The Gambler

"Slow down, we've got time left to be lazy..."

The song trips through my head as I climb the echoing stairs up to the top of Glidden Hall. Strains of muffled music drift through improperly soundproofed walls as I emerge onto the sixth floor--the practice rooms seem to hold a preponderance of trumpets tonight. I can hear them blaring through at least three different closed doors, their brassy, strident tones a contrast to the quiet tinkling of someone practicing a high piano solo on one end of the hall and the lilting strains of a violinst just starting to scrape through scales on the other.

I walk past the trumpets to the relatively quiet section furthest from the steps. There's only one light on in this small hall lined with rooms that are closer in square footage to large closets than anything else, just enough room for a piano that's just starting to drift out of tune. The Asian girl in the occupied room has a look of intense concentration on her face as her fingers dance over the keys, drawing forth chords and runs and chromatics the likes of which I could never hope to produce. But my sigh of envy is as silent as my wistful glance at the baby grand at the end of the hall as I step to the room opposite the virtuoso and close the door on my small upright, all I really need for tonight. I know enough to leave the real instruments to those who can properly use them.

I've always been an indifferent pianist--though I took lessons from age seven to age fifteen, I never really dedicated myself to learning any more than the basics of the art. Also, I've barely practiced for almost four years, so whatever skill I once might have possessed has mostly vanished under fingers that fumble where they once flew over eighty-eight black and white keys and a mind that remembers the theory but has lost the ability to apply it to life.

Nonetheless, I still enjoy playing, and while I may have let my skills with this particular instrument lapse into half-forgotten muscle memory, I can still manage to eke out a tune. And I have never lost the reverence, the love of being able to produce my own music just by pressing on a few keys in patterns handed down through generations of players that somehow still manage to sound like they're just for me.

"So just take my hand and know that I, will never leave your side..."

I've carried this song in my head all day and it's time to let it out. "The Gambler" is a relatively simple song, just a nine-chord progression with a few arpeggios added in to make things interesting without taking away from the lyrics. I found the music for free online and decided that dusting off my unused piano skills was just as good a method of procrastination as any other. It takes me a matter of ten minutes to plunk out the accompaniment, though my fingers still fumble if I think about it too hard. They're remembering, though--thumb goes here, B flat scale has two black keys, use your first finger so you can shift to the third for the next chord--and I know that if I practice the run-throughs enough the chords will be second nature before too long. As soon as I attempt to put words to music, though, both voice and fingers slip. The eternal problem of the singer: listen too hard to what you play and it's tough to sing the tune, but focus too hard on the lyrics and your hands seem to stop working properly.

The one thing I always forget about music is that if you don't practice it, you lose it. There's no way to get around this, unless you're the kind of virtuoso still racing over the keyboard across the hall--the rest of us need to go over things again and again and again to teach our fingers and our brain and our voice to remember where to go next. So I know it'll be a while before I can find the time to practice again and even when I do I'll have to go over the same chord progression, the same exercises, and I'll probably be sick of this song by the time I learn it properly and I'll certainly never be able to replicate the violin solo in the second verse or the horn chorus that comes in over the bridge--but then I remember my roommate practicing her violin and complaining about her lack of new material, the French horn player in Lincoln hall that I can hear practicing on Tuesday nights, and I smile, because if anything can bring people together, it's the chance to play. And even as I pack my already-wrinkled sheet music away in a folder bursting with pages and pages of thin black lines and tiny dots, music in its nascent form just waiting to be given birth by hand or breath or bow, I know that I'll be back.

I'm humming again as I head back to the stairs.

Hair

"It's the age of Aquari-u-uu-us....."

So Ackerman spends about a page and a half in her "Touch" section talking specifically about hair. How we use it as a symbol of social status or of social rebellion, how it is the last natural remnant of a mammal's body-covering pelt, how the tiny hairs on our bodies contribute to our sense of proprioception and the touch of our environment. Ironically enough, as I was reading this section I was laying on my futon with my head in a friend's lap, her hand almost unconsciously stroking my hair.

I think Ackerman's observations about scientific studies that stroking pets decreases stress, etc. can be applied to petting people as well. If I am lucky enough to know people that I am comfortable with enough to cuddle with them, to play with their hair or massage their shoulders without tension or awkwardness, I am going to take advantage of that essential human bonding experience of touch. It doesn't need to be sexual; indeed, I think it's better if it isn't. I ended up almost falling asleep, laying there on that couch, because the feel of my friend's hand in my hair, light though it may have been, was the most soothing and relaxing thing I had felt all day. And an hour later, our positions were reversed, she leaning on me and my hand running automatically through her hair. It's a mutually beneficial give-and-take, this unconscious petting; I get to feel comforted by giving comfort, by feeling silky strands slide through my fingers, and she gets the mini-massage of the incredibly sensitive but rarely touched muscles on her scalp.

