I ALWAYS KNEW by Susan LaFever

I’m telling my story at a horn workshop. I’ve been placed in a group of six similarly-aged women and we attend small-group classes as a unit. We’ve played sextets together, we’ve played solos for each other, we’ve talked about creative horn playing in class. Now we’re sharing our histories.

You might consider us losers. None of us is famous, but some of us play better than others, some of us play better than the instructors. What was it in our past that had prevented our advancing, whatever that is, as far as we had wanted?

Yes, there is a system for producing players; although the figure even for Juilliard grads finding full-time orchestral work is only 5%. What chance did someone outside the system have? I guess you might say none.

I start talking in a low shaky voice. I always knew I was a musician. Even as a toddler I was always singing in the car. (In those days, we didn’t have car seats; the kids just rode in the back seat.) From the age of four I knew I was going to be a professional musician when I was introduced to the violin in a Suzuki class.

I remember standing impatiently as the instructors, one American man and one Japanese man, seemed to talk forever about the proper way to hold and care for your instrument. I just wanted to get my hands on it. When we were finally told to get our instruments, I ran over to the case and opened it to see my little brown violin. I was so eager to absorb everything that I was able to stand still for the lesson, ignoring the burning and growing itch on my leg (something that I’m not able to do now)!

In Suzuki instruction, the parents learn along with the children so they can guide and participate in the practice at home. I remember my mother’s frustration trying to tune our instruments. She couldn’t seem to find the pitch even though I could hear it. The practice sessions were sometimes frustrating as well. Fortunately, we had vinyl discs with the music to play along with that we put on the stereo, a huge cabinet console with built-in speakers that was a piece of furniture that took up a third of one wall.

One day, as we were struggling to learn a new piece, I told Mom I needed to use the bathroom. Figuring I was trying to get out of practicing, she wouldn’t let me go. Finally, there was nothing I could do; a stream of urine came bursting out of me with surprising strength. I can still hear how it sounded as it hit the green carpet in the living room with such force. As I was embarrassedly running to the bathroom, Mom yelled, “You did that on purpose!”

My parents never “got” me. Despite my talent and diligence in music, they had other plans for me. In high school, I would get up at 6am, after several “prompts” from Mom, which involved blinding me by turning on the ceiling light, and calling out to me every few minutes until I finally got up. I practiced the horn for an hour, ate breakfast and went to school, then practiced the horn for another hour after school followed by an hour of piano practice.

I loved practicing and loved my teachers. One day in third grade, I was made to stay after school, probably for talking out of turn. I remember sobbing loudly as my head was down on the desk where I was told to put it for my punishment, but not because I was staying behind; it was because I was going to miss my piano lesson.

My parents being strict and religious, apparently thought music was a good thing to keep me out of trouble before college, but never felt it could be a profession. To bolster their belief, they asked my horn teacher if you can make a living playing the horn. He himself, although principal horn of the local community orchestra, made his living teaching privately. I think they knew the answer would be a qualified no.

I was always a little confused about what love was. It seemed my parents were always thwarting my plans, telling me they knew better and that I would ultimately be happy that I listened to them. I never understood what was wrong with my plans for my own life since they didn’t involve drugs, alcohol or sex. I just wanted to be a musician.

THE LIFE I WAS IMAGINING by Todd Greenwood

You could sit sprawled across the wooden floor of your apartment on Charles Street in the West Village, garbage trucks clanging and crushing their way down the street, with the map of the Indian subcontinent laid out in front of you. A copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to India with two smiling turbaned men in Rajasthani splendor guarding the door to the mystery that lay behind the golden bejeweled entrance to a mystery world. And there next to the map is a schedule of trains, and list of cities and places to be seen.

I had won the Priskell Travel Fellowship, a stipend of money that would allow me to study Open Air Marketplaces – and the world was my oyster. Anywhere in the world, any place on the planet where the agora had created its own organic form. To study and construct how the order of commerce, the simple and unplanned could be seen through the eyes of the designer, the architect. There was something to be learned by wandering in places that never saw the hand of an urban planner; places never needed to be mapped and plotted and defined.

Lying prone over the subcontinent it looked simple, easy, and knowable. It was December and the wedding was going to be in April. I had decreed. We had planned. I wasn’t going to let up this opportunity and Ruth wanted me to go, to take this opportunity and let me explore what there was in a place that the two of us could only imagine. Two mustachioed smiling men of Hindu mystery guarding an ancient door.

