Mnemonic (16 page)

These are stories redolent with operatic pathos — a bull elk gathering his terrified harem as a chorus is sounded closer and closer, a single young female yearling left on her own as the others flee to safety in the dense understory. Think of her in her golden brown summer pelage, eyes filled with the sight of the low bodies of wolves as they approach, aiming for the throat. And the whole while, the ravens making their own dark commentary, the woods loud with their gulps and chortles, a particularly sinister chuckle. “Fly, fly, my brethren, heathen rage pursues us swift, / Arm'd with the terrors of insulting death.”
⁴

Because “
Ombra mai fu
” consumed my imagination, I wanted to know more about plane trees, remembering their occurrence and shade in the cities and towns I'd visited in Europe. And it seemed that once I was alerted to them, they began to make their presence known in unexpected places. I was reading Virgil,
The Georgics
, and there they were!

He set in rows his elms when well along,

Pear trees already hard, and blackthorn sloes,

Planes large enough to offer drinkers shade.
⁵

I remembered the square with its waiting table and how we often found such places ourselves to drink a glass of Prosecco on our way back to our hotel. How the heart longs for green shade in hot climates as the heart longs for music in a quiet house.

A specimen of
Platanus orientalis
grown from seeds gathered at Thermopylae in 1802 flourishes in the Fellows' Garden of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. This is no homage to Xerxes, whose army suffered disproportionate losses at Thermopylae by the Greeks, in part because Xerxes had been so distracted by love for the tree, first encountered by the River Meander, that he didn't keep up the necessary military vigilance. (Or so Herodotus tells us in the
Histories
.)

Another magnificent plane tree of this species grows on the island of Kos and is purported to be the tree under which Hippocrates lectured. Imagine for a moment a generation of young physicians listening to their teacher, their faces dappled with sunlight filtered through the broad green leaves. Imagine one of them idly running his thumb along the prickly surface of a seed vessel, wondering about anatomy and the detachment with which his teacher described his belief that diseases had to do with the environment, with wind and water and weather, and his theories concerning the insufficiency of air experienced by those suffering from epilepsy.
⁶

Plane trees have been around for a long time. They exist in the fossil record from the mid-Cretaceous period, roughly 100 million years ago, looking surprisingly like their contemporary selves.
⁷
They grow well in hot climates as well as harsh climates — the Persians call them
chenar
, the Americans, sycamores. Their leaves are shaped like goose-feet, or (more whimsically) like a map of the Peloponnese.
⁸
I liked that they were described in terms of both a bird and a geographic location, as though everyone would have a clear image of each in their minds.

On my daughter's recent trip to Greece to study classical archaeological sites, I asked her to bring me home a leaf from a plane tree growing at Thermopylae, wanting that connection to the aria I'd grown to love. She wasn't sure which trees they were and brought instead a tiny fragment of
Lapis lacedaemonius
, the stone from which the monument to the three hundred Spartan warriors was built.

The famous London plane is believed to be a hybrid of the American and Oriental varieties, perhaps the result of a natural marriage between trees from Greece and America in the Lambeth garden of John Tradescant, gardener to Charles I. I remember the plane trees of Berkeley Square, their plated bark, and the renown they achieved for being able to withstand pollution — those dense coal fogs of London — though when I saw them as a young woman working in Wimbledon and wandering the leafy boroughs on my days off, the air was considerably cleaner. In those years I attended concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, waiting until the last minute to buy tickets in the gods (the cheapest seats or even standing room in the very rafters of the hall) — Janet Baker singing Handel in her rich mezzo voice. Passing the plane trees as a twenty-year-old, I never dreamed I would want to sing of them one day.

Emperor Caligula made a dining room within the confines of a plane tree's trunk, one of those ostentatious things that one somehow expects an emperor to do.
⁹
Not unlike Xerxes, perhaps, hanging the branches of his tree with golden ornaments and appointing one of his Immortals to care for it for its lifetime.
Cara d'amabile, soave piu
. . . In his
Sylva
, the esteemed John Evelyn remarked of the plane tree, “Pliny tells us there is no Tree whatsoever which so well defends us from the heat of the Sun in Summer; nor that admits it more kindly in Winter.”
¹⁰
The more I read, and remembered, the more I realized that the plane tree was rooted in our cultural history as firmly as the olives and oaks I already knew and revered. A heart could be bound to its boughs and leaves as mine had been to the rough bark of the Garry oak in childhood. And the more I read, the more I wanted to sing the aria which had taken me to its shade.

