The cold stone floor, exposed brick walls, and the aroma of freshly brewing coffee are my literary backdrop this morning. I am working on a story about the symphony, and my emotional attachment to music. Venturing out to my favorite coffee place to write, I am continually amazed by the rustic beauty and compelling atmosphere that thoughtful construction can produce. Our Tennessee rental home for this first year of our relocation is significantly larger than our Florida townhouse, and I still find myself without a place to steal away to think and write.  My books are without a home, sequestered on shelves in a home office, like children banished from the adult table at Thanksgiving. I choose not to write at the same desk where I pay the bills and deal with the realities of life, its conflicting energy too great a distraction. I need good mojo and an architecturally pleasing environment to do my best work. At least a place I call my own. I need my stuff. My books need to sit regally on the shelf without the intrusion of trashy fiction and business journals. I like organization as much as the next person, but a few piles of research papers sitting here and there lend “atmosphere” to my longed for writing room. But no room exists yet, and I find myself at the coffee shop penning a few lines. Actually “coffee shop” is a grave misnomer and a throw back from my 1960’s youth in New Jersey. Coffee shops were grizzly little places with lots of Formica counter tops, and a waitress named “Dot”.  My barista’s name is Chase and my coffee is a “pour-over” that costs a small fortune. He wears a hunter green canvas apron, with rich leather straps that is hand crafted by a local artisan. He doesn’t chew gum or call me “hon”.

As I look around this coffee gathering place, littered with skinny jean wearing, tattooed hipsters, I can’t help but listen to the fascinating conversations.  Regaling one another with music industry speak and all sorts of artistic expression, I find myself unable to concentrate on my own work.  Contrasting the verbal onslaught are those plugged into the Internet, lost in a world of their own, with the Bose headphones outnumbering the Apple ear buds four to one. With trepidation and no small amount of embarrassment, I reach for my little ear bud thingy’s that I purchased at Office Max and plug myself into my own escape from the incessant chatter.  I usually require quiet to write, the necessity of drowning out the noise of human conversation make it necessary to listen to something innocuous like white noise that produces no emotion. This morning I throw caution to the wind, as I begin listening to a soul stirring classical piece, Scheherazade. White noise be damned! I want the full onslaught of emotions as the tears drip onto the lined pages of my writing portfolio right in the middle of the hipster coffee place.

The Arts section of the Tennessean listed it, hidden in plain sight, in the middle of the announcements of Bluegrass, Country, and Southern rock. Like a beacon to my soul, the pearl of great price hidden among the swine. The Nashville Symphony would be performing my favorite piece of classical music, Scheherazade by the famed Russian composer, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. A rare gift in the offing, a gift to rouse my soul like no other, the opportunity to hear Scheherazade performed live, but I’m too poor for the symphony. I refer to my current situation as “underemployment”.  I am busier than I have ever been, doing the best work I have ever done, I’m just not getting paid to do it, not paid in monetary terms that is. I am receiving payment of inestimable worth by recognizing and connecting with the belovedness in every person I encounter. What a gift! What payback!

The cost of a ticket for any Arts venue is so ridiculously inaccessible to the average person, robbing the masses of the gift of art amidst our daily drudgery. That’s precisely why I need the symphony, to transport me to another place, to feed the creative soul within me.  I need to hear this piece of music that has been part of me since I was ten years old. The first time I heard “Opus 35, the Young Prince and Princess”, we were flying down the highway in my father’s 1967 baby blue Cadillac with the eight track stereo blasting.  I can still see the tape as it was pushed into the car’s stereo, opening a world of symphonic music and making me feel all swirly inside, like flying high on a playground swing, or the first steep drop of a roller coaster, your heart in your throat, and your stomach careening upward.  Scheherazade has so intrigued me I found it necessary to study all I could about its composer, and his intentions with this piece.  Whatever his desires, I have been transformed and transported over and over again.  Why does this music touch me so?

From my earliest memories music has lifted me out of my existence and gone deeper into my private soul than any human, or experience could.  Music for me has been the spirit who is able to separate the marrow from the bone, a language spoken to me, and in me. Music feels my feelings with me, encouraging me into the deep well of existence.

