My family moved to Albania for a while during my Junior year of high school. I approached my time there with the enthusiasm of a sociology student. I was a bad student, one who had not yet learned to observe. I could see what was around me all right, but I was too busy categorizing everything to be able to understand anything.

The capital city of Triana was loud. Car horns, construction work, friends yelling to each other, and music. Western music. Tirana looked to the West and eventually joining the EU. Voice of America’s rock station VOA Europe blared from cafes and bars, and mix-tapes of Western rock was passed around with relish. It was all I heard.

After a month of living in Tirana, we took a bus to Vlorë for the weekend to see our friend Anila’s hometown. The trip is around 100 miles, but given the state of Albania’s roads at the time, it was a half-day’s drive. Much could be said about that drive, but the important part for tonight is that we ran out of gas.

Most of the passengers simply flagged down a passing vehicle and negotiated passage the rest of the way. With a group as large as ours, we opted to wait for the next bus. So, it was a dozen or so of us along the side of the road. For the first time since arriving in Albania, it was quiet.

It was also a beautiful night. A full moon shone orange and red on the fields, reflecting against hundreds of pill-box bunkers, the legacy of Albania’s paranoid ex-dictator. I was stranded on the side of the road in the imagined war-zone of a tortured mind. It was the perfect Halloween night.

When we finally got to Vlorë, Anila’s family welcomed us warmly. We spent the weekend in a city that looked to Albania even as the capital looked away. It was a community of food, friendship, and stories that predated Albania’s modern governments. The EU was as far away as the moon.

There was a wedding to prepare for, and in the living room, a dozen men were practicing polyphonic the polyphonic folk music of Albania. Older than that. The folk music of Illerya. That Halloween, I was introduced to a musical tradition with roots going back to the time of the Homeric epics. This was indeed a different Albania from Tirana.

I was wrong.

When I returned to Tirana, I found echos of that music all over the place. It was an undercurrent to the city. Some of the men of my own apartment block sang polyphony. With no way to categorize the music, I simply ignored it. I never asked the right question; the answers never made it into my research.

Tirana was just as loud as it had been before my weekend in Vlorë, but I heard a completely different soundscape. VOA Europe was still there, but the car-horns that had just been noise made more sense. Each horn was tuned differently. If you knew what to listen for, you could hear the sound of familiar Shepards calling across valleys. The horns mimicked the whistles of friends. Each group had its own call-response. It was a city that looked West, but it was made of traditions older than Europe, adapting to new technologies.

I think a lot about the lessons of that Halloween. We see what we look for, and it’s easy to see past what is there. I’m not one for spending much time thinking about what we owe the past, but it did make us. If nothing else, it informs how we form our questions, and therefore the answers we receive.

Happy Halloween.

I’m going to ask a favor of you. Imagine the best storyteller you know. The one who can sit and wait her turn, knowing full well that nothing is going to top what she is about to bring to the table. The one who makes cellphone batteries cry for mercy as a 10-minute check-in becomes a three-hour call you hope will never end.

You’ve just imagined my Great Aunt Janice.

Everyone in my family can tell a story, but Aunt Janice was the Shanachie. She kept our family history and lore, and her version of any story was the definitive one. She knew where all the family skeletons were hidden, having hidden a fair number of them herself.

She sang opera, she balanced a till for the bank, and she kept the family home through some 60 years of parties. The one time I remember her being disappointed in me was when I called her early on a Sunday morning. It wasn’t that I should have been at church, mind, it was that she knew that Shannon and I had thrown a party the night before, and it was WAY too early in Alaska for anyone to have recovered from a McClear party.

“Don’t worry, Aunt Janice, it was an early party. The last guest left at 3, and I have to get up to let the dogs out anyhow.” She was dubious, but she still wanted the blow-by-blow.

Aunt Janice grew up in the Great Depression. She lost a brother in the final days of the Second World War. She went through a hard patch that even she, the consummate storyteller, does not talk about. Se saw the family through the passing of her siblings and parents. She watched the second plane crash into the World Trade Center, telling our stories all the while. She traveled a bit, but mostly, family Shanachie that she was, the world came to her. At the end of the day, it was a worldwide pandemic that did her in. So, the great storyteller died today in isolation.

