One morning in November my Arabic teacher gives us the word qitaar, train. The word is a gift, a small basket of noise that means something, each element glittering with newness. It sounds like “guitar,” only different : the beginning harsher, the final vowel darker, the closing “r” hushed and rolled instead of round. I practice pronouncing the glottal sound of the “q,” the long dark “a” at the end, the rolled “r.” Qa, I mutter over and over, all afternoon. Close the throat. Force air through the lock. It should stop and click, before forcing forward into a vowel that comes from a very different place than anywhere anything lives in English or French. Qa. And then change the vowel, trying not to choke on it : Qi. Add the second syllable. (Look in the mirror as you do this, despite the sense of humiliation at your own pulsing throat muscle, despite the vulnerability of sounding like a person trying to relearn the capacity of speech after a brain trauma. Those strangled sounds are how you learn, remember; how you discover.)
The teacher talks about trains. They used to be his passion, as a boy. He wanted his own sons to share the passion, but it is difficult in the United States. Most people only ever get as far as the train that runs in a circle around the Christmas tree.
Sitting in the classroom, surrounded by 20-year-old International Relations majors who absord and repeat these Arabic gifts every day as if it is a joke they’re all in on, I am suddenly in tears. In my mind : my Daddy, kneeling on the dark-brown living-room carpeting to snap together sections of LGB track. It is Christmastime, my brother is 8 or 9, and Dad has invested in more track this year so he can help my brother set up an elaborate train system : around the living room, under the dining-room table, through a loop behind the tree. His voice is high with excitement. I watch from the doorway, home from college and hovering outside this boys’ afternoon. Dad’s hands are strong and firm, his fingers skilled and deft. Years of clarinet musicianship have given him the dexterity to manipulate the tiniest metal catches. My brother laughs and shrieks in delight when the electrical connection lights up and the train chuffs to life, picking up speed as it rounds the curves of track, getting stuck occasionally on a thread of carpeting, then righting itself. Dad cackles his triumphant “ha-HA !” and smacks his palms together the first time the little locomotive completes a full length of the course they have laid out. Christmas lights – in the era before LED, before miniatures – twinkle placidly from the branches of Noble fir.
Years later as he lies in a hospital bed struggling for breath, Dad will tell me that he loved being a little boy because of the time he got to spend with his own father, who got down on the ground and played with him. “You did that too, Daddy,” I remind him, but he shakes his head slowly. “My Dad was like a kid,” he says, “Everything was a discovery for him.” I smile at him and say I see no difference, then lean down to kiss his forehead. I lean my cheek against his head for a long moment, wishing – not for the first time – I could soak him in through my pores, every memory, every sensation. I am already afraid there will be a day when I stop seeing him clearly. I am already missing him, weeks before he dies.
A month after Dad stopped breathing, my brother starts receiving large boxes shipped from various places in the USA and UK. They contain train parts for the old LGB set, which he has pulled out of the cupboard Dad built in the family room and set up across the (now hardwood) living-room floor. As his design gains complexity, looping all the way around the couch, under the dining-room table and out to the family room and back around the base of the Christmas tree, I feel ghosts in the room. Dad stands thoughtfully stroking his chin and suggesting improvements to the design. My brother himself sits next to the tree, studying the patterns of track and electric connections, weighing down certain cars so they won’t tip over on the curves. And I am there, too, myself at 19 or 20, watching from the doorway into the hall, wishing I knew more about trains.
I blink and blink until my tears recede. I have successfully fought the urge to raise my hand and tell my Arabic teacher about my Dad and trains. I think he would appreciate the story. It has all the good elements : fathers, and sons, and physics, and the art of freight. But this is not the moment, and I don’t trust my voice. Instead, I close my throat and practice saying, Qitaar.
It is a year and six weeks since the day Dad died. Four hundred seven pages torn off the only calendar I’ve ever been faithful to.
Strange things have been happening in my house. The air is charged with melodies. I hear them throughout the day, humming in the background as I wash dishes or type on the computer. And objects have been changing places, as if the things themselves had come to life. At first I blamed their random relocations on the kittens who have taken over the house in a swarm, and who frequently appear in one room or another carrying things in their tiny mouths that I had believed lost : a pink sock, for example, last seen in 2006, suddenly reemerged in the living room three days ago, trotted out by the tiny calico I have named Hermione (for though she be but little, she is fierce). I gaped at it blankly, my jaw hanging open. Guess I should not have given away that pink sweater set, I muttered, to nobody in particular. The kitten, perhaps.
