Each time you think you’ve got my breasts arranged so they’ll fit into the tight bodice, you pull on the zipper and one pops right back out again. Giggling consumes us, tears of laughter streaming through our chalky blush.

My mother is back to knock on the door to hurry us along. Our eyeliner will have to be fixed. Once we get going like this there’s really no stopping us.

“Unzip me!” I’m holding a tissue beneath each eye to stop mascara from migrating down my cheeks. “I can’t breathe!”

This only makes both of us laugh harder.

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Of course none of this would have happened if I were better at math.

It’s summer and the dark, unfamiliar hallways of Lawrence High School intimidate me at age 13. But summer school is for dummies like me. And him.

I’ve loved this boy since the 6th grade.

That first autumn of junior high school, I arrived back in Kansas just a few days before classes start…

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Editorial Note: This review I wrote about Salman Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence” originally ran in the Denver Post back in 2016. I had the good fortune to interview “Sir Rushdie” for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer back then, long before the terrible attack by a religious extremist he chronicled in his memoir, “Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder.”

Is Salman Rushdie the last of the great international literary playboys?

Followers of gossip pages will answer yes, but for a truly steamy love story, readers should instead turn to the lively author’s latest novel.

Dante had his unattainable Beatrice and Petrarch his elusive Laura, but in “The Enchantress of Florence,” Rushdie proves that an earthy author demands a hot-blooded heroine audacious enough to rival even history’s greatest seductresses.

When this writer caught up with Sir Salman by telephone recently at his California hotel, it quickly emerged that though he has been married four times and by all accounts is a “hot number” on the New York dating circuit, Rushdie’s most enduring affair may be with the city of Florence, Italy, which he discusses as one would an elegant former lover.

[more…]

[random picture I saved to my phone]

Rushdie’s heartbreak over witnessing first-hand the aftermath of the 1966 floods when the Arno river burst its banks is still evident, and this was a disaster that did far more damage than sully the dress of a stately grand dame of the Renaissance.

“I remember being one of the students helping in (the church of) Santa Croce. For a week or two, I was trying to pick little bits of gold paint out of the wreckage with tweezers,” he said.

The Florence of this novel, however, is dressed in all her gilt finery as the tale unfolds. And with the erotic Kama Sutra as a key reference in the book’s bibliography, it is as perfect a guilty pleasure as sipping a foamy cappuccino in the shadows of Brunelleschi’s dome.

Blending erotic lyricism with literary prose, Rushdie inveigles readers with the seductions of Qara Köz, a Mughal princess from the East who winds up in 16th-century Florence alongside such historical luminaries as Machiavelli.

“People will come across all of this crazy stuff that they’ll assume is magic realism, and those are the parts that are all true,” Rushdie laughed generously.

“And it’s all the banal stuff that people think must have really happened . . . that is the stuff I really made up!” Asked to divulge a few of Qara Köz’s erotic secrets, Rushdie laughingly confessed that mortal women may be at a disadvantage. “After all, she is a bit of a witch!,” he said. “The thing about this period in history, if you look at the Renaissance paintings, they were obsessed with the theme of the enchantresses or sorceresses. What happens is the image of the enchantress becomes beautiful rather than ugly . . . goes from being a hag to being a seductress.

Adding to the book’s eroticism is the sexual liaison between Qara Köz and the character called Mirror, her servant girl and companion.

“In my view, the real love affair in the book is between those two, so in that way, it may be my first lesbian novel.

“I’ve always felt that in all my books the women are the most interesting to write about. In this case, though, since the world I am writing about is not the modern world, women do not have the options women in the modern world have.

“If I gave them 21st century thoughts, it would be horribly anachronistic, and the reader would feel that. So you have to let them be the people of their time, doing the best they can within that social confine.”

Lucky for even first-time Rushdie readers, the social confines of the 16th century allow his characters to be both deeply riveting and perhaps just a bit risque.

“I had a history professor who said this wonderful thing to me: ‘You should never write history until you can hear the people speak,’” Rushdie said.

Rushdie explained, “After all, if you can’t hear them speak, you don’t know enough about them and can’t tell their story. And that’s great guidance for writing fiction as well, by the way.”

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I’ve bullied the sonogram technician into revealing what he sees so we don’t drive ourselves crazy waiting for the radiologist.

The tech swivels his rolling chair to face us to say the lymph nodes in your gut are “the size of Jet-puffed marshmallows.”

