Why I Am

Remember the spooky French Horn theme in Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (Op. 67, a “symphonic tale for children”)?  The sound of the wolf brought tears to my eyes and so of course
a few years later, I asked to play the horn. “Musician!”, the grown ups proclaimed, and so I was, finding myself lost most days in beats 2 & 4, (the PA to the OOM of the Sousaphone,) with the occasional bright flourishing exposure when a composer needed to make a point, say, “Hey, wake up people!”. The exposure also brought tears and a knot in my stomach, but that’s a whole nuther story. 

Remember the first time you heard a song that told your story? Where words and music lined up in a way that made you swoon, or scratch your head, say, “Wow. Brilliant.” And then say, “I wanna learn to do THAT!” I wrote a jingle for a school skit in 8th grade and my English teacher laughed and said “Writer!” and so I was, sort of. A seed planted, anyway, as everything took a back seat to music for awhile. While meanwhile, knots continued to tighten, and worrytears sprung too frequently.  Writing helped soothe my soul, and like many secret teenage things, companioned me behind closed doors, splattering the pages as I listened to The Pines of Rome with headphones on, envisioning my perfect death. The guitar on the chair in the corner helped bring me around and pulled what frayed together. 

Remember, it was and is fertile soil. Timing and context is everything.  My songs a bit too poetic.  My poems a bit too conversational. The images, painterly, the narratives too literal, as abstraction confounds me and certain kinds of cleverness eludes me.  Still, we carry on, don’t we?  The seasons, they go round and round.  Finding ourselves this or that kind of artist can be funny and at times necessary, not to mention scary and frustrating.   Sometimes I’m still waiting for the wolf at the edge of the forest.  Sometimes I’m just skipping along, looking for a groove, working the back-beat, sometimes, hollering “Hey! Pay Attention!”.  Mostly though, I’m trying to find words in the tale I hear spinning in the music, and music in the words as they unspool on a page, lighting a way, saying “follow me”.