People are nice in Columbus. As they are in Chicago. We got off the Megabus at its stop in front of Union Station and from there we walked to the Clinton Street elevated train which took us to our destination, the Western Avenue stop in Bucktown. To get from the train platform at Western down to the street one has to descend three sets of stairs. When I got off train I was all disorganized, fumbling with my suitcase, purse, gloves, scarf and hat. Tom didn't realize I was lagging behind fumbling on the platform, so he moved ahead of me in the crowd and down the staircase, assuming I was right behind him, but I wasn't. When I finally got from the platform to the the top of the stairs I stopped to try and try to get my stuff together while the crowd passed by me. But during the half-minute I stood at the top of the stairs organizing myself four different young people stopped to ask if they could help me or carry my suitcase down the stairs. So I say Chicago people are nice, too. We walked from the train station to Claire and Miguel's house in Bucktown to pick them up and from there we walked to the nearby IHSP hostel, our perennial choice of lodgings when visiting Chicago (see posts from 9/26/2014 and 12/21/2013). 
After Tom and I checked in at the IHSP we walked to a new neighborhood burger restaurant Claire and Miguel had been wanting to check out called Umami Burgers.
The burgers were really good, made with ground steak and cooked medium rare.
In place of fries Tom ordered as a side the Boring Salad,
After our burgers we all had a hankering for dessert so we walked to nearby Stan's donuts:
...where we feasted on raspberry bismark, coconut cream, chocolate turtle, chocolate bismark, sour cream and glazed doughnuts.
Our doughnut jones satisfied, we said good night to Claire and Miguel who headed home while we walked back to our hostel
Except for the disreputable WIFI, this is a really nice place.
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Last night I heard kind of an awful story, told to me by one of my 6-year-old piano students. When young students are sitting next to me on the piano bench they do have a propensity for spontaneously sharing whatever thought is currently running though their young minds at any given moment. At this time of year much of the chat is about Christmas, and they especially love talking about their elf-on-the-shelf, telling me about some of the funny places their elf has recently shown up and showing me where their elf currently is. Some of them like me to walk around the room and find their elf, which I do with much drama and delight when I finally spot the elf, which I'm always careful not to do too quickly. I can't imagine that there are many folks out there who don't know what an elf-on-the-shelf is, but for the uninitiated it's a bendable elf doll whom the children believe is a real elf sent from Santa. One day around Christmas time the elf will just up somewhere in the house and every year children wait with excitement for their elf to show up for the first time. Every day the elf shows up in a different spot around the house and the children have to search for him every morning, which they love doing.
On Christmas day the elf flys back up to Santa and will re-appear the next year.
I'm guessing that children believe in their elves as long as they believe in Santa. The one rule about the elf-on-the-shelf, as my young students are always reminding me, is that no one may touch it. If anyone touches the elf it loses its magic, though no one ever explained exactly what that might entail. Until last night. Anyway, last night my young student began chatting on the subject of elves-on-the-shelf. It occurred to me that this was the first time this child had ever mentioned the subject and had never mentioned having an elf of their own. So I asked them if they had an elf-on-the-shelf. The child became suddenly serious and shook their head, telling me that they weren't allowed to have one because last year when their mother took them over to a friend's house the friend was too upset to play because a boy had come over and touched the friend's elf-on-the shelf on purpose. "What happens when you touch an elf on the shelf" I asked. "It loses its magic and flies up to Santa and never comes back," the child answered somberly. "Is that what happened to your friend's elf?" I asked. The child nodded. "So we had to go home and my mom said, 'we're not doing that!'" And that was the end of the story. My little piano student seemed none the worse for telling it and hopped right back into the lesson. But I found the story troubling. For the rest of the lesson I couldn't stop thinking about the poor child whose elf-on-the-shelf had to fly away because some mean boy touched it on purpose. And now I'm wondering - is that what parents actually do if the elf gets touched? They take it away and tell their kids that it lost its magic and flew back to Santa and is never coming back? I mean, was the mother of that one kid an outlier or is that what parents do to their kids over these elf dolls? And if so, why? I mean, what's the point? Yesterday before I learned of the the elf incident one of my daughters just coincidentally happened to make the comment on my facebook timeline that if elf-on-the-shelf had been around when she and her sibs were young and if they'd wanted one I probably would have made one for them. This is true. Artisanal parent that I was, (see posts from 11/4/2014 and 11/5/2014) I tended to make things rather than buy them. I sewed Cabbage Patch dolls for them which, of course, didn't look as good as store-bought, and when somebody wanted an E.T. doll I sewed one from an old sock, which also didn't look all that much like E.T. Thankfully, kids have imaginations. So if they'd wanted one I probably would have made them a decidedly second-rate-looking elf-on-the-shelf, too. But their elf-on-the-shelf wouldn't have had any magic powers and wouldn't have flown back to Santa and if someone touched their elf nothing bad would have happened. I wouldn't have had the heart for it. So, once while in New York I bought a turtle from an old Asian lady standing under the elevated train near Woodside Avenue in Queens (see yesterday's post). Here's the complete story of what transpired: About 10 years ago my daughter Claire was living in the Woodside neighborhood in Queens while working for Mercy Corps in a facility in Brooklyn for developmentally disabled adults.
