First Passion

The clear, crisp winter day had turned slate-gray within minutes of reaching the coast. They had just reached Lincoln City after a two-hour drive from Portland, and realized that the trip home was going to be marked by a roiling storm briskly advancing towards the shore. The twelve-year-old daughter, hungry and fidgety in the back seat, asked what CD they were going to listen to next. She had already tired of the Run Lola Run soundtrack. After rummaging through the shoebox, the mother finally settled on one – one they’d never listened to. “This,” she told her daughter, “was my first passion. I became obsessed with him when I was eight.”

*****

Her mind wandered back to the shy, quiet, somewhat eccentric child she’d been. She remembered spending entire Saturdays listening to her mother’s eight-tracks, switching the hi-fi back to the radio at 6 o’clock for the nightly broadcast of “Ave Maria.” That was one of the positive quirks of growing up in a predominantly Catholic, Latin American country – a daily serving of Schubert.

She had favorites among the eight-tracks. By the time she was five, she had memorized all of the lyrics to Carole King’s “Tapestry.” She sometimes spent an inordinate amount of time examining the photograph of the young woman, casually dressed, with an enigmatic smile, a halo of golden hair, and a cat ready to warm her feet. She thought she’d like to meet Carole King. There was also Nancy Wilson, who looked like a model and posed with her face nesting against her clasped hands. Nancy had a silky voice, one that she liked to listen to when she was feeling mellow. She had no idea what Miles Davis looked like, but the brilliant geometric patterns on his eight-track - "Bitches Brew" - were fun to look at while she listened to his supremely cool music.

There was one that she avoided, because it looked foreboding. It was dark gray, with a photograph of a stern, older man with long gray hair, wearing clothes that belonged in one of those historical movies. The words on the label were indecipherable to her; they weren’t in English, and they certainly weren’t in Portuguese either. She asked her mother about it, and was told that the photograph was of an actor dressed up to look like the composer.

On a Saturday morning when a tropical tempest nixed any notion whatsoever of going outside, she finally screwed up the courage to listen to the strange-looking tape. Carole King was missing, she needed something more lively than Nancy Wilson, and she just wasn’t in the mood for Miles Davis.

She had never heard anything like it.
She had never felt anything like it.
She was completely stunned.

She listened to it every Saturday, all day long, for months. Her nanny was very unhappy. She didn’t think it was healthy for an eight-year-old to be obsessed with that sort of music. Her mother seemed to agree, and they both tried to reason with her: perhaps she should listen to something different once in a while? But she refused. This music was completely unlike the other music, in ways she couldn’t really explain. There were some things that made her sad, and she would sit in front of the hi-fi and contemplate it while listening. There were others that made her intensely joyful, and she would run up and down the hallway in her socks, then twirl around on the hardwood floor. She couldn’t really dance to it, but it was fantastic to twirl to.

Eventually, the eight-track disappeared. At first she was heartbroken, then perplexed, then finally something else gripped her fancy for a while. What it was, she doesn’t remember now. She eventually figured out that her mom had gotten so fed up of listening to the same thing every weekend, she had surreptitiously disposed of the offending item. She remembered him once in a while, but then pushed him out of her mind.

*****

When she was 11, her mother decided to return to the United States. She’d only been there once, at the age of four, when her parents had divorced. Her excitement about moving to another country – to California, no less! – was shattered within months of arrival, as culture shock, her mother’s depression, and her classmates’ taunts all conspired to elicit a homesickness that weighed on her like a constant, dull toothache. A year later, her mother’s suicide attempt tore childhood’s hope out of her, and left in its place a bruise that never faded.

*****

When she was 13, her maternal grandmother came to live with her and her mother. She adored her grandmother, but detested her drinking. The amount of vodka that she could pump into her five-foot, hundred-pound frame would have downed the average Hell’s Angel. Sometimes, in order to avoid the arguments, the confessionals or – worst of all – the ravings about the past, she would leave the house for hours at a time, walking the streets until one or two in the morning, coming home just in time for her mother to arrive from work. The old woman never told on her.

Her grandmother died of lung cancer after 51 years of smoking. She figured if it hadn’t been that, it would have been cirrhosis. She couldn’t have had more than half a liver left.

*****

When she was 17, she went to Las Vegas to study Hotel Management – of all things – because her mother refused to help her if she took a year off school, what she really wanted to do. “If you get out of the study habit now, you’ll never get back into it. So what if you don’t know what you really want to do? Study something. At least this way, you’ll have something to fall back on. And anyway, you already have some experience.”

