“…and they had all kinds of different music..”

“What kind of music did the teacher band play?”

It had been a high school event called Battle of the bands. A lot of different bands I had never heard of were playing, and somewhere at the end there was a band composed of teachers. Her music teacher was part of it.

“I don’t know. I mean, there were a lot of teachers in the band and I didn’t stay around to hear that much of it. “

“You didn’t stay around to hear your teacher? How could you miss his performance? He probably was looking forward to his moment.”

“Mother, I don’t think so. I mean, he plays the trumpet. What kind of band uses of trumpet?”

“How can you say that? You know a lot of bands that use trumpets. You were in Jazz band in Junior high. Your teacher probably has been looking forward to this day for months. He was going to do his OWN music, and perform. How do you know this wasn’t his dream before he became a music teacher?”

She stared at me.

“Right now, he is at home, thinking of how much he loved performing.”

“Mother, that can’t be true. He has little kids.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. His kids are trying to sleep, and he is holding his trumpet, feeling and remembering. He can’t play because of them, he has to put it aside.

But tonight, on this night…The night he played his own music, he feels it.

I can see him, taking his trumpet outside. HE has to go far away, down the block to sit on the swings at the park, in the dark. He’s playing his trumpet right now…blowing his heart and soul out on this night of nights…”


“You are completely wrong. Your imagination is not what is happening.”

“I don’t think so…Your teacher has dreams too.”

“I’m going to bed,” She flounced away to the bathroom.

I smiled at her, and in sympathy to my imagined horn player alone with his dreams in the dark.


It was night, but there was still time. I went over to my computer to use the last few minutes of the day to work on a chapter in my book draft.

There is a saying:

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I spent the last year playing a very serious game of fighting cancer. I won. 

The prize felt very stupid—

I get to stay alive. That’s serious. 

But also ridiculous. I WON that prize. Should I have to win it every day?

Apparently I did have to win it back.

Making progress towards my goals is a big deal to me. I am always thinking of the next achievement I’m striving for.

The treading water fight for life from cancer was not very satisfying. I was happy to have my martial arts to make progress on.

Not many people have a black belt. I am going to get one.

I tried to find out how many blackbelts there are. It’s not so easy to find out.

What’s it for? A lot of people get to the rank of black belt, dust off their hands and call it done.

The true experts say that the black belt is just the beginning.

But it took me years of practice every day to get this far. How can it be the beginning? I know I’m not that good. I have so much further to go. It would be a shame to take that movement literacy and not do anything more.

In that way, it’s like winning the prize in the cancer fight. I win the right to keep going.

I have the right. Will I exercise it?

I didn’t notice that life was hard when I didn’t have to fight for it.

I didn’t notice much about fighting until I started my black belt journey.

The cancer stuff was not what I expected, but I did it. Life goes on.

The fight goes on.

I plan to use what I learned and what I earned to keep going and earn more prizes.

I didn’t make it to the class on Monday, but did make it last night. I wanted to do my best at the class. I’m almost a black  belt, but I was sick and tired and sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I look like at 80 year old running around the dojo. But I’m here and the stumbling run was the best I could do.

This wasn’t how I wanted to show up, but I was showing up and that would have to be enough.

Last Wednesday I got to work, stomach cramping and head ringing. I was doing a meeting and let slip that I wasn’t feeling great. My co-worker said,  “oh, maybe you should take it easy.”

If I let beign miserable stop me I’d never do anything.

And then the misery came in for real. I had a tough week. I spent my days and nights close to the bathroom with the strength of a noodle.

I couldn’t let that continue. Saturday night me and a friend had tickets for a music festival.

She was excited too. Duran Duran were headlining and she’d been wanting to see them forever.

I had imagined myself, dressed in my best 80s gear—Maybe even pink hair!—as I heard the band that meant glamour when I was my daughter’s age. I would storm the stage, jump up and down screaming and dancing

I wanted it,  hungry for it.

Yeah, like a wolf.

Would my medically induced sickness keep me from it? Everything in me pushed back. I had to find a way.

The day came. I put on some comfortable clothes, with just a dash of flash

I took a nap, took Imodium and made my way. I trusted my friend, we walked slow and I got to hear the music. I went over to a fence so I could lean against it. 

It was not like I imagined. But I still got to have it.

Like my class. This is who I am today. I’ll be a black belt, hoping I will not be ill on the testing day. I’ll do what I can with what I’ve got. 

My black belt journey doesn’t look like Jackie Chan. In my mind I can do amazing tumbles and spinning kicks.

In my mind I can flaunt pink hair and jump and scream to the music.

My body today can show up. It will have to do. I’m still here and proud of it.

If an artist wanted to make art using time as the material, the obvious thing is music. Time is the pillar that holds music up.

I’ve been writing about both music and time.  

Time is not as stable as I had thought. The metronome my daughter, the  classical violinist, uses is very rigid. More regular than reality.

Art that inspired me shows a different perspective. Sometimes that is a yank back into the rigid. And sometimes it tears down the walls of expectation.

My musical culture is made of fours. Quarter notes and 4/4. The familiar but surprise variation is the three quarter tim. One two three one two three…waltz with me. You know it, right?

A different familiar.

 Can something completely new—not following the pattern and the usual—can it still be beautiful? Or would it be unsettling?

Jazz famously pulled music into new shapes. Dave Brubeck and his quartet created an album Time Out in 1959. He intended to try different time signatures, after traveling around Eurasia. 

He didn’t expect much from it, nor did Columbia records. 

So he and his quartet created this exploring album, with an extraordinary result. This album, taking a risk with not a lot of expectation became the best selling jazz album ever. Wrapping the mind around the wrong way, a new way of making music, the whole album had strange time signatures.

Take five proves the delight, the surprise…if no one told me it was in 5/4 I wouldn’t have noticed. But it is very catchy and even though it goes on forever it doesn’t feel repetitive to me.

Composed by his saxophonist Paul Desmond, Take five reached number 2 on the billboard charts.

I might be the only one who feels the attraction for the odd thing I’m trying to create.

Or I might not.

I still want to create.

I have this hope that time will be a stable thing. I want to be solid and unchanging, like a good chair that I use every day.

It’s not just the chair though. There are a lot of players in the field of time. The sun rises and sets. The moon waxes and wanes and at the end of of a week comes the weekend. The end of rhe week is still part of the week, but it feels like a different world. It’s a marker that sets it apart and then launches the next week strong.

Until it doesn’t.

This weekend wasn’t a weekend, because I worked Saturday and Sunday. I was out in the desert for the country music festival. I slept out there, woke up at dawn and drove home to start my day. My work day.

I got messed up and distracted from what day was what. I was not as tired as last time, which might have made me evern more distracted.

There are rungs, like a ladder or a set of monkey bars that I swing off. These habit make the rhythm and the shape of my life. This weekly wonder has been part of that shape, one that is really important to me.

I make a point of it. For more than a decade now, it’s been what I do. 

I am an artist and a writer. That’s what I want to be.

But am I a writer if I don’t write? I better write.

Just like that riddle about the tree falling in the forest, if I write and no one reads it did it really count?

I don’t want to have to find out.I want tokeep my habit of writing in public.

The thoughts in my head almost every week include “no one would notice if I didn’t do this. It doesn’t matter.”

But it matters to me enough that I keep doing it.

I’m grateful to my readers –to you!—for sustaining my desire to be and my identity as a writer.

This is something we are doing together.