Thursday, September 20, 2018

CHOPIN"S FINAL DAYS

My first piano recital piece—I was 9 years old—was Chopin's prelude in C# minor, Opus 28, No.7 When I returned to the formal study of the piano in retirement I kept running into Chopin.  The first time was during the marvelous 2000 exhibit, "Piano 300," on the history of the piano at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. which I explored three times in as many days.  Among so many other treasures in that exhibit were compositions, some in their own hand, some by copyists, of Mozart, Liszt, Haydn, Gershwin, and Chopin.  The most beautiful handwriting of all was Chopin's.  Each page of his composition on display, the Impromptu in G flat major, op 51, was a work of art.         
          I began reading biographies of Chopin, the best of which I found to be Siepmann’s Chopin, the Reluctant Romantic. The book was so good I read it twice and the second time made many notes.  But it was mostly in Paris, the city in which he spent much of his short life, that I kept running into Frederick Francois Chopin. I sought out and visited his residences, including the one on the Place Vendome near my office where he died.  I ran into Chopin again as I walked above the quays of the Left Bank.  I looked up at the delicate steeple of Saint Chapelle and up river to a clear view of Notre Dame in the near distance.  Crowds of tourists milled around the green stalls of book and print vendors, babbling in many languages, taking pleasure in the warmth and sunlight and the boats and the architectural beauty of the grand buildings along the Seine.  Sunlight flooded the western tip of the island that is in the heart of Paris, the Isle de la Cite.
          I looked for Chopin portraits and books among the stalls. =I was below the Pont Neuf Bridge and not far from the Place St. Michel.  A vendor in his late 40s with a full but neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard had just finished unloading the contents of the green metal box that held his wares and was fussing over their arrangement.  Propped up in front of rows of his old books was a full-length portrait, not more than seven inches tall.  It had the greenish tints found in some old daguerreotypes and was clearly authentic 19th Century. The face looked familiar.  "Chopin," the vendor said.  He was now standing beside me.

"A daguerreotype.  Taken in 1849, a few weeks before he died at age 39."  

          In the photo Chopin is in the final stages of tuberculosis.  It wasn't any Chopin I had ever seen, certainly not the young, frail handsome romantic. He looked old and tired, with dark circles under his eyes. He seemed to be barely holding on to life and perhaps was surprised at what the disease was doing to his body.  Death, I thought, already has her arms around him.  Perhaps the vendor saw the dismay in my face.
"Look at his eyes." he said.  "Look at the soul in his eyes and he hummed a brief passage from one of Chopin's works.  Such beauty!"       
          But I saw pain where the vendor saw beauty in the face of the man who composed such exquisite music.  I walked away but I could not forget that portrait as I sat in a cafe on Place St. Michel with an espresso coffee, thinking about the photo.  I liked it very much, I said to myself, and it is not expensive.  But could I live with it?  I finally decided no, I could not.   
          Chopin requested Mozart's requiem mass be performed at his funeral service.  The funeral was delayed because there were major parts for female voices in Mozart's mass and the Madeleine had never permitted female singers in its choir.  The church relented on the condition that the women would be invisible behind a black velvet curtain.   Also played at his funeral were Chopin's preludes Opus 28, No 4 in E minor and No 6 in B minor, both mournful keys.   Chopin's funeral was the first public funeral in the temple built by Napoleon as a monument to his victorious armies that later became a church, the Madeleine.  Thousands followed the Chopin funeral cortege, walking from the Madeleine to Pere Lachaise cemetery where he was buried. 
     For some months I walked frequently from my office across the northern edge of the  Place de la Concorde and up the rue Royale to the Madeleine.  I walked through bouquets of flowers on the lower steps and trotted up into the church almost every day to spend a few minutes remembering Chopin and my French assistant, Anne Marie-Migeot.  For two and one half years Anne-Marie and I were the USIS Paris support for our regional offices in the major consular cities in France.  We had endured much frustration in a poorly organized USIS program together.  Anne-Marie died at 47, quite unexpectedly, while visiting her brother in Brazil. While at the beach.  A blood clot on the brain.  Anne-Marie occasionally complained of migraine headaches but there were no other symptoms or warning signs.  We were all in shock.  Anne-Marie's funeral mass was held at the Madeleine. Gabriel Faure's much-loved requiem was first performed in the Madeleine for a funeral mass in l888 and he became the organist at that church from 1896 to 1905. 
          

