My Role in "The Sound of Music"

←← | ← || →

Scott Smoot with bike in the Austrian Alps, virtually

In 1966, Aunt Blanche and Uncle Jack took me and my cousins to an ornate movie theatre in downtown Cincinnati for the gala premiere of The Sound of Music: a dress-up affair, with a glossy souvenir program. I didn't know nuns from Nazis, but I saw my family on the screen, and I was pretty sure that Julie Andrews was my mom.

I bring this up now because my virtual bike tour of "places I've lived or loved" has taken me to the site where the film was made. Since January 5, I've covered 277 miles, riding bike trails around Atlanta when the weather was good, and swimming indoors when it was not. On a map of the world, that distance takes me from Venice to Salzburg.

My relationship to Julie Andrews had begun with Mary Poppins the year before. That movie about children whose father is distracted by work resonated with me, as our dad was away on business so often. Their magic nanny, being close to Mom in age, hairstyle, build, and bearing, was practically my mother in every way.

The Von Trapp manor in Salzburg was the same as the palatial home of my aunt and uncle in all things that mattered to me. Curved staircase sweeping up from marble tile? Check. French doors opening to a terrace that looks out to rolling green hills? Check. A gazebo in a sculpted garden? Gazebo, no, but sculpted garden, check.

"A captain with seven children?" Eight, and more: Aunt Blanche and her sister Shirley raised their large families in homes side-by-side on a vast campus. During the summers, I was one of them. My siblings and I stayed with our grandmother, but when she had work selling real estate, she left us with Blanche. 

My awe-inspiring Uncle Jack would arrive home for dinner dressed in boots and jodhpurs, riding crop in hand, having worked out his horse -- just like Captain Von Trapp.

My family's relationship to Julie Andrews' movies was all very clear to me, except for the fact that Aunt Blanche was both the tomboy governess and the magic nanny. Blanche took us and my younger cousins to ride horses, to canoe, and to bicycle to the next town for ice cream. Often with Aunt Shirley, Blanche took us to magical places: movie theatres, live theatre, the Queen City Tour, the planetarium, fireworks, horse shows, amusement parks, and the first game played at Riverfront Stadium. Though I saw Blanche usually in company with little kids, teenagers, adult friends, and old people, she always made me feel special. She treated me as an adult.

I learned to ride a bike in Blanche's driveway and to swim in Shirley's pool.

I am grateful for these grown ups I grew up with, and for Julie Andrews.

[See memorial tributes to Uncle Jack, Aunt Blanche, and Dad. I remember my Cincinnati grandmother in an article Thelma Craig Maier and a poem Wingtips. My mother's story continues; see the latest portrait Mom's World and more at Dementia Diary. For photos and stories of other grown ups I grew up with, see the curated list of links at my page Family Corner. ]

←← | ← ||→ Use arrows to follow the entire tour from the beginning.

1000th Blog Post: Mom's World

Among my first blogposts in April 2006 was Shrink Age in regard to poets who wrote about the diminished worlds of their aging loved ones. I didn't know then how much their words would inform my experience for the next 16 years.

At that time, Mom's world was The World. She and Dad crossed oceans on jets and ships; they trained for 5K competitions; they got involved in the church and politics.

During a recent walk in the park outside of the memory care facility with Mom and her caregiver Laura, I took a photo that my phone app transformed into the painting below. I call it Mom's World after Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth's portrait of a disabled neighbor looking towards home. (I've known that painting 50 years and never had noticed the wheelchair in the distance.)

In the image, I see how Mom still wants to appear at her best. Laura helps her with lipstick, earrings, and painted nails. The waves in Mom's hair and the white stripes of that cute top go with the white waves laid in strips over the blue sky.

Mom's reserved smile shows amusement and judgment withheld. She laughs to hear that the staff refer to her as "the Queen." She walks when a physical therapist helps her to remember how, but she's ok now with her wheelchair.

The impressionistic scenery matches Mom's vague impression that her childhood home is in those hills. She doesn't remember what that place was (Cincinnati), but she likes to look through photos of places and people she used to know and to listen as we tell her about them.

We've made it past the years of frustration when her world was too big for her to manage -- when she placed calendars and clocks in every room and stuck memos on every surface to tell her what she thought she needed to remember.

For now, we're in a sweet spot, when the past is far off and she doesn't look beyond the frame of her present moment. What we see in this image is her world, just the right size.

[See more of Mom's story at my page Dementia Diary.]

Boomers for Bacharach

Nostalgia is the first reason for me and my fellow Boomers to like the music of Burt Bacharach, who died this month at 94.

