Mnemonic (17 page)

The girl from piano

I am remembering that first lesson. While I tried to sing “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens,” a little girl slipped in the door of the studio, brushing by the rosemary shrub at the threshold so that the entire room filled with its resiny odour. She sat on the chair in the waiting area, clutching her sheaf of music, watching me with the intense fierce look of a girl who doesn't miss a trick. I know, because I was once that girl too, eyes open to the world and all that it might offer or deny. This little girl had red curls, only one front tooth, and freckles over her nose.

I finished my lesson and spent a few minutes arranging a time for a sequence of instruction that fall. The girl watched, and listened. When I walked out, I said hello to her and her face broke open into a smile that lit the room.

I continued down the Coast to the town of Sechelt where I had errands to do. I felt ten feet tall, full of music, its rich possibilities, the excitement of actually learning something new. I spent an hour buying groceries and then stopped at the library to take out the next week's worth of books. There was the little girl again, this time with a woman who could only be her mother — the same hair, the same bright eyes.

“Hello again,” I said, as I took my books to the desk to check them out.

She didn't say a word to me, but loudly whispered to her mother, “It's the girl from piano!”

And I, almost fifty, smiled at them both as I left the library.

When I was the age of Jenna (for I discovered that this was her name), I lived in Nova Scotia and had a friend who was the son of a United Church minister. His family lived behind ours, with a shared fence, easy to climb over. This boy (whose name I forget) took piano lessons and sometimes I'd sit quietly in his living room while his teacher (it might even have been his mother) guided him through scales, little exercises, and even some simple tunes.

I wanted so badly to learn to play the piano but my family moved every two years and our furniture would be driven across the country in a moving van, often with damage incurred along the way. A piano was considered impossible. Neither of my parents knew anything about music and the idea that a child might want to learn to play was frivolous in the extreme. I'd listen to my friend patiently practising, and sometimes he'd show me how to play "Chopsticks" or a one-handed version of “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.” I was taken by the magic of creating music by pressing the ivory keys in sequence: plink . . . plink . . . plink . . . plink . . . plink. Ha . . . le . . . lu . . . u . . . jah. Astonishing. And when the boy began to play the first classical piece I ever heard, “
Für Elise
,” I cried. I wanted to have this kind of beauty in my life in a way that was so personal and immediate, music unfolding from my fingers like soft cloth.

I was also learning to knit that winter, an untidy mess of knots and lumps that I hoped might become a scarf one day if I was patient, and was struck by the similarity. Starting with a kind of bold confidence, immediately making a mistake. Going back to the beginning, as the boy so often did, and as I did with my yarn, determined that the next time would be better. Taking deep breaths to stay patient as I cast on, knit, then purled, keeping the steps in my mind as clearly as I could. As I hoped, in later years, would happen with singing. I didn't know then that a throat could be trained the way fingers could be, that agility could be practised and learned. That a girl could age in the blink of an eye but still find a way to brush past the rosemary into the studio to open her mouth and hope that what came out might resemble music, though whether the beauty of plane trees or the guttural commentaries of ravens was not yet clear.

To the hills and the vales, to the rocks and the mountains,

To the musical groves and the cool shady fountains . . .

—
Dido and Aeneas
¹¹

I was waiting in the car while John filled the tank with gas from the Extra Foods gas pumps in Merritt. I had been thinking of a few favourite arias, humming to myself as I leaned my face against the window. The day was mild, not quite warm, and we'd driven down from Kamloops where we'd spent the weekend with our older son Forrest; he was living there for the months of May and June to teach Canadian history as a sessional instructor. I was humming and remembering; one so often leads to the other, in no particular order. And then I saw the most extraordinary sight: at least twenty ravens on a dumpster behind McDonald's. Some were perched on the side of the dumpster itself and some were lined up on the surrounding fence. One was on the ground, walking away in a slightly pensive posture. I realized the aria I was humming was Dido's lament from Purcell's sublime opera,
Dido and Aeneas
.

I've only seen one performance of this opera, though I have at least three recordings — one with the late great Tatiana Troyanos as the doomed Dido. The production I saw at the Chan Centre in Vancouver was modestly staged; this is not unusual for Baroque opera, I understand. The chorus stood on risers, the principals moved to centre stage to perform. The singers all wore evening dress. It was an effective performance, the singing was generally good and occasionally quite fine, but I missed the splendour of full operatic spectacle.

