The Heavenly Regions

Bright sun, a moderate breeze, and temperatures in the low sixties. These are the conditions that prevail in the heavenly regions, I suspect, and last weekend we were blessed with the same regime here in town. After rejecting three or four more exotic cycling options, Hilary and I decided to pump up the tires and make the time-honored, but often overlooked, trip around the Lakes.

What lakes? Calhoun, Harriet, and Isles, of course, a few minutes’ drive down the parkway from our house.

We got an early start. The air was sharp, and traffic on the bike paths was moderate. We were soaring.

It’s become fashionable to describe such episodes as “being in the present.” More than a few books have been written celebrating that level of innocent awareness, and offering advice about how to reach and sustain it.

I have no advice to give. I’m tempted to argue that such a concept is inappropriate to the occasion. At the least, it seems to suggest that our recollections of the past are filled with remorse, our anticipation of the future fraught with anxiety. That’s not necessarily true.

We used to live much closer to these lakes, and throughout our leisurely tour I was pleasantly reminded of people and events from the past. The recollections added an emotional depth to the visually spectacular scene. I was reminded of the years when our friends Greg and Betty lived in a condo across Bryant Park from us. As we locked our bikes and took a stroll through Harriet Gardens, I was reminded that the bedding plants near the fountains were once set off by a trim row of buckthorn hedges!

The tennis courts at Beard’s Pleasance reminded me of matches with an old friend interrupted again and again by snippets of conversation about food, films, and travel. We passed my cousin’s house, where we all used to sit on the shady porch as the morning heated up. And at one point, on the west side of Lake Harriet, I was reminded of a party I went to in the mid-1970s in an upstairs apartment before Hilary and I had even met.

On our way back to the car, we sat on a bench overlooking Bde MaKa Ska, trying to pick out a good place for lunch. Yum? No. Niviya Thai Kitchen? It’s gone downhill. Hazelwood? Too suburban. Convention Grill? Might work.

In the end, as we often do, we went home and cooked up something new, in this case a pasta salad with corn and cherry tomatoes from a recent recipe in the Times. Not bad. (But might not be a “keeper.”)

*   *   *

The next morning was equally brilliant but far more blustery. We drove down to the farmers’ market to pick up some parsley and a few discounted zinnias. Did some planting back home.

But the real highlight of the day came later, when we once again drove into town to attend a concert by Lux String Quartet being given at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in association with a traveling exhibit called Violins of Hope. The display consisted of six or seven Plexiglas cases holding a selection of violins that had been owned by Jews who died in concentration camps during WW II.  

This is serious stuff, and it might almost have seemed a bit morbid, except for the subtlety and zeal with which the members of Lux worked through their program, and also the verve with which each of the four performers announced a piece and also described what it was like to play an instrument from the venerable collection.

As an added twist, the performance consisted of isolated movements from several compositions—Grieg, Shostakovich, Kodaly, and, best of all, the first movement of Ravel’s String Quartet, one of my favorites. Taking them out of their broader musical environment seemed to refresh them.

And as chance would have it, we ran into five of our friends at the concert. But is that really chance? They all live near the Lakes, and three of the five are musicians.

After the concert I ran into composer David Evan Thomas in the hall where the instruments were on exhibit. I told him the tale of the LP of Ravel’s Quartet that I had in college, a Nonesuch recording with a pink hot-air balloon on the cover. He agreed that Nonesuch album covers could be outrageous.

“You should write something for the Lux,” I said.

He cleared his throat and replied, modestly, “Well, they premiered my second string quartet.”

Oh. I didn’t know.

 

   

Summer Reading: Three Japanese Novels

 

Convenience Store Woman is a novel about—guess what—a woman who works in a convenience store. There’s nothing so unusual about that, but Keiko has been doing the same job at the same store, part time, for eighteen years. She likes it, and she’s good at it. The position is lowly, but Keiko shoulders her responsibilities with utter dedication and professionalism. It’s basically her life.

Keiko knows she’s a little different. In the novel’s opening pages, she relates the story of a schoolyard fist-fight she witnessed as a child. All the kids were standing around shouting “Break it up! Break it up!” Keiko picked up a shovel, knocked one of the belligerents unconscious, and considered she’d done a good job. “I still don’t see anything wrong with what I did,” she tells us.

