The Leaves on our Trees

Every once in awhile, if you’re lucky, you get a teacher who changes your life.

I’ve been fortunate to have had a few over the years, notably my cello and orchestra teachers, without whose influence I would be a very different person. But I also had one very special English teacher in high school: a wonderful lady by the name of Penny. All of her senior students got to call her by her first name, and I was looking forward to earning that privilege upon completing her class at the end of my junior year. It was the spring of 2004, and I had loved her English class. It was hard work – Penny didn’t take crap from anyone, and she also didn’t accept any late work. She demanded and received responsibility, attention, and excellence from her students. Through literature, poetry, and essay writing, she got us to think critically, to examine the deepest parts of ourselves, and to develop empathy and compassion for others. Imagine my dismay, then, when she told my class that we were to be her final students – she was retiring.

Not to be deterred, I struck up a friendship with Penny after she left teaching. I had connected with her on a deeper level than most kids find with their high school teachers, and I didn’t want to lose that bond. She seemed to value me too. When Penny, who had long been a single mom, got married in 2004, I was the first student at school that she told. It hadn’t been a big to-do of a wedding, and it hadn’t even occurred to her to announce it to her students. But she felt like she should tell someone, so she confided in me one day after class. Being a self-absorbed 16-year-old, this didn’t make much of an impact on me at the time and I had almost forgotten about it. But years later she reminded me of this fact and shared what it had meant to her to have a student she could trust with the details of her personal life.

Autumn foliage in Oregon

So what was Penny’s influence on me? She didn’t teach me to write. I was already pretty competent by the time I got to her class. Although she did, however, help me refine and examine my writing, and taught me the value of using writing as a means of self-reflection. She didn’t teach me to appreciate literature, either. I was already a bookworm. I read some great stories and poetry in her class, but I could have done that on my own. What Penny did was she told me I could be a writer. 

She didn’t just say it once, either. She would write it in her comments on my school essays. She would write it in her emails about my blog posts. Over the course of nineteen years, during which we kept in touch and would get together when I came back to town, she never neglected to encourage me to become an author. She said that whenever I got up the courage to write a book, she would gladly volunteer as an editor. During that whole time, outwardly, I was enjoying my career as a music teacher. But deep down, I really wanted to write.

Admittedly, until recently, I never seriously considered ditching my music career to become a writer. I had invested too much time and energy into teaching music to even fathom giving it up. And besides, a healthy dose of realism and pessimism prevented me from thinking I could ever succeed as an author. But Penny planted that seed in the fertile soil of my mind twenty years ago, and finally the first tender sprouts are springing forth. The specter of failure still sits with me every time I sit down at my writing desk, but I’ve found the courage and the confidence that Penny always knew were there.

I last saw Penny in person around Thanksgiving 2019. I brought my then three-year-old daughter with me to Penny’s house and Penny was absolutely delighted to chat with me about books, films, and travels and to play hide and seek with my daughter behind the cushions of her overstuffed couch. We had a lovely time together, but I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. When we had knocked on the door, Penny opened it still wearing her bathrobe. She had forgotten about our meet-up. No problem though; she quickly changed and we sat down to a cup of tea surrounded by the many wonderful paintings on her walls. We had a lively conversation, but I noticed her occasionally repeating statements and questions that she had said only a few minutes earlier. This forgetfulness was new to me – I hadn’t seen any evidence of it before, and it was pervasive enough that I started to feel a tiny crack in my heart when we left. This was more than just her getting older. Her memory was slipping away from her. 

A few months after our last visit, the world began its quick collapse under the weight of Covid-19. Consecutive lockdowns, coupled with our move from Hawaii to England made it highly unlikely that I would see Penny again any time soon. As the months turned into years, it became more and more difficult to get in touch with her. Not because of her memory, but because of my fear. Penny had such an incredible mind - sharp, inquisitive, insightful - that I couldn’t stand the idea of her losing those powers of thought. I decided it would be too hard to see her diminished in such a cruel way. So when we finally came back to Oregon, nearly three years later, I made the rather cowardly decision to not get in touch with Penny. How I regret that now.

I’m back in Oregon for my first Thanksgiving since 2019. I decided to become a full-time writer in September, thanks in no small part to Penny’s persistent encouragement for more than half of my life. So at this time of gratitude and reflection, it felt only right to contact Penny and thank her for never giving up on me. I didn’t know how she was doing, I wasn’t sure if she would respond, but I needed to try. I emailed her and waited. A week went by. With each passing day, I felt more certain that things had gotten much worse for her. Finally, I saw an email from her in my inbox. My heart leapt for a moment, only to be crushed in the next when I saw that the response was from Penny’s husband, offering to call me with an update.

