Music has been part of Michael Hayden’s being as far back as he can remember. Among his first memories are singing to himself in the Indiana fields as he did his farm chores. Michael’s tough times did not end at the orphanage: his adoptive mother died when he was five, and her widower remarried twice. The boy’s open curiosity about his background upset his adoptive family. By the time he was a senior in high school, he had left the Hayden farm to live with his high school choir teacher and the man’s wife. When Michael was named to Indiana’s All-State Choir that year, he was invited to be part of an all-American group of 300 to tour Europe for a month and perform a series of concerts. The $1,500 cost, though, was serious money in 1974. The choir teacher and his wife didn’t have it, Michael certainly didn’t. But a woman in his little town took it upon herself to raise the funds, and Michael got to go. Like anyone fortunate enough to experience international travel when young, he recalls how his outlook and intellect changed in a thousand great and subtle ways. "It gave me such a world perspective that I’d always craved but never had received, something so beyond anything I had experienced before," he recalls. "It completely changed me as an artist – one piece we did on that tour was my doctoral dissertation fifteen years later. It set me up to approach my entire career with far greater musical focus."

* * * * *

Michael Hayden is now in his third year as choral director at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach. His top group, Costa’s splendid Vocal Ensemble, recently became the first secondary school choir ever invited to perform at the International Festival of the Aegean, which is held each July on the island of Syros in Greece. These days, Hayden is furiously preparing his teenage charges to be part of the chorus in a full production of Carmen, where they’ll back an international cast. Ensemble parents, relatives and friends are fundraising almost nonstop to assist those Mira Costa families struggling to pay for such a trip in these trying times.

* * * * *

It was one of his first students that led Michael to his mother, in the late 1970s. The end of college found him student-teaching at an Indianapolis high school, and the family of one of his kids befriended him. Over dinner at their house one night, they mentioned that they were journeying to Greece soon, to get back in touch with a foreign-exchange student they had hosted from there some years before. They would be in a part of Athens near where Michael’s American family had once lived. Michael said to them, "You’ve got my name, here’s my birthdate, here’s the name of my adoptive father and mother, see what you can find out, go on a sleuthing mission." In Greece the family got local help, from the former exchange student and his father, invaluable interpreters when they began navigating Athenian bureaucracy in search of their friend’s birth information. Finally one government worker growled to them, approximately: "Look, we’d have to go through thousands and thousands of pages to find that and that’s not going to happen, so here is a list of six orphanages in the area that you are describing."

The four men piled into a taxicab and began a tour of Athens orphanages. The first two stops yielded nothing but shrugs. At the third institution, they once again told officials that they were seeking the records of a boy born in July 1957 and adopted by a family named Hayden a year later. "So they sit down and wait," Michael says. "About half an hour later, this woman walks out with this beat-up manila folder with my American name on it. That father of my student, he sat there with his jaw on the floor. He couldn’t believe he was halfway around the world, seeing my name on something like that."

Michael, who was born Costakis Giahali, wrote the orphanage and requested they get in touch with his mother, to ask if she wanted communication with him. In February of 1980 they finally wrote him back, to tell him that his mother – still living in the remote, southwestern Greece village of her own birth – had been found, and had authorized contact. Like many others who have struggled to get to the cliff-edge of their own history, Michael was not ready to take the jump when he first got there. He was still young, his teaching career was in high gear, and "I was really overwhelmed with all the information," he remembers. "For about seven years I didn’t do anything. But by 1987, when I was a college professor, there was a colleague on my campus who spoke Greek and who translated letters for me, and I started writing my mother through the orphanage. The people at the orphanage read the letters to my mother – she was illiterate, she couldn’t read or write Greek, let alone English – then they would write down what she wanted them to and send it back to me, then my friend would translate it into English. We did that for several years."

His mother’s first letter to him began with the words: "My Dearest Son..."

