nine. i have nine fingers i can use right now. and, like chicken marsala, i am putting them on the keys and following the music. two weeks after breaking my wrists i was back playing and directing. who needs wrists anyway? who needs all ten fingers?
music can’t be stopped. it’s in the sound of the sunrise, the sound of your baby waking up, the sound of the clink of coffee cups. it’s humming as you ready for your day, singing along in the car, laughter shared over the phone. it’s in the hug you give your children as you drop them at school and the help you give your aging parents. it’s in dinner you prepare for loved ones, and in the volunteering you do for a local service organization. it’s in the walk in the woods, a stroll by the water’s edge. it’s in the quiet weary at the end of the evening, the sighs of a life-day done well. it’s in dreams and in hope. and it can’t be stopped.
we will always turn to the arts for comfort, for meaning, in joy and in sorrow. the music follows us; it surrounds us. it waits silently, ready to volume-up when necessary, hush-down when needed. it’s background. it’s foreground.
my aunt texted me a link to an article that was published in a long island news source. the state of ny recently enacted the child victims act, extending the statute of limitations for a survivor of child sexual abuse in criminal and civil cases.
the article she sent was about a woman, now 58, who alleges sexual abuse by a music teacher in her middle school years that extended into her high school years, a young woman whose first sexual experience was forced upon her by a man twice her age.
i just re-read the article online, which had 70 comments by readers, a mixed bag of revulsion, outright indignation and seething condemnation. people who claimed this woman was lax in her non-reporting way-back-when and was now after the money in a civil suit. people who knew that this music teacher had been assaulting young girls for years and years, whose pedophilia was ignored by the administration and who were now cheering for the uncloaking of the mantle of silence, a journey to possible justice. people who were sickened.
i alternatively sobbed and couldn’t breathe trying to click on this article on my phone when i got the text. i needed to download an app, couldn’t think straight to remember my apple sign-in; i was not at home and was anxious to get there and read in the safety of our kitchen. i was sure that i knew who this un-named alleged perpetrator/rapist/pedophile was.
when we got home, i was able to download the app and read the article aloud. no name was mentioned of the man-who-was-accused-of-heinous-acts-with-little-girls, but a school location was and it was then i realized that – in two different towns, side-by-side, in the late 70s – there were at least two men who made it their mission to prey, to take the virginity of young women and forever change those young women’s lives. the man who stole my innocence and the innocence of girls i tried in vain to protect was a different man than the one in this article.
there was no victim-witness division in the prosecutor’s office back then. in an all-too-common story, not one of the assaulted pressed charges. as far as i know, both of these men walk freely about, wherever they live. the smallest among us may still be suffering their disgusting acts. i can vouch for the fact that the fallout of the act does not end; this breach of trust, this contemptible forcing of will, the abhorrent power-wielding by another leaves fossils in every cell.
we stumble into small-but-profound acts of impact. people donating used mascara wands to aid in the cleansing, and thus, healing, of small wild animals in need of care. donations of suitcases to foster care agencies to give children a place, besides a plastic bag, to keep their tiny collection of belongings.
it may not balance out the atrocities, but these gestures, these initiatives help. we are responsible for each other.
protecting the smallest among us. the children. the creatures. why can’t this be the most important?
it doesn’t matter. anything could be happening. any fire. any storm. and then, like glitter, the tiny miracles show up. the mica. and for a moment or two we are standing still, our focus re-directed.
this quote – “life is a series of thousands of tiny miracles…” (mike greenberg) – appeared in my facebook feed, re-posting from a decade ago. a gentle tap, a hey-remember-this.
the post below (#TheMicaList) is from not-quite-a-year ago, published on my 60th birthday. as i rapidly approach 61, i find that re-reading it reminds me. to everything there is a season. and a time to see mica.
dear Life,
my sweet momma would often call me just as the time i was born would pass on my birthday. at the end of her life she didn’t do this anymore but i always remembered anyway. mid-morning i would know that this was the moment i arrived at this place, this was the beginning of my passing through, the time of my visiting.
