An Orphanage of Dreams by Sam Savage

Author:Sam Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2018-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

Wallflower

He had never learned to play anything, not a Jew’s harp, not a ukulele, he couldn’t carry even a simple tune, and the funny thing was, he didn’t know this at first. Every morning in second grade, after the teacher had called the roll, they stood in the aisles next to their desks, placed their hands over their hearts, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and after that they sang “God Bless America,” and he sang along with the others. He loved “God Bless America,” he belted it out, and it sounded good to him then. He danced as well, in junior high, when they started having dances, and he was a terrible dancer. He moved the wrong way at the wrong time, stepped on toes, or collided with his partner, and after a while he decided that he didn’t care for dancing. He would still get dressed up for parties, but once there he would hang out in the kitchen and talk with other boys. Sometimes he would stand by the dance floor and snap his fingers to the rhythm of a song, to show that he was having a good time, but he was often unsure—unsure of the rhythm and unsure that he was having a good time. A glance shot in his direction would fill him with anxiety, and he would push his hands deep into his pockets. Gradually he came to see that there was something wrong inside him, a failure of perception, a kind of blindness within him. His seemed to lack access to the vital and mysterious code that let others move effortlessly to music, and this lack, this blindness, made him incorrigibly gauche and awkward, and he was aware of that now, and he stopped going to dances and stopped singing in public unless he was drunk with friends. Later he wouldn’t sing even then, he would just sit quietly by, bobbing his head and grinning. He would have given ten years of his life to be able to play an instrument, he would have done that happily, to be able sit on his front porch and pick out a tune on a guitar. He wanted to be the guy in the old movies who sits at a piano, hands dancing over the keys, while attractive young people crowd around, adoring him. The thing was, the really tragic thing was, he wasn’t tone deaf. He was deeply moved by music. Brahms and Tchaikovsky brought him to tears, Mahler was so painful he sometimes couldn’t go on listening and had to get up and shut it off. The tragic thing was he didn’t know anybody who listened to that kind of music anymore, he had no one he could talk to about it. There had to be music inside him, if he had feelings like that, he was sure it was inside him, locked up in there, and he couldn’t understand why it would not come out. Sometimes he thought maybe that was because he didn’t have enough confidence, didn’t truly believe in himself.

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