Eden Elieff 6920 words

3815 Jack Street

Houston, TX 77006
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BIRTHRIGHT
By Eden Elieff

“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be heard.”

— adapted from Teilhard deChardin

Overture
A month after Richard Nixon resigned from office, I started to play the oboe. I was 18, a

lapsed piano player of middling skill, though music thrummed through my head most of the

time. I’d never played in a school band or orchestra. I had no performing experience. My usual

place was in a seat before the stage, not on it.

Maybe I was destined to trade places if you believe auspicious beginnings foretell the

direction of a life. When I was a child, I saw Aaron Copland conduct the Chicago Symphony

Orchestra, after which I got to sit on his lap as he autographed my program when my mother

took me backstage on a whim. I was a lucky duck that summer night, luckier than the fated duck

in Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” Even then I knew the oboe, the instrument with the sort of

goofy name, was the duck; anybody who’d been to a kid’s concert knew that. But I’d never

connected the oboe—its unique timbre owing to the double reed—to, say, the theme of “Swan

Lake” or the A Major melody that opens Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

When I answered the call of this beckoning, I understood neither its source nor scope. The
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call pleaded and scratched at me. C’mon! Yeah! Go for it! echoed its voice, exuding the sunny—

and alien—demeanor of a cheerleader. Whence this ebullience? I smoked a pack of Marlboros a

day, my romantic relationships averaged twenty-four hours in length, I cheated on math tests.

My teenage impulses, rooted in a wellspring of meaning? What a laugh.

Yet, there were triggering circumstances. Toward the end of my freshman year at

SUNY/Purchase, I snuck into a master class taught by the conductor of the New York

Philharmonic. For two hours, I observed, while ensconced in a corner, Pierre Boulez rehearse

Stravinsky’s haunting, primal “Symphonies for Wind Instruments,” a piece for 24 players. The

impact was immediate. I stumbled out of the class with the humbling realization that enthusiasm

and knowledge were entirely different things—that my love for classical repertoire had the same

traction in life as my grandfather’s armchair-historian command of baseball. Boulez was

instructing the class to hear distinctions in pitch I had no idea existed. They had canine ears,

attuned to bands of frequencies I’d never perceived. You can frame the watching/doing duality in

many ways, but that afternoon I was intuiting the distinction between rumor and truth, hearsay

and substance.

So what the hell was I doing with my life then?

Overnight, the universe turned into a giant wind section of the orchestra. And overnight,

the most compelling person in the world became the principal oboist of the school’s orchestra.

John, a junior, was a prodigy, and beautiful: tall and thin, straw-blond hair, pale green eyes, the

carriage of a thoroughbred. However, he was available only as a catalyst to manifest desire

because he was gay.

I still swooned. In his hands the instrument amplified the stirrings of the heart. Whatever

the mood, the oboe could sing it: melancholy, happy, satirical, playful, tender, anxious. Soaring

melodies, soft expressive passages, pastoral or piercing ones? Give them to the oboe. What other
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instrument was so flexible? And its double reed simulated the sound of the double-corded human

voice. My gaze steeped in wonder, I followed John from afar, his music, his pulchritudinous self.

Returning home to Chicago for the summer, I looked up the number of Ray Still, the

legendary principal oboist of the CSO. I knew of no one else I might call. After a week of

dithering, I dialed the number.

Mr. Still himself answered, his voice, a no-nonsense baritone. Shaking with nerves, I asked

him: Can you tell me how I might start playing the oboe? Without fuss, he directed me to a

woodwind supply shop that could give me names of teachers and an instrument to rent, wished

me luck and hung up.

Afterwards, I nearly got sick from the absurdity of what I’d done. But having taken this

first step, I said Okay. No turning back.

Gradually, this occasional diversion from my English-major itinerary evolved into a main

road. No longer casually exploring this territory, I was there, in music school at age 25, taking

classes alongside blemish-faced teenagers. I never asked where the road was leading me. If to a

dead end or an abyss below, then what? Forget music? Forget trying anything new? I might be

squandering the years where you typically establish a livelihood, burnish credentials, find a mate

—all the grown-up stuff—but I kept going, and so gambled on losing everything: purpose,

legitimacy, and power.

