October 25, 2010 by Dave Rama.

(Except for those that don’t.)

It is not true that my parents were mean people.There was never any beating, or physical mistreatment in our home.There was food to eat and clothes to wear, and we were allowed to sleep inside. Still, during the middle part of my first childhood, I wondered why I had been placed in their care. Why was I forced into a situation for which I had so little aptitude and zero interest?

In the course of their own childhood experiences, each parent had learned to play a musical instrument. My mother had been a violin player, and also played something called a French horn. My father had played the clarinet in the school band. The cool people called a clarinet a “licorice stick” for its black color. There is or was some divergence of opinion about the quality of my mother’s playing. Her brother, my uncle, remembers her violin practice sessions with something less than admiration.

My own experience at playing music consisted of Grandma’s attempts to interest me in playing the piano. I loved my Grandma, so I was dutiful in learning to play the scale. Given enough time (say, maybe an hour), I could also figure out what note I was supposed to play from the location of the note on the staff. The notes placed in the spaces on the staff spelled out f-a-c-e. The notes placed on the staff lines generated the sentence “every good boy does fine” by using the initials e-g-b-d-f. At this point, I have no idea whether these memory tricks read from top to bottom or vice versa. Music becomes far too complex for me after this basic instruction.

There are notes of all shapes and sizes and different tempos like 4/4, and 3/4 and 6/8. In addition, notes have an assortment of flags to tell you how long to hold that particular note, and this changes with each piece or when the tempo changes. When you have advanced far enough to understand this part of the business, some clever person will start tying two or more notes together with their respective flags. These might be called chords but I am not really clear on that. The other business about notes is that they not only have an identifying letter, but they also have fractional values. It turns out that music is a mathematical function.

I did learn to find middle C on a piano keyboard. I found it the same way I find the book of Psalms in the Bible. Look in the middle. Here is a question: Does a guitar have middle C, or are all the C notes the same? Another question: Is there a middle D or middle A? Where are they? The truth is I have no idea of the difference in sound from one note to the next. If you asked me to find any note other than middle C on a piano, it would be lucky guesswork if I got any of the other 87 keys right. To her credit, my Grandma had long since given up on my imaginary musical ability.

In our school however, there was a musical nimrod who felt there should be a grade school band. There were also a lot of people in our town who could not mind their own business. They shared the gossip about this hypothetical band with my parents. There was an available used clarinet somewhere in the family attic, and it was placed before me with the direction that I would play this creation in the grade school band.

No one bothered to tell me what hole to cover for C or any other letter/fraction, so I was pretty lost. In addition, my fine motor skills are non-existent. I could usually get the reed end of the clarinet in my mouth all right, but that was about the highlight of the day, clarinet-wise. I know at this point in my life that the clarinet and saxophone are my favorite instruments to hear someone else play. When played well, these horns make nice mellow sounds.

In my feeble attempts to blow air through this pipe, I could occasionally make a noise, but I never knew what it was going to sound like. One time it would sound very much like an enraged Rhode Island Red chicken, and the next time, it would sound like a sissified cougar. NEVER did I get a satisfying, finger-snapping, melodious tootle. It was always the sound of an angry Daffy Duck.

Trying to transfer the highly complex information on the sheet music into a rhythmic activity from my fingers and lungs and thumbs and make a pleasant sound was and is simply impossible for me. It might as well be written in Cyrillic. I was always two pages behind every other person in the band.

On the rare occasions when my horn made a noise, people in the room (including me) would stare in bewilderment, wondering if the Russians were about to bomb us to extinction. (Of course that was a silly idea. We were really well protected from that event because we had been trained to hide under our wooden desks so we would be safe). Happily, there will be no reunion of the third and fourth grade band. My career in band was actually quite brief, although at the time, I was sure that I would dwell in the band room forever.

In the intervening years following my attempted tooting, I have had the opportunity to walk through a schoolhouse where a music teacher has been entrapped to teach grade school band. One always wonders whether they were lured into accepting that position by offers of love or money. When I heard the sounds of grade school band in the hall, I promptly broke into a rash, and sprinted outside. Later, after the children were gone, I walked back past the room, and I could hear the soft sobbing of the music teacher.

I have the greatest respect and admiration for anyone who can teach beginning band without turning into a psychopathic sniper. I feel empathy for those men and women, because they, too, have come to a greater understanding of what eternity really entails. The good news is these gentle folks have no fear of dying. They have already been to Hell.

Dave Rama still contributes bits of humor despite the fact that he has been self-exiled to Chadron, Nebraska.

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October 11, 2010 by Linda Bergeron.

By Linda Bergeron

This is all about change, and growth, and personal development. Ah, it can be a nice view in the rear view mirror of life.

I was a shy child, knew that I was loved, and had the fortune of a solid, enjoyable childhood with both parents and a sister. I grew up in a modest home with my needs met, and nice surprises. (Dad liked to celebrate birthdays by taking us to high-class restaurants requiring that we dress up, and Mom made sure that a couple of trips into the city for a Broadway show or two covered a few other celebrations.) There were aunts and uncles, cousins older than I, visits to others’ homes over the holidays.

Importantly I think, all the oldsters had lived their childhoods and adolescent years through the Great Depression, so having plenty to eat, small gifts to give, good jobs, homes, and good times together were occasions that were full of stories, jokes, many, many smiles. They were thankful for all they had and their lives showed it.

