And I run my fingers through my hair, and smile, mostly because it's Thursday. And 6:57 in the afternoon. And I've had an iced vanilla latte within the last hour.
And I have cause to be the happiest man alive. It sounds -- it is -- cliched. But hey. A cliche only became a cliche because there was so much truth in it, everyone wanted to use it.
Some of us call this day of the week the Friday of the Tuesday-Thursday classes. (Tuesday is the Monday of the Tuesday-Thursday classes. Simple really.) At precisely 6:00:00 pm, every Thursday, everything stops, and exhales its seven-days-been-pent-up blackness. The deadlines are over; all frantically scrawled/typed essays, lab reports,
The world almost, quite imperceptibly, stops turning for a nanosecond, and if you blink -- or fall asleep, or jet across the Atlantic to a cabaret in London -- well, you'll probably miss it. But you won't miss the immediate immense silence; the pre-dusk gold settling into the air; the expulsion of toxins and hazmat from your thoughts. Right, all those little black things labeled with a skull and crossbones having had a week to breed, they're extinguished.
Because it's 6:00:01.
*
And since I've now had verging-on-an-hour of toxin-free living (me and Amy, we're accountability partners, see) in which I could put the week in perspective, I know what it is that needs writing.
*
On Monday (but it was really Tuesday) I went and had to do the thing I don't like to do and never like to talk about, except to my psychiatrist when discussing nightmares / and or fantasies. (My psychiatrist is a purple-striped cat, by the way, that smokes Dutch Masters cigars and visits the psychiatrist, himself, when someone mentions the name 'Alice'.) Even more than visiting the dentist, I dread taking my car into the shop; we all have our little childhood-trauma-inflicted complexes, as you know. And Monday (Tuesday) I had to take my car into the shop.
It's the whole experience from start to finish that I hate. The macho-macho men that thrive at an auto shop. Me walking in with my wool and leather bag from Gap with a novel and orange Trident gum in it, and not knowing quite exactly what to say when asked the make and model of my car... But it was fine; all was fine.
Everything's fine when discussing Tchaikovskian ballet.
It started when the man that had been sitting next to me for the last hour in the
I had already looked over at not-really-him-but-his-books a few times. They were mostly diagrams of human muscles. Deltoids, and trapeziuses, things of that friendly nature. 'Jeremy,' I replied.
'Could you do me a favor and hold out your left hand, Jeremy, palm up?' he asked.
I figured if he was a demented connoiseur of sorts that collected teenage boys' pared limbs and digits, now would be the best time to excuse myself to the restroom. But my curiosity for humanity in general got the best of me. And so I obliged.
Within the next hour, I found out he was 38 years old, had been in the navy for a long while, stationed in Sigonella, Sicily, the same place my brother had been stationed for four years while in the navy, and that he had now dropped everything to become a full-time student at NCSU, studying physical therapy. One day he hoped to open his own practice.
I told him I was in high school, and hoped to study piano in college soon.
At this, his eyes lit up and he smiled a large, genuine smile. He asked what it was I listened to. The birds. I try to understand what they're saying. People. I try to understand what they're saying, too.
Oh wait. Music. As far as classical compsers? I asked. Contemporary artists? 'Anything,' he said. 'I don't know alot about it, but I can learn.'
I liked that. It was unabashed friendliness.
Just hearing the phrase 'classical music' is such a turn-off for conversation for most -- how do I say it -- normal people. At least Americans. It's old people's music, or music one listens to when one's supply of sleeping pills is running short and one particularly doesn't feel like counting sheep, or music for the high and mighty: the cultured folk.
Classical music can be all of those things, but certainly not in a negative way. And it is so much more than that.
So I threw some names out: Bach, of course, and Mozart and Beethoven, the 'greats', so to speak, but I was quick to add that neither Mozart nor Beethoven were really things I took to immediately.
Then he mentioned Tchasikovsky, and that he had some Tchaikovsky ballet music. What I'd taken before as a friendliness-interest I now realized had been an actual, knowledgeable interest. 'Tchaikovsky, to me,' he said 'is...' and he faltered. His fingers did a little groping around in the air for a while as he looked for a word. He couldn't find one, and for a good twenty seconds was left occasionally saying 'um', or 'What I'm trying to say is...'
I smiled.
'It's wonderful.'
Seeing a person, someone uneducated in music, trying to describe Tchaikovsky, and not being able to come up with anything in words ... It was very telling. Classical musicians can analyze chord progressions and crank out essays and biographies and criticisms and magazines and newspaper articles about what does or doesn't make music great. But in the end, I think we're all reduced to wriggling our fingers around in the air, sketching out vague pictures, uttering monosyllabic words. Because the embodiment of Tchaikovsky, or good music in general, can't be found on paper, or, in my opinion, even in deep conversation.
'Exactly,' I replied.
*
As it was announced that my car's oil had indeed been changed, and I got up to leave, the man sitting next to me hurriedly grabbed a business card off the front desk of the auto shop's waiting room, and scrawled an email address on it, almost embarrassedly.
'Send me the names of some more composers like Tchaikovsky,' he said, slipping the business card in between the pages of the novel I was reading.
'Alright,' I said, smiling. 'I'll do that.'
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