Subtle Order Everywhere, or, Success With Upturned Top Hats

 

The dress code at Baldwin Manor changed in 1994. For that reason I left my job after twenty-one years of employment. As required, I'd worn a white polyester uniform for the first four years I worked at the facility. I'd begun work at age 22, as a nursing assistant, and in the 1970s, all unlicensed staff had the uniform requirement. White, as we know, is not a color but rather the absence of color. This meant no conflict with my personal system of dressing by color.  

Of course I was happier and more comfortable when, in 1977, I finally completed the coursework to become a Geriatric Nursing Specialist. Then I was able to dress in my own clothing. This took place back when the facility was still known as Hillcrest House of Hospitality, and there were still some limitations. It was understood that I would wear a dress or skirt. Later, when the nursing home was renamed Baldwin Manor, the rules allowed me to wear any type of nice professional clothing.  

The rules worked for everyone, so we were all surprised when the new dress code changes came along. The rule change went into place when the Kijlstra Brothers bought the company. The Kijlstras grew up in the Netherlands and I suppose the culture is more formal there.  

Carst Kijlstra was all right to deal with, but his brother Yos was very difficult. I discovered this for myself a week after I got a sheet cake from the dining facility. It was yellow cake with buttercream frosting -- my favorite combination. It was a nice big cake, enough to share with all the staff -- nursing, kitchen, maintenance, case management -- and it had "21 Years, Congrats" written on top. The cake actually said "21 Years, Comgrats" because Bethany had been in a hurry to get the lettering done before the lunch slips were picked up and brought back to the kitchen.  

When Bethany handed me the spatula, I quickly cut through the middle of "Comgrats" and no one noticed the typo, including Bethany. The cake was delicious, very moist and the icing was from a mix but Bethany had put some real butter in it and you could taste that, as I told her. She liked that I'd noticed. It was nice to have had someone bake it; once a person gets into the mid-forties, the only birthday cake you generally get is a single slice brought out by the server after a group dinner. One rarely gets to choose the flavor. The sheet cake was for my work anniversary and not my birthday, but it gave me a pleasant happy-birthday feeling.   

So when Mary Ellen, the facilities manager, passed me in the hallway and asked me to stop in at Yos Kijlstra's office "when I had a moment," to be honest I thought Yos might give me a gift certificate to T.G.I.Friday's. Or tell me I could have the semi-official three-quarter-size parking space next to the official Employee of the Month spot near the back door. The staff all knew my Ford Festiva would fit in the short space without blocking the exit driveway, so maybe they were going to let me park there for a month or something.  

But no, when I rapped on the door frame of Mr. Kijlstra's office and stuck my head in, he gave me an odd smile and motioned me in. I came in and sat down in the chair in front of his desk, then looked back at the open door, wondering if I should close it. He said in his Dutch accent, "This will chust take a moment, Irene." My name came out as "Irrrene," and that was charming, even though Yos himself wasn't.  

Yos used his fingertips to press down something on his desk, then he gave it a little shove, and the object slid across his desk top toward me. It would have gone over the front edge but I caught it. I was holding a photocopied booklet, with a background so gray that I could barely read the front cover.  

I squinted and made out the words "Standards and Procedures, Baldwin Manor, efective April 1994." Seven words and a date, and one of the words was spelled wrong. I opened the front cover. The text of the booklet was not only off-center and tilted, but during binding, the stapler hadn't been pushed down firmly enough. The end of a wire fastener protruded from the back cover and it had scratched me on the inside of my ring finger when I caught the pamphlet.  

I didn't say anything about the scratch. I just waited, as it was clear that neither a restaurant gift certificate nor a special parking spot were in my future.  

As I looked down at the badly-made booklet, Yos told me that in the future I would be required to wear green medical scrubs during my work day. Five pairs of these scrub sets would be provided, and if I brought my soiled uniforms in, the facility would launder the scrubs for me. I hoped the laundry crew was going to get extra pay for doing all these uniforms for everybody, but that wasn't my main concern at the moment.  

"I only wear green on Thursdays," I told Yos.  

"Excuse me?" he said.  

