In My Life

Has it really been ten weeks since the last time I wrote anything here? Yes, I believe it really has. It’s true that time flies when you’re having fun. What nobody tells you is that time just flies, no matter what you’re doing. It has the tendency to stretch out unbelievably when I’m in front of a class trying to answer a question – say, about Balzac’s caffeine habits – with arcane knowledge (my possession of which defies both logic and memory). It speeds up when I’ve got nineteen things that absolutely have to be completed by three o’clock. Yesterday. And sadly, that is most of the time.

In these last ten weeks, I have been writing, and teaching, and rewriting, and playing music. I’ve been practicing clarinet, and guitar, and violin, and piano. I’ve been singing, and writing songs. (And of course, there have been meetings – and meetingsandmeetingsandmeetingsandmeetings – and departmental commitments and library trips and not-long-enough afternoons with favorite novels.) And if I haven’t been coming here to write, it’s not for lack of music or thoughts about music. It’s partly because the weeks have melted away. And partly because every time I think about my music project, all I can think is “the year is complete.” December went up in a hiss and a puff, like the sulfur smell of a lit match. January slunk in around the corner of time and then slunk balefully out. February dropped into my lap like one of the stinging caterpillars that live in the trees down here.

And suddenly it is March, and the camellia blossoms have fallen like great crimson heads, the azaleas are exploding into Kodachrome vivacity on every street corner, and the sky out my office window is regularly more blue than grey. 2011, the Year of Living Musically, is officially only a memory now.

*****

Where does memory live? I have heard all my life that scent is the most powerful sense, the source of memory going back beyond consciousness. Memory happens sometimes in laundry soap, or cologne, of early-morning coffee. The play of a breeze across jasmine flowers in the first dew of early-summer dawn. The ocean, the pale sting of salt and the whip of wind and white-frothed water, gulls circling, wheeling, screeing overhead. Pine needles left over at the bottom of a car seat folded down, from last year’s Christmas tree. Baby powder. St. Ives aloe lotion. The smells of last things, breath, tears, even the scent of forgetting as scent fades.

But memory lives elsewhere too. I have found it in sound, in the process of weeping over a broken string, the late-night insomniac touch as I caress the back of my violin as if it were a child’s body waking from a nightmare, as if it were the one crying, not me, and I could comfort it. And in the sound of a voice I feared forgetting, Dad’s many voices, teasing or compassionate, angry, teary, his patience tested, or biting back laughter from a joke I would not get.

The Mozart clarinet concert. Bach on the oboe. Dvorak on the cello. Fingers on the piano, in the darkened rooms of a house filled with waiting or sleep or loneliness.

I had forgotten so much. Music has opened a door to some of it, a side gate to some more, a window to the rest. Mostly, I have learned, I have a lifetime to remember. And a lifetime to remember it with. And a voice with which to sing it, to call it forth again.

I had my Dad’s grand piano shipped out to Louisiana. The day it arrived, I sat at the glossy black bench and stared at the keys. Could I even play it, here? Is this the life for this instrument? Can I ever call it “mine,” or will it remain “my Dad’s piano” forever? I set my fingers on the keys and began to play without thinking – and the music that came forth, the first thing played on the piano my Dad chose with care and research and hope and love, was the song he wrote when I was born. Fanciful chord progressions, melancholy cadences, a cascade of major and minor that almost remains unresolved. And the change from B minor to E major, the trick of a replaced pinky finger in the left hand, the place Dad always caught himself playing the wrong chord and grumbled under his breath … I heard my whole life, my whole soul, in those notes. A gift, every weird breath and fumble and arpeggiated harmonic cadence.

The Year of Living Musically has ended. Typing that sentence just brought tears to my eyes – unbidden, uncontrollable. Every day away from 2011 feels like a step away from the moment during which I was that close to Dad, and to my own unbelievably weird and cool project that brought him back to me, a little, in the first rush of heartbreak after his death. I have not written the words before today because I did not want them to be true.

