Celebrate Love

Yesterday, I was wondering how to meaningfully celebrate my birthday (today I am 55). Synchronicity came into play and I came across an intriguing message about A Week of Positive Blogging begun by Ehav Ever to show the world that good things are happening all around us even while bad things are happening. Every day has a different theme, so please join in, post whenever you can, it’s OK to miss a day. And spread the word!

Today’s theme is to “Post with discussions of your positive memories, writings, thoughts, and images that you have come across in your life. It could be a place, it could be a photo, it could be a film, it could be anything.” The memories that came back were about music and art. I used to be a musician and a painter.

Where it all began: my Mom and Pops. They were a pair and a half. Neither went past an 8th grade education as they had to work because of the Depression, however, both never stopped learning and were avid readers. Whenever my brother, sister or I didn’t know what a word meant, they told us to look it up in the dictionary. I didn’t know about their lack of formal education until much later in life and was astonished as I always gave them books as gifts which we would later discuss.

My pops was a passionate guitarist and all us kids took music lessons. I began piano lessons at 7 and by 12, he considered me good enough to go out and occasionally play a few tunes with his combo. Smoky dancehalls, adults boozing it up and partying the night away—I loved it all and no one felt bent out of shape because a little girl was there. Yep, he broke every child labor law in the book, but I received the education of a lifetime. Once my ‘lil sis and bro got old enough, he formed a family band. We played at American Legions, VFWs, Knights of Columbus (a Catholic community organization) and weddings. We were steadily booked. My parents were piss poor and couldn’t afford to give us a steady allowance. But Pops & Mom turned over every cent we made to their kids. Mom played the tambourines, I played keyboards (had one of the first bold red Farfisa Combo Compacts), my sister played guitar and my brother played sax. He still plays a mean sax and is an incredible musician.

I loved to read and wanted a set of encylopedias, so when I was 12, I filled out a form in a magazine for more information but had no idea that a salesman would show up unannounced at our door. My parents were surprised, but laughed when they discovered that it was me who asked for the info and let him in. My pops and he chatted and found out that his son, who lived with him, was a jazz pianist looking for students, but I needed to qualify. As I was complaining that my present teacher wasn’t challenging me enough, my dad agreed to take me and try out a few lessons.

When Pops and I arrived, we were taken to his son’s bedroom/studio. A Playboy centerfold poster was clumsily taped on one wall over his bed. Piano keys were chipped with cigarette burns at the edges and many of the ivories were partly missing. Steve (I don’t remember his real name) looked like a refugee from a chain gang: pale white skin tinged yellow & gray covering a bony frame with hardly anything else in between, and trembling hands nervously lighting one cigarette after another. His father forgot to explain that his son was an ex-heroin addict in recovery.

Steve stared at me as if I were a Martian. Trust me, he had reason. I was no cute little girl: skin and bones, Coke-bottle-bottom thick, octagon shaped glasses exactly like this that made my eyes look pea-sized, and widely spaced buck teeth. He hunched over the keyboard and music poured out that soared to heaven and plunged the depths of hell in the space of a few minutes. Steve turned around and asked: “Do you want to play music like this?” “Yes!” So he put some music in front of me and said, “Show me what you can do with this.” As not confident as I was as a gawky, geeky-looking little girl, I lost every trace of insecurity when I played. When I finished, I turned and looked up at him. He allowed a faint smile over his dangling cigarette. Our eyes locked and for the first time in my life, I connected with another person at that level beyond the boundaries of age, life circumstances, sex, religion, nationality, job—any mundane, limiting label that boxes in who any of us really are. And yes, I could be his student.

Years later in the 1980s I was walking down Second Avenue in New York City, smoking a cigarette, and at the corner of East 5th Street, a homeless black guy sidled up and asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one and as he thanked me, he looked into my eyes and asked, “Do you know what color you was originally?” This was not a simple question about racial origins. In that moment, I no longer was a 20-something, white American with a Catholic upbringing, post-hippie, semi-punker chick typesetter smoking a cigarette walking through the East Village in New York City. And he was no longer a homeless, middle-aged African American man with graying hair and bright, intense brown eyes that pierced right through to your soul bumming a cigarette.

We tend to judge our value and others by their sex, job, nationality, sexual orientation, creed, titles and many other labels. I invite you to take time out to marinate your life, as Carole Fogarty suggests, and rediscover that place deep, deep inside where there are no labels or judgments, only your raw, unprimed spirit.

More Week of Positive Blogging posts:
Hochmah and Musar
Mes Deux Cents
SpiritedStrider
Rainbows And Butterflies

Tags: blogging, inspirational, Love, positive energy