One regret: I never heard my grandmother sing in her choir.
My mother's parents lived on a fourth floor walk up and if you leaned out of their kitchen window you could not quite touch the elevated subway which rumbled by. They did not have the money or time for sports. They went to work and returned home. My grandfather, to my knowledge never threw a ball his entire life; his one sport, after he retired on his union pension, was to walk to the park and sit on the benches and argue politics with his cronies.
For my grandmother, it was her choir.
I heard about it, but I never heard her sing.
She was, rumor had it, very distantly related to Benny Goodman. Who knows if that is true. She smiled and shrugged when I asked her about it. "A cousin," she said. "A distant cousin, if that."
That was a factoid which surfaced when my firstborn son started playing the theme from "Romeo and Juliet" on his keyboard, age five. Where did that come from? I am not remotely musically talented, cannot carry a tune and failed at all attempts to learn the clarinet. His mother's side had some musical people. His maternal grandfather was the sort who could listen to a song and then pick it out on the piano. And his mother sings in a choir. So there are likely some musical genes from at least one side, but I always liked the story about Benny Goodman.
As he grew up, he picked up the saxophone and was good at it, played in the high school jazz band, and other instruments got added along the way, guitar, and finally piano. He was always very modest about his own musical talents.
"When I first got to NYU," he said, "I thought I was God's gift to jazz tenor sax. But, after about six weeks, hanging out with the real music students, and at the Greenwich Village clubs, I realized if I worked really, really hard for four years, I might just edge up into mediocrity."
Of course, that's part of his glass half empty personality. Watching his younger brother win wrestling tournaments at age 10, he said, "Right now, he is better at something than I will ever be at anything, my whole life."
Turned out, he was wrong about that.
One of the great satisfactions of life is acquiring mastery of something, of anything. It always requires attention to detail the untrained cannot appreciate, and it requires, above all, persistence. But for some things, it also requires something that likely resides in the nucleotides of our DNA. Whatever that is, he's got it.
His younger brother, the wrestler, grew up to be a surgeon, which in our family was not a huge surprise. Both parents are in medicine and dinner table conversations have always been about patients and diseases and medical things, which left the musician in silence. Of course, he absorbed quite a lot of medicine just from hearing about it all the time, but it's not as if he could add much; he could only ask the occasional question.
Which left him with the sense, despite his parents' best efforts to deny it, that what he did in life, music, did not count for much.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Listening to some performance or song any of us might try to express what that music does to us, how and why it was so wonderful, but he can, in a few sentences dissect exactly how that effect had been achieved, the process, the details that made it work.
Now, he teaches me piano by Skype. I proved to be pretty hopeless at performance, just could not get rhythm and notes lined up. So he's teaching me composition, which necessitates some basic music theory. It turns out, each key has chords and each set of chords follows certain rules and if you follow the rules, the music sounds right, but if you violate them it just reeks. There are numbers and things which explain it and which make perfect sense to him. Something about going from the fifth to the first to end a song and make it sound finished. Stuff like that.
The fact is, I do what I do for a living because, given the modest level of my own intelligence and my paltry mathematical skills, it was the best I could do. His mother had other talents, but eventually she also found that the money was better in nursing and midwifery than in journalism, and the emotional rewards were better. His brother was one of those people who just had to go into surgery, and if he had not found surgery, he might have wound up in jail, or selling insurance. We all just kind of drifted where the tides pulled us and we benefit society modestly; at least we do no great harm, pollute no rivers, deplete no resources, drive nobody into poverty, move nobody out of their homes, demean nobody, make nobody feel worthless.
The musical son, on the other hand, works in that world which actually enriches the soul.
A friend in Hampton has a son who graduated from Winnacunnet High, then college, and then, inexplicably, went off to China, where he learned Chinese and enrolled in a Chinese university graduate program and it's anyone's guess what he'll do with that. For fans of "House of Cards" we can imagine he'll become the next Raymond Tusk, advising Presidents on China, or he'll anchor some American corporation in China. When this Hampton mother talks about her son, she has that dazzled look some parents have which says, in a look, "I have no idea where this creature came from." He's done something few of us could have imagined doing, something few of us would be able to do. He's flown off with E.T. . He's had a close encounter of the Third Kind. He's simply left us all behind, on Starship Enterprise. Chinese is a tonal language, which makes it very tough for an English speaker, and the written language is just as daunting. Going to China is going forth boldly where others would never dare.
We have the same feeling about the musician. Yes, there were some dabblers in the family, but nobody who went from dabbling to mastery in music. It's not that we all went off into medicine because we thought it was more important than music--none of us had that thing we call "the talent" to go the music route. So we settled in to do something anyone with half a brain and tenacity can do. For music, you need something more than determination.
Which is why, though we'll never convince him of this, what he is doing is in some ways more valuable than what the rest of his family has done. We kept people going, restore some people to better health, but he is doing stuff that will bind into brains of people he'll never know, and become part life where joy resides.
And who says joy isn't important?
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