Remembering to Turn
It’s weird at how bad we can be.
Okay, okay, I’ll stick to speaking for myself.
How bad I can be.
Not in terms of the eternal struggle between darkness and light, or how humans feel like exiles in a strange land, moving through it all-too-quickly.
No, I mean how easy it is to make astronomy boring, or Mozart dull. Mozart..!
(And sure about all that darkness and light stuff, too.)
I almost went off the rails yesterday in Richmond talking about Wolfie. Too many facts and figures crowded onto Powerpoint slides. Too many erudite points about the nature of Classicism vs. the later Romantic period looked good on the page, but stumbled around in absurdity like mocking ghosts when I read them aloud from an old book.
The Argentinian doctor in his nineties peered at me through his spectacles, wondering if I’d snap out of it.
A voice from the past sounded in my ear. Curtis Blues, that intensely curious scholar of world music and the man who taught me how to make a buck with the guitar on the street told me once in deadly earnest: “Don’t talk too much about Scott Joplin. Let him speak for himself.”
So I shut up, and let WA do his thing.
But the best was last.
I told them about an old friend. Martha.
How we met at her retirement home, “just like this”, and I had no clue that she had played Carnegie Hall (twice) or did the ragtime program for Voice of America, or toured China as their students crawled out from under the rubble of the brutal cultural revolution. I learned that later.
“You know they weren’t allowed to even have music until recently when I went there” she said, showing me a picture of a hundred dark-haired musicians and her blonde self standing with them proudly.
But that conversation was years ago.
“You know that Martha hauled a seven foot Steinway piano into her apartment?” I told my audience yesterday. “Then, during COVID, she somehow put on a recital. I think she was 87. She asked me to emcee it. What an honor. Even called up to make sure I had a suit. ‘I’ll rent you one if you need it’ she told me. I filmed the show. Watch this.”
We all applauded wildly in the stuffy little lecture room, as the echoes of Martha faded away.
“…those arthritic fingers…” an elderly lady marveled, seeing a bit of herself in Martha.
Oh, to remember what beauty is, and not to forget it, and to welcome it, and turn to it, like the cherished first daffodil of spring, brilliant in a vase of cut glass and clear water.
“I’m so glad you recorded that” someone else said.
I agreed, turning my head for a moment.
–Josh