With lyricist Hal David, Bacharach wrote songs that we learned from our parents' radios and 8-track tape decks, including Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, Close to You, What Do You Get When You Fall in Love? and my dad's favorite, What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love). Like lava lamps and floral prints on plastic cushions, those songs are part of a Boomer's mental furniture. Like those fashions, Bacharach's blend of soft rock percussion with brass and strings gave our parents a way to stay "with it," to be "cool." It didn't work, but, B+ for effort. When I hear any of his songs, I think fondly of Mom and Dad in their prime.

Then, in my teens and early adulthood, Bacharach's advanced musical vocabulary was what I liked. I displayed my musical knowledge by commenting on Bacharach's complex harmony, mixed meters, and odd song structures. When I played Bacharach's song Promises, Promises on the piano, I pounded its dissonant chords in shifting time signatures of 3/4, 4/4, 3/8, and 4/8 to show off my musical machismo -- which, I admit, was the only machismo I had.

But I learned how to appreciate Bacharach's expressiveness over impressiveness. Bacharach told interviewer Terri Gross that he set phrases the way they made sense to him; he never realized he was changing meters in a song until he notated it. So the character in the Broadway show Promises, Promises spits out the title phrase in 6/8, disgusted by the sleazy promises he's made; when he imagines life free of moral compromises, the meter shifts for expansive declarations: I can live with myself and be proud - I laugh out loud!.

In another song for that show, Hal David wrote, Go while the going is good. / Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing that anyone can learn. / Go! On the second phrase, Bacharach spikes the melody up an octave on the -ing of knowing and sets all the following syllables on fast notes, all one pitch, like the hammering of an alarm bell: ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! Then that single syllable Go! swells like a siren for a full measure. The music conveys the urgency that the lyrics express.

The song "This Guy's in Love with You," without hook or bridge, consists of just two verses and a tag line, a structure both unusual and very effective. Read the opening phrases aloud and you've got the basic rhythm for the whole song, a slow shuffle: You see this guy? This guy's in love with you. We hear the tune played on a muted trumpet before we hear the words, with just a piano for accompaniment. The singer asks the person he loves, Who looks at you the way I do? By the end of the second verse, evidently not getting a straight answer, "this guy" is breaking down: My hands are shaking; don't let my heart be breaking.

Up to this point, Bacharach has kept a full orchestra in reserve. The strings and winds come in forte when the singer opens up, I need your love, I want your love. Same pitches as the opening phrase, same rhythm, but so different now. Bacharach expands the phrase in two more lines: Say you're in love / in love with this guy. At peak volume, the orchestra plays chords in triplet and stops. After a pause, the singer finishes softly, If not, I'll just die. The trumpet and piano repeat the intro, the musical equivalent of shuffling sadly away.

I don't remember caring about that song before Vic Bolton, a tenor in our high school chorus, sang it for our concert. I wanted to cry.

Bacharach once said his own favorite was his title song for the 1966 movie Alfie, because he liked the message. You don't have to see the movie to gather from Hal David's lyric that Alfie is a cynic who believes it's just for the moment, we [should] take more than we give, and life is for the strong. The song is an intervention, as the singer challenges Alfie's worldview and then offers an alternative. The song tickles my nostalgia for the 1960s when philosophers, poets, and theologians were part of our popular culture, along with their discussions of existentialism, "Is God Dead?" and the absurdity of life. I like the message too.

But I also like the way Bacharach's music expresses that message. Bacharach sets the syllables of the name "Alfie" on a rising fifth, like a fanfare (e.g. the Star Wars theme), perfect for the name of a cocky character. But Bacharach undercuts that confident sound with dissonant intervals (m6, M7, m2) in lines intended to discomfort Alfie, such as, if only fools are kind, Alfie / then I guess it is wise to be cruel. Two verses follow that pattern before Hal David's words shift towards the singer's creed, one that even unbelievers can believe in. The vocal lines for that part climb up and down wide intervals over shifting chords. When the singer settles back into the notes of the opening line, it's a sunny declaration emerging from clouds:

I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love, we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed, you're nothing, Alfie..

A recording of Alfie by Cleo Laine made this my favorite of all Bacharach's songs. It's on her 1983 album That Old Feeling. She's a virtuoso musician and an actress, and she brings out every nuance in the words as she navigates the twists and jumps in Bacharach's music. The song was recorded in her living room with simple piano accompaniment, making her quiet rendition almost uncomfortably intimate. (See my reflections on Cleo.)

About Bacharach's later work, I'm agnostic. I liked his theme from the 1981 movie Arthur, and I enjoy an album of Bacharach songs played by jazz pianist McCoy Tyner with trio and full orchestra. I bought that because I'd heard Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach talk on the radio about new songs they had written together. I've downloaded those, but they're hard for me to appreciate because -- well, I prefer Costello's talking.

