“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no place for despair, no time for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
~ Toni Morrison
“The Jazz Omnibus:
21st-Century Photos and Writings” by members of the Jazz Journalist Association is aptly titled. Omnibus is a word I usually associate with politics, as in the omnibus bill. That would be an adjective signifying the inclusion of many items. While that does apply, here it is a noun. Merriam-Webster defines it as a book containing reprints of a number of works (as of a single author or on a single subject); yes, Jazz, the modifier of the noun.
I’m glad those who chose the title did not call it a compendium, that would sound heavy and dour. Now at 572 pages, this book is physically heavy, showcasing the work of 19 photographers and 67 writers (full disclosure, I am one of them and very proud to be included).
It being an omnibus allows me to play with the second definition; a public vehicle designed to carry a large number of passengers; a bus. (Writers love to play with words.) Whether the bus is carrying the writers and photographers themselves, or their actual works, I like the image of traveling to share these stories and images with the public. Or I might imagine the riders of the bus to be our collective readers — if I were a graphic artist I’d have great fun depicting a bus filled with all sorts of people each with the book in hand, sharing their favorite chapters with one another. Reading this book is a trip; whatever your preferred method of travel (I’d be prone to a magic easy chair with a snifter of brandy in hand), the destination is a world of elucidation and enjoyment for those who already love jazz music and musicians, along with those who would like to learn about it.
Kudos to those who worked tirelessly on curating and editing this extraordinary collection…The Jazz Omnibus.
Celebrating Luther Henderson
Today is the anniversary of his death.
Luther Henderson (born March 14, 1919 – died July 29, 2003) was a composer, arranger, conductor, musical director, orchestrator, and pianist. He was a proud black man who graduated from the Julliard School of Music in 1942, and in 1956, married a white woman, his second wife. He was Duke Ellington’s “classical arm,” orchestrating music for Beggar’s Holiday, Three Black Kings, and other symphonic works. Duke spoke highly of Luther, but seldom gave him the credit he was due. Luther was Lena Horne’s pianist and musical director. During his sixty-year career in music, he worked his magic on some of Broadway’s greatest musical hits, including Flower Drum Song, Funny Girl, No No Nanette, Purlie, Ain’t Misbehavin’, and Jelly’s Last Jam, starring such performers as Barbra Streisand, Laine Kazan, Robert Guillaume, Savion Glover, Andre Deshields, Tonya Pinkins, and Gregory Hines. His music was heard on television programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Bell Telephone Hour, and specials for the pop stars of the day including Dean Martin, Carol Burnett, Andy Williams, Victor Borge, and Polly Bergen. In later years his Broadway credits included Ain’t Misbehavin, Jelly’s Last Jam, and Play On, but the project perhaps dearest to his heart was Classic Ellington a concert of Ellington songs arranged and orchestrated by Luther Henderson and performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle.
Just before he died he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. When his wife, Billie Allen Henderson, gave him the news he had a one-word response: “Recognition!” You can see the NEA’s brief video bio here.
Ten Years Gone
At 10:47 PM, Pacific Time, ten years ago today, John took his last breath. His passing was peaceful and I was grateful that he was able to depart on his own terms, at home, comfortably in bed, and in my arms. When he left the house a few hours later, it also seemed to be on his own terms. The folks who came to get him had placed him on a gurney, wrapped in a very lovely quilt. When they got him to the font door and had to go down a few steps, they chose to up-end the gurney such at he appeared to be standing as it rolled down the walkway. Watching from behind, I imagined him walking tall as if heading off on another road trip. He is still out there on the road, and I continue to talk to him every day….
Happy Birthday John
Today my darling would be 108 years young. It has been 8 years since he died and I continue to miss him, and to talk to him, each and every day. This picture was taken one day before John’s 97th birthday. I sure hope I will look as good when I reach my 90s.
What would John be feeling if he were here today? Like most of us, he would be grateful to those on the front lines, saddened by the massive loss of lives (of both friends and those unknown), and enraged by the ineptitude of national government that has made this crisis so much worse than it had to be.
What would we be doing? Probably “relaxin’ on the axis of the wheel of life” and listening to Nancy Wilson’s Lush Life recording or Joe Williams’ Here’s to Life. Maybe we’d have rice and beans or catfish for dinner. If we weren’t on lock-down, we’d go to the fish market and pick up a basket of Maryland crabs so John could cook seafood gumbo for tomorrow’s Easter Sunday dinner.
Darling, you were the light of my life and you are still my guiding light: yesterday, today, forever…
Notes on Writing
This weekend The Huntington opens the first major exhibition on the life of award-winning author Octavia E. Butler. For those who do not know of her, Ms. Butler was the first science fiction writer to receive a prestigious MacArthur “genius†award and the first African American woman to win widespread recognition writing in that genre.