I looked at him directly, which I didn't enjoy. Yos had the puffy face of someone who lived on beer and batter-fried fish. His mouth was very small, or perhaps the mpression came from his choice to hold his lips in a compressed pucker. Maybe he thought this made him look reserved and in control, but it didn't. He looked like he'd suddenly become unwell. He had whitish straw-like hair like Andy Warhol's but the effect was more like -- what? An evil scarecrow, perhaps. I really wished I didn't have to sit across from him and look at his face.

I kept my thoughts about Yos' personal appearance to myself and focused on the matter at hand. "I only wear green on Thursdays," I said again, speaking more slowly this time.   

Looking back, I'd say that our conversation would have gone better if Yos had asked me why.  But instead he said "Are you messing with me?"

Unfortunately, I didn't understand what he said because of his Dutch accent. So I told him I was sorry but I couldn't understand him, and could he repeat what he'd told me? 

He did, and this time I got it, even though he said "Are you messing with me?" through his teeth.

Happenstance bad timing, but he couldn't see it as the random event it was. So I said, "Why would I mess with you?  You're the boss." The whole thing was becoming ugly and unpleasant, and just a week after that lovely sheet cake, too.  

"I don't know what's going on with you," said Yos.

And I said "I don't understand why you don't understand."

And then he said "Well, the uniform is green and it is worn daily, so you will be wearing this uniform on Wednesday, but also on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.  Do you understand?"

"The problem is not that I can't understand you," I said. "I understood what you said.  I believe the problem is that you don't understand what I am saying. I am saying that I don't wear green on any day except Thursday."

And again, this was another opportunity for Yos.  Even if he had said, "Why?" in a brusque manner, we still might have gotten somewhere.  But instead, he said "You are suspended with pay for five days, and I am going to send you for a mental health evaluation.  If they clear you, we can talk about what your future is with this company."

I said, "Well, it's true that I am a little odd. But of the two of us, it seems to me that you exhibit more textbook symptoms than I do. Your reasoning is confused, you think others are plotting against you, and you perceive your power and sphere of influence as greater than they actually are.  I'm sure that's some kind of narcissism or personality disorder.  I don't have an exact assessment. We used the DSM II when I was in school, but that's been seventeen years so they surely are up to DSM III or IV by now."

Yos listened carefully to what I said and took me off the suspended-with-pay list. He put me on the fired-with-no-pay list.

Because it was an involuntary separation at my end, I did start getting unemployment after a couple of weeks. I also had COBRA health benefits for six months. So I'd lost my job but I was all right for the moment.  

Since I didn't need to drive to work, and since my car was having issues with the timing belt, I sold the Festiva to an art student who lived downstairs from me. Jason immediately drove to a vacant lot, removed the car's fuel line and the gas tank, then set the subcompact on fire. He filmed the blaze with a Super-8 camera.  

The next day, there was a bit of a kerfuffle at my front door with a police officer, as Jason hadn't taken the license plates off the vehicle and the plates were still in my name. But I had the bill of sale, and the Super-8 movie had a time stamp which said 15:20, which is tech talk for 3:20 in the afternoon. I had used the two one hundred dollar bills I got for the Festiva to pay my heat and water bill at 2 pm at the apartment building office. So there was proof that I'd had nothing to do with the flaming auto performance art and the matter was dropped, or dropped in terms of my involvement anyway. Jason abruptly moved out of the complex a week later, and I assume the film project had something to do with that.  

The car was sold and I didn't need to renew the sticker or buy gasoline for it, and that was the important thing now. I looked at my options for the coming months. I'd paid off the budget amount for the previous winter's heat, and the rest of the water bill. My unemployment would last until Halloween, or maybe Thanksgiving. This was April, so I didn't have to go look for another nursing job right away.

I wasn't sure I really wanted another nursing job, but I was too young to retire. I hoped to come up with flexible part-time work, something I could take with me wherever I went. My long-term plan became this: I would relocate someplace temperate all year 'round. I could get a little camper and drive it from place to place and see what life was like in climates where it never snowed. I hooked at my life-skill list, compared it to my preference, and decided to become a street musician. I'd them everywhere, and in tourist season, the cash seemed to pile up in their instrument cases and upturned top hats.  

