Tattoo

For most of my life, tattoos have been in the category of “things other people do.” My parents find them vulgar. Growing up, my main exposure was in the context of shows like “Mannix” in which the Bad Person often sported a lightening bolt or dragon on his malevolent forearm. In mysteries, too, the “distinctive tattoo of a Phoenix” was often the means by which the Bad Person was rooted out, despite having covered the tell-tale ink with clerical garb, or robes of mysterious Eastern cloth. Aside from various and sundry Bad Persons, tattoos were the province of Holocaust survivors, and men who had been in the military as impressionable youths. They were, those images, numbers and anchors, signals of something dark, regrettable, or offensive.

Many years later, I began to notice the presence of lighthearted, “cute” tattoos, particularly on women. My son’s second and third grade teachers both had a tattoo in the vicinity of their respective ankles, and they were both fine teachers, good mothers, and unaffiliated (to my knowledge) with anything particularly sinister or indiscreet. I started looking at tattoos, admiring fine art, asking strangers what the words or symbols meant, and did it hurt to have it done there? I discovered that many people I knew had a tattoo I had never noticed, and that some were signs of misspent and alcohol-enhanced youth, but most had great personal significance. A honeymoon tattoo, a tribute to someone dearly loved and lost, a symbol of deep religious significance.

A shift took place during my Tattoo Studies, and I began to see nothing unusual about people who had covered large parts of their bodies with ink. My husband’s nephew enthralled me at a family picnic describing his plans to have his late father’s face tattooed onto one of his legs. This plan would, at one time,  have provoked no response on my part other than a secret conversation with my husband about possible ways to talk the kid out of doing such a thing. I was fascinated. I wanted to know how they would get the picture on his skin, how big it would be, was it a common thing to do, would it hurt, so close to the prominent shin bones of a slender young man. I read “Tricycle” and noticed that many of the Buddhist monks with shaved heads and saffron robes were extensively tattooed.

I wanted one. I thought about placement, size and design. I first considered my wrist where it could easily be hidden by a watch or a sleeve when spending time with my mother. I favored the ubiquitous ankle, but thought that maybe it should then be done only in black to avoid clashing with the colorful skirts and sandals I wear in the summer. I wondered whether anyone else in the world worried about such things. I saw a beautiful, tiny heart on the back of a young woman’s neck, but decided that for my purposes, my tattoo needed to be visible to me. My purposes had evolved, over time, from the “cute-” a whisk, a pencil, two hearts for Rob and Sam – to the more serious. I wanted either a tiny dharma wheel or “om mani padme hum” to remind me to stop and be in the moment, compassionate, and fully alive.

I ran a trial balloon past my mother, thinking that perhaps she had become accustomed to prevalence of tattoos in polite society. “What if I got a tattoo?” I began, tentatively, “I mean, I’m not saying I’m going to do it…just ‘what if?’”

“You can never be buried in a Jewish cemetary,” she began, “and it looks cheap. Who do you know that would mutilate herself like that?” There were literally a hundred people, but I interpreted the question as rhetorical, and moved on to safer topical ground.

I spent too much time thinking about the tattoo. I didn’t have the cash, and it was such a serious commitment. It is “mutilation,” strictly speaking; it’s the insertion of needles into your flesh, chemicals under your flesh, and it involves the risk of infection, scarring and pain. I have watched too many TLC documentaries not to know that there are many instances of post-tat remorse, and that the cost of removing one’s prison tattoos or the name and picture of an ex is high in both dollars and nerve endings. What if I hated it? What if, following my already flaky spiritual path, I decided that I wanted to practice Judaism and to be buried in a Jewish cemetary? What if it stretched or shrunk into some unrecognizable form as the result of weight gain or loss? What if it really, truly did mean that I was in some way cheap, tacky, and/or nothing more than a Dedicated Follower of Fashion willing to make an irrevocable mistake in order to enjoy three weeks of feeling like one of the cool kids?

