Solo Flight

He’s up there, my grandson, playing trumpet with the high school jazz band. It was a good choice since the trumpets stand in the back and it’s easy to see him nodding his head in time with the old school big band music. He’s up there with the saxophones and the trombones, lifting my spirits, reminding me that all is not lost. And then, he gets a solo, his own moment in the spotlight, and I’m even more entranced. It’s great to hear him playing ensemble, but when he has a solo there’s a glow around him, something about his essential self breaks through.

Alone is another country. The streets are unfamiliar. Encounters with other people are precious and rare. The light, the sounds, the smells are different. Being here in Minnesota by myself for the second springtime, I’m discovering my own texture in ways that I couldn’t possibly feel if I weren’t alone. There is the active me and the observer me. I observe myself cooking, eating, walking around the pond. Look, there’s Susie making matzoh brei last week because it’s still pesach and she’s denying herself linguine. Look, there’s Susie having a conversation with another older woman sitting on a bench in the park. The woman is of Swedish extraction so I tell her I spent two years in Stockholm and Uppsala. What I don’t tell her is that I was there because my first husband was a draft resister. The imprint of that time is always with me even though it comes in and out of focus. When I see the students at Columbia in tents, it all comes back. The hyperreality, the electricity, the sense of being in the middle of everything. The woman in Wolfe Park tells a story about a family trip to visit a cousin in the old country when her son was six. The child fails to wipe the mud off his shoes before entering the house. Everyone is polite about it until the woman’s husband comes in and does the same thing. The cousin says with a tone of shrugging resignation, äpplet faller inte långt från trädet. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. It’s been so long since I’ve heard that sing-song, since we were the young anti-war demonstrators, a lot lonely and a little bit brave in Sweden.

Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash

This kind of back and forth happens because there is so much emptiness when you’re alone. It’s a desert. Nothing for the eye to focus on. It’s  the between times for me now and I’ve always been a sucker for liminality. Not that it’s easy. No sir, it’s not easy to wake up and face that expanse. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, as the Buddhists say. I don’t drive anymore. I need a new phone so I can update apps whatever that means. It means I don’t have access to Uber which I’m just trying to get comfortable with. The weather is rainy. It’s not easy but I seem to be flourishing in it. All the space and silence has arrived to serve as an antidote to courtroom drama, starving children, Go Back to Poland, surveillance. People sometimes decide and declare with great earnestness that they’re going analog for a spell, taking a break from the cyber noise. But like all transformative experiences, being in empty space has more efficacy if you didn’t entirely choose it. Losses are the great motivators. I knew I was returning to Minnesota alone but I didn’t plan for it to rain all the time. I imagined myself walking around and around Wolfe Park, developing my relationship with the Swedish-speaking woman and the Black man in the grocery who comments on the healthy food piled high in both of our shopping carts. Yes, I say, you and I are going to live forever.  

For everything there is a season, they say. Youth is the season of clamor and commotion and most of all of knowing. Coming up on eighty is the season of rest and reflection and most of all of unknowing. I can feel the certainty draining out of me. Meeting the day with no plan is part of my education in unknowing. It’s a great luxury and sometimes it feels like sitting in a theater audience before the play begins. I’m expectant. I wait for the parting of the curtain, the lifting of the veil, and suddenly there it is, the music. 

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. In May, Many Voices will feature Peggy Reeves, an endlessly inventive visual artist living in the Berkshires. Peggy will comment on her infrared photography, her painting, and her digital collages.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.