how I learned to play the flute

my story and experiences are not unique and my heart is hardened to pound out references to my naivete trailing like comet tails. these have kept me from writing the chapters of my story. tonight i may be in the mood to write. i will see what comes.

music became part of my life in 5th grade. i don't know why I chose flute. they passed around the slips of paper asking if you wanted to sign up for music lessons, the free ones, in school and what instrument did you want to choose. i don't remember the conversation or choosing flute. i had no knowledge of music of any sort before this time. perhaps my parents chose the instrument they thought would sound the least butchered being practiced in the house.

we were taught to play it first only on the mouthpiece. after a week or two we tried holding and blowing with the entire flute assembled. mr. DiMeo always smelled of stale coffee and if he demonstrated on youro flute then that smelled of stale coffee, too. the first song I learned to play, in the beginner flute book, because it is 3 notes, was Mary Had a Little Lamb. I remember mastering it and playing it for my parents, in my pajamas, in front of the bathroom mirror. I would come to always enjoy practicing in the bathroom. good acoustics. after just a few months, my teacher told my parents I should take private lessons because I was good. I had no knowledge of this. I know that I was able to learn songs by ear and from memory. i kept a list of the notes that I knew, how to write them in notation and the songs that I had figured out (in some cases I didn't know the names of them, like the opening bit of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons). I wrote these in a gold pen in my free Hello Kitty notebook. some times with stickers. Privately I thought I was hot shit for this reason, not for my flute playing. THe songs I knew mostly were TV theme songs like fucking 'Dynasty'.

We were renting this flute from the local store. My parents thought were were leasing it which meant your payments added up to purchasing it. After one year when we didn't rent it during the summer vacation months the store considered it a break in agreement and cancelled the renting total. THis pissed my father off, so when fall rolled around he did not rent me a flute. Apparanetly this was the end of my musical hobby.

I should note at this point that I didn't have any extra curricular activities. Though I would have liked ice skating lessons which, who knows, could have brought me into the fold of popularity on at least a sub-level, my parents didn't go that way. I enjoyed playing the flute but now it was about money. I don't remember caring much about it but perhaps I did complain. My father was into auctions at that time, was going every week and would buy shit and stuff the garage and basement with his purchases to hopefully turn a profit in a future garage sale. He bought me a small organ. Of course I couldn't play this in school band I protested but I could still satisfy my talent for figurng out songs by ear by memory. After a few months longer still without a flute, my father told me if I really wanted one I could buy one with my own money. I placed an ad in the local pennysaver (if you even know what one of those are, a newspaper version of Craigslist) which I still remember: "WANTED: new or used flute in good condition". I paid $100 for this flute. I have no idea where I got the money from. It is possible that my parents paid for it after all but knowing my dad how I do, I doubt it, so maybe I did have it saved or something. I remember my aunt and uncle were at the house when I returned with it. They wanted me to play something, but after 4 or 5 months I could barely remember how to use it.

It came back and I really got into it. I bought some popular sheet music for the time, it is so embarrasing now. I had the music to Phil Collin's 'Against All Odds' and Madonna's Lucky Star! I knew they weren't flute pieces but I didn't play other instrument. I went for classical music and bought hard stuff, really poured over it and made notes and practiced. Partially because I had a built-in audience which were the poker games in our basement one-two nights weekly. These were serious poker players. They could hear me practice but not see me so it was easy to build confidence without getting nervous. My dad would pass along compliments the next day because these games would go on hours past my bedtime, sometimes into the morning.

In high school I did eventually take private lessons, in the church basement, with Fran DaMico. SHe was a great person. Also in high school there were still the free school time lessons of a half-period a week. This was an easy out from class. You didn't even need a pass, you would just say you were going for your instrument lesson. Naturally I used these way more than once a week. Sometimes I just used the time to do nothing but often I did go and play.

I still had no other extra curriculars and I was never good at anything else. And in college I played all through the four years and this was where I finally branched off. I was lucky enough to be encouraged to take another instrument, so I chose the saxophone and joined jazz band immediately. I will never ever forget those days. Dr. Onofrio, the jazz band instructor, and my classmate and resident genius Ian MacDougal who taught me how to improvize. I had had no idea up to that point. This is where music began for me.