But not saying them does not mean time stops. It is 6 March 2012. I sit at the desk in my office, staring out the window for a moment. The tree between my building and the next department sways in a sudden breeze, revealing a dozen indescribably different shades of green. I find myself wondering – with the Year of Living Musically over, what do I do now? Even, who am I? The work and art of music, its logic and its lilting, its possibilities and the ways it changes you, has become so much a part of my life that with this year over, I feel adrift. Unmoored. Alone, all of a sudden.

But I realize that I have done more than walk through the days and weeks like a tourist. I have taken a little bit of the music up into myself. It is in me. I am in it. I carry it, wear it, breathe it, in the words I choose and the way I hear the steady hum of the air conditioner (a low-frequency F) and the understandings that wash over me as I move through space and time … Music is who I am. It is who I have always been.

I am a musician’s daughter. A writer. A teacher. A sister, a daughter, a friend and mentor. And I have become, am always still becoming, a musician. I am alive, and as Marie Howe wrote, this is what the living do. I am living, and I remember you.

*****

I dreamed last night that Dad was alive.

That it had all been a joke, a fake, part of a bigger plan. I was shocked.

“But I saw you,” I told him dumbly. “I closed your eyes. I watched them cover you with a sheet.”

He laughed, and I grew furious. “Are you kidding?!”

All the months, the heartache and grieving and the confusion and how we never truly healed, and the things we fought over, the stupid things like who gets that green glass bowl or the “Beethoven’s Fifth” bottle opener (I could just hear my grandfather saying “yuk, yuk”). The bleak mornings with no color. The shroud over everything and the various ways we found to prick holes in it, so we could at least breathe, if nothing else.

And after the anger came a wave of grief even deeper. Because of all I had left undone and all I had done wrong, every harsh or impatient word, every time I said “fuck” too loudly, every unkind word or impatient gesture – because you want to think that when you lose a piece of yourself, a piece of your heart, the rest of you becomes more attuned to other people’s fragilities, other people’s pain.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes you are just struggling to wade through the morass of the day.

“What are you so upset for?” he asked then, in his most provoking voice, half petulant, half magnanimous. “Would you rather I was gone?”

“What?! Of course not.”

it’s just …

I think, Daddy, I can finally breathe without you, for real. I have started imagining my life, for the whole rest of my life, without you in every day. It has started to feel normal. I think I might just get through it OK. And I don’t know if I can lose you again. I think it might break me.

“It’s just … I have done so much, since you died. The days have been full, bursting with life and grief and more than grief, so much more than grief. Replete. And I couldn’t tell you about it. And now … It all seems meaningless, but I want you to know. To see. And I don’t know where to start.”

He grins, his buck teeth shaping the smile into its familiar quirky angles.

“Rosebud,” he says, in the voice I carry in every cell of my blood, “don’t you know? I’ve been right here, the whole time.”

I woke with tears on my cheeks, a strangled feeling in my throat.

The house in that first bereft wash of grey-rose dawn light hummed and sang. The day, already, at this hour reaching toward morning, full of music.

*****

A last song for the Year of Living Musically : Valentine.

Thanks for being part of my most amazing year.

Love and music,

Romy

A Voice as Big as the Sea

“All my life I thought I was crazy, that I had ghosts in my head or something, simply because I could hear music. And of course, I didn’t know it was music. All I knew was that it was something beautiful, and painful, and right.”
– Lorne, from

Angel

***

Dear Daddy,

the night after you died, I fell asleep on your black leather couch. My brother and I had worked to move all the hospital furniture and equipment out of your front room, to turn it back into your room. Then we moved the couch back in. We took off some of the acoustic stuff you’d had sprayed onto the ceiling back in the 1980s, that textured white popcorn-like stuff that your parents had had sprayed on, with glitter. Their dining room looked like a pale sea of constellations in the darkness. We never had the glitter at home, but still, when the corner of the couch gouged the ceiling in the doorway to your front room, I felt as though a star had fallen.

