Late Afternoon 19/365
Late afternoon on your way to the kitchen, you’re drawn to the light on a page of music that you haven’t touched in weeks. And you wonder: What if?
It was the summer of The Julliard Debacle. (Decades later, you still call it that.) Madame Lhevine would teach you to love music again, in an old farmhouse, deep in sunflowered Provence, where she awaited your arrival. The piano, her letters said, was a crucial part of a musician’s life, but only part of it. There was music to be heard, Madame promised, in the wind through the wheat, and the beat of one’s own heart, if only one would listen. To play one’s best, one must live a full life. And practice, of course. C’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron. Practice makes perfect.
And that is where she lost you. Perfection, you knew, could not be made; it could only be admired. As in this moment: The afternoon sun squeezing through a break in the shuttered window before coming to rest on a page from a Bartok concerto. Four quarter notes in repose.
And still you wonder: What if? What if you sat here on the bench for just a moment. Would you still hear the music?
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