But as excited as I was by the prospect of flying to Bombay, and taking the train wherever the spirit moved me, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that this voyage would be the last of my life as a single man. At 24 years of age, I would be going to India, a place where I knew only one person – my Industrial Design teacher from Pratt - who would be staying with his mother and father while I was in Bombay. But from there, I would be on my own. The names of the map were mysterious, and alluring. Places that I knew little about. I could hardly even know what to expect in a place called Goa. Places in the South that eluded pronunciation. Places with names so long that I was sure they couldn’t be correct, or that they came along with some simple and shorter nickname that the cartographers were too proper to include.

I looked at the map and thought about the fact that we had sent out the invitations, found the synagogue, found a caterer who was Kosher enough for Ruth’s mom and dad to agree to (if they were going to pay)… but cool enough to be more than the "chicken or flanken" choices of the too many perfumed Leonard’s of Great Neck Affairs that I would die before submitting to. It was set: flowers, invitations, and an auspicious date: 4/8/84.

It was December and the wedding was April. Four months and I had enough money for just about that amount of time -- backpack, youth hostels and 30 rupees to the dollar. The only problem was that as I looked at the map, it dawned on me that the distances were huge. There was no way that I would be able to circle and explore the entire continent from the disputed and communist-controlled lands of Assam to the shores of Trivandrum in just four months.

The greatest trust: The moment of standing at the Pan Am counter, in Kennedy, with a suitcase that could be strapped to my back. My fiancée, the woman who I loved so dearly, an adventure that I had wanted so much. An adventure that I would have dreamed my whole life for. All those lists that I had on my wall as a child – the fifty things I would do in my lifetime. List of travel adventures, of jumping from airplanes, of taking a submarine across the ocean. Dreams fueled by Jules Verne and Popular Science magazine.

And I had managed to convince the committee sitting somewhere above Willoughby Street at the office of Pratt that here was a young man with a crazy notion: open air market places, organic design, the architecture of the unplanned. Let me have five thousand dollars and let him explore the unseen world.

I stood at the International Departure Lounge, surrounded by people who held their cigarettes in new ways, walked in curious arrangements, wore on their faces the signs and markings of places airports away, lands beyond. My sweet fiancée stood there telling me that I should have this adventure. Give this to myself, allow myself to experience what I had planned to do. She wanted it for me. But I wanted to hold on.

A month went by in which every day I smelled more like turmeric. A month went by in which the sounds of goats crunching on tin cans and honking rickshaws awoke me. A month went by in which my sandals became more deeply caked with the dust of the streets of Goa, Pune, and Bangalore. In which I sat transfixed by temples melting into the sea and lingams buried within the dark sanctums of places that I felt I should see, but were beyond my vision.

A month went by and I was sitting on a beach in Sri Lanka, in a small town south of Columbo - a place where the empty shells of buildings stood eviscerated by the ire of the Tamils. But this place was different. It was relaxing, peaceful -- so different than the cacophony of India or the sorrow of Columbo. There was a bar, and a bar tender and there was just one cassette tape that was pumping across the beach on endless repeat. I recognized the voices, seemed to know the singers.

"Hi, Hi, hi, hi, hi, Hi, hi, I want take you home. Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Ooooo."

The Talking Heads. And the voice of David Byrne was of a deep unsavory guttural – a lurid devilish seducer, a dance of sexual invitation at the feet of imagined gyrating beauty.

I sat under a baobab tree – a tree with huge arms that swept and protected the beach for centuries. This was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been in the month on the road. The food was good. The air was clear and there was a freedom and clarity. A place of repose -- for the tranquility of India is the biggest myth of all. Maybe tranquility within – but certainly chaos without.

I sat under the tree and I cried. The pain was too great. I could not wait a moment longer and I knew that at that moment there was a decision that I could no longer put off. Each day, I had asked myself the question. Each day I felt the longing and I thought of the woman that I loved and the comfort of sleeping in our three quarter mattress atop the wooden loft, down the block from the Korean Grocer and the corner sushi and little place that we went for Gai Yang chicken after work.

My adventure… I sat under to Baobab tree, picked up my bag, and called Indian Airlines. I told them that I needed to be home on the next plane. Get me home in 24 hours. Someone at home had died.

ME & JULIAN by Rio Morales

I got Julian’s twelfth birthday party invitation in the mail. Parisi Speed School: I hate sports. Saturday, October 10th: I was going to go bowling with my mom. 4-7:30: three and a half hours of sports. I hate sports.

I’d put up with Julian’s birthdays in the past, whether it was a Wayfinder foam-sword-capture the flag-outdoors-buggy adventure, or a baseball/basketball/skateboarding party at his house which involved sports and only sports. The people at these parties were mostly his other friends, which meant Day School kids, all of which could throw a perfect three-pointer and hit a home-run or land a kickflip. I suppose I liked running and catching and kicking, but these kids, who were my friend’s friends, were so good and so terrifying and so condescending about it that I’d spend the party inside his living room watching two of them play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, which I was also terrible at. I figured a Parisi Speed School Party meant throwing and batting and running, my question answered by the football and basketball stickers around the border of the invitation.

