Submarine, pt II.

While subbing at Hums Elementary the past few days, part of my daily duties were to assist a boy named Tyler as he ate lunch. Tyler is eight years old, knows what Paul Revere yelled while riding through the countryside, loves Veggie Tales, and is rapidly going blind. While I sat with him at lunch, I watched him as his eyes stared up to the tops of the curtains in the cafeteria, desperately trying to see his surroundings. But, he couldn't, and the frustration was written all over his face, which was riddled with the pain of being defeated. Even the way he spoke communicated his hopelessness, speaking quietly and stammering through his words. And I will be completely honest. The first time I met Tyler, I found it a little more difficult to believe that there was an all powerful, all knowing God who loves us. Why would this eight year old be going blind if there was? I sat and talked with Tyler, thinking, 'God, what do You think You're doing?'

But there was something else about Tyler. Or rather, about the way everyone else reacted to him. Just about every student who passed Tyler said hello and offered to help him. Kid after kid walked by him and said hello so that they were sure he heard them. In the lunch line, two or three kids asked him what kind of milk he wanted. A little girl helped him find his chair. Someone else offered to take his trash up. And as I saw all of these seven and eight and nine year olds interacting with this boy, I thought, 'Oh, there You are.'

Friday was my last consecutive day working with Tyler. After he finished watching his video in the resource room I was working in (he did so from two inches from the screen), he stood up and turned to where he thought I was. Staring into his darkness looking for me, he raised his hand up. 'Goodbye, goodbye,' he said timidly. He left the room, and a few seconds later, he walked back in. He looked back toward me and stammered, 'Th-thank you, Mister FiiizGera.'

Thank you, Tyler.

Submarine

About a month ago, I attended the inservice for Mishawaka Schools, thus putting me into the substitute teaching service. A few days later, my Aunt Sue, who is a program assistant for two special needs second graders, called me to substitute for her some morning. I did, gladly, and enjoyed myself greatly. In the days that followed, I checked the automated system regularly, but was entirely unable to find any assignments. And so, I took my job search elsewhere--Starbucks, Best Buy, etc. There was a job fair at a Starbucks where they would be performing open interviews for full time positions. I arrived, confident in my chance and in my cafe experience, and was shortly told that the positions they were hiring required Sunday morning positions, which I can't give because of my involvement with the worship team. I left, almost dumbfounded, started my car and stared into my unemployment. "Lord, what do you have for me?"

The day after, I attended the inservice at Penn Schools, and hoped to find some jobs through that corporation, even though the pay is five dollars less per day. The next day, I was on the automated system's website, trying to figure out the multi-district options. While doing that, I went to the view of my preferred schools for Mishawaka. I was baffled; I had marked every school, every day, yet I was entirely unable to find any jobs. But lo! What is this? Above the list of schools--two previously unnoticed check marks. The first: "I would like to receive assignments from the schools marked below." My gaff: I had marked the second.

So I fixed THAT, and I've worked everyday since. First, subbing for the least organized social studies teacher at Mishawaka's social studies classes. Today and yesterday, I was subbing for a first grade class, which was much more of a handful. I love five and six year olds, but in small groups. Sixteen is not a small group, especially when all of them want to be your best friend and tell you everything about their lives all of the time. But, nevermind. I love them in large groups, too. Then, tomorrow, I'm subbing for another program assistant who was in my class in second grade.

It's good to have a job. Especially when Michelle and I just filled out an application for an apartment.

The Lord provides.

Jazz

If you've been following my status updates on Facebook, you've probably already figured out that I've been getting really into jazz lately. That's not even the half of it, really. I'm drowning in it. What started as a growing interest in cool jazz has turned into an all out submersion in bebop, hard bop, post bop, fusion, free-jazz, and the like. I've read more Wikipedia albums, downloaded more music, and read more online guitar lessons in the past three days than I have in the past month. Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Count Basie, Herbie Hancock, Sun Ra, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington--they're all over my mind. And as for learning how to play jazz, my scales have suddenly grown from seven notes to eleven, and my fingers are fumbling and jumping and stuttering all over my strings. And can I just say how much modal jazz has opened up the way I write music? I can already see the influence it's going to have on future projects.