Several weeks ago I got an email announcing that an article I had submitted had been accepted. I wrote it about my grandfather’s service as a musician in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, based on his correspondence with other musicians. I needed to revise certain sections of it, and needed the letters in order to verify what I had written back in 2010 and double-check all the quotations. Only, I could not find the letters. A stone sank to the pit of my stomach : had I lost Papa’s letters? I ransacked home and office, emptying bookshelves and filing cabinets, disturbing the rest of a large and subsequently bisected cockroach. No letters. I wrote to colleagues, friends, all over the country, hoping against hope that I had – in some bizarre moment – sent the letters off to someone else for safe-keeping. Nobody had the letters. And, worse, the photos I had taken of them two years ago had disappeared from my hard drive. A friend recommended that I focus on other work for a while, forget about the letters. I tried to distract myself, but to no avail. I could almost taste their papery smell, that scent of old wood pulp and bleach, my grandmother’s perfume, and something like leaf mulch, an organic oddity that made their age all the more poignant. Weeks passed. One night, late, I heard a kitten mewl plaintively in the kitchen. They like to jump up on these large boxes I had not yet managed to unpack, and one of them had got stuck in the open part of the packing tape : he looked like Winnie The Pooh stuck halfway in and halfway out of a box of old mugs. I pulled him out and ruffled him gently, set him on the kitchen floor, and then pulled the tape all the way apart to avoid future kitten casualties. At the bottom of the box a glimpse of paper flashed, and I pulled the box flaps down so I could investigate. Pulled out an old newspaper, a file folder containing the programs from Dad’s funeral, and the plastic archival folder holding my grandfather’s letters. I stared at the turquoise folder as tears popped into my eyes, partly in surprise and partly because I knew this was a communication. Here they are, Rosebud, I heard my Dad saying. See? Nothing is lost.
And this morning as I sat at the computer sipping my coffee, the living room began to echo with the unmistakeably tinny sound of a music box. I don’t have a music box that plays “The Entertainer,” I thought. Then remembered : the hammered-copper geometry of a miniature piano, with a copper figurine holding a book of music in one hand and a beer mug in the other, which I’d found in one of the innumerable boxes I shipped here from Dad’s house. But I had not wound the music-box up, and no kitten had passed through the living room at an altitude that would make its sudden song make sense : it sits at the edge of a high bookshelf, its wind-up mechanism too close to the wall for casual bumping, even if a kitten managed to clamber all the way up there.
A hundred, five hundred, five thousand California evenings floated to the surface of my mind : that moment when, after dinner and the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Dad would stand up in the living room, stretch, and pad his way out to the piano. Snap on a light over the keyboard and sit down, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, peering at an old book of simplified Scott Joplin tunes. The familiar D-D#-E-high C melody would plod slowly out from beneath his fingers, and inevitably he would make a mistake in the second or third measure (in the left hand, the switch to a minor seventh harmony, or else the accidental F#). He would grunt in amused exasperation, start over, and tickle the song meticulously from its hiding place behind the black and white keys. And then give it a lavishly uncomfortable ending chord, like a G# minor with an augmented sixth, and cadence into one of his own compositions, whose notes – weirder, less familiar – came more readily to hand.
OK, Dad, I said to the room, raising my eyes and looking slowly from object to object, surface to surface. I’m listening.
It may sound improbable, but these moments are like my Dad leaving me little messages. I went in to my office on campus with a heart full of peace, and ragtime in my steps.
***
October 2011
I have been dreaming of my father. It is not quite a year since he died. Sometimes I catch myself imagining the biological processes of decomposition going on inside his coffin. It is not horrifying. And I find myself wondering about this flatness in myself. Have I watched too much CSI? I have no fear of the exposed jawbone, the roots of the teeth. The pushing roots of hair. The thick fingernails – a split like a scar down the right-hand index. I force myself to imagine everything I can. Shreds of flesh against the femur.
We did not have him embalmed. (Would his stomach have exploded by now, filled with the gases of death?) Doctors spent 35 years flooding his bloodstream with chemicals to fight the rare disease that ultimately claimed him – or rather, did not claim him, but diminished him to the extent that something else could. (What happens to the heart when it stops pulsing inside the ribcage, second to second? What shape does it adapt, as it lies deflated against bones that no longer hear its singing? How long does it take for a heart to dissolve against the bones of the chest and leave only the cavity that held it?)
“No more crap,” we said. We did not want that done to his body. We wanted to keep him as whole, as natural, as we could. The funeral home charged us for refrigeration.
Dad’s first nurse told me she had flown to Côte d’Ivoire after her brother passed. Those are her exact words : “I flew to Côte d’Ivoire after my brother passed,” she said. “I had to do everything.” A pause. “I dressed the body.”
(I thought of the clothes we had chosen, my sister and I numbly sifting through Dad’s closet of patterned shirts on dry-cleaner hangers. When did he do this? we wondered. He had fallen ill with pneumonia in July, had barely left the house after that – except to go to the hospital. We chose a dark blue shirt with a batik motif of pale green exotic leaves and flowers. Dark jeans. Fresh boxers. Socks and shoes.
“Daddy always wore shoes,” my sister said, thumbing a tear out of the corner of her eye. I pictured him coming down the stairs early in the morning, his jaunty gait, the way the steps resounded with each footfall. “No matter what, no matter how bad he was feeling or if he had to go out or not. He got up, got dressed, and put on his socks and shoes. Because that’s just what you do.”)
I told his nurse : “I would have liked to dress him.”
She looked at me sideways, shaking her head.
“Nobody needs to see that, sweetheart,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re wishing.”
But I did.