Dies Irae, 1974

During those dark days of the summer of 1974, when the television broadcast the

impeachment hearings of the House Judiciary Committee, I’d returned home from suburban New

York City to suburban Chicago to face a life that mirrored the crises gripping the country. My

parents were divorcing, the family was moving for the third time in five years, my father lost his
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law license for embezzlement. To top this off, the psychologist who’d interviewed me just after I

came home rendered the judgment I was thisclose to a nervous breakdown. Hospitalization

loomed.

To deliver my dire prognosis, my mother, who’d arranged for this dip-stick reading of my

mental health, made a rare sojourn to my third floor bedroom.

“The doctor got back to me,” she said. “You need an intervention.”

From my bed, I looked at her silently, stoically. The doctor and I did not connect, I knew

that. Her bronze hair was cropped in a helmet shape, and her humorless affect matched the

martial vibe. I mustered only monosyllabic pings of resentment to her probing questions.

My mother then, uncharacteristically, fell to the floor by my bed, buried her face in the

blankets, and sobbed. Fear racked her body. I looked at her bobbing head with disdain and mild

horror. At that moment she’d become an alien creature, a Maurice Sendak pachyderm who’d

wandered into the wrong story. “What will we do with you? You need help,” she kept repeating.

While I did not expect a rosy report from Dr. Helmet Hair, my gut told me she was

confusing me with someone else. Another patient of hers? Or had she sensed some malevolent

spirit lurking inside me, a surreptitiously calved self who was threatening to usurp the person I

knew as me? Admittedly, I, the “I” whom I knew as me, was in distress. I’d never adjusted to our

move from the city’s south side to the suburbs. And my father’s activities remained mysterious,

impenetrable, leaving me prey to a feeling of pervasive dread. Would an army of creditors

descend upon us? Strip our splintered family of its remaining resources? Had he earned a prison

sentence as well? We were upper-middle class Jews. Educated. Doers of good, lovers of peace.

Where did the headline Family Figurehead Decapitated by a Jail Sentence figure in this?

And yet, if paralysis was depression’s calling card, depression had passed me by. I’d

performed acceptably in school, quit its drug scene, had friends. And music. How imperiled was
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I if I were contemplating this new venture? I’d say I was more blindfolded than depressed,

searching for bearings, anxious I’d be flattened by things I could neither see nor anticipate.

But I agreed to start “talking to someone,” which meant transferring to school back home.

Great! I thought. A chance to re-establish myself where my roots were planted. That fall, with

my rented beginner-model instrument in hand, a teacher found, I moved into a dorm on the

University of Chicago campus, six blocks from where I was born.

Etudes, 1974-1981
Note to self: Not a great idea to start something new and serious while you’ve also just

enrolled in a college where you have to take classes like astrophysics. Where you were admitted

on academic probation. What was I thinking? Yet the academic regimen was incidental to the

real challenge of learning to play.

At 18, you can’t easily create the muscle memory that would make playing second nature,

an instinctive activity akin to walking. And without the buttress of instinct, every aspect of

producing a sound will be a consciously-willed act, as if you are recovering body functionality

after having had a stroke. And you must tolerate the uncertainty that your body will ever accept

what you are trying to instill in it.

Yet, I persisted. Though I had to leave the earth to do so.

Every time I took the joints of the oboe out of the case, assembled them, and placed the

reed in my mouth, I entered a foundationless world of clouds—a world literally of make-believe,

where I made myself believe that one day I could play the solos of, say, Rimsky-Korsakov’s

“Scheherazade.” In effect, I had to tell myself lies. Down on terra firma, my fingers were all

thumbs, my breath compromised, my embouchure—my chops—unformed.

Thus deluded, I kept taking the instrument out of the case.

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And I kept failing: falling through the clouds and crashing on the hard earthly mantle of

reality. I failed to create the rich, buttery sound I had in my head. I failed in lessons, failed in

rehearsals of the college’s concert band I’d joined two years after I honked out my first note,

where my parts were mazes in which I got lost. I failed in practice sessions, where I had no

answer for the player’s lie detector: the metronome. I failed so many polygraph tests I could have

been convicted of the crime of musicide.

Still deluded, I persisted anyway.

Eventually, I began to fail a little less. Or, like Samuel Beckett’s famous directive, I began

to Fail Better. My progress, sparking through a rehearsal here, a practice session there, was as

incremental as hair growth. Eventually, my crashes to earth weren’t so steep, swift, and bruising.

