Family - Darcy Vebber

They are on the table right inside the front door, the Holy Family under their balsa wood and rough twine shelter, caught, still, all eyes on the baby and the baby's eyes on Heaven. Lisa's daughter reaches out to touch the baby's fat stomach. It has peach skin, wide blue eyes and hands folded in prayer. She hesitates, sensing her mother's warning before it comes, her own plump hand hovering over the scene, then she very gently puts one finger on the infant savior's belly and lets it rest there. Her gaze, when she looks up at her mom, is declarative. She gets everything there is to get. The figures are important, maybe even magic, but not ours, not for us to be exactly in awe of.

She is almost three, a baby herself, but she has sentences and ideas and enough small motor skill to make the letters of her name with a fat crayon. Soon, Lisa is sure, she will be reading. Just like you, her mother Alice says, whenever they come to visit. She is just like you.

Lisa knows that isn't true. Franny's brain is on fire in a way Lisa's never was. She takes in everything.

"Mom?" Lisa calls into the dim light of the apartment beyond the entry hall. "Alice?"
She hears shuffling. Her mother is getting out of bed. Lisa puts a hand on Franny's little shoulder. She is still wearing the wool coat she needed in Boston. The back of her neck is damp.

It was a long flight and Lisa feels suddenly confused. Parenthood has done this to her, made her indecisive, sometimes blank. As if she has been asked a trick question. Who to help?

"Sweetheart," she says, trying to move Franny into the living room, "Come take your coat off and I'll go help Grandma."

Franny resists. She is touching the head of a donkey now. Very carefully, she tests the plaster straw under the baby.

It looks to Lisa disturbingly like a campfire set with the baby at its center. Why hadn't she ever noticed that before? "Francis, move. Those things are not for playing with."

Her daughter withdraws her hand and looks up.

It's just because she understands so much that she looks older, Lisa believes. She is just a toddler, still. Taking it in but not judging. It just feels like judging.

"Lisa," her mother calls. She is trying, Lisa knows, to sound gay. The vocal cords are strained, the words punctuated with gasps. "I'll be right there."

Declaration of Independence - Vicki Rubini

Dear General Washington,

You’re worse than a rock star.

We have all heard your praises over and over again. Frankly, we’re all bored to tears with stories of your morality. I would like to hear more about how many cherries were on that tree you cut, or how much you brushed your teeth. How many women were you with before Martha?

Sometimes I hear your name and see your picture more than I do that of my own family. Quarters, dollar bills (admittedly, harder to come by lately), bank names, Mount Rushmore, portraits on stamps, etc., etc. Talk about overexposure! Thank God I don’t live in your eponymous city or state. I think I’d go nuts!

You have the fame of a rock icon, but no song to go with it. You weren’t a writer. I love good writing. You weren’t a dad. I live for my kids. You didn’t paint. I haunt art museums (which, by the way, is loaded with more portraits of you than anyone else).

Yet somehow you are on my mind, and I can’t shake you off.

Icy river water on Christmas Day. Frostbitten soldiers wearing rags. Battles against England, the Darth Vader of Taxation. Personal loans of spirit and cash.

When they offered you the crown, you turned it down….you turned it down. They begged. You reminded all why you had fought.

And that is why I guess I can love you in spite of your perfection.

Declaration of Independence - Chris Callaghan

The matron from the fifth row watched Cory meet his attorney in the hall. She wanted to see his face when he came through the door, but sat on a bench far enough away from it that he wouldn’t notice her. She wasn’t quite ready for that. What mask he might pull on or any of the possible conversations they might have if faced with each other. No, she wasn’t ready for any of that.

Nora had felt her son’s eyes on her in the courtroom, but he hadn’t recognized her. And then the flurry with the judge and Harry going up and Cory standing here in the sad blue clothes wearing those pitiful handcuffs, it all went by so fast.

She’d kept her own eyes fastened on his face, having been starved for it too long. She noted the hard lines and pallor – It seemed a disguise painted on the face of the boy she remembered.

She’d hoped it was worth the risk of recognition to wait in the hall. In that unguarded moment when he came through the door and saw Harry, his face lighted up, and in that and his laughter she’d seen a glimpse of her boy again. That face now etched on the back sides of her eyes no matter what else happened.