The first dream : we are a family. We are a family at lunch. It is summer. We stand in line at Burger King, the one on the boulevard, where all the soccer players go after practice, where the ballet girls do not eat the salads their parents insist they order. The one where Dad used to whistle Mozart, my brother on the melody, Dad doing a descant for “Rondo Alla Turca,” while my sister looked away and pretended to belong to other people. Silent people. Soccer people. We stand in line, plastic trays already making grooves against the tender flesh of our forearms. It is just like a summer afternoon from my adolescence. Only : I am 40, my sister 35, our brother 30. We go up to the counter one by one to order. Nobody pays : we know Dad will pay. (Does anyone else carry the sense of uncertainty? Does anyone else wonder if they should buy their own fries and shake? Or does that precariousness belong only to me?) Dad looks at each of us slowly. His words come as though underwater. Each syllable protracted, stretched. Rippling. He tells my sister she has done a good job with managing the trust. I smile and nod in her direction : See, I knew Dad would be proud of you. He tells my brother to get a job. I keep my smile to myself. To me he says nothing. I feel deflated as a teenager, leaping with my hand in the air to get my favorite teacher’s attention. I am invisible to my father, in a dream about my father, in my own dream.
I wake disoriented and spend the rest of that day groggy, feeling lost. Every night when I get into bed I pray to fall back into that same dream : that sunny California afternoon with the scent of mown grass sweet in the air, the gentle fatigue of feet and calf muscles and the familiar colors and textures of the place where I knew what my Dad was thinking. Most nights I sleep with no memory.
And in the daylight I dream of a body slowly falling apart. Press a hand to my own chest, because some days I can’t be sure I’m still intact.
***
Guitar Month has brought a wealth of discoveries to my musical project, not all of which I can put into words. Or rather, I can put them into a single word, which encompasses them vaguely : confidence. Ever since I first picked up my grandfather’s old battered guitar in college, I’ve had the problem of “dead finger,” when a note comes out twanged or strangled, as if the finger lies dead against the string. As I have worked with Frederick Noad’s book and practiced chord changes and various fingering patterns, this month, I think what I have learned is that the problem is not that the finger hits the string too heavily; rather, it’s that the finger lacks decision on the string, and does not press down hard enough. Sometimes, an accompanying problem is that my left wrist or the heel of my left hand has been hitting the edge of the string. But a solid month (plus) of practicing classical guitar has taught me better hand-posture, better control while fingering. And given me more confidence as I pick up the instrument and strum a chord.
I’ve made a lot of progress in learning to read sheet music for guitar, as well. It is sometimes surprising to me, how simple it turned out to be once I had a method for learning it. But there you are. The other day, I was practicing something, and found myself talking through the chord position I was doing not by saying “one-two-four,” indicating where the fingers fall in relation to the frets and strings, but by saying “F-sharp on the low e string, then the open a, open d …” all the way up the chord. It was a thrill.
I get the same thrill when I hear my chords bell out clear and picked arpeggios ring out solidly, each note just what it should be. Part of what comes from intensive practicing is learning how to understand – and, if not control, at least work better with – the strings’ action, too, so notes don’t randomly buzz with an unexpected and jarring sforzando.
It takes a lot more than a month to play guitar well. But Guitar Month has been a tremendous gift, and an adventure, for me, musically and subconsciously. I have begun to play guitar more knowingly, with greater attention and intention and understanding of the way it works. This month has given me a foundation on which I can build as I put this instrument down – and when I pick it back up. And in November, my Dad came back to me in dreams. These have not all been good, but his mere presence there helps me understand things about my relationship with him, and the permanence of both life and loss. It sounds like a paradox, but somehow dreaming of my dead father brings him to life for me. I open my eyes to a life continuing, and a legacy that lives on in every chord I play, every note I learn, and the process of learning it.
***
We are seated at the dining room table, the tiny one Dad calls “perfect” even though it takes an effort of geometry and patience to fit us around it. We are in the present day, it is early morning, I am visiting California. Dad has come downstairs with his usual energetic step, his shoes tap-tapping the hardwood floors. I hear him on the stairs and come out of my bedroom, the little one at the back of the house, which he redid to have a guest room : deep grey-blue walls, rich dark-red curtains and comforter, his mother’s antique mirror. An old pipe stand that I think belonged to his grandfather. He has already turned on the radio in his front room – classical KUSC this morning, and as I stand in the doorway breathing in the fresh light morning I realize I recognize the music playing : it is the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Glück’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which I learned to play on the clarinet during the first month of this Year of Living Musically. I shake my head, confused. How can I remember something that belongs to the year following Dad’s death, when here Dad is? Carrying his steaming coffee mug, grunting a sarcastic “Hey” at Dexter, who has taken Dad’s place on the black leather couch, balancing his clipboard with the daily crossword puzzle against his knee and thigh. The house is full of him. I blink, and we are sitting at the dining-room table again, which is also covered with copies of his death certificate, and Dad is sipping coffee and spooning oatmeal into his mouth and I am shaking the morning’s bewilderment out of my eyes. How is he here? I decide I don’t care. Decide to make the most of this moment.
“Daddy,” I say, “Let’s go for a walk with Dexter this morning. It’s a beautiful day.”
“Hey now, you,” he says. “Let a guy finish his breakfast.”
