Two stories by Phil Nyokai James — ‘Nyokai’ was given to me in Japan — and Philip Dylan James was given to me by my father. The first story, The Stroke, is definitely by Phil Nyokai James; and the second story, Forgotten Daddy, is definitely by Philip Dylan James.

The Stroke

Before I had the stroke, 16 years ago, I planned to create a video of nature and shakuhachi, or Japanese bamboo flute — that’s the instrument I played. It would be created with high-end microphones and a high-end camera, and I would include some other people too.

But it’s a funny thing: dragging out the electronic equipment, after all these years, I felt suddenly what depression WAS: a thud that could only be from long ago. I was suddenly thrown into a cavernous form of depression that I wasn’t aware of, I didn’t understand how DEEPLY it reached inside me.

Thank heavens I don’t have it now, I am happy and I am SANE. And yes, I plan to make the video — sixteen years later!

A side note, ‘new-age’ Ram Dass: I had gone to hear him once, and I didn’t think much of his highfalutin lectures back then. But he had a stroke much the same as mine, so I decided I would try to call him. And I did — it was difficult — but I had a great time on Zoom or whatever it was called back then. We laughed, kind of alike, and he said that ninety percent of the ‘strokees’ who visited him were as depressed as HE had been.

That was the beginning of the cure — a little at a time, a little at a time. There were others who broke the ‘stroke mold’ too: May Sarton, Agnes de Mille, Jill Bolte Taylor, Ted Shawn… and they shouted yes, YES, you can do it!

______________

Another shakuhachi player just got the stroke too: Kurahashi Yōdō. He was a teacher of mine on shakuhachi, a brilliant one. He is stuck in a New York hospital, it’s pretty bad. His wife has come from Japan to be with him, and his son too.

I don’t know exactly what he is feeling; I don’t think ANYBODY does. It’s hard for me to imagine him without depression.

Early on, Yōdō was a whole lot of fun, with a terrific sense of humor. He recorded two CDs at my studio, and he drew the beautiful covers for one of the albums. Gradually he got slower and slower, between lessons. He would have to rest — he probably had way too many students.

I consider him a brother. I am no doubt probably going to compose a piece for him.

______________

But what exactly WAS my depression, what STARTED it, what led to the stroke?

I loved my parents, LOVED them — and yet there was tension in our family. My father (Philip) was an old man, a gifted musician born in 1890 — before cars! He’d get slightly drunk and tell us stories, funny stories about the distant musical past, and about his days as a soldier during World War 1. But I remember that after he had a heart attack I’d cynically feel ‘oh, Daddy!’

And my mother (Helga) was young and beautiful, but she was a Jewish escapee from Hitler, had seven members of her family killed by Nazis. I didn’t realize ALL of her horrors back then, she didn’t want us to know about them. She had a somewhat thick accent and was, occasionally, nervous as hell.

‘Daddy’ always wore a jacket and tie, and ‘Mommy’ always wore a dress. And they were always on time, ALWAYS. I don’t know what my sister was feeling, but I quickly acquired a highly-strung attitude. I’d be fun sometimes, but angry at others. And the feeling grew in me, grew and grew and grew.

Yes, that’s ONE thing that started my depression…

______________

I am wearing a tee-shirt that reads ‘Nebraska’ in bright letters. I hardly ever wear it, only when I have to because I’m out of clean shirts. I put it on and I feel embarrassed… but why?

Well, after the stroke my talking and shakuhachi playing were both kind of rough, but I somehow felt proud. I even OCCASIONALLY took on students.

And one day, about fourteen years ago, I got an email from the Japanese ‘club’ at the University of Nebraska: I was being asked to perform along with other Japanese and American musicians, at a big concert event. NOBODY knew about my stroke, and I wasn’t about to tell them, so cockily I said Yes.

I was asked to perform a single solo ‘honkyoku’ piece — beautiful old music — for about fifteen minutes. So after several Japanese songs it was my turn. I wasn’t wearing a costume, just a black shirt and pants, and I didn’t sit down, I just stood there. Then I talked about the music I was about to play, awkwardly, and I blew a few very weak sounds. It didn’t sound much like Japanese music…

They handed me the Nebraska tee-shirt — everybody got one. I THOUGHT they were laughing at me, and many months later I felt totally self-conscious: I realized I hadn’t done a decent job. And then later I played along with a koto player who had heard me in Nebraska, and she smiled and complemented me on what I had become!

So I’ll wear the Nebraska shirt when I have to: I see the blaring Nebraska and I feel ‘oh my God!’