Neighbors came. They brought chili, bread, flowers, cheese. Cookies. Some – an artistic, enterprising couple you had always appreciated, the parents of my brother’s good friend – stayed and chatted with us around your dining-room table, the too-small one, the perfect one. After half an hour or so my sister stood and walked to the door, saying she was going to go home and would maybe come back after, that she just couldn’t deal with everybody’s normal.

Everybody’s normal came and went, and we somehow became part of it. We found a different normal, the new world we would stumble into like a discovery, the world we would have to map because every step through its landscape was foreign. And then the neighbors left, and the food went stale, or got eaten, and nobody touched the cookies so we threw them out, and the flowers held on until they couldn’t, one white petal after another falling to the countertop, or the living-room floor. (Suddenly that space seemed so ironic : a living room, holding this waxy bouquet of flowers because you had died.)

I fell asleep, pulling your music-patterned fleece blanket over myself, leaning into your thirteen pillows in various states of cleanliness, breathing in the fragrance that fabric held of you. Baby powder and aloe lotion, sweat and the metallic zing of blood, bland shampoo and Ivory soap. At least three decades of the layers of your scent, like the voice of your own body, saying different things at different times. I fell asleep, and it was as though I had fallen asleep inside you, even though that makes no sense : I felt cradled, and comforted. The lights were on their dimmest setting, the jazz station was turned off, the dog was somewhere else. The hospital bed was gone. The IV pole, gone. The breathing machine, the thing that beeped every time air got into your feeding tube, the awful awful awful smell of medicine and sterility was gone. And what was left was you, and even if it was in bloodstains from fifteen years of gamma-globulin infusions and skin mites, it was you. I breathed it in and faded.

And in my sleep I floated off to where you were, as if I could touch you for real, feel you in my fingers, caress your thinning hair, rub the spot at the center of your forehead that your mother had rubbed when you had your migraines as a kid. I brushed your strong arms with my hands, felt your warm touch on my head, soothing me the way you must have done when I was a baby and could not sleep. I laughed to remember, in this floating dream, the story of my infantile insomnia and you getting up to drive me around the neighborhood, because the motion of the old VW could rock me to sleep. We would circle the block, and then another block, and you would sing or talk to me in a low singsong voice, and I would calm my fussing and drift into sleep. Then you would pull into the driveway and stop the car, and inevitably I would awaken and howl, and you’d turn the key and circle the streets again : Woodstock, Kensington, Main Way. Maybe as far as Gertrude or Silver Fox, on a rough night.

Mom woke me when she was leaving. She had not known where I’d gone, had come down the hall to find me buried in your pillows and your blanket, and had flipped the lights on high and called my name loudly, and the sudden rupture of our communion was like being born into a world of emptiness and bleak loss, a place I never wanted to live. I sat up startled, then crumpled, weeping. You were gone. I had been with you, for ten minutes or twenty or ninety, and then the drifting dream shattered and I had to get up and go on with whatever had to happen next. Whatever it was, awaiting us all the next day, cleaning or organizing, or paying the newspaper six hundred dollars to run your obituary, or deciding what the flowers should look like for your funeral, my God, your funeral, the words didn’t even make sense, and this was the new world and I had to keep moving through it, giving it my credit card, stilling the quaver in my voice, and somehow finding a way to love it even though you weren’t there. Because that was how you lived it, and I wanted to do right by you.

And days passed. And I have found a lot to love. I hope that through this musical year I have managed to do right by you, by what you taught me and what you would have wanted. I don’t know what you would have wanted, truth be told. And it is hard to speak for the dead. Sometimes I don’t have words. I have to borrow them, or let the instrument speak. I’m not always good enough at it. Tonight is Christmas Eve, the second Christmas you’re not here for, and I had too much work to get to California so I’m alone in my house in Louisiana, the house you never saw. I went down to the levee for the bonfires with some friends, and felt a sense of malaise the whole time. As though a piece of me was missing.

A piece of me is missing. I am missing my Dad. I am missing my family. I am missing the life we shared with you. And I am missing the sense of purpose and hope that came with every new month of this weird, wonderful, crazy, heartbreaking year, every new instrument and every discovery.