OUR OWN SEPARATED CHILDREN


There has been a great deal of criticism of the Trump administration’s former practice of separating the children of would be immigrants from their parents.  Perhaps a thousand children were so affected.  The outcry was strong enough that under public pressure, the policy was cancelled.     
          What has caused little or no public outcry at all is the daily separation of American children from parents who are incarcerated.  The numbers are staggering.  Not a thousand or so, but five million children, all US citizens, have had a parent in state or federal prison at some time in their childhood.
          In some cases, the second parent, grandparents, or other relatives take them in.  But most of these children are put into some form of foster care. 
          These separations from a loved parent are terribly painful. I know that because I was such a child, and I wrote about my experience in my first book, Children of the Manse.   

Children of the Manse, p 43

          “Lonnie was arrested again following a break-in of a local liquor store. I remember the day we were taken to see Janey (new born sister) and our mother at Mercy Hospital in Portsmouth.  I best remember the occasion because I got to see my Daddy again.  He gave me and Brother and Charlie sticks of Wrigley’s chewing gum in light green paper wrappers.  He was with a sheriff’s deputy to whom he was handcuffed.

          When the visit was over we all walked out of the hospital together and I saw the black sheriff’s car and two more deputies who would take Lonnie back to jail and then to the Ohio state prison. He tried to hug me but couldn’t because of the handcuffs.  When he looked up at the deputy, asking to be freed for a moment to hold me, the deputy shook his head.  They opened the car door so my Daddy could get in and he sat between two men in suits and fedoras and they sped away.  I can’t forget seeing him like that, being driven away with his head down.  My Aunt Mary told me I came running into my Grandmother McNelly’s house afterwards crying, “Grandma!  Grandma!  They took my Daddy to jail.  They took my Daddy to jail! I believed, said Aunt Mary, my Grandmother McNelly could do something about it.  All I knew was the joy of my heart was gone and Aunt Mary said I cried inconsolably long into the night.  Nothing my grandmother or Aunt Mary said or did could help me.” 

          I was five years old, the worst time say the psychologists, to be separated from a loved parent. In my case, Lonnie was the parent I loved because he loved me and my biological mother was a selfish and cold woman who would eventually beg state social workers to place me and three younger siblings in a county children’s home. 




Wednesday, September 19, 2018

RENOIR'S NUDES


When I lived in Paris in the late l970s, the Impressionist museum was across the street from my office in the Talleyrand building.  During a later visit to Paris  I was disappointed to find the entire Impressionist collection had been moved to the fourth floor of the new Musee d’Orsay.  That was in effect moving them to the attic of what was once a handsome Parisian railway station. But it has always been  how the French treat the Impressionists. Formerly the Impressionists were not allowed into the Louvre Palace Museum proper but were relegated to an outbuilding, the royal tennis court, which was why I could walk across the street at will to view them.  
          Even so, I was delighted to view the paintings again on whatever floor they were and in 2000 spent an entire day roaming through the impressionist galleries in a half empty museum during a sunny weekday in late winter.  When I came to the Renoirs I stood for some time in front of one of the best of his 1918 painting of young bathers, Les Grandes Baigneuses.  Two plump, lovely, nude young women, lie next to each other, relaxing after their bath.  The painting is full of warm dreamy oranges, yellows, and greens.  
          In the background, as I circled the gallery of Renoir’s canvasses, I could hear a group of school girls, laughing, exuberant and joyful.  The first two, smiling dark-haired girls in blue skirts and white blouses, danced into the Renoir gallery.  They stepped up to Les Grandes Baigneuses and inspected the two young women closely. Suddenly one, in glee, turned to her companion and said,

"Look!  There are three! she said pointing at the bottom bather."

