Songwriting

Great songwriting often happens in teams (not committees, teams) of two, one of whom seems to major in tunes, and the other in texts. Think of Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Gilbert and Sullivan, Lennon and McCartney, Elton John and Bernie Taupin.  I am NOT a team.

Sometime in the late 1980s I began to write texts for existing tunes. They were all for use in ecclesiastical settings. The tunes were rather leaden, and my texts pedestrian. Through the 90s I got slightly better, but only slightly. In 2001 I attended a conference that accelerated the process. I even got the idea that I could write tunes. But, I couldn’t. A couple times I attempted to write church music in Taiwanese… DOUBLE DISASTER!  Finally I separated “tune” from “text”, so at least things were singable, if not exciting, and hewed pretty closely to existing texts in Taiwanese or English only.

Last summer I met a high school classmate. We hadn’t met in the 60s when we were both at that school. That’s no surprise, because there were nearly 600 people in our graduating class. She had been an amateur poet over the years, and in 2011 self-published a collection of about 100 devotional poems.  Since October of 2019 I’ve been adapting those poems for singing in church settings. She wasn’t initially willing to have her words “monkeyed with”, and I don’t blame her. Writers are notorious about disliking their editors. So I agreed to proceed with the project on the basis that it would be sent to her alone, and only released beyond the “private audience” with her approval on a song by song basis.  I recently finished the project, neatened up the files, and sent them to her on a .usb drive, by post. 

The process was good for me in more than one way. First, the faith so much on display in her verse strengthened mine. Second, reworking her words into metrical and rhyming verse was a good brain exercise. Third, and probably most useful in the long run, I learned a lot of tunes that I’d never contacted before. These will be a treasury from which I’ll draw as I adapt other stuff, or even write my own stuff going forward. 

Probably the best thing I learned was to separate my minor facility with words from a non-proclivity for tunes.   Sorting things out, separating what one CAN do from what one SHOULDN’T touch, is profitable.

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Switching Sides

In September of 1984 I preached a sermon in Taiwanese for the first time in my life. No doubt, neither the sermon nor the Taiwanese were much good. I was dispatched to that church to raise funds for the agency which I served in Kaohsiung. I’ve no idea if my presence there made any difference in the amount donated for the agency’s work, positively or negatively. I’m sure the records exist, but I DON’T want to look for them.

In subsequent years I did quite a lot of fundraising in Taiwan, both because I was on the staff of different agencies and because I was “available” to be sent here or there. Once I was scheduled to raise money for a cable TV program provider that declared bankruptcy on the Friday before the Sunday on which I went out with my hat in hand. The agency didn’t tell me ahead of time. Certain folks in the church where I spoke must have thought me quite the fool. 

Having retired from Taiwan, nobody has asked me to do any fundraising since March of 2018. It’s kind of nice to go somewhere without having one’s performance measured by the amount raised. But, now I’m on the other side.

The state university where I studied for my Master in Education degree (a night school thing I did 40 years ago) has tracked me down. Probably I gave them my information, so I wasn’t hard to find. Last September a young woman doing “alumni calling” managed to persuade me to give $110 for scholarship aid to students in the Graduate School of Education. Late in January another young woman called, asking if I’d like to repeat that gift in 2020. I demurred, saying that I’d respond when the university called again in September. But she DID NOT LET ME GO. A smooth transition was made to the campus food pantry for students who struggle just to get enough to eat. She made a good case for it… I credit the people who wrote her script. So $25 was pledged, and immediately collected through my credit card. 

Having asked, so frequently and for so many different funds in Taiwan, it’s time to pay back. 

How is that expressed?  I think it’s something like, “What goes around comes around.” 

 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

If You See Something, Say Something

We went to Taiwan and returned home in January aboard many different modes of transport: intercity bus, taxi, airplane, elevated commuter train, bullet train, regular train and Amtrak. 

