Free Composition

A month after acquiring a zippy, cute, and altogether charming Soul Red Crystal Metallic Mazda Miata MX-5 that I’ve named Mickey, I have become a lot more acquainted with our East County backroads, sideroads, and country roads. After all, what’s the point in having a car like Mickey if you don’t take him out for joyrides? Mickey isn’t for shopping or commuting or anything remotely humdrum. Mickey’s for the open road, the more open the better, wind in the hair and bugs in the teeth, as they say.

A few observations gleaned from the past month’s daily expeditions hither and yon:

I’m a much better driver than I was. Before Mickey I was a plain vanilla driver, safe and sound and not particularly adventuresome. I have always enjoyed driving and so I pay attention and all that. But now I take Mickey out daily as the weather permits, often on curvy affairs such as Marsh Creek Road, and acquire practice in squiring this itty-bitty, lightweight car around the many bends and curves with comfort, getting the rhythm of the clutch and accelerator and shifter just so, and in general improving my overall handling of a vehicle. Not being daredevil or foolish—there are plenty of other people to do that for me. Just honing my skills.

Cami, my Camry XLE, feels huge. She never used to feel huge. Now she feels huge. Driving Cami remains a pleasure as always; she’s one smooth ride, always cooperative, always friendly. And powerful. I have to remind myself that she has way more horsepower than Mickey and, since she’s higher and more insulated, tends to discount perceived velocity. In Mickey, 45 mph is a romp. In Cami, 45 mph barely registers as movement. Thus one must practice vigilance.

A manual gearshift is da bomb on winding roads. That’s because I can keep my foot off the brake and downshift to both slow down and increase the engine’s grip on a tight curve. Then I can upshift once the coast is clear, letting Mickey whizz along with a self-satisfied purr.

Caravans are more noticeable. By ‘caravan’ I mean a line of cars snaking along two-lane, no-pass roads such as Marsh Creek Road, Deer Valley Road, or Bailey Road, all bogged down behind a somnolent lead car that just crawls along and brakes nervously for every curve or downhill slope. Crawler cars can be almost any make and model, but in my experience the most common are family minivans like Pacificas, elderly chug-a-wug-a pickup trucks, top-heavy boxes such as Ford Econolines, and Priuses. Their excessive caution is by and large understandable; you just try skippering a Pacifica down Marsh Creek Road from Clayton to Brentwood without seasickness. Priuses, however, are light cars with low centers of gravity. They really should be able to take the curves with panache. I guess those Prius drivers don’t want to spill their vegan herbal tea.

I just don’t grok certain statements by our current President regarding American suburbia. To hear him talk you’d think that it’s all Mayfield, where the Cleavers raised Wally and Beaver on Mapleton Drive, where everybody has a stay-at-home Mom who wears high heels and pearls in the kitchen, where Dad arrives home from work soon after 5:00 PM, where everybody’s white and middle class, where most families are two-parent nuclear.

But Mayfield was a fiction even back in the 1950s. I grew up in suburbia: first Spring Branch on the west side of Houston, then Westcliff on the west side of Fort Worth, finally Applewood on the west side of Denver. They were all upstanding places to live. But by no means were they filled with suburban housewives and working Dads, nor were they Anglo-Saxon across the board, nor were they homogenous.

After a lifetime in San Francisco I have returned to my natural suburban habitat, this time on the far eastern edge of the SF Bay Area. Brentwood is in many ways the quintessential American suburb: long a Delta farm town, it saw rapid suburban evolution starting in the 1990s. Although many of the farms, vineyards, and orchards have survived the transformation, Brentwood has morphed into a small city of landscaped developments dotted with parks and schools and shopping malls, traversed via wide streets. Quiet, safe, and clean, it’s a haven for families with kids, for retirees, really for anyone seeking escape from the grittier realities and/or stratospheric pricing of inner Bay Area cities such as San Francisco or Oakland. It’s as pleasant a place to live as one could possibly imagine.

My street is a one-block cul-de-sac, built in the early 1990s and lined with sixteen houses of similar design, on three basic floor plans. Each house has two stories with a minimum of four bedrooms; each is on a 6000-some-odd square-foot lot, each has a full front yard and back yard with side yards/paths, each has a three-car garage, each is in a contemporary Mediterranean design with red tile roof and stucco exterior. The street is old enough for the trees to have grown to full height but is still reasonably new, if perhaps getting on a bit by suburban standards. It’s a lovely little street, homey and welcoming.