I haven’t decided. The cash will be available today; I’ll put it in the bank and think some more. I don’t really need a permanent, inked reminder to be mindful; it actually seems to violate the most basic tenets of Buddhism to require such external motivation. I still fear judgment, categorization and dismissal. I do not fear the pain. I need to sort out the difference between an expression of freedom and some subconscious desire to seem like someone who is free. I should be thinking about a hundred other things, like work, laundry, genocide, planting tomatoes and marriage equality. Instead, I find myself imagining a tiny, black dharma wheel hovering somewhere above my right ankle. A discreet prayer across the top of my left wrist. A message to myself and to the world, about something I have not yet understood, something inchoate, urgent, and suspect. Something I need to hear, whether or not it is ever broadcast on my flesh.

The Best of Us

There are many responses to a death, all of which are understandable attempts to understand and “handle” something alien and painful. We resort to cliches and saccharine, and people who were completely objectionable in life are lionized and worshiped. He or she was “the best,” best friend, best father, best partner imaginable regardless of actual, historical fact. What else would you say – “he was a son of a bitch and he talked on his cell phone in restaurants?” We also tend to make each death part of our own story, to draw into the fold of our personal mythology a person who, in life, might have been peripheral. High school friends unseen for thirty years, grocery store clerks with whom we exchanged a total of thirty words…they seem larger and more important merely by virtue of being dead. In our shock, we magnify every exchange, allowing ourselves to expand the relationship until we were closer people, better people, perhaps people who meant something to one another. It may be regret, projection, or merely some vestigial hard wiring that makes folks more popular in death than they were in life.

Sometimes, though, we lose a genuinely amazing person. I’ve lost one, and I’ve struggled for days with how to write about her without sounding like the stickiest, and ickiest of the post hoc fans. Bear with me.

I’ll start with the ending, so you won’t feel manipulated into some artificial kind of shock. It’s too cheap for my purposes, that reflexive indrawn breath that comes from falling in love with a character who is killed off too early. Carrie Joy Hurst died last Friday afternoon when she lost control of the motorcycle she was riding, and collided with a stationary object. She left her husband Brent, and three children. She was thirty-five. So now you know that part.

I met Carrie a few years ago because she played in a local band called The Fruitflies. We knew the keyboard player from one place, and the lead guitarist from someplace else, and it seemed inevitable that we would go to check them out at some point. It was a huge adventure for me; my husband has conversations with people about the rock concerts of days gone by, but I have no such history. When he asks someone which time they saw Jethro Tull at Cobo Hall, I have nothing to offer. I saw Peter, Paul and Mary once, without Mary (she was sick) and Don Mclean in the 70s. Other than that, it was all classical, all the time. I was nervous about going to some biker bar called Double Deuce, uncertain about appropriate biker bar attire, worried that my inexperience and complete lack of cool would make our friends embarrassed to have me in the audience. I was also thrilled at the fact that when it was over, no matter what horrible things I said or did, I would be able to say that I had been in a biker bar.

The bar was dark, the tables were vaguely sticky, and there were lots of long-haired guys in bandanas, with and without leather chaps, and the women who drank, rode and lived with them. I needn’t have worried about my clothes. There were lots of tattoos, serious shooters of pool, and waitresses who seemed to know every guy in the place. At the front, under a wall-mounted shrine to mixed cycle parts, was the band. Michael was at the keyboard with his long, auburn ponytail and trademark Australian rancher hat. There were “groupies” in Fruitflies t-shirts who seemed to be helping, not helping, milling around and/or drinking. It all seemed to be fine.

There was a “girl” in the band, and I could see her, tall and blonde, wearing overalls over a striped jersey and looking like she was possibly 19 or 20. I remembered Michael rhapsodizing about this person. He’d been skeptical about a woman singing some of the songs, but “Carrie was amazing.” He had also told me that she was surpassingly warm, and kind, and had been a great help to him during a painful divorce. From my vantage point near the pool tables, nursing some magical kind of beer that came in a self-cooling can, it was hard to believe that the  girl I saw across the room was the Joni Mitchell/Oprah combination we’d been promised. Her hair was in braids, for God’s sake; she resembled nothing so much as L’il Abner’s backwards cousin Ida Mae.

They started playing, and it was good – I watched the girl, Carrie, who wasn’t featured in the first few numbers. She played some kind of finger cymbals and sang harmony, and I was just watching her move. She had no self-consciousness, as if she entered the stream of the song and bade farewell to the bricks and mortar around her. She was graceful, and sexy, and completely uncontrived. When she sang, Dido’s “White Flag,” The Cranberries’ “Linger,” a scorching version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” I developed a full-blown girl crush. Ida Mae could sing, man.