today, this very morning, it was 60 years ago that i joined the rest of this good earth on its journey around the sun. spinning, spinning. every day.
it wasn’t long till i realized – as an adult – that we spin our wheels constantly to get to some unknown place we can’t necessarily define or find. we search and spin faster, out of mission, out of passion, out of frustration, loss, a feeling of no value or a sense of lostness. we spin. we seek. we try to accomplish. we try to make our mark. we try to finish. we try to start. we leave scarred rubber skids of emotions on the road behind us; we burn out with abrupt, unexpected turns, we break, wearing out. spinning. spinning. from one thing to another, our schedules full of busy things to do. often, days a repetition of the previous day. every day full. full of spinning. but we are still seeking. life is sometimes what we expected. life is sometimes not what we expected. and that makes us spin faster, our core dizzying with exhaustion.
the simplest gifts – the air, clear cool water to drink, the mountaintop exhilaration of parenthood, hand-holding love, the ephemeral seconds of self-actualizing accomplishment, the sun on our faces…we have images stored in our mind’s eye like photographs in an old-fashioned slide show, at any time ready for us to ponder. but often-times we fail to linger in these exquisite simplicities. the next thing calls.
this morning, as i stare at 60 – which, as i have mentioned, is kind of a significant number for me – i realize that everything i write about or compose about or talk about or hold close in my heart is about these simplest things, the pared-down stuff, the old boots on the trail – not fancy but steadfast, not brand new but muddied up with real. in our day-to-day-ness i/we don’t always see IT. the one thing. there is something -truly- that stands out each day in those sedimentary layers of our lives. it is the thing that makes the rest of the day pale in comparison. in all its simple glory, the one true moment that makes us realize that we are living, breathing, ever-full in our spinning world. the thing that connects us to the world. the shiny thing. the mica. that tiny irregular piece of glittering mica in the layers and veneers of life. the thing to hold onto with all our might.
that tiny glitter of mica. mica nestles itself within a bigger rock, a somewhat plain rock – igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary ordinariness. not pinnacle, it is found within the bigger context. sometimes harder to find, harder to notice, but there. and it makes the day our day, different than any other. it is the reason we have learned or grown that day. it is the reason we have laughed that day. it is the reason we have picked ourselves up off the floor that day. it is the reason we have breathed that day.
and now, at 60, i resolve to see, to collect those pieces of glitter. not in an old wooden box or a beat-up vintage suitcase, but, simply, since they are moments in time, in a tiny notebook or on my calendar. join me in #TheMicaList if you wish. as we wander and wonder through it is our job, in our very best interest, to notice the finest shimmering dust, the mica in the rock, the glitter in our world.
with all the reminders around us to remember-remember-remember that every day counts, we get lost in our own spinning stories, narratives of many strata. i know that in the midnight of the days i look back on the hours of light and darkness in which i moved about and remember one moment – one moment – be it a fleetingly brief, elusive, often evanescent moment of purity, the tiniest snippet of conversation, belly-laugh humor, raw learning, naked truth, intense love – those are the days i know – i remember – i am alive.
my visit to this physical place is not limitless. but each glitter of mica is a star in a limitless sky of glitter, a milky way of the times that make me uniquely me and you uniquely you, a stockpile of priceless relics. my time stretches back and stretches ahead, a floating silken thread of shiny. it’s all a mysterious journey.
“i want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.” (oriah mountain dreamer)
in the middle. of the storm. of the fire. the stallion of human nature rears up; we push back; we flail hooves with words, with rebuttals, with defenses. and the circumstances that have created the storm or the arsonists who have built the fire prevail, deaf, obstinate, bullheadedly dogged.
after a bout, we raise our beaten heads up, panting. and we silently stand. we slow our breathing down, and begin to calmly wait, deliberately, intentionally trust that the storm will pass, the fire will go to ash.
for “every storm runs out of rain.” (maya angelou)
and we will come out on the other side. joan once told me that the only way to the other side is through. those wise words have echoed in my heart time and again. there is no circumventing, no avoidance. the fires, the storms will come. no matter. and although we will live in them longer than we wish, longer than we ought, they will not last forever.
