Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I Wish I Was a Wanderer

I am seeing myself in first grade. I am sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by my classmates with a joyous expression on my face. Looking out the window, I see the brilliant colours of the leaves; yellow, orange and red. A window is slightly ajar and I am smelling the crispness of the November air of New York tickling my nostrils. Prior to this moment I have been wishing to go outside, run through the leaves, scoop them up using everything available to my body, hands, arms, chest, throat and stomach, to throw them in the air, and then and only then wait for that delicious long pause of a split second before they flutter down covering my hair, eyes, ears, and nose, sticking to my fall jacket and khakis pants, finally settling in a light drift over my brown leather shoes. With few exceptions, the call from outside would pre-empt any activity within the classroom. This is one of those joyous exceptions that is keeping my attention focused inside.

In this scene we are singing the Thanksgiving song "The Happy Wanderer". Looking back now, I can hear the exuberance of my singing, having no concern for whether or not I am remotely in tune, which no doubt, I am not. I can hear many of the words going over and over in my head, although some of them have faded away with memory. Something about I wish I was a wanderer with a knapsack on my back, wandering until the day I die. I am always seeing the mythological wanderer the same way; as an old man in corduroy pants and a flannel plaid shirt, sporting a white scraggly beard and a canvas knapsack with a wooden frame on his back. I am noticing now that he never seems loaded down, he always seems so free.

I am always seeing the wanderer in the third person, although the song is sung in the first person. Many of this boy's thoughts are lost to me now, but it is hard to conceive that there could have even been an inkling that maybe someday I could be that wanderer. This certainly did not fit into my world within an upper middle-class, predominately Jewish suburb on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. Everything was very nice in my community, the nice streets with overhanging trees, the nice houses with nice people inside. 'Nice' was my mother's favourite word; the opposite of nice is 'screcklish', a Yiddish expression meant to send shutters up one's spine. Everything in our house was nice - all the time.

Nothing was ever out of place within my mother's domain, including my bedroom. There certainly was no place for a canvas knapsack with a wooden frame, not even in the far recesses of my closet. The thought of a scraggly beard donning my face sometime in the decades to come when my biology would have caught up with such a fantasy would certainly have set off the screcklish shutters. This being the early 50's, a time to forget the horrors of the previous decade and recline into niceness, there was not even a glimpse of what was to come in the late 60’s when many a young man's face, including mine, would erupt with unkempt hair.

For my father, a successful and moral business man, the extent of his wandering was the daily commute via the Long Island Railroad into his office in Manhattan, with his companions, a brief case and the New York Herald Tribune. A major change came when the Tribune closed the New York edition and my father switched to the more conservative New York Times, which at 92, he still reads daily from his retirement home in a suburb of San Francisco.

Yes, we were Jewish and through the decades my paternal ancestors had wandered up from Spain into Germany and the Netherlands, and my maternal grandparents from the Ukraine and Lithuania had wandered into Germany and later to Palestine, but in each case, they were refugees fleeing religious persecution, mass eviction, pogroms, and the early years of Hitler's Regime. A happy wanderer embracing freedom: no, that was not part of the scheme of this little boy’s life, I am seeing joyfully singing out of tune.

And yet, seeing this delicious scene again, I am now detecting the first echoes of a call that would return as I moved through the decades. From whence the call came, discovering its meaning, deciphering the complexity of its messages, all that means nothing now. All that is of interest is that the call kept coming, over and over again, in different guises and shapes, in different degrees of intensities, sometimes speaking seriously, sometimes cunningly luring me into fantastical escapes, sometimes hauntingly pulling upon my soul like a loon's song reaching across the water.