Now I’m wishing I’d just left it alone. And I’ve got something new to add to my growing lists of forbidden foods. In the years to come, the smell of baking banana bread like yours will bring me to my knees. Just the thought of the too-green mint chocolate chip ice cream I coaxed you into eating that last summer will forever make my stomach turn.

“What did he say?” you elbow me, impatient.

I’m the filter for all medical news since your hearing was stolen by platinum chemotherapy two cancers ago. There’s a New Yorker cartoon in there somewhere—the professional violist rendered deaf overnight.

“The lymph nodes are in fact enlarged,” I yell, exaggerating each syllable as you study my lips, the blue mask pulled down.

My great fear is having to repeat myself.

Every time I’m called upon to translate, I struggle to decide which parts to reveal. You know me too well.

“Tell me every word,” you whisper. Your voice has a little less fight in it.

Maybe we could forget all about this. I’ll just lift your withering frame into my arms and we’ll escape through the sliding glass doors to the cold winter sun, just the two of us.

But you’re waiting, staring at me with those green-marble irises I have too.

“The technician said they are the size of jumbo marshmallows,” I say loudly, rolling my eyes so you’re aware how much I hate him. I’d like you to know it’s perfectly fine if you’d like to hate him too. He rises to his feet and leaves us alone in the room.

You and I know better than most what this news means.

Finally you speak but your voice is hoarse. I open a new bottle of water and bring it to your lips.

I move my ear close to your lips and you try again.

“A thing like this really makes you think twice about s’mores, doesn’t it?”

My class was in the unique position of reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in the year 1984. For a girl whose only experience of a totalitarian regime was that experienced within the nightmarish hallways of eighth grade, Orwell’s rich sequences of Technicolor prose proved a welcome escape.

Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Orwell’s Roses, is less a biography of the great novelist’s political theories and journalistic peregrinations than a pure celebration of the rich natural world found within Orwell’s writing.

Plagued by lifelong illness, the writer pushed himself to the outer limits of physical stamina to report from war-torn territories, experiences that solidified his horror of tyranny. In the spare, elegant prose we’ve learned to expect from Solnit, she details the myriad ways Orwell managed to find beauty in even the ugliest of places. Likewise, she pushes readers to treasure the small moments of grace to be found in the natural world, even now, in the face of climate catastrophes and global unrest.

I was grateful for the chance to speak to Rebecca Solnit on the phone.

¤

ANDREA HOAG: Before we discuss the book, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question about the writing life. What would your advice be to a young writer right now, just starting out?

REBECCA SOLNIT: If you aren’t going to make your living from your writing, I think the question must be: What’s most compatible with writing?

Contrary to popular belief, adjunct teaching is not necessarily it. I’ve always thought that there are a lot of stable, well-paid jobs outside the “pyramid scheme of academia.” I’ve often thought that’s what I would recommend to people: find something that doesn’t devour the energies you need for your work.

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I really never expected to make a living at writing. I had an editorial job out of grad school and expected to have a day job editing or something like that for the rest of my life. I left a job like that in 1988, and I just haven’t gotten around to getting another job since then. Thirty-three years this month, actually.

Congratulations!

Thank you. It’s a great surprise to me. I actually feel fortunate in some ways that everyone had very low expectations for me. I was just happy to reach another increment and another increment. I’m sure you’ve met a lot of young men who thought they were going to write the great American novel or otherwise were hugely ambitious, then they weren’t interested in doing all the necessary stuff in between, and so they just … didn’t.

With me, I began by publishing 800-word pieces, which was so exciting. Then I built up to 1,500-word pieces, which felt amazing. Then I did a 5,000-word piece. When I wrote my first book, I was terrified I wouldn’t find that doable. I told myself: if I can write an essay, I can write a chapter. Essentially, 17 chapters was like writing 17 essays and I realized I could do it. One thing led to another.

In Orwell’s Roses, there is a discussion of an essay of his, “Why I Write,” in which he discusses his desire to maintain his childhood worldview. You just mentioned people having low expectations of you. In spite of that, have you managed to maintain your own baseline childhood worldview?

Yes and no. Before I learned to read, I was in love with places in the natural world. I was in love with stories. And then I learned how to read and fell in love with books and the autonomous access to stories. Pretty soon I was writing them myself. So, in that way, very little has changed.

I was brought up with a kind of dismal misogyny and with what I think of often in relation to my family — and a lot of other people — as the capitalism of the heart. In other words, the less you give, the more you have. That way of thinking comes from an inner poverty. I hope and aspire to have left that behind me. But my interests from childhood are still there.