I remember in elementary school, we would gather in the library for story time. Twenty to twenty-five small children would crowd onto the soft carpet in the story corner, sit cross-legged or sprawl on their stomachs, and immediately commence playing with each others' hair. It was my favorite time of the week, because I could sit behind one of my classmates and attempt to braid her long tresses while another girl sat behind me and simply ran her fingers from my scalp to the tips of my hair like a comb. My teacher stopped us sometimes when we stopped paying attention to the story, but she never discouraged us or told us angrily to keep our hands to ourselves.

I fail to see why we shouldn't just pet and stroke and caress each other as a matter of daily life. Our culture demands physical separation; we get uncomfortable if a stranger so much as stands too close to us, "invades our personal space." That bubble of noli me tangere tends to shrink or even disappear with people we've known for a while, like family, or are consciously comfortable with, like good friends or significant others. But why does it exist at all? If touch is so important to our well-being and happiness, even our bodily health, why do we keep each other at arms' length?

Scent Memories

Listerine. The minty, slightly alcoholic scent of it pervaded their house, crept into corners and leapt out to surprise me at the strangest times. The wind could be blowing as if to batter the house down, forcing the pungent reek of half-rotted lake weed into my nose as I struggled up the stone path with more suitcases than was really advisable, but as soon as I opened the front door of that house by the lake all I smelled was Listerine.

My grandfather was the mouthwash aficionado in that house, and the smell of it followed him around like a shadow. He could be working in the garage, elbow-deep in the hood of one of his classic cars, and the young granddaughter that wandered up behind him would smell, amid the sharp bark of motor oil, the tang of antifreeze, the curiously enticing aroma of gasoline, the faintest hint of minty Listerine, even before he turned around and began to attempt to explain what he was doing with all the shiny wrenches. Later, a splotch of motor oil might still perfume his shirt or hands before my grandmother wiped its stain away, but mint mouthwash was once again paramount.

I would find him in his office, a dry, papery place with its own perfume of old books and dust, with a little bit of that crackly not-quite-a-smell-more-a-nose-feeling of heat in the air given its placement in a loft at the very top of the house. A hug there would waft those arid scents toward me from his hair and clothes, along with a whiff of his dandruff shampoo and, once again, the pervasive smell of Listerine. Its cool green aroma never lingered on our clothes and suitcases when my family took our leave from the lake house in Rochester, but when my grandparents came to visit us in Cleveland my grandfather brought his scent with him, perching it for a few days or a few weeks on the bathroom counter in the shape of a big green bottle of Listerine.

Short Takes, take two

"The Spinners," Michael Datcher

A lack of familial commitment in urban ghettoes seems to be the central theme of this essay, an epidemic begun in childhood and propogated in a vicious cycle of distrust and an inability to take responsibility. Datcher talks about the lack of fathers and how he and the boys who were his neighbors showed off in front of the neighborhood men, delighting in their attention but still unable to trust them, unable to get attached to them because, as Datcher says, "their personal lives screamed, "I'm lost toooooo." The way the essay simply ends, not trailing off but cutting off abruptly, is just one of the devices the author uses to illustrate his point.

"Winter," Larry Woiwode

This essay was a bit longer than some others that I have read, and in a dramatically different style. Woiwode tells the story of being snowed in at a North Dakota farmstead, with many digressions into such subjects as his son, the history of his farmstead, and the specifics of the furnace he installs. The point Woiwode comes to at the end of his essay, though, is an unexpected one about death and wanting to be remembered "by a row of words... or maybe not." The end of the essay resolves the conflict--the author will not freeze to death, he repairs his furnace--but the important questions has already been asked, if not answered. How does one accept death, if at all?

On Masala chai and coming home

Chai, the Hindi word for tea, has in recent decades become the term used in Western cultures to refer to a flavored milk tea drink made by brewing black tea with milk infused with Indian herbs and spices. Cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and occasionally ginger and even pepper can be added to the infusion and left to simmer and let their flavor permeate the milk and tea mixture. Then the spices and tea are strained out, leaving the finished product to be sweetened into a delicious brew redolent with gentle but aromatic flavors that are a delight to the nose and tongue.
That said, despite the growing popularity of chai in coffee houses across America and other nations, my mother makes the best chai I have ever tasted, and has been doing so for as long as I can remember.

When I was young, the height of my culinary joys was coming home from a long, hard day of elementary school to find the subtle but delicious scent of milk and spices gently greet me upon opening the front door. I immediately knew that Mom was making chai, and that if I had arrived at the right point in the process, there would be a small but dainty teacup full of spiced milk waiting for me on the dining room table. She would always make chai the same way, simmering the milk, sugar and spices on the stove for a longer period of time before adding the loose leaf tea that, at the tender age of six or seven, was wisely deemed too caffeinated for me.

