Facing the Music Read Online Free Page B

was a window into a world beyond our books, capable of launching us into a new realm of imagination.
    Long before I would learn to express my insecurities by saying “I can’t,” she began to teach us how to read the language of music. With limited resources, she found a way. There weren’t any blackboard or textbooks for her to use to help us decode the magical language of the music staff and black dots called notes, so she took to the hardwood floor. Ignoring all the markings of the basketball court, she found a clear spot where she could map outfive perfectly straight parallel lines, with four uniform spaces in between. She called the creation a “staff.” With the aid of a stuffed toy frog, she’d place it at various positions in the diagram and called out the representative letter that we would later call notes. The lines, we would learn by using the acronym “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and the spaces as “F.A.C.E.”.
    As we learned what to call the lines and spaces, she let us tap out these notes on the piano. I found it the greatest extravagance when I would have my turn to take the quiz. I would sit alone at the keyboard, where I could strike the corresponding key indicated by the stuffed frog. But one note just didn’t seem enough; I felt the urge to link the notes together, in rhythm and order to make what seemed so fantastic  . . . a song!
    Eventually, part of our musical curriculum would come to include learning how to play an alto recorder. It’s a plastic, flutelike whistle of sorts that looks somewhat like a small clarinet. Once I got my hands on my very own, I couldn’t get enough.
    Learning to read the code of music as fluently as the written word was like cracking open the door to a magic world. I was mesmerized that I could take those little black dots on the page and breathe them into life. What to some appeared as frantic nonsense scored on the page, was, to me, something that I had the power to sing into recognition. I just couldn’t get enough of it.
    Some way or another I got my hands on a book of old American folk tunes. I must have played the tune “Erie Canal” a thousand times in this state of amazement. I played that song so many times that I began to feel, in my soul, that I was there, on the canal, walking and pulling my burdens alongside the famed waterway with the aid of my trusty mule. My parents, on the otherhand, found themselves quickly exhausted. And who could blame them?
    I’ve got a mule her name is” (Wrong note, start again.)
    â€”(Okay.) I ’ve got a mule her name is Sa— (Oops, okay, start again.)
    I’ve got a mule her name is Sal, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal. I would sing along in my head as I played the notes on my trusty recorder.
    On and on it went until my poor parents, in hopes of maintaining their own sanity, demanded that I play no more than one hour inside the house and, if that weren’t enough, I’d have to go outside. So, outside I went. I played under the shade trees and in the boughs of the trees. I’d go to the barn and serenade the horses. I’d crawl up into the hay loft, make a hay bale my music stand and play every last song I could manage.
    Much to my father’s amusement, my talents never reached the same magical effect as the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Though my playing failed to abate the never-ending raid of oat-pilfering field mice from the barn, as far as I was concerned, I was a virtuoso.
    In those rare moments of youth, when we are oblivious to facts, logic, and our insecurities, everything is possible. Nothing is beyond our reach. I played my songs with abandon. I looked to the notes on the page, I sent my breath through my recorder, I moved my fingers, and the world came alive. There was not a dream I could conjure that wasn’t possible. Every song was an invitation to an experience that would otherwise be too far away for a little girl