 friends. Thank you for joining me with the Think Tech Hawaii program coming to you from Honolulu. This is a virtual background but someplace in Hawaii looks just like this. So I hope to crash into your snow-laden world with a beautiful look at Hawaii and the wonderful things that we have here. I'm Larry Grimm and I do my program Don't Just Age and Gauge every two weeks here on Think Tech Hawaii. Most Think Tech Hawaii programs deal with a lot of very important concerns, issue concerns, looking at social issues and responding to them and we have a wonderful range of social issues programs. My program Don't Just Age and Gauge comes out of my coaching for people who are entering their elderhood or in their elderhood and want to make an extraordinary my website which is personal coaching for life and faith. There we are. Check it out on my website please and connect with me if you like and let's get a conversation going about how your aging process is going because we live in a society that really doesn't like aging. It almost hates aging and it certainly feels a culture that fears dying so I am in the business of making that the time of your life the most extraordinary and excellent time it can be being coming alongside you and being an assistant and reaching the goals that you have about aging. My coaching is informational and it is emotional and in the emotional dimension I like to give you pictures and views that are inspiring and what better inspiration than people who have lived and are living extraordinary lives and extraordinary elderhood. Joseph Umstead, long time friend of mine living in Virginia is one of those people. Hello Joseph thank you for coming on and being here as an extraordinary example of an extraordinary elderhood. Thanks Larry for having me again this time talking about a completely different subject than climate change although what we are talking about I think does tonight does does relate to that that very interesting issue. So I've entitled this from crisis to composing and the reason is because I know you had several years ago a medical crisis so did you nearly die? Yes I so I had just returned from my 40th college reunion in Boston, Massachusetts area in mid-October of 2018 and my spouse Diane took a plane from Boston to Los Angeles for a business trip so on the 18th of October I woke up twice and the second time I said there's something going on here I was having a lot of trouble breathing particularly from the diaphragm and I'm very sensitive about my diaphragm since I've been playing the trumpet for 59 years so I drove myself to the LA hospital I knew about which was several miles down the road the Catholic hospital here in Newport, New Virginia where I live and they told me the very next day had I not driven myself in on the 18th I probably would have died because of what ensued after that. There's a very very serious heart incident then that you had to deal with and that became kind of a transformative moment for you tell us tell us about how you handled that what happened in that crisis to you for you Joseph? Well first of all I had trouble figuring out what was going on initially they thought it was something with my lungs and in fact it was because my mitral valve which opens to allow blood to come back in as it passes through the lungs was not functioning in fact I found a foundation that was holding the mitral valve in place had torn or ripped in several places it usually happens when you have a heart attack or it can happen when you have a heart attack but I had no heart attack so it took them actually about a day and a half to figure out that it was my mitral valve that was the problem and I think I must have had like four heart echoes that determined this and so I a few days after that diagnosis and two procedures of heart catheterization and then a camera going down my throat to really get a close look at everything heart related particularly the mitral valve I was shipped off to one of the best hospitals on the east coast for heart surgery Norfolk heart hospital in Norfolk, Virginia and on Halloween Halloween I was supposed to be on Halloween at an orchestra engagement for the orchestra that I do volunteer education work symphonicity but I was being cut open um to the mitral valve replaced by a pig valve and it was a tricky surgery um because um well first of all I want to say I requested of the heart surgeon that he play a box uh cello suites and no yo ma would be the soloist and he actually liked the idea even though he was going to put on his rock music to let Zeppelin because he had a whole mapped up process of where he needed to be and the surgery by a certain point um so it turns out that one of his accompanying surgeons was a cellist and they didn't he didn't know that um they never had that opportunity to talk about that so it was a good moment for them to hear some good music and I think sort of unconsciously it relaxed me because it's a piece of music I listened to many times before I go to bed so um the surgery itself was about seven and a half hours long and when they went to start my heart it wouldn't start the electrical system was a hundred percent blocked so they had to put a temporary pacemaker in it got it going um and then a couple hours later one of the lines in the pacemaker failed that's when they got really nervous um and wondered if they'd be able to to save me yeah so um fortunately yes fortunately they they got me going and a couple hours later they took the tube out and I was breathing on my own and asking for ice chips all night and the next day um they turned the pacemaker off to see if I would actually be able to um pace on my own and I couldn't immediately went to a low number a heart failure number so a couple hours later they um took back into surgery and put a pacemaker in and then I then I began to recover um but it wasn't an easy recovery and we can talk about that more but I'll stop there for the moment I recall well thank you so much for sharing that I recall a couple of the conversations um that I had with you afterwards and and uh typically if I may say typically um you manifested some of that depression and fear and anxiety that goes along with heart events like this um heart heart attacks heart problems heart disease can really throw people into a downward spin and I thought I was experiencing some of that with you was that right um part of what you were experiencing with me early on because you and I did talk a few days after the surgery um was what