Such Ones As Us

It’s pretty sad. Here I am, a fully-grown adult woman in my early to mid-30’s with two cats of my own, and I still hear my mom’s voice in my head. Like, several times a day. There are certain things she used to say that have stuck with me, verbatim, even after all these years.

You’ll survive. This one usually came after I’d been moaning about some impending crisis of a rustic nature, like having to pee in the woods or take a shower with no hot water or share a bunk with a girl I’d never met.

Cut yourself some slack. Often followed by “you are your own worst critic.” Often followed by me crying, “but what if I’m not??”

Focus on the positive. She said this so much that I think it might have been mainly for her benefit.

You gotta get outside of your head. When I was inflicting my well-earned and totally legitimate bad mood on innocent bystanders.

Smile. Not because feeling sad wasn’t allowed, but because smiling can make you feel better sometimes.

Don’t burn your bridges/always do your best to be nice. Because you never know what’s going to happen down the road. Dun-Dun-DUNNN!!!

Do you really want to be popular? She asked me this every time I complained about not being one of the cool kids at school. She said, “We could go get you all new clothes and different music to listen to and magazines to read…” At which point I backed down and said I’d rather just be me, whatever that was.

Do you want to quit the violin? She didn’t pull this card often. She must have reserved it for my most melodramatic displays of woe over having to practice and go to lessons. Of course, I wanted to quit about as much as I wanted to be popular. Woe was I.

Someone could put a bomb under your house.* Stay with me here. This was right after the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995, the first time I’d heard of terrorism. I was nine years old and blubbering about never being able to go to the mall or any other public place again, so she doused my panic with logic. A country girl who moved to New York by herself at age 18, my mom was big on street smarts, crippling fear less so.

My mom doesn’t say these things to me anymore, but not because I don’t need to hear them. On the contrary, I need to hear some of these things every day. It’s just that, now, most of my tantrums and diatribes and whimpers have become inner monologues and are quickly shut down by one of these adages with that perfect motherly blend of sympathy and snap out of it.

*She doesn’t recall saying this but obviously I am right.

• 

Warning: contains vulgar slang and empowerment

I have recently come up with a method of getting back on track when I start to lose focus or indulge in negative self-talk. It is fun and simple. I just start to narrate my life, beginning each sentence with “The badass…” Sometimes, it is helpful to announce chapter titles aloud. Here is how it’s done.

The badass gets ready

Sensing her own physical prowess, the badass puts on a pair of Dickies and, realizing that all of life (but especially fashion) is a game, gleefully selects a teal turtleneck sweater.

The badass regards herself in the mirror and determines that she is definitely rocking those gray hairs and dark circles. The burning warrior eyes justify them. She pulls her hair up into a bun and prepares to take on the world.

The badass recalls an embarrassing moment from last week and laughs it off like a badass.

No time for eggs and toast, the badass prepares a bowl of Weetabix, almond milk, peanut butter, and a banana, the 2019 Breakfast of Champions.

The badass recalls her dream from the night before and pauses to consider the implications (that she is a weirdo).

. . . and so on and so forth, until the third person melts away and The Badass simply is.

Today, while cutting straight down the middle of Chimborazo Park, it occurred to me that I have gone on the same exact walk at least 700 times, meaning that I have seen the James River from the same vantage point 1,400 times over the last two years. I’d never thought in these terms before. After the first few months of taking The Walk every day, I began to consider it essential. It became like brushing my teeth: I sometimes felt grumpy about doing it, but it was never really up for debate.

Most people understand this practice as exercise, asking me if I try to improve my time, or telling me that I may need to increase the strenuousness as I get older, lest I put on weight (i.e. the end of the world). But it has never been about exercise, or even health, for me. In fact, there have been days when I walk very slowly, usually due to extreme sadness. No, The Walk is about cultivating ease in my body and mind, which I generally understand to be the opposite of disease.

Because I leave my phone at home (almost always), I am unreachable for 50 minutes every day. I step outside of time, outside of my life. I am even able to step outside my role(s) as “Ellen” sometimes. Before adopting this habit, I was in a nearly constant state of craving for this kind of space, and on the rare occasion that I skip The Walk, I feel restless.