But Keiko isn’t driven by irrational or antisocial impulses; she just likes to keep order and make sure everything’s in its proper place. Much of the novel—which sold more than a million copies in Japan—deals with the minutia of her day, managing inventory, re-ordering products, setting up special sales depending on the season, tending the cash register, and remaining forever cheerful in the face of customer requests throughout her shift.

If I happen to enjoy reading about such things, it might be because I worked in a book warehouse for twenty-odd years, so I’m familiar with the satisfactions that such work can sometimes provide. That might also explain why I enjoyed the German film In the Aisles (2018).

But just when things start to get tedious, author Sayaka Murata gives her story a twist in the form of a new employee, Shiraha, hired by the manager out of desperation during a busy season. Shiraha is a loser, a slacker, an arrogant miscreant, practically homeless. Needless to say, he and Keiko don’t get along …

Tokyo Express, originally published in 1958, has the look of a mystery novel. It focuses on the question of whether an apparent murder/suicide on a lonely beach on the southern tip of Japan might actually have been a murder. But there is never more than one real suspect in the case, and from the early chapters to the end of the book, Inspector Mihara spends nearly all his time trying to break that suspect’s seemingly water-tight alibi. There are three or four “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” moments, plenty of interviews with subsidiary characters, and lots of analysis of train schedules, all of which establish an atmosphere of mild intrigue. But the fact that the book’s first few chapters focus on the behavior of two waitresses and an eminent businessman with ties to a government scandal would be hard to explain if he weren’t somehow connected to the crime … presuming  there was a crime ...

 The Summer House follows the early career of an inexperienced and sometimes dilatory architect, one Tōru Sakanishi, who, by a stroke of luck, gets hired on to the firm of master architect Shunsuke Murai. Murai needs some help: he’s preparing an entry for a competition the design Japan’s National Library of Modern Literature. In the past, he has avoided such competitions, preferring to work with clients who know and appreciate his quiet, subtle style. It’s almost as if he knows he’s approaching the end of his career. And perhaps his life.

Little by little, Sakanishi picks up the rhythms of the architectural team, which has moved up to a mountain retreat to work on the project together. He’s eager to make himself useful, though the tasks he’s given seldom have much to do with the competition entry itself. It takes him a while, for example, to catch on to the fact that in Shunsuke’s world, it’s taboo to sharpen your pencils after 5 p.m.

As the summer passes, meals are shared, errands are run. We listen in on discussions about furniture design, acoustics, the proper location of fireplaces, and sundry other architectural issues. In the course of his narrative Sakanishi also drifts into lengthy digressions on the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright (with whom Murai studied as a youth) and the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, whose famous design for the Stockholm Public Library has captured Murai’s interest.

Among the team are two women, Mariko and Yukiko, and Sakanishi takes a liking to them both, adding yet another subtle, almost unspoken ripple to the stream. Murai himself rekindles several personal connections in the mountain neighborhood, where he’s been coming for decades. Meanwhile, under an atmosphere of professional calm and unspoken reverence for the master, weeks pass, months. The competition deadline approaches.

Author Matsuie won Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for this, his first novel. He succeeds in transforming what might have been a plodding narrative filled with attestations of respect that we can acknowledge but have been given no reason to share, into an exotic and atmospheric whole, where relationships between walls, chairs, books, and people are in constant flux, restrained by patience and tact, buoyed by a sense of balance and proportion, fueled an unspoken affection, and threatened by the passage of time.  

The News from Campus

I have a soft spot in my heart for things related to campus life. There’s something “cool” about those years you spend learning things while doing crumby part-time jobs and hanging out with your friends. And in more recent years, Hilary and I have wandered over from time to time to see a play or an opera staged by the music department. I've attended a few programs hosted by the Carlson School of Business, the Heller School of Economics, and the English Department. I taught a class on the St. Paul Campus for several years as part of their Compleat Scholar program. And now that I think about it, I was once invited to join the programming committee for the West Bank Film Society. 

So when I received an email from the University of Massachusetts/Boston inviting me to join a focus group to discuss ways campuses can “engage with older adults in the community” and “foster intergenerational interactions,” I signed up. Why not? The meeting would only take an hour, and I would receive a $50 Amazon gift card as a reward for my efforts.

