People make life so interesting.
Take my music teacher, for instance. On the small side, with huge coke glasses, she dresses impeccably, in styles that went out years ago. She once told me that even when she was younger, she always went opposite everyone else. If pencil skirts were in, she wore full ones; if full ones were in, she made sure they were as narrow and straight as she could get them. At seventy four, she looks years younger, maybe because of the make-up she still puts on every day, or maybe because her youthful spirit defies age as being a number. She doesn’t know people in their seventies aren’t supposed to teach music, lead a choir of people older than herself, put on huge Broadway-like productions, and own a mansion.
The mansion, which was once a huge southern plantation, still looks like it should belong in the nineteenth century, with tall windows, twisting stairs, and oil paintings of George Washington hanging in the parlor. We practice music in a room where Thomas Jefferson stood.
But you can’t tell her true talent just by looking at her.
She majored in piano in college, has sung in front of presidents, and, after only playing for a year, was the first violin in the orchestra. If I decided I wanted to play some obscure African instrument, she’d know how. For real.
She doesn’t understand how anyone could not want to be perfect at what they do. It’s all about technique and following the written music to the very last note. That’s not to say she doesn’t put any “heart and soul” into her music. Maybe a little too much heart and soul; if my ear drums are damaged, it’s not for any reason but that she doesn’t just play the piano—she pounds the piano as if she’s expecting a passing car a mile away to hear it. Every last emotion in her heart is squeezed out onto those black and white keys, onto the strings of the guitar, or the last high note of the song.
And the crazy thing is, for being such a music lover, I’ve only ever seen one CD in her house, to be played on a battery operated player that might have been picked up at the dollar store.
“I don’t need to hear music,” she says, “I have it in my head.”
That may be true, but I think the real reason is that she couldn’t comfortably listen to anyone play or sing without wanting to correct every mistake. She can’t stand mistakes. I know this because when she’s listening to us sing, she sits tensely on the edge of the seat, ready to cover her ears and grimace the moment we go off key. But the music in her head is perfect.
Or take some of the old people who live where my dad works.
People like Captain, a lovable old black man with a big voice and a mistaken idea that he won a game of checkers with my sister. He did win it, but he played by his own rules, much to the audience’s—a group of his old friends and me—chagrin. The checkers ended with a spirited fight about how to play the game, but Captain Jack didn’t care. To him, he had won fair and square and even though that was a few years ago, he never fails to remind me…because his mind is a little confused and he can’t remember who he played.
I have a feeling that he could forget everything else in life, but if I were there on his dying day, he’d remind me about that checker game.
Then there’s Willy. Willy loved music, especially hymns. He used to play the keyboard in his sleep. For the longest time, I thought he just played the piano with his eyes closed.
I used to go in and play through the hymn book for him while he sang. He’d go along with my selections for a while, but then he’d page through the book and give me the songs he wanted to hear. Sometimes I’d play the same song three times in an hour, but he didn’t care. He also didn’t care that my butt could be aching from sitting so long and my eyes could be strained—to him, we all loved music just as much as he did and three or four hours was just getting started.
Willy's mother, who always dressed like she belonged in the nineteenth century, used to sit by the piano and clap out a beat. She wore a perpetual smile on her face and used to thank me so nicely after I finished. I thought she was the absolute sweetest thing--until I found out that she had a strong need to go through people's purses, taking anything she liked for her own personal use. Dude, she took the concept of sharing to a whole new level.
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