(photo KM)
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Blues harpist and registrar, Bruce Rowen
(photo KM) |
Not so, said this harmonica playing athlete with a doctorate in higher education. "I'm the same idiot on stage as I am at work, the same fool."
Scratch the surface of this unassuming statement and you get a rich wisdom about life from a man who's somehow blurred the lines between art, work, and play.
On campus, Rowen's job is to oversee the river of information, which flows to and from the Office of Admissions and Records. This includes registration, student transcripts, on-line information, and TRACS—as well as foot traffic for Veterans' and Athletic Affairs, grade posting, adds, drops, and general university housekeeping.
"Whatever else happens to fall on the floor," he added, "we pick up. We are awash in data," said Rowen. "One of the biggest challenges is to make that data useful to students, advisers, department chairs, deans, and the provost." An ever-growing task, esspecially with the upcoming conversions to more contemporary systems looming.
Rowen isn't daunted. "You're given a problem, and how to make it work is just fascinating," he said. "A big puzzle."
Not many people get the opportunity to solve problems, he notes. And when we do, how often does the solution really look like what we first thought it would be? For Rowen, this process, which includes the challenge of working with others, "gives your mind a sharpness it wouldn't otherwise have. You can take that everywhere. It enables you to live better."
Living better Rowen-style means a strong twenty-year marriage, spiced with the company of two dogs and four cats, and his diverse loves of weight lifting and the blues.
There's a moment when, said Rowen the weight lifter, you suddenly have 500 pounds on your back, and it's just you and the floor.
"It's a complete commitment. It's built on setting very specific kinds of goals and sticking with them." Goals that are realized in small increments, pound by pound.
Coming from a family of football players—his father was a football coach at San Francisco State, and his brother coaches for the Kansas City Chiefs—Rowen said he veered from that path because "I don't like to hit people," he explained.
Instead he's practiced power lifting for many years, benching 450 pounds before age and injuries caught up with him. Now, with "some things still functioning pretty well," as he puts it, he still squats 500 pounds.
"Most people think because it's weight lifting," he added about his two- to three-hour a day habit, "it's just animal grunting." But Rowen protested, "Our western culture is too full of post neo-platonic love of the mind. And to me the mind is definitely a limited beast. It's only one of the vehicles that pulls our wagon."
If weight training is a complete emptying of the mind, music is its opposite, and goes to some place Rowen admitted he can't touch any other way.
He's been playing blues harmonica since he was seventeen. As a student at UC, Davis, he spent "as much time club jumping as I could, rather than doing my school work."
Since then he's harped with numerous Chico bands, including local blues pioneer Ralph Shine, and with the Bay Area's Sonny Rhodes. "All these strange, weird people," Rowen said about the local bands he's played with over the years, "I love `em."
His current group, The Delmont 88's, is named after a junker car belonging to leader Eric Wrayman. They're billed as a stew of '50s and '60s Chicago and Texas blues, rockabilly, jump blues, Tex-Mex, and '40s swing styles, which offers a wild slinging sound crowds love.
Wild and sophisticated. "To me there's no difference," Rowen reiterated, "between stage and non-stage. It's all the same skill." And a matter of balance. As Rowen sees it, "I just balance them out at the extreme edges, that's all."
ZV