Still, a weird twist of fate gave her a storybook ending. Across the river, New York City residents held a city-wide sing-along. At 2 minutes past 7, the skyline that Aunt Janice has been watching all these years sang her spirit home with Sinatra.

One such person was Mitch Podolak. He understood that nothing gets people moving together quite like music. His obituary will list off his significant accomplishments: founding the Winnipeg Folk Festival, then having a hand in founding the Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, and Stan Rogers Folk Festivals, the Winnipeg and Vancouver Children’s Festivals, the West End Cultural Center in Winnipeg, and Home Roots, which organized house concerts across Canada. His obituary will list the numerous successful musicians he helped launch, including his funding of Stan Roger’s first album. The obituary will mention how he went from being a college radical to being awarded the Order of Manitoba. It will be a great obituary that befits a great man. But in doing so, it will miss the point.

Mitch’s theory on running a festival was to treat artists like visiting royalty and crew like family. Do that, and the crew will come back year-on-year as a family to create and build. For 7 years, I was a part of that family, first as a volunteer and then on the Site Crew. There were 1,200 of us, all slapping the water in time to the metronome that Mitch set, and my friends, we made a really big splash.

The magic of Mitch went far beyond the projects with his name on the marquee. At the time the Winnipeg Folk Festival was just starting, my parents were working on their own radical community experiment with KAXE, the first rural community radio station in the United States. Before KAXE, there were rural public radio stations, but it was assumed by most that community radio required a dense population of urban hippies. My folks (along with many others slapping the water in time) built a community station out of farmers, taconite miners, and pulp mill workers in Grand Rapids, MN.

The organizations grew with each other. Much of the staff and volunteers of KAXE became a part of WFF, and KAXE was, for a while, the largest box office for WFF outside of Winnipeg, but it was not easy.

For KAXE, it would have been much easier to follow a more traditional public radio model, with access to more conventional sources of funds. Mitch’s friendship with my folks, and others at KAXE, and his support of the idea of community organizations helped them through. Again in the 80’s when KCAW’s budget was cut by 40% that friendship and sense of community helped sustain my parents to persevere in keeping KCAW a community station. Finally, when the stress of my parents’ work in Serbia was taking its toll on my father’s health, Mitch took him aside and told him he had too much left to do. Dad needed to take better care of himself, so he can continue to care for his community.

Even with the thousands of people Mitch knew, he found time to keep track of what was I was doing. I left the Folk Fest to work at the Sika Fine Arts Camp, Alaska Theater of Youth, and then finally join the Board of the Three Barons Fair. Mitch proudly encouraged me every step of the way.

My friends, that’s what the obituaries are going to miss. No matter how busy he was conducting his own projects, he would always slap in time for the rest of us. His obituary will be a historical document in our current tradition. It will list him as a great man and catalog the significant events he created. It will even remeber him as a community organizer, but it will miss a point that Mitch understood and lived. Every big event is made of individuals, and our own parts, no matter how small, matter.

Most of you on this list have never heard of him, but you have felt his ripples across the water as he’s slapped his hand in time to KAXE, KCAW, and the Three Barons Fair.

Leonard, Zeke, I’m proud to be one of the thousands of people your father has influenced. I hope you can feel our love surrounding you now.

Brian Kokke and I shared a few things in common: Bad backs, bad speech, and very good imaginations. A fairly small grade school and similar Individual Education Programs meant that we were often pulled out of class to see the same specialists together. My back was only bad enough to worry specialists, his was bad enough to require a brace. Time in the swimming pool was a release for him, without the brace his body was as free as his mind was all the time. Under his guidance, our otherwise mundane physical theoropy came alive with sirens and mermaids.

Man, he had it tough. Grade school is not a nice place for someone with a speech impediment and a bad back. But man, his imagination lead us so many other places we’d rather be. Everyone needed a friend like him.

Through Junior High into High School a lot changed, but not enough. We’d sit next to each other on the bus, and the kids in the seats behind and in front of us would start teasing us about the fantastic worlds we would build. I started to withdraw and back away, but that was not Brian’s style. He taught me the basics of American Sign Language, and we slowly, clumsily continued our stories. We modified how we expressed our imagination, but he was determined we not back away from it. He was, of course, right. Even if we had much to hide, we had nothing to be ashamed of.

