Ginny Tisdale, Bach, Fugue, Ahlin, and Ganser

Sunday, March 21st, 2004

Words for Today
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
So said today's birthday boy, Johannes Sebastian Bach, born on this day in 1685 in Germany. Better known and respected as a musician (organ and harpsichord) in his time, not too many people really liked him or his music while he made his passage here in the middle world. The parishioners of the church where he played organ complained rather mightily that they had problems singing the hymns because Bach was always playing variations on the melody - just couldn't leave well enough alone. These were tough Lutherans, of course - Bach traced his ancestry back to his great-grandfather Viet Bach who was a Lutheran miller. Viet played his cittern while the mill was grinding away. Bach was always fuguing around - no one could compose a better fugue than a Bach. He was also, apparently, a good father and husband - he fathered twenty, ten of whom lived to become adults. Some might say that bringing twenty people into the world you couldn't feed was less than responsible - but this was the early eighteenth century. He left his wife Anna Magdalena when he completed his passage in the middle world on July 28, 1750. She was given a pauper's funeral when she died in 1760. It was would take decades - more than fifty years -- for his music to take off - by then, none of his family realized any money from his remarkable achievements.

Back in the early 1970s, Switched-on Bach, the composer played on the synthesizers, were all the rage - the music is still around, and 'tis grand, kola, 'tis grand - fact is, there's a Switched-on Bach 2000 that's incredible in surround sound. Bach would have loved it, methinks. If you don't dig "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor," you have a hole in your soul, kola - 'tis tantamount to not liking "God Bless America," recorded on this day by Kate Smith in 1939. Today is also New Year's Day in Persian culture - celebrated in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. And 'tis the birthday of my lovin' spouse Leslie's and my friend Ginny, aka Virginia Tisdale Adamski Miller, who now hails from the St. Paul area over in Minnesota. Longtime friend of Leslie, Ginny has become mine as well - few days past that she doesn't send along a bit of cheer to help me on my passage through the less-than-great days. Here's a big gulp of grape juice in honor of your birthday, Ginny. Live as long as you wish, may you find joy and laughter this day - all the days of your life - and may you continue to rant at political chicanery and social injustice wherever your find it. Here' a poem from Rumi, the great Persian poet of the early fourteenth century, in your honor - and in celebration of Persian New Year's:

Where Everything is Music

Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place
Where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out,
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

The signing art is sea foam.
The grace movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor,

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwllk long the beach, wanting!

They derive
From a slow and powerful root
That we can't see.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest
and let the spirits fly in and out.

Fact is, not having the instruments at hand cannot stop the music, and there's a bit of Bach in all of us - just a matter of pressing the right keys at the right time. 'Twill go round and round in our head of if we're not actually humming a few bars and strumming something - but I'm all for joining the choir and doing something like Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Mind's Desiring" together with fellow travelers in the middle worlds - hell, do it if even they aren't all Lutherans.

What a grand afternoon yesterday after at Moorhead - not too many fold showed up for the first annual Book Fair - think we sold a total of four books - but I met good friends and visited - good kola Jane Ahlin dropped over - she and her lovin' spouse Tom had just returned from Ellendale down the South Dakota border, north of Aberdeen, to celebrate Jane's parents sixtieth wedding anniversary - her father and mother are both eighty-four and in pretty reasonable fettle. Jane writes a delightful column for the Fargo Forum and teaches English over at Moorhead - she and her physician husband live over in Fargo. A half-hour visiting with Jane Ahlin can uplift a fellow for hours - she has the most infectious laugh and among the most insightful conclusions about the outrageous self-serving nature of politicians she less than admires --- and, a truly wicked but most instructive . In both speech and the written word, Jane often soars to the best of satire, which leaves the reader squirming the outrageousness of what humans are doing to other humans in apparent good conscious.

Just before we we leaving, friend Maureen Kelly Jonason, wife of my old friend Marty Jonason from over in Dickinson, teacher at Concordia College, and recent Ph.D. from the University of North Dakota came by to say hello -- Maureen worked at West Acres a few years back, and she coordinated a pretty successful residency of the Great Plains Chautauqua Society there. She's currently helping Dawn Morgan of the Spirit Room in Fargo in mounting another tribute to OMF Thomas Matthew McGrath on May 1 of this year -- working toward ongoing recognition of Dakota's greatest gift to the millennia. Hope I'll be in find enough fettle to help Dawn and Maureen out a bit with such a grand endeavor. Earlier in the afternoon yesterday, a handsome fellow came up to introduced himself to me - mein Gott! 'twas Gary Ganser, my first college roommate. 'Twas back in the fall of 1960 that we found ourselves together in the corner room on the first floor of East Hall on the campus of the University of North Dakota. He hailed from Bismarck. Our room - a tiny cubbyhole, was next to the stairs, the phone booth, and across from what everyone referred to the "crapper" in some sort of Australian affection. The room was a hell-hole - drunken students crashing through our front door with toilet seats over their head in the middle of the night, screaming calls from the telephone booth, and constant traffic - one could hear every conversation in that three-story warehouse of freshmen male bodies assigned small areas behind card-board thin walls and doors. We were several blocks east of the library and classrooms - past the stadium and the open areas before the Student Union. No one was sure what went on behind the walls of the stadium towers, the ends where there were a few rooms - they were turned over to the hockey players, Canadians, mostly, we didn't follow the same rules everyone else did. They were special - as much, perhaps, because of their lifestyle, for they had learned the ways of the professional athlete at tender ages when they played junior hockey. They were also special because they were integral to UND's claim to national fame as a first-rank collegiate hockey team. But I digress.