The childhood interests Orwell was talking about were his passion for the natural world. He had that in great intensity as a child and never lost that. It was with him until the end. He died with a fishing rod in his hospital room, hoping to fish at the sanatorium he was supposed to fly off to.

There are so many things that, in my mind, and I’m assuming yours, too, he got dead-right, but the one thing that did surprise me, not only in Orwell’s Roses, but in other biographies I’ve read, was that he did not treat his first wife, Eileen, quite as well as he might have, something he readily admitted. In the book, you quote a letter she wrote early in the marriage that I confess I found humorous. Eileen apologizes to the recipient for not having written sooner, but she’d been so busy with Orwell she assumed she would have to wait for the “murder or the separation” before she could dash off a few lines. Having said that, should we institute some sort of statute of limitations on great men of the past who behaved poorly? How do we reconcile his personal limitations?

You know, they were pretty committed to each other! She was writing him loving letters on her deathbed. He was devastated when she died. As he said to a friend, it was a real marriage, meaning they were really connected and committed. He wasn’t always faithful. Orwell himself said he could have been better, which is more than a lot of men ever admit, as we all know.

But I don’t think this is Norman Mailer, Picasso–level misogyny. I think it’s just ordinary selfishness, ordinary opportunism, and for me, it didn’t make a huge impact. Like Orwell said of Gandhi, “Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”

He wasn’t a saint, but he was also not a horrible person as far as I could tell, and the record is full of men who were. And you know, the recent controversy about the Philip Roth biography business was really very much about that: men who genuinely hate women, who harm and disempower them. Orwell was not by any measure a feminist — he could have learned a lot more from his suffragist aunts — but I do think he was a fundamentally decent person.

Since you mentioned the scandal surrounding Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth biography, as soon as I heard it was being pulled from the shelves, I quickly downloaded the audiobook version. I suppose when someone tells me I’m not going to be able to read a book, the first thing I’m going to do is rush out and read it. But I have to ask: Where do you stand on even entertaining the idea of reading an author like Blake Bailey, accused of some fairly egregious things where women are concerned? Did you read it? Would you read it?

I did not read it, mainly because I dislike Philip Roth. I don’t want to spend more time with him. I do think it’s hilarious Roth picked his own biographer, kind of rigging the game, assuming someone he chose would look favorably on things they shouldn’t. It feels like history played a huge joke on Roth, in that the person he thought would treat him well turned out to be accused of some pretty horrific behavior toward women. I have to say I kind of enjoyed the scandal.

The karmic justice of it.

But it’s not even like it happened accidentally. I think Roth wanted someone who would “go light” on his misogyny, and who better to go light on a misogynist than another misogynist? This is an era in which we occasionally punish misogynists for their misogyny. So there you go, all tied up with a bow!

It feels really perfect in terms of cementing Roth’s legacy.

[Laughs.] Lots of cement!

You note that Orwell believed paradise was behind him.

There are always exceptions to “everyone is either X or Y,” but most writers are either utopians or arcadians. Utopians believe that technology and the manipulation of nature will bring about a better world, and that way of thinking was a huge force in Orwell’s time. This idea that came from so many places, from the hyper-capitalists (remember, Diego Rivera was painting for Ford and Rockefeller!), to the Soviet Union, was that we were going to conquer nature itself, and industrialize and create this world that had never existed before. Of course, there were always people who were skeptical of it, who felt that small societies, traditional societies, earth-bound societies, were better. William Morris, for example, thought this way, and I think Orwell had a great deal in common with him. It wasn’t that they were thinking about the limits on social roles; Orwell was not nostalgic for feudalism, but he was very cognizant of the fact that women fared far better in the intact, pre-enclosure peasantry than they did in the industrial era. The standard of living went down, self-determination decreased, and a lot of traditional culture went downhill.

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He was not nostalgic for feudalism and traditional roles and hierarchy. He was cognizant of what people wanted to escape about the past, but also thought the old agrarian world was better than the new industrial world. I think there are a lot of ways we can agree with him, especially as we sit here on the brink of climate catastrophe.

I was just speaking with an Englishman this weekend about the Britain that I think young people don’t remember: London was black with coal. Glasgow, which I visited in 1976 when I was 15, was black with coal. Even in the early ’80s when I reached Dublin, it was black with coal smoke. There was just this sheer direct toxic foulness about that old coal era.

One of the things I found quite amusing when I was writing this book is that most people think that moving to a remote Scottish island was some kind of suicidal madness for Orwell, as if staying in London would have been the perfectly reasonable thing to do. London in those years had an air quality comparable to modern-day Shanghai or New Delhi.

