gyroscopethattakesyouplaces

This essay first appeared in March 2003, in Mama Says, vol. 5, No. 3. Mama Says was a newsletter for families on Cleveland’s Near West Side, published by my dear friend Laura Fratus.

He said it again: Poonis!

Dressed for speed with a fresh diaper and bare feet, he ran from bedroom to bedroom chanting, Poonis! Poonis! Like two words in one, proof that imagination is more powerful than knowledge.

Openness to sound and the blurred understanding of sense: The same fertility that makes kids so much better than adults when it comes to learning multiple languages also makes it easier for them to say things that mean nothing at all. Sometimes they are trying to imitate and missing the mark. Sometimes all that matters is play.

My relatively fluent three year-old is having a renaissance of linguistic wonder as we work our way through my collection of CDs. If it has words, most of the music on my shelves comes in languages other than English. It’s not that Eliot’s exposure to this music is new: he heard the Gypsy Kings, Ali Farka Toure, and plenty of Gaelic in the womb. But now I believe he knows English well enough that he has begun to sort other sounds from the limited collection he hears from his mother and me.

For months he was focused exclusively on Latin music. He has his own names for many of the bands on that shelf. Elvis Crespo is known in our house as “That Guy.” The Buena Vista Social Club is known as “The Other Guys.” The men of the legendary Chilean band Inti Illimani are known as “The Guys That Sneak Up On Me.” The bands on Putumayo’s collection of Colombian music are collectively known as “Cumbya Guys.”

But Eliot’s names for the bands are more a reflection of what his parents allow to stick than they are of his adventures in language. For that, we get into the singing.

We listen to this music over and over in the car. He imitates lines from most of the discs, some with enough clarity that I can understand. I heard him say this the other day: “A caballo vamos pa monte.” Let’s ride horses to the mountains.

He has no idea what he is saying, and I harbor no hope or delusion that this will develop into bilingualism. What Eliot hears has no context to connect those words to reality, no living give and take to illustrate cause and effect. It is all about the sounds.

I remember one night in Ecuador, walking back from the bars with a group of students from the Central university in Quito, as one boy in a black leather jacket and with slicked back hair sang entire Frank Sinatra songs, which he had memorized sound by sound. “Strangers in the night . . .” he would sing, in dead-on mimic of the Chairman of the Board, “exchanging glances . . .” The he would look at me and ask, “Que significa eso?”

So sometimes Eliot asks what The Other Guys are saying, and I tell him in Spanish, and he asks, “but what does it mean? So I tell him of the flames in Tula’s room, where it’s getting hot because the girl went to sleep without blowing out the candle. He lets the double entendre go by and focuses on the last word.

“Candle, you say. I see.”

His favorite music du jour comes from the late Egyptian wedding singer Ali Hassan Kuban,” a man who built fame blending Arabic lyrics with Nubian tunes, adding Western instruments and setting it all to pumped up rhythms. Not that Eliot knows or cares about any of that. But he cannot resist the drums and trumpets, and relentless exuberance. We take the disc everywhere we go, and after what must be 100 hearings he imitates verses and asks, “what are they saying?”

I don’t know that language, I tell him, and then I wonder what must be his understanding of the term Language. A different dimension, surely, a code so dense even Daddy can’t break it. But Eliot does not care. “Nazsh deling a na kink-a . . .” he sings without restraint, then asks, do you know this song, Dad?”

Maybe it is a fatherly shortcoming that, having exposed him to this range of music, I do not pounce on the curiosity and steer it toward a structure that will capitalize on it in an educational way, to make the American baby that can speak seven languages at the same time and make them all rhyme, and head to the Middle East to straighten things out.

But that seems like a lot of pressure. Maybe the sound alone will broaden his mind.

In May 2022, Eliot graduated from the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

A Pocket Full of Change is the story of a boy who puts all the coins in his pocket on railroad tracks to be crushed by trains. It’s also a new letterpress book, illustrated with original, hand-pulled color woodcuts. I made 100 of them. I’ve been at this project for about three years. Naturally, I had to conduct some research.

If you put a penny on the railroad track and leave it to be crushed by a passing train, it will flatten to an odd shape that might reach the diameter of a quarter, depending on how many wheels roll over it before the coin flips off into the gravel.

If the penny was minted before 1982, it was solid copper. If your penny was minted after that, it is only coated in a thin film of copper, and the pounding of the wheels on the rail might split the covering to reveal the cheap zinc beneath.

I didn’t start putting pennies on railroad tracks until I was an adult. There were no tracks near my childhood home in North Olmsted, Ohio, so the opportunity didn’t come up.

But Lakewood and Cleveland are crossed over and over by Norfolk and Southern, CSX, and other freight lines, as well as the Rapid Transit. As an adult, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to explore the behavior of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and all the coins under the intense pressure of passing trains.

