Makes perfect

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My husband Dave parked in front of the church. I was happy to see that the front door was wide open. One of my post-operative restrictions, of which there are quite a few, is to avoid lifting more than 10 pounds, which at the last minute was explained to me as 10 pounds, both arms, not each arm; per arm it’s about five pounds. The front door—one of a pair that fill in an arch—is solid wood with iron bands, oversized, and tends to stick. I maneuvered out of the back seat (no sitting in a vehicle’s front seat for a month, for airbag-avoidance reasons), while Dave ran up the stone stairs (I’m not supposed to hop up staircases, either) and opened the interior door, which isn’t as heavy as the first but is still substantial. 

The church’s interior was beyond familiar, but it struck me almost as sharply as it had when I’d come for my audition three years before. Thick patterned rugs in the vestibule, creaky floors, dark wood, a long table stocked with cups, coffee urns and flowers, sage green carpet in the back halls, photographs of clergy covering the walls, and drips of candle wax all over the place. 

I headed to the choir vesting room, happy to be back. 

The postop restriction that I like the least is a prohibition on playing/practicing musical instruments for a couple of months. Once the ban expires, I’m going to need practice, lots of it. I canceled my instrumental performing engagements for the spring when it became clear I’d need a big surgery.  Practice is essential to get me ready to play again. Besides which, without checking in with my instruments I feel…weird. I haven’t taken that much time off of them since I was five years old. 

I’m no saint when it comes to practicing. Musicians stress its importance; so do people in a lot of other professions. I wholeheartedly agree—in theory. Publilius Syrus, a Roman writer who had a knack for turning a phrase, wrote “Practice is the best of all instructors.” Sure, that’s true. 

Still, I remember a conversation that I had during my teenage years with someone’s mom. She said, “My boy would practice even if he didn’t have anywhere to play. Just him and the piano. I’m sure you’re like that, too.” 

Nope! I felt guilty about it for years, but that person, motivated by sheer love to master an instrument, wasn’t me. Without other musicians to play with, or an audience to play for, the younger me would have dropped practice in a heartbeat.  It took a long while to appreciate the beauty of technical exercises, the scales and long tones and etudes done with the  metronome clicking in the background. The kind of thing band directors wanted us students to document on our practice cards. 

I wanted to spend my time playing my favorite songs, the ones I’d already mastered, and also the hard parts in my music that annoyed me by being just out of reach. I hoped that my fingers would somehow master scales and other building blocks without much work. Therefore I lied weekly on my practice cards from the fifth to the twelfth grades, and my mother—who must have known that I was lying, but who had her own ambivalent history with practicing—signed them without protest or inquiry. 

I’ll admit I felt a little worried by the no-instruments restriction. It’s taken a lot of experience and years to get myself into a proper practicing habit. I worried that various stuff would start going sour. I once read a guide that insisted that practicing regularly would lead to lots of other things going right with my life. That turned out to be true, although I was biased in favor of finding the truth. It turns out that bumping to the edge of my abilities and then trying again the next day is a good thing.

 I’m lucky to have my voice as an instrument. I’d croaked through some warmups earlier in the week and arranged Maundy Thursday (a Holy Week service involving foot-washing) as my return to choir. My voice was still a bit froggy and soft, but the notes were there, nonetheless. People said hi, glad to see you. The warmup started. The music wrapped around me like a  heated blanket. For the next hour I cherished the pew beneath me, the sitting and standing, the sound of the pitch pipe, the scent of wax, the scratchy choir robe, and the notes on the page. 

 Charlie Parker said, “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then you practice practice practice…then when you get up on the bandstand forget all that and just wail.” And that’s exactly what I did, wailing these ancient songs until the lights were dimmed and the candles snuffed. 

Tuesday’s child

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The ambulance’s interior reminded me of a ship. Not much furniture except for pull-down seats for the EMTs and an area for my stretcher. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets and cubbies, with transparent covers to protect the contents from spilling when the road was bumpy. We were traveling over pot-holed city streets, so the ride was pretty rattly.  

The EMT, who’d been quite chatty in the hospital, had quieted down. This was a relief. While I find it helpful to practice conversational techniques, I’d been talk-talk-talking to various humans—well-meaning, professionally curteous note-takers, all of them—since about four in the morning. I stared out the window at Dorchester and then Boston, receding. Buildings, clouds, trees. I counted the reflections of the ambulance company logo on the back windows visible from the stretcher: nine. I closed my eyes and pretended I was sailing for France.  

A few weeks before my ride I’d had several days’ worth of strange sights. A man out in the winter cold dressed only in two bath towels, like a prophet. A (different) man wearing a powder blue jumpsuit, falling to the street from the bed of a U-Haul truck. A woman on a stretcher being ferried to an ambulance. We see EMT vehicles every once in a while in the neighborhood. My husband Dave’s ridden in one a couple of times, and Sonny has, once. My job has always been to follow in the car to whatever hospital, but on this day—a Friday—I got to ride myself. 

