Today the town is still in a drunken fiesta, so I hide out in my room working on my checklist.
While cleaning and cooking I almost always have a podcast playing. These recorded radio shows in English are my way to keep in touch with what is happening in the Western world. It is how I continue to learn of up-and-coming musicians, how I monitor politics, how I exercise my mind with philosophical conversation, etc. Basically, it is my main line to keep in touch with what is happening and what is to come.
What I never expected from podcasts, was the way they can make me nostalgic. Instead of taking be forward, from time to time they bring me back…
Bobbi McFerrin was featured on Krista Tippet’s Speaking of Faith podcast a couple months ago. Immediately my mind jumped to sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s station wagon. My feet sticking straight forward because my legs are too short for my knees to bend into the proper sitting position. The cassette tape of Circlesong echos in the car. So young, I know every tone. Every hum. Every harmony. Then, through a wormhole, I am in the studios at Butler University. Around 20 years old, still sweaty from the warm-up class, we form a U around the edges of the room as Bobbi McFerrin enters for an improve class and audition. With his graying dreds neatly tied back, my heart jumps with only his simple gaze at my movement.
The kindest, funniest, most incredible beat-boxer/ rap artist I have ever known does an improve session on the podcast RadioLab. Immediately I am in the forest of the Austin Art Outside Festival in my artists’ wristband. Reggie Watts has been introduced to me, and he is quiet and clever under his massive afro. On stage his genius can’t be held back by his farouche nature. My body can’t help but bounce to his rhythm interrupted by uncontrollable fits of laughter from his simple, canny lyrics.
I am hiking in the canyon with my ipod in my ears. I scroll through the recently updated World Café podcast to find, as the next up and coming artist, “Phosphorescent”. Always having known them as an underappreciated, unknown, underground band my body leaves this South American mountain range, and I am immediately sitting in front of the record player, on the floor in the Navasota house. A pile of to be dusted records on my left, a pile of recently dusted on my right as the album Pride spins slowly under the needle.
I don’t really know what this means; my intention to connect with the future bringing the past into the present. Maybe it is just a reminder that everything I connected, circular and such. Or maybe it just means I miss home. Maybe it means I miss music.
Even with a 7,000 something songs or 85 day music collection, I find myself missing music dearly. The music here just doesn’t do it for me. Last night I lay in bed, every ounce of me including my face under heavy alpaca blankets, awake, dreaming of my piano. From time to time I try to play through pieces in my mind. Debussy, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Gershwin; but they become harder and harder to hear. Harder and harder to see the keys that come next under my imagined hands. I can only hope that the memory sits in the muscles and nerves of my fingers waiting to show itself when I bring them to piano keys again. It has been 1 year and 48 days since my finger tips had the freedom to roam strings of a piano.
Funny how this feels like one of the biggest sacrifices in my peace corps experiences. I can make due with the food, the dirty, limited water, the cold nights, the distance, the challenge of the work itself; but, I cannot, for the life of me get used to living without my piano by my side.
So, I will continue to download music every time I am in the city, and I will utilize the best coping method I know: forget the piano, for now.
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