Maybe (Maybe Not) (16 page)

This aquatic trailer court makes for tight community. Our lives overlap. This is village life. And we are literally connected to one another in that we share the same fragile water lines and power lines, and the same eccentric sewer system, and are moored to the same wobbly pilings. We haul our garbage to the same Dumpster at the head of the dock. Any breakdown in what comes or goes quickly affects us all. And the breakdowns make for some hilarious middle-of-the-night fire drills of the run-and-shout-and-mill-about variety. This closeness also means that we hear and see
much of what goes on inside our houses and inside our families.

Why would people want to live like this? We, too, wonder that at times. You do have to have an unconventional view of housing requirements, I admit. And you don’t get into this by accident. It’s a very deliberate choice and a deliberate way to live.

It has its advantages, however. Help and company are always close by. The milk or beer or wine or bread you forgot at the store is always available next door. Tools and parts are handy, as is advice. In August, it’s like going away to adult summer camp—only you’re at home.

This floating village life appeals to me. I like living up close to these people. I compare my life to theirs. I learn from them and am enriched by gifts they never realize they give.

Like sunlight tea, for instance.

The lady next door is a nurse-practitioner, a very high order of professional nurse. Her specialty is oncology—working with cancer patients. She knows a lot about death and dying. She leads an intensely busy life. Works part time and goes to school part time, raises two small children and a husband in the small space of a houseboat. On the dock she maintains a flower garden in boxes and pots, and ashore she has a serious vegetable garden. It’s exhausting at times to observe the pace of her life. I avoid watching her when she’s in high gear.

Despite her busyness, in the summer she makes sunlight tea.

Tea the slow way.

In a clear gallon jar filled with cold water, she hangs small bags of tea and spices. Early in the morning, just before she leaves for work, the jar is placed out on the deck on a white metal table. Leaving the sun to make tea.

When she returns in the late afternoon, she pours out a glass of sunlight tea, adds ice, a lemon wedge, and mint from her garden. She sits down in a chair in the shade of an umbrella to enjoy summer in a glass.

We’ve never talked about this.

Sometimes I am home during the day in summer, working out on my deck. I keep an eye on her tea project. I note the color change from light yellow to deep amber. I think about all the energy being poured into the liquid. I think about the acknowledgment of time and energy. It calms me, slows me down, diminishes the haste of my life.

I confess that on more than one occasion I have gone over and helped myself to a glass, carefully topping off the jar with fresh water. Once I left dandelion flowers in the tea, but she never said a word. Some very fine parts of friendship don’t have to be discussed.

Recently, I tried making moonlight tea.

It worked!

Now I’m thinking about winter starlight tea and tea from an eclipse.

The light from a meteor shower or a comet ought to make a great brew.

My wife says I get carried away by these things.

Exactly.

I
t’s funny the tricks the mind plays. The longer I have mine, the less I understand how it works. Driving home from the office one night in June, I began humming the “Ode to Joy” theme from the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. What triggers these sudden musical interludes?

I was also surprised that I didn’t start thinking about my conducting experience in Minneapolis. What did come to mind was what happened the next week. It’s a kind of coda—a separate passage that brings a larger composition to a close.

Even though the orchestra was not going to repeat the Ninth after the World Theater performances, I was so reluctant to part company with its members that I went along on a bus tour with them the next
week. They were to combine a performance with a teaching session in a town way out on the flat western prairie of Minnesota.

We arrived in Marshall, Minnesota, on a cold afternoon in February, with light snow falling. The session was held in a junior high school orchestra room. If you closed your eyes and relied on your nose and ears, you would know you were in a junior high school. The slightly rancid smell of sweaty puberty and the sound of voices in transition from soprano to alto would give you the clues, and one glance at the string section alone would confirm where you were. Skinny little boys coping with cellos that outweighed them, and tall, gangly girl violinists adjusting hairdos during rests in the music.

The professional musicians sat side by side with the students in each section of the orchestra. Together they played a simple piece of music the students had been working on for weeks. As the snow and wind blew outside the window, an unbelievably poignant sound filled the room. Combining the true notes of those who devote their lives to making beautiful music with the wavering, dissonant notes made by those who were nervous almost beyond bearing to be sitting beside someone who could really play and would notice their inadequacy.

The students need not have worried. The professionals had been there in the beginner chairs themselves.
They knew—they remembered. Now, they could help.

The joy of being an accomplished musician and playing in a professional orchestra is not found only during black-tie nights on the concert stage. Their patient, hand-holding persistence carried the students on when they faltered. The music rose and fell in waves of success and failure. Whatever the music lacked, it was played from the heart.

