Left & Right. Right & Left.
My mom arrives tomorrow.
I was given every middle-class opportunity. Good schools, basketball camp, art camp, churchianity, boy scouts, little league, brothers. Some things stuck and some didn't. We had an upright piano in our living room, to this day one of my favorite pianos, which, admittedly, is probably a chicken/egg situation. There's no precise age when I first approached that alter. Just an uninterrupted, blurry ascent as my legs dangled evercloser to the pedals. Old-timey piano bench pieces: mom playing the right hand, me playing the left with both.
Downingtown, Pennsylvania was a "main street community" long before they began advertising Downingtown as "A Main Street Community!" It was on that street, actually called Lancaster Ave, that my mom first chauffeured me, eight years young, to my first piano lesson in what would be just a few years later a quaint tea room. I still remember the first piece I was ever assigned, "Left & Right", and the second, "Right & Left". Each piece has only two notes, play, repeat.
(Both songs are still quite beautiful to me. And in the way that anything becomes everything if you plum a sufficiently deep depth, I can plainly see now that all secrets of all music were already captured in those first childish pieces, just as the terrifying complexity of an entire human body is written in the DNA of every single cell.)
And now, these almost twenty years later, all that remains is the path begun, legs dangling long ago. Everything else has changed, everything. Family, friends, myself, even God, who changeth not, has changed perhaps most of all: one of his best tricks.
They say that reality may actually be not three or four dimensions, but rather ten or eleven or twelve, though they are curled up, hidden between, unseen, but very real. I couldn't ask for a more perfect mirror, now that music, time, space, money, love, food, sex, they are all inseparable, all one, curled up together in pairs and pairs. Left & Right. Right & Left.
I was given every middle-class opportunity. Good schools, basketball camp, art camp, churchianity, boy scouts, little league, brothers. Some things stuck and some didn't. We had an upright piano in our living room, to this day one of my favorite pianos, which, admittedly, is probably a chicken/egg situation. There's no precise age when I first approached that alter. Just an uninterrupted, blurry ascent as my legs dangled evercloser to the pedals. Old-timey piano bench pieces: mom playing the right hand, me playing the left with both.
Downingtown, Pennsylvania was a "main street community" long before they began advertising Downingtown as "A Main Street Community!" It was on that street, actually called Lancaster Ave, that my mom first chauffeured me, eight years young, to my first piano lesson in what would be just a few years later a quaint tea room. I still remember the first piece I was ever assigned, "Left & Right", and the second, "Right & Left". Each piece has only two notes, play, repeat.
(Both songs are still quite beautiful to me. And in the way that anything becomes everything if you plum a sufficiently deep depth, I can plainly see now that all secrets of all music were already captured in those first childish pieces, just as the terrifying complexity of an entire human body is written in the DNA of every single cell.)
And now, these almost twenty years later, all that remains is the path begun, legs dangling long ago. Everything else has changed, everything. Family, friends, myself, even God, who changeth not, has changed perhaps most of all: one of his best tricks.
They say that reality may actually be not three or four dimensions, but rather ten or eleven or twelve, though they are curled up, hidden between, unseen, but very real. I couldn't ask for a more perfect mirror, now that music, time, space, money, love, food, sex, they are all inseparable, all one, curled up together in pairs and pairs. Left & Right. Right & Left.
posted by DM at
07:56
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