He moved to a place with very clean fresh air. Very far from medical care and everything else, but for a man suffering from lifelong respiratory illnesses, London would have been an incredibly deadly place.

Two years later, the “great smog” would kill, they estimate now, approximately 12,000 people. Another happened right before he left, in 1946.

Yet even so, those days almost appear to be an Eden looking back from a contemporary 2021 perspective. Without being too depressing, do you feel any optimism that our current environmental efforts, such as they are, will make a difference?

I work on climate issues, I’m on the board of Oil Change International, a major climate activist group, and I’ve been paying a lot of careful attention to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and the report that was just released.

As I wrote in Orwell’s Roses, even though you had the organized toxicity of coal burning in densely populated regions, in Orwell’s time we had not yet burned enough fossil fuels to raise the parts per million of carbon above a safe level. I was born 11 years after he died. For perspective, the maximum safe level defined by Professor James Hansen is 350 parts per million, which is why the environmental group 350.org chose that number as its name.

That was before Rachel Carson, and a lot of people were dumping toxins into rivers. There were no pollution controls in his time, and human beings were recklessly “fouling the nest,” but it hadn’t progressed to the point it has now. The Amazon was still intact. The polar ice caps seemed permanently stable. The pH of the ocean hadn’t begun to shift. There were environmental problems in Orwell’s time, but climate change was not one of them.

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It’s a very separate topic from the book, but the IPCC report that just came out depicts the dire situation we are in, and for people following the scientific information all along this wasn’t really new information, yet they do talk about the possibility that we can stop and reverse it if we do what we know that we should do, and do it now. Climate organizers know how to do it, and all the obstacles to these changes are political. We need to destroy the fossil fuel industry and stop the use of fossil fuels in the next decade. We need to go carbon neutral. If we can protect enough forests and plant enough trees and go beyond being carbon neutral, we could actually reverse climate change.

It really just depends on whether we have the popular will to do it. It is obviously a long-shot at this point, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

I never describe myself as an optimist. An optimist is someone who thinks things will be all right no matter what. It is the flip side of being a pessimist, which means thinking everything will be bad no matter what. What I am is hopeful. Being hopeful means there are possibilities, but it is up to us to seize them and make something of them. We will see.

It is actually Glasgow, that town that was so black from coal when I saw it in the 1970s, where the UN climate change conference COP26 will happen early November, and the world needs to make a massive commitment at that point. We are running out of time. We are not out of time. But we are running out of time.

Returning to the book, you discuss a scene in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory where the lifetime lepidopterist encounters a fellow hiker emerging from the woods and asks if he’d seen many butterflies on the trail. The hiker replies: “None!” and Nabokov goes on to see beautiful swarms of butterflies during his walk.

I first read Speak, Memory when I was young, and that was such a memorable passage for me because it’s such a beautiful illustration of the principle that “you see what you are looking for.” This relates to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I first read as a teenager, and have reread many times since. It was really extraordinary to go back and read it again with the “new equipment” of having a sense of an Arcadian Orwell, Orwell the passionate gardener, someone who is not nearly as grim and pessimistic as he’s always been made out to be. Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four and finding that, although the torture is still there, the totalitarianism is still there, the propaganda is still there, the counter he offers is not just resistance to that in the blankest way, but these moments of pleasure Winston Smith seizes that are all so often moments of beauty, moments in the natural world. It was surprising to find out, on this reading, how lush the novel was, how it describes a range of pleasures that mattered to Winston Smith and mattered to Orwell … from the golden country to the coral paperweight, to the birds singing.

And going back to read Nineteen Eighty-Four again, I found that it actually really lined up with that different sense of Orwell I’d gained by running into his roses. I asked myself: what does it mean that this famous voice against totalitarianism planted roses and was a great gardener and lover of the natural world? These little moments are the antidote to Big Brother’s world … these little cracks in the totalitarian world in which you have erotic and emotional life and love and action and a life of the senses and these things that are beautiful.

Eight years before this bone-and-ice cream fantasy could come to fruition, I was lying in a Kansas hospital bed with a MRSA infection spreading across the abandoned cavity most recently occupied by my breasts. At 32, with small children, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of invasive lobular breast cancer. And because all that wasn’t enough fun for one calendar year, I also got divorced. Instead of focusing on my health, though, all I cared about was one utterly outlandish thing: Living long enough to take my children to Italy.

