I found Vivaldi when I was a teenager.

In my teens, I attended a lot of concerts. Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, The Beatles, Country Joe and the Fish, the Kinks, the Birds, Ravi Shankar, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel (acoustic at the HecEd), Moody Blues, then Laura Nyro and my favorite Joni Mitchell. I’d had guitar lessons from Candy Mack and played a number of folk tunes from The Joan Baez Songbook. Then college.

When I went to work at the University Book Store (Seattle, then the largest of its kind) in 1971 or maybe 1972. (We’re discussing this.) I wanted to work in the Art Department and assured Harriet Rucker (HR) that I knew nothing about music. But I’d recently worked at DJ’s Sound City at the Northgate Mall, so they put me in the Music Department, working for Jess Burton. It was a narrow shop with its own door and bins of LPs lining the long north and south walls with double row down the middle. Think of the store in High Fidelity, but no more than 18 feet wide. Jess’s office was upstairs.

I discovered the budget classical label, Nonesuch Records. We were allowed to open LPs and play them. I discovered Vivaldi.

At that time, I was a studio arts major, a 5-year degree at the Udub. I had a driver’s license but no car. I was making about $1.70/hour. They paid part-time people less because in theory they worked around my schedule. In practice, I arranged my classes around when I was likely to get hours in the record shop. [I rode to school with my dad at 7am, and a ride home. My parents gave me food and lodging till I moved out. They did not contribute to my education.] I received a 15% discount on most things purchased at the Book Store, only 10% on textbooks. Gary worked in Book Marking, and will claim to this day that his greatest educational opportunity was opening and marking those books.

It took weeks to special-order a recording, but we sold the entire catalog of Nonesuch recordings. Baroque and other obscure recordings. Duets, quartets, and other ensembles with lutes and harpsichord and recorders instead of guitars and piano and flute. None sounded quite like the one I link to, but I loved it all. I liked hearing the individual instruments that tended to blend in a full orchestra.

One day a man was buying a record—I don’t recall what. He had a small case and I asked him what was in it. His flute. I was delighted and I suspect a young woman in delight was the reason he opened his case to show me his gold flute. Yes, literal gold. Did I hold his University Book Store credit card in the air and demand he play or simply ask, please? He played “Syrinx” by Debussy. It’s a startling, gorgeous solo!

It is typical of me that I don’t remember the young man’s name, only what he made and where he said he was going. He was on his way to Switzerland to study with the French flutist, Jean-Pierre Rampal. Gary and I later attended his concert on campus at Kane Hall. We saw Louis Leakey there, took Anthro and Art History classes from Bill Holm. The events were as much a part of my education and many of the classes. My studio classes met more than twice the hours that my ordinary academic classes met, and I spent twice again as many hours on them. I almost never studied for my academic classes. I put off my required sciences classes, but finally took Physical Anthropology taught by a man doing his doctorate on dental patterns of chimps (a narrow-minded individual epitomizing masculine short-sightedness), Oceanography (never once studied, earned a B but took it without a grade) and then took a Botany class and very nearly changed majors as a Junior. My single favorite class was the result of African students in the Music, Art History, and English departments banding together to teach about actual African music, art, literature, and culture. They assigned Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a novel I would later teach.

I am a curious person, at heart. I want to know things. I loved college because it exposed me to ideas and music and art and cultures so very different from my own. That’s what college is supposed to do, I think.

Tonight I am reading a short piece from my novel at BOLD Coffee and Books, a favorite writer’s hangout in Portland. I am very much tempted to change from my visiting-a-grave passage to the birthing passage. [With permission of Dan.] Wish me luck!

note: I wrote this post only this morning. There is so much more to say, and when I come back from my run, maybe I will say it.