As I went from one genre to the other over the years, I would have shame and embarrassment over the genre of interest I had just left. I am still this way.

And now I don't play music at all. I have stuffed into my closet, foreign and estranged, one electric Telecaster, amp, alto sax, cheap keyboard, metal xylophone, mics, cords, and fancy high school flute.

WNHP5 reading tour and readiness details

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New York Clocks features

Hey I have now been featured on Threadbanger.com and Crafty Christina

moving, again

a recount, (if I can)

college, plattsburgh NY to '93

summer of '93, burlington VT

grad school, gallaudet, DC, 93-94
a. dorm 1 semester
b. shared house, cheverly, MD

transfer, portland, OR 94-95
a. apt in SW with wayne
b. colleague's house for 3 weeks

SE Madison St 7/75 ? to 7/96

packed up and traveled Ireland, return to USA, more travel, 2 weeks in Astoria OR and 4 in Bellingham WA, travel, 8 months approx (let's say 3 moves here)

again Portland

a. SE 46th and Clinton 3/97 ? - few months?

b. 1222 SE Madison '97 1 year ?

c. SE Halsey and 48th? past powell, almost suburbs to 12/98

d. SE 36th and Yamhill 1/99 - 8/99

West St Oakland *** the winner! 3 years one apt! 8/99-10/02

7th and Judah, San Francisco 10/02-4/03

22nd St SF 5/03-1/04

(home) Terrace Hill Drive, New Hartford NY 2/04-8/04

Holmead Pl NW DC 8/04-8/06

W 106 St NYC 8/06-8/07

E 6th St NYC 8/07-9/09

and now, E 5th st NYC


22 moves.

I am living in the future always. I am 1 step ahead. I save nothing. I put the memories away. I put myself away. everything goes away. everything is painful. yet the present is a head on a pike that I spear and wave in the face of you like flames, fanning the fire. for what, I don't know. I'm braced for the disappointment and it is there. it is always there. maybe this is the stability in my life I lack and the only thing I can count on to find and so I do.

so when I find the photo of myself from 2002 and it is another person, when I unwrap the trinket from a wedding and see that it is Kim's and not Terri's, when I un-box the wine glasses from my mother's home, when I find something I have written, it doesn't matter the format. everything is 6 feet under or another galaxy. I've made myself autistic to the present and future and once in a while I record this in words.

I put that on display and I put it away.

Fruit-Friend-Vacation Triangle

It was a true vacation. Although when I look at the photos all I see is 1,000 visual memories of when and why I was mad at Jon, I know that will fade. The disappointment will fade but keep its structure, I was going to say like a tan, but there are tan lines on the skin to keep you from lying that your whole body was tan. There's little to get around it. If you wear a shirt and no one sees you shirtless then its possible to believe that beyond the sleeves your skin continues to be golden and glowing. Like a resume. Accentuating the positives, putting your skills into sentence fragments of equal size, wasting no extra words. Each position a sliced strawberry with a quality knife.

It's difficult to believe that fruit and vegetables exist in their current format, have existed in their current format for thousands of years. In a world of processed, combined, cooked food, a colorful singular fruit is amazing. Every corner market a living museum of the antiquity of human survival. Consider the process: farming, growing, harvesting, packaging, shipping, shelving. A resume listing. Vulnerable, helpless, complete whether eaten or not. How much is thrown away? And yet this continues.

It was a true vacation. I missed no one. I was gone so long that when I returned I had the blessing of having to actively recall the names of friends I wanted to see. I was gone long enough to be missed first. text messages and emails and plans made for lunch, for a drink, for a fun activity. Kim, CC, Moses, Georgia, Jaime, Jim, Ann, Michele, Karin, Kathy. I know it sounds canned but I mean it. To see those words, "welcome back! can't wait to see you" is the wave on which I ride. I have always been schmaltzy for friendship. Even in elementary school and junior high, an age where most girls traded friends and phone numbers like baseball cards, I wrote my friends homemade cards reminding them that 'if they could look back at the end of their life and say they had one good friend they were lucky'. Too much time with adults, family who had been conservative to those outside of the family and didn't have casual American friends. Too much time reading things like 'Footprints' on plexiglass plaques from gift shops. It started early, not only a grateful-yet-skeptical take on friendship but a slightly obsessive need for social interaction that has quieted down very little. At my age, people are spending time with their spouse, looking for a spouse (busy dating) or spending time alone. I'm still ready to go out most nights of the week and need multiple plans on a full Saturday or Sunday. If I've been alone for more than a few hours, I'm sad; when I don't get a reply from a friend after a few hours, I take it personally.