The past summer had been hard on my relationship with Julian. We’d hung out less, and when we did we played Tony Hawk and he would win, and to make me feel better he’d play me the Jay-Z CD Artie made him then teach me a new curse word he’d learned from Zach. We no longer traded pokemon cards or built towers or reminisced on our trips to the Statue of Liberty or Niagara Falls or the State Capitol Building.

Eventually we stopped hanging out, eventually I stopped hearing about him or his family, eventually my Mom and Ellen lost their friendship, too. Eventually I saw him on the first day of seventh grade, wearing a hat with some obscure logo on it, too big for his head, too big for the little kid I’d known. And eventually I got an envelope from him for his birthday party at Parisi Speed School, but I wondered if he even knew his mom had sent it to me.

NO MEMORY by Rica Rock

For me, the problem is not remembering. My mother died when I was almost three and a half years old, but I don’t remember her at all. This last weekend I was at a retreat, where we had half-hour morning meditation on Saturday and on Sunday. No sooner do I make a concerted effort to clear my mind, thoughts of her come up – but they are all questions. This time I had the courage to try to remember what the physical circumstances of my first three years were.

As I understand it, most of the time it was me, my mother, and my big sister in a house about 14x16 feet. There was no bathroom or pantry or electricity or hot water or central heat. It consisted of a very small bedroom, a smaller kitchen, and a main room which was a bit deeper than the others, and as long as the two of them together. Did my mother sleep in the living room, my sister and my crib squeezed into the bedroom? Or, since my sister was a teenager and my mother a manic depressive, was it the other way around? Did I have a crib, and if so, whom was it borrowed from? If not, did I sleep on the floor, or were chairs arranged around a narrow cot to keep me from falling out, or what? Were there curtains? Bedspreads? Pictures? Books? A mirror? Where were clothes hung?

When I moved into that house again at age 14, my father had added many amenities, including a tiny closet for me in the bedroom (my room), another for him and coats, a pantry with room for the electric refrigerator, and a very small toilet with a shower. And, luxury beyond the beyond, a telephone.

But back to no memory of my mother, I cannot picture the house, or my place in it, or my mother. I had a fleeting idea to ask my sister to describe it for me – maybe that would trigger a memory – but I’m afraid that’s almost hopeless. She’s going to be 94 in August, and is past reliability. She has, however, two photographs of my mother: one is a formal studio picture taken of her standing by a tall pedestal, one elbow resting on it, in her late teens, a relatively new immigrant; the other sitting on the steps leading into the above-mentioned house, in a summer cotton dress, my father sitting next to her, bare-chested, in overalls, and my sister standing nearby in a bathing suit, with her hand resting on top of my mother’s head.

So, just as there are no physical artifacts -- except a hand-made, falling-apart, much painted-over little wooden stool, too rickety now, almost in its 90s, to trust standing on -- there are no memories of my mother.

ALONE by Cheryl Corson

I worked alone for years, weaving scarves in a bedroom I’d converted to a studio in a little house on an island in Maine. This might sound like a bad idea for an extrovert like me. The two most important people in my life then were Jim, my live-in boyfriend, and Debbie, or Deborah Young as she was professionally known, my sales rep in midtown Manhattan, and long-distance friend.

I wove as I listened to NPR, or the World Series, or cassette tapes of Robert Bly. I wove like a human machine, beating the silk, alpaca, or merino wool yarn evenly, at 12, 15, or 18 picks per inch. My selvedges were flawless. I calculated shrinkage by percentage, to the inch, so that every scarf I shipped to Saks Fifth Avenue and Macy’s was identical.

After a few years, my boyfriend Jim ‘came out’ as they say, falling temporarily in love with his academic advisor at the college he attended in Bar Harbor. Around the same time Jim moved out, Debbie got lymphoma and died, way too soon for all concerned.
If I’d thought I was alone before, I was really alone then.

I began to work outside the house. “Working out” was what old Mainers called work outside the home for wages. That was before it came to mean driving outside the home to exercise at a gym.
I became chair of public art selection committees all over the State of Maine. Suddenly, from the same home studio my loom was in, I was using a government access code to phone artists, architects, school principals, and others all over the state and then driving, often for hours, to chair meetings where these people looked at artists’ portfolios and interviewed them for commissions.

