I Know What I Know (with apologies to Paul Simon)

 his morning, I stumbled bleary-eyed to the computer to read my email and found two job leads forwarded to me by Dov. I scanned the leads. One of them didn't quite fit me: they wanted someone with an academic degree.  But Dov kept telling me to ignore all the nitty-gritty details listed on these job opps and to just go ahead and send them my resume and so I did.

Not long after, I received a message from the poster of the job opportunity that had required an academic degree. The message said, "Hi Varda, its nice to meet you.Your resume is very impressing, however you didn’t write anything about your education, and since this job is in the government they have specific demands, could you please elaborate?"

There was nothing I could really do but tell her that I have no academic degree. That I am an autodidact. That the only piece of paper I had to show her was a terrific recommendation from my boss at my last full time position. In my head, I was thinking of the lyric from a Joni Mitchell song, My Old Man:

We don't need no piece of paper
From the city hall
Keeping us tied and true  

Not that we were talking about a marriage license. But I wanted to scream and protest: I'm GOOD at what I do. I don't need an academic degree or a piece of paper to prove that. My work speaks for itself.

But I didn't scream, didn't protest. No point really. It wouldn't help me get that job.

Later that morning, I had some errands to run, and I decided I needed some music to cheer me up. I wasn't depressed exactly. But I felt like I needed to work a bit to keep my spirits up. So I grabbed my iPod and plugged in my earbuds.

I put on my Paul Simon Graceland playlist and as I was nearing my first stop, the song, I Know What I Know, came on. For the first time, something in the lyrics latched onto some synapse in my brain and really resonated. It was like I'd never heard that lyric before:

She looked me over
And I guess she thought
I was all right
All right in a sort of a limited way
For an off-night
She said don't I know you
From the cinematographer's party
I said who am i
To blow against the wind
I know what I know
I'll sing what I said
We come and we go
That's a thing that I keep
In the back of my head



Wow. That was exactly like what had happened to me earlier this morning with that job.

Now that happens to me a lot. Something I hear or read will seem to be so connected to current events. And I do not believe in a random universe. That message was coming to me from on high. So I strained to listen to the rest of the song and when it was over, I clicked replay.


Just like in the song, someone had looked me over and found me limited, wanting, because I didn't have the credentials.

I know what I know! I have the talent and the know-how. But owning the qualifications weren't enough.

It didn't seem fair.

I appreciate that education is a good thing. I appreciate that education is a commitment and huge expense. But not having a degree is like not being a man: it doesn't speak to my qualifications for the job. Isn't ruling me out because I lack a university degree then, a type of discrimination?

I came to this conclusion: When we are all dead and gone, what is left is the body of the work we produced while on this earth. I stand by the work I do and feel no shame. I know what I know. And that is the thing I will keep in the back of my head.

With that resolved, I felt better. The gloom that had threatened to ruin my day lifted and the sunshine came back. There will be other opportunities. Other jobs.

I guess I just need a little nudge sometimes.

They Paved Paradise

This morning, I was standing at my kitchen counter, kneading sourdough for my weekly double batch of Challoh. As I knead, I always keep an eye on the display of my oven, which is situated to my left. Watching my oven clock that way lets me know that ten minutes have elapsed and I can now put my dough to rest, covered with a warm, damp all-cotton dish towel, for a couple of hours before shaping.

I was in the thick of my kneading and if you've never kneaded dough, I can tell you that it's about as physical an activity as is possible to perform. I'm not a physical sort of person, but my arms and hands are very strong from years of piano playing. I really do enjoy the workout I get from kneading dough, even though it leaves me as quivering and breathless as my bread dough.

I am not the first person to suggest that making bread is therapeutic and brings peace of mind. Once I'm into the rhythm, the thrust and parry of the at first uncooperative mass of dough, my mind travels to a place where there is no thought. There is only the hard, manual labor of creating art in the form of a homely loaf of bread. Bread, the act of making it as well as the act of eating the finished product, feels to me about as elemental as, well, giving birth. So nothing much is in my mind as I knead. It's just me and the dough, and a sense of purpose.