[I first admired Stephen Sondheim for the difficulty of his music. Read about how his music is hard to sing, and why that's a good thing, in my blogpost from 06/2015.]

Sermon on the Sermon on the Mount: Providing Context

Our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon [see photo, from blessing of the animals] has preached on parts of the Sermon on the Mount during the last month, bringing new light from Jewish tradition on familiar sayings of Jesus.

When Fr. Daron shows how Matthew draws parallels between the life of Jesus and the history of the tribes of Israel, the sermon on the mount becomes more than just a moral teaching. The pharaoh's slaughter of infant boys, the flight of young Moses out of Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, and the crossing of the Jordan parallel the birth of Jesus, the sojourn in Egypt, the 40 days in the wilderness, and the baptism by John. So when Matthew writes that Jesus went up on the mountain, we should be thinking of Moses; and the sermon on the mount parallels the giving of the Law.

Fr. Daron explained a puzzling little phrase in Matthew: "Jesus opened his mouth and spoke." Why not "Jesus spoke?" How else could Jesus speak except by opening his mouth? But when Moses met God at Sinai face to face, the Hebrew expression for that is "mouth to mouth." Ah HA!

Like the first four commandments, the first beatitudes concern our spiritual relationship to God. The latter commandments and beatitudes guide our relationships to others. Fr. Daron stresses that the word translated as "righteousness" connotes "justice," so it's not about our own obedience to the law, but about seeking social justice. Fr. Daron challenged us to think on one beatitude a week.

Today, Fr. Daron took up the part of the sermon where Jesus couples what you have heard it said with but I say to you. You have heard it said, do not kill; but I say to you that you have committed murder if you bear hatred in your heart. Ditto fornication and lust, divorce and adultery, oaths and dishonesty -- a person's honesty should be known from his way of living, not dependent on an oath. The Pharisees' strict compliance with the law wasn't strict enough because it falls far short of fulfilling God's purpose, which was to change our hearts (cf. Isaiah and Amos).

The Pharisees had a question, Fr. Daron said. When the original temple was built in the time of Solomon, we read that the Lord's presence descended and filled the temple. Nothing like that happened when the temple was rebuilt after the Jews' exile in Babylon, in the time of Ezra and Nehemia, about 500 years before Jesus. Why had the glory of the Lord not descended on the temple again?

The Pharisees concluded from numerous scriptures that God would come down only when His people were obedient. So the Pharisees enforced obedience, and hedged the law with even more laws so that no one came even close to breaking a commandment. This would bring God down to expel the Romans and restore the Davidic line of kings. Jesus undercut their authority and their whole mission: no wonder they wanted him to die.

When Jesus says he came to fulfill the law, he meant literally, fill it to the brim. It's not about what we don't do. Every day that you don't kill someone or don't commit adultery, you have NOT necessarily fulfilled God's will. We are to move beyond anger, respect women, and live with integrity. It was never about getting to heaven when you die, but about how we live now.

[See an appreciation of Fr. Daron and a decade of his sermons at More than Skin Deep: The First Ten Years (10/2022)]

Living a Life that Matters: Rabbi Kushner on Jacob

Harold S. Kushner

Some days ago, I uncovered two unread books in my basement, Listening to Midlife and Living a Life that Matters. Too late for those, I guess. I wasn't yet 50 when I bought them at a long-gone local bookstore almost 15 years ago.

Yet Living a Life that Matters by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner still resonates. I'm especially drawn to what Kushner sees in the story of Jacob in Genesis.

Kushner compares Jacob's story to a play in three acts: boy, suitor, and patriarch. The arc of the play is implied by the character's name change. Jacob, his name in youth, relates to Hebrew akav "crookedness," while the name he later earns, Israel ("he wrestles with God") relates to yashar "straight."

In the story, Jacob masquerades as his brother Esau to trick their father into passing his legacy on to him instead of Esau, his firstborn son. Kushner speculates that it's deeper than that: Jacob wants the strength and boldness of Esau; he feels incomplete. (22)

Kushner observes that, lacking curtains or chapter headings, the ancient text marks transitions from one act to the next with dream-like epiphanies in the night, a ladder to heaven and an all-night wrestling match with an unnamed being. The first of these happens at the end of the day when Jacob fled his home where Esau has sworn to kill him. Ashamed and afraid, Jacob envisions a bridge between earth and heaven. Kushner says this image gives Jacob hope that he can reach higher (21). That night Jacob bargains with God: for divine help, he will give God a tithe of his earnings.

