Monica and I are just returning from a week in MA, north and south shores. We manage to maintain our bicoastal identities with these periodic renewals of old ties to family, friends and localities. The cold snap found us minimizing time outdoors—the weather app confirming my postulate that Alaska would have offered a warmer week.
Frequently I pondered what my life would have been like had I (or we) not moved out to WA in 2009. Our marriage has now reached the point where more of it has been spent in the pacific than in the eastern time zone. How has such inculturation affected my core being, I wonder? Seeing our old music buddies performing at New Years Rockport Eve (a retitling of First Night that absolves from payment to the Boston originators) felt like the Brigadoon story—where months or years in my world coincide with the passage of a single day in theirs. Would I have remained focused on music, frugally piecing together a living? Or could I have reinvented myself without relocating? My sense is that there simply would have been too many factors to overcome—the same friends, the same ‘Y’, the same house in the same village, the same circuitous drive to get over the bridge—to nudge me beyond provincial complacence. In spite of the nurturing rootedness in greeting on the street those whose memories of me or my family go back decades, it can also become the gravity that a satellite must push past to enter into orbit. I cannot, at the same time, dig up my roots and replant them in the NW.
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Since having finished an 8-minute guitar solo titled “Refugee Nocturne,” my thoughts have been on refugees. At first I imagined the piece a soundtrack to a refugee journey; but its rambling form seemed incoherent until I reimagined it describing drifting in and out of sleep—when dreaming offers an escape from the nightmare of reality. With this, the sections suddenly coalesced. And what does the refugee dream of but home? This brought back memories of Prospero’s last speech in Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest, which I orated at the conclusion of our Gallimaufry of Gambols production at Cranbrook-Kingswood schools 46 years ago: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on. . .” Here I perceived another connection to my theme in that Prospero was himself a refugee, exiled with his daughter in a coup. Scheduled to perform at Antique Sandwich Co on February 18, I began conceiving a program, culminating in this new work, to include my guitar duet partner, Ken. I have tied the remaining works loosely in around a theme of longing. Reading interviews in which those living in refugee camps express a longing for a home anywhere reminds me to be grateful to have been welcomed not only to a new region but to a new vocation as well. As I don’t have experience performing Middle Eastern music, I reflected as to what music might tap into a time when my own ancestors faced displacement. Most of them being Irish, I am tossing in some Irish songs that Monica says I don’t sound half-bad singing. [poster attached]
My day job is currently working as one of 2600 that staff Sea Mar Community Health Centers, with locations throughout western WA. I technically graduated my Masters in Counseling program a week ago, though I won’t receive my diploma for a couple of weeks. When I do, I can be licensed by WA Dept. of Health as a Mental Health Counselor, making me dual-licensed along with Chemical Dependency. Hopefully my new versatility will be appreciated—two different boxes to think outside of, which I am already pulled to do with my music/education/RC background. This Masters was twice as hard to complete as my MM in Music Composition, though at least ten times more practical. For the past three months I have worked nomadically out of four offices, learning Sea Mar’s duplicitous documentation for both MH and CD. Upon returning tomorrow it has been agreed that I will work four days at 11th St Integrated Program (f.k.a. Healthcare for the Homeless) and one day at Tacoma Behavioral Health (where I will carry a small caseload of “sheltered” clients). Each new experience has been a learning in the clinical sense as well as offering new opportunities to make reparations for my unearned privilege. Everybody, I believe, can benefit from “working a 12th step.”
Monica and I have continued to provide music for St Ann Convent Sunday Mass (order of St Francis). Early in the Mass one confesses to having “sinned though my most grievous fault, in what I have done and what I have failed to do.” Once I connect the latter phrase with the generations of white U.S. middle-class Christian male heterosexual privilege that I have benefitted from with minimal protest, this penitential rite takes on added meaning for me. My Christmas verse, relating this sentiment, is below.
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