Busking appeared to have a lot of advantages over any traditional job I could realistically expect to get, especially with the Yos' Kijlstra terse damnation entered into my Baldwin Manor employee record after "Reason for Termination."  As a street performer, I'd never be asked for my references.  I could get paid to accompany myself on a guitar while I sang, a definite ego boost which I needed after losing my job. I could spend my days near people without having to interact directly one-on-one. I'd be outdoors and would never have to listen to another fluorescent light fixture buzzing over my head. And I could get away from a uniform code. All of those expectations turned out to be true except the last part. More about that later.  

The first two weeks, I got up early every morning and happily carried my guitar out to the sidewalk. I found a stoop or a park bench, and I played music all day. My guitar case was open, a starter dollar bill lying alone on the inner lining, waiting for its numbered green friends to arrive. I wore what I liked and sang what I liked. After the first two weeks, I got a plastic milk crate to use as a seat. Then I could go to any street corner in New York. I always drew a crowd who would stand around and watch me.  Some people left in the middle of a song, some stayed till the end, and the ones who stayed clapped and said "Very nice."  But most of the people didn't put any money in my guitar case. 

A location problem, obviously.  I needed a specific corner, a carefully-chosen spot. I began searching Manhattan, looking at intersections.  Prime street-performance corners, of course, were always already occupied by some other busker or street merchant. So I did what the Americans did to the First Nations and what the English did to the irish, and what real-estate tycoon Donald Trump did to everyone in the city: I hunted for the exact spot i wanted and then I figured out how to get the current occupant off of it.  

I can tell you methods that don't work for this: 1. Asking politely. 2. Asking forcefully.  3. Offering a slice of pizza, any topping. 4. Offering an entire pizza, any topping. 5. Offering a cut of my profits in the new spot once established.

What worked most often was plonking down on my upside-down milk crate, putting  my guitar on my lap and singing really, really loud and pretty much constantly.  With this method I moved a guy off a good corner on 14th  Street. It was to his advantage, really. He had a card table with old paperback books and comics on it, and I didn't see how being so near Union Square made any sense. New Yorkers were rushing to trains or off trains, too busy to stop and look at collectible junk. Tourists wouldn't want to jam any of that stuff into a suitcase. The seller was better off moving closer to places people browsed, a street with little shops where you sent down the steps to the basement. A lot of those little places had a restaurant on sidewalk level with outdoor dining under awnings. Near a place like that, when the sky clouded up, the comic book guy could throw plastic sheeting over his stock and go stand under an awning if it rained. Better for him all around.   

But, gosh darn it, I didn't do well on 14th Street. The subway station made the corner too noisy, and people were always stepping on my guitar case, and once, a kid suddenly reached down and grabbed out a five dollar bill and ran off with it.

I decided to try the West Village. At the corner of Horatio Street and Greenwich Avenue, I got a spot by driving off somebody selling sunglasses out of an open briefcase which hung from a strap around his shoulders. Again, the original occupant benefited by my decision to move him elsewhere. The sunglasses guy was selling in a spot that was half a block up Greenwich Avenue from another sunglasses guy. By moving him away, I surely helped him find a better spot than his original corner. 

But Greenwich & Horatio was also a no-go for me. I tried a few other corners. There were a couple times where I couldn't make someone leave no matter how loud I sang. This did make me start to wonder if I had the right to rearrange these people's lives, and yet I thought I needed their corner. So I fought for turf a few times, and if I lost, I felt bad that I lost.  If I won, I felt bad that I drove somebody off from their spot. And after a month of going through all that, I concluded that location wasn't even the problem. No matter the spot, I couldn't prosper as a busker.   

In the heart of the West Village, right up the street from the Corner Bistro, I earned practically nothing.  I tried improving my musicianship.  I did vocal exercises in the morning while I waited at the subway stop with my guitar.  I introduced new songs to my repertoire.  But on a good day I was only bringing in four or five bucks, mostly in small change, which I sterilized at home in diluted bleach solution before I rolled it in brown paper coin wrappers. People weren't tipping me for doing good work. This was charity.  The nickels, dimes, and pennies came from people who felt sorry for me and saw me as a homeless woman with a guitar.    