Eventually, around a year after joining the concert band, I ventured to play a solo for the

offertory part of a church service, a couple of movements from a Telemann Sonata. I couldn’t

wait to get to get through it. More solos followed. Some went well while others, well, don’t ask.

Eventually, I joined a community orchestra in Dublin, Ireland, where I was enrolled in a post-

grad course in Irish literature.

Coming back home, I had a decision to make. I’d acquired a foundation but no mastery,

thus arriving simply at Ground Zero: a reality-based, earthbound start. I could keep going, or let

the whole enterprise wither away—what stops growing eventually dies. I’d come to the point in a

relationship where you commit or part ways.

Commitment, I knew, meant school, my second bachelor’s degree. And meant asking: Was

I nuts? There was zero evidence I had the talent, drive, and confidence to emerge as a

professional in such a competitive world. How could I invest limited resources in something so

risky? The issue redounded to value. What was the worth of this education? What did was

valuable to me? Could I really subscribe to the old chestnut that the journey itself, not the
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destination, vindicates all investments? Could I, who was paying rent by waitressing, who was

carrying loads of unexamined, stockpiled shame from my family situation, who had no

stockpiled cash, really afford to proceed as if the outcome of this journey were beside the point?

But what was I cheating if I walked away? I longed for some transcendent quality of

living, and this yearning, expressing itself as the desire to make music regardless of how

accomplished I could become, compelled me to put practical all considerations aside.

So it was settled. I bought a used full system professional model instrument, auditioned for

and got accepted into music school, where I would study with teachers who ranked among the

best players in the world, but where, on day one, I was assigned to sit in the lowest seat of the

lowest ensemble.

I was earthbound alright. I was in the catacombs.

Cantata, 1981
My teacher, Gladys Elliot, an old soul of a woman from Macon, Georgia, didn’t know

what to do with me. I stood before her like an outdated map: an older, incomplete representation

of a game plan. Nevertheless she, the principal oboist of Chicago’s Lyric Opera orchestra,

offered me no handicap. From day one, she cajoled and harangued me through Project Make Up

For Lost Time. I memorized 45 scales in a month, in a week, in a minute, learned new etudes,

revisited the old. I played series after series of rapid-fire staccato notes so I wouldn’t play like

what I called falling-up-the-stairs. I played countless long tones exercises—wind players’

version of chin-ups. I made hundreds of reeds.

To vary this endless diet of spinach and liver, I longed for dessert. Craving to feel some

level of mastery, I’d fiddle around on music I loved but was beyond my technique. One day I

brought her the music to the long, gorgeous solo of the Sinfonia that begins Bach’s Cantata 156.
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A week later she was blunt: “Aayee-den,” she said, stretching out my name, Eden, in her

diphthonged drawl, “You need better breath control to play this piece. You’re not ready for it.”

Breath, the beast of breath! I’d quit smoking and started jogging, so the issue wasn’t

endurance or capacity as it was proper support and indeed, control. And everybody in the world

had a different notion of “proper,” though the diaphragm, the muscle that extends across the

bottom of the rib cage, was always invoked. But I never knew what to do to or with this muscle

since you can’t touch or see it.

I confessed: My neck and throat often tightened when I played. The issue with the oboe is

that the small opening of the reed accommodates only a fraction of the air you must inhale to

generate the sufficient velocity to create a full, expressive sound. You must remain loose as you

release a steady, controlled stream of air while bearing the discomfort of the mounting carbon

dioxide inside.

Bach’s penetrating legato lines cannot emerge from a tight throat.

“Breathing right’s a process,” Gladys said, news which both relieved me and made me

want to cry. “Takes a while for good habits to form.”

She had me lie down on her floor and take big, deep breaths so I could watch my belly rise

and fall, inhale, exhale—watch what expands, what contracts. She guided my hands to feel

which muscles to engage, which to keep loose. A process of flex and release.

Transferring this to playing was something else. When my breath flowed freely and fully,

there was life in the composer’s lines. When the “process” eluded me, the music was stillborn. I

had, like the name of the anthem of the Bach cantata I was trying to play, one foot in the grave.

You Say Potato, I Say Potahto, 1981-forever

It starts to dawn on me: You must learn to live by oxymoron. Training requires one set of

skills while performing requires their opposite. And you have to master both and integrate them
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within you or else forget it.

You can’t display your goods onstage like a stripper unless you’ve sequestered yourself in

your practice room like a monk. You can’t fire off difficult technical passages with the bravado

of a queen bee unless you’ve worked on them with the assembly-line repetition of a worker bee.