I loved this work more than anything. So much, that I enrolled at the University of Maine to finish my undergraduate degree in case a full-time job should open up. Now I had professors and an advisor in addition to my committee members and arts council colleagues.
My time alone on the Island felt more precious, a welcome break from all the people I interacted with on the phone and in person when I drove to see them in my white Volvo station wagon, from Bar Harbor to Machais, Bangor, Biddeford, Damariscotta, Portland, Augusta, Orono and beyond.

Now, I work alone in a home studio again. It’s 27 years later, and instead of weaving scarves, I’m designing landscapes and playgrounds, writing and teaching. My clients can be wonderful, like today, when Dedra came outside when I stopped by to check on the crew working at her house. She’s had medical problems and recently retired. Her 2 acres had gotten away from her. Unable to walk well, she will need help with her gardens now.

After only 2 days, a crew of 4 men with a dump truck and a skid steer had removed every weed tree from her beds and revealed her gorgeous weeping thread-leaf Japanese maple, and the long, twisted branches of her Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick, and cleared large seating areas in the shade of her huge apple and cherry trees.

She stood there next to me and cried tears of joy. The 4 guys, Dedra and I all paused to appreciate the moment. It’s not always like this, of course, but this connection to other people, fostering their connection to the earth as well as my own, makes me not feel alone when I go downstairs to my office in the morning.

SCENE by Sophie Strand

At first we sit in the middle of the field, sunglasses reflecting the remains of the day and small spiders propelling up the seams of our shorts. I fiddle with my bag and you lie back, flicking open your phone and bitching about the friend who failed to call.

Your hair catches on your lips and you sputter, blowing waves away in a messy kiss of air. A bug bite has appeared as a twin to a bruise on my calf. It blossoms, each rosy capillary swelling up to the surface - the skim of deeper blood.

You suggest we avoid the bugs and I agree.

"Yeah. That place by the pool, under the shade of the roof."

As we slip between red buildings, breathing in breath laced with brick, you observe that the pool is open now, its water a swarm of gnats and yellow light.

We settle on the concrete, soften our bodies against the advance of dusk by lifting our faces up to an invisible sun. It sits just below the curve of the mountain, sending out long arms of gold in farewell.

"This has been a really bad year," you say, pulling trail mix out of your satchel. You pop a peanut onto your tongue. "I forgot I had this in here."

I slip a slim cigarette out of my pack, lighting it in the shadow of my hand. It illuminates the lines of my palm before catching.

"I know," I say finally, sucking on the filter.

"Can you remember anything good? At all?" you query with your hands full of assorted nuts. The raisins, though, have been thrown carelessly into the grass at our feet.

I think and smoke and watch as a cop pulls a car over, a pulse of red flashing through the chain link fence in the distance - the color of emergency.

"Making spaghetti that one time we were drunk at Jess'?" I suggest but it feels wrong.

You nod, not necessarily in agreement.

The cop is saying something to the driver. He shakes his head and then smile sternly before walking back to his car. I'd like to think he let them off with a warning. But I know that a ticket probably nips at the ashtray as the driver pulls back out onto the pavement. There is always a cost for speeding and it is often the length of the road.

HIDING by Seraphina Mallon-Breiman

My friends associate me with ‘knowing a lot of people’. They think I’m social and outgoing and confident in these public settings but I’m not. I can be, but not without exceptional self-consciousness.

When I was younger and I was in a public setting and I would see someone who I had a crush on, or whom I felt intimidated by, or someone who simply just made me nervous, I would hide from them. I would go to the bathroom in ‘Sunflower’ and stay there longer than I needed to. I would go to the back aisle of books in the library and pretend to be thoroughly engaged with my nose in the book with the biggest cover. (Libraries are very good places to hide.) I would blend into crowds, duck behind trees, or turn the other way and begin a conversation with a total stranger in order to look like I was doing something.

I’ve hidden underneath my headphones, behind my cell phone -- texting nonsense -- and in my room with my door shut. I’ve hidden in books, in my friend’s houses, in long sleeved shirts and on iChat. I always forget I’m hiding because I’m very good at it.

“…Nineteen, TWENTY! READY OR NOT HERE I COME!” Hide and Go Seek is a game I associate with my life until I was around thirteen. In North Woods, my homeschooling group, we would play this, ‘Sardines’, ‘Tag’, or something Connor Ritchey came up with called ‘Uber Tag’. I never actually ‘hid’ from anyone in Hide and Go Seek though because in my mind I was just playing a game, a fun game that included all of my friends.

‘Hiding’ when you know you’re hiding is the most healthy way to hide I think. Myself, and the people around me however do not generally know this. We use familiar people or objects or places and we use them to escape from the things that are the scariest.