It looks like a California version of Mapleton Drive. But is it sixteen houses of Cleavers? No way. Consider:

Two black families, one Caribbean and the other Californian, one with kids
Four young-to-middle-aged couples, one Asian, one Hispanic/Anglo mix, all with children, all with both parents working
Three retired couples, two Hispanic, with grown kids and grandkids who come & go
An unmarried Afghani couple with a son; the woman works, the man does not
A working divorced woman with two daughters
An indolent older man with a live-in handyman/charity case and two dubious lodgers
A divorced/remarried Hispanic man who lives elsewhere and uses his house for storage
A retired widower who lives alone
A young-ish couple, both working, no kids
A working single man (me)

Quite the diverse little neighborhood, but these days altogether typical of suburbia. Definitely not a place where suburban housewife par excellence June Cleaver stands over her immaculate kitchen sink and clutches her pearls in dismay over the thought of somebody different moving in and chipping away at her enviable quality of life. If our folk fret about anything, it’s that our geographical area needs more fire stations, and that Brentwood lacks a full-service hospital. That’s what matters to us. The ignorant flapdoodle of an overprivileged duffer is as unwelcome as it is meaningless.

It has been observed that the regular driving of a sports car can provide a boost to one’s emotional well-being. I’ll grant that a study backing up that observation was funded by a company that just happens to make several well-regarded sports cars. Motivations notwithstanding, they’re right. It’s something that people who are neutral about cars just don’t get: driving a car can be fun, and it can be therapeutic. Especially a sports car.

Back in the days of my Houston childhood, our local Kroger grocery store offered a plastic auto dashboard and steering wheel toy, complete with battery-powered blinkers and a horn. It was flimsy junk, but I really really wanted it anyway. To my delight it showed up under the Christmas tree. I would spend uncounted hours turning the wheel and honking my horn and using my turn signals, all the while imagining that I was driving along, just like my folks did in their cars down our wide suburban streets.

I was always interested in driving, and cars to a lesser extent. I’m no hardcore aficionado, no weekend garage warrior lovingly restoring some rusty old heap to prime condition and then some. I appreciate cars, from big luxury affairs to roadsters. I view them as pleasurable goodies, and not just necessary devices to get from A to B. Alas, the urban reality of San Francisco limited me to a single car, and it was in my best interests to select for durability and ease of repair. That doesn’t mean I haven’t loved the cars I’ve had—especially a gazelle-like Honda Civic that I traded in for the marvelous Toyota Camry XLE that is my faithful, comfortable, and utterly reliable mainstay. But in my heart of hearts I’ve always wanted a sports car, a roadster, a trippy zippy dazzler of a car that’s all fun and no business.

A relocation to suburbia brought the possibility of a second car into sharp focus. Ergo: a Mazda MX-5 Miata Club, in Soul Red Crystal Metallic paint with a handful of spiffy upgrades as to wheels, brakes, suspension, and seats. I got me a bonafide roadster, a glowing red two-seater convertible with awesome handling and a coltish disposition that renders even a simple drive down the street an enjoyable event. I was obliged re-acquaint myself with a stick shift after a three-decade-plus hiatus, an occasionally embarrassing process as I repeatedly stalled my new joyboy puppycar during our first half hour together. I got a lot better once I realized that I had been trying to start from 3rd gear instead of 1st. Progress has been rapid. I’m back in the 6-speed manual saddle and enjoying the added control and flexibility immensely.

But more importantly I’m re-discovering the basic pleasure of maneuvering a car around. It’s almost as though that little kid with the plastic dashboard/steering wheel combo never really left me. Sometimes I must restrain myself lest I go honk-honk all the time and flip the turn signals left and right at will. However, I do not have to restrain myself from leaping off an intersection like a springbok and darting down the street, taking a curve at a nice clip, and relishing the curvy country roads that abound in these parts. California in the summertime: golden hills, olive green trees, crystal blue skies. And me in my Soul Red Crystal Metallic roadster, having a whale of a good time while staving off any hint of becoming a cautious, nervous little old man before my time.

Optimist: a 61-year-old man who takes out a 30-year mortgage.

That’s me. Five years ago I signed on the dotted line (many, many dotted lines) and took possession of a goodly-sized house in Far Outerburbia, well away from San Francisco’s churn and squalor and tension and cacophony. Having determined that my well-being was at stake, I went into home-buying with my mind made up, my finances in order, and my ducks in a row.

Any regrets? Not a one. My house is well-nigh perfect for me. It’s in a sweet little suburban city that I have come to cherish. The price was just right. It has proven to be an excellent investment.

The house was 24 years old at the time of adoption. I am the third owner. The original owners left it mostly alone throughout their 19-year stewardship save for some worthwhile improvements: linoleum banished in favor of wood floors, new carpet, and a replaced back deck made of Trex after the wood original fell prey to rot. The second owners barely inhabited it during their five years, their home-making genes apparently dormant. Two big bumptious dogs seem to have called most of the housekeeping shots.