But really, the stroke has made remarkable changes in me: I’m just NOT the same person. For the past couple of years I feel really happy — that is the TRUTH! And before that I spent all my life in a sort of muddled state, not knowing or understanding. I just thought things were right.

Now I try to live a kind of ‘pre-World War 1’ path. I’ve given up on cars and gasoline: I walk and walk, and occasionally bicycle. I don’t really like ‘medicine,’ haven’t seen a doctor in YEARS. I eat good food, not the packaged cellophane stuff. And I meditate, meditate and PRAY.

I have been divorced twice — both times it was pretty much my own fault. I couldn’t seem to get through it: I just needed peace. But I have a wonderful daughter and two wonderful sons and two wonderful grown-up grandchildren… and I know it must sound impractical for wanting aloneness, but I’m sticking to it, as much as possible, to LEARNING what it IS, this way of life…

______________

OK, start from the beginning, from way before the stroke: 

My sister Vivien was born in September of 1952, and I was born in January of 1954. It was at what was called the Doctors Hospital, later torn down and replaced with a residential condominium building — that’s the sort of thing they’d just started doing in New York.

It was snowing that day, and my mother was delighted with the lightly falling flakes — at least she smiled and said so. I remember our apartment, on the West Side. My father had lived there with his first wife, dead now, since back in the thirties. It was a small but elegant place, eighth floor, and right across the street from Central Park. 

I remember my first dream — I was about three years old. It was disgusting: a horrible-faced clown breaking in half and spewing guts and shit all over the place. The image stayed and stayed with me; I think it was caused by my mother looking annoyed and exclaiming ‘Fooey! Fooey!’ at one time when she was changing my diaper.

I remember playing yellow records of Farmer Alfalfa, and learning from my Daddy how to change the portable phonograph’s metal needles. I remember walking and walking with him — he was still moving fairly quickly at the time. We stopped in a store where the owner offered me a glass of dirty water and my Dad said ‘don’t tell your Mommy about it.’ Or walking toward the tug boats, where he said ‘Ah, I wrote a song about that years ago!’ 

I remember tricycling and tricycling with my sister in Central Park. I remember Daddy striking a sugar panorama egg with a gavel. I remember seeing Santa Claus in the distant red sky and telling my father about it, to which he remarked nonchalantly ‘is that a fact’ and walked away, probably returning to some composition he was working on. 

I remember him talking ENDLESSLY on the phone — at one point he actually lay on the floor and talked and talked. And my Mom talked endlessly on the phone too, standing nervously, talking German with her mother.

I remember the regular guests coming over: the old composer Walter Kramer, and the Herald Tribune music editor Jay Harrison, and the vaudeville performer Harold Herremans — he played violin and piano AT THE SAME TIME! Or Thanksgiving with Nancy and Ray and their teen-aged kids Veronica and Philip, who was named after my Dad. They were distant relatives. Ray and Daddy talked and laughed, and Nancy — she was British — rode our hobbyhorse while singing ‘Ride a Cockhorse to Banbury Cross.’ Then we sat and laughingly ate and were poured a few drops of wine down the fancy hollow stems of our wine-glasses — it tasted great! And they showed father’s home movies of us as kids, with the projector’s steady noise and faint smell, and Ray would show endless slides of countries around the world.

Yes, I have the vaguest recollection of the Macy’s Parade on Thanksgiving, with its giant Micky Mouse and other balloons floating within a few yards of us — we could almost reach out and touch them! 

I remember Daddy in a touristy country cabin somewhere in New Hampshire. Vivien and Helga were away, and he talked and talked and finally fell asleep with a LOUD snore. I didn’t know what I’d do… so I went outside and played around with tools, in the dirt. It felt absolutely wonderful, like I had become free! The same feeling came over me whenever I swam in the pounding ocean.

And I remember our earliest babysitter. She had red hair and an Irish accent and played a huge ‘pillow fight’ with us. For SOME reason she seemed very concerned about my sister falling off the ledge of the apartment — was Vivien standing out there??

And another babysitter: we moved out to ‘the burbs’ and met a neighborhood young girl, who was about 12 AND a Mormon. She would walk over in the summer generally barefoot: VERY different from my parents’ shoes going clack-clack-clack as they wandered very old-fashioned around the house.

______________

Helga died in 2018, age 94. With her various ailments I didn’t think she would get anywhere near that old — but I was at the height of my stroke then, and I know now that she felt it deeply. Her nervous energy had become my nervous energy, but as an oldster she laughed the way she had never laughed before, during our nervous times together.

She couldn’t walk and couldn’t hear very well, but she always carried a book with her, for instance the biography of Oscar Wilde, or the philosophy of Schopenhauer… or especially one of the many volumes on what Berlin had been like in her childhood, in the 1930’s. She wanted to write an autobiography, but she couldn’t quite make it.

