the beauty of a lightning rod
I have fear of the Old One
Primitivo
it is said
He breaks us on the walls
that are His paths
using our hands to walk
the way so steep
we claw
our way to the stormy sky
above
the way we know
we are alive
Let’s just get this out of the way: I was a gifted child. Not the cool kind that can play Mozart sonatas on the piano by age 6, though I would have killed for the chance. I was a gifted poor kid. So I could only be gifted at what didn’t cost money.
That translated to being a brilliant student. My sisters asked for coloring books; I requested the next level math workbook. I did them for fun. By second grade, I was struggling not to answer every single question my teacher asked the class – as soon as she asked it. It was viewed as a behavior issue, like I was an arrogant know-it-all by the ripe old age of seven. She didn’t understand: I couldn’t help it. The words just tumbled out the instant my brain made the connection. It felt completely involuntary. Our desks were arranged in a circle in the classroom; mine, however, was pulled from the circle. I sat in the corner, near the pencil sharpener on the wall, next to the army green metal trash can.
Even while being reprimanded and ostracized, my standardized test scores rocketed off the top of the scale. I didn’t learn my subjects, I mastered them, dominated them. Without effort. I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t save myself. I was labeled “gifted,” pulled from my circle of friends over and over each year to attend “enrichment” programming. I felt branded, seared and scarred by my own intellectual “specialness.” It felt like weirdness. I felt alone.
Though the public library was a magical place of wonderful children’s stories and fairy tales, I had an affinity for biographies. I wanted to read about real people who accomplished amazing things in the real world. So instead of reading about zoology, I read about Jane Goodall; instead of electricity, Thomas Edison. For fun I read Laura Ingalls Wilder. But even though she was a farm girl, her life was nothing like mine. I never read about anyone and thought, hey! they’re just like me. Because my story was a mess.
Yet, I wanted to be the Mozart prodigy. On our farmhouse windowsills, I played imaginary etudes, elegantly placing my little fingers to elicit transcendent pretend chords. I went so far as to make a full-size piano keyboard – out of paper, standard sheets of blank paper taped end to end, the keys carefully measured and drawn in with pencil, a sacred scroll I would unfurl to practice piano music that never materialized.
Instrumental music began in fourth grade. A different cousin handed down her old clarinet to me – and so I learned to play the clarinet. As in my other classes, I quickly mastered reading music and playing the instrument itself. While I couldn’t play those transcendent chords myself, I could hear them when we all played together. I could feel it – a shiver runs tingling up your spine when you play beautiful music, no matter how fleeting the moment of beauty may be. I found refuge in those moments, and kept playing.
All my life, I’d been a singer, too, with a natural ear for pitch, raised on Lutheran hymns in a white clapboard, small town church where our fathers took turns pulling the thick horsehair rope to ring the church bell each Sunday. My father’s family could all carry a faithful tune, led by their Swedish mother and Danish father, accents notwithstanding as we were taught to lift our voices high. I loved to add my voice to everyone’s around me, hearing the sounds swell and rise like a flock of birds. Yet it was my unpredictable, vengeful mother who could truly sing, with the voice of a dark angel, sad and low, sometimes wistful, often hauntingly beautiful.
While I was chosen for choir solos and sextets in my old school, when we left the Midwest and moved to Colorado, I had to audition at my new junior high. The song we were asked to sing: The Star-Spangled Banner. I began to sing it in my natural alto. The teacher stopped me. “Let’s start it a little higher.” I started again. Before I finished, she stopped me again. “You’re scooping your notes. You need to hit the notes straight on.” I resumed where I’d left off. “Don’t slide into them. Now again.” I tried again, removing any trace of personal expression or feeling, trying to hit the notes perfectly. “You’re still scooping your notes. You can’t sing choral music unless you – ” but I was already walking out the door. Hurt and embarrassed, all I heard was, you don’t sing right. I didn’t understand; I sang for her as I always had. Humiliated, I never went back.
By the time I got to high school, my brilliance had become frustrated and cynical. I had developed a thick defensive shell that I maintained with a wickedly clever tongue, acing courses as I ditched half the actual classes. I fought the mundane system by arguing brashly with my teachers to “teach me! I’m the best student you’ve got, I want to learn. Teach me!” That approach eventually earned me two D’s and an F the final semester of my senior year. I decided civil disobedience was a crock. I’d said my truth, and rather than be jailed for it like Gandhi or King – no one cared. I fought the law of averages, and average won. No one wanted brilliant. Again. As always. Especially angry brilliant.