Gary and I enjoyed each other - in spite of our quirks - Gary, I remember, had something like forty pairs of shoes, which consumed a good deal of space in his part of our small area - and I was truly grateful that Gary had wheels, so I got home once in a while. We both found a way out of East Hall - I remember I had to go all the way to President Starcher to convince him that the place was not conducive to any sort of mental balance - after spending a half-hour trying to get me to stay and try to change things, I left. Gary told me yesterday that he left for the ATO fraternity - where conditions made those of East Hall seem like a fully staffed four-star hotel. I went to the Gamma Delta House, an old fraternity bought by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, where I met the Reverend Elmer Yohr and spent a long semester playing bridge at every possible moment. But Gary and I remembered some of those great characters we met - a young African American Kossuth Thomas of Mississippi, who would play and sing Fats Domino in the basement of East Hall for us - Kossuth left the middle world at a very early age. He and his Jamaican roommate, a huge man with that peculiarly cultivated English accent of the Caribbean - they open more windows on the rest of the world and into the rich heritage of folks neither Gary nor I had ever met or thought much about - in some ways, meeting Gary and those few sane folk at East Hall who were sober or sane enough to talk with was among the most valuable parts of my first year of college.

As I told my friend and mentor Jerry Tweton yesterday - Jerry's responsible for the series The Way It Was: The North Dakota Frontier Experience, the six books based on Dakotans' stories gathered in the 1930s among the area's first settlers. He graciously allowed me to have a role in the press we established, The Grass Roots Press - and next week, the series will be completed with the publication of The Townspeople -- we were in Fargo to talk about the book and the series. Both of us were initiated into the world of serious history - Jerry kept with it, I flirted with medicine and gradually drifted to literature - we both took our first class in history from the late, great Robert Wilkins. Jerry's a bit more than decade older than I - but Professor Wilkins hadn't changed in those ten years. On the first day of class, Wilkins connected each young North Dakotan to place - he had researched the newspapers of our hometowns and counties and told us a bit of what happened of significance to the place we grew up. He encouraged us to do the same - as often as we could - and began introducing us to research on the very first day of class. Wilkins know most everything about history, it seems to me from the perspective of some forty-four years later - and he fully expected his students to learn everything he knew and more. I'll never forget the first test he hand back - 'twas the lowest grade I had every received in my life, a 67 - barely a C. I was absolutely despondent. Dr. Wilkins came around the room, leaned over my desk with his hand on my shoulder, and said in something of a cultivated English accent, "Mr. Albers, Mr. Albers, take heart! That's the highest grade I've given on this test in three years!" In some ways, my A- in Robert Wilkins' history class is the greatest achievement of my academic career. Ah, what memories are evoked by seeing old friends - thank you, Gary, for stopping by - I hope to see you soon. Who knows how many layers of fogs hiding the moments we experienced forty-some years past. Heady times - most of which I missed - too much bridge (haven't played seriously since), too many repetitions of Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nacht Musik" playing while hand after hand of bridge was dissected - I wish that Gary and I had spent some more time, that I would have sought out and learned more from Kossuth Thomas, and that I would have spent a few more hours with Robert Wilkins - although later, after I became the servant of the North Dakota Humanities Council in the early 1970s - I was privileged to get to know both Robert and his wife Wynona in our work in public humanities in the state. Here's a big swig of Strawberry Breeze in their memory.

I've lolly-gagged this morning - arose early, meandered around the Internet, and began my journal - then succumbed to a great weariness which took me back to bed for a few hours - rest from a wondrously beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful day yesterday, rest to enjoy that which remains in this grand one in Dakota. My lovin' spouse and I did return from Fargo in time to drop in at Meriwether's to wish our friends Lillian and Jim congratulations on their love and their joining their forces in quest of life worth living - 'twas most uplifting to see two so radiantly happy.

'Tis a day to be grateful to be alive - I'm sustained with a couple of great Leslie apple crepes and an egg, a Prosure, and enough of the pills to be able to sit and read and then work a bit without constant interruption on this quiet spring afternoon here on Arthur Drive. Maybe I'll even find out what March Madness and the Final Four is all about this year - tomorrow, more comprehensive blood tests - hoping for levels high enough to have me in the greatest shape for another go-around at Zion's Cancer Treatment Center of America a week from Monday. Hoping for weeks sans chills, too much fatigue, or plugged bile duct stents - 'tis spring, and there's work to be one. For one thing, someone has to watch those migratory ducks and geese head north. Be well, my dear kola, all you who make may life worth living - and take care of yourselves - hope 'tis a bright and sunny wherever you are as 'tis here - hope your day is fantastic, Ginny Tisdale --

Ev Albers