Local food – Hooray for the Basques

I travel a lot and eat alone by myself too often. When you get to a certain point of time on the road, you start looking for what you know. All too often, this devolves into some chain restaurant that’s at least predictable (Chili’s, Applebees, whatever). It’s pretty boring after awhile. So I try to eat local. The problem with local is, unless you get a great recommendation, it can be pretty uneven.

But it’s still worth the effort. I was reminded of this last week when I was in Gardnerville, Nevada, driving around at supper time, looking at a full array of national chains. I didn’t want one more Oriental chicken salad. There was a Thai restaurant – usually a pretty good choice. But it was a choice I’d made a half dozen times in the last two weeks. Thai is local, I guess, but I wanted something else.

Driving through the town, the sky darkening, my stomach grumbling, I saw a Basque restaurant – J.T. Basque Bar and Grille. Definitely local (a national chain of Basque restaurants? – not this time around on the planet) You can find them in small towns throughout the mountain West – those Basque shepherds showed up and stayed and are a pretty crusty lot. And they brought their food and culture with them. Hoping for the best, afraid of the worst, I pulled into the parking lot. When I peeked in the window, I saw people at a dozen tables. That’s a good sign for a small town – especially on a Monday night. Once you walk into a restaurant, it’s hard to walk out, but I needed to eat and was committed. I didn’t have a cowboy hat to pull down over my eyes (reminding me of a Gary Snyder poem), but I hitched up my pants and walked in.

If you don’t know about Basque restaurants, here’s the deal – it’s working people’s food, and there’s a lot of it. You pay a fixed price and they start to bring you plates of stuff. It’s all served family style, which means they put one big platter of food on the table after another and everyone serves themselves. If you need more, they’ll bring you some. Up until last week, I’d only eaten at Basque restaurants with large groups of people, and midway through the meal, there were about thirty plates of food on the table with no end in sight. Now it was just my lonesome.

It’s peasant food. Bean soup. Potatoes (lotsa potatoes). More beans. Some salad. Some rice dish with some kind of meat – like paella, I guess. And then, meat. Lamb. Or mutton (when was the last time you had mutton?) Or cowboy steaks. Or pork chops. I think maybe some kind of tripe or something unidentifiable. Some more potatoes, probably more beans and dessert, too.

Wine is included in the meal. It comes in an opened beer bottle. Hmm. Drawn from some cask in the basement. Cheap red wine and more where it came from, if you need it. I was reminded of a time when I was in Italy and bought wine from a corner store – the store owner filled a recycled two liter plastic Coke bottle from a cask with a nozzle from a gas pump. Shut the pump off at 10,000 lira, willya? We’re not talking Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild.

There at the Basque restaurant, I wanted to just sit at the bar so I could watch the football game, but if I was going to eat, I was directed to the dining room.

I was wondering if I was going to get the same family style service since it was just me. Maybe there would be small plates of everything.

Nope. The whole enchilada, so to speak.

Once I ordered the main course (sirloin steak – I skipped the lamb and mutton, and apologized to the vegetarian side of me that was offered the main course of vegetables) the plates started arriving. A whole tureen of bean soup. Really good bean soup, by the way. I stopped at two bowls. A platter of house salad. The recycled beer bottle of mountain wine. I looked around to see if there was anyone to share the food with, but they were all busy with their own cornucopia. The paella (or whatever Basques call it) was spicy and good – comfort food from the northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula. I tried to save room for the steak, but I wouldn’t have eaten it all even if that was all I ordered. It was a big piece.

This isn’t me, but it sure looks like my table.

The music on the house system was Basque. Accordions and guitars and clear, impassioned, untrained, unprocessed voices. I had no idea what they were saying, and I loved it. Something about sheep, maybe?

I was somewhere else. This is Nevada? This is the good ol’ USA? I was at home somewhere else.

