Can't Quit Yet

Frances Mayes-the author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, and In Tuscany, a big coffee-table book on Tuscany and it's cooking-spoke at the local college as part of its autumn lecture series. Frances Mayes has opened up Tuscany to the rest of the civilized world with as much import as Marco Polo had when he returned from Cathay centuries ago. Her first two books still provide literary chitchat amongst the literati of the western world. Not only does she write with a poet's insight and a tour-group leader's' charm, she includes recipes and vivid descriptions of the feasts of Tuscany. With all of that, she has tapped into the Italian soul and gastronomic libido.

For Italians and Italian wannabes, eating is more than nourishment; it is sensual overdrive, which much last at least three hours to climax. The miracle in her writings is that her juvenile background is Georgia, USA, and her professional milieu is academia. As a poet, however, she has powerful valences, which can plug into an environment already seething with tradition and sensuality, and present it all to her readers with remarkable immediacy. All of that can be found in her books.

In a nutshell, she and her husband bought some property in Tuscany and restored the villa house, which reaches back a few hundred years. The reconstruction process provides us the venue by which she tells her stories. The two of them balanced their time between "Bramasole" (their Tuscan home) and San Francisco. They both teach.

During the questions, someone asked when they retired from teaching. In the most perfunctory manner, she responded, "We quit." My inner 19-year-old person leapt with glee in support of their terminating their jobs and my external 62-year-old person muttered strongly, "Yes."

I could name at least a dozen people who pray daily for the wherewithal to get out of their jobs, careers, positions, etc., to do what they would really like to do. The strange part of their departure urge is that they are very good at what they do, enjoy what they are doing, and have been doing it for a very long time. I would bet some of you fall into that description.

What is it that after a couple of decades of music ministering many of the most capable are willing to pack it all up and find something else? Bob Batastini, in his GIA Quarterly column a few issues ago, reported that an unusually large number of experienced, successful church musicians applied for an editorial job at GIA, some even willing to take a large cut in salary. Most admitted that they did not want to give up doing church music-just not in a parish context.

Our ministry is, most of the time, satisfying, always challenging, and somehow it connects us into the eternal. If also rivets us into a polity whose leadership does not always proclaim stirringly the same spiritual values we do, such as justice in language, equality in gender, and collegiality. Vatican II seems like a past good dram. On the local scene, we continually face the same problems in the ministry: working at the whim of the pastor; cantor and choir commitments; budget restraints; children's choirs' parents; Angelicite lobbies. Just when you think you have the problem fixed, it appears again. It's like stringing beads without a knot at the end.

Wouldn't it be great if each one of us could write or compose three best sellers, make a fortune, and smile benignly, "We quit"?

You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@earthlink.net