Then she walked up to the painting, dragging her companion by the hand,
"One," and she pointed to the bather’s right breast.  "Two," and she pointed to the bather's left breast.  "And three,” she said triumphantly, pointing to the bather's right elbow.   And, as in one of those geometric figures in psychology books used to teach us about perception, it was possible, looked at in a certain way, that the elbow could be seen as the bather's third breast.  After a moment of observation her companion agreed with her.  There were indeed three.  These two turned back to the next two girls in blue and white who had just entered the room, and announced with excitement,
"Look!  There are three!”
Then the first girl again walked up to the painting, and said, 
"One," and she pointed to the bather’s right breast.  "Two," and she pointed to the bather's left breast.  "And three,' she said triumphantly, pointing to the bather's right elbow."   Influenced by the excited enthusiasm of the first two girls, the second pair of school girls immediately agreed.  Indeed, this young woman in the painting had three breasts and wasn't that fun! 
So, this group of four ran back to drag the rest of their classmates and their teacher into the gallery to show them this amazing discovery.
Soon I heard a chorus of "Oui, Oui!  Il y en a trois!"  "Yes, yes, there are three."
It was obvious to the half-dozen of us who had been watching this little drama that things had gone too far for correction by the time their mother goose, a teacher plump like Renoir's bathers and wearing dark rimmed glasses, entered the gallery. She was trying to hush the girls who by now were gathered in a group in front of painting, commenting, tittering, all fascinated to see A nude woman with three breasts.
"Oh, no, no, there are not three," I heard the teacher say.  “There are only two.  What you are calling the third brest is her elbow.   Can't you see?” 

          The teacher blushed as she looked around at the other adults in the gallery who were now as interested in the reaction of the children to Renoir's painting as the children were in this unusual piece of art.   
After a few more attempts to demonstrate there were not three breasts in Renoir’s e painting, but only two, the teacher gave a Gallic shrug as her charges danced happily into the next gallery.  As they moved on we could hear the teacher still trying to hush them and the girls still twittering, still pleased with their surprise discovery.  
 


 


    

