The driest May in Minnesota since the
Dust Bowl. Venerable GM slides into bankruptcy and you shudder for the
old Pontiac dealers and the retirees in Michigan. In the middle of the
night, an Airbus drops out of the air into the Atlantic Ocean and the
veteran traveler shudders to think of it. And the posthumous John Updike
appears in the bookstore, a book of short stories (“My Father’s Tears
and Other Stories”) and his last poems, written by “my right hand ...
faithful old five-fingered beast of burden ...its labors meant
to carve from language beauty, that beauty which lifts free of flesh to find itself in print.”
In the midst of these ominous rumblings, I
went to a lovely party Saturday night, which is newsworthy because I
stopped going to parties a long time ago because it’s boring to hear
people talk about getting old, but then Saturday night there was this
party and I went. A big brick manse on a quiet street, 30 people, half
of them under 25, on a deck out back, hamburgers, fried chicken, chips,
beer, wine, the usual repartee, and a lot of youth going on around us.
A boy and a girl with eager eyes, in the
shadows, like badgers at a campsite. Three boys holed up with a video
game. A beautiful coltish 16-year-old girl leaning around in a black
strapless evening gown, trying out different personas (Dorothy Parker,
Nancy Drew, Ava Gardner), who struck me as a reincarnation of Anne
Frank. A teenage boy sitting with his nose in a book, making a great
show of isolation.
And an intensely quiet blond girl, a math
whiz, who, with no reluctance, sat down at the piano when I asked her if
she played piano, squared her shoulders and played the exquisite Chopin
Prelude No. 2 in A minor, the notes of the slow movement like raindrops
on birch leaves, smoke drifting by, an anguished old man pacing in the
grass, and played it so beautifully it transformed the entire evening.
Transformation is no easy trick: it’s what
art promises and usually doesn’t deliver. But she did. It was a
difficult piece, and what she showed us was the intense poetry
underneath her calm Lutheran exterior. She borrowed Chopin’s passion and
made it her own, an astonishment, and then she stood up awkwardly and
we all clapped and whooped. It was so much more than what we deserved to
hear, which is true of art, a lavish gift of the heart that shames
pretense by its outrageous generosity.
I went back to the crowd on the deck and
had a piece of rhubarb pie with ice cream, feeling buoyed up by the
performance, and still feel buoyant days later. The plane falls, the
company slides, the good man is gone, the lawn turns brown, but with
Chopin you come back to basics: Do I regret this life? Is it, despite
all our brave words, a cheat and a waste? Does it make any slight
difference to the universe that we are present?
What depresses me about the old-age
monologue is the air of regret — Poor Me, I Am Unaccountably Sixty-Five,
My Brain Is Leaking, My Legs Are Gone, Where Has It Gone, The Beauty
And The Dream? — and what makes me love cities, despite the uproar, are
the constant reminders of the generosity of life, the readers on the
subway, the cheeses in the deli, the pictures in the gallery, the
musicians in the park.
Playing the Prelude No. 2 in A minor is not
a step on a career path. There is only one Emmanuel Ax, and he has the
Chopin chair for now, and there are plenty of dead pianists around on
CDs. I suppose that you could argue for a correlation between mastery of
the Prelude No. 2 and scholastic achievement leading to opportunities
in computer programming, but meanwhile, it simply is an extravagant gift
from the heart of a girl to the hearts of whoever is standing nearby.
Life is good, no matter the disappointments — O God the disappointments.
Just square your shoulders and give them your utter best. As the late
great Marilyn Monroe said, “I don’t want to make money, I just want to
be wonderful.”
Life is insurmountable, but we mount up every morning and ride forward. Thanks for being wonderful, dear heart.
Garrison Keillor is an author and host of public radio’s “A Prairie Home Companion.”
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And here are a few pictures I took with my phone camera. Unfortunately my other camera is in need of repairs :(
Pretty iris
Maybe it's because it's surrounded by concrete, but look how bright this tulip is!