On one occasion while visiting Claire I was taking a walk along Roosevelt Avenue when a little old Asian lady standing on the sidewalk under the elevated train beckoned to me as I passed.
The front door. The view from Claire's room. Claire was delighted with the turtle and thought it would be an excellent gift for her younger sister, but pointed out that, before even addressing the problem of getting turtle back to Ohio, the first order of the day was to get some food and suitable lodgings for the little critter. Claire, also an animal lover, knew of a little aquatic pet store in the neighborhood that she liked to hang out at to look at the tropical fish. So we hurried to the pet store and asked the clerk for a turtle bowl and some food. "How big's the turtle?" asked the clerk. "About this big," I said, separating my thumb and finger about 2 inches. "It's illegal to buy or sell a turtle that has a shell span of less than 4 inches," replied the clerk sternly. After a few moments of distressed silence the clerk said, "We don't sell turtle bowls. All we sell are these salamander bowls." We followed him to a shelf from which he pulled down a flat bowl with a ramp rising up from the middle. Your basic turtle bowl. "I guess we'll take that salamander bowl," said Claire. "And do you have any, um, salamander food?" I asked. "They like these brine shrimp," he said as he handed me the can of shrimp, looking none too approving. So, our turtle soon properly housed and fed, we now had to cogitate over how to get him (or her?) home. The more I thought it over, the less of a good idea it seemed to try and smuggle this illegal turtle onto a plane. Claire thoroughly agreed, and she came up with an alternate plane. One of her fellow Mercy Corps friends, Jeannie, was from Philadelphia. Jeannie's mother and sister just happened to be visiting for the weekend. Claire had a friend from college, Mark, who lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. 
Mark
Claire had spoken to Mark recently and he'd mentioned that he'd be driving out to Dayton, Ohio, soon to visit a college friend who'd settled there. So here was the plan formulated by committee among Claire, Jeannie, Mark, Mark's friend, Jeannie's mother and me: 1. We'd give the turtle to Jeannie's mother who'd drive to New Jersey and hand it over to Mark. 2. Mark would care for the turtle until his trip to Dayton, at which time he'd take the turtle with him and pass it off to his college friend. 3. The college friend would care for the turtle until I returned from New York and could drive down to Dayton to retrieve the turtle and bring it to its new home in Columbus. And it all came to pass as planned, flawlessly. Theresa was, in fact, delighted with her new pet whom she named Billboat after a little turtle pin I was given when I was five years old with a green shell, gold head, feet and tail and red glass eyes. I'd forgotten all about Billboat, though I suppose at one point I must have told my children the story of how I'd named my turtle pin and of how I took him to first grade with me one day and he disappeared from my desk and how I never told my parents or anyone else because I didn't want them to get upset, not at me, but over the fact that Billboat was gone. But now, Theresa told me, Billboat had come back to me. 1. Eric Garner was accosted by the police for selling individual cigarettes on the street. Cigarettes are sticks of poison that cause 480,000 deaths per year in the United States and more that 16 million people in this country suffer from diseases caused by smoking. So why wasn't the law going after the vendors who every day sell case after case of these mass killers of American citizens instead of someone who was selling a mere few of them on the street? Why didn't the police raid the corporate offices of the cigarette kingpins who make billions at the cost of millions of lives instead of going full-force after the weakest of offenders?
