August 3, 2011
Practicing
Trickling sounds reverberate into the air. The speckled cat scurries out of the room. The high pitches send it shooing down the stairs with her ears flicked back. My younger sister is playing her flute like she does every day. She is building up her endurance for long hours of orchestra and band. Her flute’s voice weaves between fields of violins and cellos.
“This is creepy,” she says, looking out in the hallway where I’m seated on the floor, notebook in hand. “I keep hearing this scratchy, scratchy.” As she turns back to her music Anakin slowly turning into Vader on her wall poster behind her. The music stand’s arms stretch out, untiringly holding the music up.
I can tell that she still senses me there as she cautiously plays her warm ups. Her shoulders stiffen as a note goes flat. Her ears prickle for any movement from me. Rustling paper? Was that a pen scratching across the page?
The noise is a reminder to her that I have chosen writing over music. That my flute is in its case, on the floor, in a far corner of my room, cold from my lack of playing. I played at her high school Graduation, but that’s not enough. I played before her and now she wonders how her music love has outlived mine. Before long, she drifts into her ascending and descending scales, forgetting my existence and escaping into the cloud of sound.
The notes slip out, half of her air always falling off of the lip plate to the ground, wasted. The sharp tick, tick, tick of the metronome beats on. Its heartbeat echoes off of the music stand, creating borders of time. “ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three...”
A high ‘F’ rings as she repeats the descending scale, perfecting her tone. The soprano register resounds through the flute, glinting off of its silver body Her elbows sway forward and back, back and forth in time to the metronome’s steady beat.
Debussy’s ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’s melodies flow in a river of notes as she pulls out her stack of pieces. Pitches rise into soprano notes and fall into the flute’s dark, gorgeous voice. Vibrato resonates on her low ‘D’, sending ripples of sound waves across the air to collide on the ceiling. Bouncy notes hop around the room.
They dance off of the books and windowsill. The notes sprint running closer and closer to one another, racing each other as they fall down the hill. She drinks in gulps of air between phrases. Up and down the melody runs faster than I can keep up and then a sudden pause rises in the air as she identifies a mistake amidst the string of notes.
“What the heck?” she asks her flute, tapping on its keys noiselessly. She articulates her desired muscle memory technique to her fingers and her brain. “Urrm!” she argues with the silent music sitting before her.
The metronome is silenced as she hammers the notes into their fingers. Slow and steady, she changes the rhythm in order to trick her mind into playing it correctly. Once she deems the passage worthy of its cousin imprinted in stale ink on the page, she continues, letting her conductor raise his piton and tap against her music stand. Over and over, the pattern repeats.
Music floats to the ceilings in a seesaw of tones. Bright high notes sing like little birds. Dark low notes boom as deep as a bull frog’s song. Her shoulders release a sigh, twisting the flute apart until three bones remain. Droplets of water fly to the carpet.
“I think I’m just about done. I’m tired.”
August 3, 2011
Hands
I like my hands, like today writing in blue ink and the tapping on the keyboard of my laptop. They become a machine, diligently transposing my clutter of thoughts into symbols of words. When they cramp up in pain, they stumble, scratching letters into unrecognizable symbols, needing to be shaken out and well rested. The fingers are a little short for my taste, bunched up where other’s hands are long and slender.
They are not fast movers and the knuckles are not tough with lean muscles, but they are mine. I may favor one hand over another. Depending on my right hand to do the heavy lifting, the hand eye coordination, and sometimes completely forgetting about my left hand until things start to fall. I am grateful to the many tasks that they do without my notice. Like an old forgotten maid, they scrub the dishes and reach behind the refrigerator past the cobwebs for that missing fork. I like my hands, but I don’t like my nails and I’m not so sure they like me either. I under appreciate all of their hard work, offending them.
The first offense happened in sixth grade during PE. I was waiting in line to do pushups, worrying about how many pushups I could do and how many I had to do in order to “pass” as healthy according to the PE charts. The sun was beating down and reflecting back up at me from the black top. I was standing there worried and then I pulled my right hand up from my side, feeling liquid on my thumb.
At first I thought I had hit a tree earlier or a seagull overhead had pooped on me. Neither prospect was appealing in my mind, but as I looked down at my thumb, I was shocked. Sticky blood swept under the thumb’s cuticle, from deep red spreading out to light red. There was a spot of red on my index fingernail. I realized what had happened. My fingernail had dug right through the epidermis layer and the dermis layers of my skin right down into the blood capillaries.
I asked the teacher if I could get a band aid and indicated my finger. As I wrapped up the swelling skin the pain began to prickle. I wondered where my fingers had learned such a horrible habit. I wondered where I had learned such a horrible habit. Though I have been able to shake the nasty habit when I am happy and calm, the nails take on another life of their own when I am stressed.
Nails. Those half moon shaped nails may look cute when they are clean and following my commands, but when I am stressed, they take over control. The sharp edges attack their enemy, the cuticles. The nails dig into the soft top layer of skin, encasing the nail to the veiled nail board below. Red liquid seeps out, spilling out a tattle tale to me off what my nails have done again under stress. They function without my approval, running on a mind of their own. Severing from my conscious thought. Angry, frustrated with misguided rebellious group, I cut them back up.