Every day, my route is the same, but the monotony pulls the curtain on detail. I’ve seen the leaves change–really seen them–three times now. I’ve walked in heavy rain. I’ve made the first footprints in fresh snow.  I once saw a couple of unattended peahens crossing the street. Some days, all of Church Hill smells like hops from Stone Brewing. Once, I discovered fruit growing on a tree I must have passed hundreds of times already. I have traipsed through weddings, bike races, and school picnics. I regularly exchange greetings with neighbors who seem to always be out on their front porch, people walking their dogs in the park, and several fine cat friends. I feel like I live here.

Our productivity-obsessed culture stands aghast at such a colossal waste of time. “If you aren’t burning calories, are you at least listening to an audiobook or something?” That I would actually be doing nothing seems unfathomable. I still don’t fully understand why I walk, or what it means to me, but I am spurred on by an observation I made during the first few weeks, which has now been confirmed 700 times over: the people with the nicest porch furniture are never sitting on it.

One day in 3rd grade, our teacher divided the class into groups to discuss and formulate an answer to the following question: which weighs more, a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers?

Fortunately for my group, I’d heard this riddle before. “Don’t worry guys, I heard this at my old school,” I said, putting an end to the discussion before it began. “It’s a pound of bricks.” They asked if I was sure, and I said yes. We wrote our answer on a piece of paper and waited for the other groups to reach a consensus.

The death glare fired at me by my best friend when the correct answer was announced (an aside for all my third grade readers out there: both weigh the same) shocked me less than the revelation that one can be both 100% sure and 100% wrong.

My days as an arrogant eight-year-old were far from over, however. A few months later, the same teacher corrected my spelling of the word “violin”. With all the respect I could muster, I said, “Mrs. Harwood, I’ve been playing the violin since I was five years old. I think I ought to know how to spell it.” With all the patience she could muster, Mrs. Harwood again asserted that there is no “o” in violin, at least not where I’d put one.

I was furious. Not only was I absolutely sure, I had credentials. Why, I was even more of an expert than my teacher on this matter! On the pretense that I had a serious and urgent issue, I excused myself to run down the hall to the school’s secretary (my mom), knowing that she would back me up.

“That’s not how you spell ‘violin'”, my mother said quietly. “You need to apologize to your teacher.” (Memory redacted.)

By the time of the Moon Incident, several months later, I had lost almost all faith in my ideas about how the world works. I was riding in the backseat of the family station wagon with my dad and my older brother when I overheard one of them refer to the moon as a satellite.

“Wait,” I said, leaning forward between the seats, “the moon is a satellite?”

“Yeah,” my brother said, and turned back around.

This is my earliest memory of having a truly open mind. I sat back in my seat, craning my neck to look out into the night sky, and tried to align my brain with a world in which, apparently, NASA had designed, built, and released into space that great, shining, spherical object I’d always naïvely assumed had occurred naturally.

But, as I learned momentarily, you can even be wrong about what you were wrong about.

Things that have happened since my blog bit the dust five years ago, in no particular order, but which I probably would have written a post about if my blog hadn’t bitten the dust, as it did, so regrettably, five years ago:

• I read Love in the Time of Cholera and not a whole lot else.
• I founded, ran, and resigned from a non-profit organization.
• My husband created a new art form called Pizza.
• I got married.
• I took a gypsy-inspired violin solo at a salsa show in Paris, for some reason.
• I found an affordable (hahahaha) 18th-century German fiddle in Albuquerque, NM.
• I had a rendezvous halfway around the world with a vindictive millionaire.
• I played bongos for a talent show (?) while a guy read that one Allen Ginsberg poem about peaches and penumbras.
• I got so nervous for a concert that, faced with losing my mind entirely, made a decision to simply enjoy myself, and here we are.
• I started going for a long walk every day, forsaking all other forms of exercise.
• I found a bat in my bedroom, and I’m not talking about sporting equipment, though I wish I were.
• I learned that my ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and that one of them married William Bradford, whom I portrayed in my 3rd grade Thanksgiving pageant during which I performed my own stunts.

All in all, it has been one big juicy bite. But I missed the part where I thought long and hard about how best to describe it to you.

