Windsong

"Two nonagenarians told me many times before to never go back, that I was wasting my life on them. You are too young to care for us, and they are not paying you, their exact words."

“Wild is the Wind”

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Dear Alex,

I have forgotten him, barely known him but his voice.

In the middle of 7th grade, I moved to a new school half the city away. I woke up early to take the bus that would swell in its swallow of bodies young or bent, with vigor or malaise, from past to post. By late dawn, I was stuffed by the encircling chatter and gestures, my mouth too jammed to say more.

So when band class started in the morning, I blew jaw-locked into my clarinet, making music in mute. It was my song. I had composed every note of it on 3 or 4 loose pages double-sided. He directed the ensemble to play their sections as I had played them in my mind.

He was our new music teacher, having arrived only months before I did at this century-carved building. He had selected three band students to create songs for the group to perform on the last week of school. Among the trio, I wrote the longest piece, each score booming in babble as on the bus, busy in self-doubt, sweating secrets on sheets.

Weeks through wind and reed, I howled into my clarinet the questions too strange to sound. And the wind and wild in the wilderness of wounds I could not quench. I wondered why he would waste his windpipe on my two chosen classmates and me to teach us music theory after school, welcoming us each afternoon in the band room at least twice a week, mist or wind, whisking his wand off the music stand to flee with us through shingles and glass shattered somehow, somewhere through the milliseconds and millennium that have led me to believe change is possible on earth quaking in wind.

I am mentoring another lively crew of new interns this month through the year. We talk through wire and screen, our faces sheltered in separate enclosures. There is no safety in giving. The riskiest gift, our voice changes in the wind dangerous and devastating to routine. Listen to the wings of the hummingbird, music from gentle voices money or talent cannot change, faces long forgotten and still caressing ours to touch and change someone new.

Yours, Kate