Thank You and Farewell to Bookmans

A couple days ago, I went over to Ponderosa Head Start here in Flagstaff and sang with each of the seven classrooms at the preschool's "graduation" celebrations.

For the past three years, I have been the beneficiary of a grant from Bookmans Entertainment Exchange that paid me to go into these classrooms and provide some musical activities and instruction. Of all my experiences in Flagstaff, this has been one of the most fulfilling. I consider it to be a real honor to have spent time with these beautiful children and their fabulous, dedicated teachers.

The time has now come for my family to move on to our next adventure. We're leaving Flagstaff in less than a month. My time as a Music in the Classrooms instructor has come to an end, but I feel a great deal of gratitude to the folks at Bookmans who made this happen — especially my friends Kate and Desiree who really went to bat for this program. It's been an amazing experience.


Also, our final regularly-scheduled Dancing With No Shoes On! show at the Flagstaff Bookmans location with take place on Saturday, June 1st at 10:00am. We've been doing this for much of the last eight years, and we've has a lot of success with the program. Often, the cafe is literally overflowing with parents and their children. I'll be more than a bit sad to see our run end. But we're going to have some fun!

Thank you and farewell to my good friends at Bookmans! We'll see you down the road.

- Chuck Cheesman

Chicago to Flagstaff to Portland

About ten years ago my wife and I said goodbye to our jobs and lifelong home of Illinois. We bought a van, loaded it with camping gear, and hit the open road. Our sabbatical took us across much of the American West. It was the adventure of a lifetime and one hell of a great honeymoon. We left at the beginning of August and arrived back in Chicago on Thanksgiving, keeping the secret that Jill was pregnant with our first child. Then we made a shorter stab at the Northeast, visiting New York City, Washington D.C., and rural Massachusetts before returning home to announce our big news to family and friends on Christmas.

Much of that trip was about making sure we exercised some wanderlust before settling down to raise children, but it was also about finding a place where we could make a home for our family. We have always wanted to live where there are mountains and wild spaces. After returning to work for a few more months, we packed-up our things, sold our van and house, and pointed the Toyota west. Jill took a temporary job with IHS in Chinle, Arizona (not much for me to do there but feed the baby and change diapers while Jill worked) and then we moved to Flagstaff. We've been here for almost eight years now.

We have made truly great friends here in Flagstaff. Jill and I have both become firmly rooted in the community through our jobs, volunteer work, and our children's gregariousness. The children have a great school and are involved in some worthwhile extra-curricular activities. We've invested in remodeling our home to the point that it is almost completely carbon neutral. We have a great garden, a half-dozen chickens, and world class hiking right across the street. It's a good life. We have no regrets about coming here. We've been fortunate.

But the time has come for a new adventure. Sometime around the holidays this past year Jill and I had one of our occasional "state of the union" discussions. We do pretty well making sure we talk about how things are going, where we are at the moment, and where we hope to be somewhere further down the road. Much to our surprise, the "further down the road" part of our discussion quickly led to asking ourselves, "Where?"

Inside of maybe forty-five days from our first discussion about moving, Jill accepted a new job in Portland, Oregon. I like to think we are a decisive team—when we decide to do something we do it. Our friends might just roll their eyes and say, "Wow. We didn't see that one coming." Up until a couple months ago, we didn't either.

The fact is that Portland offers our family opportunities we don't have here right now. Jill has been working far too much the past couple years with no relief in sight, and she has found a job with more defined and reasonable hours. She is going to have more time and energy for our family and for herself. And while I have only praise for our children's school and the quality of life here, there is no question at all that there will be new and exciting activities for the kids in the Pacific Northwest. We've already been researching schools and extra-curricular programs, and I'm excited about what I see.

The biggest thing for me is going to a wider, healthier music scene. I feel like I've accomplished about as much as I can accomplish playing original music in Flagstaff. I've begun to feel a little bit trapped, and especially over the past year it's been harder for me to get the creative fires burning. It's just too small here, and there aren't enough opportunities for collaboration or for singing to new faces. I hear Portland has a healthy scene. Playing music anywhere is a gamble and a challenge, but going from a population of 70,000 to a metro area of two million is bound to offer some new possibilities. With Portland sitting on Interstate 5, I expect to do some traveling down at least as far as Eugene and north into Seattle. I'm chomping at the bit to start gigging and to sing my songs to new audiences.

We originally came to Flagstaff for the landscape. In moving we lose the Grand Canyon and the San Francisco Peaks, but we gain Mt. Hood and the Pacific Coast. That's a fair trade. We will have to surrender quite a bit of sunshine; escaping Arizona's repulsive political climate offers some consolation. While we have a few dear friends in the Pacific Northwest, the hardest part of going is saying goodbye to our friends here. There is no consolation for that. It's a lesson to me, and it's going to be very difficult to say goodbye. Flagstaff is a special place, and we've made some amazing friends. There have been buckets of tears around here already.