You can’t perform as if your passion for the music is fresh, like an ingénue, unless you’re as

practiced as a courtesan. You need to listen and blend in, you need to assert yourself and take the

lead. You must perceive the symbols on the page, then instantly translate them into active

expression. All systems come into play—intuition, logic, emotions, senses, motor memory. You

must be both right and left brained because you need all corners of your brain.

Scotch Symphony, 1983

For my orchestral repertoire class, I had to learn the music to Mendelssohn’s Third

Symphony, the “Scotch.” The second movement, so rousing and joyful, is an explosion of

staccato sixteenth notes that filigree all over the place at the speed of quarter note=126 beats per

minute. The fluttering woodwinds evoke an army of butterflies doing the Highland fling. To

learn my part, I set the metronome at quarter note=84, a leisurely trot, and repeated the 25

measures of solo/exposed passages until I could play them, say, ten consecutive times without a

mistake. Only then I could move the metronome up a notch. At 116 bpm, I hit a wall. Always

slipping somewhere, I just could not play the entire passage faster than this.

What was I supposed to do? Quit? SOS the devil and start bargaining: staccato for my

soul?

Despair spread through me like truth serum. The class presumed you already had the

technique; style and balance were the focus here, not the notes. My dirty little secret was that I

was taking the class to put the notes of Beethoven, Brahms, Rossini, Dvorak, and of course
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Mendelssohn into my fingers. And I had no choice: step one before step two. Still, there was no

exculpatory “grandmother clause” for me—yes, I was the grandma of the group. No allowances

for the life-of-the-party charm of Mrs. Doubtfire, no way to fake-it-‘til-I-make-it.

I was no better in class than I was at home, but the teacher, the CSO’s principal clarinet,

didn’t belabor the issue. Yet I still felt shame, shamebarrassment. I wanted to scream I belong

here!—I was acing everything else. But only thought: One day. Maybe. Then slithered back to

the sanctuary of my practice room, where as a monk I kept trying, kept praying to the gods of

Mozart, Ravel, Saint-Saens, and of course, Bach—prayers of sonatas, concertos, orchestral solos.

The isolation offered solace and the real object of my Faustian bargain: time. I needed lots of

time for my prayers to be realized.

Sunrise, Sunset, 1984

One night late in June, my third year of school wrapped up, my oboe serviceman came into

the restaurant where I worked. He was with his brother, the English horn player of the St. Louis

Symphony. When his brother learned I played the oboe, he invited me to participate, tuition-free,

in a music camp/festival near Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he was going to teach and perform.

They were short a player. Hence his invitation.

Stunned, I said yes. It was the first time I could pair the words serendipity and oboe in one

sentence.

The camp was prairie rustic—a converted barn with a grassy floor constituted the

performance space. Yet the program was great. Faculty hailed from Chicago and the Milwaukee

and St. Louis symphonies. I was placed in a quintet and thrilled.

On day two after lunch, I was stretching before going on a run when a strapping fellow

with Clive Owen good looks approached me. He was the principal trumpet player of the resident
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brass quintet based in Chicago. He introduced himself, said he ran too—could we go together

some time? Sure, I answered, a bit jazzed. This guy was easily the stud-babe of the camp.

Though my personal life had been nonexistent for over a year, the prospect of romance was not

on my radar. I mean, what a cliché, a dalliance at a camp. Nevertheless, I was not immune to his

charms. He had an attitude but also a homespun quality, an American country boy directness that

felt worlds away from my urban, Jewish reality.

Later that afternoon, The Trumpeter found me in a practice room. His figure filled the

window of the door, and he entered, Zeus-like, to claim his quarry. Kneeling down to the level of

my chair, he draped his arm over the back rest and asked if I’d like to have a drink in town after

tonight’s performance. I could not say no to his searching brown eyes.

Our connection, sparked by shared Midwest roots and a personal-ad checklist of common

interests, was immediate—and sizzling. Our date lasted all night, finding closure at sunrise under

a tarp that had been placed beneath the grand piano on the stage of the performance barn.

Goodbye monk, hello stripper.

