Scenes from Childhood: Johnson Bones

People who have bones that float, that are filled with air, can swim easily. Buoyed by their bones, they stay afloat with little effort and their swimming energy can be devoted to the business of propelling themselves forward.

 

My Johnson bones are dense. Oh, I know, that's the goal established by today's medical gurus. And I don't know whether the lifelong density of my bone structure is the same kind of density that the doctors are exhorting us to achieve.

 

Let me put this a lot more simply: I am a terrible swimmer. The history of my body in water is not a pretty story.

 

We had no swimming pool (or Old Swimming Hole, either) where I grew up. But one summer when I was 13, our high school gym department organized swimming classes at a pool in Lafayette, twenty miles down the road. The classes were to be taught by our own Coach Miller, who coached all the Delphi High School sports teams.

 

Coach Miller was over six feet tall, young, and handsome by anyone's standards. He was the kind of teacher who inspires high school boys to great loyalty and high school girls to ardent crushes.

 

Here's what I remember about that first swimming class. We beginners were in the water, hanging on to the edge of the pool. On a signal from Coach Miller, we were to push off and float on our backs. Coach Miller described what this would be like, this floating. We would be able, he said, to extend our arms, relax our legs and torsos, and just float, breathing naturally.

 

On the signal, all ten of us little fledgling fish pushed off and floated. I relaxed. I kept my eyes closed so as to concentrate better on what I was doing, or to keep the chlorine out. But I was floating. I was relieved to know that I had passed the first test of the class. Look, ma! I'm floating on my back!

 

The next thing I knew Coach Miller had jumped into the water and was lifting me up. It seems I was doing everything exactly right. I was indeed floating. Unfortunately, I was floating a foot below the surface and thus in danger of drowning should I try to take a breath.

 

My body does not float.

 

This was the start of my ignominious relationship with water.

 

A one-term swimming class was compulsory for freshmen girls at my university. The teacher was Miss Somebody (her name is gone, but I can see her as clearly as if I'd seen her yesterday). She assigned me a position right next to the pool wall. And as I swam, pluckily attempting all the strokes she was teaching us, Miss Somebody walked along the edge of the pool. Right beside me.

 

I thought nothing of this. Someone had to be in that lane, after all.

 

It was only years later that I learned that my sister Sari, who entered that same university four years after me, also had Miss Somebody as her swimming teacher. And she also was assigned to the lane beside the wall. And Miss Somebody walked alongside her through every exercise.

 

These Johnson bones: long and lanky, and apparently as dense as cement blocks.

 

Copyright 2007 Ann Tudor
www.anntudor.ca

Scenes from Childhood: Musical Genes

The cement that holds our family together is music. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How many music stories can I fit into a little essay?

 

Baby Mary Eileen was the youngest of us all by far, and she is the only professional musician in my generation of Johnsons. Our father never tired of telling the story of Mary's first piano recital. She was six. Imagine beautiful, blue-eyed Mary, with her curly dark hair and classically pale Irish skin. Imagine little Mary timidly walking up to the big baby grand in the church, the pews filled with the relatives of all her fellow-recitalists as well as her own. She's been taking piano lessons for a year and she never has been too fond of practicing. Nonetheless, here she is at her first piano recital.

 

Mary approaches the keyboard, as they say, and she looks for middle C, the opening note for her little piece. She has been taught to find it by tracing her finger down from the first letter of the manufacturer's name on the upright board above the keys. Whoops! This is a different piano. There is a different placement of the manufacturer's name. Middle C is nowhere to be found.

 

Mary chooses a note that might be the right one and tries out her piece. Nope. Doesn't sound right. She stops and chooses another note. No luck. She tries three times in all, after which she simply chooses a note at random and plays the piece on whatever notes present themselves under her fingers. Relatively speaking, she plays the piece well: all the notes are in place relative to that first note. But the first note was not middle C, so the piece ends up being in an obscure Lydian or Mixolydian mode instead of in C major. Mary knows it's wrong, but what can she do? This piano obviously has no middle C. She finishes, bows to the applause, and takes her seat. She's done the best she could do.

 

In the meantime her father, Myron, and her sister Sara are in hysterics in the back pew. Myron has tears in his eyes from laughing so hard. Sara has nearly wet her pants from laughing.

 

And the story becomes legend, to be retold at every family feast, as regularly as a Scandinavian edda at the banquet of long-ago warriors.

 

Our father, the tease, never lets go of a good tale.