And the space--good Lord, the space! There's so much space in jazz to just let things happen. Like in Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, in the segments where the rhythm section just holds a groove and waits--sometimes for several measures--for Miles or Cannonball or Coltrane to make something happen. And in free-jazz, they take that space and they use up every bit of it they can. Free-jazz especially has changed the way I hear the world around me. I recognize different creaks in a door hinge as the door lazily swings open. I hear syncopation and borrowed rhythms in my footsteps and in dishes falling into the sink. I hear the chords created by water running through the pipes or cars driving by. And above all, I hear the wide open space of life, just holding its groove and waiting for something to happen.

Jazz has taken everything I know about music and broken it wide open. Ever since taking music theory in high school, I've understood music pretty well. I recognized the forms and the progressions and the melodies and the scales as things I understood in a sort of formula--well, not exactly a formula, but something pliable that I could still manage with my own hands. And the thing is, even in that seven note, four scale world, music was still so much more to me than the sum of its parts. But jazz--it's easy to get bored listening to anything else after listening to John Coltrane's Ascension. Not much sounds exciting compared to eight guys cutting improvising their own parts at the same time. This isn't to say that I dislike all other music now--the upper level of my spectrum is just broken wide open.

But the biggest thing...jazz has taught me more about life and God than any other type of music. Mostly, the space. There's so much space in life, and God's holding down His groove just waiting for us to do something. And a lot of times, He'll give us a lead in. But since jazz and life are both improvised, there's room for mistakes. So much more room than we with our western scale, top 40, over produced ears allow for.

Album release

The Sparrow & The Whale is finally finished and released. I was writing the liner notes in a text document, and I realized that this album has been a huge part of my life for the past three years. Each song was a huge part of me when I wrote it. I remember the dark, dark days where I sang Sister's Winter Coat, Brother's Tennis Shoes back to back with The Sparrow & The Whale. I remember an amazing (albeit complicated) beginning to a wonderful friendship that spawned The Trollopw & The Troubadour, and then the year after where I found myself living in the wrong direction and writing Trees & Towers, Floods & Fires as an admission of that. Then, a few weeks later, writing Wings on a church camp bunk before the campers arrived with the other counselors standing in the doorway listening. And as time went on, those songs started to trap me. Sister's Winter Coat became a two and a half minute filler. The Trollop & The Troubadour grew too long to sing. Trees & Towers, even moreso. Song For Everyone was the annoying pop song I had to play or people would get angry instead of the anthem to friendship it was when it was written. Sparrow was the only song I felt I had any freedom to move around in--I added drum machines, trumpets, electric guitars...it was the only song on the album I really enjoyed, even when recording became a chore.

I remember getting my MacBook and messing around on Garage Band, and the record suddenly became fun again. I would scream in octaves out of my range to create a background part that wouldn't be heard above the rest of the sounds anyway. My roommate Justin laughed and told me I was crazy. Then after I moved to Chicago is where things really started to move. One day, I was fiddling around with the new version of Sister's Winter Coat, and I was playing trumpet along with it. Mind you, I don't play trumpet that well. But Kriss was disappointed when he found out I wasn't recording, so in went a trumpet track. And then a cello track. And then an electric piano. Suddenly, the experimental spirit I had when I first started the album in the dining room of our farm house returned full force. And for the past few months, that is all I've done with the songs. I've experimented. I added bass parts for the first time (which all rock). And it made it fun again.

And now, on the night of the release, years after the writing, months after the tinkering, and a day after all of the mixing is complete...the songs are finally songs. They're no longer projects to tweak and add to and edit.

And it's all pouring out of me.

Thank God for completion.

Now onto the next album.