Escrow-period inspections revealed nothing particularly alarming, so upon taking possession I could move right in and begin making it my own house from within. That was a good thing. I didn’t really know at first just what, if anything, I was all that keen to upgrade. I needed time to adjust, to worm my way in, to amplify my aspiration to match my surroundings before making any big decisions. At first I limited myself to the no-brainers—replacing several worn-out power outlets, having the recalcitrant patio door serviced, that sort of thing. Replacing all of the light bulbs with LEDs. Repainting the five rooms that the previous owners had rendered garish. Cleaning, cleaning, and cleaning yet again.

As familiarity and comfort rose, so did ambition. I prepared my wish list, and before long I got to it. Gradually I acquired all the requisite contacts and relationships: plumbers, electricians, landscapers, gardeners, handymen, haulers, contractors, vendors. I wrote a lot of checks.

As Year Five draws to a close, that first list is pretty much a done deal. It included some sizable (and costly) upgrades. I haven’t regretted the expense for so much as a millisecond.

It was a good house to begin with. Five years in, it’s a dandy house. Comfortable, sparkling clean, and well furnished, it envelops, supports, and cuddles me. It is my house, my home, my space, as meticulously fitted to me as a custom-tailored dress shirt. Anything that required upgrading or replacing has been upgraded or replaced. Everything works. This is a house that throws no curves. Neither grand nor imposing, it is gracious and congenial.

Its overall afflatus is appealing, welcoming, and warm. And consistently so. There are no closed-off junk rooms or brooding, contradictory closets. Ample windows (35 in all, plus patio door) provide abundant light so I have restricted draperies to only a few strategic windows. It’s a house full of possessions, but judicious organization banishes any clutter. Paint colors range from plain white to warm flesh-like tones. The golden oak woodwork—cabinets, drawers, bannisters, railings, etc.—glows. Even the roomy three-car garage is a model of cleanliness and order.

The grounds are pleasant throughout, especially the back yard with its lush flower garden, wraparound deck, brick patio, and enclosing trees. A once-desolate side yard has become a dryscape garden that radiates a subtle allure. The front ‘curb appeal’ is pronounced. This is the home of somebody who really cares, it announces. People notice the lush velvet lawn, the freshly-painted exterior, the new windows, the meticulously maintained shrubbery, the spiffy fences and gates, the immaculate driveway and sidewalk. Their compliments are gratifying. I’m pleased that folks enjoy viewing and visiting my home. But I’ve done it all for me.

My list for the second five years is prepared. We’ll see where that one stands once the summer of 2025 rolls by.

Nobody used to have much of a handle on distance learning. Oh, it was around, mostly by way of online courses that served for various credentialing programs or training for office skills. While some of the institutions were worthy and the teachers qualified, lax accreditation practices allowed appalling lapses of elementary pedagogic integrity. To call it a mixed bag is putting it mildly.

As to acquiring professional chops, online just wasn’t it. To achieve that, you needed a bonafide physical college or university, and the more prestigious the better in your chosen field. Long, painstaking training. Pitfalls to be overcome. Time and bother. Expense. If your intention was to become a federal judge or a doctor or an epidemiologist or the concertmaster of a great orchestra, there was no way on Earth that an online degree was going to cut it. Nobody would take you seriously, and with good reason. In my profession, worthwhile supplicants go to Juilliard, to Curtis, to NEC, to my beloved San Francisco Conservatory of Music, to Michigan, to Indiana, to Oberlin, to Rice, etc. They might satisfy a few breadth/humanities requirements via distance learning, but that’s about it. The rest has evolved over centuries of practice, and it’s resolutely up close and personal. Today’s conservatories aren’t really all that different from their 17th century Neapolitan ancestors. (Except for the castrated teenagers. And bully for that.)

Then came Covid-19 midway through the Spring 2020 term and we conservatory denizens moved online. August professors in their dual-Steinway studios and well-equipped classrooms were obliged to become talking-head-plus-algorithms in a Zoom/FaceTime/Google Meeting screen box. Some intrepid types had already gotten there via globe-spanning Internet master classes. But many had never even considered the possibility or had the slightest idea how to go about it. Some schools dropped their faculty into the river without any preparation save a vague directive to swim, and by the way, be sure to provide reassurance and guidance to your students. And maintain educational standards.

I am blessed with a wise and compassionate administration. An extended spring break afforded space and time. Highly experienced colleagues—this is an institution with a jim-dandy music technology program—provided expert guidance. I heard no wailing, saw no gnashing of teeth. We recognized the challenge, and we fell to it. Stumbles and bumbles there were a-plenty at first. But we learned, we practiced, we grew.