BARBERS ABROAD


I recently timed a female barber who cut my hair.  Five minutes, 10 seconds.  A record.   All through the years, reaching back over half a century, having my hair cut required at least 20 minutes and sometimes half an hour.  Then when unisex barber shops arrived, old fashion males-only barber shops began to disappear and 20- minute haircuts went with them.  Well, I guess some folks reckon a five- minute hair cut is progress.  But I don’t.
          Today’s five- minute haircuts in unisex shops make me nostalgic for the barber shops of my youth when the barber began with clippers and trimmed his work with scissors. Then he applied lather from a shaving mug and shaved your neck with a straight razor. The barber cocked the razor in one hand to begin shaving.  Then he wiped off his work with a hot towel.   
          Ahhh!  The warmth of the next step, a second hot towel, was most pleasant against my neck, a mildly sensual experience.  Often a gentle shoulder massage was included. Eyebrows and ear hairs were trimmed and a moustache or beard if you had one.  It was a relaxing and delightful experience, having someone fuss over my hair. In those days such shops were as much a territory of males only as was the local beauty sop the territory of women.  But women could enter if with their small sons. On those rare occasions when women were present, the sounds of the conversation would hush, and it was sometimes necessary to change the subject.  When I began to grow a beard, a shave with more lather and more hot towels was even more relaxing.   Then there were the ointments and the pungent lotions, which were probably not necessary or even healthy but nice none the less.  Yes, I miss all that. 
          Now I have just described an old-time American haircut.  But when I became a diplomat and began to travel around the world I found there were barbers and haircuts that were quite different from those in the US. Even so, haircuts abroad were mostly an occasion to look forward to, a too-brief 30 minutes of luxury and pleasure.
          At one extreme I have sat in the shade of a mango tree in open African markets for a barber working with the old-fashioned hand clips and a pair of scissors.   Not an altogether pleasant experience but it did have one plus.  Those haircuts cost me a British shilling, at the time worth about 14 US cents. 
          At the other extreme I have been coiffed by a lovely young woman in a unisex parlor near my office on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoree in the upscale 8th arrondissement in Paris.  I was never able to find a proper barber shop in Paris, so I had ended up in a fancy French salon where “haircuts” lasted an hour and cost the equivalent of 60 US dollars.  The process began with a shampoo by a pretty assistant of the coiffeuse who pulled my head back into a large semi-circle stainless steel receptacle and gently messaged my scalp.  It ended as my hair was blown dry and somehow given body and a shape not its own.   I was quite handsome at the end of all that….for 24 hours.  
          One of the best haircuts I ever had was in an ultramodern, air-conditioned Portuguese shop in Beira, Mozambique.   I had arrived by freighter a couple of days before and settled into a pension called the Gato Noir (Black Cat). All the streets in the center of the city had been dug up and were open as workers replaced an ancient sewer system.  At that time Beira was surely the most foul-smelling city on the planet and it was in this very modern Portuguese barbershop that I sought temporary relief. The Portuguese barbers were highly skilled, but I suspect what has planted that haircut firmly in my mind is the rank smell of the city’s open sewers.
          The Chinese barbers in a shop I favored near our embassy in Singapore were skilled but unremarkable, perhaps because haircuts in Singapore were much like those in the US in the l940s and 50s, as also were those in Canberra, Australia. 
          If I were to choose my favorite barber I would select a shop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  That barber -- he was a one-man shop -- was from northern India. He used only hand tools, not an electric clipper, and worked slowly and carefully.  Once he was happy with what he had done and had my approval, he rubbed a delightful smelling unguent around my neck and over my face.  Then he messaged my shoulders and upper back.  Then…the first time he did this I could not believe what he was doing…he began firmly beating the center of my upper back with the edge of his hands and descended my back, disc by disc. Because I had been suffering from lower back pain for some months my first reaction was, Oh, No!  But I did not try to stop him. When he was done I realized that my back felt better than it had in many months and I continued to go to his shop for haircuts and the service of what I came to think of as a skilled chiropractor during the remainder of my four-year tour in Malaysia.      