Sleep and discretion became casualties of the week. The way we concluded our date—

cocooned in delictum in the most public of places—was emblematic of our dynamic, as if the

scenario had emerged fresh from the metaphor factory of one’s dreams, narratives packed with

only warnings, not warranties. As The Trumpeter was a natural performer, so talented and

ambitious, the public and private domains became intoxicatingly conflated with him. His energy

inflated me. Maybe he could, I yearned deep down, lead me out of the cloister of my practice

room. Maybe he could transfer by osmosis a relish of risk and exposure on the stage, just like

he’d already done. What were his secrets? If he could seduce me, could he encourage me?

At some point, he casually let me know he had an audition for a principal trumpet position

in a Canadian orchestra in a few weeks. But meanwhile, back in town, The Trumpeter pursued
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me. Let’s continue where we left off, he said.

Twenty years later, he’d tell me he just knew it was his destiny to win the job. And he, at

29, did exactly that. We’d have one more month together.

My impossible dilemma: I could, prophylactically, disengage from him immediately, or I

could squeeze out every remaining moment. Which felt like being told to choose between the

practice room—the closet, the catacombs—or the living room, never mind it was his life

arranging all the furniture. What loomed for him dominated everything. Scheduled for his debut

concert was Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a Mt. Everest of a piece for principal

trumpet. What was more compelling? Certainly not my school-girl technical struggles with my

instrument or my family issues. My life was roiling in the interiors, while his was moving

inexorably toward the limelight.

So, no surprise, I went along for the ride. In fact I became his ride—driving his car across

the northern plains of the country while he drove the packed U-Haul. With every mile I drove, it

felt like I was investing more of myself into his future. Yet one thing he did not pack in the truck

a commitment to me. He was moving. Time to move on.

“But we’ll stay in touch, Babycakes,” The Trumpeter said as we hugged at the airport

before my flight back home. “I won’t easily forget you.”

I drank many glasses of wine on the plane trying to sort out whether I’d lived through a

life-defining experience or merely an action-packed chapter, a heady fever dream.

Yet stay in touch we did, calling and writing through five years, often with the intensity of

our intimacy. We talked the night of his “triumphant” debut with the orchestra, through years of

his concerts, through my graduating, through my meeting the man I married two years after I

helped him move—The Trumpeter even met my husband when he blew through town. We

stayed in touch through his courtship of the woman he’d marry two years after my marriage.
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But when in his thank-you letter for our wedding gift he expressed a yearning for the

freedom of his bachelor days, I snapped, demoralized over what he was revealing about himself.

With too much to say, I said nothing. Just put his letters and my knotted, unresolved feelings into

a storage bag, in effect, burying him. Then settled into marriage with the man for whom fate had

devised a more extraordinary narrative—we met at a World Series game in Milwaukee and got

married in the same stadium, four years later—and to whom 25 years later, I am still married.

Marriage forced my hand about music. My technique developed such that I could play

challenging repertoire, even the Mendelssohn, but it was never rock-solid reliable. For a

livelihood, I needed to return to what was reliable. We both found jobs teaching English at a

boarding prep school north of Chicago, where we’d work for fifteen years, and where my

husband would become the interim head of the school.

Yet I kept playing, in a semipro community orchestra and sundry other gigs. But when I

started an MFA program in writing, eleven years after getting married, I put the oboe in the case,

what I presumed to be for good. Then released a sigh that lasted a week.

* * * *

Take Me Out to the Ballgame: the Seventh Inning Stretch, In Medias Res
Middle age. The darkest part of the tunnel. The entrance long gone, the exit not yet visible.

A time and place you can demarcate only in retrospect, so you don’t know where you are—it’s

too dark to tell anyway. Seems you can only navigate your way forward by feel, by instinct.

But forward? Who wants forward? The soundtrack for forward is Stephen Sondheim’s

song “Every Day a Little Death” from A Little Night Music. But I’m hearing a lot more than a

little night music these days—I’m hearing dirges in Christmas carols. So let’s creep backwards, I

think, let’s hear golden oldies. Give me the warmth and familiarity of the light of the past. Or, let

me stay put. Let me freeze the way I froze in alleys when I was a kid playing hide-and-seek, now
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hoping that time or gravity won’t find me.

Soon enough, the inertia in the dark gets oppressive. I start fearing I’ll lose my vision

permanently. But what I do see is that the middle, where forward is of course inevitable, is a

singularly treacherous time.

* * * *

Auld Lang Syne, 2007-2009

A few months after my 51st birthday, I heard the beckoning again. This time it was big as

life, embodied in a person who stood before me: my nine year-old daughter. She, a violin player

and a singer, had had enough.