All at once, the motor of my refrigerator stopped cold, jolting me out of my bread-making induced mental coma/revery. The quiet was so sudden I glanced at the display of my oven to see if the electricity had gone out. But no. It was just my refrigerator motor, at rest. It occurred to me then that the motor makes a background noise I never notice until it ceases it's electronic grumbling.

That got me thinking, even though I was still kneading. I thought: this situation is ripe for a quotable quote.

So I mulled it over: when I knead bread, I realize that I am content. Even though I may moan about being overloaded with work and housework, I am happy to be at my work. It feels right. Maybe, I thought, my contentment is like that refrigerator motor: I don't notice my contentment until something in my life goes south--goes crazy, haywire wrong. Then I look back and think, "What happened to the normalcy of yesterday? Where did it go?"

So here it is: Contentment is like a noisy refrigerator motor. It's background noise until it stalls.
Of course, this thought was immediately followed by, "Nah. Someone must have already written a quote like that."

Yup. It didn't even take long for me to figure it out. It was Joni Mitchell: "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."

Trumped again.

At least it was Joni.

True Blue

Most marriages are filled with compromise, and my own is no exception. I always tell Dov that it's a good thing we don't own a house—we'd never agree on the interior décor. But he always insists that there is plenty we can agree on and we'd have no trouble finding that place of agreement. Maybe so.

But while we can and do find places of happy agreement, there are still a great number of tastes and issues on which we will never see eye to eye. We have learned to stay out of each others' way with mutual good grace so as to provide us the freedom to pursue our differences. Music is a good example of the way this marital consideration works. I love Joni Mitchell, Dov hates her with a capital H.

I get it--I get why he doesn't like Joni: her voice with its twists and turns, sails into the higher registers and grates on his nerves. But I like that about her. I just do. Her jazzy vocals don't just sing, they speak. I don't like all of Mitchell's music, but I could listen to the tracks from Blue, for instance, all day, and never, ever tire of them.

I have the habit of falling in love with songs, so that I can listen to a single, beloved song over and over at full volume, for hours at a time. That's how it is for me with All I Want, Carey, Case of You, and California. I used to wait until Dov left for work, and then blast those songs, in a continuous shuffle, as I swooned and crooned, attempting to match her vocal acrobatics.

Now that I have an Ipod, I can listen to my heart's content without causing offense to my dear husband, though there is a certain amount of occasional annoyance generated by the idea that I've cut myself off from him and the kids. I've learned to keep one earpiece in and the other dangling, so no one feels scorned: not my family, and not Joni, either.

Yes. I'm on a first name basis with this particular singer, because she is singing my soul. The other day I wrote about the affection we have for reading diaries because they represent the writer's truest and deepest emotions without concern for others' eyes. The tracks on Blue, both the music and the lyrics, are like that, offered with such complete honesty it makes me ache.

Maybe Joni's musical/lyrical approach back in 1971, when Blue came out, was a bit immature in its full-blown rush of emotion. In 1979, Joni discussed the way the music on this album reflected her raw, emotional state at that time, "The Blue album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either."

That's the precise reason the album became so popular: the music and lyrics are so open and poignant that you suspect the writer was either very brave or never thought anyone else would ever listen in. I don't believe anyone other than Joni has the power to convey that state of raw adolescent feeling as expressed in All I Want. James Taylor's gutsy guitar on this track is unashamed and strong. That guitar is like a heartbeat weaving in and out of the words:

"I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you.
I want to renew you again and again.
Applause, applause—life is our cause
When I think of your kisses my mind see-saws."


Most of the time, lyrics don't mean much to me. I'm paying much more attention to the music. But with Joni, it's different. To my mind, the most poignant lyrics ever heard on the subject of longing can be heard in My Old Man:

"The bed's too big/The frying pan's too wide."


In Blue, Joni took emotion and turned it into an art form.