On a break, Michael came to out table to drink with us, and Carrie stopped by to meet us. Her braids were falling apart from sweat and motion, and she had a tiny diamond in one of her nostrils. She put a gentle hand on Michael’s shoulder as she talked, and she smiled constantly. There was nothing phony about it; she was a really, genuinely, happy woman. I knew from Michael that she didn’t love her job, that she really loved her kids, that she’d been a stay-at-home mom for several years, and what I saw was that this ordinary woman with an ordinary life was giving off sparks of joy that were nearly palpable. She was damned happy to be there, with us, singing for twenty-five bucks and free drinks. It would have been wrong not to be happy with her, so I relaxed, had another beer, and felt the warm glow of alcohol and admiration soothe my soul.

Over the years, we saw Carrie often. She and Brent-the-lead-singer fell in love, divorced their respective spouses and married each other. It should have been a scandal and an occasion for gossip and disapproval, but mostly it wasn’t. They loved each other’s children, they respected their exes and treated them fairly, and when they were together, it was like having an audience with a four-handed, two-hearted deity of love. Every time I saw Carrie, I wanted to be her, to crawl out my own, uptight skin and spend a day relaxed, happy, and able to surf life’s killer waves without crashing. She was so easy, so beautiful in her imperfections, that I found myself wondering how to get like that – it wasn’t the superficial things like the tats or the piercings, she had what us high-falutin types call “joie de vivre.” She was at home in her body. She was a friend of the universe. One serndipitous evening we walked to our neighborhood park to hear another friend’s band, only to find Brent, Carrie and their assorted children. We joined them, and  I watched their children throw a Frisbee together, the bigger kids careful to aim low enough to give the little ones a fair chance. I watched Carrie draw a quilt around her shoulders, lean back into Brent, and sink into the cool evening, the music and the grace of being right with the world.

We were friends, and we were groupies, following them from the biker dive, to an outdoor Fourth of July concert, to the bowels of a college basement bar with beer in plastic cups. We were always just a little puffed up to be with the band; a seismic shift for my controlled, sardonic self. Then, of course, Carrie rode into that stationary object and that part of our life was over. At the funeral, Brent sang John Lennon’s “Real Love,” accompanying himself on the guitar. Carrie’s son and Brent’s daughter spoke, and if you didn’t know that one of them was a stepchild, you would never have guessed. A photo montage showed Carrie smiling, holding her children, marrying Brent in waders and a white veil, and singing. After the service I found Michael and hugged his bony frame, the brim of his hat bumping my hair. “She was the best of us,” he said. Ordinarily, nine times out of ten, I would have chalked that up to Post Hoc Deification Syndrome. As it happens, though, he was right.

Torch & Twang

Let’s be real, here. People who grow up like I did are not often country music fans. Aside from my mother’s odd taste for the sounds of the Grand Old Opry (acquired during her years at Wellesley, no doubt) I knew no country music unless it was from one of those “Willie Nelson’s Greatest Hits” ads that ran constantly on our local CBS station. Well, sometimes I caught a little bit of “Hee Haw” if no one changed the channel in time. Suffice it to say that “another somebody done somebody wrong song” was never my music of choice.

I like irony, subtly, and a literary lyric. Like my tea, I tend to like my music un-sweet, unless the sweetness is only one of many layers and has no cloying quality. There was a kind of song that made me queasy from the time I was very small:  ”Baby, I’m a want you,” and “Cherish” come to mind. Well, and that other kind; the kind where a dog dies and is carried out to sea, or someone (or something) named “Wildfire” is apparently lost. There was a kind of broad, needy, whiny quality about those songs, and that Ick Factor seemed to exist in every country song I heard. “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain?” Seriously?! Every song seemed to be a celebration of Good Ole Boys, brainless women who perpetually fell in love with (and were jilted by) Cads, and a blessedly unfamiliar world of tractors, church, and girls made to wear hideous homemade garments and/or sell themselves to feed their families. It was hyperbolic, sentimental and ridiculous.