And it’s working. We’re maintaining our enviable artistic and educational standards. Will I ever think that online teaching is an improvement over in-person? Poppycock. The Royal Touch is integral to our traditional method of training, placebo effect or no placebo effect. Apprentices need to sit beside their masters, listen to them breathe, watch their hands move, read their body language, hear subtle differences in tone. Teachers ditto with their students, classroom and studio alike. Students need to play and sing for each other, make music together, perform (live!) in public, debate and compete and criticize. But if certain aspects of our tradition pose a deadly risk, as they do at present, then we will adjust. We’re artists, not fools.

Certain of my classes made the shift almost effortlessly. I run my weekly advanced analysis class as a seminar in which I put that week’s homework submissions up on a flat-screen TV as each student presents the work in turn, with commentary from me and open discussion. It’s a fine approach for a small group of high-roller types who have committed to a course with a high work load and equally high expectations.

Translation to online instruction via Zoom posed little difficulty. The students continued to submit their weekly assignments to the same ol’ Google Drive as always. A Zoom share replaced the flat-screen TV. The student presented, I commented, the class discussed. My training presentations, formerly handled via whiteboard with staff lines, dry-erase markers, and the piano, moved to my iPad running GoodNotes on a Zoom share, accompanied by my piano at home. I saved my GoodNotes whiteboards for future reference. All Zoom sessions are recorded by my institution, so students could review or catch it at another time if geography or Internet fecklessness had thrown up barriers.

To be sure, my performance-oriented subjects required considerable tinkering and diddling. I had to give up ensemble solfège, to give one example. But I found substitutes—“music minus one” exercises that my students could solfège, record, and submit, recordings for dictation exercises, pre-recorded Keynote presentations, extra scores posted as PDFs for study. My departmental colleagues shared their strategies. We talked and planned and evaluated. It worked. And it will work again this fall semester as we continue exploring the formerly unthinkable practice of transferring a tradition-bound, master-apprentice educational model to an online environment.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world and its impact will be felt for a generation if not longer. It has also changed higher ed. There will be no flipping of a switch and blithely returning to the pre-Covid educational world. And that will be, ultimately, a good thing. Disruptions and shakeups are integral parts of anything worthwhile. It’s our choice: gripe and moan and fault-find, or take the opportunity for growth and reflection.

I choose the latter.

A recent post, available here, was devoted to the joys and comforts of housekeeping. A followup is in order, this time on the subject of gardening, a dialect of housekeeping that dwells in its own separate bailiwick.

A disclaimer: I’m a neophyte gardener, having taken up the pursuit only upon buying my home out here in Far Outerburbia in the San Francisco Bay Delta region where there’s room to have lawns and gardens. Upon taking possession of my house I also took possession of an assortment of trees, shrubs, and plants. Some, such as the magisterial Arizona ash tree in the front yard, were thriving. Others, such as a spindly and prickly hawthorne bush by the back yard gate, were scrawny and unappealing. It wasn’t quite a blank canvas, but it was miles from being the verdant sanctuary I envisioned. I would need time and practice. Five years later that refuge exists, still very much a work in progress, but a worthy and inspiring space.

More often than not the plants themselves were my best teachers. That is especially true of the roses, of which there were about an even dozen in three locations throughout the backyard: five by the side fence, two along the deck railing, and the remainder lined up along the back of the house. None were in all that great of condition but at the time I didn’t know that. I just knew that I had mature roses and that I was very happy about that. I read up a bit and learned about deadheading, i.e., trimming off the spent blossoms so the plant won’t expend needless energy on making seeds. I was ever-so cautious at first: cutting the plant seemed invasive, wrong somehow. I flashed on images of Morticia Addams cutting off blossoms, leaving bare sticks. But I knew it had to be done, so I did it.

I also figured that the previous owners may not have fertilized the roses, and I knew for sure that plants need those salts and minerals and such. So I got rose fertilizer and applied it, and within a few weeks I began seeing a response. Aha, I thought: it’s called “rose food” for a reason. Those poor babies were hungry.

In the late fall I began to notice black spots on the rose leaves. That can’t be right, I thought, especially given the way those black-spot leaves soon yellowed and dropped off. Me being me, I looked it up and quickly discovered that black spot fungus is a serious affliction. I researched remedies. I learned that you must snip off the afflicted leaves once they’ve got the black spot fungus, but the best cure is prevention: make sure they don’t get it in the first place. Check and double-check; by my second season I had banished it from the garden via application of Bayer 3-in-1, a miraculous concoction that not only demolishes black spot fungus, white powder mildew, rose leaf rust, and a host of other afflictions, but that also slaughters mites, aphids, and a veritable army of other pests. Oh, it’s not organic gardening. But it works, dammit.