Sometime in 2012 or so I developed an affection for doing such interstate travel as I was required to undertake on Amtrak. It could be because Holland, MI, where I reside, is served by a daily morning train to Chicago and a return one in the evening. Once at Union Station in Chicago (where the train from Holland arrives soon after 9AM) the entire Amtrak network can be accessed. The station is spacious and clean. Its great hall was totally renovated between 2016 and 2019, and now is a beautiful, though noisy, place in which to wait for a train. 

Part of the noise is provided by people talking to each other (in person or on telephones) while waiting for their trains to be called. Another part of the noise is the announcements of trains now ready to board, part is background music, and an annoying part is provided by the many public service announcements regarding baggage, boarding procedures, and safety. From time to time new announcements are recorded, but one about “suspicious people”, urging passengers to speak up if they see anything suspicious, is the same one, I swear, that I first began hearing 8 years ago. Whoever wrote the script had a certain manner of speech in mind, but the woman who voiced it missed the rhythm in one cleverly worded part. 

In the novel, Staggerford, by John Hassler, a Sunday at the local Catholic church was described. The lay reader for the epistle lesson was the town’s mayor, whom Hassler described as having read the scripture “as if it were a municipal ordinance.” When I hear the announcement in Union Station requesting that we who use the station work with the security staff to “make the railroad a safe mode of transportation,”  I think of the mayor of Staggerford. 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

The “Unchangeable Edict” Metaphor in Action

A Persian Emperor’s edict, as described in the Biblical stories of Hadassah (Esther) and Daniel, was impossible to change. As a plot device it introduced tension into the narratives; tension that was relieved when, in the story’s denouement, the original edict was undone by a larger or greater one. You can see some of these in Esther 8:8-11 and Daniel 6:19-28.

We spent a couple weeks of January in Tainan.The scheduling was arranged to allow us to cast our first ever votes, as citizens of Taiwan, for president. That was accomplished on the 5th day of our visit. Apart from voting, though, we did a lot of other things: visiting friends, re-connecting with former students, associates and colleagues, and (it being Taiwan) enjoying a lot of meals. Soon before our departure, Dr. Ong Chongiau, the president of Tainan Theological College, directed his executive secretary to arrange our travel to Tainan’s High Speed Rail station at the college’s expense.  

Two days later a young couple who reside on the campus and study for the ministry there offered to drive us on this trip. They are sincere people whom I like and admire. Theirs was truly an offer of kindness and friendship. Sadly, I had to tell them that the president had already ordered the matter settled. Because they are divinity students, I was able to refer them to the Bible stories, to give a context. 

We should all know stories, all KINDS of stories. The more we have, the more abundant our resources for dealing with situations become. For the most part, it shouldn’t matter whether those stories come from Harry Potter, Shakespeare, Aesop, the Bible or Sex In the City.  Last week, answering a question in the Khan Academy US History course, I had found myself directing a student to the source of the metaphor “a City on a Hill”, about which she asked regarding a lesson on the New England Colonies. If it was just her youth and inexperience that left her “in the dark” about that metaphor, that’s OK, time will take care of it. If, however, it was an aversion to religious or biblical literacy, then it’s a pity. 

People of all religions, and of no religion at all, need to be basically familiar with metaphors that emerge from the stories in each others’ worlds. 

The force be with you.

 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

 

Noise

In 1999, when our son was 7-going-on-8, we had a year’s leave from mission service in Taiwan to spend in North America. We visited churches, re-engaged with American culture, and took care of things that lots of people employed outside of their native countries normally do.  At the beginning of August we arrived in Holland, MI and took up residence in temporary housing. Though our son had spent half a year in the USA when he was in pre-school, all of this was pretty new to him. He missed his friends and classmates in Taiwan. During the first week we were there, he said,  “Let’s go back to Kaohsiung. This place is too green and too quiet.”

That statement was very much on my mind during two weeks we spent in Tainan during January of 2020. We were not in central Kaohsiung, where we had lived for decades, but on the campus of Tainan Theological College, where we spent our final 11 years. We stayed in the college’s guest house, which is surrounded by trees and located far enough from city roads to actually be quiet. But going out to just about anyplace was accompanied with the noise of urban Taiwan, which assaulted ears which, in the past 18 months of retirement, have been conditioned by the very town where our son found it “too quiet” in 1999.