If I didn't start producing serious income soon, I might really end up as a homeless woman with a guitar, and after I pawned the guitar, I would be a just plain homeless woman. My unemployment was going to run out no later than Halloween, and here it was the end of May. My unemployment check covered the rent but that was all. The heat and lights and groceries and subway fares all came out of my dwindling savings. Time was not on my side.

 .

One morning I sat down on my blue plastic milk crate, and first thing, the B string on my Yamaha acoustic snapped.  The string had been a little frayed near the tailpiece, but I'd been ignoring the sharp twist of wire that was coming loose.   Then snap! and I was down to five strings.  I was lucky that the end of the broken string didn't hit me in the eye, and I appreciated that, but after I took the broken ends off, I was not in a good place.   

The morning going-for-coffee crowd was passing me by, and I didn't want to miss them, looking for someplace to buy guitar strings. I quickly changed to DADGAD tuning minus one string, I adjusted the E tuner down to a D and used the high string as a kind of drone.  

As I strummed, trying to to look panicky, I noticed that I was getting even fewer coins than usual from people. I needed a plan and fast. The drone of the high D made me think of the sound of the Great Highland Pipes, which my father's father played. Those are the complex bundles of pipes, arranged in a large armful, the ones you see in the movies. We used to go and watch my grandfather play in piping competitions, and I loved the sound so much that for my ninth birthday, my father gave me a plastic chanter. the chanter is like a little recorder and it's the pipe part of bagpipes, the piece with the mouthpiece and finger holes.   

For a fourth-grader, I showed some perseverance with the chanter. Keeping my breath going to make the reed vibrate was pretty challenging, but I found learning the tunes pretty easy. With only six holes, the fingering wasn't complicated for me. For a couple years, I fooled around with the chanter, learning some Scottish tunes from my grandfather when he was feeling patient enough to show me. When I got my first guitar in sixth grade, I forgot about the chanter and learned to play "Dominque" by the Singing Nun.    

Now, on a street corner in the West Village, I leaned over my five-stringed Yamaha guitar and began fingerpicking slowly. Reaching back into 30-year-old memories, I pulled up the melody for most of "Ye Banks and Braes" and as much as I could remember of "The Bluebells of Scotland."  After that, my confidence grew. I went into "Scotland the Brave" from memory, then "Annie Laurie," and then I ran out of songs till I remembered how to play  "Auld Lang Syne." Then I thought I was done before I came up with "On the Bonny, Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond."    

 

When I'd finished fumbling my way through the last "Oh, you take the high road and I'll take the low road," I looked into my guitar case and there was a pile of change and a sprinkling of dollar bills in it.  So I started the Scottish rotation again with "Ye Banks and Braes," and by the end of the day, I had made forty-six dollars.  Well, I'd made fifty-one bucks but I'd given five dollars to a woman wearing two coats who told me she was the deposed Queen of Hawaii and needed plane fare to get back to her tropical home.   

I used part of my bonanza to buy a set of guitar strings and four yards of Tartan plaid fabric in red and green.  I fashioned three yards of the fabric into something that resembled a kilt and used the leftover bits as a sash draped over my green turtleneck.  Women don't wear kilts in Scotland, but I figured an ethnic costume, no matter how culturally inappropriate, would bring in the dollars and was I right.  The most popular request was "Danny Boy," which has depressing lyrics, all about Danny Boy coming home to find that you've died and been buried, and it's an Irish song not Scottish, but I called it Celtic and warbled about mountainsides and glens, and I raked in the dough.  

Since I had the red and green plaid going, I could wear my Scottish ensemble on both Tuesday and Friday.  I guess I never explained about the colors and the days of the week, did I?  I have always had an anti-chaos agenda in my adult life.  Both of my parents were paranoid schizophrenics.  My brother Tim and I spent our childhoods behind blinds closed against enemy agents, CIA informants, and UFO high-frequency transmitters.  Tim and I didn't have freshly-laundered underwear, or nutritious food, or peaceful sleep.  When I was 11 and Tim was 9, the county came and took us to a foster home where we lived until I graduated from high school.  My foster family, the Hudsons, were very orderly and I noticed immediately how much better it felt.  Other teenagers resented having to be home by curfew or ready to sit down to dinner at 6 sharp, but I loved it. Tim hated it, became a runaway, lived on the street and started using injection drugs, and died at age 19. This convinced me I'd chosen the better path.   