Helga’s paternal grandmother, Julie Bujakowsky, was deported by Nazis to Theresienstadt in 1942; she was killed at the age of 83. Hans — her father — had a brother named Fritz, and he and his wife Else and young son Walter were deported to Auschwitz, where they perished in 1943. Another brother, Kurt, who had worked as an editorial assistant fled to Vienna in 1936; he, his wife Dina and daughter Stephanie (‘Steffi,’ born in 1937) then immigrated to France after the Anschluss, and from there they were killed at Auschwitz in 1942.

Helga fled Germany in August 1938, with her parents; they settled in Freeport, a suburb of New York. Her father changed his name from Hans Adolph Bujakowsky to Henry A. Boyer — he copied the actor’s name, Charles Boyer. And she became Helga Boyer, too. She went to collage, then worked toward a Master’s degree in musicology at New York University. My father was her professor of music — and almost ready to retire!

But first she married a fellow NYU student, Bill Shank, from 1948 until 1951. Like Bill, she did NOT believe in killing, even Nazis. Bill wrote:

I really had made up my mind that I was not going to go into the Army, that I had a philosophical objection to war, that I felt that war was immoral, that I thought it was futile, that I thought it was evil, and that I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

They were both taking music classes, were both music majors. I haven’t the slightest idea where they lived; it was DEFINITELY poor. She always spoke of restaurant jobs, laughing and getting fired, and cold-water apartments, tiny places in Greenwich Village.

Besides musicology, she studied conducting and orchestration with my Dad. She says Philip smiled at what she had composed ‘Russian-style.’ She laughed too, and he wrote at the top of the page ‘An Afternoon in Minsk.’

And she divorced Bill, and married Philip. I don’t think it was for money — that wasn’t what she was like, that wasn’t her. I think it’s because she was falling in love, in genuine real love. And he had been, like her, through all the wars, and through ALL the suffering.

But there was something broken in Helga, a sad missingness, a loneliness… I saw it in her eyes.

She was very shy, especially around people at cocktail parties. And she was scared of heights, scared of uniforms… and she would very occasionally break down, get worried, fall on the bed crying.

One day my father decided we’d eat at Lüchow’s, a German-style tourist restaurant. We’d only been there a few minutes before my mother started arguing with the waiter. He was a tall old German, and he yelled at her ‘No, I am NOT a Nazi!’

‘Yes you ARE!’ she shouted back, and loudly. She knew she was right. They never quite died away, those Nazis and neo-Nazis. They ALWAYS crept in.

And she was ALWAYS getting some slight disease. She usually showed ‘palpitations,’ whatever they were. And I guess I got sick a lot too: mumps, measles, ‘the croup’… But I actually liked it, being sick. My Mom brought me new toys and lots of books, and she smiled at me WONDERFULLY.

Ah, the way she’d loudly sing on three notes, singing that dinner was ready: Vash hands and sit down! [Pause…] Vash hands and sit down!

She mail-ordered a ‘Barber Kit,’ frequently sold in those days — but Helga was NOT a ‘hair artist.’ I looked like shit and was embarrassed as hell, looking weird, like an irregular mop. I even was called into the principal’s office, where he asked me how I’d gotten the haircut. I said it was at a barber shop in another faraway, faraway town.

And I remember Helga loving animals, absolutely LOVING them, dogs in particular. I remember her smiling humanely with ‘Seppel,’ the miniature dachshund in our funny family. Once a minister came over, I don’t know exactly why, but Seppel LEAPT at him and furiously humped his arm, to which we all (including the minister) cracked up. 

Helga and Philip smiled together, too. And they played old four-hand piano pieces composed by Dvořák. I remember one time Helga felt VERY nervous about it, and Philip seemed somewhat annoyed… But he gave her sentimental perfumes, jewelry, someone’s autobiography, whatever… and she gave him vests, with pockets to hold his gold chain and pocket watch. One of the vests she gave him was BRIGHT red, and he loved it!

She learned to drive, taking over the wheel from him. It took her many ‘driving school’ lessons — she failed the license twice, but then at last we could go away on car vacations. We drove, slowly, to Philadelphia, to DC, or the Amish, and the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains… and she’d be worrying about the stove being left on, while my Daddy was sitting on the passenger side peeing in a Mason jar. My sister and I were in the back seat, staring in wonder at the ice melting down the mountainsides… Or we’d laugh and laugh about how blueberry pie — popular in those roadside days — was leaving a blue stain on Mommy’s teeth.