How pitiful she had been back in the old days. How desperately she had tried to keep first Bill and then Cory tied to her. How long she had wandered from room to room in the empty house and how close she’d come to disappearing. And then finding that tiny ledge of hope or will inside herself – She’d almost passed it by.

Had she made a conscious decision to build on that or had it occurred instinctively? Like a terrified animal struggling for the shoreline in a flood.

Well, no matter. The fact is that she had built on it, many small steps that had led to that first job and a semblance of independence. Always making sure to give thanks for helping hands, yet allowing her self a modicum of pride at each accomplishment. And so by the time Harry came along she was no longer grasping for rescue, but standing steadily on her own two feet. That could be why he saw things in her that Bill had never seen, and was able to give her what Bill could not.

Poor Bill, she’d been such a scared girl with him, with no sense at all of who she was, no base. And poor Cory, with a child for a mother, no wonder he’d sneered at her.

Nora straightened her back and checked her watch. It had been over an hour since they’d left the building, but she and Harry had allowed for two. It should be enough time, they’d agreed, for Harry to lay the ground work of her plan. A plan for Cory to find his own ledge of hope and how he might build on it, how she might help.

She already knew what she would say when she slid into the booth across from him at the restaurant. First she would say, “I love you Cory.” And then she would say, “You can call me Nora, or Mom, whichever you prefer.”

How She Thinks About Music - Anne Wright

Suzanne didn’t come from a musical family, although before her grandmother Mimi died, she used to sit at the ebony grand in Mimi’s apartment when Dad took her to visit, and press with her fingers on the smooth ivory keys. The tonggg of the low note would go on forever, and a chinggg of the high note, especially if she could manage to reach a foot down to the pedal. Like the colored glass perfume bottles on Mimi’s bureau, and like the empty Marlboro cigarette boxes that Mimi saved for her to use as doll beds, and like the black and white television set tuned in to As the World Turns in Mimi’s darkened apartment, the piano was mysterious. Nobody played it; Mimi had bulging arthritic knuckles, Daddy never offered, and Suzanne had never thought of it as a musical instrument. She had never heard piano music.

Suzanne’s family moved into a furnished house one year. She was eleven years old, and in the living room sat an upright piano. After seeing that Suzie was enchanted with the sounds she made on the old piano, Mother agreed with Dad that she could take lessons, and sent her each week to Mrs. Murphy’s house. For half an hour she played nursery rhymes set to music, and she just didn’t get it, this baby music, note by note. She never practiced; it was boring, and no amount of nagging could get her to sit an hour a day at the stupid piano. It was more fun to tease her sister and read library books. So when she went for her lessons she never progressed, and was embarrassed so she quit.

The next year she heard of a little radio that ran on batteries and she had to have one. When she heard the sounds coming from its little speaker she was excited and became so attached to the radio that she slept with it on her ear, only to wake up in the mornings with no sound coming from it, its batteries dead. After school she turned on the television and watched Dance Party, and practiced dancing using the doorknob as her partner, stepping back and forth to the beat of the music until she fell down, joyous and out of breath. The music just got better, every year, and when she closed herself into her bedroom with the record player on, loud as it could go, she couldn’t even hear her mother screaming, turn that noise down. It helped her bear living with a couple of idiots who just happened to be her parents, and whose job it was to torture her by making her clean up her room.

How She Thinks About Music - Bonnie Smetts

And I just stand there until Randy comes to get me. She comes screeching around the corner from the highway into the school parking lot and I’m there in the place she picks me up.

“Hey,” I say and slide in. Randy’s got oldie tune, rock and roll, blaring and she’s bobbing her head to it. As soon as I’m sitting, this music is grating on me, I already got my insides all grated up anyway. I can’t get my rushing out of class out of my head.

“Hey, girl,” Randy says, her head bobbing to the music with her eyes almost closed. Then she sees I’m not moving at all, and says, “What happened to you?”

I point at the radio. “Off?” she asks. Randy knows me too well. “If you don’t want the music on, something really bad must have happened. Tell.”

She’s pulled the car into a spot and I can tell she’s not moving until I talk. She turns off the car. “What.” she says.

