On A Tuesday

Originally written circa 2004.

“This is a perfect fourth.”  The piano replied, pling…pling.

“This is a perfect fifth.”  Once again, the piano responded with  lazy pling…pling.

“This is a perfect fourth…followed by a perfect fifth.”

I was in agony.  What sadist had decided to put Aural Harmony at eight o’ clock in the morning?  It was bad enough that the class was essentially remedial of grade-school music class, and that anyone who’d ever had a single piano lesson would be bored out of their mind.  But North Central College had, in a stroke of brilliance, hired a teacher who could easily have been Ben Stein’s twin brother.  I slumped in my seat, waiting for him to utter the inevitable “Beuller…Beuller…”  Close enough, he continued:  “This is a minor sixth…”

Thus far, college had not made a good impression on me—and this was only my first class.  It seemed as though it would be too easy and too boring, which was essentially what the last twelve years had been like, too.  Nothing new here.

Lucky for me that my first class at North Central was a musical one.  A music class is the perfect place to start making friends.  In every other class that term, I think, I had trouble finding even one person I could relate with.  It was the same with me as with them:  in the academic classes, we were just a bunch of snotty hotshots trying to impress each other, still high off the glory of beings seniors only a few months ago and looking for that same glory instantly in our new place.  Even in my orientation group, where we were all supposed to have the same interests, there was no one with whom I clicked instantly.  Maybe it’s just that music people have a unique way of looking at the world, or perhaps, more accurately, that we share our own unique brand of geekdom; but I walked out of Aural Harmony that morning with two or three allies already by my side.

We’d spent the class rolling our eyes at each other, and as I left the class with two flautists and a saxophone player, I mentioned to them that I’d likened our professor to the teacher in “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.”  They all emphatically agreed with me, and we crossed the street to the Cage laughing and joking, contemplating how to spend the six hours until band.

When we entered the Cage, I was glad that I’d already found company in my new school.  It was dead silent–no college food depository is ever dead silent.  Everyone was clustered around a single television; it looked like they were watching the news.  My new friends and I were no longer laughing and joking, though we’d had no reason to stop.  I wondered to myself why they were watching the news…the Simpsons was a more likely choice for the Cage.  I caught a glimpse of a burning skyscraper on the screen.

This isn’t the real news, I thought.  It’s a sci-fi movie or something.  Surreal plumes of smoke fanned across a skyline that I knew to be New York City.  We four, the just-arrived, band-geek freshmen, silently pulled up our own chairs and added them to the clump.

“We have now received reports that another plane has just crashed into the second tower of the World Trade Center…”
I felt sick.  I felt scared.  Probably for the first time in my life, I felt really vulnerable.

I could have gone home–it’s only a forty minute drive, and I didn’t have any dorm room on campus any way.  My band director would have understood.  I sat outside Old Main, literally telling myself that I wanted my mommy, but I didn’t go home.  I needed band that day.  I needed to make music and not think about this for two hours or so.

Posters started springing up in Pheiffer Hall.  “Band has been cancelled today, 9/11…”  “Women’s Chorale will not meet on Tuesday, September 11th…” Women’s Chorale was going to be my third class that day.  Now I really could have gone home…still, I didn’t.  In high school, when life hurt, I always wound up in the band room.  Now, I found my feet taking me automatically to Pheiffer 25–North Central’s equivalent.

I found I was not the only one there.  The two flute players I’d met that morning were there, along with several other band geeks who, like me, had found life suddenly a little tougher and just wound up in a familiar spot.  We lounged around in the classroom chairs, keeping each other company.  We were all sort of keeping to ourselves, but I think, perhaps, that we all needed safety in numbers that day.

Some of us cried.  A few tried to make half-hearted jokes.  All of us called our parents, from other people’s cell phones if necessary.  A lot of the time, no one said anything, but it was comforting just to be in a room with people–especially these people.  We were all musicians here; we all understood each other.  Underclassmen, upperclassmen, brass players and percussionists alike drew on each other’s strength.

Band was cancelled; officially, anyway.  We didn’t have to be there, but we needed to be.  On my first day of college, I didn’t play a single note on my clarinet.  But I was still honored to be part of a band.