I feel very fortunate. Jill and I didn't make this decision based on money or anything other than our desire to do what we feel is best for our little family. We're in this life together, and for that I am very, very grateful. It's a good life.

****

I'll play my last regular Bookmans gigs the first weekend in June, and I have an evening concert at Beacon Unitarian Universalist's Flagstaff Folk Project on June 21st that is supposed to be something of a farewell party. As far as I know, I'll be waking-up the next morning to drive "home" to Portland.

Leaving certainly doesn't mean leaving for good. I'm working on producing a CD for the Whale Foundation, and I don't expect that to be completed before June. I'm returning to play children's music at Pickin' in the Pines in September, and I hope that will remain an annual commitment. I'm also hoping to book a few gigs (living room concert, anyone?) each spring. Jill and I have hopes we might even do an annual kid-friendly river trip on the San Juan. We can't say goodbye to the Southwest or our friends for good. Not going to happen.



- Chuck Cheesman

Border Songs Presentation ~ April 6th ~ Sedona Library

Saturday, April 6th, 2013 - Sedona Library
3250 White Bear Rd., Sedona AZ 86336
Border Songs CD Presentation at 6:00 pm


The Border Songs CD is a compilation CD benefitting Tucson-based humanitarian organization No More Deaths/No Más Muertes. Producers Robert Neustadt and Chuck Cheesman will present a program including spoken word and music about the project. Special guests to be announced.

http://www.bordersongs.org/

2013

I'm finally getting around to jotting down a few thoughts about the coming year. January is inevitably a time of resolution and reconfiguring.

I began recording a new singer/songwriter album last April, but I got distracted from that project and instead worked on producing the Border Songs CD compilation — which has become the biggest fundraiser ever for Tucson humanitarian group No More Deaths / No Más Muertes. I'm very happy to have been involved in that project, but I am also happy to be back at working on my own record. My first priority for this year is to finish this CD and get that music out into the world. Look for it by autumn.

My second big project for this year is another benefit compilation I will be producing. This one is for the Whale Foundation, a Flagstaff-based advocacy group that assists members of the Grand Canyon river guiding community when they need access to mental or physical health services. One of the nice things about this project is that it is giving me an excuse to work with several local artists and musicians whom I admire.

The Whale Foundation project represents my big volunteer work for this year. I have made a personal commitment to doing one major volunteer project every year in addition to the many volunteer performances I donate to various events. It's really important to me that I can contribute something positive to my community, and with this kind of project I have found an enjoyable way to do that.

Each new year reminds me that time is a limited resource. I hope to spend a good deal of energy practicing and writing this year. Other than my family, few things in this world give me such joy as music. I think this is going to be a fabulous year rich in new musical experiences.

And I have a few surprises...

Cheers,
Chuck Cheesman

Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise

Originally published on the Passion Aggressive Blog on 12/11/2012.

During the election season I became – like many of my fellow Americans – a news junkie and amateur pundit. Emotions run high during election season. It seems a lot is riding on getting "your guy" into office. So I'm as a guilty as anyone. When things appeared to not be going well for my candidate, I often sought comfort in Nate Silver's forecasts at the FiveThirtyEight Blog. Nate consistently reported that President Obama's re-election prospects looked quite good, even after that disastrous first debate. And it turned out that Nate Silver's forecasts were impressively accurate.

Shortly after the election I picked up Nate's book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don't. I always feel it necessary to mention that I don't do reviews. This is a recommendation. This is a fabulous book.

Nate Silver has had an interesting and unique career trajectory. He made his initial mark (and financial independence) by developing a baseball performance forecasting system called PECOTA. He then made a mostly successful stab at playing online poker for a few years. When the online poker (somewhat predictably!) turned sour, Silver began to develop his own approach to political forecasting. His FiveThirtyEight Blog where he forecasts election results has become extremely popular. Unlike the omnipresent network media pundits, his forecasts have been dependably accurate.

While it may appear that Silver is a liberal pundit to some on the political right, what sets Silver apart from pundits is his devotion to digging up the truth before he makes a prediction. (I have a friend who predicted a Romney landslide victory. This friend called Silver a "partisan hack" when I mentioned the FiveThirtyEight analysis. My friend might want to check his mirror.) Silver sees truth in statistics – though it's important to note that Silver's devotion is to statistics that arrive by way of a particular approach to going after the truth. 

Silver explores the art and science of making forecasts across a whole range of seemingly unrelated topics: baseball, poker, chess, economics, weather, climate change, earthquakes, and even terrorism. Silver delivers his argument about how we should approach forecasting with a lot of colorful and interesting anecdotes, and he has a pretty good radar for ways to make statistical analysis accessible and interesting to a general audience. I've never been interested much in poker or gambling, but I found the chapter on Silver's foray into online gambling fascinating. Weather reporting? Silver explains why the NOAA is far more trustworthy than your typical media outlet even though the commercial weather forecasters have free access to all of the NOAA's work. His chapter on climate change is the best thing I've read on the topic. It's persuasive to the nth degree; anthropogenic climate change is real.