Joni Mitchell sang “I wish I had a river/That I could skate away on,” and I knew exactly what she meant. I did not require her to explain that she was unhappy, why she was unhappy, or that she was unhappy because she had broken up with a guy named Jeff. I got it. I spent hours parsing Beatles’ lyrics for meaning (stymied mainly by my inadequate supply of psychedelic drugs) and posting lyrics I loved on my bedroom walls. “Skating away on the thin ice of a new day;” “I have become comfortably numb;” “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.”  The words were poetry, and they spoke to me, as good poetry does, in beautiful abstract tongues that offered me the answers to my adolescent problems if I was willing to do a little thinking. I had no truck with musical pablum.

In college, at the peak of my black-wearing, Marlboro-smoking archness,I took a break from my regular classical show and filled two-hours of radio with a mockery of country. I assumed a Southern drawl, used the name “Candy Memphis,” and played anything country that I could find in the record closet. I spun “Stand by Your Man,” and got my friend Wallis (who is really from Memphis) to call in live and request something called “This Bed’s Not Big Enough for the Three of Us”  in his more authentic accent. It was one of the finest mornings of my young life.

In the mid 90s, I met Cassie. She was the secretary in the law office below mine (I couldn’t afford a secretary), and we went to lunch together most days. She was a revelation to me, with her tough life story, her big wedding plans, and her propensity to dip her fries in her Frosty. She was un-ironic, an open book, untouched by cynicism or snark. Her fiance watched Nascar races and football games, and she watched with him. She had a cat named “Squeaker” and kept pictures of him on her desk. She read bride magazines, and went to blockbuster romantic comedies. When we took her car to lunch in the summer (my 10-year-old Honda had no air conditioning) we listened to country music.

By the end of August, I had fallen in love with country music. It wasn’t the old-style country of Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty; it was the first wave of “new country.” I listened to Garth, Clint, Shania, Trisha, Lorrie, and Alan. I loved the sad stories, and teared up the first time the car was filled with the melancholy strains of  ”Don’t Take the Girl.” I smiled at “Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.” I belted out “Friends in Low Places” and invited my (imaginary) drinking buddies to “Prop me up beside the jukebox” when I died.  With kd lang and Mary Chapin Carpenter as gateway drugs, I Went Country.

There was something I needed in that music, something about sweetness, and wholesomeness without edge or cynicism. There were songs about the joys of summer days, falling in love, staying in love, and raising a family that were some kind of balm for my single, 30-year-old heart. I remember sitting in my own car at the end of a work day, hearing Pam Tillis sing “Sweetheart’s Dance,” and bursting into tears. I didn’t really want to be what I was any more, I didn’t care about being cool and detached, I wanted a sweetheart. I wanted a sweetheart and a house with a porch, and a pie on the windowsill and a jar full of fireflies. I wanted Aunt Bee next door, and The Saturday Evening Post on the coffee table, and a boy who played baseball. I wasn’t necessarily going to wear gingham and call everybody “honey,” but I was sure as hell not seeing myself in a black suit with 3-inch heels and The Virgin Suicides as bedtime reading.

Within three years, I was married to my sweetheart, and the mother of a potentially baseball-playing boy (We tried, but I think that part of my fantasy life is over). I now have a house with a porch, and although there is rarely a pie on the windowsill…there could be. I have swung back to some kind of center, musically and personally; there’s a little Keith Urban and a lot of old Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson on my iPod, but it coexists with “Vampire Weekend,” “Spoon” and a little Jay-Z. I still admire the incredible voices of most country singers, voices that put Britney and Gaga to shame. I also admire the singer-songwriters who craft poems and set them to music in ways that are sometimes as sublime as anything I loved in my youth. I have choices, about what I listen to, and whether I’m feeling more Edie Sedgwick or Aunt Bee on any given day, and that’s part of what makes life worth living.

I guess something just had to give, back in the days when I Went Country. I don’t know that it happens to everyone, and it certainly doesn’t happen in a 120 degree car with Pam Tillis on the radio. I’m sure that during that 3 minute song I felt myself change. I understood something, I  took a leap of faith from the safe ground of self-protective cynicism to the unknown territory of admitting that I wanted something as common as a family and a home. I identified with that raw, patent need for love and safety that I had dismissed and mocked for more than thirty years. I would never, in my current incarnation, pick country music as my favorite genre, or even my second favorite. It might make third behind classical and alternative; then again, it might get bumped by classic rock. In a Tom Petty-George Strait smack down, well, never mind. All I know is that when I needed a catalyst it was there for me in all of its resplendent sweetness and spiritual generosity. For that I will always be grateful.