I’ve spent the week in a kind of funk, mourning you and wishing for the world “White Christmas” describes in the lesser-known introductory section, the part about blue skies and palm trees on December the twenty-fourth. I stayed here because of work, but also because, I think, I fear going back to California where your scent has faded from even the most stained pillows and I will never have another night on the couch in your front room where I could feel you reaching across time and life and touching me, consoling me about the life you had and lost, and the one I have. Since I could not quite stand the sound of twenty-four-hour Christmas carols pealing through the house, I have been playing bitter songs on the guitar about deceit and desire, songs about love lost, about people lost. It’s hard to feel the Christmas spirit when you’re singing a “somebody done me wrong” song.

So tonight I sang as much as I could – before the tears got me – of the Christmas song that always made us both pause and wipe our eyes as surreptitiously as possible : “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” You heard it as a wartime carol, Bing Crosby in 1943, in the persona of an American soldier on the battlefields of the European Theatre. I heard it as the anthem of my own war with loving the place and people I came from and knowing that my life lay elsewhere. I remember years of Christmases on the couch next to you, holding your hand when Karen Carpenter scooped into a note and back out again, both of us breathing wheezily and sniffling until the final chords dissolved. So here you are, Daddy, a Christmas song for you.

Love and Music,
Romy

***

The Voice

For every other month of the Year of Living Musically, I have had a specific project or goal : discovering an instrument from scratch, challenging my knowledge of an instrument by taking myself in a new direction, or assigning myself a piece of music that could reflect the process of learning to play, as well as the art available for that instrument.

The voice is different. Every day since I officially ended Guitar Month, nearly halfway through December, I have sat down in front of the computer or the video camera, and made a recording. I have sung pop ballads, rap choruses, Christmas carols, Romantic lieder, Gregorian chant melodies, and of course showtunes. And I have erased every recording (except the rap chorus because it cracked me up, and no, you don’t get to see it), and come to this blank page and sat back and thought – I have nothing to say about the voice.

It isn’t true. I have a lot to say. But what I do have to say is overshadowed by my fear of saying it. I sing all the time : alone in my house, sitting in my office on campus grading papers, driving in the car with the windows down, wandering through the aisles of the supermarket, while running on the treadmill, at church even when the rest of the congregation mumbles or remains silent, in my choir … my head is full of songs and lyrics that punctuate my days. I love to sing, and most of the time I think I’m pretty good at it. Not opera diva quality, but enough to make someone reconsider me when s/he thinks s/he knows all there is to know. I love to sing. The thing is, I kind of hate my voice. No, not hate. Fear. I kind of fear my voice. Fear letting it ring out completely free. Fear where it might take me if I let it take over.

I have sung all my life. When I was growing up, the girl down the block and I used to tie kitchen towels around our hair and act out The Sound of Music in my front yard, with the record player spinning faithfully and the window thrown wide open so we could hear the accompanying orchestra from inside the house. (Sometimes we did this on roller skates, which added a whole new dimension to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”.) I still remember vividly the day I finally hit the high sustained note in “Climb Every Mountain.” It felt as though a door had just opened in my brain, to the world, and stepping through it brought a new level of possibility to the world, like a shimmer. Then, telescoping forward through time, there was the year in grad school when my choir sang the Bach B-Minor Mass, and I understood how to reach the high D in the alto line in “Sanctus.” I heard my own voice belling out around me like a whirlpool of light, and the sound grew and swelled. I had never heard myself that way before, not in that register. It was exhilarating. It changed me.