“Play for me!” she bellowed. “No more saying no!”

I’d always rebuffed her entreaties to affirm the rumor that I had once spent much of my

time practicing an instrument, as I’d been enjoining her to do since she was five.

This time she cornered me. She went to my study, took the oboe out of a desk drawer, and

set it on the table.

“Here. Come on. Now.”

Almost numinous, the small black rectangle of a case embodied too many stories to count.

Those of the moment blared a decade of rust and entrenched skittishness and lamented an

endeavor that represented what I’d failed to accomplish rather than what I actually did. I looked

at the dusty case with spiking anxiety. My daughter was staring at me, her eyes imploring. I

started to protest, but then…just stopped.

Don’t think, I told myself. Don’t! Just move your hands. Let them unzip the case, put the

joints together, soak the reed. Let your breath flow.

I played for as long as my collapsed embouchure would allow—around twelve minutes.

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News from the glass-is-half-full camp: My fingers remembered. They had not touched the

keys in ten years, but they released passages of a Bach aria and a Mozart quartet by memory,

music coiled inside them all that time. I was genuinely stunned: My hands had been deeply

branded after all. So to model the practice of music for my daughter, I decided to get back in

shape.

If this were a Lazarus-style resurrection, it would spawn another one: a pressing curiosity

about The Trumpeter. Through the years, I’d encountered his ghost often—ghost-hearings.

Hearing music with a big trumpet part, I’d wonder if he’d played it. But it was always a passing

curiosity, one I’d quickly shrug off. Now, two decades later, I was feeling a persistent pressure

from some locus of energy I could not ignore. The physical act of playing had dissolved the

boundaries that defined the chronological periods of my life.

I easily found him online. He had the same job but was separated—as I’d predicted twenty

years prior, his marriage had collapsed. Without much ado we renewed “staying in touch,”

exchanging enthusiastic tip-of-the-iceberg chatter. I did not hide our reconnection from my

husband.

Meanwhile, news from the glass-is-completely-empty camp exploded. A few months after

I reconnected with The Trumpeter, my father revealed that he, at age 83, was penniless and

imminently homeless. He’d spent all his inherited money, had saved nothing, had no pension.

His next month’s rent would claim his last banked nickel—his social security checks provided a

subsistence. If his kids didn’t “do something,” he’d be out on the street.

Well, “something” was impossible for me. For one thing, I’d left home, and my husband’s

ascent to administration had made my family of three vagabonds. A move from to Seattle to

Houston was imminent, and we had a housing issue ourselves: We had no place in which to

move. So my three siblings in Chicago would have to find him shelter.

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But that was just logistics. My father’s revelations yanked me back in the tunnel some

forty years. My throat tightened again. Everything tightened as I felt the encroaching avalanche

of pervasive dread.

When we got to Houston and to the home we did find over a weekend, I saw ghosts

everywhere. And these old spirits were dislodging my new foundation, like what the powerful

roots of the immense live oaks had done to the sidewalks in our neighborhood. In this shade-

filled landscape, one crowded with both the past I’d summoned and the past that had invaded, I

was turning into a specter myself. I needed a Ghostbuster.

Several months into my sessions with the Ghostbuster I found—a Jungian analyst—my

exchange with The Trumpeter intensified. Through his solicitation, I’d assumed the unlikely role

of his confidant, counseling him on his uncertain personal life, helping him through the thickets

of a new relationship. Ironically, I was an authority now, schooling him with my knowledge of

durable partnering, which incidentally allowed for the resolution of decades-old questions: Yes,

building a bridgeless moat around his relocated life was a mistake; yes, he’d create a CD of his

playing for me, since I’d never heard him play; no, he was not ready to appreciate the potential in

our relationship when we’d met. Yet I still felt restless. Something was missing. Literally.

“Why do I keep feeling he will always have some part of me?” I asked the analyst one day.

A pop-psych way of putting it, but exactly how I felt—a terrifically unsettling feeling, given my

marriage, my future, everything.

“Because he does indeed have a part of you,” he said. “He has of you what you freely gave

him, what you’ve never reclaimed—your power, among other things.”

Instantly, thick tears streaked my face. I defaulted to my usual English teacher I-see-

allegories-in-Tide-commercials mode of thinking. Was the analyst saying I was a character in a

passion play? That I was the anti-hero of my own life?