Seven years later, living in an apartment sandwiched between noisy college kids, I was no closer to this fanciful goal. We were living beneath the poverty line; how could I afford a trip to Italy?

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When I returned to the Young Survivors support group every month, there was always another empty seat at the conference table. Moms just like me, even those who had passed that magic 5-year survival mark, were dying. It was clear I needed to take my children to Italy for their fill of arts and culture. Immediately.

It was always going to be Venice. I figure la Serenissima and I have a lot in common: We’ve both been invaded, scarred and conquered. And just like me, Venice is constantly wondering when her time will be up.

It takes me a solid year to save the extra money we need. I write book reviews for 11 publications, sell my collection of art books, clip coupons, save every penny of my tax refund. One week I review five books in five days, a new personal record, speed-reading the novels during school pickup, in the pediatrician’s office, during basketball practices. I scrawl my reviews longhand on the back of doctor’s bill envelopes, then transcribe my work into the computer late into the night once my kids are asleep.

I research the cheapest places to stay and find a convent with spartan rooms, no breakfast and a 10 p.m. curfew. We aren’t Catholic, but it’s the only place I can afford. When Alana, 14, and Miles, 10, finally kiss their father goodbye at the airport, sling their backpacks on and hold hands through security, I’ve calculated we have $27 a day for food.

Our morning routine is as follows: Argue bitterly until 8 a.m., leave the convent for the day by 8:30, then stop at the cappuccino-scented cafe next door for a glorious, chocolate-filled ciambella. We aren’t sleeping well; our cots are rock-hard and I’m pretty sure they’ve been in service at this convent since the First World War. The nuns, bless them, think we are lunatics. They are right.

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This particular day, I have a half-dozen free activities mapped out. I’m careful to lay out my plans at the exact moment the children’s mouths are filled with pastry, to cut down on complaints. During morning briefings, I always lead with the saint whose remains they’ll spy that day through a centuries-old reliquary. Morbid? Maybe. But I know my audience

.

“I’m starving!” Miles sobs as we round the bend to the next cafe displaying a bounty of pastry options. If Miles were telling this story, he would report he’s never received a solid meal in my care.

“Fine,” I sigh, realizing we’ve already dispensed with one-third of our daily allotment and it isn’t even 10 a.m. I turn my back on the kids to buy them a treat.

When the cashier hands me my change, I spin around to find both kids have vanished.

Prickly heat spreads up my legs in panic before I spot them on their hands and knees, crawling across filthy pavestones. But why?

A Venetian matron is giving my children directions as she points to the ground. She’s in her 90s, her hair dyed the color of dried apricots. She wears a formal suit, carefully pressed, blue as a Canaletto sky.

“Her necklace broke!” Miles yells.

“Mommy, the pearls are everywhere!” Alana chimes in, her hand cupped with treasure like something you might see behind glass in the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s square.

My daughter empties her booty into the woman’s outstretched hand.

And then it’s Miles’s turn.

In his enthusiasm, a few pearls get stuck inside his clammy hand before bouncing back down to the cobblestones, rolling in every direction.

I reach inside my fanny pack to uncrumple the glassine bag from my first brioche of the day.

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“Put them in here!”

The signora’s eyes are hidden behind enormous brown sunglasses, but she nods.

Hundreds of pearls are still in motion between people’s feet, escaping into tiny cracks. With her walking stick, the signora is pointing in the direction she came from, and it’s clear she has marked her path with a telltale track of freshwater bread crumbs.

Alana shoots me a proud smile as she adds her next handful to the signora’s crumpled bag.

“Grazie, grazie,” the old woman whispers, a faint smile finally appearing on her face. I feel panicky watching the kids growing grubby on their hands and knees. Miles beams up at me as he worries an entire row of trapped pearls out of a crevasse with someone’s discarded toothpick. I swear I was never one of those crazy germ-phobic moms until that MRSA infection tried to kill me. I force myself not to spoil the moment by pulling out my bottle of hand sanitizer.

“Le perle appartenevano a mia madre e mia nonna prima di lei,” the signora finally tells me, placing her ancient hand on my arm.

The pearls belonged to my mother, and my grandmother before her …

After the final pearl is recaptured, we are a trio again, continuing on toward the day’s promised saint. As we parted from the lovely old woman, her reserve melted suddenly as we said farewell. Without being asked, the children hugged her, and she kissed them goodbye.

“I was so proud of you two! That necklace has been in her family for generations.”