they call a pump head since I was on a heart lung machine for a number of hours um it does really mess with your brain once you're not on it um and of course I had been off and morphing for a couple of days but yes anxiety was part of the equation now I do want to add quickly that there were there was there was there were different people who were present to me during my surgery so um when I woke up and my spouse asked me well who was there with you and I said well my mother Evangeline was holding me from the waist up my father Claire was holding me from the waist down and both of them um were were well you had died a long time ago and my grandfather Donald who I never met he died three months before I was born so I was present and felt my mother's grief at his funeral and you know um months after uh but after standing in the background just supporting me and only two people spoke to me um and somebody might be saying only two people I didn't know anybody could but so my experience was Jesus came in as a court jester and Jesus Joseph you need to let go of some of that old anxiety when you wake up so there was an assurance that I was going to wake up and keep going so I did start working in therapy on that anxiety which you know been present in different traumatic moments in my life the other person that spoke to me was Martin Luther King Jr. he said Joseph I know you've been to my house and uh George and Atlanta because I had been with my daughter and her boyfriend at the time and we um we had a really nice tour of the house and we learned from the tour guide that uh Martin was actually always wanting to be a baseball player and uh play and at that point a Negro league but I think he had um aspirations if there was a chance to play in the big leagues he wanted to do that but when he went to first grade he was no longer allowed to play with his friend across the street and um who was a white um uh friend and it was all the grocery store where the family did continue to shop but because they went to two different schools the father said you can't play with Martin anymore that really troubled him so the first night he said to his dad you know this is really bothering me and he says and his dad said let me tell you how it is so he said to me in my dream um I think you're aware that this particular incident is one of the reasons why I became um an activist in the way that I did throughout my life wanting equality equity love justice for for all of us as Americans it was his sort of version of a more perfect union he also said to me that I when you wake up I want you to keep composing in the way that you do doing music with children the way that you do which is a very hands-on organic um process where in my music classes I gave kids many opportunities with piano ukulele drums um guitar um instruments which are different sizes of let's just say xylophones um or marimbas they have that kind of sound um so they had a lot of opportunity to compose and so that's how I was installing them when I got a chance to to teach although I do love us now um and and so I was gonna say so when I when I woke up you know I had that on my mind and so I'm moving forward with that yeah yeah great how soon were you able to pick up the trumpet again hmm a number of months because one of the things that happened is my lung state partially collapsed for about an inch in each lung um and and so I remember going to the cardiologist about a year after the surgery he goes oh your lungs are fully functioning now um and I would notice this like when I would go to cardiac rehab it was really cold outside and I would just struggle to get through the parking lot and and once I was inside I could do the treadmill and the problem but um you know just little things like that but it did take a while for me to be able to play my horn because you need good breath but I tried to sing and I mostly played the piano so um here you are recovering in your story and we're looking at your story and um I'm wondering how those those moments with encounters how did they play into your recovery do you think I mean I'm assuming that you're not crazy and that I'm assuming also that these encounters are substantive uh in some degree in some way and and I honor those and I'm sure how how did those continue to be um a part of your recovery well let me let me start by telling you giving you a little story or a little context so when I was growing up I moved to Washington D.C. at the age of two and left at the age of 10 and so in 1963 when I was seven I just turned seven Martin Luther King jr and company came to town and I knew it was going to be a big deal and I actually wanted to go down to the Lincoln Memorial and and take part in this well my brother Craig was nine my sister Carol was five and my brother John was two and my mom was home with us that day she wasn't working at the church where she and my dad worked but my dad was and she's like sorry we can't ride the the bus down to the end I would like to go with you too so she did turn it on and she and I were the only ones that watched it and I was captivated first by John Lewis um 23 year old man who was I thought gave a very powerful seven year old boy hurt you know I tear up a little bit when I think about that and then Martin followed of course with his very famous I have a dream speech which unfortunately gets used by people in different ways to justify their continued racism and I would say that I'm just trying to be as anti-racist as possible and every day I learn new things about that so all my life I carried you know that day with me and just growing up in the city there at the time um in all the things that Washington went through during those times I mean of course I remember the day um that he was killed and that was a hard take for me as a kid um and I think a lot of people really um didn't have to happen but it did um and so yeah let's move into your composing story um had you composed before you had this part event so with children we would do little melodies basically nothing ever complicated because I worked with elementary children I taught about 20,000 children over a span of 40-ish years wonderful at schools and yeah DC and North Carolina and Arizona were the places and so yeah there was a lot of that or taking their melodies and you know helping the class hear them there was always a time to hear them so was the there was that but you know arranging music is something that takes time and so it's not something at that