 

Although I think I must be at least a reasonably disciplined person, I’ve never been one to commit to doing anything on a daily basis. I’ll decide to do yoga every day, warm up for 30 minutes before practicing violin, get up at 7am, meditate, write, whatever, and I’ll do it for 3 days before slipping back into familiar habits.

In college, I was given an assignment to make one positive change in my diet (it was a nutrition class) over the course of the semester. On the last day of class, I sat and listened as my classmates gave presentations on how they successfully drank 8 glasses of water a day, switched to whole grain bread, incorporated more vegetables into their diet, or stopped drinking coffee. Then I had to stand up and report that I’d tried–and failed–to stop eating after 10pm. I know you are envisioning french fries at a bar, but my downfall was, in fact, Grape-Nuts with soy milk in front of my Toshiba laptop in my room. I am but a feeble human.

It will surprise you to know, then, that I have gone on the same 40-minute walk in my neighborhood every day for the past 4 weeks. (Almost…I missed 2 days.) I can’t account for this, except to say that The Route is magic. I stumbled into it 4 Sundays ago when I turned left instead of right at a certain juncture, and my meandering stroll became a beautifully symmetrical path through a park that took 40 minutes to complete, an amount of time that seemed to wring out whatever needed to be wrung out of my body and mind. And then I became addicted.

My walk has become something to build my day around. If I know I’m leaving the house at 10am and won’t be home until after dark, I get up earlier than usual. I try to leave my phone at home so I won’t be tempted to stop on the street corner and send an email. It is free time for my mind–my feet follow the path, but my mind wanders. The positive effects of this routine have been numerous and unexpected. Here are some.

• Abs. I have them now.
• Digestion. It’s just better.
• Cardiovascular health. I feel like I’m in shape, a feeling I thought you could only achieve through punishing yourself with strenuous exercise.
• Problem-solving. When you’re walking, ideas come without being called.
• It’s easier to make other healthy choices. One of the days I missed, I missed because we were experiencing sideways freezing rain. I felt like the time had already been carved out for me, so I did yoga instead.
• I used to get to the end of the day and feel like I hadn’t done anything good, even if I’d been working on my computer, practicing, and doing housework all day. I never feel like that anymore.
• I see people being kind to their kids, their neighbors, their dogs, strangers, stray cats, and themselves. My newsfeed paints a different picture of the world.
• I see other people living their lives–taking their kids to the playground, collecting carts from the Chimbo parking lot, sitting on their front porch, waiting for the bus. This offers perspective that is hard to get from inside your house.
• Other people want to go on The Walk with me. My husband joins me about half the time, and a friend joined us the other day.
• I feel happy knowing that I can continue this habit well into my old age. Maybe I’ll slow down, but walking is something I can do even when I’m not feeling all that energetic.
• I can feel the days passing. I am present for my life.

Given my track record, I am in no position to tell you to adopt a similar habit. But I hope you will. As I posted on Instagram on Day 5, “Find your route and walk it every day. Good things will follow.”

Originally published in Style Weekly on May 5, 2015.

There’s something about the last few seconds that rattles me.

Up to that point,  Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 has been chugging along like some sort of sinister factory. But in the final bars of the piece, the whole operation is reduced to a few musicians. They continue playing as if unaware that you’ve suddenly zoomed in on them, until finally, they’re swallowed up by the rest of the orchestra in one triumphant gulp.

Every time I hear it, my chest rattles, tears fill my eyes, and I’m lucky if I manage to suppress a yelp. The first time I heard it, however, I suppressed nothing.

It was the summer of 2006, and I was a student at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina. Keith Lockhart was coming to conduct Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, and everyone wanted to make a good impression. The faculty was so concerned that the students might come unprepared to the first rehearsal that they scheduled an extra one just for us before the maestro arrived.

They were right to be concerned. Summer music festivals tend to pack in more rehearsals, coachings, lessons, classes and performances than is humanly possible, leaving students little choice but to fly by the seat of their pants and make huge artistic strides.

At lunchtime on the day before the student rehearsal, it occurred to my group of friends that we would have to step up and lead our respective sections in the absence of the faculty. Furthermore, we realized that we didn’t have time to learn the music, the afternoon was filled with chamber-music coaching, and there was a not-to-be-missed recital after dinner. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, we agreed to meet at 10 p.m. to listen to the entire 45-minute symphony.