I want to remark upon how nice it is the woman wears her pearls as she goes about her daily life instead of just saving them for special occasions. Perhaps she realized the necklace should be enjoyed every day instead of being locked away. I want to tell these sweet kids what a great metaphor that is for life: bad things happen all the time. You can’t allow that to make you fearful. Things you treasure — pearls, breasts, a marriage — these things can disappear any time. All that matters is that you keep moving forward.

We stop beneath a madonella, a small shrine built into the corner of an old building. The outdoor altar displays a faded painting of the Virgin Mary, protected by curved glass fogged over with centuries of grime. Red wax from a long-extinguished prayer candle has melted into the cracks below.

I stop myself from turning this into a teachable moment. Besides, Alana is busy framing a picture in the viewfinder of her camera, humming to herself. Miles happily drums his hands on the ancient marble cistern in the middle of the piazza polished to a high gloss by decades of old men’s bottoms.

A part of me wants to lecture my children on the importance of doing everything in their power to survive, just as the city of Venice herself has managed to endure for so many centuries.

Still, I force myself to be silent.

I have the feeling they already know.

Miles is a sophomore, so this isn’t his first winter on these great northern plains, and I can’t help but wonder if things had gone a little differently, perhaps he would have wound up at the University of South Dakota on a double-bass scholarship instead of basketball. Both he and his sister, Alana, inherited their grandparents’ germline genetic gifts for music.

The town of Vermillion, and surely one must call it a town, is a collection of bars and churches and modest but neat-as-a-pin homes huddling in the shadows of the bucolic university. During the warm months, of which there are not many, the campus is lush and green and walkable. During the interminable winters, the school’s sainted grounds workers wake in the dark dawn to push new snow into the ever-growing 10-foot walls of ice that never melt off completely until Spring. Even then, it takes weeks for these prairie icebergs to melt down on the lush campus fields, late into May.

Surrounded by corn and sorghum fields, Vermillion seems at first an unlikely place for settlers to have chosen. My Nordic forebears, too, settled near here more than a century earlier, and I’ve always assumed that a beautiful South Dakota September conned that group of austere Scandinavians into thinking these wide-open rolling hills could be an ideal place to make a go of it.

Most of all, though, Vermillion is the whitest town* I have ever visited.

(*Editorial note: Miles’s experience of being an African American man attending school in a less than diverse place is not my own story to tell. It will always be my chief goal, whether successfully realized or not, to limit my writing to my own personal lived experience)

As the well-trained daughter of an academic family, I’ve always taught my own children that the first thing you should do in a new class is, one: sit in the front row, and two, read the class syllabus, cover-to-cover. I was forced to abandon this first teaching as Miles grew into his full 6’10” frame: he prefers to sit in the back row with his teammates, mainly so that he can fold himself into the toddler-sized classroom desks without an audience of onlookers behind him. Sometimes the only way he can get comfortable is by stretching his endless legs out into the classroom aisle. One of the first things I noticed when I first visited in the winter months: all the athletes on campus are marked out by their matching standard-issue USD Coyotes full length coats. (I can always tell which kids hail from Northern states because they wear shorts, Yeezy slides, and socks beneath their impressively puffy down parkas, even when the temps are in the single-digits.)

As the text from my son pings into my phone, I can almost hear Miles’s jolly basso profundo voice:

“My professor got his PhD in musicology from the University of Kansas!”

Miles knows I’ll enjoy the small-worldy-ness of this. And he knows I’ll be happy he really read the syllabus.

A bit of background: Miles and Alana’s grandfather, the late Charles Kelso Hoag, taught music theory, composition, and double-bass at the University of Kansas from the late 1960s until his retirement.

Both my parents were professional musicians, my late mother, Mary Tuven, played the viola in the Kansas City Symphony for decades. As a child growing up in a musical family in Lawrence, Kansas, I often felt the pressure to achieve musically myself. I also felt overwhelmed, and–OK, I’ll say it–maybe even just a little bit creeped out by the sort of visceral physical reaction both my parents had to the music they loved. To me, it felt, as my own kids might say, EXTRA AF, the way my normally coolly Nordic mother’s eyes would fill with tears when she played her collection of records by the German baritone singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Daddy’s face would glow at the dinner table as he gesticulated with his hanky and described the night that his idol, Louis Armstrong, brought an entirely White crowd to their knees in a northeastern Iowa DeMolay ballroom more than 50 years before.