point in time I had a lot of time for beyond what I was doing with the school children but when the hard thing happened I tried to go back to teaching for three weeks I was teaching a band and orchestra to a number of private schools in the area um Virginia Beach all the way to Williamsburg and we figured out after my surgery I should only stay on this what we call the this side of the peninsula um and so my number of schools went from 13 down to 7 but I couldn't answer what I was too weak so um I just continued with my recovery and started just playing the piano a lot and looking at my dad's music because he was a composer of sacred music um and I have all his music and listening to a lot of his music and then um around the time George Floyd was killed um I was at a good place in my recovery and I was playing my horn so that event sort of you know touched all of us in different ways but I played the piece lament which was then followed by um lament um leads to hope and then the piece that we're going to hear shortly sounds of love and I think the version I just sent over is for um fiber phone and violin that was the original version but when symphony the orchestra I volunteer with played at this past May uh Becky and I who's my arranger she she's the one with the orchestral arranging background from Berkeley College of Music in Boston um she she and I collaborate of course in all this but she she's the nuts and bolts to take my melodies and and make them into our orchestra or ensemble works of course I have input but you know she's the main person so we had to come up with a wind and french horn version for sounds of love so that that really those three movements and I call it ode to breath not only my breath but the breath of countless people of color who have been killed um by our systemic racism in this country um that's been around for 400 and what 21 years now and it actually came to our shores the verse and slave people came to our shores in Hampton Virginia uh which is now Monroe an actual fort that was very active during um the civil war president leaking even came there was a union strong on hold and some you may remember from your history that's where the virginian and the monitor our first sub had a battle out in sort of the James River slash York River slash Chesapeake Bay because it all sort of meets there so that's really how that pace came to be yeah I'd like to say to the viewers that I've known Joseph for many years and as a as I was in past relationship with him and his family and friendship as well and Joseph has always been since my knowing of him of a very socially social justice conscious person and so it was exciting for me to see him emerge from this critical event with composing music for social justice that he devoted to his passion and I'm wondering Joseph how it must feel to bring integrate those two things your passion for justice and love and peace and your love of music what how is that as an elder well I'm I'm very grateful to have breath to do it to be honest and um and so when I woke up I was very clear that I needed to be more intentional in my life with being a loving person I know tearing up a little bit but it's that deep in me and so Martin Martin was right when he said to me you know keep climbing the mountain in the way that you do and we all do that and so that's the mountain of justice love peace kindness unconditional love a more perfect union that's how we get there get there the other way and so actually another piece that was created that came up in the picture was good trouble so after John Lewis died I was of course very touched by that and I began to sort of have the the Ave Maria roll around in my head and I started putting some John Lewis good trouble piece words to it so what ended up with that piece is we have the sopranos and and altos singing and tenors and basses singing some of those good trouble lines but also um there's a high soprano in the Ave Maria part and then the marimba does the but the but the but the but the Bach line right and I love the marimba I'm actually creating a marimba duet piece for something else Becky and I are coming up with them yeah but it's in my head so we hope that a choir will sing that someday that'll be beautiful and we're not sure when a little bit about sound yeah I'd like to I'd like to have that play soon but give us some orientation now this two sounds of love so sounds of love is the third movement to the ode to breath work so you have lament lament least to hope sounds of love so in the grieving process there's always lament there's you know we're about things I was about my heart we were about what was going on in the country in 2020 or what's gone on for years or if you're a person of color what's happened to you all your life in this country at different points along the way and so you know lament has to go somewhere you can't always stay stuck in sadness if you're going to thrive particularly you know at any age and I wanted to thrive so lament within a couple days moved to lament least to hope which is actually played by the brass it's a brass ensemble piece no no strings or percussion and then from there you know you know let's go to love because love acceptance is a place we all want to be in the grieving process and I understand you know the grieving process you go in and out of grief but eventually if you're going to come to terms with something me my own heart surgery and reviving that racial injustices in this country whatever it is climate whatever the the concerns are you know we have to get to a point of acceptance and in order to keep moving forward and so for this because about almost nine minutes long that was the resolution we have just a few minutes I'd love to play some have in place some of the sounds of love so the viewers can get a sense of the creativity that you drew upon and and how it fleshed out at this this side of your heart event is so beautiful just so tender thank you my viewers it's from Joseph's heart to your heart thank you for composing and moving from crisis to composing and and being an example of what it is to to be inspired and truly follow your bliss and your inspiration thanks so much for being with me here today Joseph it's great to renew with you and those of you who are viewers I want to welcome you to come back again in two weeks join with me again here at don't just age engage and let's make your elder hood a phenomenal and an extraordinary experience thanks Joseph peace be with you all aloha