M E M 0 R

~IUSIC IS ~IY BAGConfessions of a lapsed oboist

By Meghan Daum

Rture a fifteen-year-old boy withthe early traces of a mustache whohangs out in the band room afterschool playing the opening bars of aBillyJoel song on the piano, and who,in an unsuccessful attempt at a per-sonal style, wears a fedora hat and ascarf decorated with a black-and-whitedesign of a piano keyboard. He is theboy who, in addition to having taughthimself some tunes from the Songs inthe Attic sheet music he bought at thelocal Sam Ash, probably plays thetrombone in the marching band,and also no doubt experienced aseminal moment one afternoon ashe vaguely flirted with a not-yet-kissed clarinet-playing girl, a girlwho is none too popular butwhose propensity for leaning onthe piano as he plays the openingchords of "Captain Jack" clued himin to the hitherto un imagined socialpossibilities of the marching band.

If the clarinet-playing girl is an av-erage student musician, she carries herplastic Selmer in the standard-issueblack plastic case. If she has demon-strated any kind of proficiency, she car-ries her Selmer in a tote bag that readsMUSIC IS MY BAG.The boy in the piano-key scarfdefinitely has music ashis bag.He may not yet have the tote bag, butthe hat, the Billy Joel, and the eupho-ria brought on by a sexual awakeningcentered entirely around band is all heneeds to be delivered into the unmis-takable world of Music Is My Bag.

I grewup in that world. The walls ofmy parents' house were covered withframed art posters from musical events:

Meghan Daum is a freelance writer living inLincoln, Nebraska.

the San Francisco Symphony's 1982production of St. Matthew Passion, theMetropolitan Opera's 1976 productionofAida, the original Broadwayproduc-tion of Sweeney Todd. Ninety percentof the books on the shelves were aboutmusic, if not actual musical scores.Childhood ceramics projects made by

my brother and me were painted witheighth notes and treble clef signs. Weowned a deck of cards with portraitsof the great composers on the back. Ababy grand piano overtook the roomthat would have been the dining roomif my parents hadn't forgone a table

and renamed it "the music room."This room also contained an

imposing hi-fi system and a$300 wooden music stand.

Music played at all times:Brahms, Mendelssohn,cast recordings of Sond-heim musicals, a cappellaChristmas albums. Whenmy father sat down with abook he read musicalscores, humming quietly

and tapping his foot. When Iwas ten my mother decided we neededto implement a before-dinner ritualakin to sayinggrace, so she composed ashort song, asking us all to contribute alyric, and we held hands and sang itbefore eating. My lyric was, "There's asmile on our face and it seems to sayallthe wonderful things we've all done to-day." My mother insisted on harmo-nizingat the end. She alsodid this whensinging "Happy Birthday."

Harmonizing on songs like "HappyBirthday" is a clear indication of theMusic Is My Bag personality. If onedoes not have an actual bag that readsMUSIC IS MY BAG-as did the violist inthe chamber music trio my mother setup with some women from the Uni-tarian Church-a $300 music standwill more than suffice. To avoid con-fusion, let me also say that there aremany different Bags in life. Somefriends of my parents have a $300 dic-tionary stand, a collection of silver

~~9164HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2000 Illustration by Polly Becket

bookmarks, and once threw a dinnerparty wherein the guestshad to dressupas members of the Bloomsbury group.These people are Literature IsMy Bag.I also know people who belong toMovies Are My Bag; they are easilydetectable by key chains shaped likeprojectors, outdated copies of Halli-well's Film Guide, and one too manyT -shirts from obscure venues like theSan Jose Film Festival. Cats Are MyBag people are too well-known to re-quire explanation, and the gaudiness oftheir paraphernalia-the figurines,cof-fee-table books, and refrigerator mag-nets-tends to give the category dom-inance over the slightly more subtleDogsAre My Bag.Perhaps the most an-noying Bag is\Vhere I Went to CollegeIs My Bag:Yale running shorts, plasticYale tumblers, Yale Platinum Visacards, and, yes, even Yale screen savers-all in someone pushing forty, theperennial contributor to the classnotes.