The guest house has enough rooms for 12 people, but we had it mostly to ourselves. A couple nights before we left a group of four alumnae were staying in rooms downstairs. Late the next morning, the sound of one of them, playing lilting tunes on an ocarina, echoed through the whole house. 

Taiwan can sometimes be noisy, but at other times and in other places, wonderfully sonorous.

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Make Bathroom Fixtures Great Again

     Early in December of 2019, America’s president addressed a topic that was bothering his political base, water saving bathroom fixtures. The regulations that govern the installation of new fixtures were first signed into force by an earlier Republican president and reaffirmed by a subsequent Democratic one. They’ve been regulating things for nearly 30 years. 

     The president was upset. He said that showers didn’t deliver enough pressure to btdhe, sinks enough to wash hands, or toilets enough flow to flush cleanly. America’s water surplus, derived from rain, was being wasted into the ocean. Responses to the remarks came from many quarters, none particularly favoring the president, but some admitting that he may have had a point, especially regarding toilets. Early models of “low volume flush” fixtures included some, the performance of which, was less than stellar.

     Bathroom fixtures in Taiwan, where we mainly lived from 1976 to 2018, have also evolved. Some of the changes were, indeed, to cut the amount of water they used, and some for “stylistic” reasons. We’ve resided or sojourned at places where the toilet tank hung high on a wall, where it was attached to a wall and connected to the stool by an angled pipe, where, like in America, it is bolted to the stool, and during a couple weeks in January of 2020, in a place where the tank itself is part of a single unit with the stool, and almost no higher than the top of the stool itself. This last one was, to say the least, problematic.

    The problem was not that it didn’t flush. Things were configured so that water entered at the bottom in a way that created a swirl that washed out whatever had been left there to be flushed. It didn’t need an extra 10 or 15 flushes, as the president suggested in December. But it was still a bad toilet. It smelled of urine.  Downstairs in the same facility where we stayed there was an old-fashioned, unsleek and unfashionable commode. It didn’t smell at all. So I watched the both of them. In the traditional one, the flush water entered from just under the rim, rinsing the walls of the bowl as it headed to the bottom where it raised the level of water enough to create a flush. The newer toilet never got rinsed. Whatever urine may have been splashed about the interior of the bowl in the middle of the night when the lights were off stayed there to dry out.

     Having discovered that, it was merely a matter of using the brush to rectify the matter. Things ceased to reek soon afterward. 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan. 

Copyshop

We lived into the era in Taiwan when photocopying became both common and cheap. We didn’t realize how blessed we were until we retired in the USA.  Of course, our “printing needs” are much more modest than they were while we taught in Taiwan, but every once in a while something with a lot of pages, that uses a lot of ink, needs to be put onto paper. 

In Taiwan, if we wanted to print lots of pages on the inkjet machine at home, we could always refill the cartridges quite handily. That is NOT the practice in America. Running out of ink and having to replace a cartridge with a new one costs double what a new one runs in Taiwan, and many times more than what it costs to do a refill. Photocopies at a big office supply store near home in Michigan cost 15 cents each, the same as they do at the library.  Color, of course, is more.

So, it just happened that we had a 95 page thing that needs copy-editing (done more accurately on paper than on a screen) and a 38 page book of meditations with a dozen color plates that Char wanted done. I took those 133 pages plus a 6-page sermon manuscript, all as electronic files, to a neighborhood copy shop on January 17th. While I waited, they all rolled off the printer, and the bill was 193 Taiwan Dollars, less than US$6.

If our homeward bound luggage were not already getting too heavy, I might raid the files I now have stored at Google Drive and print here what I might be needing in Michigan in the near future. 

Count your blessings.

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.  