I don't know why it took so long but I finally realized I could take voice lessons and see if I might develop not only my singing voice, but also my knowledge of music. All the years I was raising my children, it wouldn't have occurred to me to indulge myself this way; there wasn't time and not much extra money. But the summer before I turned fifty, I asked a few people for recommendations and was told that I would learn a lot from Shelley Dillon, and that I would love her too. I had met her once, at an event for Earth Day in Roberts Creek: the Goddesses Concert. Women performers had been invited and were taken to a table with a sign: “Reserved for Goddesses and their escorts.” (This should happen to every woman at least once in her lifetime, the opportunity to lead her husband or significant other to such a table . . .) I'd been invited to read my poems, the only non-musical Goddess of the evening. Shelley was there with her singing partner, soprano Jo Hammond. I remember their performance vividly — Jo's high sweet voice and Shelley's lower, rich one.

So I called Shelley and set up a trial lesson to see what might be done. Her studio was around the back of an attractive low house and overlooked a lovely garden full of azaleas, magnolias, vines over a twiggy pergola.
Di vegetabile!
Birds enjoyed the feeders and the shelter of the trees. There was a grand piano on a pretty Persian carpet, a stand for music, a waiting area green with plants. A red metronome. Folders containing sheet music were laid out neatly on a shelf. In addition to her voice students, Shelley taught piano. I was nervous.

So much in our culture requires us to maintain the privacy of our mouths. We don't bare our teeth unless we have a good reason or are with intimates; we don't show our open throats; we keep our voices low. I felt shy about following the simplest of instructions: to lower my jaw to make more room; to raise the soft palate; to do an exercise for the correct placement of my breastbone. Bursts of breath through pursed lips. Contorting my facial muscles. And the scales! Oh, I was embarrassed at the sour notes that came from my mouth, that suddenly disappointing orifice. But Shelley was so kind and so helpful that I found myself arranging a regular schedule of lessons and trying to articulate what kind of music it was I wanted to sing.

I thought that this would be like beginner's piano, and remembered an old friend telling me that her husband had bought her a piano for her fiftieth birthday. She arranged for lessons, somehow imagining she would be playing Mozart within weeks. She was humbled to discover that she would be working on “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” for what seemed like months. Intense desire doesn't always translate to even modest ability.

I thought maybe folk songs would be the way to begin and we started with “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens.” My attempts were thin and squeaky. And yet it felt wonderful to sing. To try to sing. For several lessons, we practised that song and once I was praised for adding a grace note. I didn't know what that was, but was pleased beyond what was reasonable. When Shelley asked what I wanted to sing next, I wondered if we might try an aria. That aria. “
Ombra mai fu.
” David Daniels made it sound so effortless. She smiled. “If you were a fifteen-year-old girl wanting a career as a singer, I'd tell you that you weren't ready yet. But I think you'll learn a lot from trying, so why not?”

Shelley played the opening bars of “
Ombra mai fu.
” My heart began to race and I could feel my shoulders tensing. I wanted so badly to do some sort of justice not just to the song but to the woman who sat at Homesite Creek and wept for the beauty of those words in her small car . . . David Daniels's offering of them, the way they eased into my heart like a homecoming, a blessing for trees and the solace of their shade.

Of course I mangled it. Everything conspired against me, myself most of all. My lack of musical ear, breath control, agility, and support; but I knew I wanted to keep trying. Driving home, I'd sing the scales over and over, attempt the arpeggios — and could manage perhaps three without the comfort of the piano to guide me up and down.

And there would be the audience of ravens as I drove the long highway home, standing on the roadsides with their complicit gazes, the little falsetto yelps as I passed. Sometimes I'd stop the car to see what it was they were doing. There might be a flattened squirrel or snake, depending on the season, but often there would be nothing that I could determine might attract them to stand around as though waiting. As though waiting for me to let them know how the lessons were going.

An Unkindness of Ravens

Ravens mate for life although infidelity is not unknown. They have the largest brain of any songbird. They have learned to make use of sticks and other things as rudimentary tools. Their vocabulary is considerable. The ones we know on the west coast of British Columbia are thought to have come over the Bering land bridge from Asia. Their name,
Corvus corax
, has classical roots: the genus, Corvus, comes from Latin; the specific name, corax, from the Greek. In Old English, they were
hraefn
, in Old Norse,
hrafn
. These ancient words contain something of the raspy noise of their language! What comes first, a name or a sound? Is this the chicken and the egg riddle? I imagine the ravens waiting for a hen to leave its eggs unattended, and then swooping in to feast on the rich yolk. If a tiny embryo had already formed, so much the better. The ravens certainly wouldn't have been participants in a debate about their origins but might have been seen in the distance, muttering, taking any opportunity for a meal.