Defeating chaos improved my relationship with the Creator, who I began to perceive as surprisingly organized.  I felt that the world only seemed disorganized, but really there was a system to everything.  The laws of the natural world were amazingly unbreakable compared to ordinary rules and regulations, like traffic laws.  People tapped their brakes briefly at stop signs and they often didn't stop at all for lights which had just turned red.  But a system like harmonics never changed.  Pythagoras knew 2500 years ago that if you plucked a string and got the note G, you could shorten the string by half, double the sound waves and get a perfect octave. You could pluck a string all day in random spots and claim there was no order to the notes but if you figured out the ratio thing, everything fell into place and ta-da!  Air for the G String.    

I often wondered if the patterns in my physical brain became more orderly with age and experience. With all the modern medical scanning available, I suspected doctors were finding more and more that some people's' brain grooves were orderly and some peoples' were chaotic.  I felt that the people with the organized brains were happier.  I knew from experience that when I looked at the the nightmarish jumble of urban architecture or the inside of a Wal-Mart, my brain began feeling like it was wrinkled up worse than cotton bedsheets left in the dryer overnight.  But when I looked at beautiful architecture, my synaptic network was aligned, and my thinking was clear.

I got a book from the library on sacred geometry, and it said that the largest Buddhist stupa in the world had a spire with a height which corresponded to the depth of the sacred relic box buried under it.  Another chapter showed how the Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral and the Mona Lisa were based on the rule of the Golden Mean, which used geometry to imitate the way living things unfolded and expanded in nature.  It was comforting to know that I was not the only one who saw that there was subtle order everywhere.

There was nothing I could do about the horrors of urban chaos or Wal-Mart, but I could make choices about where things went in my house, or what colors to wear,  rather than slap together the elements of life randomly.  Why should I grab any old thing out of the closet when I could take a moment to learn the colors and which days they corresponded to, and be in harmony with universal forces? Why would I want to clash when I could harmonize?   

I couldn't know for sure, of course, if wearing gold or orange on Monday or red on Tuesday really made me smarter or stronger or friendlier or better-looking.  In fact, I knew that purple, the correct symbolic color for Wednesday, didn't work for me because certain shades of purple, especially near my face, made me look like I died an hour ago.  So for Wednesday I usually went with amethyst jewelry. Otherwise, I stayed within the color system. It made me feel organized inside.   

Wearing the red-and-green sash and kilt kept me in cosmic harmony two days a week. I wore a red turtleneck with my kilt on Tuesday, and a green one on Friday.  Since the Scottish thing was bringing in good money, I went ethnic on the other days too.  My mother's  Jewish, so I hung out near the Ellis Island ferry.  I thought I might catch tourists with family from Eastern Europe going to see where Bubbie and Zaydie first came out of steerage, blinking in the sunlight.  Ah, but I needed a Jewish outfit. Who should I dress like?  Golda Meir?  My grandmother from Queens?  Shari Lewis, with her puppet Lamb Chop on her arm?  I put together a flowing gypsy thing with bells and beads and told myself I was vaguely Sephardic.   

For the Ellis Island gig, I had once again to struggle a bit to find the best spot to perform.  Ellis Island already had steel drum players, acrobats, more of the many men who sell sunglasses out of suitcases, and a woman who painted herself green and stood on a homemade pedestal posing as a living Statue of Liberty. Lots of competition but I was the only singer in costume. I found a park bench I could commandeer if I got there early enough in the morning, and I hoped my music might draw an audience.  

Being out near the water in breezy weather was tough on my guitar.  The strings went out of tune, and the changes in temperature expanded and contracted the wood of the body. The Yamaha got a crack that I had to fill with Super Glue. The crack got longer and deeper. The glue softened in the heat and the wood pieces shifted and it put a strain on the grain lines. Pretty soon the glue wasn't going to work any more.   

I didn't have money for a new guitar. I had money for rent, and the water bill, and groceries (if ramen and big bags of oranges counted as groceries) but no money for new guitars.  Also, I was getting more people and that meant I played a lot more, and my fingertips stayed sore.  And once I'd gone multi-ethnic, II'd gotten into all these minor keys. The guitar wasn't working for the gig near the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. I went to a Sam Ash store to see if I could find a cheap plastic bagpipe chanter, the kind I played in grade school. I left the store with a Hohner Melodica.