2. It's illegal to sell contraband on the streets of New York City, as Eric Garner was doing. But people do it all the time in New York, it's everywhere, just start at the intersection of Broadway and Harald Square and walk in any direction and you'll pass quick-moving vendors hawking stuff on every block. There are little knick-knack stores where the vendors keep secret drawers of bootlegged CD's and DVD's for interested buyers. So why in New York City was one man selling a handful of cigarettes such a crime that five police officers needed to be on the scene to stop him? Though when I presented this argument to Tom he replied, cryptically, "Staten Island is different." 3. If Staten Island is, in truth, different from all the other boroughs then perhaps it's good that I've never been there. Because I have a confession: I've bought lots of stuff from fly-by-day New York City street vendors and from the secret drawers of knick-knack shops. In the Woodside neighborhood of Queens I once bought a turtle from an old Asian lady standing under the elevated train who beckoned me over then lifted the cover from a little plastic container that held a tiny painted turtle. I bought the turtle and the container for $5. Which I guess technically makes me a petty criminal, too. So if the police had caught me in the act and I'd balked at being arrested for something stupid like buying a turtle would they have felt it necessary to choke-hold me and pile upon me the way they did Eric Garner? An affluent-looking white lady like me? You think? 4. But then I was in Queens, not Staten Island. Maybe things really are different there than in Queens. All I know is that when I watched the Eric Garner video my immediate impression was of a pack of school yard bullies attacking the fat helpless kid. Because he was a big easy target. Which is the favorite prey of bullies. 5. Watching that video made me angry. But mostly it hurt my heart. So, the plan had been that Tommy would take all the left-over recital goodies to work on Friday to share. But somehow the box of left-overs got mixed up with my stuff and ended up in my car and eventually in my kitchen, and so I ended up having to spend the weekend standing my ground against this:  I did a fairly good job of resisting, except against these Kroger Mini Pumpkin Cheese Bites that somebody had brought to the recital:   These little cream-topped sirens would not stop calling to me until I finally dove in and polished off half a dozen of them at 81 calories each. After which I threw the rest of them away. In fact, I tossed most of the left-over sweets away, except for the mini-cupcakes that I'd made, which I put into the freezer because I couldn't in good conscience throw these away.  I figure they'll keep until somebody comes by to help us eat them. But all the store-bought stuff I had no qualms about throwing away. I figure that if you eat something just because: 1. you can't resist eating it if it's in your presence or 2. you don't want to waste it, then you're wasting it anyway just the same as if you tossed it into the trash. So you're better off tossing it into the trash than into your mouth, right? So I threw the Kroger Mini Pumpkin Cheese Bites and their sweet cohorts into the trash so that they would shut up and stop calling to me. And they did. I have no regrets. The sweets off my radar, I was able to get on with the rest of my weekend. Some of my piano students and parents regularly tell me that our Winter Recital (see posts from 12/03/14 and 12/04/14) kicks off the Christmas season for them. Seems that way for me, too. Maybe it's the rush of relief I always feel in tandem with all the lights and decorations all around that puts me in the holiday spirit, but I was feeling it. I felt like going out and walking around the mall, taking in the decorations, the lights, the music, the crowds and basking in the glowing feeling that I didn't have to do any Christmas shopping this year. Or any year. Ever. I gave up Christmas gifting years ago by mutual agreement among Tom, myself and our adult children that none of us really needed to give or receive Christmas gifts from each other any more. It was actually quite a relief for all of us. Tom and I have never given each other gifts for any occasion - except that one time before we were married that he gave me a pair of army gloves for Valentine's Day (see post from 2/14/2014) - and we decided to stop giving Christmas gifts to friends and family shortly after we were married, much to the delight of some who loved the idea of no more Christmas shopping, and to the horror of others who were appalled by the idea of no more Christmas shopping. But anyway, even though I didn't have any Christmas shopping to do, I did have some non-Christmas shopping to do. So after a stroll around Eastland Mall to take in the Christmas sights,   ...we headed to the place where one goes to get down to the business of serious shopping: the thrift store.  I'd been wanting to check out a new (to me) store in Whitehall (the next suburb over from Gahanna) that I'd caught sight of a few months ago from the bus stop at Broad and Hamilton where Tom and I were waiting to catch a bus downtown to the Megabus to Chicago (see post from 9/26/2014).   This place turned out to be a real find among the thrift store phylum.  Alas, I went crazy, to the tune of $59.22. When I told my son Tommy how much I spent he laughed, "How did you manage to spend almost $60 at the thrift store?" (Sigh). 'Tis the season.  This morning we are all basking in the happy relief of another piano recital, pulled off: 
We came, 
We played,
Tommy played and sang: 
We ate, 
We played some more just for fun, 
We ran around, 
We went home. 