I was a watcher. I was hugged and entreated to join in. I warmed up slowly and smiled and ate, and lapped up the goodness of ‘family’ like a happy pup.

School was a challenge, but I strived to do my best, and winced when I heard another oral report announced. Dad had finished the ample attic of our Cape Cod house into a bedroom each for my sister and I, and sitting in the seat of the front dormer was a favorite reading place for me.

Mom and Dad were fine models of affectionate parents. She took care of the house, had us girls do dishes, clean our rooms, hang laundry; she worked part-time when we were older; enlivened our home with her sewing, crochet, and painting. Dad loved his drafting work in an office with a friendly mentor Sam; always had a building project in the works, with wood, or concrete or something; took the small downstairs bedroom for his den (why he built those upstairs rooms, of course); was up late working on his book, about a math higher math than I could understand as an elementary student. He loved the yard, the woods, driving to beautiful places, and camping. The out of doors was his church, he said, and I loved his church.

They all accepted me as quiet and reserved, and egged me on as gently as they could. The unspoken family motto was that we were a unity of support for one another, and the blessing words were, “I love you.”

Then my sister became a teenager, Dad’s health got trickier, Mom got sick, my best friend of all time moved away, and Mom and Dad decided to sell our house and move too. She became very ill very fast; I was not told she was dying; I struggled with a new school and classmates (in the south) who were about two years further developed socially than I.

I could of course write an entire long book about my high school years, long marriage of challenges and how I emerged, divorced and raising a last child, alone, at 46.

Now you know my background, reader. I believe our childhood is like the foundation of our whole house – our beliefs, our ability to trust, that spiritual knowledge that we grow up with (or without). That beginning is what we fall back on when life throws us fast balls, or when we make horrendous mistakes and have to scramble back to an even road. It’s what we have for answers in the middle of the night when our first child is very sick, or when a letter in the mail changes a day from normal to unthinkable. It is the great underlying realm that we view our world from (even as we dream), our lens that, over time, we learn to polish and aim and carry at our sternum from which we look and look and look.

I did not mention that I was a fearful child - only learning to ride a bike at age fourteen because I was afraid of falling, avoiding ladders and cliff edges because I was afraid of heights (Mom had vertigo), afraid to speak up because listening was so much more interesting, and my inner voice always so much more dependable. I grew in manageable, safe areas, but it was very slow.

Even as an adult I had never traveled alone. I was in my fifties, and my sister (the first-born, independent, very traveled person) was visiting from the great diagonal line of Florida to Oregon in her van. She would be driving back soon and I suddenly wanted to travel with her. We made the plan that we would drive away together, stop in Salt Lake City overnight, and I’d catch the short air flight hop back to Boise, and home. It was a perfect first time: a short flight, great plane ride, do-able. And done! I definitely felt that leap of growth.

Next time, only a few years later, we planned a reunion on the east coast to visit relations. We would travel up through the states in my sister’s van, and I’d fly in to join the trip in Raleigh, NC and, at travels’ end, fly back home in the west out of Washington, D.C. This was a much longer ride, and when all was done, and I had a full journal and many photos of this memorable trip, I felt like a woman of the world, capable of all kinds of things.

Then last year, after my oldest son had waited several years for me to take him up on his invitation to visit him in Alaska, I did. It was a marvelous flight along the coast with a window seat where I could view all the bays, the long line of cresting waves far below, the wondrous view upon the marriageable terrain to ocean world.

I knew there was an offer in Denali Park for a guest trip in an eight-seater, two-engine plane that was ‘flight-seeing’ around Mount McKinley and the giant world of huge sloped valleys, highways of glaciers, braided riverbeds and crusted peaks of snow in clouds. I said Yes to this, was appropriately nervous the day of, but followed through, finding myself in no less than the co-pilot seat for a grand escort and fear left behind on the ground.

Imagine me, doing these things? My sister, my daughter, this eldest son – they all know me, have known me through the years, and see me now. See the pictures that I could only have taken from where I truly sat! (And my son was in the rear of the plane, so he really saw me get on and off.)

The adventure of life is available each day. It was there when I struggled with feeding and caring for young children, and my concern about what they learned and how they felt. It was there, inherent and strong as ever, when I felt the onslaught of obstacles and cried and would have beat my chest if it had done any good, learning lessons, getting through it.

Adventure lives as I read a wide array of history and commentary and feel the strands of understanding catching to one another, and having conversations of discovery and insight with another who reads, late at night.

I think I learn the most when I stand outside listening to the morning; sometimes it is silent and I wait for that one bird that may call from afar. Traveling in a solo rhythm over miles, beside rivers, paralleled by crags and wild growing things and the flow of thoughts that arise as I, in the present and moving forward, carry my history, the ancestor spirits alive in me, and the wherever that I am moving toward.

If the moment is blessed, the eagle will let you see him, or the formation of the rock will be alive to your eye and the feeling that comes to you.

It has been pointed out to me that the eagle is so revered because he can go higher than any person can, that in his lofty world he can linger on the current of air, relaxed and beautiful, that his eyes can see further, of the wide and rounding view of earth, and if we imagined ourselves looking out from his eyes, we could see far also.

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