At another point I wanted to go to college and become a math teacher.
I actually wanted to be a lobbyist first, until I spent a middle school career day in a room full of boxes. Then I changed my mind.
I liked my high school geometry teacher, Mrs. Bouck, so much that I started to envision myself as her. She spoke efficiently and delivered tight packed instruction. The proofs always worked out. Everything always checked. She didn't miss a beat. Her lines were straight, her voice definitive.
And at another point of my life I wanted to sing and play piano.
At a young age I took piano lessons for 3 months. It made me miss the magic of chord and rhythm discovery.
I wish my piano teacher had taught me the difference between melodies and finger exercises. These piano songs I was forced to play (presented with titles like "ping pong dance" mind you), can confuse a deep-thinking child and disenchant her from the love of music.
Years later and also some years ago (almost 10 years ago!), when I turned 24, I forced myself to learn one hard song - Journey's Don't Stop Believing. I found a YouTube lesson and watched it probably 1,000 times. And everything else I learned afterwards on piano came relatively easy.
My relationship with music happens in my own headspace most of the time. Not on paper or into recording devices or into audience ears. I think up little melodies everyday. I layer them with other rhythms and melodies, depending on what kind of day I'm having, and maybe what other songs I've been listening to, until an organic fusion of music and mood creates a little background life soundtrack to my day, inspired by I don't know what. The songs are passing clouds, and the particles disperse and go who knows where. And what once was is gone forever.
Some melodies do come back and others take new shape in my mind over time. There's a few I'll take to the grave. Some things are impossible to forget.
I have a guitar now too. My grandfather gave me one. It was a Roy Clark signature guitar, a gift to see me off to college with. I didn't see grandpa much the next 4 years. And he died shortly after I graduated. I wrote a couple songs on my guitar, just making up chords, just playing by ear and experimenting with what sounded good, and memorizing where to place my left fingers over strings and frets. One day some dorm friends encouraged me to play at a music competition on campus. I did. I had a base player and guitar player accompany me. I just stood and sang into a microphone. It was so uncomfortable! But I put my nerves into that performance, and I was humble about it.
It was a strange song but had a nice melody and people clapped and hollered for me. I got such a rush when it was over. I also got an honorable mention but didn't place in the top 3. Grace Potter won 3rd place. I remember her performance of "Toothbrush and My Table." It was good. I have her album "Nothing But The Water" in my car cd player most days of the year. I really have a strong attachment to those songs. They get to me.
Nowadays I don't play music so much. As for guitar, I hate trimming my left fingernails whenever I'm in a random mood to play. I end up talking myself out of it. I have a strange relationship with my instruments. I also quit playing flute in high school because I was frustrated I couldn't blow a high C.
My teachers believed in me. My friends liked me. My parents told me I was smart. When I graduated high school, my junior year English teacher, Mrs. Lanthier, advocated for me to be able to walk with the top 10% of my class. I was really at 11%. But I ended up walking.
I also got a $96,000 financial aid package to go to college with. I should have put all that money straight towards my tuition bill, but I used several thousand to travel and enjoy myself during those years. And now I have to pay SallieMae every month! Grrrr.
Mrs. Bouck used to say that math was all around us. But I couldn't quite see the depth of it. I saw manmade lines and angles. I saw patterns in nature. But no formulaic fourth dimension.
I think we wait sometimes for insight to slap us in the face, and sometimes it does. A friend of mine emailed me once about an insight he had about God. He wrote, "Some people trip and find God, or they say he spoke to them, but it never happened to me. When God did speak to me it wasn't with a voice or with words but in some way I can't explain. Just signs and events that tie thoughts together and make singularities complete... it's like I've been allowed to see light and it's changing me inside somehow."
William Butler Yeats compared human thought to a spiraling gyre, a shape in which something appears to be spinning in circles but reaches a different level with each rotation. As a gyre rotates and elevates, each circle becomes smaller than the one before it, until at the end you reach a point.
When this spiraling gyre is reflected, it makes an hourglass shape. Yeats believed this hourglass shape could explain human thought and ultimately human history.
Watson and Crick, just a couple decades later, contemplated the hourglass shape when checking out women's bodies on the beach. In that sunny, relaxed, libido-stricken atmosphere, an understanding of human DNA was born. It became clear how a person's cells could constantly divide and replace themselves without changing the person.
I think the person does change though. Our memories change us. Memories are merely reflections. Illusions of something that's not physically there. It's in the fourth dimension. Our past is reflected from new distances. There's a different landscape in the foreground. The background gets blurrier. Eventually there's a new form altogether, like looking at our planet from outer space, where the main forms are sparsely composed of something tangible, and the tiny forms become blurry gaps left up to our imagination. We remember what we want to remember.
Maybe it's best to let go before trying to hang on. What you let go might still come back to you.
When I step away from a song or blog entry and forget about it for a while, then revisit it months later, I give it a completely new shape. This particular post has been edited about 6 times.
All our present moments just become points to look back on from afar. We try connecting the dots. It's like organized chaoe. If you've ever seen young school kids play on a playground, you've experienced this type of disorder. There's a beauty in it. But it can also be scary to watch.
Lightning used to scare me as a child, until my father convinced me thunderstorms were exciting. I began to redefine anxiety as excitement. I'll never skydive, but I've learned to appreciate storms with big lightening. The kind that strikes and disappears. It escapes into an abyss of fleeting flashes, synapsing along a scatter plot. And it leaves an echoing resonance of it's crackle in your bones.
Thoughts, like stars, sometimes seem to go away long before we really notice them. When we see stars at night, some of them aren't really there. They burned out a long time ago but their light took however many light years to travel to our eyeball.
I used to wonder if we could send out a video camera in a rocket that went slightly faster than the speed of light. It might be able to travel far enough into the future to take a picture of the past. But it would have to be so far away, that a really good camera would have to be invented. I probably won't see that happen in my lifetime.
And life begins, the grains of sand aligned
whole, complete, away from time
whole, complete, away from time
appearing first as sedentary
moments slip
through
our
fingers
detaching us
from those temporary
clouds that pass like trails of sand
shadows like echoes from a far-off land
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