That’s what Helga was like back then. She could be absolutely wonderful, and laughing almost hysterically, but then she’d be quiet, and even angry…

I felt like I had to IMITATE her, without fully understanding the behavior. Yes, she had the ‘signs of depression,’ and I began to feel everything that way, just like her. I’m afraid I was always over-thinking, always over-sensitive. I was changing from a child into a cigarette-smoking cynic — and alas, a secret drinker!

And I’d go to my room and just write, read and then write write write…

What do you want: it was the sixties.

______________

So we had moved out to Long Island, away from the thousands of people and the dirt. First it was a dilapidated old house that we stayed at for about a year, just a short hop from NYC. We had tiny yards, Mormons on one side of us and an old wedded couple of HEAVY drinkers on the other; they’d sing with crackled drunk voices late at night. And we used to go to a nearby church where the organist had been a student of my father’s. Daddy wrote anthems on a regular basis most Sundays. I remember him playing organ as a guest one time — I was just six or seven and he needed me to turn his pages. He got a little annoyed at me for not turning at the right time.

He had a serious heart attack and we moved a bit further out, into clean suburbia itself, Manhasset. Our house was just a block away from a hospital. It was a split-level with a ‘decent yard,’ and it had a special room called ‘the den’ that included a hidden TV, a hi-fi, and a VERY 50’s bar. I used to sneak sips, unfortunately. And my father hung up very romantic paintings and autographed 1930’s photos of musicians. It was strange, the old-fashioned stuff hanging on new-fangled plywood.

The neighbors invited him to a new-in-the-party kind of thing, and I went along. He was the ‘artsy old man,’ paying a call on the striving young businessmen and their spouses. And he got SERIOUSLY drunk — I had to help him walk home as he sang old World War 1 tunes. I was totally embarrassed. He was never asked to visit these guys again — although a similar incident happened much later, in another neighborhood. And I don’t think my sister even heard about these visits, she was somehow protected from the anxiety — ‘us boys’ had to handle it.

There was another ‘rite of passage’ early on. I was seven at the time, and a rowdy neighborhood boy convinced me to pull down the diapers of the one-year-old next door to us. So I waited for the one-year-old to appear outside with his babysitter and I DID it, to which he cried and cried. His mother came out and marched to MY mother, yelling. I never saw those neighbors again, don’t even know what their names were.

But I DID get to know the neighbors on the other side of us, the three boys of the O’Mally’s: Sean, Kevin, and Neal. Kevin was my own age, and we had lots of fun playing ball, riding our bicycles, and laughing. He went to a different school than I did and we didn’t bother with science or literature — we just had FUN! And I remember his Dad had purchased a color television — rare in those days — and sat us down to watch the very first of the color series, Bonanza.

But aside from this, there was school — private school — and the weird mix of getting ahead and nervousness. The stroke was slowly on its way…

______________

I was in my forties, making tons of money writing technical books about software and not feeling really good about it. Oh, I was playing music too, but that just didn’t pay enough. It was software software software — I was caught in that world! 

I have to admit I was really good at it, somewhat of an expert. If somebody had a question about software, particularly communications software, I could generally answer it, with a smile.

But I felt nervous. I just didn’t like my ‘world.’ And I got impatient with my family, a wife and two teenage kids. I must have been a pretty lousy father. They might tell you something else, but I think it was true, my restlessness, my frustrations. 

My daughter was great: she said I had to leave — yes, that really was a great move! I got an apartment near our house and stayed in it for a month. I read books about music — at last! And I worked intensely on the shakuhachi.

I returned a little better — just a little. I still had anxiety, tenseness… what WAS it?

I ended up divorced, and married again. I was a teacher now, of shakuhachi, and we moved to New England. We traveled a lot. My second wife, Lara, was VERY pregnant when I drove us around Grand Canyon in the winter of 2010, and my whole ‘body-mind’ felt uneasy, with the sort of nervousness I had felt as a boy with my nervous mother… or at school!

And then it happened: I couldn’t drive straight, I was swerving the car as it screeched loudly to the right, the left, right, left… Lara was yelling loudly, I couldn’t talk, my body was squeezed in a taut tightness… 

Yes, it was the stroke!

______________

‘School’ and ‘Mommy’ — I mention both of them for partly making me nervous, for leading the way to my stroke… Helga would be highly strung-out for moments at a time, but as I say, once I had the stroke she actually became lovable. And if I think back, she was always as lovable as she could be — it’s just that I HAD to figure her out, her peculiar version of reality. 

The first two schools were pretty horrible: Buckley Country Day School from the first grade through the ninth and Phillips Exeter Academy for part of the tenth; I pretty much hated them. But then I went to public school for the last year and a half, Schreiber High School — ah yes, it was a bunch of us hippies having fun and relaxing!