I say this because my favorite local restaurants are a couple of Portuguese places in East Providence, Rhode Island, close to home. It’s peasant food (a little more fish on the menu) with no pretense. Cheap Iberian wine. Open on Monday nights with fado music (Portuguese music of unrequited love) – when I go on those nights (or almost anytime) I’m the only one that doesn’t speak Portuguese. The waitress smiles and yells at me. I feel lucky to be there.

That’s what the Basque restaurant felt like to me. I asked the manager about the music playing, and he wrote down the names of the musicians – there were a lot of “x”’s in it. He said it’s usually busier, and someone often brings an accordion in – a customer – and wanders around the room singing. We talked for a while and he told me about the family that owned the place, and where he came from (LA – wouldn’t you know?).

I left full. And not so lonely.

Better than Applebee’s for sure.

Here’s to the Basques and local food. And wine in beer bottles.

“Life is short, art is long” – Darius Frobisher lives

Sometime in the early Nineties, I started to write a book about a kid and a bicycle. At the beginning, I had only a vague idea of what the story was, and an even vaguer idea of how to write a book. I got rid of the parents in the early chapters (first rule in children’s literature – get rid of the parents so the children can become the lead actors in their own lives). The mother died in a horrible accident involving an umbrella, a can opener, and an English muffin; the father disappeared in a hot air balloon. I inserted some mean people (Aunt Inga, who makes our hero sleep in the basement of her home). Following my mentors’ leads (Dickens and Dahl) I gave people compound names that reflected their personalities (Dickens had Thomas Gradgrind, I had Anthony Gritbun).

The book had promise. I sent it out and it got rejected. People said they did like it but not enough to publish it. (Hmm, maybe just being nice…) I rewrote it again. And again. I let it sit, neglected, for three or four years. I picked it up again and had friends read it and be as brutal as they could in their comments. I threw out characters, created new ones, rewrote the biographies and back stories of major characters. A couple of publishers nibbled.

Then, success, of a sort. Tim Wadham at the Maricopa County Library in Phoenix decided to publish it as a serial novel online. Simultaneously, Peachtree Publishers took it on.

The editors at Peachtree challenged every weak link in the plot. I had to rewrite again and again. Another year of rewrites. We changed the title from “Flyboy” to “The Amazing Flight of Darius Frobisher.”

Darius came out in 2006 – over ten years after I wrote the first draft. Fame and fortune? Not quite. Relief and a sense of accomplishment. Yes, those things.

It’s had a pretty good life. At shows, I regularly run into kids who say, “This is the best book I ever read.” Children are given to hyperbole, but hey, it works for me. A number of teachers have told me it’s their favorite read-aloud book to their classes.

This fall, two new milestones – it’s out in paperback, and it’s printed in Japanese. I got the Japanese edition in the mail the other day. It is drop dead beautiful. Who knew my name could be written in kanji? The text is beautiful, it’s a wonderful size, and it has a ribbon book marker in the spine. I wonder what “Anthony Gritbun” and “Colonel Crapper” sound like in Japanese.

Darius in Japanese!

And as far as a paperback edition, one of my joys is seeing a kid scrape together enough dollar bills and quarters to buy a book on their own. Paperbacks make it more possible.

I am not an incredibly impatient person. I write something and I want it to be in a book or on a recording the next day. And I’m not as brilliant as I’d wish. It takes me a long time to figure things out. I guess if I were smarter, and more diligent, things would happen faster and I wouldn’t have to be patient. But my experience with art (and life) is that things take a very long time to come to fruition, they sometimes ,can’t be hurried and they usually don’t look like what you thought they were going to look like when you started.

But Darius is alive and kicking. One of the questions I get regularly from teachers and parents and children about the book is, “What happened to Darius? Where is his father? When is the next book coming out?” I’ve put all those things off. But after all these years, Darius is reappearing regularly in my thoughts, and I think I know what happens to him.

I just hope it doesn’t take another ten years.