But where could all four of us listen to this blaring music after curfew?

We ended up in the middle of a dark parking lot underneath a lone street lamp, sitting in and on top of a BMW Z3 convertible, a fourth-generation iPod blasting Prokofiev Five through the car’s sound system, following along in our music.

Hearing the soaring melodies with those athletic leaps and the unexpected, yet heartbreakingly gorgeous harmonic shifts, all underscored by militant rhythms, made my body rumble while panic and dread gave way to excitement and joy. How lucky was I to get to play this incredible music? Having familiarized ourselves, we retired to our bunk beds and eagerly awaited the new day.

So what is it about that ending that still resonates so deeply? Perhaps it’s the insignificance of our lives in the grand scheme of things, or maybe it’s the futility of all our scurrying about, or just our obliviousness to said futility.

Or perhaps it’s the integrity of people who are meticulous in their work even though no one is watching. Whatever it is, it’s human.

The first time I swung my wit around indiscriminately and ended up hurting someone was Christmas day of 1991.  We were all at my grandpa’s house—me, my parents, and my brother.  Grandpa had recently remarried into a large family, and the tree was amply stocked with presents.  I had already gleefully unwrapped a Barbie and a Cabbage Patch doll when I was handed a gift from my brother, Andrew.  A gift from across the family tree was something I had not thought possible.  Yes, he was older than me, but not by that much…

I tore off the shiny paper to find a purple plastic hairbrush with unicorns or something equally delightful printed on it.  Immediately and without missing a beat, I connected two of 34 possible dots in my little brain and, before even saying thank you, said, “You probably just picked purple because it’s your favorite color.”  Yep.  I was a 5-year-old Mean Girl.

My audience—a group of adults who had no doubt been holding both hands over their hearts and cooing—fell silent.  I’ll never forget the look on Andrew’s face.  I don’t remember what happened next.  He may have denied that purple was his favorite color, and my mom may have told me to say I was sorry.  All I remember is the shock I felt when my clever comment fell flat.

This is when I learned the first important lesson about clever comments: when you think of something clever to say, first ask yourself, will this hurt somebody’s feelings?  I think the second lesson is to then ask yourself, will anyone actually think this is funny?  But my dad saw to it that we skipped over that one.

Ten years later, we were at another family Christmas gathering, this time at my aunt and uncle’s house on the other side of the family.  For six months prior, I had been continuously falling head over heels in love with my first boyfriend.  We hadn’t even kissed yet, but I had never felt so strongly about another person in my life.  He was spending Christmas with his family, and I found it difficult to think about anything else while a group of us strolled around the neighborhood that chilly night.

Since my feelings were the ones to get hurt on this occasion, I don’t remember exactly what was said.  I just know that I somehow proclaimed my love for Michael, and Andrew scoffed, in the form of a clever comment, at two high school sophomores being “in love”.  I felt stupid.  Young and stupid.

Hours later, as I was lying on the couch in the living room, nursing my wounds, Andrew appeared in the doorway.  I’ll never forget the look on his face. “At my school,” he said, “my group of friends has gotten into the habit of making witty remarks that are sometimes mean, and I just forgot where I was and that those comments can really hurt.  I didn’t mean what I said.  I’m really happy for you and Michael.”

My respect for my big brother tripled.  I hadn’t considered that one could apologize for making an ill-advised joke.  I thought what’s done is done! This was the third lesson of clever comments, and the hardest to implement.  But every time I have to do it, I think of my inspiring role model.

Merry Christmas, Andrew!  Thanks for leading the charge on growing up.

I realized the danger of habits early on when I had two mental lapses (later known as “brain farts”) in quick succession.  Around the age of 7, I was riding in the back seat of the family station wagon.  As we pulled out of our driveway and began moving slowly through the neighborhood, I reached to put on my seatbelt and instead opened the car door.  I remember looking down at the sliver of pavement flying by and thinking, “I should really pay more attention.”

The second mental lapse occurred when I was wandering around in our backyard, blowing bubbles through a bubble wand.  The act of dipping the wand in the soapy concoction and blowing a string of bubbles became increasingly hypnotic, and at some point in my deep day-slumber, I confused it with the act of eating yogurt with a spoon.  I remember scrunching my face and thinking, “Did I not just learn this lesson?”