I Just Have to Love Him.

I live by rules that focus largely on compassion, and the avoidance of doing harm. Much of the time it’s fairly easy, and I can feel deeply magnanimous as I carry an insect outside, or agree to help someone when I really don’t feel like it. I am one, big, glowing Compassion Center, lighting up the Midwest with my patchouli-scented nobility, meditating and reading Thich Nat Hahn (while underlining!)

If I’m honest with myself (another thing I’m kind of supposed to do) it becomes clear that even when I think I’m being compassionate for the sake of being compassionate, I am more often making some kind of bargain hidden even from my conscious mind. When I carry bugs outside, the trade-off is that I feel good. When I agree to chaperone the Middle School Activity Night, I appear to be selfless, and get thanked a lot. I eat it up, I love it so. When I find myself growing impatient with someone I love, and stop myself, I feel righteous. I see with my keen and self-serving eye that I am  a good, good person, and maybe no one will compliment me on my near-guru status, but I will know that I chose to be compassionate when I really felt like hanging up, walking out or blowing up.

At the moment, I am facing the necessity of compassion with no visible gain, at least not in the foreseeable future. I will not say what it is, or who it is because that’s pretty irrelevant; what matters is that there is a person in my life who fills me with intense anger, resentment and, honestly, loathing. Strong words, all true. I awaken, sometimes, with a galvanic jolt of anxiety and realize that the situation still exists. I fantasize dark, vicious ways that I can Teach A Lesson. I am unquestionably smarter than my antagonist, and if I wanted to, I could easily jab, feint and otherwise verbally box him into a mewling mess. I could say everything that’s on my mind; a long litany of grievances ranging from the petty to the stupendous. For a little while, I have to say, that would make me feel absolutely splendid, relieved of my burden, and lighter than air. It would be vindication and release.  I would prevail because I’m right…if one is given to looking at humanity that way.

I am not disallowed from expressing an opinion when I think it’s helpful, even though the person on the receiving end might prefer that I keep my thoughts to myself. I can tell my son that he needs to do his homework even if he (quite reasonably) hates his teacher, because I am speaking from love and compassion. I can tell my mother that I think she’d be better off if she stopped watching horrible news stories about kidnapped and murdered children, because, again, I know that I love her and genuinely want her to be less anxious and more peaceful. I have a strong inner compass that tells me when I am constructive and when I am venting, and I work hard to move towards doing no harm. Sometimes there is a period of pushing back, and discomfort, but it is always possible to come back into balance because the filaments of love are strong, and binding.

There is no love between me and the Fly in the Ointment of my life. If I live out my fantasies of “schooling” him, he will not see it as a gesture of compassion, and it will not be such a gesture. It will be my vain, flailing attempt to correct him and shape him into a person less shocking to my sensibilities. I don’t want what’s best for him; I want what’s best for me, which is for him to straighten the hell up. I know that I should conquer my anger and resentment by loving him, but I am struggling to find the tiniest trace of something to love in him – I have tried picturing him as a helpless baby, pitying him for his difficult upbringing, and watching him for a spark of vulnerability, charm or humor. I want my compassion to be triggered in some autoplay mode, to “kick in” and make it possible for me to turn things around and see another flawed specimen of humanity instead of a heedless monster who haunts my peace and shakes my convictions.

If it were easy, if there were always an accessible “autoplay,” we would all be the Dalai Lama, or Mother Theresa. Real spiritual work is not done in the context of appealing subjects. We are born ready to forgive and understand the people we love, or understand. There are paths easier than trying to love him – I can tell him off, or exert enormous amounts of energy pretending he simply doesn’t exist (the latter being my general tendency). There is, though, no compassion in that. Both choices result in harm to my nervous system, and do nothing to help to my misguided, life-challenged enemy.

To make this better, I have to love him, I have to find it in myself to stop wishing him dead, unborn, or in Peoria. I have to accept that he is who he is, and that he is unlikely to see any reason to change his life based on an angry attack or a cold shoulder. He might respond to love. I can only hope. We might both feel safe working towards common goals if we were bound together by those strong, flexible filaments that would bind us, but allow us our individuality.