I put my hands up, placating. “OK, OK. It’s just that …”
He looks up.
“I want to tell you how much you mean to me,” I say, stumbling on every syllable. It is an awkward thing to say, first thing in the morning, and the spoon stops halfway to Dad’s mouth.
He gives me his classic gape and non-understanding sound. “Hunh?”
“One day,” I start again, “You won’t be here. And I want to be sure I have this moment to remember, so I can look back at my life and know that I told you how important you are to me. How much I love you. How much you’ve given me, and inspired me. And to say thank you.”
Dad stands and places the oatmeal bowl on the floor for Dexter, who laps up the leftovers in quick snorts.
“Did you hear me, Daddy?” I sound pleading, and hate my voice like this. But the moment could fade at any second, and I want to know I did everything I could. Said everything I want my Dad to hear. A lifetime of I-love-yous and thank-yous that too often got pushed to the side in the hurry to do something else, be somewhere else, be someone else.
“Sweetheart,” he says, turning from the sink, silver water splashing over his fingertips and the scabs on the back of his hands, these little wounds that never seem to heal, “I know.”
That’s all I want. It’s all I get. The alarm goes off, the radio playing Saturday-morning Bach, and I realize as I climb forward out of sleep that my cheeks are wet, I am crying. California fades into the chill of a Louisiana December, Dad and Dexter are gone again, there is no sun in my morning windows. I get up, put on yesterday’s jeans and a red pullover, pull on socks, shove my feet into clogs. This is what it’s about too, as Dad knew : you get up, get dressed, and keep going.
“I know.”
As I wake up and make the first motions of what will become another full day with/out my Daddy, I hope it was true.
A year ago on Thanksgiving, I sat with my family around a table none of us really understood. It was Dad’s table, the always-too-small one that he called “perfect” with a smirk, the one at which we had seated eleven and twelve people even though it was made for four. We extended it with a second makeshift table, covered them both with cloths and some ancient candles in the shapes of brightly clad pilgrims that we found in one of the drawers of the hutch.
“Remember these?” my sister asked, holding up a miniature pilgrim boy with a tall black hat, and a miniature pilgrim girl with an apron and bonnet.
“What do you think, 1978? 1979?” I replied, and we looked at their smudged faces, white as the people-figures in our history books would have been, as no agricultural émigrés’ faces would have been.
We set them on the tablecloths, one per too-small table, and I wondered if this year would be the year we actually held a match to their perfect wicks. If this year, of all years, they would finally burn.
We put the technology on music and football and Caillou for my niece. We sat in front of the fire, taking turns with our backs directly in front of the flames my brother and his girlfriend had coaxed into existence with poking twists of newspaper. I sat there, eyes closed, until my skin itched from the heat, listening to the clamor of the New York Giants fans on TV and the strains of early Christmas carols coming from the jazz station in Dad’s front room. Eventually, we ate. I’m sure, knowing that I come from a family of cooks and foodies, that everything was delicious. But in truth all I remember is the apple my brother’s girlfriend cut up and that we had as an appetizer. It was crisp and cool, sharp. It cut through the dull, painful haze of the afternoon.
The next day Dad’s friend Charlie drove down and gave my sister and me a clarinet lesson. He taught us about posture, and how to breathe by using your diaphragm muscle to push your stomach out, and hand position, and the positioning of tongue and teeth. We played a slow, lopsided scale, starting from middle C, each note sounding a bit like a honk and a bit like a squeak. And in a way, it is as if my memories of the first year after Dad’s death begin then : that late-November morning with pale light coming in through the bay window, soaking into the floor, and the new discoveries of sound that, somehow, remained possible even in a world without Dad in it. We had made it through the first holiday. We were still thankful.
Every day since then some part of me has relived the moment Dad left us. The gasping breath, the cold flesh, the staring blue eyes. The last words he said to me the morning he died were “No – stay,” and I couldn’t, I had an appointment in L.A. and had to drive and everything took longer than it should have and I got home in time to stroke his head as he slept and I didn’t realize he was letting go. And then he was gone. And I’ve replayed the day a hundred times – more than a hundred. How many days in a year? How many times a day? I’ve replayed the day a thousand times, three thousand times, imagining it differently – and every time, no matter what I change or reenvision, I lift my head to the new world Dad isn’t in anymore and it doesn’t matter, nothing has changed. And for the year and some since that October day, I have carried the memory of my father dying. Lifted his suffering body to my shoulders, into my eyes, felt him grasp at the roots of my hair, and brought his death forth into the world with me like a color. It has been as if that was the only Daddy I had ever known, the one with a bloated belly from the feeding tube and a weak voice and legs with wounds that never healed and a mattress that hurt him in every position and which we had to line with plastic sheeting.
