Mikhail Pletnev: Beethoven: Sonata no. 21 in C major, “Waldstein”
From an early age, we took Jeremy to everything.
He “saw” the movie of Catch-22 when he was eleven months old. It didn’t go well. The bomb blasts and ack ack fire woke him from blissful sleep. He was, generally speaking, an easy baby to deal with but in the theater that afternoon, he was gearing up to cry his head off when Esther took him to the lobby where she nursed and coddled him while I finished watching the (not all that successful) movie adaptation of one of my favorite comic novels. (How could so much talent produce such a bloodless film?)
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At Wells College, where I taught from 1971-78, the meat and potatoes of my teaching load was a two-semester sequence in European history covering the Renaissance and Reformation (1300-1550, first semester) and Ancien Regime (1550-1789, second semester). Classes met twice a week, for an hour and a half a session, one for lecture and one for discussion of historical texts. In the discussion session, we went over a single primary document that I had assigned them –Pico, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, More, St. Ignatius, all the way through Diderot, Gracchus Babeuf, and Condorcet– with a fine-toothed comb.
I brought Jeremy to my discussion classes but not the lectures.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster: ask an active three-year-old, no matter how sunny, to sit for an hour and a half while adults talk about subjects about which he knows nothing and has no particular interest. But it worked. He brought along paper or a coloring book and Magic Markers and crayons, plus a Hot Wheel truck or two. He’d start the class sitting in my lap or next to me on a chair. When he lost interest in the discussion, which was soon, he’d climb down on the floor without a fuss and color or draw or push his Hot Wheels around, making “Vroom! Vroom!” sounds to indicate how powerful their engines were.
My students loved having him around. How could they not? They spoiled him rotten. How did he feel? I suspect having fifteen to twenty older sisters or aunts, all on loan to him and all eyes focused on him, was not the worst feeling in the world for a three or four-year-old –at least until I called them to attention to concentrate on discussion of the text for the day.
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The first movie we took him to at Wells was Downhill Racer —Robert Redford skiing down mountainsides and Gene Hackman coaching him. We came home afterwards and I lay on the bed on my side, flank up, talking to Esther. Jeremy climbed up my haunch and slid down my side onto the bed, over and over for maybe five minutes, which is a long time for a young sprat. He was Redford and me the Alps.
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We decided to test his patience at a music concert. We didn’t take him to hear John Ogden, though Ogden’s concert was excellent: we figured an evening of Liszt was too much to ask of even the best-tempered three-year-old. But next up was Beethoven, the piano sonatas, and this we did take him to hear. (This long after the event, I have no idea who the pianist was.) He sat between us, attentive and happy, through the first half of the concert. But the sonatas run an hour each and after the first one we could see he was fading. Esther took him to the lobby and sat with him on a couch, just a pair of doors separating her from the music –she could hear it almost as clearly as she could inside. She sat with him, Jeremy coloring in his book and playing with his toys, and occasionally talking to her about something that provoked his interest.
The concert ended. The auditorium doors opened and people filed out. We left, the three of us, satisfied with our night out together.
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Some time in there, I got back on track. I narrowed the focus of my dissertation and actually wrote words that I didn’t reflexively destroy as soon as I wrote them. Soon, I was ready for my colloquium, at which a number of distinguished professors would take pot shots at a hundred or so pages of my prose. It was 1975.
It went well. Better than well, actually. Stellar. I wasn’t done with my dissertation –far from it!– but I was back on track at last. Long last! Before I left New Haven to return home to Esther and Jeremy, I celebrated by buying a stunningly elegant elk suede tan sports jacket and a record: Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run. Rock on, Brucie!
This is the jacket in the photo below. We didn’t have much money then. For the past four years, I had been teaching all sorts of combinations of time –half-time, two-thirds time, one year full time as fill-in for a colleague on sabbatical, once even five-sixths time– on a non-tenure track in a school so small it couldn’t afford a fourth full-time historian. But I had just received payment for some copy editing work and sometimes you’re tired of pinching pennies, right? So I went ahead and bought it. The photograph is from a family wedding in Ohio. Aren’t Esther and Jeremy elegant? (Somehow we always found money for Jeremy’s clothes.)
The record is still, I think, Brucie’s best. The song below is the best on the album.
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This is my favorite photograph of me from then. I include it for no other reason than I want to. I was thirty-seven.
Bruce Springsteen, “Jungleland” (1975)
MUSIC & ME 