Good stuff.

At the heart of Silver's approach to forecasting is something called Bayesian Reasoning:

It is, rather, a statement — expressed both mathematically and philosophically — about how we learn about the universe: that we learn about it through approximation, getting closer and closer to the truth as we gather more evidence. - The Signal and the Noise, p. 241 - 242

This resonates with me. I've written before about my skepticism of anyone and anything that claims to have any sort of final, absolute truth. If we are really interested in truth and accuracy, doesn't it make some sense to acknowledge our own shortcomings and any possibility we could be wrong?

This brings me to the thing I'm interested in a book like this. I wonder how this kind of thinking in Silver's approach to forecasting might be applied to other areas in my own life. Silver is primarily interested in getting as close to the truth as possible. He wants to identify and track the signal and differentiate it from the noise. Identify these things and you are much more likely to make an accurate forecast or informed decision.

I keep asking myself as I think about this book, "Doesn't this kind of thinking make as much sense in non-competitive pursuits as it does in competitive undertakings like baseball or elections?" Even in my work as a songwriter, isn't a large part of the creative process really simply zeroing-in on the signal? Dismissing the noise? Can I apply this to parenthood or to being a husband?

As every child's baseball coach says, "Keep your eye on the ball." 

Church

Originally posted on the Passion Aggressive Blog on 4/13/2012.

“Papa, why don’t we go to church anymore?”
“Well, that’s a pretty good question. To be honest, I thought I was the only one who wanted go.  Besides, we’ve been so busy that most Sunday mornings we're pretty tired and just want to enjoy having some quiet time together as a family.”

Friends would laugh at the notion that I am the one in my family most interested in church. I’m a declared agnostic; I don’t know what I believe, and I feel strongly about that. I find fundamentalist religion of all stripes completely unconvincing­­­––and that includes atheism. The planet will likely soon reach a population of seven billion. It seems unlikely that any one of those people has the answer to, as Douglas Adams put it, “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” My wife and I were both brought up in the Catholic Church, where the body of Christ is served as a Styrofoam-like wafer and women are second-class citizens. That didn't work for either of us. But we do share an appreciation for the value a church community can provide.

One Sunday morning last fall––after our usual, enormous breakfast at Martannes Burrito Palace––we walked past our local Unitarian Universalist church just as service was letting out. It seemed like we knew everybody and everybody’s children, and we stopped to chat and kill some time. We knew that the Unitarian Universalists welcomed all people and tended to emphasize kindness and love. I even have a fairly hardcore atheist friend who attends the services on occasion. So we made plans to visit.

To tell the truth, I liked it a lot. Close friends filled the rows of chairs in the small room. My children enjoyed the singing. The “sermon” was like an entry-level lecture in social justice––a bit boring at times but also very agreeable to my way of thinking. A short time into the service, the children were whisked away for religious education. What was that about? Apparently, they learned that people have a lot of different values and traditions, and that we can learn from all of them. Not bad. The UU folks even served cookies and coffee, which I saw as a big improvement over the Styrofoam-like Jesus wafers. We came back for three or four weeks in a row.

Then life happened. We stopped going to church just as quickly as we had begun. My wife often works a twenty-four hour shift on weekends. I sometimes have gigs. Often, we just want to enjoy a moment of peace, and Sunday is about the only time we can find it. If God needed to rest on Sunday, surely mere mortals like us ought to be excused for being too whipped to leave the house. Sadly, we haven’t been to church this year, though we do continue to eat at Martannes at least once a week. The funny thing is that I was the one who most wanted to continue going to church.

Now that my daughter is asking about it, I suppose we will attend some more services. I suspect she might be as interested in seeing her church friends as anything else, but that’s a good enough reason to go. It sounds like a reasonable idea on Friday afternoon. We’ll see if our enthusiasm holds until Sunday morning.

My children––probably like yours if you are a parent––are always asking questions. It can drive me nuts sometimes! But I know it’s what they are supposed to do. I believe it is part of my job as a parent to make sure that their curiosity about the world is never diminished. Writers talk about finding a “jumping off point” as if it’s something we need to go find. It amazes me that kids are always standing there at the precipice ready to jump. We could learn from that. We’d be better for it.

I greatly value my children’s public school education. There they will undoubtedly run smack into ideas that I have not given them and of which I don’t approve. They’re going to need that. After all, Papa is only one man. He is wrong about some things. Mama is only one woman. She is wrong a lot less often than Papa, but she still doesn’t know everything. We should hope our children’s lives are wider and richer than our own. They’re going to need more than we can give them by ourselves. It’s an uncomfortable but necessary truth.