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In reality, this was a simple police procedural. The analyst had arrested and handcuffed me

with the truth: As a young woman, I was complicit in my own diminishment. Haunting me was

not an allegory but a problem of economics, of opportunity cost. How much had my life—my

playing, my strength—been limited all these years by what I’d given away? Most urgently, what

did this portend for the future? And I was asking this, I’d later realize, on the very silver

anniversary of that first night with The Trumpeter. Life had come full circle, but now the cloud

of my father’s example hovered over everything, clarifying my own personal stakes.

The analyst framed my looming challenge by way of etymology: Did I know that in the

foundational tongues of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, the words for breath and spirit are one in the

same? Spiritus, pneuma, ruach: all mean both breath and spirit.

“Compromised breath has profound consequences,” he warned, echoing what Gladys, my

oboe teacher, had told me half my life ago.

So there it was, the illuminating metaphor: The role of the abandoned lieutenant had only

allowed for shallow breathing. And I’d adjusted to this shallowness only too well.

Clarity came with a mandate. I had to engage those “re-” words: relinquish, reclaim,

restore, in a face-to-face reunion. In a perfect expression of Jungian synchronicity, I was already

headed to Chicago for a family visit the following week. I called The Trumpeter: Would he drive

to a halfway point from Canada, say, Minneapolis, to meet me for dinner?

He said yes.

It would be a stealth reunion. I could hardly ask my husband to digest let alone empathize

with my need to spend an unchaperoned night with an old lover.

The Trumpeter entered the hotel room basically the same man who entered my practice

room 25 years earlier, though—speaking of life economies—he embodied the math of middle-

age: more weight, less hair. Yet the voice! Still combusting with energy, still filling the space.
 18

Quickly, we found a conversational rhythm to replace the cadence of email, though

moving into the muted lighting of the restaurant, I hesitated. But I hadn’t driven seven hours to

demur. After two glasses of cabernet, I took the deepest breath I could muster.

“I need to reclaim what I once surrendered to you,” I said.

His face—a question mark. What, after two decades, did he have of mine to relinquish?

“My mean my power. I helped you leave me for a job I couldn’t dream of getting. I

believed your example would empower me, so I invested my hope in you. Time, finally, to settle

these accounts.”

I also believed, given his livelihood, that he had this whole breathing thing licked. But I

couldn’t tell him that—too grandiose. I asked for two things: that he acknowledge, finally, his

own role in what I’d given him, and that he root for me now, as I’d always done for him.

Sure, he nodded. Of course.

After dinner we settled in for the night. Covered flesh, separate beds, chirped good-nights.

Very 60s sit-com. With the past a lighter load, we parted ways, promising, of course, to stay in

touch. I could honestly tell my husband, to whom I’d reveal everything on the drive back to

Chicago, that nothing vow-breaking had transpired.

Send in the Clowns for the Fool on the Hill, 2009

Getting back to Houston, I was determined to recover my peak playing form. But to

engage my expanded notion of breath, I needed to reckon further with the spirit world. Dutifully,

the Ghostbuster scheduled field trips back to the time and place where I’d been spooked. As I

spent much of the fall seeing how my father’s myths and cause had absorbed an immeasurable

amount of my vitality, I was sharing my discoveries with The Trumpeter and gratified we

seemed to be developing a friendship that was more authentic and vital than our original

relationship.
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Just before the holidays, he revealed he’d been sharing our correspondence with his newly-

serious girlfriend. Did this betray my trust? he asked; he hoped not. My letters helped her

understand him. Plus they fascinated her. To explain what fascinated looked like, he returned to

me a letter of mine that he’d forwarded to her. “If you have 45 minutes to kill,” he’d written to

preface my personal revelations. Well, she killed the time alright, as she’d marked up my letter

with comments, questions, and boldface highlighting, emendations addressed to him as part of

their intimate conversation. And he had no idea of the depth and scope of what he had killed.

The sight of my altered, ping-ponged letter literally took my breath away. So fool me

twice, shame on me. I battled the sensation I was hurtling down an elevator shaft, the floors

zooming by corresponding to years of my life.

My response bypassed denial and blasted straight out of anger. I was crazed. Humiliated.