In the second act, he is the first (the only?) character in the Bible who falls in love. Others take wives, are given wives, coming to appreciate them later, but for Jacob and Rebekah, it's love at first sight. Rebekah's father tricks Jacob as badly as Jacob tricked Isaac, fooling Jacob into marrying the less lively older sister Leah. We're told that Jacob hated Leah. Kushner speculates that she was always a living reminder of Jacob's own malfeasance. Jacob has to wait 14 years to consummate his love for Rebekah. He builds a family and wealth, and readies himself for a return to Esau.

[My poem Angels Never Know grows from Jacob's story.]

In the second transition between acts, Jacob has sent his family ahead. We're told that Jacob was alone. But then he's wrestling with someone who doesn't give a name. Who is it? I've heard it's God, it's an angel, it's a devil, it's a spirit of the place. Kushner thinks it's Jacob's own self, equally strong, equally adept. Jacob's fighting his own fear; Kushner says he's fighting his own impulse to use some underhanded way to avoid meeting Esau face to face. Jacob's injured, but survives, a lesson to take away, that he doesn't have to be afraid. Again, Jacob prays, but this time he does not bargain with God but requests strength to do the right thing (31).

Across the three acts, Kushner sees Jacob moving from amorality and selfish ambition, shame being the only sin, to a morality of integrity, in which the primary sin is to fail to live up to your ideals (21). Kushner tells us the scripture calls him "shalem, whole, united within himself" (107). He lives the rest of his life raising the brothers who will constitute the nation of Israel, and he carries his love for Rebekah to the end.

What does Jacob's story have to do with Kushner's readers leading lives that matter? Kushner's chapter following his analysis of the Jacob story is titled "Family and Friends: We are Who We Love." Essentially, it's what I've known for years, said simply in a lyric by Comden and Green, Make someone happy / make just one someone happy / and you will be happy, too (see blogpost of 11/2006). Kushner tugs at my heart when he refers to adolescents, himself included, who were "redeemed from self-doubt" by a parent or teacher who let them know what Jacob's first dream told him: you are someone who will matter. Kushner steps out from behind his screen of authority to tell of his son killed in middle school by a rare genetic disorder, whose classmates years later cited him again and again as their inspiration and a shaping influence on their lives.

Kushner's message resonates with what I believe as a Christian: We cannot bring the Messiah down to solve the world's problems, but we can bring the Messiah down for someone else.

[Harold S. Kushner. Living a Life that Matters. (New York: Knopf, 2001.)]

Finding Allies at "Desolation Mountain" : Cork O'Connor Series #17

←← | ← || →

A plane carrying a Senator crashes at Desolation Mountain in William Kent Krueger's novel of that name, 17th of his series featuring detective Cork O'Connor. The crash is a partial fulfillment of a vision that has kept the young man Stephen O'Connor awake, in which he sees an eagle with red-white-and-blue tail shot out of the sky by an arrow. But, then, why does he continue to have the vision after the incident? And what is the presence Stephen senses behind him in the vision, so monstrous that he's afraid to turn and see it?

From that beginning, this story has a strong downward tug into chaos and malevolence. The little Minnesota town of Aurora is overwhelmed with investigators from a half-dozen federal agencies. Good people disappear, and (sad to say) dogs die. There are white nationalist vigilantes and also a para-military group commanded by Gerard, whose allegiance we don't know. Even Cork's adopted grandson Waaboo (Ojibwe "little rabbit") is troubled by a vision of a many-headed monster.

But there's an equally strong tug upwards towards light, even lightness. Cork's grown children are inured to threats and know how to fight back. From the families of everyone who disappears, Cork picks up an array of allies who grow into their roles as ad hoc crimefighters. Cork's old friend Bo Sorenson joins the team. As always in this series, there's also Henry Meloux, a mide or "healer" now over 100 years old, whose hermitage swells with visitors as de facto HQ for the good guys.

The most thrilling part of the story is also slapstick funny. Cork assigns his son to take their least-favorite Ojibwe relative to a safe place. Beulah, a product of the Federal government's efforts to expunge Indian culture out of Ojibwe children, is a Christian of the sour judgmental kind, innocent of both wilderness and physical exertion. It's already funny to see her in a canary-yellow helmet bundled into Stephen's ATV clutching the safety bar; when the bad guys force them off-road, it's fun to see that Stephen -- formerly a frail and needy little boy -- is now an Ojibwe action hero saddled with this prim and panicked sidekick. (Think African Queen.)

Stephen also reaches out to Winston Harmon, a "willowy" young teen of Ojibwe descent, an artist in whom Stephen sees some of his own sensitive nature.

I laughed and, yes, I cried. Great addition to a great series. I'm half way through Lightning Strike; the one after that is still in hardback. Don't look behind, Mr. Krueger: I'm catching up.

[Links to my reflections on other Krueger novels are listed at my Crime Fiction page ]

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire series in sequence.