“I left class,” I say.

“Well, so did I, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here. What do you mean, you left class?” she asks.

“I left, left in that I ran out of the class in the middle of it,” I say.

“Why’d you go and do that?” she asks. We both know that our hopes for ourselves are there, staying inside these classrooms.

“Teacher asked us to write. About family,” I say.

“Hmmm,” she says. Words aren’t exactly Randy’s thing and that’s why she’s going to be a hair stylist. She says it’s inherited, not being good with words. “But Rawling, couldn’t you just have faked it or something. How much did you have to write?”

“It wasn’t the how much that got me, it was the family part,” I say. Now Randy’s got a family story that isn’t exactly perfect but mostly she knows about my momma.

“Rawling, why didn’t you just go back in there and say you had to use the ladies room or something?” Randy always makes a lot of sense, sometimes I wish I could just carrying her along in my purse.

“I didn’t think. I couldn’t think, I just didn’t want to write about momma,” I say.

“Monday, you are just going to go in there and if Miss Sheila asks, you’ll say you had female problems and that you’d suddenly not felt well.”

That seems so easy. I just hope that’s what I’m gonna do.

How She Thinks About Music - Jackie Davis Martin

A reporter and a photographer arranged them on the sidewalk in front of the high school, the yellow buses puffing and snorting impatiently at the curb. First there was the entire concert band, but Marcie couldn't find herself easily in that picture. She was happier with the photo of the woodwind quintet, happy with the way her red and white dress fitted her midriff, her waist, snugly, then flared into a fullness, a nonchalant sailor collar. She squinted at it. Would anyone identify her as the bassoonist of the group?

Dan Wahl, solid, dark, grinning, was next to her. Dan played French horn and Marcie was in love with him. Sometimes he acted like he was in love with her, too. He'd shoot an intense gaze in her direction, eyes meeting above the music stands in the semi-circle they sat in, either when they were getting ready to play or sometimes in the middle of a piece, when he had a few bars' rest; he'd count them, and gaze at her. If she glanced up, her mouth puckered around the narrow double reed (and which she'd do only with a whole note), she'd often see him looking at her.

He'd smile slyly and cradle his horn into position on his lap, opening his mouth toward it before he began to play. During those times, which Marcie thought of as harvests, so abundant she couldn't gather them enough to store, Dan would linger after practice, watching her take apart the pieces of her bassoon and arrange them into their velvet fitted holders, talking about the Hindemuth, about section 32, or about the test they'd had in physics—how did she do? It was the only class they had in common besides this, music, the band, the quintet, the after school practices. Or, he'd lean against her locker, also in the bandroom, the round, bulging case of his French horn leaning against his leg, and watch her put on her jacket, ask if she was going to the studio. The studio was downtown; it was where they all took private lessons. Other times Dan would laugh with her and the others but his eyes would be unfocused when they met hers and he'd hurry away to another girl—there were many. In the quintet Dan belonged to her; neither ever missed practice. Well, none of them did. If you were in the quintet you didn't fool around with not going to practice.

The picture was taken because they—both the band and the quintet and several other instrumental groups—were going to the state competitions. On Marcie's other side stood Dina Dee, composed and exact, her neck long, her waist long, who also leaned in. Dina Dee, who played the oboe and was the other girl in the group, and Marcie were almost friends. They weren't not-friends; they roomed together happily at these competitions, had fun, but never made any other arrangements outside the group. Dina Dee studied piano, too. Well, so did Marcie, so did they all, really, but Dina Dee was really serious about it. Her oboe was almost an afterthought, a hobby, although one she was extremely good at. The threesome: Marcie, Dan, Dina Dee, were flanked by Bob Akers and Jerry Jones, flute and clarinet. Bob Akers was in charge, more than likely gay, and Jerry some sort of wunderkind, younger, dazzled by his own promotions.

The other thing was that they were all scheduled in the competitions as soloists as well. Their nerves were at a pitch. Marcie was playing the first movement of the Mozart Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra, although in her case—as in the others, the band director assigned a pianist and they two would rehearse over and over together, to time the rhythms, the pacings—even the breathing.