And next week it will be back to work. 
Tonight is our winter piano recital. The ritual post-recital reception mini-cupcakes and the guacamole dip, without which we cannot have a piano recital, are ready:
As, hopefully, are all the other goodies of which we'll partake after we've shared our pieces with our audience. We're all a little nervous. I'm a little nervous. But our pieces are as ready as they're going to be, and everyone seemed fairly chill at their lessons last night, some more than others: 
Me, I'll be playing the love theme from one of my favorite of all favorite old movies, "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). 
Maybe some of you old foreign film buffs out there have seen it. It's one of those movies that, if you've seen it once, you'll probably want to see it at least 10 more times. Or more. Anyway, the movie came out in 1964 and all the dialogue is sung throughout in French to the beautiful music of composer Michel Legrand. The song I'm playing is from the scene between a 16-year-old girl and her 20-year-old sweetheart, who has just learned that he's been drafted and must leave the next morning to go off to fight the war in Algeria. The girl begins sobbing and begging the boy not to go, telling him that she loves him, she can't live without him, vowing she'll never love another her whole life. The boy just keeps singing "my love, my love", telling her that he must go, promising her that he'll think of nothing but her, ever. 
At the end of the scene the the boy looks forlornly from the departing train back at his beloved, who runs along the platform after the train until it's gone from sight and she's left standing alone on the platform. A truly a classic movie scene. The piano arrangement I'm playing is one I put together a few years ago from the music from this scene. I tried to capture the elements of the dialogue between the two characters: first, when the boy breaks the terrible news to his girl, then the outpouring of sorrow and love between the two, then the big scene of the train pulling away, the girl running after the train, then finally standing alone on the platform. Tom says that when I play this piece he can almost smell the coal smoke from the train. If I get it right tonight hopefully everybody in the recital hall will be able to, too. 
Last week when my daughter was visiting and I told her that I had a piano recital coming up this week she laughed, "Again? What, do you have recitals every week?" Actually, no, I have student recitals three times a year. But sometimes its seems like every week. I expect that's because, even though we only perform three times a year, we're always preparing for the recitals. As soon as one recital is finished each student is given his or her piece for the next recital and we get right to work. So for my students and for me a performance is always there on the horizon and it gets closer week by week. I'm a performance-based teacher. My philosophy is that we learn to play to perform not only for others but for ourselves, too - after all, who feels like playing, even for themselves, if the playing doesn't sound beautiful? - and so we're always preparing for a performance. Also this way we're always working towards a goal. In truth, it's me who needs a goal. It keeps me organized and focused. Otherwise I think I'd have a hard time teaching - I truly wouldn't know when a piece is finished. I think I would be like the old sculptor who, when asked once how he knew when a piece of his art was finished he answered, "I never know when it's finished. I just keep polishing and polishing until they come and take it away." I think it's the same with a piece of music. We just keep practicing and practicing, polishing and polishing our pieces until it's time for us to perform them at the recital. And I feel like you don't really own a piece until you've performed it. You can work and work on a piece, but once you've performed it, then its yours. Not that performing is easy. Playing the piano doesn't come easily for most of us. As one young student once observed after a few piano lessons: "This isn't as easy as it looks." It's a problem of having only ten fingers to deal with all those keys. I sometimes wonder how anybody learns to play the piano. And yet we do. I've taught manys the four- and five-year-old.
