learn and live

older is not always wiser

This past week we noted some significant anniversaries. October 31, 2015 was the last day we got to sell Milton’s Famous Cookies off the Cookie Bike at the Durham Farmers Market. November 2 marked ten years since we drove into Guilford to unpack the boxes and stay for a while. November 4 marked one year since they activated my cochlear implant and set me off on my journey to learn to hear again, this time via electronic sound waves. Both moves were profound, disorienting, and full of surprises.

Between Thursday and Saturday last week I stood with three families facing the deaths of loved ones, building altars of memory that will become anniversaries in the years to come. Today is already on its way to becoming a keepsake, perhaps for reasons we don’t yet know. I am grateful for the mental landmarks that remind us to retell the stories and remember who we are.

On a more practical note, I wrote some time ago about moving this newsletter to Substack from Mailchimp. Well, I have a version of it there and it also seems to continue to thrive here, so I’m keeping it in both places. Both are free to whoever finds them. If you would like to help support my writing you can become a sustaining member or by being a paid Substack subscriber. I am grateful for all of you who already do that.

As always, thanks for reading and subscribing. If you are willing, please pass it along to someone you think might enjoy it.

learn and live

About a year ago, my friend Heather and I started The Occasional Coffee House because we wanted to create a place where people could come and hear music, and also where performers could come and share their songs without worrying about whether they were going to make enough for gas money. Most of the folks who have graced our stage over the past months have connections to the New England Songwriters Retreat. because that is where I met them. In hopes that you will take time to hear what they are doing, I am listing their names: Sadie Gustafon-Zook, Halley Neal, Sam Robbins, Taylor Abrahamse, The Bargain, and Spencer LaJoye.

The task of trying to create a new performing space and then figuring out how to get people to come to the concerts is full of lessons, many of which I am still learning. Each show brings new insights about what we can do and what we can do better. As someone who likes to write songs of my own, the evenings have also given me a chance to go to school on the various performers, watching the way the play their instruments, craft their lyrics, and offer them to their listeners. I have learned from each of them.

Spencer LaJoye closed their show with “Plowshare Prayer,” which ranks as one of the top songs I have ever heard. The lyrics continue to move me, even though I have heard the song many, many times, and actually hearing Spencer sing it live added another layer to it all.

The morning after the concert, Ginger and I were going over the evening, and we began talking about how we learn and who we learn from, which led us both to thinking about mentors we have had who are younger than we are, and how much it matters that we understand wisdom is not just handed down, it is shared--if we are willing to learn.

The announcement this week that Nancy Pelosi is retiring is timely because I have felt for a long time that the folks in government who are my age and older have long since stayed beyond their effectiveness. I am grateful for Pelosi and others and they made a mistake when they decided that the generations following didn’t have much to teach them. (I realize the political situation is more layered than that; I’m speaking to how her retirement hit me as I thought about how we look at those who are younger than we are.)

One of my career changes came about fifteen years ago. I began working as a trainer for Apple Retail. I took the job because they provided health insurance for part-time workers, and that is what we most needed. I ended up making enduring connections with my colleagues at the stores in both Durham and New Haven, in part, because of the way Apple trained us to work together. From day one of training, we learned we weren’t expected to know the answer to everything, AND we were expected to admit it when we didn’t and ask for help.

There was a lot I didn’t know and without exception everyone who knew more than I did was younger than I was. And they knew a lot. Not a day went by that I didn’t ask for help and learn something new. Also, not a day went by that I wasn’t reminded that I wasn’t the expert. I made good contributions to my team in several ways, but I was never the one to look to just because I was older.

I don’t mind growing older, in fact, there are ways in which these days are the richest I have known. I have less to prove and more to relish. Even so, these aging is not for the faint of heart. I’ve chronicled some of my medical issues, but beyond the aches and pains is also the increasing amount of grief to which we have to become accustomed. The losses have stacked up on several fronts. Thinking about learning through that lens took me back to a passage from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, where Merlin is talking to young Arthur. His words are uncannily prescient.

“The best thing for being sad . . . is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

Open any of our social media and you will find a plethora of self-proclaimed experts who are not interested in learning nearly as much as they are determined to tell what they know. As I have said before, certainty and cynicism are siblings, and dangerous ones at that. The world can feel certain, I suppose, when you decide you don’t have to listen and that you have nothing to learn, but people suffer and die because of that certainty.

To learn means to listen. To stop talking. To pay attention. To ask questions. To foster relationships. To ask for help. And when we learn, we grow.

During their concert, Spencer said that their therapist had challenged them to sing a song in each show that scared them. I don’t remember the song they sang, but I love the risk they were willing to take in front of a room full of mostly strangers connected by our open hearts. We were there not to make proclamations but to listen and learn from each other. I wish nights like that were more than occasional.

PS--It only seems right to include Spencer’s song.

borrowed words

These Poems
June Jordan

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?
These words
they are stones in the water
running away
These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.
I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me
whoever you are
whoever I may become.

a song for the road

Roseanne Reid is another singer-songwriter I have the privilege of knowing. We met eight years ago at Steve Earle’s Camp Copperhead. She had come over from Scotland to be a part of Steve’s team. She and I have stayed in touch since, and she continues to write and sing wonderful songs. Her newest single is her own story of living with grief, “A Different Kind of Brave.”

I feel every single trip 
I’ve been around the sun
some joys I’ll never know again 
and some have just begun
living on the edge 
you start believing you belong

it’s a different kind of brave I’m working on
it’s a different kind of brave I’m working on

this world ain’t exactly 
what I thought I would see
and it ain’t easy two of us just finding how to be
we’ve got a lot of history we needed to get free
it’s a different kind of brave we’re working on
it’s a different kind of brave we’re working on

someday the silence will fall
with the sun sinking low
I’ll stand atop the mountain
feel the freedom in my soul
and we’ll go walking hand in hand
into the unknown
it’s a different kind of brave we’re working on
it’s a different kind of brave we’re working on

That’s the kind of brave I want to be.

Peace,
Milton