The Music Calls

 I can’t imagine a world without music. Luckily, I don’t have to, especially in southern Louisiana. Music season is all year round of course, but certain times of the year there’s an explosion of events and gatherings built around live music. Music melts boundaries, builds friendships, grows romance, and is generally what is right about the world.

Music is being in harmony, being in sync. Music releases tensions, brings smiles, gives hope, and builds bridges of unspoken communication. The ultimate Cahoots train. All aboard!

If I sound over the top in praise of music’s ability to bring us together, it’s because I find myself repeatedly in the position of being consumed in its magic.

Last week, The Dew Drop Jazz and Social Hall in Old Mandeville, Louisiana opened its doors once more for the fall season of concerts. Concerts can be held only in the fall and spring because the 1895 wooden structure has no heating or air conditioning. Personally, I hope it never has. A couple of times a month, the old cypress hall with eight-foot tall window openings but no windows, and multi-colored lights strung from the ceiling, its only lighting, hosts some of the absolute best musicians around. They play to a crowd who are there because they love the music. Some dance on the wooden floor, and all are rapt. The atmosphere is indescribably delicious in its communal absorption in the moment, in the beauty, in the beat, and in the universal language. The audience and the musicians are in intimate exchange, almost inseparable from one another.

It was obvious last Friday that when Don Vappie, his banjo, and the rest of the Creole Jazz Serenaders played, they weren’t simply doing a job, they were making love—to their instruments, to the music, and to the audience who loved them back. Who can deny that this, and not the hokey pokey, is what it’s all about?

Even if we can’t ourselves make music or can’t dance, we can still open ourselves to the harmony and magic.

Unto Others

A recent trip to a department store to return a skirt brought an unexpected gift.

I had left the store in a hurry to finish my errands in another one when my cell phone rang. Not recognizing the caller’s number, I hesitated to answer it because I’ve gotten too many robotic sales or phishing calls of late, but something prompted me to answer anyway.

“My name is Susan,” she said. “Is this Carroll?”

“Yes.” I waited for the pitch, but none came.

She told me she had found my wallet, which I wasn’t even aware I had lost, in the ladies department in the store I had just left. “The manager put it in the safe,” she said, “but when you go back, you can ask any cashier to page her, and she’ll get it for you.”

After thanking Susan, I rushed back to the store. Within minutes the manager smilingly handed me my wallet, which of course contained what could be a tidy bundle of information for an identity thief.

They were able to contact me because I had my business card in the wallet, the manager said. I remarked that I appreciated the honesty of the store’s employees, but when she told me that it hadn’t been an employee but a customer, I was even more impressed.

At home later, after finishing a phone call with a friend, I must have pocket-dialed a number. “Hello, hello,” the voice on the other end said. “Hello, hello,” I said, thinking someone had called me. Then it registered.

It was Susan, of the last number in my recent calls list, which I had believed to be a store number. “Your wallet was sitting on the check-out counter, so I gave it to the cashier, but she just slipped it into a drawer and said she’d have the manager put it into the store safe. She said it was store policy.”

But Susan strongly objected, found the manager, and urged her to open the wallet to determine the owner before putting it in the safe, then called me.

If my business card hadn’t been in the wallet, Susan said, she would have taken a photo of my license, then come to my home to let me know where my wallet was. When I thanked her profusely and said how grateful I was, she said simply, “Well, I would just hope someone would do the same for me.”

That a woman who didn’t even know me but who was honest and would have the concern and take the trouble to see that my wallet was returned to me raised my spirits and boosted my faith in the good in people.

You couldn’t find a more succinct moral directive than the time tested Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

From Chaos to Common Ground

For more than twelve years of being an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, I have been privileged to teach, and learn from adult students from forty-seven different countries. Recently having left that role to attend to another life calling, I find myself contemplating the wealth those years have brought me – wealth of both mind and heart – in cultural, social, intellectual, and emotional gifts.

From those years as well as years spent living abroad in various countries, I understand that despite the surface differences among us, and wide differences among our cultures, we all share at our core at least two commonalities. We are all born with the instinct for survival and the need to love and be loved.

These are driving forces, despite the odd forms that the instinct and the need sometimes take, and how they may be submerged or perverted. We can mine for the good and beautiful in people and their cultures. In learning to love, and loving to learn, we are better equipped to have meaningful and joy-full lives, no matter our circumstances, and to help others to do the same. So, I see the twin pursuits as our charge – the price of life.

Fortunately, if we are open, we can learn from everyone who crosses our path and every culture we encounter. It doesn’t matter if we speak different languages from those we meet.

On a recent trip to Montana, we visited a few of the places where Lewis and Clark overcame immense challenges, drank in the stunning ‘cowboy’ art of Charles Russell, and learned a new appreciation for the culture of some Native Americans through their perspective. The unifying “visions” of so many bled through these experiences, and I felt connected to all.

Perhaps this world could use more “vision” – described as “a mystical experience of seeing or knowing” by Kenneth Cohen. In his book “Honoring the Medicine – The Essential Guide to Native American Healing,” he wrote that in all Native American cultures, the most powerful visions come during the Vision Quest, typically a one-to-four day period of isolation, fasting, and prayer, in pursuit of guidance from the Great Creator.

In this world of chaos, we can find or make islands of sanity and restore our balance. Short of this type of Vision Quest search for vision, I wonder: How can we all do better at finding answers to the great questions and successfully meet on common ground?
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