The Most Beautiful Concert Imaginable - and Somber Thoughts

Last night we heard an Austrian tenor, Daniel Johannsen, accompanied by a British pianist, Graham Johnson, perform Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin. Johannsen's voice is sweet and accurate, his stage presence is modest, and he sings strongly but almost as if he isn't trying to. I am not particularly fond of Lieder in general, but Schubert's Lieder are something else.
Then, after the intermission, we heard the string quartet, Death and the Maiden, performed by the Aviv Quartet: Sergey Ostrovsky, Evgenia Epshtein (violins), Nomie Bialobroda (viola), and Alexandre Khramouchin (cello). Their playing was on the highest level, dramatic and entirely in harmony with one another. We were elevated by the performance.
During the intermission, I looked at the audience. I am seventy, and I didn't feel old compared to the other listeners. It was great to watch the people greet friends, gesture animatedly, and respond enthusiastically to the atmosphere of high art. These old people, including myself, are engaged in life, interested in getting out and hearing music, pleased to see one another.
Then, in keeping, perhaps, with the morbid theme of The Beautiful Miller Girl, whose admirer drowns himself in the end, and the title of Death and the Maiden, I started wondering where the audience for Lieder recitals and chamber music is going to come from when we all die off. How many of us will still be alive in ten years, coming together again to hear great music?
As my wife and I walked home from the concert, I didn't raise my depressing thoughts. Rather we talked about how wonderful it is that these four musicians have worked so long and so hard to become masters of their instruments, brilliant interpreters of music, and an ensemble that plays with such mutual understanding. 
I also had thought, during the concert, how the music written after Schubert, which the Aviv Quartet also plays, radiates back onto Schubert. Ears that have heard Shostakovich cannot but hear Schubert in a new way. We recently watched a BBC program about the first performance of Beethoven's Eroica, based on the conceit that no one, not even the musicians, had ever heard the symphony before. But that's not how we hear classical music now.

Iron(ing) Man

The dry cleaner on Bethlehem Road, near the corner of Yehuda Street (in Jerusalem, of course), has a pair of amazing shirt-ironing machines. The shirts are placed vertically in the machine, the machine puffs up the sleeves, and then it presses and folds the shirts. Nevertheless I don't bring my shirts in to the laundry. I wash and iron them myself.

I could afford to have the shirts done, and they would come out a lot better than they do when I iron them, but it's a point of honor with me to iron them myself. What exactly that point of honor is, I'm not sure. I try to be self-sufficient. If I can do something, I would like to do it myself.

My mother used to send my father's shirts out to be laundered. A man named Mr. Epstein came to our apartment once a week to pick up dirty laundry and deliver the clean shirts and sheets. They would come back starched with a shirt cardboard in them, and eventually I would get to draw on the shirt cardboard or paste things onto it. Mr. Epstein was lean and energetic, and kind of gruff. My mother made a point of speaking very politely to Mr. Epstein and calling him by his last name. She absolutely never spoke rudely to storekeepers or to the people who worked for us. She was a democratic person.
 When I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our
An acquaintance of mine, a wealthy, gay English Jew who eventually jumped out of a window and failed to kill himself immediatelWhen I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our y (he died in hospital some time later), once shared an Arab Christian cleaner with us for a wh ile. The cleaner, Bashir, was actually a chef at the King David Hotel, but tourism had fallen off to almost nothing, and he was laid off. It was a bit embarrassing to be hiring such an intelligent and highly qualified man just to clean our house, but he needed the money, and he wasn't ashamed to work.

While Bashir, was working for us, I bumped into our gay acquaintance on the street, and he told me that Bashir did shirts splendidly. Then he looked at me and said, "But you probably iron your own shirts, don't you?"

It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask Bashir to do our ironing. I can't handle having a servant, though my mother always had women in to clean our small apartment, and in fact they had very little to do, so they also did the laundry and ironed our clothes.

These African-American women were a constant presence in my life as a child. My mother (who was nosey because she cared about people) got them to talk about their lives, their children, and their husbands. She spoke with them like a friend, not like a mistress to her servant. Obviously she was white, and they weren't, and she was rich, and they weren't, and that affected the relationship. But that was an unavoidable given of the situation.

