Today’s post relates to yesterday’s post, which is actually about the day before.

In the kids choir I’m playing for on Saturdays, is Alexander.  He’s barely 7, hair that looks like it needs Brasso to keep it clean.  He’s generally so dreamy and vague that he can barely put one foot in front of the other, let alone speak a whole sentence out loud.  This Saturday, the kids were allowed to get up and sing in front of the rest of the group.  A treat!  Alexander got up….a surprise in itself…and looked quite nervous.  The other boys were rowdy on Saturday…goofing around, being naughty…laughing at Alexander.  He started singing, stopped, and then said “I dont know if I can do this, because people are laughing at me, and I don’t like it.”  No problem!  Silence in the room, the boys looking remarkably sheepish,  Alexander began not so much singing as quietly groaning his way through the song.  His preferred style.  Such tiny vocal cords!  Such an underdeveloped sense of pitch! 

I wish I could sometimes be more like Alexander.  Not so much with the chronic pitch problem, more so with the ability to note when things aren’t working in my favour, when I’m being treated with disrespect, and to do so with remarkable clarity and no great emotional upheaval.  How do we dislearn that behaviour?  Where does it go to?  Probably the same place as spontaneity and flexibility.

Sunday – a really lovely and moving day, for a number of reasons.  One of them being that I went to a concert at the Art Gallery of NSW.  It was to celebrate Peter Sculthorpe’s 80th birthday.  There was even birthday cake!  And champagne!  I’m sure he loved celebrating his birthday with a bunch of society dames and competition winners.  But I say hey Peter, you’re famous and we love you.  So enough with the complains ALREADY.  Geez.  80 year olds.  So complainey. 

So. I’m a pretty good pianist.  I’m not amazing, I’m not brilliant, but I’m really quite good.  Good enough that I’ll always earn an income from banging the 88s.  And that’s a pretty remarkable way to have a living, when I stop to think about it.  Hmm.  Stopping to think.  Hmm.

Hmm.

I’m quite happy with the level of my pianistic ability, knowing that my talent also reflects the amount of time I choose to devote to my craft.  But sometimes, I DO wish I’d practised harder.  Or just had a bit more natural talent.  I wished that on Sunday.  I wished that on Sunday because the performers got to hang out in a special place where us concert goers couldn’t go.  They got to hang out in the rooms beside the booze room, beside the recital room.  They got to hang out in these fantastic rooms, dripping with Cezanne and his good friends, all UNLIT.  I don’t know why the unlit-ness got me so much…but I stood at the ropes gazing longingly at the dark rooms, imagining how quiet and private all those rooms would be, would feel, overnight. 

And then we were jammed in an overlit room, with art stuffed on the walls, none of it bearing any kind of aesthetic relationship to the one next to it…Roberts, Lambert, Meldrum, McCubbin…all just jammed in together, all jostling for space, and all because this was obviously the “Australian Painting” room, and heaven forbid that galleries are hung in any way other than this.  Sorry, I rave.  Remind me to stop next time.  So in this room, having no choice but to rest my thigh against the thigh of a stranger (only an old society dame….shame….), I listen to Peter Sculthorpe reading from DH Lawrence’s “Kangaroo,” and listen to one of my very favourite melodies:

And I stare at the ceiling, at the man in the Max Lambert staring back at me, and I think: I am who I am.  My joy, my grief, my confusions, my knowing-ness, my confidence, my anxieties, secrets told and secrets kept, loves lost, and love yet to be gained.  All of it is me, and all of it is fine. 

I close my eyes and Ian keeps playing.

Tomorrow’s post today

I have many things to say.

Tomorrow.

It will involve: ranga children, Australian classical music, outrageous blazers, art scrapbooks, and dimly lit hallways.