vacation-fruit-friend triangle - I was going to say circle, round and together, where shit works out, instead of an awkward, jagged 3-sided shape.

We'll Never Have Paris Variety Show #3

where: Hi Christina 632 Grand St, Brooklyn, just off the L at Lorimer

Saturday Aug 22, 8-11pm. Cost: $10 for show, includes raffle prizes

We'll Never Have Paris is a NYC literary journal and zine that publishes narrative nonfiction. The WNHP variety show is an opportunity for anyone new and experienced to perform their stuff, just as the zine encourages first time writers.

Performers include Amy Harlib with yoga dance contortion, TJ Hospodar of BACON PANTY (http://www.tjhospodar.com/), Russ Josephs (http://russjosephs.wordpress.com), Scott Magri music and video, Joseph Mauricio with comedy, Fritz and Christina of LOVE Sparkle, ANdria Alefhi, Pablo Paniagua from the Mera Makia Circus System and more!

zine (submissions accepted now through 9/03 for Vol 5) neverhaveparis@gmail.com

OPen Mic performance opportunity! for more info: http://www.hichristina.com/

Feet that don't touch the ground

Today I returned a pair of shoes. This is nothing, I know that.

But then there is the future. I head back towards the subway, back to work, out of my mind from ice coffee on a still-empty stomach. You know when you come head to head with people walking in the other direction and you pass them by. That.

Old woman exiting her apartment with a shopping cart for a walking aid., grey and wrinkled but not decrepit. I allow a second of sympathy while wondering if I will really want to live in the city through my senior years. Old dude with a nurse and a walker. I stepped to the side, almost disgusted, as though infirmity would catch. I am among the living. Going back to work, about to eat lunch, swim two hours later, rush home to shower before a party. Flying out to Europe Sunday night. Pass an overweight woman in the middle of the sidewalk. She poses no future threat to me, just in my way. But then.

Then, the future I forgot about is in my path. Older guy with metal ‘hand crutches’ and extra thick black shoes. I notice the shoes barely touch the ground. Then I look up and see it. His spine is deformed into an S shape, crunched on one side from shoulder to hip. I realize he cannot walk without crutches and I realize that will be me.

How can I be going through my daily life without preparation for the calamity and yet I am. Occasionally I see myself full-length, like the mirror, and I can’t believe my leaning torso, no less than the Tower of Pisa. Now that I think about it I cannot believe no one has ever asked me about it. Not even my family or boyfriend. I guess because it’s unnoticeable unless I am in a tight fitting dress. For now. When I see it on myself, I turn nauseous and my mind starts to race. I should be doing something about it.

Like now. Looking back on the visit to an orthopedic doctor who treats scoliosis, I’m pissed at myself for leaving unsatisfied with my 3-minute visit. “I’ve seen worse. Don’t worry about it. Go home”. A part of me felt relieved to be dismissed by a professional so I let that soothe me for a few months. I literally have no idea what to expect in ten years. In twenty.

I cannot pretend this is not going to get worse. It’s not like it can go away. My spine is shaped like an S. And not a skinny art deco S. I mean a full bottomed swooping S, measured at 35 degrees. I go through phases, just six months ago even, where I tell myself I should talk to a doctor about surgery. The dismissing doctor dismissed the idea quickly. Well, whew for me. But no one has given me a picture of the future. I’m honestly too paralyzed with fear to think about it. I feel the slow changes that no one else sees. It’s already hard to stand or sit comfortably pretty much everyday. Why am I carrying around this secret? Then again, what do I gain from pointing it out?

Worry: don’t worry. I don’t know.