I’m not sure when it happened. Perhaps during the month of October, a month without music, when I dreamed vividly about Dad several times and woke up reaching toward a shape that dissolved in the air, convinced if I had opened my eyes thirteen seconds sooner I’d have caught him. Or earlier, during Violin Month when I wasn’t dreaming at all. But at some point, my father’s dying body fell from me, like a cloak I had shrugged off. And I got a glimpse instead of his living self, at different ages of his life and of mine. I saw him dancing in his Halloween costume – when was it? the year he was a flasher, in a huge brown velour cape which he wore on our driveway? or the year he was a nun, with a piously upturned (and mustachioed) face? the year he dressed as a genie, in shiny blue harem pants and a headband? – across the entryway of the house, cackling to himself. I saw him holding the kitten my college boyfriend and I had adopted and named Neko Chisai (a mysterious appellation meaning “small cat”), nuzzling her ear and making his high-pitched whimpering sound, the way he did with cute or hurting creatures. I saw him rounding the baseball field in his coach’s uniform, trim in his beige baseball pants and red jersey. I saw his gestures, the way he would rub his index and middle fingers together against his thumb when he didn’t have a napkin. (The way he would, alternately, while snacking on peanuts, wipe the salt on his socks.) The exasperated glance he would give the phone, with a sigh as if he were steeling himself, followed by a carefully enunciated, “Hello” that had no question mark. And the way he would shout at telemarketers. I felt his skin – soft at the base of his neck where he liked to be rubbed, rough on his hands that had always worked, dry on his legs – whose warmth seeped upward into my own fingers.
And I began to hear his voice. Not the ill, peevish voice of his suffering, nor the breathy voice telling us how lucky he was as he lay on his back in the CCU, but his Daddy voice, the one that sang “I rock my doll” as he swept my sister up higher and higher into the air, the one that sang “How Could I Ever Know” from The Secret Garden when I came home from grad school with the sheet music and a crush, the one that shouted “OH, FUCK OFF” to the caller from the Press Telegram whose subscription-renewal attempts he had already rebuffed. Extra emphasis on the “CK” and the “FF.” The voice that always greeted me when I lifted the receiver or pressed a button on my cell phone to a call from home : “Rosebud !” – the interval not quite an octave, the inflection perfectly musical. Always punctuated with an exclamation point.
One year and one month ago, I lost my Dad. And at some point in the month after it had been a year since I lost him, I got him back. I can’t explain it ; there was no real catalyst. At first it was very disorienting, and quite hard. I wanted to pick up the phone and dial the number that is still marked “Daddy Peters” on my speed dial. Knowing that it wouldn’t be him who picked up knocked me flat, sucked the air out of me. I sat back and had to bury myself in work so I wouldn’t think about it too much. Thankfully, there is always work that needs doing : papers to grade, articles to revise, emails to send or to answer, students to see. And work at home : boxes to unpack. The dishes to load into the dishwasher, or load out of it. Plumbing to repair. Trim that still, two-and-a-half-years into my life in this house, needs to be painted. Leaves to rake. Music to practice, and to play.
I’ve been doing everything I can. Work, mostly. I found out a few weeks ago that an article I had written about my grandfather’s years as a military musician was accepted for publication, so I’ve been revising and revisiting that subject with emotion. I’m not a historian, and I submitted the paper after a conference at which I gave a version of the talk, and the whole process made me very nervous. I knew that I was working on a topic that would be sacred, and that even more than anything in my primary research focus this article had to be perfect. It made my Dad so proud to know that I was writing on his Daddy’s music. And the process of writing about my grandfather, and a part of his life that I never truly knew, made me better acquainted with Dad, too. And the whole time I fretted that I did not know enough, and that the honor I carried of this invitation should go to someone who could tell this story better.
But I wonder if anyone could. Part of what makes my grandfather’s letters so extraordinary is knowing that he never once, after the war, talked about the war. Music, yes. Family, yes. The Germans who were POWs in Idaho and who helped babysit his son, my Dad, while he was rehearsing the hospital band, yes. But the war itself, and the military … no. It is a buried history, a secret microhistory that doesn’t even appear secret unless you know the silence he guarded about it. And I think, especially after the past year of writing about my Dad and his music and his life and our lives through music, that there is a kind of knowing that comes from outside research, and a kind of knowing that comes from the stories you never realize are important enough to tell. Music carries all of these stories. It carried my grandfather, and it carried my father, and now it carries me, and sometimes the enormity of the role I have given myself in this project hits me and I have to sit back and breathe : I am narrating other people’s art. I narrate their passion and their foibles and their love. And sometimes I don’t have the words for it. I have to rely on chords or harmonies or metaphors or silence.
So I’ve been practicing, and playing. Frederick Noad has been an immense source of knowledge, technique, and help ; and as with so many things before during this Year of Living Musically, I found the book just when I needed it. As if my Dad – my living father, not the dying body, but the vibrant spirit with the irrepressible guffaw and the off-color sense of humor – had put it somewhere I would find it at just the perfect time.
On 22 November, St Cecilia’s Day, I sat down with the guitar and exorcised some anxiety. I started with Carcassi, then practiced some of Noad’s exercises, and then some other chord-based songs. I practiced arching my fingers in order to avoid dampening certain notes (I’ll talk more about this in my next post), and shifting between positions more smoothly, with less self-doubt and more confidence. And then, riffling through the front pocket of my guitar case, I came across a stack of printed chord-sheets for various songs I have tried to play off and on. They are mostly pop, a couple country songs, a bluegrass ballad, some in Italian, some in Greek, songs that have struck me as lyrically and emotionally meaningful over the years.