The trope of the long-married couple being able to finish each other’s sentences had a twist in my family. One of them could begin humming a Paul Hindemith or Charles Ives melody while the other caught the vibe as they cooked dinner, unthinkingly joining in to finish the musical phrase. The two worshipped at the altar at Edvard Grieg, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg; an enduring memory from my childhood is seeing their blonde heads bowed together as if in prayer over a music score Daddy brought home that evening from KU’s music library. And I loved that for them.

But I did learn something pivotal during the lonesome summer my parents balked at buying me the Grease record I pined for. I wanted to be like my peers: crooning along to the voices of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta as the record of my dreams spun on the family record player. I learned it’s important to find something to appreciate in the music your children are interested in.

And so, later, when Alana burst into my bedroom to plop on my bed and play a new song by her then-favorite, Anees, I made a point of bopping my head, too. During the period of Miles’s fascination with all things Lil Uzi Vert, I prided myself on knowing each lyric before his favorite rapper even rapped it. When another favorite, Juice WRLD, died far too young, my own tears were genuine as we sat on the couch in the living room together re-listening to his entire oeuvre.

But popular music was not a part of my own life growing up, and I missed it. The most mainstream music that ever touched my parents’ turntable was the Beatles’ white album, Johnny Mathis, Simon & Garfunkel, and Peter, Paul & Mary, the latter because my father once spent a summer touring with PP and M up and down the eastern seaboard, long before I was born.

While I imagined the parents of the popular kids I loathed in high school slow-dancing in a country club to music you might hear on Top 40 radio, my parents spent their version of date night practicing their “signature song,” a duet by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf for viola and double-bass. I heard that particular Dittersdorf so many times as a kid it still lives rent-free in my brain as the soundtrack of my late 1980s psyche.

All of this may simply be a rather long-winded way of saying: I never got all that worked up over music the way my parents did.

What, you may ask, did I care about?

I cared about cats and horses and biographies of viragos from the Middle Ages. I cared about frogs and toads and snakes and fairy stories from Ireland hidden behind battered green book covers, slick-paged foreign fashion magazines I saved up for and bought at the Town Crier bookshop downtown with its vanilla-pipe-smoke smell and scratch-and-sniff children’s books.

My parents’ music was something I mostly felt I had to withstand. In general, music felt like something to have in the background while I did things I actually cared about: writing letters, painting my nails, journaling. Things my parents, at heart, regarded as rather trivial.

And then everything changed for me.

It happened on a monochromatic Kansas winter night in the 1980s. I tuned my clock radio to the local college station, KJHK. This station, still 90.7 in Lawrence, was my pre-internet lifeline to the outside world.

That night, there was a brand-new radio show debuting. One hour, once a week, all they played were artists in a genre I had never heard of before.

Reggae. Never having seen the word before in print, I wondered if perhaps it was an acronym of some sort.

“Ray-Gay?”

That night is forever magical to me now. It was the first time I understood why my parents felt so strongly about their music. It is no exaggeration to say my life would never be the same.

I think it’s important, especially for anyone under 40, to understand the lay of the land at the time. Without the internet, if you wanted to hear what might be regarded as an “obscure” singer, or a lesser-known song by say, Billie Holiday, or Ella Fitzgerald, you were forced to go to the library and request they send out for that particular album if they didn’t have it in their collection.

Saturdays in my childhood meant dinner in Kansas City before my mother’s evening symphony concert at the Lyric Theater downtown, which is where they played before the glorious “new” Kauffman Center was built. We went early enough in the afternoon we could browse Peaches records (RIP) in Westport, a place where my ordinarily frugal father might splurge to buy himself two–even three–jazz records to add to his collection. Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis.

If I had once greeted these journeys with the eye-rolling of a spoiled teenager, I now found myself flipping excitedly through the limited reggae offerings tucked into the dusty World Music section. Now I dreamt of being rich—hardly a family goal—just so that one day, I might be able to buy and listen to each and every one of these brightly colored green, red, gold album covers.

Only a few decades later now, my own children are able to experience music in a more immediate, self-directed way. And while (of course, ha!) Alana and Miles endured the same musical goalposts that characterized my own childhood—12 years of piano and then their “own” stringed instrument, predictably a viola for Alana and a double-bass for Miles—the new technology available allowed them to discover their own music on their own terms.

No delay waiting for inter-library loan. No battered old Panasonic tape recorder poised in front of the radio until the moment their favorite song came on so they could capture it on cassette. In one sitting, they could easily access the latest output of an obscure mumble rapper recording his work on SoundCloud in a non-descript Georgia basement, a folk duo from Lithuania delivered by the YouTube algorithm because Alana had searched for the alto-only part of a piece her choir was singing. They could even, in my father’s antique words, “call up” a 1940s BeBop tune Daddy had long played on the piano from a memory deeply etched on the wax grooves of his brain that he’d never actually known the name of until his tech-savvy grandchildren found it for him via Shazam.