One of the women who worked for us for a long time was named Dorothy. She had very dark skin and very African hair, which she didn't disguise in any way (though she didn't have an Afro either; this was in the 1950s). Dorothy was smart and dignified, articulate, and no one could push her around. If she had had a fair start in life, in a society that gave black people equal opportunities, she would have been a lawyer, not a house-cleaner. She often spoke to my mother about her sons, whom she was sending to Catholic schools, for the discipline. I hope they went on and did well.

Dorothy was very dismissive of my mother's skill when she saw something my mother had ironed by myself. I sure Dorothy would have a good laugh at me.

I don't enjoy ironing, so I let my laundered, wrinkled shirts pile up for a couple of months before I iron them. I only wear buttoned shirts that have to be ironed on Shabbat, so my supply of shirts can almost last me all winter. When I finally start on them, I get involved in the process. Yesterday night I had thirteen shirts to iron, and I resolved to do them all.

When I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our home.

We had gone to a recital earlier in the evening, Schubert Lieder sung by a plump American tenor, and it was about ten when I set up the ironing board, filled the steam iron with water, and set to work. I iron in the living room and listen to CDs while I work. Last night I listened to Helene Grimaud playing two Mozart concerti and Jean-Pierre Rampal playing twentieth century music for flute and piano. Two brilliant French musicians.

I didn't like the music that Rampal was playing all that much, but I was full of admiration for his sound and technique.

It took my nearly two hours to finish the shirts. By the time I was finished, my legs were aching, and I was exhausted. But I went to bed with a feeling of satisfaction. Ironing is meditative. It takes some concentration, but it's not terribly demanding. As I iron, I listen to the music and follow the thoughts and memories that pop up in my mind.

I imagine I'll have to iron another batch of shirts in the spring, when we put away out winter clothes. I can't say I'm looking forward to it, but I won't mind either.

Engagement with Life and Drifting

One of the most satisfying moments for a parent, in my experience, is seeing one's grown children assume the commitment to raising a child of their own. If they do well at it, this is an assurance that one hasn't done such a bad job oneself. Beyond that ego satisfaction, raising children, like marriage, is a sign of engagement in life - though there are many other ways of engaging in life, and certainly not every parent has made a mature commitment to being a parent.

Many of our friends have grown or growing children who have never, as the saying goes, found themselves, which is hardly surprising. Finding oneself has not been easy since modern societies have told us that we must invent ourselves rather than accept the definitions imposed by traditional society.

Since I have to admit that I am an old man, at least chronologically (see how I can't accept the definition), my engagement in life is different from what it was when I was an ambitious student, a new husband and father, a man trying to make a career, and so on. Ambition is part of being engaged in life, but how much sense does ambition make toward the end of one's life? Or, what sort of ambition is appropriate for one at the beginning of one's eighth decade?

Recently, because a good friend forwarded me a message from a man who was a professor at Princeton when I was an undergraduate, I sent him an email, which he answered almost immediately. As it turns out, he's only ten or eleven years older than I am, though at the time I never even wondered how old he was. He was a professor! But, from my present perspective (and his, I assume), he was a kid then.

Being in contact with that professor put me in mind of my immaturity when I was in college, of how little I knew about myself and the world, about how thoughtless I was. Being smart enough to get into a top university didn't mean I was smart enough to know how I wanted the rest of my life to unfold. I said I was an ambitious student, and I was, but my ambition was restricted to getting very good grades, to excelling, not to anything beyond that. I have always found transitions difficult.

But I was engaged. I didn't drift while I was in college, and I didn't rebel (maybe I should have). I was fortunate enough to get a Fulbright scholarship to study in France between college and graduate school, and I used that year to drift. I had no particular aim beyond talking a lot of French. A friend of mine in the Fulbright program used her time to write a very ambitious paper about something, and that idea never even crossed my mind. I read a lot, wrote a lot of letters home, did some traveling, and went to lectures at the university. Sometimes I reproach myself. I should have used the year more productively. I should have accomplished something. But, in retrospect, having a year to drift, and getting a monthly stipend to subsidize my drifting, was valuable.

Maybe I should let myself drift now.