It’s funny to see my little boy deal with the issue of God. There are days when I feel like I have a little evangelical on my hands, “Papa, God is everywhere. He made everything and he knows everything! He’s even in the trees!” His exuberance can’t be contained. Of course, he hears this from his fellow classmates. It’s good that he hears it. I simply ask, “How do you know?”

I feel sorry for most of the homeschool crowd. It isn’t that it is impossible to do a good job homeschooling; I have a friend who clearly has been doing it impressively well. The problem is that most homeschoolers don’t do it well, and a big part of their failure begins with the very reason they want to homeschool their children: They want to protect their children from ideas that differ from their own.

I taught school for five years in Chicago, and I’ve continued to volunteer and work in school settings. Every single time I have witnessed a child re-enter public school after homeschooling, that child was unprepared both academically and socially. The failure on the part of the parents was catastrophic for these children. And why? Because the parents were certain the children should not be exposed to ideas that might cause them to question their own religious faith. Shame.

If your faith or religion can't hold its own against hard questions and challenges, I suggest that there is probably a good reason for it. What does that really tell you?

I hope my children maintain my own sense of wonder at the Universe. I hope they always embrace the mystery of it, and I hope they never attempt to box it up neatly the way religious fundamentalists do. There is too much to it. I believe the folks claiming the most certainty are the biggest frauds. However, I am aware of something far more important; I must let my children come to their own understanding through exploration and questioning. I can guide them. I can lead by example. But in the end they must decide for themselves what they believe. 

I can’t let them do that by keeping God out of their lives. They’re going to bump into God whether he exists or not, and they need to be ready. I just hope they can address it with an open mind and a willingness to ask hard questions.

And I hope in some way they can find both peace and joy in asking the questions, regardless of whether or not they find answers.

“Papa, why don’t we go to church anymore?”
“I don’t know. We can go on Sunday if you’d like.”

- Chuck Cheesman

"Get a Real Job"

Originally posted on the Passion Aggressive Blog on 3/31/2012.

There is a newspaper that is sold on the streets all over Chicago. It’s called Streetwise. Essentially, it was created to assist homeless people. Streetwise vendors are trained and required to carry badges. The idea is that the job is a stepping-stone to other gainful employment. Sometimes vendors are also contributors to the paper. It is literally a “man on the street” operation, and it gives its readers a perspective that is simply unavailable from either of Chicago’s major newspapers.

It’s been years since I was a twenty-something schoolteacher hoofing it around Chicago’s neighborhoods, but I always enjoyed buying a Streetwise from a licensed vendor. It felt like I was contributing to something important, and in return I received a great little paper.

There was one instance when I purchased Streetwise that has become one of my mileposts in life. For various reasons, I often revisit this story. I suppose it was an incident that taught me something important about what I believe to be right and good.

This happened somewhere around fifteen years ago. It was a weekend, and I was walking downtown towards the train that would take me out to the suburbs to family. As I hustled to the train, I stopped to grab a copy of the paper from a Streetwise vendor. I was in a hurry, and probably since it was around the holidays, I gave the man a five and told him to keep the change.

He had a big grin as he took my money. He didn’t just take the tip and let me run. He got my attention. “Thank you! Listen man, I’ve got a column in this one!” He directed me to turn a few pages, and sure enough there was that same big grin staring back at me alongside a half-page column. I actually can’t remember what he was covering. I think maybe it was sports, and I seem to remember some stuff about Michael Jordan. Details fade with time. We chatted briefly and I congratulated him. Then I ran off to catch my train.

I read my paper from cover-to-cover on my way out to the suburbs, and I probably read that vendor’s column more than once. I remember feeling really good about things.

A family member picked me up at the train station, and we went back to his house to visit. We were sitting at his kitchen table. I can still remember that very clearly. I was relating the whole story to him; how I gave the guy a five and wished him happy holidays; how he had seemed so proud that he was not only a vendor, but also a writer; how we stood there and chatted about how he was getting back on his feet; how great the Streetwise concept was; the whole thing.

This family member—a car salesman at the time—listened to my story without saying a word. There was a pause when I finished, and then he sort of snarled, “So, did you tell him to get a real job?” 

I know I turned red in the face, and I’m sure I was trembling. I shot back, “Tell him to get a real job? He’s got the same job as you. He’s selling a product. The only difference is that he has invested something of himself in the product!” Immediately, I could see my blow had hit its mark. It certainly didn’t make me feel better.

All these years later I still don’t feel any better about it.

****

Please visit http://streetwise.org/ if you're interested in Streetwise and its mission to provide people, “a hand up, not a handout.” Either that or buy a copy from a licensed vendor next time you're in Chicago. It's worth it.

- Chuck Cheesman