She knew she shouldn’t have gone. She knew better than to be so dishonest with herself; but, she’d always been the good girl. She convinced herself that her mother, being older and presumably wiser, knew what was best. She then proceeded to get three F’s and one A (in Sociology), lost her virginity, and went to juvenile hall for aiding and abetting a runaway. It was only three weeks before her 18th birthday, but her mother drove to Vegas right after work and picked her up in the middle of the night.

*****

Four months later, her mother returned to South America. She didn’t know where her father was, and her mother’s family barely acknowledged her existence. Seeking love and an anchor, she fell – no, plummeted – into a life with the first man who demonstrated interest in and love for her. She had her first child, a son, at 18, her daughter at 20. She tried to be a good person, a good mother, a good wife, but found that without dreams, waking life was an empty existence. The first time she felt the temptation of a cool blade against her wrist, she forgave her mother for the attempted overdose.

*****

When she was almost twenty-one, she called the father that she hadn’t spoken to in fourteen years, and embarked on a new journey.

*****

About a year after she and her children’s father split up, she found someone new. They married and remained together for almost seven years. Neither man was a bad man; but both wanted something that she couldn’t give – some sort of 50’s fantasy that didn’t really exist even in the 50’s, much less in the 90’s. I’d be perfectly willing to be a stay-at-home mom and cook and bake and clean and have sleepovers, she thought to herself, as long as I wasn’t expected to do it after a ten-hour workday.

She devoted herself to her work, wrote lengthy letters to relatives who never responded, absorbed herself in books and films, and lived a false life as a member of a controlling Christian sect that provided structure in her increasingly anchorless life. She realized one day that she hadn’t drawn or painted for years, and had no idea how to start again.

*****

When she was 29 and bought her first CD player, she thought hard about what she really wanted on disc. She sorted through her box of tapes, some of which she’d had since high school. Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, Prince, the Eagles, Journey, Sade, Chris Isaak. Further down were the relics of the 80’s – a-ha, Kajagoogoo, the Cure, Depeche Mode. When she visited the music store, she selected an assortment of old and new, including some in Spanish and Portuguese. She glanced, briefly, at his name in the appropriate section, and decided against it. She told herself that she wouldn’t know where to start, and she didn’t have anyone to share it with. The truth was, she felt her life was too banal and ordinary to deserve the passion of his music.

*****

When she was 32, her paternal grandmother died. Her father took care of the paperwork and the legal matters, but the task of sorting through everything in the house fell to her. She was surprised to find a cache of CD’s, still shrink-wrapped; her grandmother hadn’t owned a CD player. It was probably another Ed McMahon thing. Elvis, the Time-Life Classical Collection, Alan Jackson, Reba MacEntire, and a bizarre assortment of one-hit-wonders party mixes.

He was there.
He went home in her suitcase with her.

She put him on the shelf, but didn’t dare listen to him. She was afraid it wouldn’t be the same, afraid it would be the same, afraid she wouldn’t feel anything, afraid she would fall apart. She was afraid of everything.

*****

The day she left Tahoe, she went to the lake and gave it her sorrows to drown, then drove away without looking back. The drive down the Oregon coast transpired a few months later, and she felt good that night – despite the incessant, pounding rain on the pitch-black, curving road. She had just moved to a new area and started a new life. She thought it was as perfect a moment as any to rekindle that first passion. She remembered a line from one of her favorite movies, Thelma & Louise, when Geena Davis says to Susan Sarandon, “Do you feel awake? I feel really, really awake. More awake than I’ve ever felt in my life.” That was how she had felt the first time she listened to his music.

She slipped the disc out of its case and into the CD player. She recognized the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as the piece that always made her sit in front of the hi-fi in deep contemplation. Her heart nearly burst with joy, as much as it had when she was eight, when she heard the Brandenburg Concerto № 3 in G. By the time she recognized her favorite, the Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, there was a cascade of tears streaming down her face.

Her daughter asked her his name.
“Johann Sebastian Bach,” she said to the child.
I’ll never bury him again, she said to herself.

*****

Many thanks to David Holper of College of the Redwoods for his invaluable assistance with the above. It was written in 2003.

Interesting piece that ran in the Eureka Reporter on the occasion of Bach’s birthday.