Having a Bag connotes the state ofbeing overly interested in somethingyet, in a certain way, not interestedenough. It has a hobbyish quality to it,a sense that the enthusiasm developedat a time when the person was lackingin some significant area of social or in-tellectuallife. Music Is My Bag is themother of all Bags, not just because inthe early 1980ssome consumer force ofthe public-radio-fund-drive variety dis-tributed a line of tote bags displayingthat slogan but because its adherents-or "music lovers," as they tend to callthemselves-give off an aura that dis-tinguishes them from the rest of thepopulation. It's an aura that has to dowith a sort of benign cluelessness, acondition that even in middle agesmacks of that phase between prepu-bescence and real adolescence.

Music Is My Bag people have a sex-lessness to them, a pastiness. They cannever seem to find a good pair of jeans.You can easily spot them on the street:the female French hom player in con-cert dresshailing a cab to Lincoln Cen-ter at around seven in the evening,her earrings too big, her hairstyle un-changed since 1986. The fifty-some-thing recording engineer with the run-ning shoes and the shoulder bag. TheIndiana marching band kids in townfor the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Pa-rade, snapping photos of one anotherin front of the Hard Rock Cafe, hav-

ing sung their parts from the bandarrangement of Hello, Dolly! the wholewayon the bus, thinking, knowing, thatit won't get any better than this. Likeall Music Is My Bag people, they aretoo much in love with trappings andmemorabilia, saving the certificates ofparticipation from regional festivals,the composer-a-month calendars, theMostly Mozart posters. Their sinceri-ty trumps all attempts at snideness.The boys' sarcasm falls short of irony;the girls will never be great seducers.They will all grow up to look like highschool band directors no matter whatprofession they choose, with petsnamed Wolfgang and Gershwin

and hemlines that are nev-

I er quite right.

played the oboe, which is not aninstrument to be taken lightly. Theoboist runs a high risk of veering deeplyinto Music Is My Bag, mostly becausegetting beyond the entry level requiresan absorption with technique that canrender a person vulnerable to certainvagaries of the wind ensemble subcul-ture, which inevitably concerns itselfwith the sociopolitical superstructureof the woodwind section. Within thissubtype, the oboist faces the twintemptations of narcissism, in contem-plating the disproportionate numberof solo passages written for the oboe,and pride, because it is she who soundsthe A that tunes the orchestra.

The oboe is a difficult instrument,beautiful when played well, horriblewhen played poorly. Yet even whenit produces a lovely sound, it is not aninstrument for the vain. The em-bouchure puckers the face into an un-natural grimace, an expression welldocumented in the countless pho-tographs from my childhood that sug-gest some sort of facial deformity: thelipless girl. Then there is the questionof moisture. Oboe playing revolves al-most entirely around saliva. Spit getscaught in the keys and the joints andmust be blown out using cigaretterolling paper as a blotter (a scandalousdrugstore purchase for a twelve-year-old girl). Spit accumulates on the floorif you play for too long. Spit must beconstantly sucked out from both sidesof the reed. Fragile and temperamen-tal, the reed is the oboe player's chron-ic medical condition. It must be tend-

ed to constantly. It must be wet butnever too wet, hard enough to emit adecent sound but soft enough to blowair through. The oboist must neverstray far from liquid; the reed is forev-er in her mouth or in a paper cup ofwater that teeters on the music standor being doused at a drinking fountainin Parsippany High School at theNorth Jersey Regional Band and Or-chestra audition. After a certain age,the student oboist must learn to makeher own reeds, building them frombamboo using knives and shavers-aseemingly eighteenth-century exercisethat ought to require an apprentice-ship. But oboists, occupying a firm, al-beit wet, patch of ground under thetattered umbrella of Music Is My Bag,never quite live in the same era aseveryone else.

Although I did, at one point, holdthe title of second-best high schoolplayer in the state of New Jersey, I wasa mediocre oboist. My discipline waslacking, my enthusiasm virtually nil,and my comprehension of rhythm (inkeeping with a lifelong math phobia)held me back considerably. But beingwithout an aptitude for music was, inmy family, tantamount to being aKennedy who knows nothing of poli-tics. Aptitude was something, perhapseven the only thing, I possessed. Asindifferent to the oboe as I was-andI once began an orchestra rehearsalwithout noticing that I had neglectedto screw the bell, the entire bottomportion, onto the rest of my instru-ment-I managed to be good enoughto play in the New Jersey All-StateHigh School Orchestra as well as in alocal adult symphony. I even gained ac-ceptance to a music conservatory.These aren't staggering accomplish-ments unless you consider the fact thatI rarely practiced. If I had practicedwith any regularity and determinationI could have been, asmy parents wouldhave liked me to be, one of those kidswho was schlepped to [uilliard on Sat-urdays. If! had practiced slightly morethan that I could have gone to [uil-liard for college. If! had practiced a lotI could have ended up in the New YorkPhilharmonic.

And yet I didn't practice. I haven'tpicked up the oboe since my junioryear in college, where, incidentally, Isat first chair in the orchestra even

MEMOIR 65

though I did not practice once the en-tire time.

I never practiced and yet I alwayspracticed. My memory is of always be-ing unprepared, yet I was forced to sitin the chair for so many hours that Isuspect something else must have beenat work, a lack of consciousness, a fail-ure of concentration, an inability topractice on my own. "Practice" wasamong the top five words spoken inour family, the other four beingMeghan, Mom, Dad, and Evan. T0-

day, almost ten years since I last prac-ticed, the word has finally lost the res-onance of our usage. I now think ofpractice in terms of law or medicine.There is a television show called ThePractice, and it seems odd to me thatI never associate the word sprawledacross the screen with the word thatwas woven relentlessly through ourfamily discourse. For my entire child-hood and adolescence, practicing wasboth a given and a punishment. Whenwe were bad, we practiced. When wewere idle, we practiced. Before din-ner and TV and friends coming overand bedtime and a thousand otherthings that beckoned with possibility,we practiced. "You have practicingand homework," my mother said everyday. In that order. My father said thesame thing without the part abouthomework.

Much of the reason I could neverquite get with the oboe-playing pro-gram was that I developed, at a veryyoung age, a deep contempt for theMusic Is My Bag world. Instead of re-ligion, my familyhad music, and it wasthe church against which I rebelled. Ihad clergy for parents: my father was aprofessional composer and arranger, akeyboard player and trombonist, whoscored the Gulf War for ABC: mymother was a pianist and music edu-cator of the high-school-production-of-Carousel genre. My own brother was areluctant Christ figure.A typically rest-less second child in youth (he quit pi-ano lessons but later discovered hecould play entirely by ear), my broth-er recently completed the final mix ofa demo CD of songs he wrote and per-formed in the style of mid-Eightiespop, late Doobie Brothers groove. HisLos Angeles house is littered with Bil-lyJoel and Bruce Hornsby sheet music,back issues of Stereo Review, the liner

~~o166 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! MARCH 200e

notes to the digital remastering ofjohnWilliams's score for Star

I Wars. Music is the bag.

compose songs in my sleep. I can'tdo it awake. I'll dream of songwriterssinging onstage. I'll hear them performnew songs, songs I've never heard,songs I therefore must have written.In childhood I never put one thoughttoward composing a song. It wouldhave been like composing air, creatingmore of something of which there wasalready quite enough. Wind playerssuch as flutists and saxophonists needas much air as they can get. Oboists arealways trying to get rid of air. Theycalibrate what they need to get thereed to vibrate, end up using even less,and dispense with the rest out of thecorners of their mouths. It's all aboutexhaling. On an eighth rest, they'reas likely to blow air out as they are tosteal a breath. There's alwayscoomuchof everything for oboists: too much air,too many bars when they're not play-ing and too many bars when there'shardly anyone playing but them, toomany percussion players dropping tri-angles on the floor, too many violinistsplaying "Eleanor Rigby" before the re-hearsal starts.

Most orchestras have only twooboists, first chair and second chair,pilot and copilot. The second oboist isthe perpetual back-up system, the oneon call, the one who jumps in andsaves the other when his reed dries upin the middle of a solo, when he miss-es his cue, when he freezes in panicbefore trying to hit a high D. I've beenfirstoboist and I've been second oboist,and first isbetter, though not by much.It's still the oboe. Unlike the gregari-ous violinist or the congenial cellist,the oboist is a lone wolf. To play theoboe in an orchestra is to completean obstacle course of solos and duetswith the first flutist, who if she is hard-core Music Is My Bag will refer to her-self as a "flautist." Oboe solos dot thegreat symphonies like land mines, thepizzicati that precede them are drumrolls, the conductor's pointing fingeris an arrow for the whole audience tosee: here comes the oboe, two barsuntil the oboe, now, now. It's got to benailed, one flubbed arpeggio, one flathalf note, one misplaced pinky in themiddle of a run of sixteenth notes,

