50 Septembers
Half a century of being me.
September is an understated month. It is far mellower than those show-off months June and July. September doesn’t try so hard.
Warm but not blistering, sunny but not blinding, cool at night, but not cold. People forget that September is mostly a summer month. September is okay with that.
I was born fifty Septembers ago. Mom endured a drug-free hospital birth and Dad was in the room for the whole thing. It was all quite progressive for 1971. When I popped out, my Dad announced, “It’s an Andrew!”
The very same week, the Kennedy Center had its glittering grand opening, 14 miles away. Opening Night featured the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. President Nixon skipped the whole thing when he learned Bernstein’s piece was a musical protest of the Vietnam war.
The Kennedy Center and I debuted the same week. Mine got less press.
I was nine when I found music. Our next door neighbor was a piano teacher, and for a while I was the lone, squirmy boy in her studio of neighborhood girls. I liked to pound on the keyboard more than practice my scales. I wasn’t a model student.
Undeterred, my mom introduced me to George Gershwin, another squirmy kid who liked to pound on the piano. My first concert was attending a performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with my mom at the Kennedy Center.
Gershwin confirmed what I already suspected: the piano is considered a percussion instrument for a reason. It began a lifelong love of music.
The second keyboard I fell in love with was attached to an Apple II computer at my friend Burton’s house. Over the course of a summer during grade school, Burton and I taught ourselves a little BASIC and started programming our own Choose your Own Adventure games. It involved a lot of IF, THEN and GOTO statements.
I still remember what it felt like to successfully run code I had written myself. It was absolutely thrilling.
September babies are Virgos and Libras, known for being practical and a little intense.
For a few Septembers in grade school, I played in a youth soccer league. Every day at practice, I would stand in the middle of the field, transfixed by the migratory patterns of birds as they headed south for winter.
One afternoon, the soccer ball literally hit me on the side of the head. The coach yelled at me to get my head in the game. My head was anywhere but the game. It was with the birds and with the piano and with George Gershwin.
I asked my mom if I could please quit soccer. She was fine with that.
Dispatched from soccer, I spent my now empty afternoons at the piano, scribbling away on manuscript paper. Writing music suited me better than playing soccer, and I no longer had to worry about things hitting me on the side of the head.
The sound of September is football
Wearing a white tuxedo, red bow tie, extravagant ruffles and cotton gloves, I strode past the cheerleaders, climbed the podium at the fifty yard line, and conducted the marching band halftime show. Our show included Summertime by George Gershwin and the Overture to Candide by Leonard Bernstein.
I would never be cool in high school, but for a few months I got to lead a band of 100 friends, and I really liked that.
September is back-to-school season
On my eighteenth birthday I was hundreds of miles from Virginia, in a dorm full of Hoosiers. I went to Indiana to study music and ended up with an unexpected double major: an official degree in Music Composition and an unofficial one in Midwesterners.
I learned that basketball can really matter a lot, soda can be called pop, and the card game Euchre is just an excuse to stay up all night and talk about life. I learned to love people from one-horse towns, cornfield counties, and rustbelt cities. Still do.
September marks the traditional start of the New York City arts season.
I spent my 24th birthday in a windowless office in midtown Manhattan, helping to prepare for Carnegie Hall’s annual opening night gala. It was my first desk job — Special Events Associate — the lowest rung of a very tall classical music ladder. That fall I built my first database, to help us keep track of all the dinner table seating assignments for the $2,000-a-plate event. It was a different sort of Choose Your Own Adventure game.
Songs will tell you that autumn in New York is a magical time to fall in love.
When Peg and I got engaged in 1996, we had two criteria for picking the wedding date: We wanted an autumn wedding and we needed two years to save up for it. We found our date when we realized the last Saturday in September 1998 would be George Gershwin’s 100th birthday.
Peg dressed like a movie star. I wore spats. Everyone danced. Gershwin pounded out the soundtrack.
July has the 4th, January the 1st, October the 31st. Understated September never had a memorable date.
The morning of my 30th birthday was beautiful. Warm but not blistering, sunny but not blinding, not a cloud in the sky.
Peg hustled off work, but I wasn’t in a rush. I remember feeling unusually peaceful on such a pretty birthday. I hoped it was a harbinger for my 30s.
I made some coffee, wrote a little music, strolled over to the 181st Street station and headed downtown to work. As we approached the Columbus Circle station, the conductor announced, “Due to an incident at the World Trade Center, this will be the final stop on this A Train.”
All of the riders grumpily filed out. None of us had any idea.
I never forgave that September day for being so beautiful.
My father was a September baby, too. In 2004, leading up to his 85th, he suggested we celebrate it in his homeland.
Our Guatemalan family likes to party, so we celebrated Dad in Guatemala City, then again in the mountain town of Panajachel, and then again at an arts center in Antigua.
It was boisterous, zany and loud: three words that never described my father. Like his birth month, his three words were: understated, mellow, and chill. Always a good sport, he danced with my mom, blew out the candles and swung at the piñata.
I believe this was his last trip to Guatemala.
Peg and I loved spending our 20s in New York, but were ready for a change in our 30s. After a long search, we chose a new state that was warm but not blistering, cool but not cold, earnest, practical and understated.
Oregon is the September of states.
“Stay with her, Dad!” barked the midwife, moments after our daughter was born. The hospital room was suddenly filled with noise and lights and people in scrubs.
There were some potential concerns upon her birth that ended up being unfounded, thankfully. Still, in that terrifying moment, as our little baby was being whisked away by the nurses, our midwife ordered me to go with our daughter. The midwife stayed with Peg.
Our baby was placed on a metal table with a blinding light shining on her, diodes attached to her chest, goopy drops in her eyes. The nurses went off to find the doctor, and for a few moments, it was just me and my kid.
She gazed up at me with her big eyes and button nose. I offered her a finger and she gripped it. Right then, I thought she looked like my grandmother. So we gave her my grandmother’s middle name: Caroline.
It was September 28.
September’s birthstone is the Sapphire: Cool, blue, a little opaque.
When we replaced Peg’s engagement ring several years ago, she chose a sapphire rather than a diamond, for her two sapphires.
By the time I was 18, I knew my three major passions were music, computers and leadership. I didn’t intentionally seek out a job that combined all three. It just turns out there’s a job for anything.
For instance, to see great music you need to buy a ticket, and to buy a ticket you need a database, and to run a database company you need leadership. I was 31 when I learned about a nonprofit called Tessitura. I was 46 when I became its President.
Well into my 30s I continued to write music, primarily for a small New York theater company, even after moving to Portland.
Still, once Caroline was born, my attempt to balance family, Tessitura, and my music, was failing. I had to keep my family and I had to keep my day job, so I gave up writing music.
It’s okay. Caroline is music enough.
I’ve stood at the admissions window at the Met Museum, ducked under the seawater pipes at the Shedd Aquarium, seen inside the sails of the Sydney Opera House, and tread the boards at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
I’ve visited cultural organizations across 18 time zones, and once flew completely around the world. I celebrated my 47th birthday in London.
I travelled a lot. Until I didn’t.
On my 49th birthday, well into the pandemic, Portland’s air was orange and toxic from nearby forest fires, and our town was once again in the national news as we eclipsed 100 straight days of Black Lives Matter activism.
If my 30th birthday was the hardest, my 49th was a close second.
I’ve come to realize that life is like a card game. A fulfilled life comes down two things: the cards you are dealt and how you play those cards. Reading back through these anecdotes from my life, I am happy with how I have played the cards of my life.
What I didn’t understand until my 49th birthday was the other secret of my success: the amazing set of cards I was dealt.
I was dealt a handful of Aces: Male, White, Straight, Non-Disabled, Economically-advantaged, US Citizen. I have grown up in a system built by and for people like me.
It took the shock of George Floyd’s murder and the reckoning that followed for me to see how much my own success came down to the cards I was dealt the day I was born.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the world, there was a baby born the same day as me, no doubt bursting with innate potential, but with zero Aces in their little hand. The odds that this baby even saw their 50th birthday is quite low. For instance, the average life expectancy of a black, trans woman in America is 35.
Even if this baby beat the odds and has grown up to have a fulfilled life like me, they have done so through far more struggle than I have ever known.
At 49, I understood that simply being able to Choose My Own Adventure was a form of privilege.
At 49, I learned a new kind of humility.
At 49, I saw all the Aces in my hand and I couldn’t unsee them.
So I have been learning, listening and taking action to use my privilege to help change the rules of the card game. A card game where Aces don’t trump the other cards.
Peg and Caroline have been my partners and they continue to push me to do more and to do better. It’s a start.
A few months ago, I learned that the Kennedy Center was planning their 50th anniversary celebration, including a performance the night before my 50th birthday. This special performance would honor the 20th anniversary of 9/11. The tickets would come out of Tessitura.
I really wanted to be there that night. It would be the symbolic conclusion to my first 50 years on many levels. How cool would I feel adding that to my bucket list?
I didn’t attend. Not everything needs to be a photo op. Perhaps that’s something I’m starting to learn after 50 years.
There was no great pomp on my 50th birthday. No trip across the country. No tuxedos. No spats. Just a barbeque in our backyard with a few Oregon friends, a few Indiana friends, a few Virginia friends, Peg, Caroline and me.
It was warm but not blistering, sunny but not blinding, cool in the evening, but not cold.
Just another understated September day.
It was just right.