Another thing to learn was about garden locations and climate. My home town Brentwood is blessed with abundant sunshine and big beautiful blue skies. The summertime heat can be blistering. I discovered that you cannot under any circumstances leave a pot of impatiens out in the summer sun. It’s like putting them in the microwave. I researched and found out about sun and shade and everything in between. Aha, I thought: I began putting impatiens under the shade trees in the back yard, where they flourished.

A now-departed gardenia taught me more about soil chemistry than I ever really wanted to learn. Gardenias demand acidic soil, and that gardenia’s big planter with a neutral 7.0 pH balance of good ol’ Miracle Grow just wasn’t going to cut it. So I added aluminum sulfate and chelated iron, which helped, but things really were never right. Quite the diva, that gardenia. Eventually I did away with it, but not after gratefully acknowledging the lessons it had imparted on the subject of pH balance. As a result, the camellia on my front porch—another plant that prefers more acidic soil—flourishes magnificently. (It’s also more pragmatic than hysterical, which helps.)

We practice, we learn, and as we grow our garden flourishes right along with us. I’m a lot better with roses and temperature and sunlight and soil pH now, and I’m way better about preventative spraying and feeding and insect management and weeding and pruning and all of that. I’ve become partial to books on gardening with their cheerful tips and insider tricks. I’ve realized that I totally dig roses while I’m kinda ‘meh’ on celosia. That dahlias are lovable, carnations are loyal, and that New Guinea impatiens and sunpatiens are not only gorgeous but aren’t quite so picky about being in the shade. That star jasmine is a marvelous thing to have climbing all over one’s back fence, and that cape honeysuckles can grow to almost unmanageable size but are otherwise invincible.

Almost nothing in this world pleases me more than to put on my straw gardening hat, collect my bucket and tools, and putter around in the back yard garden, pulling little weedy sprouts (mostly from the sentinel ficus trees) and seeing to each plant in turn. Trimming and tucking, futzing and putzing, savoring the bursts of color that pop throughout the dappled sunlight. It’s centering and calming and appealing. To watch my rose bushes thrive—Bubba the grandiflora with his enormous blooms, Leonard the bliss rose with his white-pink short-lived blooms and intoxicating scent, Bombazilla the volcanically productive peace rose with her retinue of trailing courtiers along the fence, miniatures Goldie and Finnegan on the deck, newbies Cynthia (climber) and Queenie (Queen of Elegance floribunda)—engenders a kind of paternal pride as they push out fat new leaves and unfold fragrant blooms.

Plants have a lot to teach us. Consider the unassuming little bougainvillea that I bought from a local big-box store’s garden center. It was all of two feet high with only two skinny viney-branches extending upwards. Like so many plants in those stores, it had been tortured into producing a bounty of bright magenta bracts and tiny white flowers, far more than would be normal for that tender young age. Having rescued it from garden-store hell, I gifted it with a fine big pot, trellis within handy reach, along the side fence. During the first summer it tiptoed along, oh-so tentative, then over the winter went into full proper hibernation, just barren tan-colored vines with hypodermic-sharp thorns. But then came the spring: new leaves emerged from the hypnosis within, and that little bougainvillea woke up a new plant, reinvigorated and recovered from its ordeal in captivity. It has been growing like the near-weed it is, throwing out new vines, bracts, and flowers with joyous abandon. It has a good ways to go before it becomes the eye-popping wall of color that is its destiny, but we’re well on the way. A little time, a little patience, a roomy pot with good soil, light, and regular watering: it’s a happy organism now, just as home in its pot-with-lattice along the fence as I am here in the house.

Bougie the Bougainvillea says: Renewal is just as inherent to the life cycle as is impermanence and decay; the seasons spin along, and barrenness gives way to bounty.

Bougie the Bougainvillea: still young, but happy and thriving

“This sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease. It is a complex thing, an amalgam. In part, it is a sense of having special rights, dignities, and entitlements—and these are legal realities, not just emotional states. It includes familiarity, warmth, affection, and a conviction of security. Being at home feels safe; you have a sense of relief whenever you come home and close the door behind you, reduced fear of social and emotional dangers as well as of physical ones. When you are home, you can let down your guard and take off your mask. Home is the one place in the world where you are safe from feeling put down or out, unentitled, or unwanted. It’s where you belong, or, as the poet said, the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Coming home is your major restorative in life.”