Like Hippocrates said, “Life is short, art is long”. I take that to mean it lasts, but it takes a long time to make it. You just hope that the art you’re making gets a chance to live.

Oh, and by the way, I’d love it if you’d read the book. You don’t have to get the Japanese edition.

Latest favorite music – Danny Ellis

My friend David Holt gave me a recording by Danny Ellis, called “800 Voices”. It is truly gorgeous. Danny is an incredible songwriter and singer from Ireland, now living in the States, and the album documents his childhood growing up in the Artane Brothers Christian School, an infamous orphanage in Ireland and a very, very tough place to be a kid. The songs are both personal and universal, and prove how art is some kind of alchemical process, turning pain into something beautiful. Here’s a live performance of one of the songs, “Tommy Bonner”. I’m listening to his album everywhere I go. Like David told me, try to listen to the whole thing through at once.

The structure of teaching

SIEHUNG, South Korea—Children smear paint around the room in this class to enhance creativity and expression, 2007. © Thomas Hoepker / Magnum Photos

When I do workshop with teachers on stories and storytelling, I talk about how we perceive the infrastructure of education and teaching. What some would have us believe is that the structure of education and learning is: a state board of education, then a town board of ed, then a superintendent, then a bunch of principals, and then finally, the teachers. Teachers are dependent on the people above them for their work and their direction.

That’s true politically and economically, but when I take a long term view of learning and education, that’s not how I see it.

Instead, I see the teachers working. And I see the teachers who made them want to be teachers, and the teachers before them that made them want to be teachers. That structure, or lineage, goes back tens of thousands of years in an unbroken chain. And it stretches ahead to the people who will be touched by good teaching and want to teach. This is a very impressive structure. Long after whatever system we operate here to facilitate learning is gone, this other, more vertical, structure will continue – even if we end up in some kind of Blade Runner post-apocalyptic B movie script. Some teacher in rags with a few books or hard drives, or whatever is in their head, will teach a younger person because someone taught the teacher when she was young.

That’s true for any kind of teaching – reading teachers, guitar teachers, dance instructors, of after-school chess coaches. I find this thought comforting when I get frustrated with the current structures we have.

I was reminded of all this when Michele, our office manager and computer maven, sent me a link to a collection of photos on Slate called “Thanks Teach!” that shows teachers over the last fifty years working in a variety of settings. What comes through is the incredible humanity of the situation (as opposed to the fellow in my last post, “I Meet My Enemy”). My favorite is the teacher in Korea with the poster paint. So much for organization.

Happy teaching. When you get depressed, think about the kid in your class who is the next one in line to carry the torch.

I Meet My Enemy

A little while ago I was doing school visits in a city in California – four or five schools in a week. It’s part of the itinerant traveling whatever-I-am that I never know what to expect when I show up at a school or library or theater.

That week I got it all.

One of the schools had kids’ drawings of my books, stories and songs hanging from the rafters and plastered on the walls. That’s enough to give anyone an overhealthy sense of themselves. Because they’d been listening and reading, I had something to offer – shows, workshop, even a stop in the teacher’s lounge for some high-end coffee.
What’s not to like?

Then I got to the last school of the week. It was just a reminder that I’m not the center of the universe. And that some people don’t get what I do. To them, I am just a distraction in an otherwise very well-ordered and planned educational project.

It was a large elementary school in a well-off part of town. When I got there, I found that despite the advance work, nothing was arranged as I had asked. One microphone on the cafeteria stage ( I need two, one for my guitar). The lunch tables were set up, which meant some kids were in the far corners of the cafeteria, seemingly miles from me, with kindergartener’s legs dangling down – an uncomfortable position for forty five minutes. I like them up close on the floor. The shows were scheduled by the office to mix fifth graders with kindergarteners and pre-schoolers. That arrangement doesn’t recognize the difference in language, social, and cognitive skills. (Note: The difference between a four year old and a ten year old is greater that the difference between a twenty-five year old an a forty year old) I can do it, but I don’t like to. After twenty-five years, I know what works.