As I returned the CD of his playing that he’d given me during our reunion, along with a

valedictory letter, I saw that whatever you’d identify as spirit had no place here. This was a

dance of flesh. He saw me as flesh, meat on a bone. And probably always did. The ultimate

legacy of this relationship? A massive vertigo hangover.

Baby, You Can Drive My Car, 1971

Hard to figure what stung more, the betrayal itself, the knowledge of my own repeated

complicity in the outcome, or the abrupt way this 25-year chapter of my life slammed shut.

Lurching forward, you carry your losses like ghost limbs. Yet, as the Ghostbuster kept reminding

me, there is a clearing that emerges when the loss is also one’s delusions: a space for your own

breath to fill. Still, it is hard to see opportunity in emptiness, and I wasn’t—and am not—finished

clearing.

Nearly a year later, in the fall of 2010, the family was coming home from Yom Kippur

services. Maybe the sobriety of the Day of Atonement created the space for what emerged in my
 20

mind, but seemingly out of the blue, I thought about the first time I drove a car on a highway.

The experience was so assimilated into my bloodstream I could no sooner imagine isolating it for

scrutiny than I could fathom talking about my T-cells. But as we settled inside, I started narrating

my long-dormant memory.

I was fifteen, driving on a permit. My father had supplemented driver’s ed with sessions in

parking lots, graduating to suburban thoroughfares. On a winter Saturday afternoon, we decided

to take the next step: the expressway. I took the wheel of our station wagon downtown intending

to drive home, forty minutes to the north.

“I got in the middle lane but struggled to keep pace with the traffic,” I said to my husband.

“Cars rocketed by me. I clutched the wheel, white-knuckled. I could barely breathe.

“Yet I’d fall apart if I vented my anxiety. I just had to keep going. Ignore my fear. Ten

minutes into the trip, around Belmont, I looked over and couldn’t believe my eyes. My father

was asleep. Was he testing me? I don’t know.”

As I said these words, I started to cry, soon escalating into full, primal sobs. For the first

time, I let the terror I’d suppressed emerge. I let it wash over me, out of me, then acknowledged

what I could not then: My life was expendable to my father. He carried within him a potentially

lethal indifference that bordered on nihilism. I had beaten back his indifference as I got us home

safely, but I couldn’t claim “victory” because the truth of it was too shameful to confront: Our

survival enabled, in that it did not challenge, a dark, dark reality. To live was to relieve him of

the consequences of what he’d done. Crashing would have exposed him—but at what cost? The

disgrace of this exoneration, like the adrenaline that burned as I drove alone for thirty eternal

minutes, seared and stained. We have never talked about what happened.

“Why didn’t you just wake him up?” my husband asked.

“I was paralyzed. Too shocked. He’d revealed himself. I knew it was all up to me.”
 21

Coda, 2010
Famously, in Genesis 2:7, man becomes a living soul when God breathes into what He

created from dust. Breath, then, confers life, breath manifests the soul. Respiration, Scripture

instructs, is a human birthright. Respiration is our umbilical cord to our source.

When I saw Pierre Boulez teach two dozen young people how their breath creates music, I

was a spiritual asthmatic. Smoking was the physical analogue. The summons to music, that

ebullient voice, expressed the germ of vitality that survived my upbringing, and this spark craved

connection to something that might preserve, renew, and express itself. The oboe was the

answer. As a conduit of breath, the oboe saved—preserved, renewed, expressed—my life. I

didn’t understand this when I began, but the instrument was asking me every time I played it to

claim my birthright. And my middle-of-the-tunnel crucibles have taught me you cannot

outsource this responsibility.

As I’ve resumed the form of my school days, I thought about John, the prodigy player I

knew in college. Wouldn’t it be nice to connect with him to let him know what he helped start?

Once, years ago, I thought I saw him in a restaurant in Chicago. Our eyes even lingered in a

glance for a few seconds as if to register mutual recognition, but I was too shy to say hey.

I will not get a second chance. The obituary I found revealed he died at the age of 47, in

2001. No cause given. My original beacon, gone.

Even as I play in two quintets these days I still feel like an auslander—knowing my

playing reveals my limitations the way the accent of an immigrant exposes foreign roots. But

there are days when none of this matters. On those days I have a great reed, my support is easy

and free, and I am able to direct my air into the instrument in a way that expresses the strength of

my love for it and my joy in the beauty of its sound. I think, inside my body I am shaping and
 22

bending light, I am releasing a rainbow, and there is really, really nothing like it.

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