I was hoping to pay more attention to the experience than I did, but I was worried about dying (Dear Readers, a spoiler: I am still alive!). Ship feel, gray interior, shelving, shocks could be better, lots of reflections, skyline and sky: that’s what I remember. 

Tuesday I had surgery. I was born on a Tuesday, and this day of the week has always been one of my favorites in terms of messages and mysteries. Tuesday’s child is full of grace, as the rhyme says; I don’t know if this applies to me, but it would be nice if it did. I often have unusual interactions and conversations on Tuesdays. Surgery Tuesday was a blur, though, with any conversations faded from my memory. I hope I didn’t perseverate about bath towel-clad guy or my crush on Benedict Cumberbatch or long paragraphs or other odd things, but I’m sure the anesthesiologists are used to people blathering on. 

On surgery Tuesday my final conversation was with Dave, and I suspect it was mostly one-sided. He left me a lovely note on a heart-shaped pillow. 

The next week—still in hospital, but on the way out soon—it was a remarkable Tuesday. I’d been talking a bunch in the meantime, of course. Mostly about books and music. People like to talk about their book clubs, the instruments they learned as a kid, their hopes to pick up music again someday. I’d met a therapy dog, a poodled who’d gazed at me with topaz eyes and allowed me to stroke her ears. Communicating something, although all I could reply was “What a good girl.”  

On Tuesday I talked with an endocrine doctor  about the clarinet solo in Peter and the Wolf. With a phlebotomist about the proper contents of Easter baskets—should they be gifts only, candy only, or both? (I say, any combination is fine—she seemed to like that.) The last big conversation of the afternoon was part of a trip off the floor, all the way to the X-Ray deparment. We traversed a set of corridors with background music, Brazilian jazz, coming out of the loudspeakers. This was the only place in the entire wing where there was music, my driver told me. He wheeled my stretcher into a spot across from the coffee machine. Mmmm, coffee. 

In the next bay over, another stretcher-occupant called out. His voice was muffled and indistinct. Post-surgery, I’ve found, junk builds up in the lungs, making it difficult to talk clearly or loudly. 

“I need my hearing aids,” he said. 

A doctor or technician—a scrub-clad dude—said, “Hearing aids? I’ll help you find them. Did they fall down here?” (noises of searching the sides of the bed)  

Louder: “I need my hearing aids!” 

“Okay—are they in your room? Where are they?” 

“At the end of my penis!” 

This, as you might imagine, nonplussed the doctor. He hovered like a confused angel beside the stretcher. However, I had a flash of possible insight involving slant rhyme. I am not usually someone to butt in on a private moment, but I raised my phlegmy voice as much as possible and said, “I think he is saying that he needs to urinate.” 

This proved to be the case. The search for hearing aids was called off, and the patient was able to get some relief. 

I waited for it to be my turn to have my insides photographed and thought about whether I could tune my own ears to a frequency where the message would be clearer. Maybe I am indeed on the way to France. 

Sick bed

Hey, Readers!

I’ve missed a couple of posts lately because I’ve been in hospital (still am…). Oh the tubes!

Why not browse through a couple of your favorite topics until I can post again?

I hope you all are having good weeks, and I’ll be writing more soon.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

The paragraph

Check out the video/audio version of this essay here!

I was searching for “longest paragraph in English literature,” but all the entries were about sentences. The most frequently cited was William Faulkner’s 1,288-word wonder, rambling and full of runons, and nineteen words longer than this essay—from the novel Absalom, Absalom!, published in 1936. There are longer sentences in the record. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club contains one of 13,955 words. Then there’s Nigel Tomm, whose The Blah Story “demolishes the barrier of words and meaning,” as a two-star Goodreads review puts it. Volumes 16-19 of this series comprise a sentence of nearly half a million words. Or at least that’s what the internet says; I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to reading Coe or Tomm. (My forehead may be high, but my brow is low.) Generally Faulkner’s sentence gets the nod as the longest “proper” sentence. 

My search for longest paragraph was due to a recent addition to my nightstand books. On my visits to the libraries in nearby towns, I always look for the book sale section. Just about every library has one. Sometimes there’s a little box for you to pay for your purchases, strictly on the honor system, and sometimes you pay a person—a librarian or a Friends of the Library volunteer. I often buy something. The prices are great, anywhere from a quarter to three dollars per book. The money goes straight to  the library, and when I’m done reading I can drop the book in a donations bin to keep the cycle going. 

