Sunday
morning, before the sun and birds and breakfast smells, I’m awake, lying in bed
in the middle of all that soft gray stillness and listening to the rain come
down, making tinny sounds on the gutters, a mellower putputput against
the roof. I haven’t gotten up yet to turn the radio alarm off, but the volume
is turned low so that the song floats behind the watery pattering of the rain
like a whisper, a memory. Moon River, wider than a mile: I’m crossing you in
style some day… [Johnny Mercer,
1961]
I know
the song, and hearing it brings it all back. After my piano teacher’s memorial
service, as I was cleaning out my piano bench, I’d found the tape he’d given
his students for Christmas, recordings of him playing a selection of his
favorites. It’d opened with Tchaikovsky’s First. It’d ended with Moon
River.
Two drifters, off to see the world. There’s such a
lot of world to see…I am reminded of a story about a little boy who loved music so much he
practiced in the dead of night on a piano with chipped keys and missing hammers
because his parents couldn’t afford anything more; who met Arthur Rubinstein
and walked away thinking, I’m going to have that one day, and I’m going to tour
Europe and play a Steinway and wear a bowtie and make recordings for the world to
hear; who grew up but kept playing and played his way into Juilliard, and
played his way to Europe; and there was music, and fear and darkness in Cold
War-era Germany, and love, and then children.
But there’s another story, about a man who divorces and settles in
Monterey for retirement and becomes a teacher, a mentor, records tapes only his
students hear, lives several quiet more years, and one day locks himself in his
car and falls asleep breathing in the carbon monoxide trickling out of the end
of a rubber hose, dreaming of music and sunsets. We’re after the same rainbow’s end,
waitin’ round the bend, my
Huckleberry friend, Moon River, and me…
Early
Sunday morning, with the rain and the radio murmuring softly in the background
and myself in the gray light, and life has never seemed more beautiful or so
broken.
I was doing homework with my two best friends
when I found out; we were more interested in Tom Cruise and how to do French
braids than trains that left Topeka at 4:00 and airplanes that lifted off at 45°. The phone rang. I penciled in an answer and
my mother picked the phone, and I looked up from my homework and watched her
face change.
After the memorial service, I ran a search and
Yahoo! pulled up a newspaper article. I read it several times, wordlessly. My
piano teacher had not died because of a car accident or a heart attack. Pianist
commits suicide…
Right then, my composure broke and I suddenly had the sense that I was
simultaneously falling and being crushed. He was—had been—the best pianist on
the face of the earth. He’d had a beard, a stomach going round with age. Like
Mr. Rogers, he took off his shoes and hung up his jacket when he came in. He
had been there for my first recital, and he’d clapped and whooped louder than
anyone. He was invincible, in his brilliance and warmth immune to sickness.
He’d considered me his best student, and I didn’t know why. The moment
I had to play for anyone, including him, my arms would jellify, my fingers
would ossify, and my palms would sweat-ify. I’d be embarrassed to look at him
after butchering a piece, afraid that I’d find his face twisted in disgust or
plastered with a forced encouraging smile. Instead, I’d see understanding: There’s
no reason to be ashamed, because I know.
And so I remembered and remembered, and they were
golden memories, but all I could feel was sadness hollowing out my bones. Then,
gradually, anger and hurt. My computer began to hibernate. I tried to
think, but all I could come up with was How could he? He was kinder and
brighter and stronger than I was, and yet I couldn’t imagine myself facing
anything that would make me give up, and maybe that’s because I have only felt
the weakest of life’s blows—but I did know what it was to open yourself and be
weighed and found wanting, to be laughed at and discouraged, to fail and fall
until it felt like your heart would bleed. And because of this, all I
knew was determination. It is what makes me send a short story out again after
I receive its thirteenth rejection, it is how I keep writing and standing in
the ruthless writing business. When I ask myself why—why dream so boldly, why
risk so much—I know, at almost the same moment I begin to question, exactly
why. Love for what I do—passion. Strength of mind—the courage to hope, and the
knowledge that I will be OK because my existence is not all words and musical
notes, but also the bonds that I make, sometimes through those words and notes.
He not only had his music, his passion, to live for, he had his
students and his daughter and his grandsons—so how could he?
Why?
Because my emotions were jumbled and my thoughts were going nowhere, I
woke my computer up and wrote for a bit, did some sorting. My teacher, when he
was younger, used to have the same problem I did. Nerves so bad he would retch
into a plastic bag before the curtains parted and he would snap up ramrod
straight. And instead of being sorry for me but unable to suppress that little
burst of lightness because he himself had gotten over it and didn’t have to
deal with it anymore, he had compassion for me. Sitting in front of the
computer, I remembered what he had done for me and what I was not doing for
him, and I took a breath, stepped back and swallowed my own feelings, my
preconceptions, my sense of right and wrong. I began a story; I created a
character, fashioned a world for him, and set out to understand. So that one
day, when it was over for me too, I could turn to my teacher, who had once
believed in and felt for me like a grandfather, and look at him with
compassion—not pity or uncertainty, a face twisted in disgust or plastered with
a forced encouraging smile—and say, You shouldn’t have been ashamed of your
life, because I know; I know what it’s like to carry the weight of the
world, we’re in the same boat.
At the end of my journey, at the bottom of page
twenty, I skipped a line and wrote Pity steps to the side and says, I’m
sorry. I’m glad I’m not you. Compassion says, I know. Then I deleted
everything.
So it’s Sunday morning, three years later,
the sun rising and making the rain look like diamonds, my dog thumping his tail
against my door, and, with these thoughts in mind, I’m out of bed, pulling the
curtains apart to open the window, reminded of why it feels so good to breathe,
to feel, fearlessly and deeply, sorrow, and compassion, and peace.
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