 

Other People on the Plane

We arrived in Taiwan on January 7th aboard a Boeing 777 with about 330 other people. Our imagined “ride with many others coming home to vote” was tested severely in line to check in. The flight, it turns out, was a codeshare with Singapore Airlines, Thai Airlines and one other that we couldn’t identify. Further, many of those checking in all around us had stacks of cardboard cartons addressed to persons and places in Vietnam. When passengers on the non-stop flight deplaned in Taipei, only those of us planning to stay in Taiwan gathered around the luggage carousel, where no cardboard boxes were in evidence. 

After a round of airline deregulation in the USA in 1978, the Hub and Spoke system for routing became common. I recall hearing someone in the early 80s saying that Eastern Airlines flights “couldn’t get south of Atlanta without stopping in to say hello.” When I began flying regularly in North America I became very familiar with the airports in Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis. But I’d not really thought of an airport in Taiwan, the “end of the line” for many international flights, as being a hub until rather recently. 

When, about a dozen years ago, airlines from Taiwan and China began flying back and forth between the two nations, more folks flying trans-Pacific began to make connections here. Apparently with code-shares, Taipei has also become a good place to change for South East Asia. This is one additional good thing about Taiwan, one more thing on a long, long list of good things. 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan. 

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Slavish Literalism

There’s a little restaurant with an interesting name in the neighborhood where we resided for 10 years in Tainan City. It’s been there for a long time. Folks hosting a business lunch or taking friends out for a meal frequent it because the menu has a pleasing variety of offerings. It’s cozy for 2 or 4 people, and has a couple of rooms upstairs that can accommodate groups of 8 or up to 16. 

In Chinese, it’s called the “Cloth Tiger” for a stuffed animal in the front window. That’s kind of cute. But then someone decided that it needed an English name, too. That became problematic. A stuffed animal, such as one gives to a child, is called by a term that must include the word “cloth”, otherwise taxidermy is implied. But the “tiger” element had to be included, too. So something like “Tiger doll” might be apt. However, someone looking up stuffed animals in a bilingual dictionary found the term “rag doll”, and chose that. 

THEN, apparently, a grammarian got involved. It wasn’t a “Tiger Rag Doll” or a “Rag Doll Tiger”, but only a simulacrum of a tiger. So, “tigerish” was chosen.  The name on the sign is “Tigerish Rag Doll”. Not only weird English, but a lot to say for a restaurant so small, and not all that easy to pronounce when English is one’s third language.

But it is, literally, what the place is about.  Had anyone asked me, I’d’ve called it “Tony’s.”

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Choosing the Wrong Translation

As a high school student half a century ago, I sat in an English Literature class one day when the teacher introduced the idea that language changes, new words come in, and old words that fall out of usage remain as quaint reminders of the past.  To demonstrate this, he showed us a low priced kit of wood carving tools, made somewhere in Asia, where the label upon them had been translated into English by someone using a bilingual dictionary. The tools would be good, the label read, for every “quidity” that one might wish to carve. To high school teenagers in 1968 suburban Los Angeles, that label was meaningless, because “quidity” had dropped out of usage sometime long ago and far away. 

Watching TV in Taiwan the evening of election day, January 11th, we saw many ads. Though a few of these were in Taiwanese, most of them carried audio in Mandarin that was too fast for us to make much sense of. One product, with a name like “white flower”, was a fragrant oil with medicinal powers, intended for application to the skin. That’s about as much as I could get as spoken words flew past my ears and graphics past my eyes.  I did catch a couple bits, though. The name of the product had been transliterated into latin script, and looked as if it followed the pronunciation of the characters in Cantonese. Then there was the English part, “Embrocation Oil”. 

About a week later I looked it up in an online dictionary. Apparently it exists to renew the skin by removing dead flakes from the surface, by “embrocating” what it touches. 

I think somebody, sometime long ago, found the word in a bilingual dictionary and pinned it to the product.  “Salve”, “ointment” or “lotion” would have done better by me. But then, I’ve learned a new word. Or maybe, like “quidity”, an old one. 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.