Before the advent of auto-pilot and zombies, I think this kind of behavior was labeled “absent-mindedness.”  I try not to succumb while doing things like driving a car, playing the violin, or getting dressed in the morning.  Of course, habits are what make it possible for humans to do all three of these activities in one day, so it’s not our habitual nature that is so dangerous.  The problem is the proximity of the “reply” and “reply all” buttons, so to speak, in our brains.

Originally published in Style Weekly on Feb. 24, 2014.

One of the less glamorous parts of my job as principal second violin of the Richmond Symphony is that I must ensure that the bows of the second violins always slice through the air in the same direction as those of the firsts — for safety as much as anything else. In the business, we refer to this task as “doing bowings,” and it is only slightly more artistically satisfying than filling out a standard achievement test.

So imagine my surprise when, while doing bowings at my kitchen table a few weeks ago in preparation for the Richmond Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s monumental Tenth Symphony, my throat tightened and tears came to my eyes. As I scanned through my part, no. 2 pencil in hand, I could hear the whole orchestra swelling underneath the violins. Although I hadn’t played the piece in nearly 15 years, the entire emotional journey of the symphony hit me all at once — the pain, the fear, the loneliness, the triumph. I realized that, like a first love, Shostakovich 10 still shaped me.

I was in eighth grade and starting my second year in the Portland Youth Philharmonic, an orchestra with a reputation for performing pieces that are widely considered best left to professionals. The announcement that our 1999-2000 season would open with Shostakovich’s Tenth symphony was met with a chorus of naysaying; not only is it one of the Soviet composer’s more technically difficult works, it is also quite emotionally intense. We thrived on the challenge. At 13, my brain still melted when confronted with double-flats or dotted 32nd notes, but I was determined to get the Shostakovich in my fingers, if only to prove those people wrong.

Our conductor, Huw Edwards, was a sturdy Welshman with an endless reserve of wit and sweat. He took the time to explain to us the historical significance of the piece: after composing his Ninth Symphony in 1945, Shostakovich didn’t write another until 1953, after the death of Stalin. Shostakovich’s musical signature, D.S.C.H., appears throughout the Tenth, as if declaring victory over the tyrant. Mr. Edwards’ passion and intensity inspired us all to root for a composer who had died decades earlier.

When the Richmond Symphony performs Shostakovich 10 next week, we will have four rehearsals in total, all of them within days of the concert. Portland Youth Philharmonic rehearsed it twice a week for three months. When you play a piece of music for that long, it seeps into your bones in a way that isn’t possible in one week. The more you play it, the more you learn to love every heart-breaking moment, and the anticipation makes the pain that much sweeter. By the night of the concert, we felt we had bonded with the piece, and each other, for life.

Enthusiasm can yield many undesirable results in an orchestral performance. It makes you want to rush. It makes you blow too hard or press too much. If you get really excited, you might even out-blast the other instruments temporarily. Youth orchestras are the best at enthusiasm. The hormones, the boundless energy, the overcompensation for technical discomfort, the fact that they only get to perform a few times a year — it all amounts to some seriously charged performances. This energy provokes chuckling among professional musicians everywhere, but the joke is clearly on us.

Recently, I listened to the recording of my childhood performance, and I was moved by how we seem to be playing like our lives depended on it. Our hands might not have been hitting all the right notes, but our hearts were on point. The swells in the brass are distastefully loud, causing them to sound dangerous and menacing, like a tank that might run you over. The strings have teeth, the winds scream, and the percussion section sounds too loud, like heavy artillery. The galloping second movement seems like it’s about to run off the rails — but it never does. Our performance is far from refined, but there is an element of defiance that a professional ensemble would never have.

I still remember the pounding in my chest as I turned the last page. The trumpets were winding up for the climax, and I had to turn in time to play the flurry of notes that underline the final intonement of the composer’s initials (D.S.C.H. translates to D-Eb-C-B in German notation). But by that time, I already knew that victory was ours.

Now, after years of specialized training, I can get around my instrument just fine. I eat double-flats and dotted 32nd notes for breakfast. I learn hundreds of notes every week. But these upcoming performances are going to be different. As my bow slices through the air in all the right directions, an old flame will be burning deep inside.