“this too shall pass.” (my sweet momma)
the pain will subside, even a tiny bit. the angry words will run out. the crisis will start its labored, interminable return to zero axis. good will begin to tilt the seesaw. the sun will rise. next will come. and we will have survived a worst day, worst fire, worst storm. we will still be breathing, having passed through hyperventilating, catching our breath, slowing our pulse. we will be standing.
” i don’t care what’s in front of me or what’s behind me; i just wanna stop the wheel and stand still…” (phil vassar, ‘stand still’)
and we will be in this moment, this one we won’t ever get back. the fire, the storm attempt to rob us of these very seconds, to draw the breath from our ashy-rain-filled hearts. but we stand still. we know it will pass. we know that every storm runs out of rain.
when i think about my sweet momma and my poppo, my big brother, my godfather uncle allen, my grandmother-mama-dear, more beloved family and dear friends – all who have left this earth – i don’t think about their jobs or upward mobility, their income or the status symbols they owned. i don’t think of the timeline of their school or work or whether they had finished a degree or if they had even gone to college. i don’t ponder awards or certificates they received or resorts where they may have vacationed.
i think about what a difference they made in my life. my mom’s devotion to cheery kindness, my dad’s quiet and stubborn thoughtfulness, my big brother’s goofy humor and ability to tell a story in all its details, my uncle’s absolute commitment to his fun-loving smile no-matter-what-was-happening. i think about the joy my mom experienced when my dad brought her grocery-store-flowers. i think about big bowls of coffee ice cream with my brother, neil diamond playing in the background. i think about my uncle generously paying for my very first recordings in ny, diligently holding me up and gently pushing me. i think about simple moments with them. in what could be a crowded-with-information-obituary in my head for each person, i hold a piece of their heart instead. they have made a difference in this world. they made a difference for me. i remember.
(from THE FAULT IN OUR STARS) “you know, this obsession you have, with being remembered? this is your life! this is all you get! you get me, and you get your family and you get this world, and that’s it! …. and i’m going to remember you. …. you say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s an insult to me. i know about you.”
we live on an infinite continuum of opportunity. chances to bring light and hope to others. deeds we can do out of kindness, goals reached by collaborating together. we face choice just as soon as the sun-peeking-over-the-horizon wakes us. we innately or intentionally decide, we head in a direction, we live a day.
“We’re all traveling through time, together, everyday of our lives… All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable life. I just try to live everyday as if I have deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it… As if it was the full, final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.” (from ABOUT TIME)
this song. i have performed it countless times. in nyc’s central park for tens of thousands of people, in small medical clinics, in large oncological settings, in chicago’s grant park. at a pharmaceutical conference in puerto rico, outdoors with the lance armstrong tour of hope. across the country, in pajamas and jeans and all-dressed-up. in theatres and at walks/runs, in schools and churches. for organizations including y-me, the american cancer society, gilda’s club, young survival coalition, susan g. komen foundation, the annual breast cancer symposium. and each time, heidi and i, working together in performance, fighting back tears. the list is profound. not because of the innumerable times i have sang this song, but because of all the people in these places and behind the scenes, joining together, remarkably touching the lives of others: those they know and those they may never know.
we make a difference. in every arena of our lives. every place we go. every interaction. every gesture. every assumption. every conversation. every every-thing. every single thing.
what intention will we have? will we be positive or negative?