The Melodica had remained in production and yet unpopular generally, the music store clerk told me, because people kept buying them for children. The clerk wished the people of America wouldn't. "Their children overblow," he said sadly. "That's what causes the screeching. The Melodica is too complicated for a child."

It was great for me, though.  If it rained I did have to stick it into a big Ziploc bag, but other than that, no issues with weather. The sturdy plastic didn't mind the heat or cold.  The Melodica was easy to carry, I didn't have to tune it, and if I was playing Jewish music, I had 37 piano keys with all the notes I needed.  "Hava Nagila," for instance, had a lot of black keys in it.

Once I got the Melodica, I expanded my "Sephardic" repertoire beyond Jewish tunes.  The instrument had an accordion-type sound, and I started  working on French café music, Czech dance tunes, and Russian folk songs.  But just as I could take tourists around the world via Melodica, I had to shelve some of my plans for expansion as, rather annoyingly, I found I'd gotten a job.  

What happened is that I was sitting on my Ellis Island bench, wailing out a little arrangement of "Tzena Tzena Tzena" I'd just improvised, and a woman in a taupe pantsuit sat down next to me and asked me if I knew "Tumbalalaika."    

I told her I had an old Barry Sisters record that had been my mom's, which I played on a  three-speed record player I'd inherited from my brother when he'd moved away from home. I told the woman that I not only knew "Tumbalalaika" but "Vyoch Tyoch Tyoch," and "Chiribim Chiribom."

The woman in the taupe pantsuit said her name was Judy Blasberg, and she was the Activities Director at the Herman Glassman Retirement Center, and would I consider coming by to play and sing for the people there?       

 

And I said, "Sure. Since it's indoors I could bring my guitar. I'm pretty sure the Super Glue is dry since I glued it yesterday."  

"You had to glue your guitar?" Judy asked. "Is it broken?"

"Not really broken," I said. "Just a crack in the back. A little Super Glue works if I keep it the instrument out of the direct sun. I think it's the sun that melts the glue and makes the crack in the wood open."  

"Makes sense to me," Judy said. "Would tomorrow afternoon at one be a convenient time for you to stop by the Glassman Center?"

"Yes, all right," I said. "Um, do I need to wear anything special?"

"Just whatever's comfortable for you," she said.   

"That sounds great," I said. "I'll be there."

Since the day I started, I have loved working at the Glassman Center. The people there enjoy the sing-alongs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Right after lunch I came in, and that is a good time, as sometimes  people in an institution don't have anything to look forward to except meals.  Once they eat lunch, they just sit there waiting for dinner to come around.  So the sing-alongs on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from one o'clock till three work out very well. We do "Shine On Harvest Moon," and "Till There Was You," and some of the residents dance, and a few more sng, and some make noises that are probably singing.  Some of them just sit and stare at me like owls, but I welcome participation at any level.   

I would be happy to volunteer, but the people at Glassman are very generous and I not only get a check on the first of the month, but they are able to continue my COBRA health insurance for a very reasonable premium, taken right out of my check.  

Since indoor work is so much more comfortable and pays well, I have stopped playing outdoors. A few months ago I took a Celtic version of the sing-along to the retirement center associated with St. Brendan's near 3rd Avenue and 17th Street, and I've begun to work there Mondays and Wednesdays.  That pays something too, so I am able to take Fridays off and I've enrolled in a course in sacred architecture at CUNY.

The group favorite at St. Brendan's, at first, unhappily for me, was "Danny Boy." Over time, I've  gotten the attendees interested in a few songs from other places in the world. In the last six months, I've tried out some of my "Sephardic" song list at St. Brendan's, and a lot of the residents seem to like it. At any rate, no one objects, and one gentleman always asks for "Hava Nagila," because he finds it "very peppy."  

I told him the title means "Let's Rejoice." What I didn't say to him was that I have always put a lot of joy into that song. If I need to get my mood into the best place, all I have to do is think about is the day I put my red-and-green kilt, the gypsy skirt with the bells on the hem, and an unworn pair of green scrub uniform slacks into the Goodwill donation box.