Fast forward about 40 years now. It doesn’t escape my notice that this is the period that my ancestors wandered through the desert. I am at the 24th annual folk music festival in the idyllic setting of Jericho Park on the west side of Vancouver, British Columbia in July, 2001. On the south side of the park is a meandering pond with wild ducks, swans and other fowl, beaver and even the occasional turtle. Beyond the pond is a thick stand of trees buffering the park from the traffic on 4th Avenue. To the north is the beach on the Vancouver inlet. At this time of year one not only gets the visual scene of the dozen or so freighters in the middle of the inlet waiting for a berth at the dock in the East End, but numerous pleasure vessels out for a summer’s day romp. Beyond the masts of the sailing boats are the beautiful mountains of North and West Vancouver and further to the east one embraces the skyline of downtown Vancouver melting into the beautiful Stanley Park. Although more than a dozen years had elapsed since I had last lived in Vancouver, I still considered myself a Vancouverite, proud of a scene that no city in North America can match.

In its 24 years of folk music extravaganza, I had only been absent a handful of times. As with so many of my generation, I came of age listening to the likes Pete Seager, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Buffy St. Marie and Phil Oaks. So it was a forgone conclusion that when the infant festival opened in 1978, I would be in attendance, and remain one of its loyal fans over the years. Scheduled in mid July, it was often the first weekend of the summer in which the sun was in attendance. The hallmark of this festival is that it is global in context and invites creative and unique artists and groups who generally have not made it big on the mainstream music scene.

The main attraction for me this year was Utah Philips. He was definitely not wearing corduroy pants. Other than that, however, he looked, acted, sang and told stories, as I imagined my metaphorical wanderer of those bygone elementary schooldays would have done. He even sported the necessary plaid shirt and flowing snow-white beard. It had been many years since I had last been entertained by Utah at this festival and I was looking forward to it. Irreverent as one can possibly be, he is brilliant at getting one to think about the injustices of this world through his songs and stories.

In the middle of Utah’s performance, he asked if we knew the difference between a bum, a hobo and a tramp. Well, he says: a bum is a wanderer who drinks; a hobo is a wanderer who works occasionally; a tramp is a wanderer who dreams.
After the laughter subsided, I looked at my dear wife Lucy seated at my side and said: “Well darling, I can’t drink because it gives me headaches and working is killing me. I think it is time for us to be tramps!!”
Lucy’s first response was to laugh. Her second response, which surprised herself as much as me, was to agree.

Our life was no longer working. We had known that for some time now. My daily migraine headaches, which had been plaguing me for several years, had drained all my strength and resources, and yet I continued working in my private psychotherapy practice. Healing others and teaching them to take care of themselves came easy to me. Following my own advice was another story. Lucy was exhausted beyond imagination from trying to hold the two of us together. And yet we continued on and on, thinking that we were doing the responsible thing.

Responsibility. How often had I broken down the meaning of that word for my clients into ‘response’ – ‘ability’; the ability to respond? How often had I heard myself say that responsibility did not necessarily mean working hard, making money or following the mainstream assumptions of what one should sacrifice in life to be considered a good citizen? No, I would explain, it is one’s ability to respond to life and that self-care is often a huge component of that quality. I knew that, but didn’t follow it. I seemed to be following the old adage: do as I say, not as I do.
I return to that moment now. I am sitting beside my wife wishing to follow my dreams. I am thinking of becoming a tramp. How will I explain this to my parents, I am thinking. Hi mom, hi dad, guess what? I’m going to be a tramp. I’m going to be wandering. I’m going to be dreaming. Isn’t that grand? I’ll be down to visit them in their exclusive retirement home and they will be introducing me to their friends as their middle-aged son, the tramp.

I am laughing as we begin walking across the field after the concert. I am laughing with equal measures of excitement and nervousness. We are already becoming aware that that comment, absurd as it may have been, was hitting a chord that was not remotely absurd. As I sit here now, writing about this event that seems part of another lifetime already, I am listening to a CD in which Utah Phillips is singing a song: “I am all used up”. Watching back through time I see these two folk walking hand in hand, becoming more and more aware of how used up they really are. Wandering and dreaming isn’t seeming quite so absurd to them at this moment.
Making the decision to leave home and begin the journey to find the answers they are looking for is still six weeks in the distance, but from that moment on, they feel its inevitability and proximity. It will always remain a poignant and defining moment.