The ravens on the fence were different sizes. Some of them would lift their wings briefly and then settle again. One large bird sat on a pole — a sentinel? I got out of the car and walked towards them. The sound was amazing. Chortles, gurgling, clicks, toks. The raven on the ground stood still and posed in profile, throat shaggy as a ruff, while others plundered the dumpster. I listened. I know that the avian vocal organ is the
syrinx
, a bony structure at the bottom of the trachea. In humans and most other mammals, our vocal chords are contained within the larynx, located at the top of the trachea. As air is blown across them, the chords or folds vibrate to produce sound. Well, as I understand it, vocal chords oscillate as they make contact with each other.

Birds have a particular skill, or at least some species do — song thrushes for instance, though I'm not certain about ravens: they can control two sides of their trachea independently, thus producing two notes at once. A throat that is its own duet! When I have difficulty even creating one true note, I think of this with something like envy, something like awe.

“Split-voice, wind-carried child of sound . . .” sang Theocritus of the
syrinx
in the third century BC.
¹²

It was a kind of magic, a black magic, that I was in a part of the country I love — the golden hills rippling like buckskins, rainbows appearing over the irrigation sprinklers on the hay fields, cattle with their young waiting to be transferred to the high ranges — watching a theatre piece at the McDonald's while all around me drivers filled their vehicles with gas, shoppers transferred groceries from carts to the backs of pickup trucks, someone swept the sidewalk in front of the Dollar Store, the
Open
light at the Taco Del Mar was flashing red and blue, and a loud clanging of iron up at the Canadian Tire indicated someone was hard at work with wrenches and jacks.

The ravens on the fence muttered and yelped. Periodically they'd change places. One would hop down into the dumpster while another would take its place on the risers. It seemed choreographed, orderly. Occasionally there would be a loud falsetto passage, like a countertenor from
Dido and Aeneas
calling for some kind of macabre action:

Wayward sisters, you that fright

The lonely traveller by night,

Who, like dismal ravens crying . . .

And they did, on their risers, a concerted high cry, pretending to be dismal, though obviously exuberant at the possibility of yesterday's hamburgers and stale sesame-seed buns.

Beat the windows of the dying

Appear! Appear at my call, and share in the fame

Of a mischief shall make all Carthage flame.

Appear!

The black chorus on the fence would answer:

In our deep vaulted cell charm we'll prepare,

Too dreadful a practice for this open air.

I walked closer. A few birds eyed me suspiciously. Was I there to steal from the dumpster? I looked away so they wouldn't get ideas. That one on the pole — a sentinel? Or a conductor? It watched but never made a sound.

Thanks to these lonesome vales

These desert hills and dales . . .

The raven on the ground, followed now by another, uttered its own noise. It gurgled, chuckled as though in great amusement as it gazed out towards the hills rising beyond the highway leading to Quilchena, and then it began to utter a ravishing song, like water falling into more water, rattling against stones. The other bird inclined its head, listening and considering. Although I know it's an anthropomorphic imposition, I am tempted to say that this was Dido's grand aria. The raven was as regal as any queen as it croaked and gulped.

When I am laid, am lai . . . aaa . . . id in earth,

May my wrongs create

No trouble, no trouble . . .

Remember me, remember me, but ahh . . . ahhh, forget my fate!

An easy reach to that high G.
Remember me!
And the second bird trailed behind like Dido's faithful maid, Belinda.

I listened, closing my eyes to shut out the Extra Foods store, the Canadian Tire, the Tim Hortons with a line of cars waiting at the drive-through lane, the McDonald's itself. This was music worthy of my concentration, an outdoor opera with a cast in full voice. Even the sorceress's role cunningly sung by a countertenor, which would have pleased Henry Purcell. The falsetto was quite clean and confident, which made me realize how art often sounds artless but the reality is that there are obstacles to such beauty. The Adam's apple lodged in the male throat (and to a lesser degree, the female throat, too, but not as obvious a protrusion) is a thickness of cartilage around the precious voice box. And if I had trouble hitting a G, a clear A flat, how on earth did a countertenor do it? A raven?

When I opened my eyes again, there was just a raven walking across the road to the grassy verge, where a sprinkler spun under a couple of small pines. Spreading its wings a little, tilting its head up and opening its beak, throat shaggy and silent, it entered the spray.

In my mind, I see three plane trees, leafy and beautiful, two men playing backgammon in their shade. From their branches, golden ornaments hang and turn in the breeze. But wait, there are ravens on the boughs too, one there, and another there, and look, two more on the crown. And wait, listen: the ravens are singing “
Ombra mai fu.
”