(no subject)
It feels like summer and it smells like fall.
Pudgy college boys with their shirts off are standing on the fraternity porches, talking on cell phones and drinking a beer. Up on south hill the Ithaca College kids are moving in and playing hacky-sack in our parking lot. Someone down the street is teaching violin lessons to a young child with a strong, self-assured tone but no vibrato yet. I'm drinking a mixture of mango, orange juice and pomegratate flavored seltzer water with a shot of gin and watching the neighbor's chihuahua pace nervously around the lawn.
I don't consider myself a nostalgic person, but fall always does strange things to me. It's back to school time in more ways than just the start of classes. It's the right time for a little bit of looking back, if only to stop you from looking forward. Playing the clarinet again contributes to this weird retrograde feeling. My case still has the name plaque permanently glued on it with my old name. I thought about changing it, putting one on with my new name and my shiny Ithaca address. But I know I won't. Sometimes when I'm playing I feel as if I've borrowed the instrument, as if it is her clarinet, who ever she was. (An old music camp friend says he can't get over the feeling that I have killed someone and taken her life.) It's been so long since I played clarinet with any sort of seriousness that it sometimes amazes me that I can still play. I'm so different now that I feel like I should actually have different fingers, different lips by now. But the muscle memory is there, powerful enough to make me question whether I can really have changed as much in other ways as I like to think.
I feel agitated in the fall. It's not that I am unmoored, or ill at ease with the decisions I have made. I've been both those places and this is not them. Life is life as I know it. Life punctuated by classes and rehearsals and the modern trappings of procrastination. It's also life as I got to know it when I was out of school. It's life perpetually out of bread and with too much milk and eggplant to reasonably use before it will go bad. But I feel that there's always a silence to the fall, perhaps an inhale before a particularly long exhale of a played phrase. But it always feels like the conductor waits a little too long to let you let the air out. And I'm right ... there ... right now.
Pudgy college boys with their shirts off are standing on the fraternity porches, talking on cell phones and drinking a beer. Up on south hill the Ithaca College kids are moving in and playing hacky-sack in our parking lot. Someone down the street is teaching violin lessons to a young child with a strong, self-assured tone but no vibrato yet. I'm drinking a mixture of mango, orange juice and pomegratate flavored seltzer water with a shot of gin and watching the neighbor's chihuahua pace nervously around the lawn.
I don't consider myself a nostalgic person, but fall always does strange things to me. It's back to school time in more ways than just the start of classes. It's the right time for a little bit of looking back, if only to stop you from looking forward. Playing the clarinet again contributes to this weird retrograde feeling. My case still has the name plaque permanently glued on it with my old name. I thought about changing it, putting one on with my new name and my shiny Ithaca address. But I know I won't. Sometimes when I'm playing I feel as if I've borrowed the instrument, as if it is her clarinet, who ever she was. (An old music camp friend says he can't get over the feeling that I have killed someone and taken her life.) It's been so long since I played clarinet with any sort of seriousness that it sometimes amazes me that I can still play. I'm so different now that I feel like I should actually have different fingers, different lips by now. But the muscle memory is there, powerful enough to make me question whether I can really have changed as much in other ways as I like to think.
I feel agitated in the fall. It's not that I am unmoored, or ill at ease with the decisions I have made. I've been both those places and this is not them. Life is life as I know it. Life punctuated by classes and rehearsals and the modern trappings of procrastination. It's also life as I got to know it when I was out of school. It's life perpetually out of bread and with too much milk and eggplant to reasonably use before it will go bad. But I feel that there's always a silence to the fall, perhaps an inhale before a particularly long exhale of a played phrase. But it always feels like the conductor waits a little too long to let you let the air out. And I'm right ... there ... right now.