* * * * *

Lappa is a village of about 250 dwellings that sits atop the hard coast of the Peloponnesus region of southwestern Greece, 150 winding miles from Athens. Some things there have changed in recent centuries, more have not. When an unwed woman got pregnant in Lappa fifty years ago it was a deadly serious matter, a calamity that brought absolute disgrace to her family. The fact that the father was a man who had promised to marry her, but abandoned his betrothed when he learned of her condition? Of little consequence. Such girls and women were expelled, erased. Michael insists that there was nothing particularly Grecian about his mother’s banishment from her hometown. "It was just how things were done back in the 1950s – in Greece, in America, everywhere. Girls were run off, shipped off to group homes, hidden until they had the baby, and often thrown out by their families." The village priest was summoned, and Michael’s mother was carried off to the Athens orphanage. After the birth and forfeiture of her baby she came back to Peloponnesus, but her parents and siblings disowned her. She would never live with them again, barely spoke to them. Another family took the outcast young woman in, a clan that lived just around the corner – one can only imagine the years of chance encounters between Michael’s mother and her family on Lappa streets, the awful stares or averted eyes when passing each other. Finally an old man in the town offered her a gentler exile: he owned some grazing land outside Lappa and she worked as a shepherdess for him. Once she left the village, even going near it agitated her. Only when it became very cold did she sleep with a roof over her head; she preferred living under a large tree, near her flock. "She really just took care of herself with the support she was given," her son says. "She cooked out there, she slept out there. Her own family tried to reconcile with her, but she just couldn’t forgive them. And so she led a very lone, quiet, and singular life. She was out alone in the fields with her sheep all her life."

In the summer of 1994, Michael finally got to Lappa.

* * * * *

Thirty-six years to the day after giving birth to him, Anthoula Giahali set eyes on her son for a second time. He and a translator were brought to a house near the tree where she lived, and bid to sit down and wait. It was a birthday Michael will never forget. "When she walked in the room my first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, that’s why I look the way I look. I looked exactly like my mother. And Anthoula – her name, in Greek, means ‘little flower’ – she just came up to my shoulder, she was four-foot-nine. I just was completely struck by how much I looked like her. But there was very little emotion in the beginning, I was struck by her lack of facial expression – and so what was running through my brain was, ‘Gosh, not even much of a smile or anything.’" Before long, though, Michael learned that this was because the 66-year-old Anthoula had advanced Parkinson’s disease. "Parkinson’s renders one sort of unable to be facially expressive," he explains. "But I didn’t know that initially, I didn’t know what was going on –then I found out. When I reminded her that it was my birthday, this one tear came out of her eye."

For the rest of his time in Greece, Michael visited his mother every day at her pastoral workplace, bringing her food and company. He picked up bits of the language with surprising speed. Anthoula was leery at first, worried he would try to take her back to America with him. Her son reassured her that she would stay on the land she loved. Michael saw that he was far from her only companionship – while she shunned the brothers and sisters who had once shunned her, she gladly let their children look out for her, let them bring her medicine for the Parkinson’s.

The agonies of the past were never far away, though. Michael’s Greek family threw him an elaborate dinner party during his stay. At the table, he ventured to ask if anyone knew his father – and the gathering all but disintegrated. There were tears, a melee of shouted accusations he couldn’t understand, stony refusals to answer him. On his last visit with his mother, Anthoula admitted that the man fled to another town, where he married and raised a family. He never came back to Lappa either, and no one there has ever asked after him.

* * * * *

Michael will go back to Lappa, though, in July, with his Vocal Ensemble in tow. When the Festival of the Aegean’s promoters heard his life story, they arranged a side trip for the Ensemble to the village. Anthoula will not be there – she died in 1996, two years after being reunited with her son – but her family eagerly awaits his second homecoming. Michael recently received his first e-mail from a cousin’s fourteen-year-old daughter in Athens who speaks English, so he can finally communicate directly with his family.

But the real purpose of the trip, of course, is inside an exquisite old opera house on Syros, and Michael speaks with complete enthusiasm about what awaits his choir. "First of all, they’re going to experience what it’s like to be in a professional opera production of Carmen on the international stage. I just got the cast – Carmen is from Mexico, one of the leads is from Russia, one is from Spain, another from Greece. Plus, they’re going to be doing a sacred concert in the Orthodox Church, in front of a completely international audience. What I do, a high school choral conductor, does not really exist in Greece. These people will have no reference point for a high school choir like ours, sounding like we sound. What they’re going to experience is a very special and high level of performance from kids fourteen through eighteen – it’s going to be amazing."

The cold truth is that most people slink through life doing badly at their jobs, because they don’t really care about their work. Like his mother did, though, Michael Hayden cares – and the results show every time the Mira Costa Vocal Ensemble takes the stage. It will show in Syros, it will show in Lappa. Watching Michael work reminds you that teaching is one of the easiest jobs to do halfheartedly, but one of the hardest to do truly well. Anthoula phrased it best, in one of her letters to her son:

"You have chosen a good and noble profession."