First Buckley: 

My father decided that private school was the right idea for me and for Vivien; he’d grown up pretty poor. So here we were now, in the burbs of New York. And at Buckley Country Day School, or ‘BCDS’, I met the ultra-rich — well, I met a very few ‘regular’ guys too. And I became a geek, a nerd, a dork, a dweeb — a poindexter! I was a very smart one, but clearly one of those weird guys. And yes, I usually was a shy and sensitive little boy, but not always. I got angry in reaction, at home.

And at home I was alone a lot of the times. I’d improvise piano pieces — my father was COMPLETELY in favor of this! Or I’d read and write, collect stamps, do magic tricks, make films — I loved making films. The slick athletic boys would sometimes laugh and sneer at me. I didn’t really care, at least not deeply.

I was short and skinny, and I used to go to evening dance-class, all dressed up in my Brooks Brothers suit, hair carefully Brylcreemed. The girls didn’t give a hoot about what a nerd I was, they just knew me — and we DANCED! Yes, I learned the Lindy, the Tango, the Bunny Hop, the Twist, and I just LOVED IT! Ah, the girls with their white gloves, coming at me with smiles… 

And I wrote and wrote, poems, stories, whatever… 

I learned alot about writing from the playwright John Ford Noonan. He was our seventh and eighth grade Latin teacher – amo, amas, amat. I’m not sure he knew a lot of Latin, but he was a fantastic teacher — probably the only one. His writing was somewhat sentimental, and at the same time it was ‘avant-garde’ and funny. It is VERY weird that he taught here, in his pretty ragged clothes. But I learned to WRITE!

Class started, and he stood halfway in the hall with a cigarette. Then suddenly he would say ‘Would you like to hear some of my play?’ Sure! And he read the dialog — high for the women, low pitch for the males, searching, discovering… His expressions would get stronger, every piece of dialog would have a secret. ‘Whad’ya think?’ he asked sheepishly. ‘Is it all right?’

Oh YES it’s all right!!

And I followed in his boots: I actually wrote a novel, a very weird one, entitled 53 Bones and an Appendix. He loved it!

Other than Noonan I pretty much hated Buckley. The rest of the boys mainly just sat there, until it was time for ‘sports,’ which I really couldn’t stand THEIR way of playing. But I did became friends with a few of them, the fellow poindexters… they were the Jews in my class!

So Noonan moved to California, then came back in a year or so; he was dressed now as a totally dirty hippie. He came to our house once — I think my parents were trying hard to find a connection between me and cheerful Noonan. 

Yes, Daddy, I started to drift away from the musical ‘you’ and toward the youthful Noonan — 

And I was trying to make ‘avant-garde’ films. I borrowed a 16mm camera from a schoolmate and called Noonan to see if he could bring a couple of young actors to work, in NYC, one afternoon. ‘Sure!’ he said gleefully. So they came and did a scene I had written — ha, it was pretty passionate, lots of kissing. And then when they had left I asked Noonan to lay down and roll around in Central Park — I was shooting in slow motion. Damn, I wish I hadn’t lost the film…

Now I’ll talk about what Noonan was like much later on:

I was 18, and Noonan and I drank and drank! We went regularly to a NY bar called Jimmy Ray’s, filled with drunk TV and stage actors — you’d recognize their names. And I was working on plays, not films any more.  

One day I HAD to just leave him, without a word: I’m NOT going to be that kind of miserable drunk! Oh, he had a couple of very successful plays, but…

…then I heard he died a few years ago, not so old, at a home for actors.

______________

OK, back to Exeter, the Phillips Exeter Academy:

I’m not going to say much about it, but I was somehow different at age 15. I think my parents sensed it too. They sent me away and hoped it would do me some good. 

HA!

Boys boys boys, ah YES, boys were suddenly a great attraction. But so were drugs. I was getting heavily into more and more marijuana and LSD… Exeter SHOULD have taught me about farming and gardening, and cooking, and constructing buildings, and the arts from other cultures, India, Japan… 

…but they didn’t teach me about any of those things. Instead they kicked me out for ‘attempted suicide’ — it really was kind of fake, kind of. I was trembling inside their infirmary — couldn’t stop it — until the two Germans, Helga and her mother, came and got me. I smoked cigarette after cigarette on the long drive home, no conversation at all.

At home my father didn’t know WHAT he should say, any more than my mother. I went to a psychiatrist, just this one time. I said to my mother that I REALLY didn’t like it. And she suddenly screamed, LOUDLY:

‘I AM NOT THE CRAZY ONE!!!’