This is not easy. It may be the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do. My next sentence was going to be “it may not even work.” There, again, I reveal the limitations of my understanding. I succeed if I am able to change my own mind, to find the seeds of compassion, and maybe even love towards the enemy of my peace. Changing him through the filter of that compassion would be a huge relief, but it’s really not even necessary.

I just have to love him.

Poet and Peasant

During my brief tenure as a cello student at the New England Conservatory, I often earned money as a “ringer.” Various musical groups in the greater Boston area possessed of rather more ambition than talent would put works on their programs that far exceeded the capacity of their members, and we would be summoned to save the day. We appeared for the last few rehearsals, displaced the existing principals, and discreetly collected our checks after the concert. Sometimes the natives fawned over us, but more often we were regarded with bitter suspicion as the ousted regime set out homemade cookies during the break. As an eighteen-year-old I found it ridiculous that anyone would be unhappy to be rescued from the morass of bad intonation and terrible bowing. It was simple: we played well, and they didn’t. Looking back with the perspective of thirty more years, I see that we were somewhat insufferable.

One of our more lucrative gigs was the Melrose Symphony Orchestra. The director, Mr. Baer, had great vision, and an admirable unwillingness to be discouraged by the lack of local talent. He programmed things like Peter and the Wolf, Amahl and the Night Visitors, and the Rossini Stabat Mater, assessed the gaps in his talent pool, and called the Conservatory. He personally drove a van from Melrose to Boston, picked us up, and transported us to the school where we rehearsed. I was happy because not only was I earning money, butthe group of boys who were my constant companions were always on the Ringer Roster – they generally became First Oboe, First Bassoon and First French Horn. Many nights, after a full day of classes, the ride to Melrose, and the rehearsal, I fell asleep on the ride home, my head on the shoulder of one of the boys, half-hearing conversations about chord progressions or Mahler as the dark, Masachussetts night raced past the windows.

In addition to the folding money and an excuse to hang out with my friends, Melrose was balm to my battered ego. In high school I had been good in a fierce, competitive sea of musicians. Our orchestra was nationally known, we played standard orchestral repretoire, and we had chair challenges to keep us on our toes. As high school seniors we played an entire, solo recital and soloed with the orchestra. We graduated and headed to Julliard, Curtis, Eastman or other schools known for their music programs, and became musicians and music educators. I had succeeded in that musical hot house, ignoring the fact that I really hated performing, and that there was really no joy in it for me, ever. At the Conservatory, my chinks became gaping holes, and it was a rare day when I did not see the disparity between Real Musicians and my fraudulent self. It was their passion, the oxygen in their universe, and they grumbled about hard classes or a tough new concerto, but they were energized by the challenge. I was not energized; I was depressed, exhausted, perpetually terrified of exposure and failure, and increasingly unable to see any future in music. My technique was not solid, my sound was muted by fear and tension, and I was too clenched to play with any real emotion. In Melrose, I was still Good. I sat first chair, I sounded wonderful in comparison to the rest of the section, and it was bliss. It was a break, a haven and a chance to be, if only for a few hours, what I thought I was in the first place. A musician.

In the spring of my freshman year, Mr. Baer announced that our next Melrose engagement was a Pops Concert, and that the program would include Franz von Suppe’s Poet and Peasant Overture. The piece, which is somewhere beyond schmaltzy, involves a long solo played by the principal cellist. It’s slow, pretty, and the kind of musical bon bon that requires practice and skill, but sounds far harder than it actually is. I sat behind my cello, trying to remain blank and immobile while a current flowed through my body. I could do it! I couldn’t do it. I would really be a star! God, I’d screw it up. I heard a voice. (A real one). “Ann?!” Mr. Baer was saying, looking at me from the podium. “Can you?”

“I’m sorry, can I…?” There was a quiet titter from the ranks of displaced cellists behind me.

“Can you do the solo – I can bring in somebody older from NEC, if you’d be more comfortable.”

“No” I answered, “I can do it.” I filled my vest with bombs, and started the timer.

“Great.” He smiled and ran a hand through his thick, black hair. “You know you don’t get paid extra, though – just fame and glory.” The laugh came. I smiled, distracted by the ticking of the timer. “Plus,” he added, “there’s a surprise involved.” A scout in the audience? A record of “Melrose Symphony’s Greatest Hits” featuring my solo? The stakes were high, indeed.