Each coin denomination behaves differently. The weight of the train always smears them into useless forms, flat and elongated, never quite symmetrical. But when crushing a dime, for example, the copper layer between the faces always spreads out to make a ring around the silver center, like a bull’s eye. Crushing half dollars and silver dollars makes something resembling a shiny potato chip.

In A Pocket Full of Change, our hero Jake goes coin by coin through all the money in his pocket, weighing dollars and cents against experience. The book is full of imagery from Northeast Ohio: specific buildings, streets, and skyline perspectives, vernacular housing styles, and even examples of the region’s street art. Some of the images will look familiar to people who are connected to me via Facebook, including the one that serves as my profile picture.

The twenty, multicolor wood block pictures in A Pocket Full of Change are made with a total of more than 150 blocks of oak and shina. Each book in the edition of 100 is hand bound. A Parent / Teacher / Nanny sub-edition includes footnotes and helpful discussion points set in hot metal Linotype at Madison Press.

You can check it out at Tregoning and Company from October 16 – December 19, 2015. I’ll be there for an opening reception from 6 – 9 pm October 16.

Here’s the event as it appears on Facebook.

Michael Gill: A Pocket Full of Change

Wood block artist book and prints

October 16 – December 18

Also on view: Andrea Hahn: Collage

Tregoning and Company

1300 W 78th St

Cleveland, OH 44102

216.281.8626

tregoningandco.com

I brought my own pedals to Germany, and a pedal wrench to install them.

I knew the vast majority of my cycling in Dresden would come in daily commutes around the city. But I knew there would be days when I wanted something more, and today was one of those days. Clipless pedals with cleated shoes make for speed and distance. I was headed to Meissen, the intact medieval city 25 kilometers west of Dresden along the Elbe. And my tour guide would be none other than Marina Jach, the Meissen architect and town planner.

Urban geeks: Her job is to coax back into use the scores, maybe hundreds of medieval buildings that were run down under the communist government of the GDR time. She talks to landlords, floats ideas, helps them navigate many of the same kind of redevelopment challenges we know in Cleveland. But the buildings are older. And the burden that wore them down was not the march of so-called free market capitalism, but instead the stagnation of communism. She is a friend of a friend. We met one night drinking.

This is the story of a day, a bit of an odyssey, a trip out and back with adventure in between. Regular readers of this blog will know that the bike I ended up with is the Checker Pig 6000, a full suspension mountain bike with big, fat tires—not a bike for 50 kilometer round trips. But under stunning blue sky I mounted my road pedals, changed my shoes, slung my backpack around, and got on the road.

Regular readers will also know how my travel stories spin out of control. Something happens that I didn’t plan for. Here in Germany the effect is compounded by the language barrier, and my willingness to go far into the realm of what you might call “improvisational living.” Stuff happens. By the end of this, for example, I might be headed to the opera. You just never know.

But getting back on track: I have marveled at the ways Dresden reveals its history. You can tell, for example, where the Allied bombs fell during World War two: Just look for the new buildings. Where they stand now, after February 1945 there was rubble. New buildings map the footprint of the bombing. The exception is the old Baroque neighborhood around the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper Haus, and the Zwinger complex of museums. Those were also leveled by bombs, but in recent years have been rebuilt, stone by numbered stone.

Meissen, though, was not bombed. It’s an entire town of buildings 400, 500, and 600 years old, tightly clustered in a rolling landscape along the Elbe, its skyline dominated by a palace and cathedral on the highest hill.

So I rode. The Elbe bicycle trail—which runs from Prague through Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, and all the way to the North Sea—winds along the green flats on both sides of the river: planted fields, meadows, groves of trees, small villages. It is paved, level, and altogether gorgeous. The skinny and smooth tires on my road bike would make hardly a whisper on such pavement, but it’s not that way with the Checker Pig 6000. The big, knobby tires on this borrowed bike hum along the asphalt, generating a pitch that wavers up and down with the pressure on the pedals. As I rolled, I could hear each pedal stroke in the hum of the tires, the wavering pitch like tuning a guitar string: sharper is faster. That’s the pitch we want.

I crossed farm land and passed through villages. I saw a windmill. I arrived in Meissen. And there, standing on the Eastern side of the bridge at exactly noon, was Marina. We parked my bicycle at her office, and we set off to tour the town. We visited the stunning Meissen cathedral, gothic, stark, bare stone interior with muscular pillars and vaulting, big but not huge, mostly built in the 13^th century. I generally don’t take photos inside churches, and so I don’t have pictures here. Unlike the big cathedrals of Rome, and despite a beautiful Sunday afternoon, we shared the space with perhaps a dozen or twenty other, respectfully quiet people. One could feel the gravity of the space.