 

Lest you think he was all malice, however, here's my own piano recital story. I was an advanced pupil of Mrs. Eikenberry, whom I adored as a teacher. I was a senior in high school and the recital, held in Mrs. Eikenberry's house, was for her "advanced" students. I was to play a Beethoven theme and variations that I'd been working on forever.

 

We arrived—parents and nervous performer. Suddenly I realized I was not wearing "my ring." This was a "friendship ring" my father had given me several years previously for my birthday. I laver realized that my father never in his life bought a gift for any of his children or for his wife, so the ring purportedly from my father was actually from my mother. But at the time, when I still thought it was possible to be my father's beloved daughter, I believed that he had given me my friendship ring.

 

But where was it? I had left it at home! Oh no, my lucky ring!! My ring that I nervously twiddled between my fingers, using pinky and long-man to twirl the ring that was on my right-hand ringman. Oh, and I was SO nervous that day. I knew I'd never be able to play without my ring. It was my talisman.

 

I asked my father to go home and get it for me. I couldn't play without it. Please Daddy! He thought the request was ridiculous and pooh-poohed the whole idea. I pleaded, tears in my eyes. Finally my mother took my side and said, "Myron, just go home and get the ring!" And he did. (This was NOT across the city, you understand. This was a three-minute drive in our old station wagon.) So he brought me the ring and I put it on, feeling immediately more at ease, or so I said. When my turn came I played the Beethoven as well as could be expected. And certainly no better than I would have without the ring.

 

And in the generation after ours, do we have musicians? The "children"—now ranging from 30 to 50—are either totally musical or totally lacking in musical interest. (The latter circumstance is obviously what happens when we marry outside our musical gene-pool.)

 

We have drummers, keyboardists, an acoustic bass, a couple of singers. Some are part-time professionals (as in, "Don't quit your day job!"); some just do it for fun. But the music gene is still strong among at least half of them and goes into the next generation. All the young parents watch the new babies for extraordinary talent—although why they would is a mystery. Since they have seen the difficulties of the full-time musician's life, you'd think they would want to stomp out any musical talent, not encourage it.

 

I remember Coleman saying about baby Hannah (only a month or two old at the time): "I was singing the mockingbird song and she hummed it along with me!!"

 

Well, maybe.

 

 

Copyright 2007 Ann Tudor
www.anntudor.ca

Scenes from Childhood: Farmhouse Grates

When I was little, we and our cousins used to eavesdrop on the adults when we went to the farm for holidays. The two-story farmhouse was very simply built, with no heating vents on the second floor. Instead, each room had an opening to the first floor, predicated on the notion that "hot air rises." The openings were covered with cast-iron grates, to keep the children from falling through, and the heat from the first floor was supposed to rise up and then warm the upstairs rooms.

 

This never worked very well, but the grated openings were ideal for eavesdropping.

 

The adults knew where all the grates were, and they surely knew that we clustered around them. But in the flush of gossiping or arguing, they always forgot that they had an audience. They held nothing back until one of them would suddenly mutter, "Little pitchers . . ." and they'd all look toward the kitchen ceiling and become silent. For a moment or two. But then they'd be irresistibly drawn again into unguarded, delicious, adult conversation.

 

I can see us now. Four or five of us and at least two of our three boy-cousins, huddled on the bedroom floor around the grate that overlooked the farm kitchen, where the adults always congregated. We looked like a scene from a Busby Berkeley movie, heads to the grate, legs and feet straight out behind us making a star-wheel. We knew how to be silent, since our silence was the key to hearing the good stuff. Inevitably one of us would bump another (accidentally on purpose) and the whispered bickering that followed would escalate into sounds that the adults could hear. And then it was, "You kids get away from that grate!" and we'd scurry away, scattering to the farthest corners of the upstairs rooms, only to creep back again as soon as they'd forgotten us.

 

What on earth did we hear? I implied above that there was "good stuff." Actually, we heard about the state of the farm crops and the chickens (at one point Uncle John T. had been seduced into investing in an egg-farm facility—the kind with caged hens and automated egg collecting). There were interminable discussions of the mileage and routes of recent trips to Indianapolis. Or death reports on old people in the county—people we'd never heard of and about whom we cared not at all. Perhaps we occasionally heard a cross word exchanged between our mother, Eileen, and her sister-in-law, our Aunt Jeannette, who was almost permanently green with jealousy over Eileen's high-achieving offspring.

 

We really never heard anything juicy. But the very act of getting away with eavesdropping was its own reward.

 

Copyright 2007 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca