My Second Language

Yesterday I found the notebook containing my original, hand-written harp music. 

I wasn't looking for it. I had forgotten that I even had it. I pulled the dusty, black binder from no-man's land, down there on the very bottom of the bookcase that stands behind the big recliner. 

Now I use and reuse notebooks for all kinds of things, and needed a binder for the Lent and Easter readings I had collected. I usually have extras, just waiting for the next thing I want to save or organize, but there were none in the usual places.

So I went on a hunt. My plan was to find one that I could empty or perhaps add to. I spotted the collection of odd, multicolored notebooks down in no-man's land and began pulling them out, one by one. Some sneezing was involved.

And then, there it was. 

Some years ago I had begun using a music notation program on the computer, and most of my music had been put into that form. But there it was - the notebook containing hours and hours of work, transcribing what I could hear in my head and play with my fingers onto pages and pages of staff paper. It is difficult to articulate what I felt.

Maya Angelou once wrote of her childhood:  Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. As an introverted fourth child, I found my voice in "the space between the notes." Using the keys of our old, upright piano I learned to express all the feelings and words I could not speak out loud. Music became my second language, my hedge against loneliness. Finding this dusty old binder was like recovering a long lost journal, a written record of a particular portion of my life.

An odd stream of coincidences let to the discovery of this notebook. On our recent trip back to San Diego we took my harp with us for first time. The harp has become my Sanctuary instrument since my piano must remain in San Diego. But I was working on some new music up there in the woods, and I wasn't ready to break when we needed to return. 

National Asset seamed a bit surprised when I first mentioned this idea. It wasn't actually anything he said. But when you've lived with someone for two thirds of your life you become proficient at reading things like eyebrows. Good man that he is, he readily agreed. Providing it would fit in the Prius, that is. This harp is somewhat bigger than the one we lost to the flood. But he found a way to make it work.


So... my search for a binder brought me to the no-man's land behind the recliner. (Ah-choo!) And there it was, my bulging, black notebook, bursting with musical memories. I paged through it and immediately had to wrestle my harp out of its case and set it up. I had to try three different chairs to find one approximately the correct height. (There wasn't room for my harp stool in the Prius). I commandeered the ottoman for a make-shift music stand. (The stand didn't fit in the Prius either.) And I began to play. 

I worked my way through the book, page by page. I found a pencil-scribed piece with no name and began to play. The notation was no longer familiar. But my fingers remembered, and a picture flashed in my mind of my son, young, listening to me play, commenting on the music. This particular music.

"Listen to this!" I call to the Asset. "Do you remember this?"

"It's pretty," he remarks. Over the years he has learned exactly the right thing to say in such situations.

"It is, isn't it?" I reply, amazed. It was one of the very first pieces I wrote. I hadn't played it in maybe twenty years.

Many of the hand-written pieces are now in my other harp books, all dignified in their computer generated form. But some are not. Some were never entered into the notation program, or were lost in the flood. Some remain inside our water-damaged computer and I thought they would never be recovered. I smile over the lost pieces that will now return to my harp repertoire and whisper a prayer of thanks.

These carefully pencilled pieces feel like treasures from a time capsule that has been dug up in some long forgotten garden. I play them, sitting there on my kitchen chair, dusty black notebook propped against a stack of heavy books on the ottoman. I play and memories literally fill the air.

It is wonderful - a treasure found. It is poignant. The yellowed pages are marked with dates. Can so much time have passed since I began playing harp? How quickly a life goes by!  

Victor Hugo said:  Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. 

Amen.