AN ARTS EDUCATION
This story of awe, pubescence & longing is dedicated to FOUNDING SUBSCRIBER, Mike Krafka!!!!!
I looked at my shitty, uninspiring middle school gym and the black shards of hair poking out of my thighs below my gym shorts.
This is not glory, I thought, exiting the locker room.
I am destined for better.
But my yearning didn’t have an aim and I couldn’t name it.
It was just a sixth grade malaise and a sense of waiting. For something.
My foggy dissatisfaction took shape the day Lynn Hsu* played a “gypsy dance” violin concerto in front of the whole sixth grade.
She was my friend and my touchstone for what glory looked like. In the case of Lynn, glory was a slim but sturdy looking child with wire glasses secured behind her by a tight croakie. She walked with an unevenness to her gait as if electricity was surging through her and she was trying to manage the current. Like all of us in middle school, her body was something she just borrowed, hoping to exchange it soon, and having not read the user manual yet.
Sometimes she dressed like a little girl, with a headband that she would readjust as accompaniment to her nervous laughter. Often her clothes were plain and nondescript cotton/polyester monochromes, like she had gotten dressed while thinking about something more important.
I sat with Lynn at lunch and admired her curiosity and grounded demeanor. The cafeteria was debilitatingly loud, but our table had its own safer and softer energy.
Every so often, when she didn’t agree with something proclaimed at the table by one of the other girls, she’d cast her eyes down and levy a sharp judgment, but always in the words of someone else.
Something like: “Well, I’m not allowed to have sleepovers. My father says it’s a waste of time.” Or “I’m not supposed to eat ice cream. My mom says I eat too much.” Or “My teacher says, ‘Never apologize for mistakes you make onstage. No one will notice unless you point them out.’”
Though she patently lacked physical grace, her percussive fingers thumped gamely when she spoke, flying across the expanse of Saran Wrap, searching her tuna sandwich for the Scotch Tape that held the plastic closed.
Lynn was a violinist, a pianist and a clarinetist. She once drew some quick drawing in art class and I later found out that it had sold.
To a grownup. For money.
The drawing was an exquisitely accurate rendering of a laughing little boy in a garden. I didn’t even know she could draw.
When it came time to estimate the number of jelly beans outside Ms. Grove’s math class, Lynn’s estimate of 547 beans was closest to the actual 549.
My estimate was 315. Other kids guessed, like … a thousand? Two hundred? How in the hell would anyone know how many jelly beans were in a jar?
Though I was in all the honors classes, no participation medal in the world could have tricked me into believing that I shared academic air space with Lynn.
Lynn was often teased, but the popular kids couldn’t really get an angle on her.
“Hey Lynn,” they’d call out, “Would you cry if you ever got a 99 percent on the science test?”
Walking next to her during these intrusions, my heart tensed. What was she going to say?
Her rebuttals came in the disarming form of earnest statements.
“Hah,” she’d reply. “I bet you did great on your science test, John.”
Then she’d stage whisper to me, “John is really good at science.”
John then would wander away, unclear as to whether he’d achieved his aim.
The day that my yearning got its name, Lynn was wearing a puffed sleeve dress with a paisley print as we all gathered for an assembly. She looked very 1989 that 1997 day. A cardinal sin for any other student, but the way she carried her broad even shoulders and positioned her patent leather feet beneath her hips, it was clear that Lynn was about to blow the roof off of King David** Middle School.
My mom was next to me because it was an award ceremony and I was getting some dumb awards for some several silly things like my beginner Spanish class or some other kid-level stuff not even worth winning.
In the crackling silence, Lynn touched her bow voicelessly to the violin. She gave a pert, authoritative nod to the adult at the piano and they were off. It was a “gypsy dance.” I loved this type of virtuosic, cadenza-laden music, but I felt numb to any pleasure from it that day.
My confused little purgatory body buzzed with something more absorbing than envy — a call to prayer — a desire to take my whole personhood and launch it in one direction at one thing.
(Ironic, of course, because Lynn herself did so many things.)
I didn’t even know what the “one thing” was, but my desperation for it reached a fever pitch as Lynn flew, darted, spun and dove across and around the instrument, making the halls of our cinder block school ring like none of us even knew it could.
The crowd went wild. My mother, Margie, jumped to her feet and while applauding, accidentally let her defenses down and said to me,
“That was good. I mean, really good. You know with kids you just clap to be polite, but with this, you want to clap because it’s actually so good.”***
So.
My mom had been lying when she said I was good in our production of Cats? My “Skimbleshanks” was just average. I had sensed it then, but now I knew for sure. And there was nothing special about my voice recitals, I realized now in the cacophony of endless applause for Lynn. When my voice would choke with fear because I was so nervous about forgetting the words … I saw it now. I was a dilettante. I had nowhere to put my greatness. No skill to hold it and to show it so that other people could see the power that I knew was inside me. Power that felt just like this concerto looked and sounded. Like Lynn soaring on her violin.
The rest of the day after the awards assembly, I spent as a pre-teen zombie in search of her purpose. I watched the grownups in my midst to confirm that, yes, Lynn had unmoored them, too.
Hot Mrs. Paulus, our science teacher, stood as if stranded before our last period class.
“You know,” she began tremulously, facing the white board like it was Judgment Day, “Some of us will never be as good at anything as Lynn was today at 11 years old.” I facepalmed inwardly. Our science teacher continued, now turning toward the class:
“What Lynn has is really special. And. Not everyone finds their special thing.”
Mrs. Paulus’s faraway look and her constantly evolving hairdos told me that Mrs. Paulus was one of those people who had not found her special thing.
“Oh God, let that not be me,” I thought, gripping my pencil. “Let me find my special thing … before I’m 12.”
The stupid awards I’d collected that day for my performance in Spanish, choir, and English were now with my mom who’d frame them to hang in my room. She was proud of me.
But I knew it was a racket.
“Everyone speaks English,” I grumbled. How can they even give an award for that?
Maybe, though, Lynn had found me just in time. I invited her for sleepovers, even though I knew she never would.
If I hung out with her and observed her ways of being in the world, maybe then I’d never be sad like Hot Mrs. Paulus, who had never found her special thing, or never be dumbstruck like the parents in the auditorium, who could do nothing but clap and wonder how it might feel to be extraordinary, and most importantly, someday, maybe my mom would fly to her feet because some one thing I did was so good that she just — couldn’t — sit still.
Lynn went on to do diabetes research. I met up with her 15 years ago at a coffee shop near the Princeton laboratory and I asked her about her work. I knew (from middle school orchestra gossip) that she saw colors when she played notes. I wondered if she saw colors when she did science, too?
Across our coffees, she chewed her blueberry muffin.
“I hate when the mice scream,” she shrugged. And she laughed, less nervously now.
“I play music whenever I can.”
*Not her real name.
**Not this king’s real name.
***Now. Look. This is what *I* remember my mother saying. She likely does not remember or might disagree. Don’t shoot the memoirist. My parents are great. They are subscribers. I am grateful to them. Ok. Keep reading.
Emma, Thank You for the dedication!! This is thoroughly enjoyable.
And, it's wonderful to be able to visit you in *your* airspace!
Emma, You are way more special than Lynn*. You are unique in this world and the other worlds.