— Cheryl Mendelson, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Housekeeping

It took me long enough to get around to reading Home Comforts, but it was inevitable I would delve into it sooner or later. No dyed-in-the-wool homebody can resist it, once its existence has become known. Encyclopedic, comprehensive, even a bit intimidating, this is the housekeeping book to end all housekeeping books, not just a compendium of information and tips, but an entire philosophy of what it means to care for a home, far beyond any simplistic notions of mere cooking-and-cleaning drudgery. “Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home” writes Mendelson, reflecting precisely my mindset when it comes to taking care of my home and why I value housekeeping far beyond mere fuss-budget cleanliness.

Because it is important. It dwells at the very core of what it means to live the good life—by which I don’t mean a morally good life, but a good life that knows comfort and belonging and fulfillment. Good housekeeping can’t create happiness just in and of itself, probably, but a well-maintained home is unlikely to get in the way of happiness, while the very process of maintaining one’s living space can provide an important emotional outlet. Whether the home is a one-room apartment or a multilevel suburban house, the arts of housekeeping are anything but dreary necessities. To take care of one’s home is to assert one’s inner jewel, to make a statement that living is far more sophisticated than merely surviving. To take care of one’s home is to take care of oneself, to establish an ordered refuge amidst the chaos.

Ensuring the continued functioning of that refuge provides a grounding in rightness. To come home to a tidy house, to a clean bedroom and a made bed, to food in the pantry and in the refrigerator, to a maintained lawn and garden, is to claim refuge anew. The journey itself is essential to that grounding. Just making one’s bed in the morning before leaving for work is making an investment in the immediate future: it’s for tonight when I get home. When I get home. A refuge is a refuge only if you can return to it.

Just learning the ins and outs of housekeeping can be a pleasurable adventure in and of itself. It’s useful knowledge, applicable, practical, and real. Like many worthwhile practices it is a techne—i.e., a craft that is honed via practice, such as making a good clay pot or playing the piano. If one’s livelihood is spent in relatively cerebral pursuits, as mine is, house tasks ensure that I don’t make like the Worm of Ourobouros and disappear down my own gullet. After the ecstasy, the laundry, says Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. Ultimately his message is that the two are one and the same, both vehicles for mindfulness and growth. Washing the dishes is like washing the baby Buddha, says Vietnamese monk-teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

The cyclic nature of housekeeping establishes its own comforting tempo. The daily allegro of cooking-kitchen-bathroom is complemented by the weekly andante, itself encompassed by the adagio through largo rounds of monthly, seasonal, yearly. The sun traces out its north-sound band over the year and the housekeeping cycle matches right in step. Some of the actual tasks may have changed over time but the fundamental iteration remains. Housekeeping is a life activity, a regularized rondo that complements all of our other reiterative activities.

The lawn grows back after the most meticulous mowing; clothes become soiled no matter how careful the laundering. Bathrooms, kitchens, carpets, you name it: they’ll all need regular attention. Appliances have finite lifespans and will require replacing. Furniture will wear out or break. Live in a house long enough and almost everything will need replacing or upgrading. Our home mirrors ourselves: we are all impermanent, subject to decay. But just as we can aim to make the best of our limited time via beneficial lifestyle choices, we can extend good health practices to our own home, minimize its inner and outer decay and render it as wholesome as possible.

A friend of mine once observed: even if I should be reduced to living in a box under the freeway, my box will have a window with curtains. To which I might add: furthermore, my box will be meticulously clean and well-organized.

An article in the SF Chronicle regarding restaurants judged as worthy of waiting in line for has set me off. In my opinion, no restaurant is worth waiting in line for. It can’t be innovative enough or cheap enough or trendy enough or fancy enough or legendary enough to make it worth waiting for. A restaurant, when you get right down to it, is a room with tables and chairs, plus kitchen, plus staff. That’s it. The rest—decor, ambiance, all that—is piddly. It’s a box. Why wait in line to eat food while sitting on a chair in a box? Trust me: you can eat food while waiting in line. And you can sit on a chair in a box for free in lots of places.

When I lived in San Francisco’s Castro district I saw lines of mostly young folks clustered around certain restaurants on Sunday or holiday mornings. The brunch crowd. There they were, waiting in line, and some of those lines were damn long. They weren’t going to be brunching for an hour or more, it looked to me. In the time they were standing around on the sidewalk (often being pestered by fog, mist, cold, wind, and wino-druggies) I could have easily whipped up pancakes, French toast, fruit, even eggs Benedict or eggs Florentine or something suitably brunch-y, eaten it, and plopped the utensils and such into the dishwasher. And I would have paid a fraction of what those kids were paying.

