I�ve been listening to lots of pseudo-folk music lately, things with lots of acoustic backing. Like Suzanne Vega�s first album (or, more accurately, my battered bootleg tape of a gig she did at a coffeehouse I used to frequent in Boston before her first album came out. Also old Cat Stevens records, which were already old by the time I started listening to them, but which I listened to a lot the summer after my sophomore year in college. I was working at an arts camp in South Jersey. The camp was in the middle of fields and fields of farmland and since I didn�t have a car and no one else shared my day off, I generally put on my headphones and sunglasses and made myself as invisible as possible. Often I hiked around the camp. Often I did my laundry in the big open sided shed that housed the industrial machines. I was the youngest of the instructors there that summer, the only one who wasn�t old enough to drink. In our evenings out, Janice, the ballet teacher, and Dan, the director of the music programs, both of whom were at least 10 years older than I, would try to sneak me into the bars we�d drive to over the Delaware border so I could hang out with the rest of them. We�d always play the geekiest games of classical music name that tune. During the year, Dan taught at a small music school in Brooklyn. Janice had run away from home at the age of 16 and ended up studying dance in Toronto where, by the time I met her, she had her own studio.

I also befriended Kate, a theater teacher who lived in Philly, the closest city. I remember spending a weekend at her house, which had once been owned by someone who was a bit macabre. There were stained glass windows from churches built into the house and a basement paved in old grave markers. Kate admitted that although she�d lived there for years, she�d never been down the stairs alone. I remember lying on the floor of her sunny living room after I�d walked miles on the river from downtown Philly to her house while Kate fried tofu in the kitchen and we both wailed along to her Cat Stevens records spinning on the turntable. Marty, the animation instructor, shared our love of Cat Stevens too. He played acoustic guitar on the porch of the staff trailer in the evenings, singing �Peace Train� and �Sad Lisa� with his sweet, boyish voice. Marty was one of those few people who manage to be perennially childlike in all the right ways while still having a strong sense of responsibility to himself, to his students, to his friends and the world in general. He was reed thin, and taller than he looked with his stoop, with California blond curls that were always in a state of disarray. I never saw him without a pair of Birkenstocks on his feet, usually with socks. His students adored him and would stay up until all hours of the night working on their films. He motivated them by his utter faith that they would always be doing their best work and by his passion for his own work and his good heart. One day I helped Marty take a group of students on a field trip to nearby (relatively speaking) Philly. We were snaking our way down South Street when a nearby telephone began to ring. Most people would have continued walking, but Marty, who never let a curious impulse go unquestioned, answered and proceeded to have a 15 minute conversation with a total stranger. Marty was always having conversations with total strangers. When you were with him, you always met a lot of people and they were all far more amazing than you would have dreamed. I never knew Marty to have a lover. He seemed to have equal space in his heart for everyone he met.

I didn�t realize this was going to become an entry about Marty. I think I was fascinated by him because he was so different from myself � so open, so trusting, so un-self-conscious, uninhibited. He seemed to know the secret for living an engaged and happy life.

I�ve been thinking a lot about personal heroes lately, the people who without knowing it have shaped my life, and I think Marty was one. I needed a hero just like him that summer. Early in the season, I was stalked in the outdoor shower near my cabin by someone I thought I knew who tried to rape me. I was an incredibly na�ve and sheltered 19-year-old. It hit me hard. I was humiliated that I had been taken in. I was bruised and bleeding. I felt ugly and uncomfortable. I was afraid to go home to my small cabin at night, even when my roommate was there. I told no one, merely tried to avoid him, which was difficult given the smallness, the closeness, the inescapable nature of the place. A week later he was caught with drugs and fired immediately. I breathed a sigh of relief, but for years afterward, I was afraid I might run into him whenever I went to the city where he lived, which I did often. I spent the rest of the summer recovering, becoming myself again, working hard at my job, teaching students � many of whom had damage of their own to contend with � how to write, letting the sounds of guitar and singing under the night sky wash over me like a healing wave. When the summer was over, I returned to college with new enthusiasm and intensity. I was a little sadder, a little wiser, but I was more myself than I had ever been. I�d learned to embrace the good with the bad. I�d found my center.

It is amazing to me that all it takes to return to that summer is a few bars of an old record. I�m thinking of making a kit to be used in an emergency when I feel like I�m forgetting who I am and why I do what I do. In case of existential crisis, DO NOT PANIC! 1. find turntable 2. set needle 3. lie on the floor 4. close your eyes and 5. just listen.

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