I paid $2 for William Kennedy’s O Albany! (published in 1983) at the Tufts Library in Weymouth. It was my first visit to Tufts since a big remodeling a few years back. When Sonny was a kid, we would visit the library and the park behind it a couple of times a month. There were swings, benches, a playground, an amphitheater, and a big slide set into a hillside. Plus a Dunkin’ in walking distance. The big slide and swings were long gone, along with my need to amuse Sonny with playgrounds, but the playground remained, and the library was much bigger. Lots of places to sit and work, art everywhere, grandfather clocks!, warm lighting in the stacks, and a bookstore room on the mezzanine floor. The Kennedy book was atop one of the piles in the nonfiction section. 

I’d heard of Kennedy but never read him. All I knew about Albany was that it’s the capital  of New York. I had driven through Albany around thirty years ago while on my journey from Chicago to Boston. I didn’t stop; my mind was set on Massachusetts. It’s a pity. Albany, settled in 1614, incorporated in 1686, a state capital since 1797, is—as Kennedy’s subtitle promises—an “Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels.” It would have been worth a look. 

I added O Albany! to the nightstand pile and started reading it in my usual fashion, a few pages at a time. As stopping points, my habit is to use either a formal section end or the end of the first paragraph on a left-hand page. It turned out to be the kind of book I like: detailed, historical, with lots of back-room deals and double-crosses. Kennedy’s energetic, unfussy writing style, as well as his content, a city and the Democratic machine that ran it, reminded me of Mike Royko, who is one of my favorite writers of all time. Royko was a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times and then, when that paper was bought by Rupert Murdoch, the Chicago Tribune. I loved his pieces about Chicago places and characters. Action and intrigue that the giddiest space or soap opera can’t match! 

The fourth chapter in the Kennedy was titled “North Albany: Crucible for a Childhood.” It began with a winter’s day in the 1930s, when Kennedy was a child. His  mother slipped on some ice on her apartment’s front steps, tumbling to the sidewalk and breaking her glasses. As she lay on the sidewalk an neighborhood man approached, greeted her politely by name, stepped over her and the glasses, and continued on his way to work. 

Great start to the chapter! I kept reading. The narrative in the chapter was organized along stream-of-consciousness principles and was now recalling a public pool owned by Henry Gratton Finn. My eyelids felt heavy, so I looked for a paragraph break. It was then that I realized there wasn’t one in sight. I paged back to Chapter 3: standard-sized paragraphs. Forward to Chapter 5: same. But in Chapter 4 there was one paragraph, twenty single-spaced pages long. 

Paragraphing comes from the Greek paragraphos, which means “to write beside.” It’s amazing to think how much thought has gone into presenting the written word. Innovations include spaces between words, punctuation, conventions for the direction of a text, and paragraphs. The paragraphos was a symbol that indicated where the speaker or thought changed. Eventually it became a printer’s sign, the pilcrow, indicating the need to leave room for a big fancy capital letter to start a new section, later simplified as indentation and then just an extra line of blank space. Then came the idea that a paragraph was one or more sentences expressing a point. 

My sense is that paragraphs today tend to be shorter than in the days of my youth. Is that because of our collapsing attention spans? Because there are some great writers who are masters of pith? Or does it make it easier to fit in a few extra ads in between? I dunno. But on the night I started Chapter 4, I had happened unawares upon a Himalaya-sized graph. I knew from my armchair mountaineering that patience is most likely to conquer a peak, so I read the first couple of sentences at the top of the page 28 and camped for the night.   

Kennedy’s writing hadn’t seemed particularly highbrow. However, he was writing in a time of great experimentation in form and tone. Kennedy—who is 96 as of this writing—was born in Albany in 1928 to a working-class Irish and Catholic family. As the book’s title shows, he was well aware of Faulkner’s Absalom. Early in his career Kennedy worked as a journalist in New York, in Europe (for the US Army), and in San Juan. While in San Juan he became friends with Hunter S. Thompson, an innovator extraordinaire. Kennedy returned to Albany in his 30s, where he worked as an investigative reporter for the Albany Times Union and wrote a lot of stories about the machine. His first novel,  1969’s The Ink Truck, was set in Albany, as are many of his novels. One of those Albany novels, Ironweed, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984. 

None of the sentences inside Chapter 4 was overlong. I concentrated on enjoying the climb, page after page, night after night. It took close to a week to finish the chapter, since I was also reading other of the nightstand books and intent on completion without the supplementary oxygen of skimming or skipping ahead. 

At last I came to page 42, where Kennedy closed out the chapter with a meditation about the benefits of sentiment, and even of sentimentalism. No spoilers, I promise! That long paragraph suggested an answer for a question that I have had about myself, and maybe helps explain why I, a rootless person, am so entranced by books that are tied to a particular place and time. It started me thinking of how and where to set my roots, and which library to visit next.