And I knew I was about to meet a principal that just didn’t care if I was there or not.

I hate to present someone so stereotypical, but I guess stereotypes are based on something. It’s enough to give m the hives, but there he was. Good looking, early forties, suit and tie; he had the smell of a future superintendent about him. I asked for things to be rearranged according to the information I’d sent in advance.

“This is the way I like to do things,” he informed me. “It works better. The schedule doesn’t allow the changes you suggested.”

Oh, I thought. This school is different from the other two thousand I’ve been in.

The shows were flat – the kids were far away. The teachers graded papers. The principal watched at one of the tables for ten minutes, and didn’t seem all that impressed. I didn’t feel impressive – this was in marked contrast to how I’d been feeling all week. DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I thought. And the unspoken answer was, “Well, no, and we don’t care!”

Oh well.

Believe me, I tried. It’s my job to entertain people, and I try to do that. If someone doesn’t smile a little in my performance, either their life is in crisis, or I’ve failed, or both.

Finished with the shows, I only wanted to escape, but I didn’t have a ride, so I was there until the last bus left. Boy, the school day is pretty long, and I’m not five years old. And then the principal, who I had studiously avoided, gave me a ride back to my favorite Hampton Inn.

.On the way back, my curiosity got the better of me and I started asking him questions about the school. I mean – I spend so much time in schools, I’m actually interested in them. And I found myself sitting in a car with someone who I guessed looked at me like I was inconsequential. I was interested.

So I asked about the continuing move towards standards and testing.

“I’m a numbers guy,” he said. ‘I like to know where everyone is, and the testing helps us get an angle on that.”

I let this pass. I was gathering information. And by the way, I know testing has a place. But I suspected my understanding of its function was different from his.

So I pushed a little deeper. “Given we all want kids to learn a certain body of knowledge and particular processes,” I asked, “do you think there should be a wide range of methods used, according to the teacher’s approach and the kid’s needs?”

“No,” he said, “I think we’re better off if everyone is using the same approach. I don’t like people experimenting.” He paused, then went on. “I want to know what my teachers are doing. Oh, I know…some of the older teachers grumble about this, but we’re all better off being on the same page. We ought to use the same methods throughout the school, throughout the district. The school is for instruction. Between a puppet show and a language lesson, we should have another language lesson.”

I looked at him as he drove.

Holy cow, I thought. This is my enemy!

He didn’t really look like my enemy – he didn’t have three heads or anything. But he was – or I was his nightmare.

Because I, of course, am the puppet show he would rather not have – foisted upon his fiefdom by a school district or PTO mom.. I’m a frill. In his mind, I have nothing to do with language development or test scores. My approach, global in nature (and by that I mean all encompassing, holistic, and not delineated into separate tasks), is that if people develop a love of language – of words, and story, and naming things in the world – they will want to develop the skills to help them interact with the world and understand themselves.

That is, by the way, the approach that has been used by the human race for most of its existence.

The use of story and music in a learning environment is about the structure of language and the world (something he wants to teach, I believe) AND the content of the story and song, and the feelings that arrive in their expression. I assume this principal would acknowledge that those things are nice, but they are not what we’re here for.

Kill the puppet. Teach the lesson. I hate puppicide.

No wonder I’ve come to view my work as a guerilla attack on some schools. I hope they tell my stories in class, and in the lunchroom when no one is watching. I hope someone sings my songs walking down the hall. I want to write a song good enough that even my nemesis finds himself singing it . I want to tell a story that makes him think about something that happened in his own life – or even better, in the lives of the people he touches.

I want to be outside the curriculum and inside his life.

This will be my final revenge.

Wash Your Hands (lávate!) – free download!