At the same time, I have years of memories of performances that my Dad attended, when the high-school choir would perform complex choreography to medleys of James Taylor or the songs from Footloose or Bye-Bye, Birdie, interspersed with solos when one hopeful Southern California golden child after another got up and belted out the latest Madonna hit or a tear-jerking Christmas carol. Sometimes that kid was me, on the stage, only I never felt golden. Trapped and self-conscious, I stood in the pool of the spotlight terrified that I would forget my lyrics or lose my footing or, God forbid, have my voice break (a fate worse even than farting). Given the number of performances we did, statistically there must have been a time when I let go and enjoyed singing on stage. I don’t remember it. I don’t recall ever forgetting myself enough to stand there and, simply, have fun. I was always too afraid of getting it wrong somehow, of hearing myself go nasal or flat or hiccupy or forgetful or whatever. And in the car on the ride home Dad would kvetch about the fact that we never sang classical music, and then he would offer criticism. Of the performance, of my performance. Other kids’ parents brought flowers, hosted cast parties. My Dad brought knowledge about how to be a better musician. And he never seemed to realize that his comments took all the air out of the evening for me, so that the next time I stepped into the oval of light in front of the microphone I was even more afraid of screwing up.

It feels like betrayal to say, but my happiest performing moments probably came during the summers, up the mountain at Arrowbear Music Camp, because I could sing my heart out in front of other musical kids on our Tuesday- and Thursday-evening talent nights and know I was safe. Dad wasn’t there to hear me.

This changed in grad school and, later, when I lived in France and conducted a choir, and later still, when I came back to Boston and sang the Tenebrae for Holy Week, and later than that too, when I moved down to Louisiana and auditioned for the Symphony Chorus and we performed Handel and Bach and Rimsky-Korsakov and Verdi and Orff. All I wanted, those years, was for my Dad to come hear me sing. I wasn’t afraid anymore : the choir was good, better than good, and I had found my anchor. The song moved through me, fixing me inside the music the way a lightning bolt would nail a person to the ground, and while onstage all I was was music, sound like fire. One year I had a solo in Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. But Dad was too stubborn, and then too ill, to travel for the concerts. I sent him CDs he never listened to. I called him from rehearsal, every week, during our 15-minute break. I would walk outside into the steamy Louisiana night, and press the buttons that pulled up Dad’s inimitable “Rosebud!” when he answered. Minutes would tick past and I’d catch myself grinning as I talked about the struggle for an in-tune soprano unison, or the one bass who sounded like Kermit the Frog and never could blend, or the conductor’s little jokes – about “hairy alto sound,” for instance. Dad would give his wheezy chuckle, a short bark of laughter that led to a coughing fit, and I’d look back at the door to the music building, over which hovered a chorus of tiny white-bodied night insects, and we would tell each other “I love you” twenty times apiece and then I’d dash back in, hanging up as I took the stairs two at a time, scurrying breathless to my seat among the other Alto 1s, thinking what a luxury it was to run and make myself breathless as my Dad struggled for air, as we launched back into the evening’s rehearsal piece.

I am carrying all of these memories with me, the bittersweet and the breathless, the hard and the holy. So my goal for Voice Month is not to perform anything in particular, but to sing a multiplicity of things that I love, in different styles and with different backgrounds – classical, rock, folk, Broadway (the answer is still no about the rap chorus). Because the most important difference about this instrument is that I cannot simply say “the” about it. This is not an absolute, nor a televised singing game show. This instrument is intimately, intricately, mine. And more than the process of learning to read sheet music or a new clef or developing better finger technique or even a new way of breathing, the main thing I need to do with this instrument is let it sing. Accept its limitations and open myself to its offerings, its possibilities. Because though I’ve carried it with me all my life, we are still learning each other.

To begin with, since December is the beginning of the liturgical year and full of gorgeous somber traditional music, I recorded some Gregorian chant : a favorite Marian hymn, the “Ave maris stella.” I did this on 17 December, and so combined one of the great “O” antiphons into the verses of the hymn as a separate track. In the recording, you’ll hear my voice amplified and reflected back – Gregorian should not be a solo venture, but sung as part of a communal celebration. So I did what I could – Garage Band helped – to increase the number of mes singing. And since I made only an audio recording, I decided to set the music to a little photo-anthology video. The photos come from monastic settings and secular places on my map of the world; they represent Christmas and winter (on three continents), along with scenes of holiness from any season, scenes of beauty. The sacred is all around us at all times. That’s part of the Advent message, I believe – learning to see the numinous qualities of every leaf, every spark, every stone, and in every face, every sound, every voice.