That night at the performance hall, I didn’t have any responsibilities. So I spent backstage time being part music student and part orchestra chaplain—asking about instruments and listening to people talk. When it was time to go onstage, it seemed natural to me to go along. I just picked up a chair and walked out with them, sitting in the symphony without an instrument while they played. I had finally become what I most wanted to be—part of the orchestra. I played me.

On the long way back home in the bus, we sang and drank far too much beer, and they told orchestra jokes. We confessed all that had gone before our coming together to do the Ninth—the fear, the confusion, and the embarrassment. We toasted the dreams of those who reach for a piece of the glory—Beethoven, the junior high students of Marshall, Minnesota, and all of us, as well.

I told them my cup runneth over. I asked them please not to forget me, as I would not forget them. I
asked them to keep me and my kind of mind when they played. And to never forget that music is much too important to be left entirely in the hands of professionals.

If you ever could attend a performance of the Minneapolis Chamber Symphony when it plays out in the small towns of rural Minnesota, you might notice an empty chair just to the right of the double bass player and just behind the violas. The orchestra voted to put it there permanently. The chair is for those who always wanted to be part of the symphony—not just as listeners, but among those upon whom the making of music depends. It is the chair in honor of all those who, however competently, embrace the impossible. Sit in that chair someday.

H
ere I was in Atlantic City. At Mr. Trump’s Taj Mahal. Largest gambling casino in the world. Please understand I came to speak to a convention, not to gamble. Being a rational man, it is clear to me that gambling is ultimately a losing proposition—my interest is one of intellectual curiosity—about the sociological, anthropological, and economic dimensions of risk strategy and its consequences.

Do you believe that? Don’t.

While I am walking around the casino floor—just looking around—the Devil is talking in my ear: “Take a chance—could be your lucky day—somebody wins, why not you?”

Right. Why not me? I’ve had conversations with the Devil on this subject before. Usually at racetracks. And it’s always the same. Some fools win—
why not me? I’d sure as hell like to know why not me.

The Devil continues. “Come on—just drop one dollar, one lousy dollar, in this machine right here—the one dollar they gave you compliments of the house—what can you lose?”

OK. One dollar.

Chinkety, chinkety, chinkety, chink. KAFOOM!
Flashing lights, bells, sirens, and $264 is mine. And I am in league with the Devil again.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, like winning. Nothing like feeling lucky. Yes!

The roaming cashier rushes up to pay me, shouting “HERE’S A WINNER!”

And the people playing slot machines all around me flash envious smiles.

It’s my lucky day.

Just then a man walks up to me and says he’s a gambler—a craps shooter—and he thinks luck rubs off on people, and he’s seen me hit the jackpot on this machine, and would I come over and just stand by him while he shoots craps, and if I do and he wins, he’ll give me 10 percent of his take, and if he loses, it’s no hard feelings, all right—all I have to do is to blow on his hand when he’s holding the dice just before he throws, OK?

Of course it’s OK. He’s talking to Mr. Lucky now.

So he shakes ’em. I blows on ’em. He throws ’em, screaming “COME ON, BABY! COME ON, BABY!”

And
BAM!
He hits.

Shake, blow, throw, and
BAM!
—shake, blow, throw, and
BAM!
—he hits and hits. Nine, count ’em, nine, straight times he gets his point.

By now a crowd has collected, betting on this guy’s unbearably sweet luck, making side bets, yelling, whooping, screaming “COME ON, BABY!” because this guy never takes his winnings off the table—everything rides—and he’s beating the odds to pieces. Sic ’em, dawg!

Tall blond lady next to me is rhythmically chanting softly to herself, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.”

What exquisite madness it is to be around this kind of success—this defiance of the laws of luck. It can’t be done, and this guy is doing it. Out on the high wire of fate, thumbing his nose at the groundsuck of gambling gravity. “COME ON, BABY!

The guy pauses. “Nine is my lucky number,” he says. And scooping up his chips, filling his pockets, he bows to the croupier and walks off a winner—to the cheers and applause of the limply ecstatic crowd. Whooha, in spades! What a guy!

What holds this story fast in my mind is not the excitement or the luck or all the money or the fact that he won. If he’d lost, he would have laughed it off.

I privately believe that any fool can be a good loser.

But that he quit when he was
that
far ahead—
that
I’ll never forget.

To be a winner is great. To be a great winner—that’s strong work.

Money talks, but it doesn’t sing—luck does.

And only a few who dance with Lady Luck have
all
the moves.

P.S. Yes, he did give me my 10 percent. He did have
all
the moves.

W
ithin my secret life, there are touchstones. Ideas, phrases, facts, and notions I refer to time and time again—as often as I would consult a map when traveling. Among these treasures is a story from the world of chess.