I was just trying to think to myself how you get into this sort of thing, writing.
There are rules, there are laws in physics and chemistry, Archimedes law about the displacement of an object in water,
but there aren't any laws about writing or painting or the arts.
I think about when I had some timers in the army and you have some spare time when you're not sort of terrified
and I had a lot of time to read and think about this and I kept some journals and notes.
When I got back to Augusta, I looked to the time when I was in high school and there were teachers who encouraged you.
Richmond Academy was a boy school at the time and they were able to deal with us in a different way than if sex had reared its ugly head.
But Mr. Reed and Ms. Marshall and other teachers were nice to me and then later Ms. Holbert in the chorus and she didn't care.
She knew we weren't going to be professional singers but she wanted us to share in that joy that she felt about opening our mouths
and letting something that's deep down inside of us flow out.
Her face came from deep inside her body, a face which never thought beautiful looks were worth spending time on.
Though she did everything beautiful women do, lipstick, a ribbon drawn through her gray hair, dressed young though,
not trying to look young, sixty something, but being young the way some people are, boys, girlish.
We knew nothing about music, dodging drill or study hall to go into her class chorus after girls.
She never told us or even thought we couldn't sing, had complete faith in something inside us, vocal apparatus she said.
But I imagine these years later she met soul, the song Inside Us All.
She liked quoting Isaiah, even as we go down to the grave, we make our song.
And when we performed, think of us on stage, twenty boys, bearded, unbearded, tall, short, fat thin,
every opposite a public high school could supply, the curtain, purple and gold behind us.
She stood in front of us so only we could see her face.
She looked right, left, down the middle of us, our voices arranged according to puberty,
a condition she described as descent or ascent on the scaled and smiled a moment of such pure and perfect silence,
I can still hear it.
Sex and blood for the last time in our lives had nothing to do with such a look.
She smiled, we smiled, smiling, unflattered the pitch, she said.
Our legs trembled on the risers, the student body was a blur.
She caught us up in her hands, our mouths opened, the surprise of our voices almost making us turn around to see
whether a ventriloquist was using us and we sang, this is my country.
It was so beautiful, she had known it would be and we hadn't.
She held us in her hands, looking each one of us in the eye with her clear blue gaze, slowing, speeding the tempo,
as if suddenly we could be everything our parents wanted.
They clapped as she told us they would, the bow we rehearsed thought we'd never need was called for
and an encore, our favorite song, give me some men, Sigmund Romberg, who are stout-hearted men,
and we were those men and she was the woman who called them out of the clay and dust of not quite so clean blue jeans,
and t-shirts with wrong numbers and schools, we'd never attend on them.
We bowed from the waist again, good as it hid our amazement and glee,
and she beheld us, revealing creation to an audience, young men, red spots on cheeks, chin,
now made smooth.
We bowed from the waist again, good as it hid our amazement and glee,
and she beheld us, revealing creation to an audience, young men, red spots on cheeks, chin,
now made smooth.
We bowed from the waist again, good as it hid our amazement and glee,
and she beheld us, revealing creation to an audience, young men, red spots on cheeks, chin,
now made smooth.
We bowed from the waist again, good as it hid our amazement and glee,
and she beheld us, revealing creation to an audience, young men,