When you’re sitting in class, There’s a tickle in your nose
Then you let out a sneeze and it finally explodes
You look down at your hand, It’s all covered with that goo,
Don’t wipe it anywhere, You know what to do!

You gotta wash your hands (lávate las manos)
Wash your hands (lávate las manos)
Wash your hands (lávate las manos)
Wash your hands (lávate las manos).

I wrote this song several years ago for the Paul Cuffee School, and have just recorded it for the upcoming flu season. NPR’s All Things Considered played it on Monday with an accompanying story on the swine flu.

You can have it for free! Go here to listen and download.

We decided to not worry about money ( What, me worry?) and do what we could do to get the song out there before the H1N1 virus comes back with a vengeance. The Massachusetts Department of Health is distributing it to schools, and we’re happy to give permission to other schools, organizations and agencies if they wish to do so. Contact our office (michele@billharley.com) or call 508-336-9703.

And please spread the word to friends and families that we’re making this offer. If you need a physical CD for your local radio station let us know – our WONDERFUL CD duplicators, Oasis, have generously donated the manufacture of a number of CD’s for us to distribute.

It seems ridiculous to repeat this, but one of the greatest deterrents to the spread of communicable diseases is handwashing.
In order of importance (I know this now, since I seem to be involved with various Departments of Health!)
1) Get vaccinated
2) Cover your cough
3) Wash your hands
4) Stay home when you’re sick

If you need me to write you an excuse from work, let me know.
Bill

Honoring Failure

Honoring Failure

A couple of years ago I was doing a show for a primary grade audience at an elementary school. After an introductory song, I took a good look at the audience, decided on a particular story and launched into the telling.

A minute and a half into the story, I realized I had miscalculated – it was the wrong story, it was not going to work, and it was long – another fifteen to eighteen minutes. It was going to be a tough slog. I pushed on for another minute – I could feel attention wavering.

Then I stopped.

The students were suddenly alert. This was not expected. The guy up there was just supposed to keep blabbing about something they didn’t care about. What was he doing?

I paused. Something was now clearly wrong. This was even more interesting.

I looked at the teachers, sitting in chairs on the side of the audience – even they were now paying attention – even the ones grading papers! I addressed the teachers.

“Have you ever spent a lot of time on a lesson plan, and realized as soon as you started it, it wasn’t going to work?”

A couple of teachers nodded. The kids were looking at their teachers. I went on.

“So, then you have two choices – you can just push right ahead and teach that lesson no matter what, or give up and try something else.”

I paused again. A few nods. Kids looking at me.

“I’m giving up,” I said. Then I said to the kids, “I don’t like that story. I’m telling another.”

The teachers laughed and applauded. They knew exactly how I felt, and were relieved to see me readjust. I started another story, a better one for that moment. The kids listened and liked it.

Messing up, admitting it, and adjusting is one of the great challenges of being human, and I wish it were easier to do. (Okay, the messing up part is surprisingly easy – it’s the whole process that presents difficulty). But when someone can admit failure and move on, it’s a blessing for everyone around them.

I was reminded of all of this when my friend and fellow storyteller, Syd Lieberman, told me about a recent school visit. The head of the school had challenged all the teachers to bring a story about a mistake they had made in the classroom to the next staff meeting. They sat around and told their stories, and there was a prize for the best story. The head of the school told a story, too. Syd said the feeling of community and support in the school was exceptional – unlike any he had ever seen.

What a great exercise.

I should note here that a story of failure is different from a war story, or what musicians call “gigs from hell”, in which everything happens to you. Those are fun to tell, and comforting, to a point. But this story, where people admit failings, is a different bird.

Two things happen when a trusted friend or respected colleague admits mistakes. First, there is a lesson more easily learned. When an accomplished teacher or craftsman of any kind shows where he went wrong, others learn quickly from that mistake. It’s always hard to learn from someone else’s errors, but you’re more likely to when someone you respect shows where they went wrong. That kind of mistake sticks in your mind.