I apologize to my poor cuticles as I bandage them up. No matter if I cut the nails back to the point of them bleeding or paint them with pretty colors in order to distract them, they take over when my stress runs high. “Reduce the stress,” they plead as I snip my nail back once again. It’s my only act of reprimanding that they listen to anymore.
I don’t listen to their plea. I can control you fair easier than stress levels around me, I tell them. Whether it’s playing the flute, clapping, or learning to sign. I know my hands will always be there for me. My hands and I agree on one thing. We both like to write. We both…rats!
My one finger stains red. I wrap up a band aid around my finger and apologize. For now, maybe they’ll forgive me.
Practicing (Scene)
July 7, 2011Trickling sounds reverberate into the air. The speckled cat scurries out of the room. The high pitches send it shooing down the stairs with her ears flicked back. My younger sister is playing her flute like she does every day. She is building up her endurance for long hours of orchestra and band. Her flute’s voice will weave between fields of violins and cellos.
“This is creepy,” she says, looking out in the hallway where I’m seated on the floor, notebook in hand. “I keep hearing this scratchy, scratchy.” She turns back to her music. The music stand’s arms stretch out, untiringly holding the music up.
I can tell that she still senses me there as she cautiously plays her warm ups. Her shoulders stiffen as a note goes flat. Her ears prickle for any movement from me. Rustling paper? Was that a pen scratching across the page? Before long, she drifts into her ascending and descending scales, forgetting my existence and escaping into the cloud of sound.
The notes slip out, half of her air always falling off of the lip plate to the ground, wasted. The sharp tick, tick, tick of the metronome beats on. Its heartbeat echoes off of the music stand, creating borders of time. “ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three...”
A high ‘F’ rings as she repeats the descending scale, perfecting her tone. The soprano register resounds through the flute, glinting off of its silver body Her elbows sway forward and back, back and forth in time to the metronome’s steady beat.
Debussy’s ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’s melodies flow in a river of notes as she pulls out her stack of pieces. Pitches rise into soprano notes and fall into the flute’s dark, gorgeous voice. Vibrato resonates on her low ‘D’, sending ripples of sound waves across the air to collide on the ceiling. Bouncy notes hop around the room.
They dance off of the books and windowsill. The notes sprint running closer and closer to one another, racing each other as they fall down the hill. She drinks in gulps of air between phrases. Up and down the melody runs faster than I can keep up and then a sudden pause rises in the air as she identifies a mistake amidst the string of notes.
“What the heck?” she asks her flute, tapping on its keys noiselessly. She articulates her desired muscle memory technique to her fingers and her brain. “Urrm!” she argues with the silent music sitting before her.
The metronome is silenced as she hammers the notes into their fingers. Slow and steady, she changes the rhythm in order to trick her mind into playing it correctly. Once she deems the passage worthy of its cousin imprinted in stale ink on the page, she continues, letting her conductor raise his piton and tap against her music stand. Over and over, the pattern repeats.
Music floats to the ceilings in a seesaw of tones. Bright high notes sing like little birds. Dark low notes boom as deep as a bull frog’s song. Her shoulders release a sigh, twisting the flute apart until three bones remain. Droplets of water fly to the carpet.
“I think I’m just about done. I’m tired.”
July 5, 2011
Hands are made up of five fingers each with their own set of bones and joints linked together. Hands can be either long slender knuckles trickling across the silkily piano keys or small hands of a child twirling in the breeze, a flying airplane lifting off of the ground. Either way, hands help us communicate. When language barriers form around us, hands serve to paint a picture of words. They have always been there, the support of an old forgotten maid. Doing our hard work for us, they are stained with car oil and cleaning soaps.
My numb fingers stretch across the darkness, feeling around for a light switch or another living being in the blinded room. Hands are the ones that touch and comfort one another. They provide strings for our connections. Hands help us communicate, whether it be grasping someone for the comfort of another human or giving people an unspoken voice.
My hands sign, dancing in the winds. Fingers fly like little birds. My fingers synchronize with each other in an orchestrated unison, to perform songs of words, they dance around each other. The beauty of their silent tonality vibrates from my fingers. Without them, we would be lost, relying solely on our voices for communication. Rolling wrists and smooth joints pour out with emotions, conveying expressive thoughts.
Hands can heal our bodies or build our communities. They can cut people open to remove bullets and heal wounds. Gloved in latex, worn fingers pull back our skin layers. The three nerves of the hand, like marionettes, fall in place, using the fingers to bounce up and down. Callused and bent back, they beat back into the cement, building up monuments and sky scrapers from dust.
They are beat upon over the years, being worn out by our carelessness as they run on muscle memory. It’s only when arthritis sets in that we truly appreciate our most wondrous servants that are by this time inflamed with scar tissue and in pain. Only then, with varicose veins sticking out of our thin skin that we become conscious of all of the past work we have put them through. Hands have been dunked in water, stripped of their oils by soaps, dried out by tough winds, responsible for the mundane tasks of picking up a pencil and digging behind the refrigerator for a lost screw driver.
The hands will become crippled and curl back, never silent long enough to shake hands in greeting. For now, my hands, cramped with exhaustion, can only reach across the page with these simple words. My fingers tap the keys of my keyboard, sending this message.