I wish music had been given the chance to speak through me. The exact age escapes me, but perhaps around the age of five or six, the beautiful baby grand piano arrived in our house, and my world suddenly changed octaves. The story of how my mother acquired the piano remains a mystery. She owned a high-end ladies consignment shop in our hometown, The Once More Shop. The consignments came from the wealthy society ladies in our town, whose need to dispose of last season’s fashions kept my mother in business, and the middle class clothed. Maybe the piano made it’s way to us through one of mom’s customers, but we were never privy to the how of the piano’s arrival, my piano. The Once More Shop existed on one of the exclusive streets of the uptown shopping district, nestled between the antique shops and a turn of the century bookstore that smelled like stale graham crackers. Within walking distance from my Elementary school, many after school hours were spent playing amid the racks of clothes, like the costume department of a local theatre company. Depending on who I wanted to be that day, I would pull clothes from their hangers and pretend away my otherwise painful childhood. The section of clothing that always creeped me out was populated by the fox and mink stolls, the real kind, before it became politically incorrect to skin an animal and proudly wrap yourself in it to prove your position in wealthy society. Several of the stolls still had the poor little foxes head attached, eyes petrified and staring intently at all lookers, creepy and frightening to a small child. The only time I touched those pieces was when I donned the fringed buckskin jacket from the children’s section and wrapped that old fox around my head pretending to be Daniel Boone, with his ever-present coonskin cap. It didn’t matter that it was fox, any furry animal would suffice in my imagination. Sometimes I would use a broom handle as my musket, ripping the fox skin from my head, stomping it into the floor with a loud, “bang” and then pretend to cook him up as vittles for dinner. My mother’s consignment shop lent itself to an overactive childhood imagination that took me anywhere but the reality of my life.

It matters not how the beautiful old Steinway piano made it’s way into my childhood, just that it did. Music found me at an early age, and I know in my heart I would have been an actor and a musician if I hadn’t had to become the other me as a young child, disassociating from the abuse, robbing me of my true self. The old piano became my childhood friend, a constant companion.  The sheer size of the thing made it a perfect play toy.  With a bed sheet it became my tent, or a dark cave to explore. More often than not it became my stage.  I would crawl underneath it, and next to the spindly carved legs and brass foot pedals, I would sing and act. The premiere of the Oscar winning movie “West Side Story” hit the theatres in 1961, and soon after, our family of six drove to the big theater a few towns over. Back in the day, you used to get dressed up to go to the movies. It was certainly a very special occasion and the only time our family ever went to the theater together. West Side Story was very intense for a five year old, to say the least. I remember the excitement of being in the theater as the music swelled, and the plush purple curtains peeled back, revealing the movie screen. Today’s multiplexes pale in comparison to the production the old theaters used to be.

Something unexplainable happened inside me as I experienced West Side Story as a small child that night in the theater. I was transported to a place of inner fantasy, creativity, and wild imagination. Imagination that would cost me dearly in adulthood, as my inner world would spiral uncontrollably. I’m quite sure that something so graphic and evocative emotionally is not suitable material for the young and impressionable. I became part of them, or more accurately, they became part of me. I chose sides in the films conflict, and I was definitely a Shark, perhaps because of my mother’s Latin influence, or perhaps because I was tender to the marginalized, the underdog, even as a child. Or maybe I just knew the Sharks were cooler. I desperately wanted to look like them, with black high top Converse sneakers, bright purple shirt, black jeans, and leather wrist braces. So cool. I wore them all in my mind, under the big piano in our living room, my stage. I became a character on the movie screen, and became the images I saw, my escape. I was one of the Sharks and danced Mambo at the gym, (one of my favorite scenes in the movie by the way – musical theater’s birth in me no doubt!).  I so vividly remember lying under the piano acting out the scene with Tony and Maria after he is shot and his life is slipping away, tears streaming down my face. The emotion was made all the more intense as I played the cast album over and over again, acting out the scene and singing all the characters parts. I would be under that piano for hours and hours feeling incredibly deep emotion and letting my fantasy and imagination make it completely real. Most children were outside playing in the gorgeous sunlight without a care, as a childhood should be played. My private world was under that baby grand piano, crying and feeling real emotions through a fantasy life too adult for a tender child to be experiencing. That acting mimicked reality for me though, the reality of the struggle and simulated gang warfare that occurred between my parents daily in our house of secrets.  Music was born in me at a young age, and the sound track to West Side Story compelled that love.

The memories of music from even earlier, the age of three or four are engulfed in confusion and emotion. My mother would play her old Latin records, the living room transformed into the dance floor. As the alcohol began to change her happy memories as a professional big band singer in the Jose’ Casanova Orchestra in 1940’s Manhattan, to the reality of her life as a trapped suburban housewife and mother of four, her dark secrets took the melody out of the music. What began as joyful reminiscence always ended in her painful tears, and a rage that made me run for cover. My love of music and dance came from her though, and I thank her immensely. The best part of her made it into me, and so did the worst. She was a happy drunk at first, and we would dance Rhumba, Meringue, and the Lindy.  It’s the only time in a long and lonely childhood that I felt any connection to her.  When the music played and the mambo began, I knew I had at least a few moments with her and the music, before it all went bad. My mother’s pain conspired to deepen my emotional attachment to music, simply because I wanted her love, or at least I wanted her not to hate me.

Music has a power over us like no other medium, it’s choruses bringing us instantly to a place and time. Memories both good and bad are invoked with each note floating across our lives. Music found me at an early age, my constant companion, waiting to come out and play on the playground. As the song says, “I got the music in me”, and it’s never too late!