Though not as highly anticipated as another ongoing drop of old emails and such, here as promised is the first in a series of personal notes focusing on gratitude. My series will continue through the end of the month, or at least through Thanksgiving day.
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August 28, 2019
Dear Doug,
This is a song for you, far away.
You may remember me as a student from your time at Rutland Junior High School in the mid-1980s. I want to tell you a bit about what has happened to me since then.
In brief, after graduating from Rutland High in 1991, I went on to study biology in college and in graduate school, winding up with a Ph.D. in Physiology & Biophysics, and I am now working at Everett Community College north of Seattle, where I mostly teach human anatomy & physiology (“A&P”) to pre-nursing students. I am married and have three sons.
Beyond that boilerplate bio, though, the part that may interest you most is this: every so often, I sing with my biology students. I devote possibly excessive amounts of time to writing little songs about the biology content, and I share these songs with the students as a supplementary way of learning and remembering the material. These musical interludes are definitely a small part of my job – but they are my favorite part of my job. And you, among others, gave me the tools to use music in this way. Thus, the main purpose of this letter is to thank you (very belatedly) for your excellent music instruction, which, decades later, continues to enrich my life.
I’m now 46 years old – i.e., quite firmly entrenched in the middle-aged years – and, at this point, I have few specific memories of my K-12 education. Nevertheless, there is much I can recall about taking Music with you in 7th and 8th grades. Perhaps my clearest memory is that of learning intervals according to the examples of familiar songs, e.g., a major 5th = “Star Wars.” And beyond the intervals per se, I remember getting a lot of practice working on scales in a solfege context, e.g., thinking of notes as “do re mi” rather than C D E. I even recall your advice, when descending from do to ti or from fa to mi, to think of pushing the note up, since the drop is only a half step. To this day, I still know my way around scales pretty well, and I attribute that in large part to the wonderful ear-training and sight-singing practice that you provided.
Beyond learning to read music and sing better, I have fond memories of your Beatles lesson on “Is Paul dead?” The idea that hidden messages could lurk beneath the surface of a song was, for me, very novel at the time. It was perhaps one of the first times I was shown, and could see, how art could be multidimensional and ambiguous. Musical ambiguity is on my mind a lot these days, since, in the context of songs about science, scientific clarity is often sacrificed for the sake of musicality. In writing my own songs, I try to strike a reasonable balance between the two, and my musical training has certainly helped me achieve whatever success I’ve had in that realm.
Finally, as I think back to the Mr. Meyer I knew 30-plus years ago, I recall your fondness for James Taylor, as well as your ability to sing like him. It might amuse you to know that atop my own list of musical heroes is Carole King, who of course has been a friend and collaborator of Taylor for decades. I don’t think my Carole King fandom was inspired by your James Taylor fandom … but, with the workings of the human brain being as mysterious as they are, one can never be sure.
You might well wonder what prompted me to write this letter now, so many years after we both left Rutland. Well, this past June, both of my Ph.D. advisers died unexpectedly, eight days apart. Since then I’ve been contacting others who gave me great support as I developed into a scientist and teacher, so that I can express my gratitude.
Doug, I wish I knew more about your life after those two years where we overlapped. I hope you’ve found lots of professional success (did you ever get that calypso song published?) and personal happiness. But, without knowing about any of that, it still feels good to be able to thank you at last for having such a positive and long-lasting impact on my life. I’ll never be a great musician, but the power of music touches us all, great and small.
Sincerely,
Greg Crowther
My Track Record 
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