I played the song below as I realized all I had held on on to, and believed in, and grappled with, and all I have let go of, in the past year. I made mistakes. It was a hard weekend and I was preoccupied, a fact I could not hide when my fourth finger insistently hit the high C# instead of D#. I’m not as good as I would like to be, at either singing or playing. But I played it, in tribute to goodbyes, and to the strength of continuation. This is not a song for Dad – or not for all of Dad. Maybe it’s a borrowed narrative for my dying father and a suffering body that brought me to a more sublime understanding of death, and life, and the song in everything.
The thing about the guitar is, you can play it badly for years. “Play” it. Get by. Strum and pick and make it up as you go along, and as long as you sing louder than you play and smile widely while you sing, it — kind of, almost — doesn’t matter. This is what I’ve done since the first time I learned how to form a G-major chord (you know, the one that looks like an improbable claw). Bono once chanted, “All I’ve got’s this red guitar, three chords, and the truth.” I had neither the red guitar nor the truth, so had to make do with three chords. Mine were G, C, and D. And I’ve done the best I could with three chords. I even added three more : A, E, and Amin. Eventually, B7. And F#min. Still, eight chords — of which I could only play three with any certainty — hardly make a person proficient. I’m including pictures in this post, and they make me laugh. Not because of the stripey hair (Hair From The Past), but because of my finger position ! And bad wrist posture ! And the way I am staring at the fingerboard as if an elf might just pop out and point silently to the place I should put fingers down next, since I clearly haven’t figured it out for myself.
Learning to play the guitar for real is a challenge. And what I’m discovering is that what was true for playing it poorly — the way hours can disappear into sound that is never quite right — is even truer for playing it well. The fingerings are less of a mystery, the strings are beginning to make sense, and now that I’ve started learning how to read sheet music for the guitar I even understand why the G falls where it falls (though I have yet to understand the logic of string arrangement that determines a G-major chord will look like a claw).
Yes, I have started learning to read sheet music. It feels like unlocking an ancient mystery, as if I were tunneling through the guitar at Indiana Jones’s side, excavating harmonies and tracking the placement of index, middle and fourth fingers, tracing out patterns that might provide the key to some eternal riddle.
Learning to read the music took a single afternoon. Well, to be honest, in the larger scheme of things, that really means it took about twenty-five years and a single afternoon. I found a guitar method book in Dad’s sheet music back in California, and it has proven a wondrous guide, a Virgil to my dazzled poet wandering through forests of lost chords. It was written by Frederick Noad back in the 1960s. “One note at a time,” Frederick Noad reminds me, as if directing a wobbly-legged child along the path of stones that crosses a stream. He hand-lettered the notes onto stoic staves, even spelled out the little acronyms music teachers use to get children to remember how the notes fall on the staff : Every Good Boy Does Fine for the lines, F-A-C-E for the spaces between the lines. And then wrote out individual staves for each string, organized from the top (string 1, high E) down to the bottom (string 6, low E), with the notes of each string spaced neatly in small scale-phrases so the learner can pick them out and hear how they work individually (presumably, to avoid getting overwhelmed by the guitar’s three octaves and tuning in fourths).
So, today, I played the first thirty-three exercises in Frederick Noad’s book. Yes, that was the first thirty-three. Some of them, the earliest ones, are simple hops from the high E down to the high B, with an index finger pressed down to get a C and make a rudimentary chord. I played a lot of these. Then added a middle finger, a fourth finger, and another string change for a little jig-like melody. I stopped when Frederick Noad had me playing competing melodies, one in the low strings and one on the high ones. One tune at a time, there, Frederick Noad ! I told the book as I started to fold it closed.
As I flipped the back cover toward the front, the corner of a piece of paper caught my eye. It was an enveloppe, paper-clipped into the back of the guitar-method book. Inside it, a type-written letter on the letterhead from the public television station of my childhood, KCET 28, Los Angeles, addressed to my father at the house he grew up in, the one he lived in all through college and graduate school and starting his first teaching job, leaving only when he got married.
Dear Mr. Peters,
Thank you for your letter of March 9th and your request for the instruction book for the guitar which will be forwarded to you shortly.
Regarding the name of the collection compiled by a 19th Century musicologist on the March 9th program, these six pieces are from the Chilesotti collection published by the Columbia Music Publishing Company in Washington, D.C. They are obtainable here through DeKeyser Music Company on Hollywood Boulevard.
Again thank you for your interest in our program.
Yours sincerely,
Frederick Noad
A minor mystery opened before me. I found myself incredibly touched, both by the fact that Frederick Noad had written personally to my father and by this sudden vivid whiff of memory — Dad’s fascination with ethnomusicology, the PhD he decided against, the collection of unusual native instruments in a lovingly hand-built cabinet in the family room, the way a piece of music or literature would get in Dad’s head and he had to write it down, find it at the library, read everything about it. For a moment the loss engulfed me. That whole way of learning, gone. That passion and curiosity, that encyclopedic knowledge, that willingness to ask questions, to write letters, to spend hours with a book or an educational TV program or an instrument. Gone.