“the truth is, I now don’t travel back at all, not even for a day. … live life as if there were no second chances.” (ABOUT TIME)
the sun lights our room early in the morning. we don’t have room-darkening shades so if artificial measures haven’t been used (read: obnoxious alarm clocks) we wake with the light.
thoughts stream in with the light in this just-past-the-dark-hour. our quiet as we sip coffee, like jiffy-pop starting to pop on a hot stovetop, is punctuated by bits of conversation. the dreams we are climbing out of, the babycat’s snoring through the night, dogdog’s sweet need for early pets, what the weather looks like out our window peering into the backyard, projects we are working on, what is on the docket for the day. ideas, reminiscences patter through. we stretch into the day yawning in front of us, putting on, and trying to keep on, caps of making-good-assumptions. today is a good day to have a good day, as the saying goes.
good assumptions. apparently, they are a high ticket item. for we all are, in the world, surrounded by those who do not make good assumptions. my sweet momma would tell me, “don’t jump to conclusions.” “ask questions,” she would admonish. a difficult lesson worth oft-repeating.
we would sit on the couch at the end of the day, sipping tea and eating chips ahoy cookies. we’d talk about the day, bitter jabs by classmates or exclusionary moments i had endured. “try to find something good,” she’d remind me, while at the same time not underplaying the hurtful behaviors. “make good assumptions.” this is the same woman who, on the emergency room table in the wee hours of the night, in great pain and fearing a broken hip, looked up at a cranky and tired nurse and remarked, “you have a beautiful smile.” it changed the moment; i suspect it changed the rest of the nurse’s day; perhaps it changed all those who she interacted with thereafter and so forth. those undeniable concentric circles.
in early days with david, clearly in the beaky-beaky school of thought, one of the most-oft-repeated things i remember him saying is “ask questions.” don’t assume you know. don’t assume anything. ask. listen.
quite some time ago, mike stated, “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.” watch, ask questions and listen, he advised. don’t make assumptions. the best way to learn, the best way to collaborate, the best way to approach challenge, the best way to move in the world.
momma would smile and look at me, facing down adversity or standing tall on a personal summit, and say, “wowee!”
i can practically hear her now, her eyes dancing, saying, “see? if you ARE going to assume anything, assume awe.”
there is a screen door that i am lusting over. it sits outside an antique shoppe, subject to the rain and snow, sun and wind. one of these days we will take big red over there and purchase it; the test is that i am still thinking about it. we have no idea where we will put it. but there is something about it; it has a story and that story will always be a mystery to us. giving that door a home again will add to its journey, its history.
last night i had a dream. it was, as dreams are, fraught with inconsistencies and unlikelinesses, but i remember one thing about it in particular. in my dream, david handed me a check he had received from someone. someone, presumably the person who wrote the check, had scratched out the address and, all along the top of the check, had written in a different address: my growing-up-on-long-island address. i was delightedly startled and pressed david to tell me about the person who clearly now lived in this cherished house, but, in the way that dreams make both little sense and all the sense in the world, he was unable to give me any more information. what i know is that it left me with a reassurance of the feeling from that house. it was a reminder of a time gone by, a time woven deeply into who i am and, for that house, the fabric of about two decades of our family.
houses remember. and you can feel it. the moment i walked into our house i knew. this was the place i wanted to live; this was the place i wanted to have the next part of my life. this house had all good things to offer; i wanted to sustain its story. i suspect it would have been easier to have purchased a brand new home way back then, something pristine and customized to our needs. something that had a sparkling new kitchen or an attached garage, central air conditioning or an open floor plan.
but this house said, “wait. don’t go. give me a chance. i can offer you a lifetime of sturdy foundation. i can tell you i have been there in the light and in the dark times. i can be a safe place for you. i can hold you and celebrate you and listen to the laughter of your children. you can walk on my old wood floors and keep food in my old pantry. you can have dogs and cats and they can run circles through my rooms and children can push or ride plastic wheeled toys round and round hall-kitchen-dining room-living room. you can use my rooms as you need. a nursery with a singing-to-sleep-rocking-chair can later be a studio with a big piano; i can rejoice in listening. you can sit in my south-facing living room and delight in the sun streaming in the windows. i know it will need a little tuck-pointing down the road, but you can burn all the torn-off-the-packages-christmas-wrappings in the old fireplace. you can paint and redecorate and remodel as you wish for it won’t change how i feel. i can be your house. and i, even someday when you have moved on to somewhere else, will always remember you.”
