My best friend and I were 15 and spent most summer days sitting on the thick stonewall in the center of our small town. This was our container — a never-changing town with church bells sounding every quarter hour as they had for over 100 years to remind us that things stay the same. We were two freckled bookworms who loved to philosophize about relationships and interesting concepts we found in books. Other girls our age had paired off with boys. We thought we had a vision of life beyond their understanding.
One of those girls told her mother that she was going to the river with Cherie so her mother would approve even though it was after dark. She told me she wanted to practice nighttime driving and wanted someone with her. Little did I know she had arranged to meet her boyfriend and he had brought a friend of his to distract me. That girl and her boyfriend disappeared into the woods. I was seething, but this friend, Carl, was as lost as me and he was kind. He said, “Let’s make the most of it.” We climbed onto the hood of the car and laid back on the windshield. It was surprisingly comfortable to identify constellations and wildlife sounds and talk of people we knew in common at school. There was no romance involved. I could be myself and just talk. We made no plans to see each other again.
The school year’s first dance, Barnwarming, happened a few weeks later. I reluctantly entered the gym, staying by the door, feeling out of place. The DJ played my song, “Sherry” by the Four Seasons, so I ventured further in. Carl saw me and asked me to dance. He started singing along as the colored lights above us flickered across our faces. We were smiling as we became one with the music.
When the music stopped, Carl bent forward and kissed me on the lips, and then walked away. But I kept standing, frozen in the moment. What had just happened? No book learning had prepared me for the coursing sensations I felt. This was something of substance and sweetness outside of my world of books that I had not suspected.
That was the beginning of many equally heart-stopping firsts like my first paycheck, my first travel, my first love, my birthing experience. With each new awakening I discarded some cherished viewpoint or reintegrated it into a larger outlook and those firsts added to the sweetness of life. But now, more than 50 years later, a first is a rare occasion and I have no desire to range farther afield to look for them. Most present experiences are replays of past firsts. And yet the sweetness of new understanding continues to unfold in an unsuspected way.
Claude DeBussy famously said, “Music is the space between the notes.” I now find this applying to my life in the sense I am seeing the deep life that exists in the space between the exciting firsts. And so today I sit in the community garden, taking in the shifting clouds against the blue sky, the riotous color in the flowers that surround me, the earthiness of the large pumpkins and bursting tomatoes, the rightness of the bees landing on Russian sage and white butterflies flitting over the cabbages, the laughter of children at summer camp. Even the fact that I am here at all considering all the coincidences that had to happen among my ancestors amazes me. All the everyday moments I once considered mundane now shimmer with mystery and richness.
The music of my life is complete with this recognition of the exciting notes and the comforting spaces between.
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