As I entered the orchestra room, I would feel it shift. Music folder on the stand, open my case, twist the clarinet together, slip in a reed and warm up by drawing a soaring chromatic run up, up, up to the highest breathless notes, a pause, then plunging down down down, faster and deeper into a low, still pool of calm tranquility, meaning made of sound. My refuge, week in, week out.
I played first chair, always. Not because I was competitive and defended my seat; I was just…first chair. Playing came easily to me, and with my long pianist’s fingers, I could nimbly follow what my eyes read on the music staff. Here, my voice was always right. Here, I played the notes that were written for me, followed the rules. I practiced religiously, to get it right, all to channel those ephemeral moments of beauty.
So when my band director announced All State Band tryouts, and my orchestra director announced All State Orchestra tryouts, I said, “No thanks.” I didn’t want to “try out.” I had no interest in competing with others to “make it.” I got away with my polite refusal one year. But by the next year, the pressure was on. Again I said, “No thanks.” I tried to explain my feeling. “I can’t – I just, I don’t do competitive…art.” It fell on deaf ears. I earned the ire of my band director, the disappointment of my orchestra director. I was the talented player who would promote their music program. Suddenly, my brilliance was attractive – as a commodity. My refuge was disappearing.
My senior year, a new policy was instituted: all first- and second-chair players were required to audition. Mandatory. I went to each of my directors. “Don’t do this,” I pleaded. “I won’t do it,” I warned.
Audition time came. “Are you ready?” they asked.
“Didn’t practice; I’ll be sight-reading,” I replied. After the terrible audition, I looked back, gaze level, before I walked out: “I told you, I don’t do competitive art.”
In that moment, civil disobedience was not a crock. It had been the only way I could live with myself, in the small world I was living in. But walking down that hallway out the front doors of the school that day, I felt misunderstood, and alone once again.
Mine was a lone fist raised in protest, which just makes you look like a rebel without a cause. Leonard Cohen was not going to join me, “clenching your fist for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“So, where’d you go when you skived off?” Francesca asked with a knowing grin.
I pulled on a loose shoulder strap to tighten my pack to my back. “To drink coffee and write poetry.” I stopped for a drink from my water bottle.
“Oh! So not much different than now, really,” she quipped, laughing at me.
“That’s right,” I replied, chuckling as I wiped my mouth and tucked my water bottle back in its pocket.
“And what did your parents say when they found out?”
“They didn’t – I had already left home by then.”
Not yet 30, Francesca nevertheless had become my best walking buddy. A much faster hiker than me, still she would often walk along with me to talk, or stop for cafe con leche and rest our feet, comparing albergue blister surgery stories. Her Londoner’s wit was scathingly direct and wonderfully clever, deliciously sharp smart commentary on whatever topic we were discussing, my favorite being her political commentary. She was thoughtful and generous with her attention, as well. I valued her insights.
Francesca was walking the Camino promoting epilepsy awareness – based on her own experience. I was amazed that she planned to hike to Santiago, but she responded that with her latest medication, she had been seizure-free for nearly three years, and decided it was time to go. Her parents and her partner were supportive yet nervous; Francesca, however, was liberated, boldly striking out on her odyssey. Internet in hand, she posted a daily educational fact about epilepsy, along with a trail photo, linking her chosen charities to the power of the Camino de Santiago.
Unhappy with a turn of events at her job, she had faced down an ethical dilemma by speaking out, shining a light, and making the decision to engage with what appeared at first glance to be negative consequences. The first truth was: she was frustrated and disappointed. The final truth: she was free.
Just like with the epilepsy. Oh, the seizures might one day strike again, probably would, unfairly, inappropriately, maddeningly. But seeing her world clearly and honestly, with no expectation that it would be fair, she now took it in stride. She had a pilgrimage to walk, choices to make about what came next. Her courage was her greatest beauty.
I thought about the irony of her brilliant, shining mind suddenly overwhelmed with electrical impulses. I felt a kinship, for all the times my world had short-circuited without warning. The times I came home late from work after school to be greeted by my mother’s wrath that I didn’t do the dishes despite having not eaten at home for two days. The times she slammed kitchen cabinets in angry silence for days until unleashing venom on me for walking by. The times I disagreed with her and she called me a little bitch, sneering, “That’s why your boyfriend broke up with you.” The time she followed me to my room, snarling and vicious, and hit me across the face, knocking off my glasses. The time I decided to leave. When I was seventeen. During my senior year of high school.
There are no tryouts for these roles, Francesca’s and mine. You are born into them. You just get struck – then you see if you can take it. You see if you can figure out a way to harness all that energy, and not let it destroy you. You have to be made of iron. You become a lightning rod.
Francesca leads the way. Buen Camino, Francesca