What did Dad see on TV that inspired him to write a letter to the public television station — to Frederick Noad himself? What were the six pieces Dad had heard and wanted information about? And who was Frederick Noad?
I typed “Frederick Noad” into my browser’s search box, and discovered he was a premiere guitar performer and educator. Noad was born in 1929 — ten years before my Dad. He died in 2001 (again, almost ten years before my Dad). He founded The Guitar Foundation. He created a PBS series — The Guitar with Frederick Noad — that ran in the mid-1960s, then again in the 1980s (in color this time). Apparently, you can still catch it on PBS stations from time to time. I resolved to look out for it. I felt a certain kinship with Frederick Noad, not just because he actually took the time to write back when Dad wrote requesting information, but because his letter seemed to “get it,” Dad’s fascination with something beautiful and of which the brief glimpse he had caught was not enough. I found Noad’s response gracious and informative. The reply of an educator, of a music teacher. He had this Great Thing he knew about, and he wanted to share it. I found myself thinking that Frederick Noad was probably a lot like my Daddy, and I was terribly, terribly sorry he was gone. Wikipedia says he died suddenly, and that made me sad. He was seventy-two years old, the father of a school of guitar-education, and not nearly old enough to be gone forever. I think if he were still alive I would write him a letter and tell him what I had found in Dad’s guitar method book, the one from Noad’s PBS series, and that the book was in not-quite-pristine condition : Dad had taken care of it, but had used it, and learned from it. Every couple of pages I found a little grid-box, the kind I draw for myself when I can’t remember how to do a complicated chord, and in the box a fingering indication, in Dad’s funny, angular handwriting.
My eyes filled all of a sudden. I wanted very much to tell Frederick Noad about Dad’s handwriting. Wanted to tell him about a lifetime of letters and funny little sketches and encouraging notes on student papers and hand-written lopsided music notes across the printed staves, about lists of mystery novels by a few select authors and jazz setlists for performances and birthday cards that always featured love and pride and appointments in a diary where every other page was a drawing by M.C. Escher, or Georgia O’Keefe, or a painting by Van Gogh, or a World War II airplane, or an odd musical instrument from somewhere in the world where Dad had never travelled except in his capacious listening, in his imagination, as the ethnomusicologist he became in his dreams. I wanted to know what the six pieces from the Chilesotti collection were, what had grabbed Dad’s attention so strongly he actually wrote to the TV guitar-teacher to ask about it. I wanted Frederick Noad to know that Dad had kept his letter. Had kept his book. Had written in it. Had even made a correction : in the “Notes on the Third String” section, page 22, which mistakenly declared “G open, A 3rd fret,” Dad had crossed out “3rd” and written in “2nd.” I could picture the twist of Dad’s mouth as he realized the error and his own cleverness in catching it. It made me laugh out loud, one of those sharp cackling laughs that Dad used to do, a laugh that cut through tears or awkwardness and opened a new door. The laugh even cut through the memory of Dad’s last diary, where every page was filled with doctors’ appointments until, suddenly, they just weren’t. No more appointments. Five months with nothing written, because Dad wasn’t there for the last three months of the year, because Dad was gone.
I decided Frederick Noad is my guitar hero. He taught me in an afternoon what twenty-five years of playing on my own never did, and he did it seamlessly, almost without my noticing as it happened. And he gave me back a piece of my Dad, a way of learning and seeing and hearing and remembering, a way of seeking more. And I opened his book again, and practiced through Exercise 38, one note at a time. And sometimes, because Dad and Frederick Noad had given me confidence in guitar-learning, two.
The first thing I needed to do – predictably perhaps – was clip my fingernails. However, before taking that drastic step, I needed to document the fact that I had any fingernails to clip in the first place.
Weren’t they lovely? I thought so too. Even in length, contoured to a gentle slope around the curving edge of my fingers, and glossy in the light. Possibly the best set of fingernails I have ever had, and I had to cut them.
This occasioned some grieving. My fingernails have been a lifelong source of insecurity : in high school, it was almost a badge of deep personal merit for a girl to have long, beautiful fingernails. My short, stumpy nails, at the tips of short, stumpy fingers, made me want to hide my hands in shame. As if the lack of glossy, perfectly shaped fingernails made me somehow less of a girl; indeed, less of a person altogether. Whenever they have managed to grow out past the barely visible white horizon beyond the quick, I have felt like celebrating. I’ve painted them purple, vermillion, black, silver; have filed them to a point or a breathtakingly arched perfect curve; have scratched more than one back in friendship or pleasure. Because let’s just get this on the table right now : long fingernails make a girl feel sexy. Short, stubby (= string player’s) fingernails, on the other hand, make a girl feel, well, stubby, more Irish-washer-womanly than womanly. So I have gone back and forth between a desperate desire to wave beautifully manicured hands with a flourish, and the equally strong though conflicted desire to cut my nails and not care, cut them to the quick and be the kind of ruddy-faced country peasant who I imagine would not care about such trivial matters as keratin protrusions. If I didn’t type all the time and love creating music with my hands, I would seriously consider becoming a vocalist. At one point I owned a perfect rainbow of nail-polish colors, everything from deep metallic purple to demure pale peach. At another point, trying to reconcile myself to the stubby nail-less-ness of my hand profile, I threw it all out.