We also toured the Castle, built in the late 15^th – early 16^th centuries.

But enough about the spectacular buildings. As profound as those are, I am at least as taken by the fabric of the city, the narrow cobbled streets with their small grandeur, two- and three-stories, peaked roofs with ornate gables, most beautifully restored, thanks in part to encouragement from Marina Jach. The town planner of this ancient place deals with many of the same issues as her counterparts in Cleveland, and likely wherever cities are recovering from something: “We talk to landlords,” she says. “And then we wait.”

The town square, with its 15^th century town hall, was the sight of a familiar battle: whether to allow cars, or not. Here, in a great victory for humans over cars, the people won. On weekends, in the town’s historic district, there are no cars.

Meissen — like Dresden and many towns along the banks of the Elbe–deals with periodic flooding. Marina showed me a building with plaques marking historic high water marks through the years, many of which are above her head. 

I stayed in Meissen much longer than I expected, or wanted. My plan was to ride home in daylight, at least mostly. But the excellent guidance of Marina kept me pushing departure back to the point that it was getting dark in Meissen before I even arrived back at my bicycle. Neither of us was concerned about this: I could just take my bike along and ride the train back to Dresden. So she gave me directions to the train station, I got back on the Checker Pig, and off I went.

It was at the train station that I met Chris Bruckman. He had arrived at the station a minute ahead of me, long hair well kept, with red cotton pants and a sweater, riding an old mixte three-speed. I couldn’t tell by his accent if his English was spectacularly good, or if he was a native speaker, and the edges of his words had picked up a Germanic flavor after years living here. The latter, as it turns out. Chris is from New York.

He could read the signs at the train station, which told us something all of us knew, but all – including the town planner – had also forgotten: The engineers were on strike. There would be no train. It was fully dark by this time, and I had no light. Chris did, however, and he was also headed back to Dresden. So off we went together, following the path along the Elbe.

Chris, it turns out, is a rehearsal pianist with the Semperoper company, one of the great opera companies of Europe. He just moved to Dresden to take the job, having worked for smaller companies in the Rohr region of West Germany for several years, since studying at Lucerne. It was a slower ride home in the dark, but under clear skies we talked about music, orchestras, and the arcs of both our lives, for about two hours. We had to stop once in the middle of a field to look up, so distracted were we by the stars.

So –like a prophecy being fulfilled–by meeting a pianist on a trip to Meissen, I ended up going to the opera, to hear Beethoven’s Fidelio a few nights later. But that is another story. Back in Dresden, after a great day and moonlight ride, we ate middle eastern food at the Durum shop on Rothenbergerstrasse, and made plans to hear jazz the following night. This is how it goes. Stuff happens.

The pictures speak for themselves: It’s a snowy day, and the tiny birds alight in the palm of your open hand to to pick out a sunflower seed before just as quickly fluttering off to eat it.

At the Brecksville Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks, chickadee feeding in the winter months dates to the 1940s, when naturalist A.B. Williams began to feed the birds. Inside the nature center there’s an old black-and-white photo of Mr. Williams, nattily dressed in his fedora and tie, his hand outstretched as a black-capped chickadee perches there.

Seventy years later, the birds in those woods know the custom. Dozens of them gather in the trees around the feeders at one end of the shelter—chickadees, woodpeckers, and some other birds that don’t skip town for the Cleveland winter. They know the drill. When we were there, as many as a dozen people at once stood in a little arc around a split rail fence, their hands reaching out, offering food.

The feel of a little bird’s feet perched on your finger tips, suddenly, twitch twitch, and gone—is a little like fishing for perch. You wait. You wait. You concentrate on standing still. You try to think like the birds. You look into their eyes, and when they get close you can tell when they’re thinking about the seeds in your hand.

They flick their wings and land there, peck a seed, hop, twitch, and then the bird is gone, and once again you’re waiting for the next.

The chickadees are dusty shades of grey, white, and black, with beige beneath their wings. They’re quick and beady-eyed. You’d be justified on a cold winter day to put a glove on your hand, and the birds don’t seem to care if you have a glove or not. But I’d recommend going with your bare skin, the better to feel the little bird feet, the shuffle of their weight, the gentle peck of their beaks as they snatch a seed.

It feels lucky every time.

A Naturalist in Brecksville says they prepare for the chickadee feeding season about a month ahead of time by putting a dummy naturalist out among the trees with a wooden bowl of an outstretched palm there full of seeds, just to introduce the idea of a human shaped feeder standing there. Some of the other Metroparks reservations have begun feeding programs in recent years, she says, and she’s tried it herself at home. But nowhere she knows is it so magically successful as in the Brecksville reservation.

You should try this, and bring your kids. It’s 10 a.m. to noon Saturdays and Sundays, through January. Here’s the info.