Instead, my younger sister and I would sit and sip delicately from our little cups, the small teacups decorated with the New York skyline that resided in the cupboard for every other occasion except this, the creation of the rare and lovely beverage of spiced milk. Even before the brew cooled enough to drink, we would inhale the wisps of steam that rose gently from the cups, "sipping" at the air through mouth and nose and catching ever newer and more subtle scents and flavors as the tea brewed in the kitchen and the spiced milk cooled gently in our cups. We would exchange secretive smiles between sips, wondering when we would be old enough to drink proper chai like Mom and Dad and Auntie Palmo. Even after the spiced milk was gone, we would stand in the kitchen and sniff at the simmering pot with its forbidden brew, drinking in the small differences that marked this as the grown-ups' drink. The smoky scent of loose black Indian tea combined with the sweetness of the sugared milk, the fiery hint of cinnamon, the smoky-bitter musk of cloves, and the sharp green scent of cardamom to make something that seemed utterly foreign and fascinating, something familiar but just that little bit different than our white-bread lives.

It took some years before I realized that the scent of chai, of Indian herbs and spices, reminded me of my Aunt Palmo for a reason other than that Mom always seemed to make it when Auntie Po was visiting. My mother's next eldest sister, Catherine Rybicki had rebelled against her strict Catholic upbringing in a decidedly stronger manner than that of her other younger siblings. In her travels around Asia after leaving college, she had converted to Buddhism and, in time, changed her name to Ani Palmo and taken vows as a Buddhist nun. In my youth she lived and taught classes on meditation and compassion in an apartment in the city of Cleveland proper, a three-room paradise full of things I was forbidden to play with but that endlessly fascinated me--altars, figurines, mandalas and tapestries--and permeated with the scents of incence and spices. These spices and incense permeated the robes she wore, emanated from the thermos of chai she often carried, and made me think paradoxically of far-away places at the same time they reminded me of coming home to find my mother humming while a pot of steaming milk simmered on the stove.

When I first came to college, I brought with me a small packet of ingredients for chai. Whole cardamom, cinnamon sticks, black tea bags, and whole cloves, packed lovingly by my mother amongst many other supplies for the care and feeding of her college student. I knew she had packed it for me, I had asked her to and had watched her as she did, but in of those first few weeks of missing home enough to be lonely but not enough to want to leave this brand new world, stumbling suddenly upon the small bag of chai makings in a desk drawer was almost enough to make me cry. I remember sitting on my bed, closing my eyes and opening that bag, and as the smell of tea and spices drifted out I was once again back in that perfect moment of opening the door at home and having my mother and my aunt waft out to embrace me in the delicious, subtle scent of chai. 

Short Takes

I opened Short Takes to a random page to begin this assignment and, by some chance, ended up with Lawrence Millman's "Bookless in Biak." Another random page, this time closer to the beginning of the  book, and Amy Tan's "Confessions" came into my life. Choosing which to respond to took exponentially longer than reading either of the two/three page essays; I had before me a light, funny essay about the search for a book to have if not to read and a dark, moving essay about parents and memory and the duality of one's will to live when faced with the possibility of dying. After conversations I'd had with a friend over the past few days I could relate better to the Tan essay, but I'd had enough of suicide and sadness for a while, so here is my reflection on being bookless.

Millman speaks of not necessarily reading books but rather the inherent security that comes of having books. Thus I collect books and read them once, occasionally three twenty times but mostly once and then leave them to sit on the shelf and collect dust but I do not need to read them to be glad that they are there if I ever do need them.

I'm not sure if I'm doing this assignment right, or if I'm trying to be faithful to a typo. Fifty words is not enough words to communicate anything of substance, save in poetry.  

On Montaigne and stars

The personal writing of Michel de Montaigne is often characterized by long, involved sentences that nonetheless manage to maintain proper grammar, phrasing and punctuation. He also frequently quotes other authors, mainly those of classical philosophical texts, and maintains a moralizing or philosophical theme with which he concludes and unifies a piece.

An attempt to emulate a piece by Montaigne might, then, follow thus:

The internal cosmos of the mind may shift without notice to those observing it, whether from the inside or outside of one’s particular universe. “Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;/Men reckon what it did, and meant;/But trepidation of the spheres,/ Though greater far, is innocent.” I am still not Donne, I am still moving and though neither harms nor fears have been brought to those who live with me the planets and solar systems and galaxies of thoughts and dreams and desperate surmises have shifted to no one’s sight save my own. 

My earth has not moved but the stars are closer to alignment and no one has noticed, for their telescopes are focused inward, on themselves rather than on myself, but still I look into my skies and see that things have changed. I am still stable and rooted in the earth but I am taller, I am reaching farther toward the pinnacle of my existence and stretching closer to the stars even as they move. Yet those around me take no notice and I think it is a blessing, for had I the burden of the movements of their stars I should not pay nearly so much attention as I do to my own.