and everyone will hear. Everyone.My parents' presence at a high

school orchestra concert turned whatshould have been a routine event intosomething akin to the finals of theOlympic women's figure skating com-petition. Even from the blinding, flood-lit stage I could practically see themin the audience, clucking at every er-ror, grimacing at anything even slight-ly out of tune. Afterward, when theother parents-musically illiteratechumps-were patting their kids onthe head and loading the tuba into thestation wagon, I would receive my cri-tique. "You were hesitating in the sec-ond part of the Haydn Variations.""You overanticipated in the Berceusesection of the Stravinsky." "Your tonewas excellent in the first movement,but then your chops ran out." Mybrother, who was forced for a numberof years to play the French horn, oncewas reduced to a screaming fight withour father in the school parking lot,the kind of fight possible only betweenfathers and sons. He'd bumbled toomany notes, played out of tune, com-mitted some treasonous infractionagainst the family reputation. My fathergavehim the businesson the way to thecar, eliciting the alto curses of a four-teen-year-old, pages of music every-where, an instrument case slammed onthe pavement.

This sort of rebellion was not mystyle. I cried instead. I cried in the sev-enth grade when the letter telling meI'd been accepted to the North JerseyRegional Band and Orchestra arrivedthree days late. I cried in the tenthgrade when I ended up in the All-StateBand instead of the orchestra. I criedwhen I thought I'd given a poor recital(never mind that the audience thoughtI wasbrilliant-all morons), cried be-fore lessons (underprepared), cried af-ter lessons (sentenced to a week of re-viewing the loathsome F sharp etude).Mostly, though, I cried during prac-tice drills supervised by my father.These were torture sessions whereinsome innocent tooting would send myfather racing downstairs from his atticstudy, screaming, "Count, count, you'renot counting! JesusChristl" Out wouldcome a pencil, if not an actual con-ductor's baton, and he would beginhitting the music stand, forcing me torepeat the tricky fingerings again and

again, speeding up the tempo so thatI'd be sure to hit each note when wetook it back down to real time. Thesesessions would last for hours, my mouthmuscles shaking, tears welling up fromfatigue and exasperation. If we had acopy of the piano part, my motherwould play the accompaniment, andtogether my parents would bark com-mands: "Articulate the eighth notesmore. More staccato on the tonguing.Don't tap your foot, tap your toe insideyour shoe." The postman heard a lot ofthis. The neighbors heard all of it. Af-ter practicing we'd eat dinner, but notbefore that song: "There's a smile onour face, and it seems to say all thewonderful things ... " "Good practicesession today," my mother would say,dishing out the casserole, WQXR'sSymphony Hall playing over thekitchen speakers. "Yup, sounding pret-ty good," my father would say. "How

about one more go at it~I before bed?"

II y mother called my oboe a"horn." This infuriated me. "Do youhave your horn!" she'd ask every singlemorning. "Do you need your horn for

school today?" She maintained thatthis terminology was technically cor-rect, that among musicians a "horn"was anything into which air was blown.My oboe was a $4,000 instrument,high-grade black granadilla with ster-ling silver keys. It was no horn. Butsuch semantics are a staple of Music IsMy Bag, the overfamiliar stance that re-veals a desperate need for subcultural af-filiation, the musical equivalent ofpeople in the magazine business who re-fer to publications like Glamour andForbes as "books." As is indicated bythe use of "horn," there's a subtly ma-cho quality to Music Is My Bag. Thepersistent insecurity of musicians, es-pecially classical musicians, fosters akind of jargon that would be betterconfined to the military or major leaguebaseball. Cellists talk about rock stopsand rosin as though they were com-paring canteen belts or brands of glovegrease. They have their in-jokes andaphorisms: "The Rock Stops Here,""Eliminate Violins in Our Schools."