I am not particularly an aficionado of sci-fi, but she was a master story-teller and to those of us pursuing the ‘creative’ or ‘narrative’ nonfiction path, stellar story-telling is the holy grail.
Ms. Butler’s literary archive resides at The Huntington and included among her manuscripts and drafts are what I might call ‘notes to self,’ including the one above, and this affirmation shown below – don’t knock the power of positive thinking!
William Hurskin and Nigel
When Mr. Hurskin first came to Crown City Veterinary Medical Group, it was with his young German Shepherd named Cleo. This Afro-American man in his mid 60s, tall of stature with a military bearing, was cordial but reserved. Over the years of bringing Cleo in for routine care, Mr. Hurskin became friendly with Dr. Tyson and her staff.
After awhile they learned a little of his history. Mr. Hurskin was first drafted in 1966, but was deferred because he was still in school in Mississippi. A few years later he moved to California. By 1970 he was working security for the Pasadena school district, but was drafted again in 1971. He served three years in the Army, both stateside and in Frankfurt Germany, repairing infrared night vision equipment. When he mustered out he returned to his security job for several more years before moving on to a jobs in aerospace and finally security for the Los Angeles Department of Airports, from where he eventually retired.
As Cleo aged, she developed hip dysplasia and Dr. Tyson worked with Mr. Hurskin to reduce the dog’s weight. Mr. Hurskin was really open to hearing someone who wanted to use preventative care instead of simply band-aiding the problems. With guidance from Dr. Tyson, he mounted a crusade to reduce Cleo’s size which would put less pressure on her hips and retard the pain and progression of the dysplasia. Cleo went from being a 120 pound German Shepherd to being a 89 pound German Shepherd, essentially extending her life for several more years than she would have had otherwise.
Animal care is not always easy, but Mr. Hurskin was impressed with what could be done when it came to rehabilitating an animal. With the ongoing encouragement from the veterinary staff, Mr. Hurskin stayed the course. “I wouldn’t let him not do what he needed to do,†recalls Dr. Tyson.
And Mr. Hurskin became attached to Dr. Tyson. “She’s like a sister to me. She’ll say anything to me to keep me from doing something stupid. That’s what I like about her. She talks to me like she a big sister, and she’s caring,†explains Mr. Hurskin. “That’s what I like about her. She’s a very caring person. She doesn’t want to be hurt, which I can’t blame her. She got a tender heart, a very tender heart.â€
In the end it was not the dysplasia that ended Cleo’s life, it was a tumor that was initially found on one of her limbs. When tumor ended up popping up in her chest at the late phase of her life, Mr. Hurskin brought Cleo to the clinic so that she could end her life peacefully without any pain.
What’s remarkable about Mr. Hurskin is that very soon after he had lost Cleo, he realized that his good, and his purpose in life, is best suited for a companion, maybe another shepherd. Without hesitation he came back to the clinic and said, “I don’t know what you have in store for me but I know you said that there were animals in need. I am in need.”
“I think that abrupt loss was enough for him to also want to reinvest himself in a different way,†said Dr. Tyson thinking back on her decision to unite Mr. Hurskin with Nigel, a 40-plus pound brown-and-white 11-year-old English bulldog in need of a human companion who would take care of him and who would give him purpose. Nigel was one of the many dogs who were under the care of the Asper de Tyson Foundation and Sanctuary, a non-profit organization that takes a holistic approach to the natural contributions that flow back and forth between People, Animals and the Planet.
Nigel, who had come back to the foundation not long before Cleo’s passing, is an interesting case because he wasn’t abandoned or treated badly. He was an adorable puppy bought in a pet store by a lovely couple who loved him.The couple didn’t know that bulldogs are prone to have eye problems, but they took care of him as best they could.
By the time Nigel turned eight, the couple had exhausted their funds and, desiring to start a family, they could not afford the ongoing veterinary expenses. Nobody wanted to take a dog that needed surgery and they did not want to put him down. Luckily, Dr. Tyson was Nigel’s vet and she told the family that if they gave him to the Foundation, she would take care of his medical needs and find him a home. They agreed.
Nigel had so many skin folds around his eyes that he couldn’t see. Dr. Tyson resected Nigel’s face and his eyes and allowed for him to see again. Two surgeries plus some recovery time and he was ready for his next life’s assignment.
For a short time, Nigel went to live with a client who had a female bulldog in need of a friend. That worked great until the other dog passed. Soon after, Dr. Tyson took him back because the man was too busy to take appropriate care. Once a Foundation animal, always a Foundation animal.
Even though Mr. Hurskin was thinking to get another shepherd, Dr. Tyson tasked him with fostering Nigel for a weekend. Mr Hurskin did, a little reluctantly, and then brought Nigel back when the weekend was over. But Dr. Tyson had seen, or maybe felt, that they were meant to be together and she was not surprised when Mr. Hurskin called and asked for a second weekend. Man and dog, Bill and Nigel, had bonded.
