I had an aunt who was a violin teacher and, according to family legend, when I was two or three, I’d watch her teaching and then pick up two pieces of wood and “play.” When I was five, she gave me my first lessons, and quickly became excited about my talent.
I was nineteen years old, returning from a winter in the jungles of Southern Belize, dramatically changed by a foreign climate and culture. On contract as a student of The Evergreen State College of Olympia, Washington, I’d been immersed in studying rainforest natural history and the lives and subsistence strategies of the Kekchi Maya.
I hear water music in my sleep: foghorns, and the scratchy voice of a Great Blue Heron, frogs in the marsh. There is the tide as it slides out, then rushes back-the ocean breathing in and out. I dream all the voices in a room filled with people but I can make out only snatches of dialogue, a little blond girl saying, “Change is a fast-moving current,” and a tall, thin professor who explains, “the explicate lies enfolded in the implicate.”
I watched from my waiting room chair. A snow-headed ancient, bundled into a thick car coat, came in through the automatic double doors of the hospital specialty center. He leaned heavily on a cane with his right hand as he lurched forward, steadying himself with his left hand on the shoulder of a slight and equally snow-headed woman with glasses and handbag and long coat.
My breath catches in my throat; all my muscles tense. My right eyebrow automatically snaps up. I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, reopening what remained of last time’s struggle for emotional control. ‘Not again. Just one day can’t you leave me alone, or at least put a little variety into your insults? Ugh, just not right now.’