"Now, when there's so much electronic music being made, a lot of people who make great music don't actually play an instrument they program the beats on computers and stuff, but there's a joke that goes: A car full of trombone players are driving along, and they pass a car full of frogs going in the opposite direction. Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?" Musicians are always starving, so they're really mean to each other about who makes what. Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. "There are a lot of musician jokes in the music world. I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar. So I started playing the trumpet, and I lost interest in that and started playing guitar when I was about 12 or 13. I took music lessons, learned to read, and my father was into Dixieland jazz, the kind of music that was made by Louis Armstrong, the kind that was popular in the 20's and 30's. "I started playing the trumpet when I was about eight. I hope you come upon people and places that interest you.
And I have also compiled a website exclusively devoted to interviews, profiles, and story-talking, called The Living Stories Collective. There are additional interview-based stories and articles within the blog, Still Amazed. I thank every student who participated in this project over the years. Almost all of these interviews were done with the help of students from Vista de las Cruces or Dunn Middle School. And when you do it, do it well, with all your heart.
"What will you do with your one wild and precious life?" asks the poet Mary Oliver. They have taken vastly different paths, but each one tells us, in word and deed, to find our own mission and embrace it fully. What do they have in common? First and foremost, each agreed to sit down and talk with a group of middle school students that in itself is a special kind of graciousness, though I have yet to meet anyone who was not afterwards glad to have done it.Beyond that, what they share is incredible passion and spirit. The result is an eclectic collection of conversations with all kinds of fascinating people - from a cowboy to a Congresswoman and everything in between. Borders blurred as we wandered through time and place, learned of work and wisdom, and vicariously faced adventure, both epic and small. Our own lives grew rich with new memories. The age of our subjects suddenly seemed much less significant than their willingness to talk and share. And indeed, as time went on, we discovered that many people we knew and worked with every day, both young and old, had unique perspectives and remarkable experiences to tell about. "Everyone lives a story," said one of our first interviewees, Caroline Henning, a woman who made her home in Gaviota's local mountains for much of her life. We began to see ourselves as the gatherers of stories that would otherwise be forgotten, and this became an ongoing labor of love continued by students each subsequent year. The old-timers remembered things they hadn't thought about in years - important things like rainy Christmas mornings, the best spots for catching steelhead, and what it was like riding along the muddy roads to school in a horse drawn sulky cart. We discovered that something different happens when people talk to kids. Our idea was to talk to the elders of the community, particularly the ranchers and long-time residents who seemed to have a special connection to the land. The interviews in this section are part of an oral history project I began with my middle school students in 1996.