Nigel went home with him with all of his bag of tricks, his medicine, his special food, his eye wipes. A baggage of things that needed to be done three or four times a day, and Mr. Hurskin was ready for the task. That would not have been true a decade before, believes Dr. Tyson. “Back then he would have said, ‘What? People do what for their dogs? Are you kidding? You use face wipes? They have special things? You wipe their boots? Like really, this is a lot more than I had signed up for.’” But now Mr. Hurskin was ready to do it, realizing that without a friend to care for he wasn’t complete. “Without hesitation he signed up for it knowing that Nigel was coming with all of that,†recalls Dr. Tyson.
Nigel likes routine and so does Mr. Hurskin. Nigel’s preference is early to bed and late to rise. “He’s is something else,†says Mr. Hurskin. “He doesn’t like to sit up late. I would be trying to do things on the computer and he’d want me to go to bed at 8:00, 8:30. Yeah, come scratch me on my leg. I’m thinking he wants to go outside. No, uh-uh. He wants me to come go to bed. If I didn’t get all the way in bed, he wouldn’t get in bed until I got all the way in bed.  Yep. Then, he would come up, climb up the little footstool, and come up and he want to lick me in my face I don’t know how many times. English bulldogs, they’re heavy. Sometimes, he’d want to stand on my chest. I’m like, ‘Oh, no! You can’t stand on my chest now.’ In the morning he wanted to stay in bed. Sometimes, we wouldn’t get up ’til 10:00 or 11:00. Then, I’d get up, clean his eyes, wash his eyes out and everything. Feed him. Then, I’d go out in the backyard, sit in the sun, and have my coffee.â€
Mr. Hurskin was once married and has a daughter who, he recently found out, is living in Sacramento, now retired from the Air Force. He hasn’t seen her since she was a teenager, and he’s never met his grandson. They are estranged. So it’s just Mr. Hurskin and Nigel enjoying coffee in the sun and long walks.
They also listen to music together. “I like music,†says Mr. Hurskin. “You can just listen to music, you can relax. If you’re working, it’ll make you forget about thinking about your time. I took a class in classical music, so I could understand what it was about. Then, once I understood it, I took a liking to it, too.â€
“You know the strange thing?,†Mr. Hurskin reminisces. “I could get dressed to be around the house, or I can get dressed to go somewhere, and have on the same thing. But Nigel, he could tell when I was going to go somewhere. Yeah. He’d head straight for the door. I started taking him everywhere I went. He’d get in the back seat of the car and just go to sleep.â€
Mr. Hurskin enjoyed good health most of his life, but early in 2015 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, but Mr. Hurskin and Nigel were not ready to part. Nigel requires a lot of care, cleaning his eyes several times a day, tending to his allergies with a special diet, and he has heart issues as well. They both felt a responsibility to one another and they kept each other going for well over a year.
“If you spend time with animals, they get to know your moods. When you feeling sad, they’ll feel sad. They give you that look. Sometime, they’ll try to bring you out of it,†says Mr. Hurskin.
Whenever he had an appointment for chemo, Mr. Hurskin would bring Nigel over to the clinic, walking quietly in the back door and straight to “his” crate on the bottom row in the middle in the treatment room. When it’s too hot, Nigel pushes aside the towel meant to make him comfortable. After touching base with the staff, offering fatherly advice about life and saving your money, Mr. Hurskin would drive off in his red jaguar, returning a few hours later to collect Nigel and head for home.
In late April of 2016 Mr. Hurskin’s health began to decline. Nigel was back at the clinic while Mr. Hurskin was in the hospital fighting his way through pneumonia and still looking forward. “I just don’t feel that I’m strong enough to do the things Nigel needs, like take him walking and stuff right now, stuff he needs to be doing. He needs to be exercised. He likes outside. I can’t do that right now. I don’t know what I’m going to do. First, I know I got to be well. Get that straight.â€
“Nigel can’t be there with him; he wants to be but he can’t,†says Dr. Tyson. “They both can’t continue to thrive together. Having two advanced age candidates together is hard because one feels obligated to make sure that the other is doing okay. And when the other is not doing okay, in this situation, it will make him docile and quiet, like Nigel is now. He’s pensively waiting.â€
It is now October 2016 and, like Nigel, Mr. Hurskin is much on the minds of the staff at the clinic – praying for him to have a peaceful journey when his time comes, and hoping that he truly knows what a tremendous gift he has given to Nigel and to the humans at the Foundation and clinic who love them both dearly.
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Lives Well Lived
Well here I go again! Welcome to the relaunching DevraDoWrite. I hope you like the new “look.”