I paused for a second — and then I laughed and laughed and LAUGHED!

That’s all I have to say about Exeter. Maybe I’ll write a story some time.

______________

But Schreiber: YES!!!

I showed up there in March or April, 1970 — the 60’s were over! It was morning, kids arrived by the hundreds and hundreds — there were buses, cars, bicycles, walking… The hippie-looking boys and girls were crowding together, joking around — they all seemed to know each other. And quickly and happily I joined in. At night there were cigarettes, occasional joints, beer, and lots of laughing. It felt comfortable there, it felt usual — not the wild-n-wacky (and dark!) LSD of the Exeter past.

I stayed busy writing, but most of all it was MUSIC. Yes, I was getting back to it, touching the piano again. And the other musicians at Schreiber were really great. They were true musicians! 

So I wrote part of an orchestral piece for eleventh grade, and another guy wrote part of it too. It was called ‘Siva – a Study in Dissonance.’ We played it, for full orchestra, in Atlantic City, messily and sloppily… it sounded a lot like my father’s music!

And guitar-playing Peter Pickow: he and I were good friends for the year and a half I was there. And bass-playing Dan Bartlett and my flute-playing girlfriend Melissa Mann.

I used to go over to Peter’s house to play music, and he, too, had great guitars and a great voice. And a VERY cool home — lots of wood everywhere, unlike my parents with their plywood. I wish I LIVED there!

I got to know his father well, the photographer George Pickow, and his mother too. She was a musician who had long ago moved from Kentucky; her name was Jean Ritchie. ‘I see folk music as a river that never stopped flowing,’ she told The New York Times in 1980. ‘Sometimes a few people go to it and sometimes a lot of people do. But it’s always there.’

Johnny Cash recorded her ‘The L. & N. Don’t Stop Here Anymore’ and Emmylou Harris performed her ‘Sweet Sorrow in the Wind.’ Bob Dylan has cited her as one of the folksingers he listens to. Her own song ‘Black Waters’ took aim at what strip mining has done, and her album ‘None But One’ received a Rolling Stone Critics Award.

Jean was a very, VERY cool lady. But Peter was equally fun. Oh, we partied and drank too much — but what the hell, it was FUN!

I was able to start carving my life out, putting the nervous energy on temporary hold… but I felt the tension sneaking up on me…

______________

Ah, the seventies in New York City! It was truly idyllic. I lived on the Lower East Side and paid $75 in rent; later it went up to $85. OK, it was kind-of sleazy, but so what: it was HOME!

You could walk along the street and say Hi to everybody, the poets, the artistes — and I was starting to write back then, stories and poems and even very weird piano music.

I moved in with Heloise Gold, a beautiful dancer. We started doing performances. I was, admittedly, a part-time drunk: she changed that! Well, at least for a while…

And in 1975 Daddy died, but I didn’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to perform. He left me 11,000 dollars — and I was elated! I was twenty-one years old and it was burning a hole in my checkbook.

Then suddenly I knew, oh yes, I KNEW:

I was eating at a macrobiotic restaurant in NY and saw a sign advertising shakuhachi: ‘Ronnie Seldin, shakuhachi lessons…’

So I went out to Flushing, a long train ride and a long walk, twice a week. Ronnie was just back from Kyoto. He and I were sitting on the floor across from each other, with a short table between us. We’d start by bowing to each other… But I couldn’t really play it yet, it was all new to me…

One night we were doing a performance with some kind of audience-paricipation dancing and weird instruments, at a loft — that was how you did it, at a loft. Deborah Hay, the dancer who lived in Austin, was there that night. I didn’t know who she was, but she just about smiled the whole time. Afterwards she introduced herself and we traded phone numbers. Then a day later she called with a proposition: we would give a performance in Austin AND babysit her five or six-year-old Savanah, for at least a couple of weeks while she was away on tour. And we could find a place and move to beautiful Austin if we wanted.

Wow!

Hm, what about Ronnie? Well, we COULD bring the flute along… and the notation…

OK: YES!

______________

It’s hard to describe beautiful Austin, its magic back then. I bought a used 1967 VW van, light blue and as hippie as you can get; I traveled, all around Texas and New Mexico; I took odd, ODD jobs; I lived in a tipi for a while; I’d get with people and sing outdoors; I tried to teach them a little shakuhachi; and yes, I toured with Deborah, in New York, in Washington DC…

But, BUT:

Oh, there is joy, there is happiness, but I am somehow once again depressed.