CARUSO, THE SINGING BLACKBIRD

          One of my favorite birds in Australia was not an indigenous Australian bird at all.  Lying in the sun on our second-floor deck after a long bike ride, I heard beautiful birdsong. The bird trilled, warbled, and did acrobatics with his voice.  He had one standard call and then began a series of imitations.  I tried to observe the bird with binoculars, but it managed to stay out of view. The song seemed to be coming from a eucalyptus tree partially hidden behind a neighbor's high fence.  
          Then one weekend evening, the bird changed his perch to mount a corner post of the neighbor's fence, and I got a good glimpse of his profile.  I wanted to know more about this marvelous songster.   I went searching through The Field Guide to the Birds of Australia, by Gordon Pizzey and Frank Knight, the bible for birders in Australia.
          I observed that my bird—I already thought of him as my bird—began to appear regularly on the post as if it were a small stage.  I occasionally heard him in the morning as I left for work, and I often heard him during the early evening when I returned to my residence. On weekends, I could hear him singing throughout the day.  I observed that he would sing for 15 minutes and then leave the stage as though for an intermission.  After a brief rest, he was back, singing his heart out.  I decided to call him Caruso, as I was sure he was a male.  Was he trying to attract a mate?  There were many mating rituals going on among the birds during that season in Australia, with chases in flight and chases on the ground.  I thought that if I were a female of that species, I would be easily won because Caruso's singing touched me deeply.  Only two or three times before in my life had I been so moved by birdsong. 
          Then one afternoon the light was just right as he flew up to his perch on the post and began to sing.  Through my binoculars, I could see that the bird was black, solid black.  The late afternoon light caught his beak.  Was I seeing orange?  Yes, I decided my bird had an orange beak.  Were those yellow circles around the bird's eyes?  The only bird in the guidebook that had a similar profile, was black, had an orange beak and yellow circles around its eyes, was the common English blackbird!  Since when does a common English blackbird sing like an angel?  According to Pizzey and Wright, the English blackbird was introduced into Melbourne. Australia by a visiting bird dealer in 1857, and then into Sydney and Adelaide in 1863.  I have no idea how Pizzey and Wright determined the exact years.  The English blackbird, they wrote, is a thrush like the robin, and like robins, it hops across the ground, cocks its head to listen, and then jabs its bill into the ground for worms.  I read the following description in the Pizzey's and Wright guide:
“Voice, serene, mellow, often loud in measured phrases; lacks repetition of the song thrush. Whisper song in autumn includes imitations of native birds.”
          This is not autumn.  It is spring Down Under, but I am hearing imitations of native birds every day from this blackbird.  Today, while planting my tomatoes, I got a clear view of him through my binoculars again.  Yep.  Black, orange beak.  Yellow eye rings. That settled it.  Caruso was indeed a common English blackbird—how unglamorous in Australia where so many birds come decked out in bright colors!   How can such a plain bird sing so spectacularly?
          Over the months, I learned a few things about Caruso that are not in the "official" bird book.  First, the imitations by male blackbirds occur in spring as well as in autumn.  Second, blackbirds are great mimics, the rivals of American mockingbirds.  Third, when this bird is trying to attract a mate its song is loud, but it is also varied in volume and is musically poetic.  Last is something no expert has written, but I am persuaded is true.    The blackbird in my garden is special within his species.  He is, if you like, an individual bird with an unusual musical talent.  He is indeed a Caruso of blackbirds.  His range, his timbre, his creativity, his desire simply to sing, must be at the higher range of his species.  Birds, like humans, surely have individual qualities of their own. 
          Then Caruso disappeared.  I no longer heard his singing.  Had he given up on finding a mate​?   Was he the victim of a predator?  I missed him.  Six months later, in the southern spring, during the first week of September, I heard the call of a blackbird as I walked away from the embassy late one afternoon.  I had not realized that blackbirds were migratory and thought Caruso was gone forever.   I wondered if he would return to the same tree or even the same neighborhood as before.  The very thought he might filled me with joy. 
          I could not believe it!  Less than an hour after I heard the blackbird near the embassy, I saw a blackbird in the pear tree in the middle of my back lawn.  Is it possible? Is he Caruso?  I have not yet heard him sing.  I watched as he sharpened his beak on the branch of the tree and looked around as if to reacquaint himself with his territory.  He seemed to approve what he saw and seemed glad to be home.  Then he began to sing.  Yes, it's Caruso! He has returned!  It seems that blackbirds migrate in  a single flock and Caruso’s flock arrived in Canberra that day.  
          During November, I wrote that my blackbird sang faithfully each day, when I left in the morning and when I returned in the evening.  One day I heard another blackbird responding to his song.  It was thus that I learned there were blackbirds everywhere in   Canberra.  Now that I was aware of them, I heard them all over the city.  My theory, based on observation only, is that English blackbirds form a singing network based on territory, and they sing to and respond to each other throughout the day—a telephone system for blackbirds.  Caruso disappeared each March and reappeared each September during the next three years of my tour in Australia.  He sang every day, all through the day.  Blackbirds are monogamous for life.  Perhaps there was a shortage of female birds so that he was unable to attract a mate while I lived in Australia.  I liked thinking he found a mate eventually because Blackbirds can live to be 20 years old.