we really need to go get that old screen door and add it to the story of our house.
i don’t subscribe to ‘inspirational daily’ but somehow this showed up in my email feed on thursday, a particularly good day to read the wise words of eleanor roosevelt. an activist, the first lady regularly published her musings and views. her accomplishments as a diplomat were far-reaching; her life story difficult and profoundly inspiring. and she was wise. her words remind me of sue bender’s words (from ‘plain and simple journal‘) “to reconcile our seeming opposites, to see them as both, not one or the other, is our constant challenge.”
what would either of these wise women say about our current climate, i wonder?
would eleanor roosevelt pine for the fine-tuned, thoughtful, intelligent discussions of her lifetime? would she abhor the fact-less, jarringly aggressive re-telling of stories, of narrative, all-dressed-up and skewed to one side? would she shudder to hear of attempts to decimate human rights, to place limits, to undermine? i can’t imagine that she would consider the display of indecency, of avenging and putrid name-calling ‘great-mindedness’. i fear she would, instead, point a wagging finger at the players and implore them to be wide awake, to be thinking, to be discussing idea and possibility and wholeheartedly move forward with conscience.
i wonder, does sue bender, in her middle 80s now, feel a sense of deep disappointment in a society that does not attempt to reconcile seeming opposites, does not see them as both, does not cross the aisle but instead builds walls of hateful rhetoric, looks for the worst in each other, advances the ugly? what would her kind soul say about the divisiveness, poisoning all in its rampant siege, a pandemic reaching unsuspecting venues, its toxic arrows out of the quiver and readied. how would she parse out the arguments, the lack of concern for the victimized, the harassment of those on the other side than the leadership?
goodness knows, i suspect both of these amazing women, living in different generations, would be saddened by this climate. they might weep in absolute dismay. or, they might just whisper into the wind, to whomever might listen, “great minds discuss ideas. average minds discuss events. small minds discuss people.”
with these broken wrists i have moved from a whole rest to a quarter rest. i have made progress playing my piano and my broken-wrists have told me when to be silent. in the silence the earth keeps spinning, we trek around the sun, everything keeps keeping on. but for a moment, i rest.
we are each granted rests upon entrance into this orchestra-of-earth. sometimes they are chosen, sometimes they are not. always they are necessary. it is in your quiet that others make noise, that others speak, that other timbres color the muted. the hush is yours to own; the rest is yours to take. the silence both sometimes frighteningly deafening and sometimes a grand relief. the metronome really never stops.
(a reprise of paragraphs from 8.13.2015 post): at 1am, we walked to the lakefront. away from as many lights as we could get away from, we laid on some old steps, bricks and mortar digging into our backs so that we could gaze straight up, watching the night sky for the meteor shower.
the streaks of white light across navyblueblack make us draw in our breath. i’m wondering how far away this meteor is…how it is that we, here on earth, can see this amazing sight. such a big sky. such tiny bodies in contrast lying on the ground, waiting for the symphony to start, waiting for the downbeat, the symphony that has been continuously playing, the downbeat lost in centuries upon centuries of time gone by. like any good piece of music, it’s the rests in-between the notes, the rests in-between the meteorstreaks, that build the anticipation, that create the emotionflow, that bring tears to your eyes. each burst, each streak of whitelight is a miracle, a tiny moment exploding in time, so far away, in vast vastness.
time stretches out in front of us. and behind us. we are tiny and we are big. we gather in the moments, we breathe them, we rejoice, we worry, we ponder, we move. there is no downbeat and the symphony is already playing, has been playing and will continue to play. always. it is magical. and it is vast.
reverse threading 