And I kept it secret…  

And I didn’t completely realize my unhappiness until I had a stroke, in 2010. Then I just studied it, the pain, the anger, the ‘illness,’ alone for years…

I am one of those so-called ‘stroke victims’ who has a YES in his smile. And there is something wonderful about the shakuhachi: it doesn’t make a ‘Western sound’ at all, nope — but it curves the air, carves a realm, weaves a sound that is beyond anything I’ve heard before. It drags me out of sadness into the blank beautiful moment. Yes, the shakuhachi IS my altar; it asks me for my ULTIMATE respect. And it sings sings SINGS!

So it was the late seventies/early eighties: I drove my ’67 light blue VW down to Big Bend, alone. It was the summer, no less, and the van had no AC — but who cares? I was YOUNG then! I had to fall asleep sweating in the 100-plus evening. But I felt incredibly happy, for a change. I loved being alone. And I loved PARTICIPATING in the sound of the shakuhachi: I played it late one night, over and over, and it went howling across the riverbed — and the trees were talking back to me!

I thought about what ‘music’ had been like as a young boy — how I hated practicing piano in front of this or that teacher, those bitter money-hungry men. I remember the first piano teacher I had. He would flick his cigarette and DULLY repeat the phrase ‘wrong, wrong, wrong.’ My Dad had to take over, he taught that music was beautiful. But I would have to find my way into it. Yes, my OWN way.

So shakuhachi came to me. And Ronnie Seldin, like SO many shakuhachi teachers I later studied with (and continue to learn from) was as kind as they come. That’s what I felt at Big Bend. I was, in that magical moment, truly happy.

______________

So I’m laying in a hospital bed, the so-called ‘victim’ of a stroke, and wondering:

Who am I? Who the hell AM I?

I have since then grown to become a very different person — and I really, really like it. It took strength to get to this place, and at times a complete aloneness. Pain, sure, every day… but I don’t care at this stage in my life — I want to go out smiling!

Not long before the stroke I married Lara — the ‘second wife.’ We had traveled all over the place, Italy, Thailand, India… Now she was very pregnant — and a little younger than me. We rented a car to drive around Arizona; it was winter, and desolate, but none the less beautiful. And because she was pregnant I did most of the driving.

When I woke up that morning I felt somehow uncomfortable, with a feeling I hadn’t experienced before. I had a slight peculiar throbbing, as if something needed to escape my body. Nevertheless, I decided I would drive to Grand Canyon.

While driving I thought and thought. I thought about how I didn’t want to teach all those shakuhachi students any more, how I didn’t want to keep writing computer books, or advise people any longer — in short I didn’t know WHAT I’d do for money: I was lost. And Lara was pretty needy in those days too, as she should have been. One day she wanted to know how I was going to earn a living — to which I responded, falsely, ‘Oh, it’s no problem.’

The pressure in me was intense.

I drove and drove. We stopped at the cold empty Grand Canyon once more: it was beautiful and surreal. My headache was staying about the same, very weird. And I kept driving.

Then suddenly my body went completely stiff, and I started steering the car screamingly left, and then right, and then left, and then right… ‘Phil, Phil!!!’ Lara screamed, and she was finally able to brake the car. The baby inside her must have been totally panicked!

We were out in the middle of nowhere. My body was bent; I don’t remember much more than that. But I remember being walked or carried into a helicopter. These two handsome men, whom I thought of as ‘evil,’ asked what my name was. Oh, that’s easy: I answered in what I thought was right but was really gobbledegook. They shook their heads, and the motors got loud, and I passed out.

Next thing I knew I was in a bright white light. There was no pain, but the entire right side of my body couldn’t move. I felt that this would be it: for the rest of my life I wouldn’t be able to move my right leg or my right arm; listening to music, but no shakuhachi. I started thinking about what had happened: was it polio??

______________

Later that day I learned it was ‘the stroke.’ Ah yes! My father had it back in 1974; his lips were angular and he could barely talk. Same with me.

I don’t know how long I was there, at the Mayo Hospital in Scottsdale Arizona. I like to think of it as the ‘Mayo Prison.’ Supposedly they were experts on the stroke — hmmm, I don’t know…

I DO know that I was in ICU for quite a while…

And everything was dreamlike. For instance I stared at a video screen and it grew and grew, suddenly just about big enough for me to enter! And FLAVORS were different now too, and the SMELL… yes, the whole damn world became somehow altered.

The dancer Marita happened to be in Arizona at the time, and she came to visit. I smiled, and she smiled — it seemed like her smile came from somewhere deep inside the Earth!

