How Long does it Take to Count to 100?

A meditation on Offcourse #100, and on Ricardo Nirenberg’s essay “Three Salvos for Cultural Appropriation”.  

“Offcourse” published its 100th issue. Three digits seem so very huge to most viewers, much as a child assumes anyone age thirty must really be old.  In its March 2025 upload, the editors noted: “Ten years ago we wrote that since we might not be here to enjoy and celebrate a hundredth issue...”

Years:  I thought about Ricardo Nirenberg’s essay regarding purity in music, and memory found me sitting on the bench covered in needlepoint my mother’s skills made, learning to play the piano on her 1939 walnut Baby Grand.  The piano teacher made me learn only classical and composers’ original versions. My mother had once performed in Carnegie Hall –she kept that accomplishment to herself and I only found out about it closer to when she died– and the piano was the center point of the family after dinner when guests surrounded it and sang to popular songs.  Television was not yet a part of households. 

“I’d like to suggest that the whole concept of purity in music is meaningless; it is only a pretext for nationalism and xenophobia.”  Ricardo’s essay touched another memory: Wagner’s famous piece we call ‘Here Comes the Bride’.  When my daughter married in 1986 and chose this music to walk down the aisle to change from Miss to Mrs I was questioned or rather, subjected to this sentence: ‘how can you allow Wagner’s music to be played.... don’t you know about his background!’  I heard music, I still wonder how anyone at the Reform religious chapel could not hear the composition and its association with weddings? 

1939.  I was a little girl at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park, living in a suburban part of that town.  After the bus ride to Main Street, our family got on a trolley to the fairgrounds. The seats were made of ‘rush’, slats from that woody plant scratched my tiny legs.  My dad laid his large starched handkerchief down to protect them on the trolley rideback to Flushing Main Street.  A coin bank of the Trylon and Perisphere logo of the fair was clasped in my hands.  A united world’s celebration in the park coincided with the beginning of World War II in Europe. 
     
The music familiar to 1963-4 attendants at the same place for another World’s Fair was “It’s a small world after all....”  Modern technology, jet planes, and such had allowed an expansion of travel and showed similarities between different peoples, rather than differences. But the ‘small world’ didn’t change the large need for power, cruelty, persecution, no matter how simple the lyrics of the catchy tune.  The music welcomed; but human attitudes and Ricardo’s words “I’d like to suggest that the whole concept of purity in music is meaningless; it is only a pretext for nationalism and xenophobia” lingered.

In 1955 I commuted to grad school for my Master’s Degree; my 45 year old dad had been in his grave for a little over a year.  Teacher’s College, Columbia University would have so pleased him.  My mother kept her worry to herself about my night classes, busses and subways and the rides back standing on subway platforms after 10pm on 116th Street waiting to get to 34th to take the Long Island Railroad to Flushing, or if class ended late and I missed the last Port Washington train I’d take a bus to Main Street and then another bus to 165th Street where we lived.  It was dark, long trip, few people on the streets then, I was tired, I had a long walk once I got to either the bus stop or train depot near home.  My feelings, since last year’s protests at that Ivy League place of learning, have changed from honor to disgust and the ‘symphony’ in my head isn’t graduations’ “Pomp and Circumstance” but a tune composed for a horror film. 

My mother’s piano has been part of my entire life.  Its keys have been touched or banged on by fifteen grandchildren, and many of my thirteen (so far) great-grandchildren.  It is only referred to as ‘my mother’s piano’ and I never asked these family members what they actually call it.  Does it matter as long as she’s remembered by those who never knew her except through my words or photos?  

Issue 100!  I’m in that last segment of my life on the planet.  The number is no longer a ‘wow’ or ‘who lives to be close to that old?’.  No one on either side of my family had long-life; I’ve felt survivors’ guilt remembering my great-grandfather was only 39 when death claimed him after his young wife had just given birth to her 7th child; my paternal grandfather’s life ended after 41 years when my grandmother had 6 children and was in her 30's.  And didn’t 45 sound ‘old’ when my father’s heart ceased to beat?  After an uncle lived to be in his 60's, I thought, “That’s pretty old.”  When the April scribble on my last calendar said 90, I reminded my husband that he’d said to me, as we became engaged December 1955, “I wish I’d known you when you were young”.

Offcourse Issue 101 is due out in June; will it seem possible that, should my husband and I continue to live, we’ll have been wed for 69 years?  There will be two more great-grandchildren expected by then. And I’ll find humor in once having thought 30 was such a big number.  The constant is music, music still being played on my mother’s 1939 piano, with no care about the country of origin of the composer.