I've even had a few three-year-olds. But then, of course, performing - as opposed to just playing - is a whole 'nother game. Still, as I always remind my nervous students - and my nervous self - that a tangle or two in the middle of performance does not spoil a piece that's beautifully played as a whole. I also remind us all of what happens if one messes up one's piano recital: nothing. (The same is not necessarily true if one is performing brain surgery. Even though playing a difficult piece well may require an equal amount of skill and dexterity. In fact, I have a very able student who has told me that he wants to be a brain surgeon when he grows up. I've decided that if I ever need brain sugery 20 years from now I'm definitely going to him). So anyway, if we don't perform our pieces to perfection at the recital, we still have the rest of our lives to play our pieces whenever we want. We'll be people who can play the piano. We'll have music in our lives and when we grow up it we'll want our children to have music in their lives. And that's why we take piano lessons, right?  Last Sunday the body of 22-year-old Ohio State Buckeye defensive tackler Kosta Karageorge was found in a dumpster by a mother and her child who were picking through the dumpster. It appears that Kosta died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Kosta had been missing since last Wednesday night when he left his apartment near campus after sending a text to his mother apologizing for being an embarrassment and telling her that his head was "messed up" from the concussions he'd received. When I heard the news that the missing young man had been found dead in a dumpster I immediately thought of something our pastor Kai Nilson had said earlier that day in his Sunday sermon: that during the holidays the state of one's life is amplified; if your life is going well and you're happy then the holidays can be a time of great joy. But if you're going through sadness or hard times then getting through the holidays can be a struggle. And so I think of Kosta Karageorge's loved ones struggling through the holidays, the music, lights, decorations, and holiday activities amplifying the loss of their child, their brother, their friend. How sad that this young man, described by his team mates as big-hearted, enthusiastic, someone who cared about and was liked by everyone, who loved and was loved by his family, felt so worthless that he thought he deserved to die alone in a dumpster. Or maybe the way he chose to end his life was a final act of considerateness on his part, a wish not to trouble anyone with finding him. But seems to me that along the periphery of this tragedy is another: that Kosta Karageorge’s body was found by a mother and her child who were scrounging through a dumpster. It's troubling that here in this country, while most of us were still enjoying left-overs from our national celebration of plenty, there were mothers and children sccavenging through the post-Thanksgiving trash of others. That some of us spent Black Friday trolling the big-box stores while others searched for scraps in dumpsters. That the other America is right here in Columbus, Ohio. There was no further mention in the news of the mother and child who found Kosta Karageorge. We don't know who they were, where they came from or where they went to, whether they had shelter and a meal to look forward to on that cold November night. We don't know how they processed the ordeal of finding what they found in that dumpster. And yet because they happened to be looking through that dumpster the family and friends of Kosta Karageorge can at least have the peace of closure, of finality. May Kosta Karageorge rest in peace and may his loved ones find solace. And may that mother and child be provided for, wherever they may be. POST SCRIPT: I wrote the above blog last night. This morning there was a front page article in The Columbus Dispatch on the woman who found Kosta Karageorge in a dumpster. Evidently others were wondering about this woman and her child, too. Her name is Linda Mulligan, she's 49 years old and lives with her 8-year-old grandson in Weinland Park, a Columbus neighborhood near the dumpster. She's a scrapper, and was out looking with her grandson for some bits of metal to sell. It was her grandson who first saw the body when he opened the lid of the dumpster to look inside. And though she said that she can't stop thinking about Kosta Karageorge's face, "remembering what it was like to look into his eyes", she's thankful that she found him and considers it a blessing that she and her grandson were there. We never know in what way our life's actions may turn into a blessing for another. May Linda Mulligan's life be blessed, to. Even now, after all the media play and opinionated discussion everywhere you go, I still can't quite seem to wrap my head around the events of that day last August in Ferguson, Missouri.
Even after the grand jury verdict, the jury in my mind is still out. I'm still not sure exactly what I believe happened, except that a boy is dead and a police officer's career is over, outcomes that surely neither had foreseen when their paths crossed in the middle of that street that day. But here's what I do feel sure about: that this is a tragic case of unintended consequences and that from now on all police officers should reach for their Tasers or pepper spray before their guns. Let the guns be the last line of defense, never the first. Had police officer Darren Wilson used a Taser on Michael Brown during whatever it was that went on in his police car and moments later on the street, we almost certainly wouldn't know their names today. Wilson would still be doing his job and Michael Brown's case would have been adjudicated by our criminal justice system instead of by a bullet. Among the protests, conversations, and dialogues there have been calls for major reforms within police departments across the country to crack down on police abuse and promote better and more just community and race relations. Yes, by all means let there be a shake-up and improvement in police policies. How about starting with the mandatory use of non-lethal weapons before guns? |
"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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