So I cut my nails when Guitar Month began, every last one. Then I cut them again, ruthlessly removing even the narrowest sliver of white extending beyond the peach color of skin at the fingertips. I sighed deeply, and picked up the guitar. For a few weeks there, I had really beautiful fingernails.
Throughout the centuries, people have suffered for their art.
But oh, there is no feeling on earth that compares to the feeling of a fingertip flush against a guitar string. The way the first note expands to fill the air around you, the air itself vibrating within a sonority that lies somewhere between metal and breath, the hum that sings before it fades, singing and fading, like the filament of crimson in a sunset gone to indigo as night falls. And then : the way the fingers lift up, hours having passed within an instant, fingers lifting up dented, shaded in charcoal and aching with triumph. The way the sound of the guitar lingers in the dark of an empty room, playing off the corners and against the glass of darkened windows, night pressing in closer to listen.
Unlike any other instrument I know, the guitar speaks the language of darkness, its contours and its shadowed hues, as if the instrument draws its notes right out of the river of time between dusk and dawn. Those hours, indigo-grey and brick-purple, shot through with streaks of silver or gold luminosity, the gentle silk of moonlight and the flash of a streetlamp’s lamé gleam through fog – those hours hold the weight of hope and grief, like the endless arms of a heavy bowl or the lapping succour of an ocean.
The first night, I merely played. And I do mean “play,” in the strictest etymological sense of the term : letting go of goals, letting go of guilt, even releasing a bit the tight grip of expectation and perfectionism that continue to haunt me, I unleashed my unknowingness into a reckless, joyful shout and just had fun. I knew three chords automatically and by heart; I played them, and made up words to go with their progression. Other chords came back to me as I played, so I added them. The progression might have gone something like : G – C – D – A – E – Emin – Amin – ohyeahDsus – andohyeahC7 – G. It sounded weird and promising. The D chord always seems too high when played in first position, but I don’t know any other positions at this point, so I shrugged and played it. Fabulous. The A sounded tinny. I shrugged again. Meh. Overhigh D, tinny A, wonky Emin, strained C7 … it didn’t matter. The only important thing was getting notes into the air. They rang out and seeped into the hardwood. I let them go and played other ones. It was wonderful.
After an hour of playing, my fingertips were swollen and tight from the pressure, and a groove marked each fingerprint like a gutter. I thought of chords like rain, falling into the gulf between street and sidewalk, the channels along rooftops, the worn paths down hillsides where rivulets have formed mineral patterns. This is what guitar music does to the body : it forms deposits that become a part of your physical being. You wear your callouses like a badge, fingertips peeling until they don’t, the harder callouses underneath strengthening so you can slide, and extend, and hammer on, and pick, and strum.
I put the guitar down until the following day, when I pulled out actual sheet music and a tab guide and a book of my grandfather’s on how to play classical guitar. It occurred to me only some seventy-two hours later that, in the thrill of playing, I had not thought about my discarded fingernails once. Not a single time.
My goals for Guitar Month are threefold :
– 1. Learn to read sheet music for guitar and identify where the notes are positioned on the strings. You would think that, as I’ve been reading music since I was four or five years old, this goal would be a minor challenge. You would be mistaken. I learned to play guitar the way many folk guitarists have learned, which is to say, by imitating someone else’s hand position and knowing only a smattering of the actual names of chords. Giving names to the lines and spaces on the staff, and understanding how each finger corresponds to a line or space on each string, requires a kind of mental calisthenics that so far has me feeling breathless, as if I’d just jumped rope for an hour or slammed my solar plexus into the lower of two uneven parallel bars.
– 2. Increase my knowledge of chords and perfect at least one harmonic progression. Yes, that includes bar-chords and things like F, Bb, and Bmin, and means learning a much better technique for hitting the frets at just the right place and developing the confidence to play a progression without staring at my left hand or halting in between parts of a song. So yes, Guitar Month will also feature some singing. I’m nervous about this, and excited too. I’d like to learn to play some things out of first position, too. Explore the upper frets more than I have done up to now, and let their resonances ring out.
– 3. Learn to play Matteo Carcassi’s Étude III, Opus 60. This is my classical goal for Guitar Month. I have loved this étude – might even call it my favorite guitar piece, though that’s quite a tall order for such an amazing repertoire – since my friend Joaquim gave me a CD of Rita Honti playing guitar favorites as a goodbye present when I left Boston for my first faculty job. In the back of my mind, I want to play this for Joaquim. So he knows how his gift has touched and inspired me. And that means I have to play it really well, if not perfectly, because the piece was the reason he chose that CD to give me in the first place.
These may be tall orders, but I prefer to think of them as honorable ambitions. And already, after one week, the guitar has become a close friend all over again, filling my days with the kind of yearning that a deep friendship creates : I can’t wait to get back to it when my working day is done, can’t wait to get home so I can bruise and groove and blister my fingertips. I find comfort in the company of these breathy chords, and the ways they reach and lift and breathe into the room, this room, this ordinary living room, transforming it into a breathing chamber full of the light and logic of music.
yearoflivingmusically 