And Lara circulated the following to our friends:

I have been trying to get him to hold his shakuhachi flute every day and blow a sound. The first day was not so good, quite devastatingly sad, the silence and awkwardness. Today a little sound came out! I am committed to pushing him to hold this comfortable friend and try every day, every single day. I know in my heart this is a lifeline to his recovery… Music, music, music, music. I know the power for healing…

______________

My stay in the hospital was hard — hard for me as well as for other family members. An attendant woke me up every four hours at night, in a sort of ‘kindergarten accent.’ I wanted to tell her that I’m not that stupid — and I just needed sleep, SLEEP!

I was sometimes really depressed and sometimes ecstatic. I’d bop between the two, I didn’t know why… but I think depression was caused by my memory, memory of how things used to be. I’d remember bits and pieces…

Yes, I’d see that my entire past was almost completely gone. The exception was people, PEOPLE! THEY were there, my family, my mother…

And on some lonely nights I managed to listen to a CD by the composer Frank Denyer, with Yoshikazu Iwamoto on shakuhachi — ah, so beautiful! I’d listen to it over and over again, pushing the buttons with GREAT difficulty. But I could listen, listen to the magical sounds inundating my world!

______________

The past… I’m lying in the hospital bed and memory comes at me with a ferocious force, and then it goes away. What will I do, what will I do?

I’m remembering what it was like in Austin, playing music, writing, marrying Kim… and I was confused as hell! We had two beautiful children, but for some reason I was confused that way too, I was all anxious. Kim knew it, and the kids knew it, but around everyone else I seemed relaxed and smiling.

We moved to Missouri, bought ten beautiful acres and lived in a trailer; we ‘worked the land’ part-time while I became a barn roofer and chimney sweep, as well as playing shakuhachi and piano music whenever I could — and writing writing writing…

And yes, I had a ‘slight problem’ with alcohol…

We moved into Columbia, Missouri; I decided that I didn’t want any more poverty, nope! I set my mind to it, I became somewhat of an expert in telecommunication software. I headed up in a software company for seven years, then I quit and became a leader in writing technical books, earning tons of dollars. Which I really HATED — I wanted to become successful at artistic music and words, but I didn’t know how to make any money there.

Kim and I were divorced, and I married Lara. We moved to Portland Maine; I absolutely loved New England. I finally took up teaching shakuhachi. When I played or taught it was a magical moment: I was finally there with shakuhachi, not a bit nervous now, but JOYOUS!

And NOW I’m suddenly lying in a hospital bed, wondering what the hell comes next… no shakuhachi, no nothing...

______________

It has been a difficult sixteen years. Lara had a beautiful baby, Julian, and then she fell in love with another younger man; I can’t really blame her! But I was left all alone.

I couldn’t do simple ‘math’ any more — or at least I didn’t want to — but I could read, read read READ. And write! And I loved art, and dance…

Once again I tried teaching shakuhachi, but it was hopeless. Now I have just one student — and he is great, a sort of ‘sensei.’ And I am teaching MY way — I don’t care what other people are doing, I’m doing it MY way; playing shakuhachi has become who I AM!

For a while I hung out romantically with Jennifer, who had been an editor of my technical books long ago. She lived in San Francisco and we would meet at home, or in New York, Boston, Chicago… even cities in Canada. But three years went by and we were stuck in our own worlds, and we said goodbye; that was SO difficult!

I totally gave up stinking cars and took in WALKING. At first it was very difficult, I had a limp caused by the stroke. But it got easier and easier, and eventually there was no problem at all. Today I walk at least four miles a day, in whatever kind of weather. My father used to walk until late in life, I remember that… and it is JOYOUS!

And what about alcohol? I finally gave that up too, about five or six years ago. It was SO hard, but I had to do it. And now it too has become JOYOUS!

So that leave a question about the stroke: does it just happen or is it caused by something you can take care of? ‘Medicine’ would claim it just happens, but I don’t know. I have spoken with LOTS of people who have gotten it and almost invariably it is caused by emotional stress, even when that’s not obvious. I believe I wouldn’t have gotten it without the stress pouring through me…

And what about the ‘cure?’ For those who don’t die I think that’s obvious: yes, you CAN do it, you CAN do it!!!

__________________________________________________

Forgotten Daddy

My father, ‘Daddy,’ was an old man. He’d be limping around our suburban house, slowly, with a broad smile and wrinkled jokes. Or he’d sit at his desk writing letters, or fall asleep snoring in his naugahyde reclining chair. Or he’d walk, once again slowly, with our miniature dachshund ‘Seppel,’ coming back indoors pretty damn soon. So that’s what I felt about him: he was an old man, and I felt kind of sad.

But I didn’t realize just how important he was in the New York music scene, just how much he’d done. Here is a recording by an old student of his, Milton Babbitt, who had later won the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship: