Cambridge Memories of My Dad

So already, my very sweet, very kind 94-year-old dad, Ben Soble, passed away peacefully on Saturday, December 12, one more of COVID-19's many victims. That's him to right, smiling proudly right before a holiday concert performance by his senior living community's choral group, which he joined as a 90-year-old. In my whole life, I'd never known my dad to be, or even to aspire to be, a choral singer. But at Orchard Cove in Canton, MA, music and companionship beckoned, and my dad heeded the call, with enthusiasm.

Needless to say, as the word spread that my dad had passed, many reached out to my sisters and me to share stories and memories. That's when it struck me that I had a very particular set of memories that members of my extended family might never know unless I wrote about them--though I suspect that what they reveal about my dad's nature and values will not surprise anybody. Hence this blog.

Geographically speaking, the memories I'm going to share are Cambridge-based, generated just north and northeast of Harvard Square. 

They are much related to my many years as a choral singer and public high school teacher. That's why on the adjacent satellite view, you see labeled Sanders Theater and the Swedenborg Chapel, where my various singing groups performed during my student- and post-student days, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where I taught for twenty-six of my thirty-five years in public education.

It makes sense to begin with my student days: my parents were Sanders Theater regulars because they attended all of my Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum and Radcliffe Pitches concerts. 

My Parents, Two Years Ago--Not at Sanders Theater

When the Pitches sang our first-ever Sanders concert, my parents were warmly welcomed in the group's onstage introduction because  they'd provided so much support during the group's first year--among other things, my dad was always willing to lend his station wagon when we needed it.

Forty years later, when the original Pitches performed again at Sanders Theater, my parents were in the audience again--in roughly the same seats they'd sat in forty years earlier--and were again specially welcome by the group's emcee. You can imagine how thrilled they were! As one of "the girls," as my parents called them, wrote to me in a note last week, "Joan, your dad was such a wonderful 'Father' to all of the Pitches. We loved having your mom and dad in the audience, cheering us on, at all the really big Pitch concerts at Sanders."

After I graduated from college, I still sometimes sang in Sanders Theater as a member of Back Bay Chorale. Soon, though, my parents had to acclimate to crossing Quincy Street and heading to the Swedenborg Chapel in order to hear me sing. It was one of the places the Oriana Consort regularly performed. My husband Scott had already been a longtime member of the Oriana when I joined the group and first met him. 

As he had in the past, my dad quickly made a positive impression on my fellow singers in the Oriana Consort. One former member of the Oriana, someone I've come to know well during the last few years since I began singing in several Hingham-based groups,* put it this way: "I'm thinking of your father's bright smile, and of all the times I saw him, beaming, beside your pretty mother after a concert. His was one of my favorite faces to see in an audience, as he was so obviously delighted to be present."

Recently, the Oriana recently recorded a virtual choir performance of Stephen Paulus' "The Road Home"; if you watch all the way to the end, you'll see that my dad is one of the COVID-19 victims to whom the group dedicated their performance.  Sadly, several current members of the group have also lost parents.

My fellow former Oriana singer was right about my dad's general delight in being present: frequently when I asked him what he really liked in a concert, he'd tell me, "I liked it all." 

"Delighted to Be Present" at Marina Bay With My Cousins and Mom

He had that same embracing enthusiasm about family occasions, especially if they happened in restaurants where there was something new and different to eat: "I liked it all" was something my dad often said about lunches and dinners, too.  

CRLS Seen From Broadway

But back to Cambridge--and to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS), where I taught for most of my public education career. For my first thirteen years at CRLS, I taught in  CRLS's democratic alternative school. 

Annually, the Pilot School produced a variety show in which the students sang, danced, rapped, and performed scenes and skits, many of which they wrote collaboratively.** The play was always too long, the school's theater was always too hot, but my parents came every year. They enjoyed watching the students relish being in a play that they had helped to conceptualize and write--and watching the students grow up. "The boy who had the lead in the ____ scene--I think he's eight inches taller than he was last year," my dad once remarked; "The girl who sang ___ --she lost a little weight since last year; and luckily, she didn't sing as flat as she did last year," my mother shared one year.

But it was the annual Pilot School Academic Festival, which featured students' best and most interesting academic work, that really spoke to my dad. CRLS was (and still is) a large urban high school necessarily charged with educating all kinds of students; and as a proud public school product himself whose immigrant parents had arrived in the USA speaking no English, my dad was perpetually interested in how--and how well--CRLS managed to meet the individual learning needs of its diverse student body.

Part of the CRLS Student Ceramic Mural Depicting the Students' Homes***

At every Academic Festival, there was always a table covered with student essays that attracted far less attention than the more visually appealing posters and projects displayed on the nearby walls and easels. But it was at that table that my dad always positioned himself and spent the evening reading students' papers. 