Penny is now in a memory care facility. She was moved there about nine months ago and her husband visits her several times a week, taking her out to lunch, and bringing her back home for a few hours. But every time he takes her back to the facility, she gets upset again, which must be absolutely heartbreaking for him. Nonetheless, Penny’s husband kindly offered to take me to see her. He was hopeful that she might want to go out for coffee, or at least chat with me in the cafeteria. I, on the other hand, had no idea what to expect. Would she remember me? Would she want to talk to me? Would any of the teacher that I loved and respected remain?

The answer: I’m not sure.

Perhaps due to some side-effects from her medicine, Penny has recently been sleeping for most of the day. When we visited her, she was tucked up in bed, unable to stay awake for more than a minute. She hadn’t had breakfast, hadn’t gotten out of bed at all that we could see. She was so drowsy it seemed like she was struggling to come out of general anesthesia. When she briefly sat up, I could see that her gray hair was longer than she used to keep it, and was unusually untidy. She looked old and depleted, not the petite firecracker of wit and wisdom that I was accustomed to.

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But when she saw me, for a brief moment her eyes lit up, her wan face transformed with a radiant smile, and it was just like old times. Her husband asked if she remembered me and her response was a quiet but enthusiastic “Yes!” I felt replete with hope, my heart so happy to see her smile.

Then, just as suddenly, she flopped back down on her pillow and closed her eyes as if we weren’t even there. After a few more attempts to wake and engage her, Penny’s husband went to the cafeteria to procure a bit of food for her breakfast. When he returned, she and I shared a small chuckle when, with a sassy shake of her head she replied “ppfft” in response to an offer of strawberry yogurt. It was a very Penny-esque gesture, and I felt a moment of relief that some element of her was still there. 

But that was as much as we got from her. Not long after, she wanted us to leave so that she could sleep again. With tears in my eyes, I walked away from my dear friend and mentor, leaving her to waste away in a place that projects a false cheerfulness to hide the profound sadness of the inmates who are experiencing memory loss.

A good teacher leaves indelible marks on her students, helping them to grow and to overcome the obstacles in their path. Penny achieved all of this and much more in her decades of teaching. I only had one year in her class, but was lucky enough to get nineteen years of her friendship. I am beyond grateful for her love, encouragement, and support, and would give anything to take away her present afflictions. But even now, I’m still learning from her - learning how to have courage and strength in the face of difficulty. And of course, she’s still inspiring me to write too. 

Here’s to you, Penny. Thank you for everything.

359 Days in the English Workforce

They say when one door closes, another opens. I just didn’t expect this door to slam in my face quite so soon. My journey into the British workforce lasted only 359 days. I didn’t even make it a full year. My final contracted day was last week, and as I left the Sage after returning my laptop and key card, I paused for a minute to look at the building that only a year ago, I was so excited to be calling my workplace. 

The Sage Gateshead

It’s a very unusual building, iconic. I think it looks like a shining, silver patchwork chrysalis for a gigantic caterpillar that’s resting along the quayside. The inside is just as marvelous. There’s no hint of a transforming butterfly–just massive, beautiful concert halls and exceptional views of the River Tyne, including the plethora of imposing yet graceful bridges that straddle the water, the nearly 900-year-old keep of Newcastle Castle, and all the amazing old buildings, spires, and clock towers that still make me marvel that I live in England. I felt a childlike excitement every time I beeped my way through the stage doors and into the front of house, always secretly expecting someone to stop me and ask what I was doing there. 

Newcastle quayside

Before we even moved to England, when Rory was just applying for the job at Newcastle University, I found the Sage after some quick googling and instantly knew that I wanted to work there. It’s not just a concert hall, but also provides a very robust community music education program. And the program I was most keen on being a part of was In Harmony. Similar to El Sistema music programs around the world, In Harmony is about transforming kids’ lives through music education. In Newcastle, it operates at two schools in the culturally diverse but lower-income West end. Every child at the school receives his or her own orchestral musical instrument as well as two to three hours a week of music instruction. All for free. It was the perfect fit for me, working with In Harmony, or so I thought.

The thing was, I knew, after fifteen years of teaching music, that I was done being a teacher. I had suspected that I needed a career change about eight years ago, but I persisted in music teaching because that’s what I had trained to do. Since I was a teenager I had wanted to teach music, and everything I did after high school prepared me to follow that path. So even though I knew, deep down, that I should find a job that aligned with my true self, where I wouldn’t have to put on an extroverted façade all day long, it felt too scary of a prospect to up and leave. That’s where In Harmony came in. 

An In Harmony program assistant job opened up last summer, and given that the program runs at my daughter’s school, and I would be working close to our neighborhood, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me. It was a purely administrative job, not a teaching one, and it was in the music education field, so I would still feel right at home. Or, mostly anyway, because music ed in England is not the same as in America. But we’ll come to that later. I worked out of the two schools, doing mostly simple tasks like printing music and setting up chairs and music stands, and I could be as introverted as I wanted to be. There was very little stress involved, no work in the evenings, no sleepless nights agonizing over how to deal with difficult students. After two years of pandemic- and baby-induced stay-at-home momming, I was grateful to be out of the house and having conversations with adults again, even if the majority of my skills and training were not being put to use and most of my music teacher colleagues had no idea that I was actually one of them. It was a job and I was getting paid for easy work.

