Saturday, September 15, 2007

Autumn

By now the fields are sprawling with goldenrod, punctuated by stands of tall tipped asters that I recently decided are my favorite flower. We have a long history, the aster and I. When I was very young I thought that my birthday, November the fifth, fell in September and that the aster was my birth flower. When I later realized that November fell in November and that the chrysanthemum was in fact my real birth flower, still, neither of those things seemed that far off from my original suppositions.

Here is another story about asters, one that came back to me a few days ago. That morning I was driving, off on my way to teach English at the high school. We'd be talking about starting the personal essay--their personal essays--and my main point that morning was this: start big. Which is what kept me from starting this essay myself because later, I had no idea how to begin it. So I find myself now beginning by explaining that I don't know how to begin, and also that this is another memory that had kept itself hidden from me until I saw those tall wild asters nodding in the morning light.

The year I was in fifth grade I began to learn the clarinet. In the early weeks of that school year I used to go to my grandmother's house afternoons. I'd take my clarinet and walk down to the field behind her house, and from there into the woods that bordered it. I knew two notes on the clarinet, and I would sit down among those trees and play them for a long time: at first mournfully, each one in turn for as long as my breath would hold out. Then I would trill them together, flying my fingers back and forth between them as quickly as I could. Because I'd already been a pianist I wasn't half-bad at that; but because my teacher was stingy with his knowledge those two notes were all I had for some time (and because I wasn't much of a musician it never occurred to me to go off looking for more notes on my own).

Still, there was the novelty of the instrument's portability. My only other musical experience was with the piano, and you always went to it--which meant that when you were making music, you were generally in the vicinity of someone's living room corner. The idea of being able to wander about and play music wherever you landed was, therefore, a real novelty. And so I was drawn down into the woods, and sat on the damp mouldering leaves of the forest floor and mushrooms grew there, and a particularly short, vivid kind of aster which nodded at me the way they had been nodding every year, and I played my two notes all afternoon while the light shifted in the sky and my grandmother finally clanged her old school teacher's bell from the back porch and that was my signal to come back to the house, supper was near ready. Later I inherited that bell, inherited it from my mother who had used it to summon me those last nights when she was dying from cancer and couldn't call out loudly enough for me to hear.

Down there in the woods I loved the asters, loved how they shook off the first light frosts and were always there, underfoot and companionable. I hated how the clarinet reed felt against my lip, hated the clarinet I played because it was old, silver, and unfashionable. We were poor, and so I had been given my aunt's old instrument to play, while everyone else in my group lesson rented a new instrument, shiny and black. Most of them regarded my silver one with a bit of uncertainty--what was it? Was it even a clarinet, looking like that? I suppose it was a bit of serendipity that I had been assigned the clarinet at all. This is how you auditioned for the school band, when I was in fifth grade: you went into the musty auditorium of that pre-World War elementary school, and one teacher played a few notes on the piano, which you were to sing, and then another teacher--the instrumental teacher--examined your teeth and through the calculation of some mysterious formula known only to them, you were told flute, or trumpet, or trombone. Personally, I considered it a lucky thing indeed that no one had looked at me and said tuba.

As far as I know, no one in my family owned a tuba to hand down to me, so chances are I was never in any danger from that quarter, anyway. The clarinet I acquired was also different from the new ones in that it wasn't made to come apart like those were, and so even the case I carried it around in looked different from all the other cases in the clarinet section. In those days, to me, things like that mattered. But my perception of my family's relative poverty may also be why everything the land offered up on those two little acres my grandmother owned, seemed like real wealth. Summers I couldn't get enough of the blackberries that grew wild all over the property, and we picked and picked and the berries bled all over our hands; we ate bowls of them for breakfast and they were the first pie I ever learned to bake. The asters were wealth, too, for all you couldn't eat them.

That year, by the time I had learned enough clarinet notes to play a whole song the asters were gone; I never did learn to tolerate the feel of the reed against my lower lip, nor did I ever learn to like the sound the clarinet itself made, and after that school year was over I gave it up entirely. The antique school bell sits on a book shelf, and every spring I study the pictures of asters in my seed catalogues, and every autumn it is a little piece of a miracle, a bit of proof that maybe the universe loves me after all, the way they appear all through the fields all on their own, despite the fact it has been forty years since I poured my music all over them, or maybe because of it. Forty years, and when they appear I am still celebrating my birthday at the wrong time, still sitting on the damp forest floor half-listening for some bell, somewhere in the distance, to call me in.

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