One of the great joys of social media for me has been our ability to get back in touch again over the past few years. Again, a lot has changed, but not enough. My friend, who I met in physical therapy, found a light dancing on stage as Miss Delight. Brian never grew tired of telling me about her family. They found in Brian the same determination I did on the school-bus, the same way of connecting through those who would shout us down.

That gift of connection is a joy whenever it’s found, and the connections Brian made will continue to be a blessing to us all for a long, long time.

I have dyslexia.  This is not news, this is something that my instructors and I have been fighting all my life.  It’s been the background noise to my education, sometimes drowning out the class.

I have recently found that dyslexia is not what we thought it was in the late 80’s.  Then, I simply knew that I had a disability that affects my ability to write and spell. We now know that a major component of dyslexia is vocal.  I am not able to differentiate all of the sounds of the English language.  Some of the sounds I can speak, but I don’t fully appreciate the sounds themselves.  When I speak them, it’s just the natural process of getting from one noise to the other.

Imagine I was making a blended color band of the entire rainbow; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.  Imagine I could not perceive orange, yet was shading from red to yellow.  I would pass through orange on the way through blending red and yellow, and my rainbow would look completely normal.  If all I had to do was show the picture, there would be no problem.  Now, imagine I am describing the picture.  My inability to describe orange would become much more pronounced.

This is me trying to understand reading and writing.  If I don’t recognize all of the sounds within the word, describing those sounds in the written form is exceedingly difficult.  Reading the written form becomes significantly harder, as the brain struggles to decode all of this extra, to me meaningless, information that is within the phonetic spelling of a word.  The extra concentration needed, the brain’s attempt to get to the answer using abnormal brain paths, that all causes some of the weird effects reported by many with dyslexia.  However, that’s not the problem, that’s the symptom.

There are other markers that come up in dyslexic writing that led to the more traditional understanding of dyslexia.  The stereotype of b-d confusion is real (along with q and p, thank you very much).  That, we now know, is about orientation of letters more than spelling.  If you know how to spell something, but you write a d instead of a b, that’s not a spelling problem.  One of the startling moments of my recent discussion with a speech pathologist was when she, before she looked at a sample of my handwriting, predicted I write with mixed capitalization.  I do, although I was never taught to.  She said that it is a fairly standard accommodation that people with dyslexia often come to, as it removes one of the barriers to communication (B is not easily confused with D) in a manner that has nothing to do with spelling.

This new information means many things.  Not the least of which, this means that all of the considerable work I have tried to do to become a better speller was not actually aimed at fixing the problem I was facing.  It means I should cut myself some slack, and go about learning in different ways.

It ALSO means that there are now better understood different ways to learn.

I don’t know of anyone who is quite as fortunate as I with regards to education.  My parents were the strongest advocates I could hope for, as were most of my teachers.  My teachers were tireless in reaching me as a student.  Mr.  Wright, in third grade, went to great lengths to rein in my frustration (and bad behavior that stemmed from it) and instead re-focused my understanding of school around my curiosity.

Ms. Mills, my 5^th grade math teacher (who I tended to treat as a sparring partner more than a teacher) figured that if I could not learn how to do my multiplication tables (by 5^th grade), she would find me rhymes to remember that gave me specific bookmarks from which I could work forward or backwards.  Ms. Pazar, who faced the same challenge teaching me in high school, taught me physical and visual tricks to do math, and then focused on giving me the tools to know when a calculator was lying to me.

In writing, Mr. Bagley, Mr. Stevens and Ms. Orbison went to great lengths to separate my spelling problems from my creative expression, making sure that the former did not make me lose my interest in the latter, and teaching me how to use tools to mitigate my problems with the former.

Most children with dyslexia are not nearly so lucky.  The good news is that with the new understanding of dyslexia, new curriculums are being developed that mirror much of the unofficial curriculum I was taught with.  There is more focus and less experimentation, and apparently good outcomes.  Good news for me personally is that there is an adult version of this curriculum available, which may be able to help me further going forward.  Those who have taught me taught me to find and use the tools for life long learning.  This new understanding of dyslexia have given me a complete new toolkit going forward.