So I practiced endlessly, far more than I had practiced anything for the school orchestra, my lessons or my string quartet. The saccharine nature of the music made it easier for me to sound emotional – there was no subtlety required, no interpretation. It was simply a matter of showmanship. I milked every slide, put in a breath of space where it would build suspense, and generally played up the musical drama of the gentle, lyrical poet in contrast to the bombastic and rambunctious peasant in the second part of the piece. Think Little Nell tied to the tracks, followed by a daring rescue; I was playing Little Nell’s theme on the most soulful and plaintive of instruments. It was guaranteed to make the crowd go wild.

The first rehearsals went splendidly; I played well, I hit the high notes, and I was gratified to see admiration in the eyes of those seated behind me. My friends, all better musicians than I was, were delighted that I was doing so well, and the gay one (with whom, predictably, I was in love) offered to French braid my hair for the Big Performance. The night of the dress rehearsal I swaggered in with my cello, feeling that old sense that I was a Real Musician, stickers on my case, the best rosin, a life of adventure ahead. I could end up in Amsterdam, smoking great pot and playing with the Concertgebouw. I could be touring Asia, riding bullet trains in my distressed bomber jacket and reading Camus while the Violins had sectionals. Maybe I’d be in an all-girl quartet and wear flowing, Bohemian dresses and play arrangements of Black Sabbath.

I sat at the front of the cello section at the dress, on the edge of my wooden chair, through the wedding cake opening of the overture. All eyes were on me. The solo was coming. The moment was pregnant with hope and redemption. I lifted my bow and started the solo, thinking I sounded good -damned good – and catching Mr. Baer from the corner of my eye as he nodded encouragement. He backed off the podium, motioning us to continue playing as he backed towards the edge of the stage. When he emerged from behind the fraying curtain he was accompanied by a slender, elderly black man in a vest with a watch chain. As I played, Baer stepped quickly back to the podium, and the old man began to tap dance. He was tap dancing to Poet and Peasant, embellishing my mournful notes with that old, soft shoe. He grinned, he turned to wink at the principal flutist, and and he mugged at me with an expression of comically broad melancholy. I felt terribly hot, then terribly cold, and I knew that no one was looking at me; I had become the soundtrack. He was the surprise. My solo ended, the music became fast and dramatic, and he bucked and winged dramatically across the stage. He was the surprise, he was the show stopper, I was…a mediocre eighteen-year-old cellist getting fifty bucks to make him look good.

On the way home, my friends offered comfort – they knew that I had anticipated a Brave New World, and been sadly disappointed. I stopped practicing the solo all the time; I stopped practicing it at all. I had it, it wasn’t going to get any better, and it really didn’t matter if I played the whole thing with one finger and a straw hat on. In fact, that might have been more appropriate, given the tenor of the performance. I was a bitter, bitter girl.

I showed up on the night of the performance in my long, black dress, my hair French braided with tasteful sprigs of Baby’s Breath, and I knocked it out of the park. The audience was transfixed by Bojangles, from the first gasp when he shuffled on stage, to a standing ovation at the conclusion of his act. Although it is customary for a conductor to ask a soloist to stand and take a bow, I was not really the soloist, and there was no solo bow.

Afterwards, as I packed my cello and picked the  itchy sprigs of flora out of my hair, the old man approached. I kept my face neutral; I was not, under any circumstances going to become part of his fan club. “Hey,” he said with a bow, “you play real good. How’d you get to be so good, young as you are?” It was harder to resent him; he was fairly charming. And, I might add, a damned fine tap dancer.

“Practice” I answered, snapping the locks on my case. “you must practice, too, to dance like that?”

“Ah,” he smiled, “I do. That I do. I used to be famous, all up and down the Poconos, other places like that. Not much call for tap dancers now – good to have a show again.” Mr. Baer and the Symphony Ladies were approaching, trailed by a man with a bag of camera equipment.

“It was a pleasure working with you” I said, extending my hand. He took it, turned it palm down, and kissed it.

I only knew that my heart had changed, I did not know that that old man with his watch chain and his clicking shoes had given me more than a great story. He loved what he did, he burned with it, and the smallest gig was a chance to spark an audience and set them on fire. I didn’t have that, and I never would. From where I sit now, my fingers un-calloused, my bow arm gone to seed, it’s clear that it all happened just as it should have.