It’s so often the case. Looking back. Seeing that we did actually bear the unbearable.
On my walks I frequently listen to the podcast “How I built this” — delightful stories of success in business, arts and industry. All with their own challenges. (No story is complete without them.) I suppose just enough time has passed — I’ve noticed a large percentage of the stories began during Covid. People suddenly had the time and the urgency to create something. And it’s beautiful to hear the good that can come.
It was during Covid that she decided to learn how to play the ukulele. Not the obvious choice, but as they say, we all have to make our own kind of music. And she has it now, the thing I think we all look to do when going through something — make the proof that we did in fact survive — And didn’t just survive, but thrived! We awakened the “good that can come.” She not only woke it up, but put it to music.
The bird book is my ukulele, my “How I built this.” And the most glorious thing is when our stories merge. When her music seeps on to my page, into the bird song, I know that we are thriving. I know that together, no matter what, we can do anything.
I suppose the real heroes don’t need the “proof.” But still it’s nice to see. It’s nice to hear. All the good that can come.
We don’t wear gowns in France for visits to the doctor. The windows where modesty must fly out, are left wide open. I keep a mental pile of these things I would have thought to be traumatic, just as a reminder — not unlike the sticky note above my mom’s phone that read, “What haven’t you survived?”
Yesterday, to check my lymph nodes, the doctor asked me to place my hands on her shoulders. She in turn put her hands on mine. Then just under my arms. I’m not sure anyone else heard the music, but I could have been back in Junior High at the gymnasium dance, swaying arms-length apart from last night’s worry of “would he ask me to dance.”
And that’s how we save ourselves, I suppose. Our brains our wired to come running, sticky notes in hand. Some as proof of what we’ve survived. Others just to make us laugh.
Is that why I love the color yellow? Because all of my original thoughts that come dancing on the original yellow pad? Or maybe that’s just another thought to distract me and remind me of all the love around me. I don’t know, but I still hear the music. So I raise my arms on shoulders, in the air, and I keep on dancing.
We were doing so well, until we got into the higher numbers. Not only did we have to learn the language, the French words for the numbers, we had to do the math as well. To say the teacher explained to us — (A “we” that could be only described as a collection of people from the land of misfit toys. Myself – the American, the two women from South Korea, the Cambodian, the Russian, the Mexican, and the 5 Arabs.) — this would be an overstatement. But in her defense, what good reason could there be to stop giving the additional numbers their own names and start combining them in different math problems? For example — the number for eighty is not given its own name, no, it is quatre-vingts (4×20).
Deep in my wandering brain, I thought of the first time I had heard this four and twenty. Yes, yes, baked in a pie…
“Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened, The birds began to sing. Wasn’t that a dainty dish To set before the king?”
It was my first music box. It was red and yellow, shaped like a tiny radio. You spun the knob and it sang the nursery rhyme. This one was my favorite. I dialed it in. The birds survived every time. Imagine that I thought – baked in a pie – and they survived! Glorious! I sang it again and again.
As the nursery rhyme repeated in my head, the teacher had already gotten to the nineties. It was even worse. In the nineties, you have to multiply and add. You can imagine the nightmare that 99 brings for a non-French speaking person — quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (4×20+10+9).
I suppose it will come as no surprise. To test out of this first unit, we had to hold imaginary conversations with the French officials. The first scenario, she explained, was in a store. I was to be the clerk selling dresses (so far so good.) She would be the customer. I looked at the pictures she gave to me. It showed a dress hanging on the rack. As big as life the tag read, $99.99. My heart sank. She asked how much it was. I started doing the math. The numbers raced in my head…all clunked together with the Song of Sixpence. I began my quatre-vignt-dix-ing… then stopped and said, in my best French — this dress was on sale. (Wasn’t that a dainty dish, I thought?) She laughed. I passed the exam.
I have been given the tools I need to find my way in and out of life’s pie. And so I keep singing!