But this was my first foray into UK working life, and it was the first time since moving to Newcastle that I was surrounded by non-family British adults all day long. It was eye-opening. Although everyone was welcoming, more or less, I never quite got over my feeling of otherness. It was little things: having my colleagues offer me a cup of tea multiple times a day (nice, but strange), hearing different music terminology and pronunciations (see below), and not understanding 90% of the interactions I had with the school caretaker (US: janitor) due to his Geordie dialect. 

On one memorable occasion, I was talking with my boss and some of my colleagues, and I learned what I thought was a new British term. New to me, anyway. They were describing someone and feigning surprise at the person’s actions. “Shakara!” my boss said. Shakara? What the heck does that mean? I thought. Perhaps it was a word with roots in one of Britain’s former colonies, like pukka, or pundit. I pondered it the rest of the day, and when Google didn’t help elucidate things for me, I asked Rory if he was familiar with the word. He was puzzled too. But later that evening we had a breakthrough. Turns out I hadn’t learned a quaint new English word. I simply couldn’t understand my boss’s accent. It wasn’t shakara, it was shock horror. Oops.

British music terminology also required a lot of learning. It was strange to be working in the same field as I’d always been, and yet to not know the right words for things. Take rhythms for example. In the US, rhythms are described using a logical fraction system. A long, four-beat note is a whole note. A shorter two-beat note is a half note. One beat is a quarter note, and so on. In Britain, logic is nowhere in sight. Rhythm terms are random, and admittedly, rather comical. 

• Whole note = semibreve 
• Half note = minim
• Quarter note = crotchet (how do people say that with a straight face?)
• Eighth note = quaver (also the name of a cheesy crisp)
• Sixteenth note = semiquaver
• 32nd note = demisemiquaver
• 64th note = hemidemisemiquaver (you’ve got to be kidding me) 

Perhaps it seems a small thing, to have to use new terminology and to not always understand what people are saying. But it’s those little things that cement the feeling of not belonging and shatter the illusion you create for yourself that you’re at home, doing what you’ve always done. They make you realize again for the thousandth time that you’re a foreigner. You’ll never quite fit in here. That’s life in the immigrant lane, I guess.

You may be asking yourself by now, what happened to the job? Why did it end? Surely Talia couldn’t have been so incompetent at setting up chairs that she was fired? (Yes, thank you for the vote of confidence.) Well, as with most things in the arts sector, it came down to money, or a lack thereof. The Arts Council England, a government agency that provided two-thirds of In Harmony’s funding, suddenly pulled the plug this year. I guess they decided that ten years of changing kids’ lives with music was quite enough. They left us with one more year of funding as a transition year, but starting in August 2024, the Newcastle In Harmony program will be decimated. As the last one in, I was the first one to be let go. It’ll only go downhill from here.

I’ve seen first-hand the difference that In Harmony makes in the lives of the children and families who participate. It transforms communities, it brings people from wildly disparate backgrounds together in one common endeavor. It gives children with minimal hopes for the future the tools and attitudes they need to overcome the innumerable obstacles in their path.

And it’s going down the drain.

In Harmony Newcastle will still exist after 2024. At least, in some form. Maybe not in both schools, maybe not for all the children, but a shell of In Harmony will remain. Yet it will never have the same impact as it does now, which, frankly, pisses me off. All the more so because my two kids should have benefited from this program throughout their primary school years, and now that’s been snatched away from them. Through In Harmony, my daughter started learning the cello in school, twice a week, from age five. My three-year-old son is going to have musicianship classes in his nursery (US: preschool) this year, taught by an excellent, qualified music teacher. That’s freaking remarkable. How many schools do you know that provide that level of music education? I’m willing to bet the answer is none.

And given the government’s disregard for the value of arts education, I expect there soon won’t be any schools left in England embracing music on the same level as they currently do with In Harmony. For me, as someone who has dedicated my entire adult life to teaching music, this is heartbreaking. I was only with In Harmony for a year, and all I did was make copies and stack chairs, but it’s been hard to leave this program, hard to see its foundations crumbling, and hard to say goodbye to my first British job and colleagues, even if I didn’t always understand what they were saying.

But when one door closes, another door opens.

There is one upside to my newfound lack of employment. Thanks to the financial security provided by my wonderful husband, and the free preschool childcare provided by my kids’ school, I now have the time, freedom, and mental space to try full-time something I’ve always wanted to do: writing. The ultimate job for the introverted. You may be seeing more blog posts from me soon. Stay posted.