Second, and most important, it has a leveling effect and helps others relax. “She’s just like me,” is a wonderful insight. When you realize that mistakes are part of the process, you’re much more likely to stretch for new approaches and make yourself vulnerable to the moment. People in positions of authority who can admit mistakes don’t have to hold up the façade of a role that doesn’t quite fit them. Real loss of authority comes when everyone can see the leader has made a mistake but won’t admit it.

My friend, Curtis Buchanan, chairmaker extraordinaire, told me of a class he was teaching in which he had forgotten to perform a basic function before the class – sharpening his chisels. He kept trying to perform one procedure and failing, with a dozen people watching. Then he realized the problem, stopped and showed his error. In the evaluations, one of the students said, “The most liberating thing about your class was to see you make a mistake and admit your error. It gave me permission to try things I wouldn’t have tried, for fear of failing.”

Failure? It’s a great thing. When you can admit it.

It really isn’t about me – not tonight

Not to worry – I’m not doing the four post a day thing.
But..
Just got a message from my producer at NPR that a news item bumped my piece (What’s that about? What do they think this is, a news show or something?) But so many people had already commented they’re leaving it up on the web. You can still see it there. So thanks for taking a look.
Maybe tomorrow.
Then again, maybe not.
Meanwhile, I have to turn this computer off.

NPR piece tonight

Tonight on National Public Radio, All Things Considered is playing a story about my learning experience with the National Anthem at a minor league ball game (yay, McCoy Stadium and the Pawsox!). You can listen tonight during the show (not sure which segment, sorry..) or go here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112484915. Please comment and spread it around – they need to know that these little stories add something to the broadcast. Some people hate ‘em. Some love ‘em. Like someone at NPR said to me years ago – “There’s two parties here – those that do the hard news and those that want to have fun – guess which one you belong to?”
Well, I want both, I guess, but I know my job.
Hope you listen.

Ducks, sheep, and dogs

Last week, after finishing up at the Timpanogos Storytelling festival in Orem, Utah, Debbie and I went to the Soldier Hollow Classic International Sheep Dog Championship at a former Olympic site in Heber Valley, Utah. It was amazing, and a reminder that the relationship between dogs and humans goes way, way back.

There were water jumping contests –

And duck herding contests

(Ducks act a lot like sheep, and so are good training for sheep dogs. Pretty stressful for the ducks, though.)

But the heart of it is the sheep herding contests. A dog comes out to the contest area with his (her) trainer – they’re all border collies, and all descended from one dog, Old Hemp, that lived over one hundred years ago. They’re all black, white, and insanely eager.
Up on a hillside, about a quarter mile away, a group of five sheep is led out and held there by another dog. At the whistle, the dog runs up on the hillside, making a wide arc to get behind the sheep without disturbing them. The other dog leaves, and the contestant has to lead five very ornery sheep down through a gate, around a post by its trainer, up another hillside through another gate, across the slope to another gate past the first one , then down again into a circle marked by red flags. There the dog and trainer have to split the sheep (all this without touching them) into two groups of three and two, then get them into a little pen.

This all has to be done in thirteen minutes. The trainer calls and whistles, the dog responding to the calls from hundreds of yards away, lying down to wait for the sheep, turning to right and left, circling to get ahead or behind them. The relationship between the trainers and the dogs is amazing.

One of the trainers did a stunning job with his dog – the sheep would not move, but the dog patiently led them through all the gates, and ran out of time at the end, with the gate open and the sheep not budging. Debbie and I talked to him afterwards (and his dog).
“You did a great job,” I said.
“Me?” said the trainer and laughed. “Not me, my dog.”

Debbie and I watched for three or four hours (championships, even more difficult, the next day). We left, struck even more by the relationship between dogs and people that has developed over eons.

Here’s a promotional video from last year:

Now, if I can just get our dog Harpo to listen. Of course, that’s my fault, not his.