I grew up surrounded by phrases like"rattle off that solo," "nail that lick,"and "build up your chops." "Chops"is a word that should be invoked on-

ly by rock-and-roll guitarists but ismore often uttered with the flailing,badly timed anti-authority of the highschool clarinet player. Like the vio-linist who plays "Eleanor Rigby" beforerehearsal, the clarinet player's rela-tionship to rock and roll maintains itsdistance. Rock music is about sex. Itis something unloved by parents andtherefore unloved by Music Is My Bagpeople, who make a vocation of pleas-ing their parents, of studying trig andvolunteering at the hospital and mak-ing a run for the student governmenteven though they're well aware theyhave no chance of winning. Rock androll is careless and unstudied. It mightpossibly involve drinking. It most cer-tainly involves dancing. It flies in theface of the central identity of Music IsMy Baggers, who chose as their rolemodels those painfully introvertedcharacters from young adult novels:the klutz, the bookworm, the latebloomer. When given a classroom as-signment to write about someone whoinspires her, Music Is My Bag willwrite about her grandfather or per-haps Jean- Pierre Rampal. If the bad-attitude kid in the back row writes

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about AC/DC's Angus Young, MusicIs My Bag will believe in her heartthat he should receive a failing grade.Rock and roll, asher parents would saywhen the junior high drama club putson a production of Grease, "is not ap-propriate for this age group." Even inthe throws of adolescence, Music IsMy Bag will deny adolescence. Evenat age sixteen, she will hold her earswhen the rock music gets loud, sayingit ruins her sense of overtones, sayingshe has sensitive ears. Like a retiree,she will classify the whole genre asnothing but a bunch of noise, thoughit is likely that she is a fan of Yes.

During the yearswhen I was a mem-ber of the New Jersey All-State Or-chestra, I would carpool to rehearsalswith the four or so other kids from mytown who made All-State every year.This involved spending as much as twohours each way in station wagons dri-ven bypeople's parents, and, inevitably,the issue of music would arise: whatmusic would be played in the car?Among the most talented musiciansin school was a girl named ElizabethOstling, who was eventually hired asthe second flutist for the Boston Sym-phony Orchestra at age twenty-one,and at the age of fifteen was unac-countably possessed by an enthusiasmfor the Christian singer Amy Grant.Next to Prokofiev and the HindemithFlute Sonata, Amy Grant occupied thenumber-one spot in her studious, late-blooming heart. Since Elizabeth'smother, like many parents of Baggers,was devoted solely to her daughter'smusical and academic career, she didmost of the driving to such boony spotsas Chatham High School, MonmouthRegional, and Long Branch MiddleSchool. Mile after New Jersey Turn-pike mile, we were serenaded by thewholesome synthesizers of songs like"Saved By Love" and "Wait for theHealing," only to spillour of the car andtake no small relief in the sound oftwenty-five of ew Jersey's best stu-dent violinists playing "Eleanor Rig-by" before the six-hour rehearsal.

To participate in a six-hour rehearsalof the New Jersey All-State Orchestrais to see the accessoriesof Bagdomtum-ble from purses, knapsacks, and totes;here more than anyplace are the realMcCoys, actual Music Is My Bag bags,canvas satchels filledwith stereo Walk-

J~9168 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2000

mans and A.P. math homework andT rapper Keeper notebooks featuringthe piano-playing Schroeder from thePeanuts comic strip. When we pausedfor dinner I would embark on oboemaintenance, putting the reed in wa-ter, swabbing the instrument dry, re-moving the wads of wax that, duringmy orthodontic years, I placed over myfront teeth to keep the inside of mymouth from bleeding. Just as I had hat-ed the entropy of recess back in gradeschool, I loathed the dinner breaks atAll-State rehearsals. To maximize re-hearsal time, the wind section oftenate separately from the strings, whichleft me alone with the band types, thehorn players and percussionists whowore shirts with slogans like "MakeTime for Halftime." They'd wolf downtheir sandwiches and commence withtheir jam session,a cacophonous whitenoise of scales, finger exercises, andmemorized excerpts from their home-town marching numbers. During thesedinner breaks, I'd generally hang withthe other oboist. For some reason, thiswas almost always a tall girl who woresneakers with corduroy pants and aturtleneck with nothing over it. This isfairly typical Music Is My Bag garb,though oboistshave a particular spin onit, a spin characterized more than any-thing by lack of spin. Given the ab-sence in most classical musicians of astylegene, this isprobably a good thing.Oboists don't accessorize. They don'twear buttons on their jackets that say"Oboe Power" or "Who Are You Go-ing to Tune To?"