I was a little proud of myself for noting that the meeting was scheduled in Eastern Daylight Time. That meant that the 2 p.m. Zoom session would be starting at 1. But when I tuned in, the session was almost over. The moderator invited me to return in an hour, when a second session was scheduled to start. That gave me time to refer back to the original email invitation, which specified Fri, May 22, 1:00 – 2:00 EDT. My mistake. (Perhaps this faux pas established my bona fides as an elderly person struggling to come to grips with the complexities of the modern campus world.) 

I was surprised to discover, in any case, that both of the sessions—the one I’d missed and the one I attended—were made up entirely of women, all of whom were employed at college campuses in Massachusetts. Quite a few of them seemed to know each other personally. It struck me as odd that they were all academics or administrators. None were average citizens expressing concerns about campus access--the things that the panel was purporting to address.

Except me.

The facilitator was articulate and well-organized. She had drawn up a series of questions, and also mentioned how much time she planned to devote to each—five or ten minutes—before initiating discussion. The questions were broad, on the order of “How can colleges and universities support accessibility, navigation, mobility, and safety for all ages on campus?” and “What discourages or prevents older learners from coming to campuses?” Within the confines of the time limit, our answers were inevitably superficial. Concerns about crime? Better campus lighting, more cops. Navigation? Kiosks with maps. Parking? Take a bus. And so on.

The section that seemed most fruitful to me explored ways to connect older students to academia by scheduling classes and events off-campus. Although I tried to maintain a low profile during the discussion, I couldn’t resist mentioning the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute, which supports learning programs at more than 250 universities around the country, with classes held in local churches, high schools, libraries, and online. I also mentioned the numerous readings and educational programs hosted within our local Hennepin County Library System, and the city-wide system of motorized scooters that make it easier for older adults to traverse the sprawling U of MM campuses.

(The idea of older people riding around on scooters may sound absurd, but in the minds of the panelists, a twenty-five year old would be considered an “older” returning adult. Anyway, isn't this a prime examle of the much encouraged "thinking outside the box"?)

With about three minutes left in the hour, someone brought up the issue of Zoom classes, which obviate the challenges involved in negotiating a college campus entirely. “I think they’re great.” I chimed in. Someone countered with a remark on the order of “but then you miss the interactions between student and teacher and among the students themselves.”

“That’s true to some extent,” I said. “But in the classes I teach on Zoom, there’s a lot of useful interaction going on between students in the chat—questions being answered, enthusiasms being shared. Far more than in a "live" classroom. And everyone has the opportunity to email me directly after class with questions, observations, or challenges to my remarks.”

I might have gone on to observe that quite a few people in my classes would never dream of leaving their assisted living arrangements to attend a class ten (or two hundred) miles away on a 400-acre campus serving 50,000 students. In my most recent class there were students from as far away as Crosby and Lac Qui Parle.

What I did says was: “More than 160 people registered for my most recent class. You’re unlikely to reach a third of that total in a college classroom.”

I might also have mentioned, as an aside, that Luther Seminary, after more than a century of operation in the beautiful St. Paul neighborhood of St. Anthony Park, now plans to sell its entire campus and reincarnate itself as a more lean and nimble institution, responding to the reality that even now 70 percent of its students attend mostly online. 

So many avenues to explore, so little time!

The question that remained most forcibly in my mind as I switched off the Zoom portal was this: to what extent, in its efforts to expand inclusiveness and nurture “community,” is the university willing to shed its dedication to "higher" education and refashion itself as a purveyor of community ed?     

Any professional educator will confirm that learning styles differ from person to person. At the U of MN, anyone over the age of 62 can audit courses for free and earn credits for only $20 apiece. That’s a good deal, though it doesn’t appeal to me much. I don’t need credits at this late date. And although some professors can be inspiring, my eight years on campus back in the 70s convinced me that many of them aren’t. In such cases, I’d rather just read the book.

My plan, all along, had been to devote my $50 Amazon credit to buying books that I might otherwise have shied away from as too esoteric, too expensive, too dense. The books I chose were Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle, What’s Eating the Universe by Paul Davies, and Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeoisie Deal Enriched the World, by Deirdre McCloskey. 

That should keep me occupied for a while.