In the days following the Festival, my dad always had comments to make about what he'd read--and learned about the students. "One student had some very interesting ideas about The Scarlet Letter,"  he once remarked. "I was really surprised that a teenager would write with such excitement about the New Deal--but he needs to keep working on his writing skills," he said on another occasion. "I think your students have been learning some things about American history that I was never taught in school," he noted one year. That last remark led us into a whole discussion of dominant narratives and missing perspectives and voices.

That discussion mattered years later when the removal of Confederate monuments became a major issue across America--and in my parents' den at Orchard Cove. When my mother made a nostalgic "Gone with the Wind"-influenced argument for keeping the monuments in place, my dad persuaded her to change her mind with one really good question: "Thelma, would you have wanted to attend the Adolf Hitler Middle School?"

In addition to the topic of how the teaching of American history was changing, my dad was also interested in the pros and cons of standardized testing programs and the factors that made it easy and hard for non-English-speaking students to become proficient English speakers. A couple of years back, when there was a ballot question about charter schools, he asked me to provide him with readings so he could educate himself about the arguments for and against them. 

But as much as educational issues and debates interested him, ultimately it always came back to the students for my dad. He understood that events and experiences played important roles in the way the students saw themselves and their futures. I recall his concern in the early 1990s about how the kids were feeling, and what the school was doing, in response to the police beating of Rodney King; similarly, in 2013, he had questions about how the students were making sense of the Boston Marathon bombings, especially since the Tsarnaev brothers were CRLS graduates whom some of the kids knew personally.

Actually, the second cohort of Kimbrough Scholars

My dad was also attuned to the positive events and experiences that affected students' lives. When the first cohort of CRLS Kimbrough Scholars traveled to Mississippi to further civil and restorative justice efforts related to a Jim Crow-era cold case, he remarked, "These children will never forget that they got to work on something so important."

Whatever education-related topic we were discussing, the background question was always the same: what would give every public school student the best possible chance to succeed, to have a good present and future life? It definitely reflected the values of somebody who liked people, who believed all people deserved to have a comparable chance to embrace opportunity, who believed all people should get to feel good, at least some of the time.****

With the Arizona Sobles at The Townshend in Quincy in Fall 2019

He was also interested in what had become of the kids, something he knew I sometimes knew from Facebook. A few years back, when I told him a former student had opened a new restaurant in Central Square, his immediate response was "When are we going?" We never got to go to La Fábrica Central together, but we did have a great steak dinner at Davio's last winter right before the pandemic changed everything.

I'm starting to ramble, I know; so let me conclude by saying that I'm glad that I got to go to several of my dad's choral concerts over the last few years. It was least I could do, considering that he and my mother had attended 150 of my performances--I think this is a conservative estimate--over the years.

And so in honor my musical indebtedness to my dad--actually, I'm indebted to both of my parents for so many musical and nonmusical reasons--I end with some choral music. It's the second section of Tarik O'Regan's "Triptych,"  which begins at minute 4:29 of this YouTube link. The first part of the section sets an adaptation of a text--Roland Gittelsohn's meditation in The Gates of Repentance (1978)--that will be very familiar to many Jewish readers of this blog post; in fact, my nephew, who's a rabbi, included it in the materials he provided when he officiated at my dad's graveside funeral on December 15:

In the rising of the sun and its going down,

      we 

      remember 

      them.

In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter,

      we 

      remember 

      them.

In the opening buds and in the rebirth of spring,

      we remember them.

In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer,  

      we remember them.  

In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn, 

      we remember them. . . .   

When [we're] weary and in need of strength,

      we remember them. 

When [we're] lost and are sick of heart,

      we remember them. . . .

So long as we live, they too shall live,

For they are now a part of us, 

      as we remember them. 

 

Thank you for reading all that I've shared here. It's comforted me to write this, to have shared with you some stories you may not have known, and to have listened again to the music embedded here. Happy New Year to all; and please, please stay very safe!

* Specifically, I've been singing in the Unicorn Singers and Broad Cove Chorale--the former a mixed group and the latter an all-women's group--and in the Crossroads Singers. The Crossroads Singers are a 6-person vocal ensemble that annually--at least when the world isn't in pandemic mode--offers 10 minutes of poetry-related seasonal musical entertainment at the annual Old Ship Church Winter Solstice Poetry Reading. Scott and I are two of the six.

** Note: the staff sang, too, so I count the Pilot Play among my performances that my parents attended, too.
*** Photo by Kristin Knowlton Daugherty; thanks, Kristin!

**** And definitely the question of someone who always chose to play golf at public golf courses, which often meant showing up and becoming part of a random foursome that was getting ready to tee off. Because he often did this at the Fresh Pond Golf Course on the Cambridge-Belmont line, he sometimes ended up playing with one or more of my CRLS colleagues. As a result, one of them always greeted me not with "Hello, Joan, but with "How's Ben?"