For starters, I have added a new category – Lives Well Lived – that will spotlight people and programs that make a positive difference, large or small. First up in that category is a man and his dog story. William Hurskin took in a 40-plus-pound 11-year-old English bulldog named Nigel. The ‘old dog’ had been rehabilitated by the Asper de Tyson Foundation and Sanctuary (more about the Foundation in future posts), but Nigel required a very high level maintenance for his ongoing survival. Mr. Hurskin was willing to care for him, and, as it turns out, when Mr. Hurskin was diagnosed with cancer, Nigel took very good care of him.
We the People
We the people must protect ourselves, not with guns but with intelligence. Don’t let others manipulate you with emotional speech that hides their true intent. We are too smart for that.
While candidates hurl insults and accusations at one another, we must look deeper to see their motivations. These “remarks” they make are not really meant to hurt the other’s feelings, they are meant to manipulate our emotions and lead us to ignoring our own intelligence while acting in the heat of passion – love them or hate them, it’s all the same form of manipulation.
We need facts, and we need to use our good sense.
We the people must take a good look at each person, their words, their behavior, and all that it implies about their character, their personality, and their values. This goes for candidates and anyone else who wants to influence you.
Some things a candidate supports might be good in your opinion, others not so good. Each and every one of those who would claim to lead or represent us all have agendas of their own. Having an agenda is not bad in and of itself. What you must determine is whether their agenda is in conflict with what you believe is best and/or right.
This goes for people we admire as well as those we detest. These people come to us with personality traits that we might like or dislike, traits are part of a person’s psychology. From one extreme to the other – from Mother Teresa to Hitler – desires to be selflessly kind or to kill are influenced by early life experiences. A person can be passionate about saving the world and doing what they believed to be best, but that doesn’t mean that they are reasonable. Whether for better or worse, passion can cloud judgement. “If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.” (Attributed to Benjamin Franklin.)l
Now negative campaigning is nothing new – candidates did it back in the 1800s. What IS new is today’s media, and we have to look closely at their motivations as well. First, the traditional media such as network news programs are no longer as dedicated to truth in journalism because they don’t have time to fact-check and verify. Today’s news is immediate. If they take the extra time to verify, they risk being scooped by a competitor – never mind that the competitor’s facts are also not verified. Second, there are a multitude of competing sources, some professional, some not, but all immediate and many visibly biased toward one side or another due to pressure from advertisers and the company’s executives.
So what are we to do? First, stop and take a breath. I’m not kidding. Try to calm your emotional response and then evaluate what you are being told. Next, think for yourself! Whether you are hearing the words from the candidate him/herself, or from a supposed “person in the know,” or from the media, or from your social circle, or even best friend, do not fall into crowd mentality without thinking first for yourself.
Think about what is most important to YOU, and question the truth of what you are hearing and whether it truly makes a difference to your goals. If you think Clinton has lied about some things, does that mean she lies about everything? Does it make her unfit to be President? If Trump makes rude comments about women, does that make him a chauvinist pig and, if so, therefore unfit to be president?
I cannot answer for you and you should not allow anyone to control your thoughts and actions whether through persuasion, manipulation, or outright lies. Think for yourself. Do not believe everything you hear or read. Look at multiple sources and evaluate for yourself. I urge you to be true to your own values and beliefs and not be swayed by the crowd.
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NOTE: this essay was inspired by my mother, a psychoanalyst who, along with her colleagues, is concerned about the effects of bombastic rhetoric on the population at large. She contributed thoughts and words to this piece, for which I thank her.
Is it worth it?
“Today’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems†said Sam Greengard last week at the American Society of Journalists and Authors conference. He was talking about how cool technological gadgets and ‘apps’ have left us drowning in gigabytes of data. Tagging is one of today’s solutions and applying tags to email messages and files not only allows you to categorize them without having to move them into various folders, but it also allows you to assign more than one tag to each item. Wondering if I really have time to re-read and tag tens of thousands of emails and files led me to more basic questions: Do I need to do it? What do I have to gain? Trying to harness, arrange and tame our data troves seems an illusive goal and takes way too much effort. And that, in turn, led me to an even more interesting consideration: What might I lose by doing it, besides the most obvious time suck?
Coincidentally, while thinking about this I was embroiled in the parallel endeavor of straightening up an office, arranging and taming the piles of envelopes, papers, bills, receipts, cards and letters, articles, books, stick-it notes, photos….
Whether the labeling and filing is physical or electronic, once done one can quickly and efficiently find what one is looking for and that is the ultimate pay-off, right? Time is money; waste not, want not. Hmmmm…..maybe not. By arriving so immediately at the destination, what is lost is the journey itself. It may take longer, possibly even create a detour, but if one has to sift through piles, or open multiple electronic documents to see what is inside, serendipity might strike, yielding an answer or solution not previously considered, or uncovering something about which you had forgotten. Even if what you find is not relevant to the impetus of the search, accidental rediscoveries might open up a whole new avenue of thought…or just make you smile.