It feels impossible, sometimes, to explain to my children how fortunate they are to have the (admittedly flawed) streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music on their telephones. On a lark, 24-hours a day, my children can type any name after a blinking cursor and instantly listen to whatever musician strikes their mood.

Also this:

Reggae wasn’t omnipresent in the popular imagination then as it is now. There are no maddening insurance commercials with bastardized reggae beats. Outside of larger urban environments, at least in my sleepy 1980s Midwest, it was hard to find Jamaican and Caribbean music on the airwaves.

That special night I first heard the Technicolor melodies over steel drumbeats emanating from the shitty little radio I purloined from my father’s basement workbench, I was hooked.

Instantly hooked.

From then on, I saved my telemarketing money for records.

I rented the VHS tape of Jimmy Cliff’s movie “The Harder They Fall” from Liberty Hall in downtown Lawrence so many times it would have been far more cost-effective to simply purchase it.

[Sidenote: Had I been a different kid: a way cooler kid who was tuned in to what was going on around me in local pop culture, I may have immersed myself in the famed music scene happening right then in my own Kansas back yard. Bands like the Meat Puppets, Fishbone, Sonic Youth, and Ice-T’s Body Count made Lawrence a fixed point in their touring universe, a must-play city on the map as they crisscrossed the country on former Greyhound buses converted into stale-beer scented touring vans. I maintain that I may be the only kid who came of age in Lawrence Kansas in the 1980s/1990s never to have darkened the door of the internationally famed Outhouse (RIP—now a BYOB strip club) for a punk rock show.]

Another small complaint, if you’ll allow it:

I was forbidden from playing “my music” loudly even in my room because my father complained that he was “composing music” and being able to hear anything else distracted him. Back then, this always struck me as a bit phony. Daddy would complain of this when he was folding laundry or cooking dinner or even just walking by my open door. I regarded the act of composition as something one did when actually seated at the piano. Only later, as an adult myself trying to finish an overdue book review, did I understand the way the mental work of creativity could be upset by outside interventions. This was driven home to me the day that a very young Miles showed his annoyance with my hours at the desk, seizing a rare opportunity when I took a phone call to sneak into my office and peel each plastic letter square from my laptop’s keyboard in a burst of crazy toddler strength.

But then one afternoon when I was 17, Daddy came home from “school” with an unusual question for me. Turns out, there was a PhD candidate doing his dissertation on the music of Bob Marley.

Would I play some of “my reggae” for him?

Up until that point, understandably, I had never been sought out for my authority on the topic of music in my house. To be taken seriously on any topic at all was a thrill. But to be taken seriously about my own personal obsession felt revolutionary to me!

After playing Bob Marley’s “Legend” album, I moved on to a few other artists I was becoming more interested in, just then: Black Uhuru, Steel Pulse, Peter Tosh. My father bowed his large crown of blonde curls as he listened to “Downpressor Man,” staring at the burgundy carpet of my floor, nodding every so often.

After an hour, Daddy thanked me quietly and left. Had he loved it like I did? I couldn’t tell. My father and I didn’t discuss the records together that afternoon. That was never really the point for me. The point was that he had asked.

Now my iPhone rings, breaking into my thoughts.

It’s Miles, my funny extrovert, FaceTiming me after class, looking jubilant, his new professor standing next to him. My son is beaming.

Dr. Moskowitz had known his grandfather!

Not only had he known my departed parents, he’d even done odd jobs for them around the house during his lean graduate school years. The tall fence that still encircles my family’s home today was constructed by young David Moskowitz.

I’ll never know if Miles’s teacher had a moment of confusion calculating what possible connection this lanky Black student towering over him could have to a seemingly unrelated White college professor he’d encountered decades before. After a few greetings thanks to the miracles of modern video calling, Miles signs off, so he won’t run late for practice.

A week later, I travel to Vermillion in a blizzard to visit him. When Miles jumps into my snow-covered car so we can eat dinner together in the town’s solitary Chinese restaurant, he hands me a book.

“It’s a gift from Dr. Moskowitz,” my son explains.

It’s a crisp new biography his professor has just published about Bob Marley.

You see, Bob Marley was once the subject of his PhD dissertation.