Big schools would be there, too, as scouts. Penn, of course, where they were going, but Pitt and Duquesne and Carnegie Mellon from here, too, from Pittsburgh, where they'd be most likely to accept a scholarship, if offered. But others, too. Peabody and and even, somebody said, Julliard. There would be the smaller colleges, too, they were told, who desperately needed somebody skilled on horn or oboe or bassoon. They—the quintet—were doing the Hindemuth as their chosen piece, wild in its changing counts, so deliberately cacophonous it made them all seem competent, above the fray, particularly when they'd just played faultlessly the required, dull madrigal. That's what mattered most, to Marcie anyway. It'd be nice to be offered something, but frankly, she cared about doing as well as the others; she wanted Dan Wahl to be proud of her. There was so much at stake here! How were they all breathing? How was she?

Years later, Marcie, now old, unfolded the scrapbook and noticed in the yellowed photo—how did she overlook it before—Dan Wahl's fingers over her head, the stupid rabbit ears! How could she have yearned for someone who did that? At the last reunion mailings, Dan Wahl's and Dina Dee's names were among the missing. Dina Dee, Marcie was pretty sure, had gone on to study music at Carnegie and Dan had done the same at Duquesne. Then, her own life had gone elsewhere, so many other things, people, arts.

What she had here was a photo of a bus trip—buses and five young people bunched together and grinning nervously—of a time when just about everything that defined what was important in life was music.

How I Think About Music - Melody Cryns

Music is life. And music has been a part of my life since I remember.

I was only three when I yelled, “Peter Pan, come back, come back!” at the end of the old Mary Martin musical version of Peter Pan that appeared in black and white on the small-screen TV. We hadn’t even moved from Chicago to San Francisco yet back then.

My mother held me and assured me that yes, Peter Pan would come back and all would be well.
I remember how I sang along with all the songs that I’d heard ever since I’d been a baby when mom would fly me around and pretend I was Peter Pan – I’d yell the song, “I’m flying!!!!” and actually run around the room – and even sing the prayer Wendy, John and Michael’s mother sang for them at the beginning, “Tender Shepherd.” Then I’d march around to “I don’t wanna grow up, I don’t wanna go to school, and if someone tries to make me, I will break all the rules!”
When we had to clap to revive Tinkerbell, I clapped and I clapped so hard that my hands turned red, stomping my feet to the jingly music…

And, in the end, I’d shout and yell, Peter Pan, come back…because I never wanted Peter Pan or the music to leave…I wanted to remember it and keep the music in my heart forever, my first love…music. I heard it all around me, knew every musical jingle played on TV by heart. I believed in magic and that fairy dust really was magical…and I believed in music. I also believed that anything was possible…

And hearing the music all around me made me remember all the magic. I began pounding on the piano and picking out tunes at five, and when I was not quite seven, “they” arrived in our den on Second Avenue in San Francisco – on February 9, 1964, the Beatles arrived on the big screen black and white TV in our living room…me and my mom got so excited, stomping our feet, holding each other and yelling, “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah!” over and over again…it was the first thing I remember having in common with my Mother, our love for the Beatles, for the music that lit up our lives and made us so happy…

So, the music surrounded me and while life happened and I went to business college so that I could always find a job because my mother freaked out when I told her that I’d like to start playing guitar on a street corner for a living because the people who did that looked happy, I never lost sight of music.

Years later, my kids and I would bounce down the road in an old car, listening to music blasting on the radio – maybe it was Led Zeppelin or Grateful Dead, or of course the Beatles. We all knew the songs by heart, the kids and I, even Megan who was so young back then. We would listen to music and talk about how some day we won’t struggle for money because I’m going to publish my book and we’d go on road trips and have a nice car…and I wouldn’t have to work and be away from home so much…life would be wonderful and we’d surround ourselves would music, and fairy dust still existed.

I had almost forgotten about that until just a couple of weeks ago when I became overcome with emotion at a workshop at a writer’s conference in New York – the one I go to every year with my daughter Megan.

What happened to the dream? When did the dream have to take the back burner? The kids are grown now…and the dream never happened and to this day I still struggle to make ends meet and worry over how much rent I’m paying.

But as long as I can hear the music, the dream still lives, but somehow I feel as if I disappointed my kids…I wasn’t able to show them that anything is possible.