Eclectic Company: The Hurricane Irene Effect: Music Lessons Are In My Future

We’re getting back to ourselves here in Long Island, after Irene, where my mom’s apartment building right on the water shipped a little mud, but as it isn’t at the western end of Long Beach, New York, didn’t get inundated with the Atlantic’s storm surge that flowed over the beach up to the raised boardwalk, and then with a crash pushed through the halfheartedly erected sandbag barrier below to spill onto a mostly empty east-west street, tugging the lifeguard station off its moorings and smashing it into the boardwalk’s pilings – an image that the news stations delighted in showing again and again, while frustrating us who were hoping to see other streets , other towns, so we could find out what havoc the floodwaters had wrought on our own properties. I know you remember that feeling all too well, and I’m grateful for all of you who checked in before and after to make sure we were all right.

My brother-by-marriage, David, and his wife Susan and sons Josh and Ethan opened their doors to us in North Bellmore, a few miles above Sunrise Highway (the I-10 of Long Island, north of which, the Nassau Country Executive said, we’d be safe from the worst effects of Irene), and we bedded down – 14 of us – including one three-year-old celebrating her birthday in pale pink princess attire (complete with “Happy birthday” singalong, and a truly awesome homemade cake), one almost-four-year-old visiting from Israel, alternating her own princess toggery with PJs, and one Star Wars-addicted almost-five-year-old, brother to Ms. Birthday Girl, after one heckuva hurricane party. The kids were kept amused by all the doting relatives, and when everyone else needed a nap, or some respite from piggyback rides, and storytelling, and teaching the five-year-old to play Battleship, someone bright pulled out The Muppets and played it on a laptop. While we adults dozed or sat around like slugs in sugar-fed stupors, we could hear familiar Muppets songs sung in Hebrew, and occasionally, the kids chiming in.

Did you ever notice that the screeching of a small child can sound like a seagull squawking? Oh yes it can. I know, I listened to it at unpredictable intervals afternoon, evening, and morning, while waiting for the heavens to really open, and the winds to start really howling, which, where we were, they never did. We adults kept busy as if we were on a cruise ship, surfing the web on one of six!! available computers and four smartphones, occasionally calling or texting friends who’d stayed behind in the strike zone, eating, endlessly eating, and learning to play Rummikub, a highly addictive game at which my mother turns out to be a shark! After fruitlessly searching for a classical radio station, we tuned the TV in to the local news station for aural wallpaper, and stared out the windows as if we could catch something happening.

Eventually we pulled out the guitar, and Yoram played and sang in Hebrew, and we sang along if we could, belting out the beautiful Naomi Shemer song, “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (“Jerusalem of Gold”), that I learned after the Six-Day War, and have sung with an incipient tear ever since. I tried to find lyrics to a song my mom wanted to hear, and both Creedence Clearwater songs that reference rain, while David found chords and lyrics to Beatles song requests, and Yoram played those too, to enthusiastic chorusing by our all-ages storm troupers. He passed the guitar to me at some point, and I played a couple of tunes, but not much that could be sung along to because I don’t really play well (musically) with others: A fact that was made apparent to me in 1972, when I played rhythm guitar in the Kibbutz Hefzibah Jubilee celebration orchestra. I had never really learned the barre chords I needed to play those classical and band pieces, and I didn’t spend my spare time practicing them then, hoping that my unamplified guitar would get lost in the auditory shuffle, but mostly trying to keep my head down so I couldn’t see when the conductor pointed his baton at me.

So agonized have I been that I can’t back up anyone’s singing or playing but my own, yet unwilling to practice the dreaded barre chords, over the years I’ve developed increasingly unbelievable excuses for backing out of jam sessions, mumbling apologies and promises.

When it comes to blending in musically, I believe I truly want to hold my head up high and not be afraid of the storm, but I have yet to put my money where my mouth is. So there I was, waiting for Irene to make landfall, finally hoist on my own petard. I was digging around in my case for a capo, explaining to Yoram that I would have to transpose the song I wanted to sing to a different key because “I can’t play an F chord,” with a look of defiant embarrassment on my face. “You can’t play F?” he asked me, clearly disbelieving. “No,” I said, even as I pressed my fingers into the F chord shape in first position. “You’re doing it,” he said, but I insisted I wasn’t doing it properly: “I don’t have the strength in my left hand to play barre chords. You have to press down so hard.” I limply barred and strummed the F to prove my point. Yoram’s look of knowing pity was matched by my pathetic look of shame.

So that’s it. No more getting by with ‘good enough for folk music’ or ‘pretty good for a girl.’ I’ve resolved to buckle down, take a few lessons, and maybe eventually get to Carnegie Hall. How long will it take me? In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, neurologist Daniel Levitan is quoted as saying “ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything.” That’s forty hours each week if you make it a full-time job, longer if you can’t put in eight hour days (and who can?). Even at that accelerated rate it takes five concentrated years to really master whatever it is you’re practicing. If I want to master barre chords, which, if I am honest with myself, I do, because what I really want to be able to play is jazz, for which barre chords are like water is to life, I’m going to have to practice for ten thousand hours, starting now. I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. When the sky cleared, we discovered that while we on the north Atlantic coast mostly dodged a bullet, my baby sister’s family fifty miles inland in New Jersey lost power, and when it came back on today they still didn’t have a working pump for their well, and so have had no water for three days and counting. Others I know have been wiped out financially, have had their towns disappear under floodwaters swollen by 13.5 inches of rain in one day, and we’ve learned that flash floods and tree limbs and other freak surprises have taken the lives of more than forty people in the northeast. Sounds like 2005 all over again. Maybe some Louisianans want to return the favor and help rebuild in the Catskills and Vermont?