I found myself hating moments of today's singing lesson.
I walked into it with half a bad mood on, the irrational kind, the kind that leaves me hating myself for not having the fifteen minutes to sit aside and breathe a little deeper and wrench things righter in my head.
Mr. Pyke is right, lately I haven't been remembering to take the entire fifteen minutes at all.
In any case, I hated parts of today's singing lesson because the lessons are beginning to... become real.
Because Heather is beginning to tell me when I'm carrying my lower register too high.
Because Heather is beginning to chide me for not putting enough power into it, for the sorry state of my abdominals.
But when, oh when, she lets me flirt up to those higher notes, even on a bad day like today when my life ended on B-natural, and she nods her head in concentration and says
"Good resonance, excellent resonance"
as though I'm actually singing, more than just desperately trying to not little-girl screech my way up a melody.
Me. She said that about me, about tone-deaf brute-brute ignorant me,
and when I balked at following her on the piano she snapped at me and told me not to be silly and just sing it
and I did.
And then I went to the gym and I climbed halfway up a wall (we were in a hurry) that didn't have any markings on it, and got to pronounce it a 5.7 just like the grownup climbers do.
And then when some impossibly nice fellow, the kind that knows it of himself and doesn't carry his nose higher than his eyes, when this same fellow tried some impossible wall and fell as though he were pirouetting that most intricate part of Swan Lake with his harness
well somehow beginning with Mr. Pyke's clever retort to the fall, we resulted in a rousing rendition of singing the CanCan to accompany his dancelike climb.
Surrounded by 60 foot walls our CanCan cacophony cooed up the chimney and curled into the corners and rebounded and echoed all available ears, and I was suddenly aware that we'd just done something completely special.
Later, in a pub across town, I spilled orange juice on a couch, I stole moments away from conversation to just hug my princess, I made a new friend who might come climbing with us, I saw Brian smile when he remembered the very first Stuff-Gatherings from which sprung both my first inklings of beginning to believe that people might actually want to see my face and my first problems with overly enjoying being the centre of attention.
Both of which, thanks to so many people, seem to have come a long way since the wallflower days when I hid in a corner and held my special mantra over my head as a shield.
Later, I drove home a little crooked on only half a pint of Smithwick's, and when Mr. Pyke put his heavy head on my shoulder, and his impossibly soft hair planted butterfly kisses on my cheek,
I sighed inwardly, trying to remember that tune that I had in my head earlier today, confident for once
that I might just be able to reproduce it.
I sighed inwardly and promised myself those fifteen minutes, that concentrated sighing acid-trip replacement
to do a defrag on my head.
I wrote a poem yesterday, for the first time in many months, and one of these days I might even have the courage to post it.
Friday is just barely beginning as the bed bids me crawl in, and there are a million things to get done tomorrow, as the pap�rasses slowly untangle into finite tasks,
but I will not think of them now.
Now I will think of impossibly soft hair planting butterfly kisses on my cheek
and I will rejoice that I wrote a poem
and I will pull out my contact lenses and try to remember what a bed of pine needles feels like at four in the morning while staring up at a perfect autumnal sky.
I will remember that week that we rode up to Oka to find our totems, and I will remember how it took until many years later for me to realize that I didn't really want to be a panther anyway.
I will remember the pine needles and the owl perched above my head and the way the bough shook with his landing.
I will try to convince myself that my poem is beautiful because I bit down hard enough to write it, and that this in itself is a virtue right now.
I am thinking of butterfly kisses.