What does two person’s worth of home-made pancakes cost? A cup of flour, an egg, some milk, baking powder, salt, perhaps a bit of sugar. A few tablespoons of butter and some syrup. $3? Then add four strips of bacon, coffee and fruit juice. Unless you’re a spendthrift doofus you can bring it in for under $10, easy.

And what would that same brunch for two cost in one of those brunch joints? $30? $40? And don’t forget the tip and, if you’re in San Francisco, the add-on fee that goes to pay the workers’ health insurance costs.

And that’s not even factoring in the wait time, which in my view completely trumps any consideration of “well, this way I don’t have to cook and I hate cooking.” But you like waiting in long lines? Paying four to five times what the meal should actually cost?

I wrote an article in Free Composition some years ago (all right, a decade ago) all about the discomforts of brunch in San Francisco. Those discomforts are considerably ameliorated out here in Far Outerburbia. But even if the restaurants themselves are several orders of magnitude nicer, the fundamental question remains the same: why pay so much, and wait for so long, for simple meals?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like restaurants for dishes requiring considerable training and expertise, or ethnic delicacies that I’ve never even heard of. There’s also a fine social component to restaurant dining, especially if you can find one that isn’t airplane-hanger noisy and cattle-car crowded. But I keep such visits to an absolute minimum, so as to reserve my disposable income for things that I consider valuable and worthwhile.

The ever-wise Julia Child preached: to streamline your food budget, learn to cook. How right she was, and no better time than Sundays and holidays!

One picks up a lot of experience during forty years in a collegiate classroom. I have seen abundant good and bad from the students who pass through my classroom during their four undergraduate, or two graduate, years at the major conservatory of music in which I teach.

Conservatories are similar to, but are not quite the same as, regular old colleges. As both trade school and college, a conservatory must prep young people for a life in one of the world’s most demanding professions while at the same time giving them the overall education that they will need for their future, whether as musicians or not. It isn’t an easy task, and no conservatory really has the college-vs-trade-school balance down perfectly. For that matter, no individual conservatory professor really has that balance down perfectly, either. Yet, while we all have our own opinions on the matter, we all have the same basic end product in mind: a person who has the skills, the training, and at least the nascent professionalism to make a go of it in music.

Which includes this utterly basic requirement:

Just Show Up.

How simple is that? Be there. You must be present to win. And yet it seems every year I encounter students who aren’t any good at that most basic of tasks, despite being warned (repeatedly) that unreliability is the kiss of death in this profession. Nobody wants a musician who can’t be counted on. One can work around other issues as necessary, but this one trumps all.

That’s the reason behind my own department’s attendance policy, which states that students may take ‘x’ number of absences from class for free, no questions asked, but absences in excess of that maximum allowed will chip away from the semester grade, one-half letter grade at a time. The only exceptions are school-sanctioned leaves of absence. It’s a sensible policy and excellent practice for a career in the ‘real’ musical world, where rock-solid reliability is so fundamental as to be taken for granted in a successful musician.

And yet. I send out notices to serial offenders. I inform the class that I may not say anything about it, but I’m recording absences, just as I’m recording each time tardy to class, which imposes its own penalty. I will do the arithmetic at the end of the semester and that’s that. You could be doing A+ work in the course and wind up with a C or worse.

So just show up. It really is that simple. Even if you think that your theory class is less important than a rehearsal, just show up. Even if you utterly hate some class and/or some professor, just show up. Even if you’re intimidated by something, just show up. Even if you’re sure you’re going to bomb, just show up. There is no such thing as selective professionalism. If you’re not professional about everything, you’re not professional. Period.

If a student can’t learn that during those relatively benign conservatory years, then it’s best that the axe fall right then and there, instead of depending on the profession to do the honors.

The first time I ever saw Brentwood, California was on a Saturday morning in late June 2015. I was informed by a sign on Highway 4 that, should I wish to visit downtown Brentwood, I should take the next exit. Said next exit was Sand Creek Road, which turned out to be a spiffy boulevard with landscaped medians and sidewalk strips.

Me being me, one of the first things I noticed was how clean Sand Creek Road was. Debris was at a bare minimum along the medians and sidewalk strips. The grass along the road was mowed, edged, and without weeds or bare patches. The roadway itself was new and smooth. The traffic lights all had sensors and so didn’t just go cranking through their cycles, but adjusted themselves to traffic needs.

I was intrigued, even more so after I reached a major north-south thoroughfare, Fairview Avenue, and decided to make a right turn. Here was another four-lane boulevard with a tree-lined median and gorgeously landscaped sidewalk strips, all of it immaculately clean. I mean, really really clean. I went several blocks without seeing so much as a wadded kleenex beside the road or wedged in the shrubbery. Another big street loomed: Central Boulevard. I coasted on Central for a while; the pavement wasn’t quite as smooth as Fairview but everything was just as clean as it could be, and the landscaping was gorgeous.

I progressed from being intrigued to being a bit enchanted. By the time noon had rolled around I had seen a lot of Brentwood and was having lunch in the charming downtown. By late afternoon as I headed back west towards San Francisco I was certain that Brentwood was going to be my home in the very near future.

And it was.

Upon further exploration, I discovered Brentwood’s extensive park system. There is about one park per 1000 residents. Amazing. Brentwood has gone the suburban route of creating numerous smaller parks that serve their specific neighborhoods, spearheaded by a few larger showcase parks. Since it’s a small city of 60,000 people nothing is all that far away, so one has a wide variety of landscapes and facilities within easy reach. Some parks offer basketball courts, others baseball fields, others swimming pools, others bocce ball courts, others skateboard parks, and the like. There’s something for everybody, including parks that are glorious expanses of grass, trees, shrubbery, and flowers, and nothing else beyond a playground, picnic facilities, and water fountains.

But here’s the thing: they’re all pristine, every one of them. They’re all perfectly maintained. They’re all so clean that a kid’s candy wrapper by the side of the path sticks out like a sore thumb. The grass is mowed, edged, weeded, aerated, and emerald green. The shrubbery is trimmed. Fallen leaves don’t stay fallen for long. The water fountains are shiny, and they work.The trees are healthy. The playgrounds are modern, sturdy, and imaginative—man, I wish there was stuff like that when I was a kid—as are the paths and trails.

To make that happen requires a goodly crew of landscapers and gardeners, and they’re always busy taking care of everything, including those street medians and curb strips. They’re invariably friendly and, as far as I can tell, take justified pride in the quality of Brentwood’s public spaces.

But there’s another reason everything is so spiffy: Brentwood folks really care about the city and its public places. Even after big festivals or holidays the parks here are clean, and I think that’s because they just don’t get very messy in the first place. People here are great about picking up their stuff, including dog poop—and every park and trail has dispensers with free plastic poop bags. Folks use the trash cans. They don’t do anything mysterious and gross with the water fountains. And if anything seems a bit out of place, a heads-up to parks & rec—they even have an iPhone app for that—gets quick results.

Which leads me to think about demographic differences. San Francisco sports spectacular and gigantic parks, but they’re regularly overwhelmed by slovenly users. I’m not even counting the depredations of the pervasive vagrants, druggies, and transients who have so diminished an already marginal quality of life; I’m just thinking about the mess everyday people tend to make in their city parks. (Vide Dolores Park after a sunny warm Sunday.) Nor are they particularly responsible about the streets, parking lots, and the sidewalks.

So why is this? In my opinion, it has to do with the uprooted nature of so many San Francisco residents. They are renters, not owners, people who may live in SF for a while but don’t plan to stay. There aren’t many kids. It’s not a city for families. The people who abuse the parks aren’t vagrants as a rule; they’re residents—at least for the interim between college and marriage/kids—joined by out-of-towners who come into SF for a night on the town or a Sunday bash. San Francisco just isn’t a place where people come to settle, to stay, to raise a family. They have no skin in the game, so if the parks are dirty and/or dangerous, if the roads are full of potholes and lined with blowing trash, if the sidewalks are next to impassable due to dirt and excretion and tents and crowds, it doesn’t really matter. Not their problem.

But Brentwood is a small city inhabited almost entirely by homeowners; renters make up a minuscule percentage. There aren’t even very many condos; it’s almost all single-family detached houses. The people of Brentwood have a lot of skin in the game—they bought, which means they came to stay. They came here to raise their families, or they came here to retire, in a safe and clean environment. The schools are first-rate. The city is filled with big houses on big tree-lined streets, and home builders are industriously adding more new homes in immaculately landscaped new neighborhoods. Brentwood real estate is relatively inexpensive compared to the inner Bay Area, but by just about everybody else’s standards the property prices are sky-high. Settling here is a big commitment, and not just because of the real estate prices—there’s the whopping commute to the inner Bay Area to consider as well. And that line item concerning park and public maintenance on one’s yearly property tax bill serves as a potent reminder that all this order, all this pristine landscaping, all this well-maintained everything, comes at a price. And it’s property owners, not businesses, that pay most of the bills.

Homeowners. Landowners. Families. Retirees. Small businesses that depend on the goodwill of those homeowners, landowners, families, and retirees.

So of course everything is tidy and shipshape. It’s in everybody’s vital interest that it be so.