There's high-end Bagdom and low-end Bagdom, with a lot of room in be-tween. Despite myparents' paramilitarypractice regimens, I have to give themcredit for being fairly high-end Bag-gers. There were no piano-key scarvesin our house, no "World's GreatestTrombonist" figurines, no plastic tum-blers left over from my father's days asassistant director of the Stanford Uni-versity Marching Band. Such acces-sories are the mandate of the lowesttier of Music Is My Bag, a stratumwhose mascot is PDQ Bach, whosetheme song is "Piano Man," and whoseregional representative is the kid inhigh school who plays not only thetrumpet but the piano, saxophone,flute, string bass, accordion, and woodblock. This kid, considered a wun-

derkind by his parents and the rest ofthe band community, plays none ofthese instruments well, but the factthat he knows so many different sets offingerings, the fact that he has the po-tential to earn some college money byperforming as a one-man band at theannual state teachers' conference,makes him a hometown hero. He maynot be a football player. He may noteven gain access to the IvyLeague. Butin the realm of Music IsMy Bag,the kidwho plays every instrument, particu-larly when he can play Billy Joel songson every instrument, is the alpha male.

The flip side of the one-man bandare those Music Is My Baggerswho arenot musicians at all. These are the kidswho twirl flagsor rifles in the marchingband, the ones who blast music in theirrooms and play not air guitar but airkeyboards, their hands fluttering outin front of them, the hand positionsnot nearly as important as the atten-dant head motions. This is the essenceof Bagdom, which is to take greaterpleasure in the reverb than the melody,to love the lunch break more than therehearsal, the rehearsal more than theperformance, the clarinet case morethan the clarinet. It is to think noth-ingof sending awayfor the deluxe pack-et of limited-edition memorabilia thatis being sold for the low, low price ofone's entire personality. It is to

let the trinkets do the

I talking.

was twenty-one when I stoppedplaying the oboe. I wish I could comeup with a big, dramatic reason why. Iwish I could say that I sustained somekind of injury that prevented me fromplaying (it's hard to imagine what kindof injury could sideline an oboist-lipstrain? carpal tunnel syndrome?), orthat I was forced to sell my oboe in or-der to help a family member in crisis,or, better yet, that I suffered a violentattack in which my oboe was used as aweapon against me before being stolenand melted down for artillery. But thetruth has more to do with what in col-lege I considered to be an exceptionallylong walk from my dormitory to themusic building. Without the proddingof my parents or the structure of a state-run music education program, my oboecareer had to run on self-motivationalone, and when my senior year start-

ed I neither registeredforprivate lessonsnor signed up for the orchestra, dodg-ing countless calls from the directorimploring me to reassume my chair.

Since then I haven't set foot in a re-hearsal room, put together a foldingmusic stand, fussedwith a reed, markedup music, practiced scales, tuned anorchestra, or performed any of thecountless activities that previously haddominated my existence. There aremoments every now and then whenI'll hear an oboe-dominated section ofthe Bach Mass in B Minor or theBerceuse section of Stravinsky's Fire-bird Suite and long to find a workablereed and pick the instrument up again.But then I imagine how terrible I'llsound after eight dormant years, and Ijust put the whole idea out of my mindbefore I start to feel sad about it. I canstill smell the musty odor of my oboecase, the old-ladyish whiff of the vel-vet lining and the tubes of cork greaseand the damp fabric of the key pads.Unlike the computer on which I nowwork, my oboe had the sense of beingan ancient thing. Brittle and creaky, itwas vulnerable when handled bystrangers. It needed to be packed uptight, dried out in just the right places,kept away from the heat and the coldand from anyone too stupid to distin-guish it from a clarinet.

What I really miss about the oboe ishaving myhands on it. I could come atthat instrument from any angle andknow every indentation on every key,everyspot that leaked air, everynick onevery square inch of wood. I knew pre-cisely how its weight was distributedbetween my right thumb and left wrist,and I knew, above all, that the weightwould feel the same way every time,every day, for every year that I played.But I put my oboe down, and I neverpicked it back up. I could have been apretty good oboist if! had practiced, ifI had ignored the set design and justplayed the instrument. But I didn't andI wasn't. When I look back I hardlyrecognizemyself,that person who couldplaya Mozart sonata by memory,whosefingers could move three times fasterthan I now type-a person who wasgiven a gift, but who walked away fromit because of piano-key scarves and fe-dora hats and all those secondarymelodies that eventually became theonly thing I could hear. _

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