A Short Story About Credit Cards

 Last Sunday, I received two packages from amazon. I had not ordered anything, and I wondered aloud if perhaps someone had sent me a very early birthday present?  Jared set to opening it.  No cards or anything.  The items inside were clearly either a prank or were sent to the wrong recipient. We looked through our amazon accounts (which we rarely use), and saw nothing weird. 

Two days later, Jared and I got the bill from the green credit card.  This one is usually used only for small occasional purchases at the neighborhood safeway when I am on foot, but the bill was several times larger than usual.  We opened up the details online and saw close to $700 worth of spending at amazon,  plus Jared got a notification about needing to set up a nintendo account.  Ah, so we are in the land of theft and fraud.  Jared called both the bank and amazon to have the card canceled and the stolen charges recouped.  Not quite sure how the card was compromised...

Yesterday, precisely one week later, I set out on my daily 3-point-something-mile walk after a long and tiring day.  I had in my pocket my grey credit card and my phone with my earbuds.  This was so I could listen to music and audio books.  I listened to the Prokofiev Sonata for Two Violins and 5th Symphony.   I listened to Shostakovich 1st violin concerto.  And just after I passed through the busy park at the eastern zenith of my walk, 3/4 of the way to the grocery and on my way home, I suddenly realized my card was not in my pocket.  It occurred to me that I had idiotically put it in the same pocket as my phone and thus taking the phone out to adjust the music or skip ads must have also pulled out the card and let it tumble to the ground unnoticed.  

I immediately began retracing my steps, carefully noting which parts of the sidewalk and which sides of the road I had utilized, scanning the ground.  It is amazing how many pieces of plastic junk I saw with this careful study, and how many of them were not my card.  I listened to the Stravinsky Violin Concerto.  I walked and walked and retraced my steps carefully all the way home.  As I was dejectedly and very exhaustedly approaching our house, an unknown man in shorts and a T-shirt was leaving our front porch and reentering an SUV in the street, piloted by his hijab-wearing wife.  Simultaneously my phone rang.  It was Jared.

As it turns out, the family who had been to our door had found my card at the park (it must have been one or two minutes after I had dropped it.)  The wife was an agent of some sort who was able to look up the owner and address of the card, and they drove over to return it to us.  The second card issue of the week had a very happy ending, thanks to some quick-thinking and kind neighbors.  So with a glance at my walking app (I was already at around 7.3 miles), I pocketed my newly returned card (NOT in the same pocket as my phone) with wonder and gratitude,  and dragged my tired self to the grocery for the couple of desired items.  I listened to the chamber music I had played at church that morning and the next little bit of my audio book, Madeline l'Engle's The Moon by Night.  It is part of a series which I have listened to many, many times.  I am estimating I am on at least the sixth or eighth go-round.

Proximity to Genius

Also handwritten in cursive in a lined notebook:

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to be in proximity to a person my own age who is considered an absolute violin superstar.  When I was younger, I was judgmental of her playing; I don't know what it is about certain decades... I felt she was too plain - not creative or interesting enough - and her priorities in musicianship were too far skewed towards perfection and away from story-telling.  But here I am at a place in life where I am dominated much more by curiosity and desire to understand than by judgment or the desire to fit the world into my box.  It is still true that my fondest dreams with the violin, even under the most miraculous of circumstances, pull me in a different direction than that of this superstar violinist's own North Star.

Our proximity was completely without interaction and probably without awareness on her part.  It consisted of my seeing her walking backstage between her practice room and the wings, sitting analytically in the audience during the dress rehearsal, and practicing in adjacent practice rooms before the three shows.  She was playing the solo in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, plus encores.  I was not needed in the Beethoven, as it was a reduced orchestra.  I only played in Prokofiev Symphony No. 5.

Classical music is so much better, so much more interesting,  so much more gripping,  when it is in person.   I have spent untold hours of my life perusing recordings,  but the energy in the room is so different when musicians and audience are breathing the same air and sharing the impulses of their heartbeats in the same space.  It is such a joy to be a performer again after so many years sitting in teaching studios.   I have returned to playing with new skill and new appreciation and determination to be in the moment with wisdom and intuition and playfulness, and without judgment.  It is a difficult journey, as I am absolutely my own worst critic and expect (but do not nearly obtain) goddess-like perfection of myself.

Watching the dress rehearsal of the Beethoven, these are some things I observed:

*This violinist has unbelievable control over her body in a way I have virtually never witnessed.  The intensity and consistency of that control set me to pondering how absolutely everything in her life has been, and continues to be, shaped and aimed toward that end.

*That absolute force of nature when it comes to control, screams to me that the way she plays Beethoven now at 45 is identical to how she played it at 16.  Every note every bow stroke,  every finger strike, every phrase decay, every vibrato nuance, each shift, and every left hand extension has been analyzed, measured,  and repeated into absolute submission with complete elegance, efficiency of technique, and precise denouement of phrasing.

*It set me to wondering with great curiosity what innate force of personality (not to mention natural coordination to a degree not often seen in the general population) must be behind that lifetime of absolutely focused intensity of sameness.  Despite my earlier judgments, I found myself in awe, because I am so generally curious about people whose minds (and by extension bodies) are so far to one end of the bell curve.  Also, that sense of technical control and consistency has been a major missing piece in my own playing since the beginning, as I have tended rather to function on abundant inspiration, sudden bursts of focus, and the synthesis of environmental data and hope.

*This person carries a strong sense of self, a solitary pillar of being.  Despite having a career at the forefront of Classical music playing hundreds of times a year on famous stages, she seems to be very private and centered in her bubble of focus.

*I was very interested in how and what she stopped to point out in the dress rehearsal.   I think everyone was more or less expecting a run-through and then a touching up of a few spots.  However, part way through the first movement,  she stopped the orchestra.  From my vantage point in the auditorium, I could hear that she was talking to the conductor about the center of pitch pulling one way in the winds and the opposite way in the strings.  I don't doubt her assessment, but stopping for it surprised me a little.  The problem, while I am sure she heard it accurately,  was so subtle that I had not yet noticed it.  It pointed out to me how central playing in tune is to the life of this violinist.  She stopped the rehearsal one other time as well, and I was unable to discern the reason.

It was very interesting to watch her body language during the verbal interactions with the conductor.  Her level of confidence in what should be done was full and complete.  She was in command of the situation.   She is an in-demand soloist who has been in this sort of work situation weekly for decades. She was speaking with a female conductor her own age who is clear and precise and not fluffy or beating around the bush.  As she spoke to the conductor,  her lower body was leaning in, as if to create privacy and permission for the other musicians.  Her upper body was leaning back with her free hand in a chest-level "don't shoot" posture - a very socialized female way of softening the blow and stepping away, giving the others permission and freedom to disagree and make their own choices.  I was fascinated to see how culturally submissive this force of nature became immediately after delivering precise information. 

(Some criticize females for not standing stronger, and I have too often seen female string teachers beat about the bush with "maybe's" and "try a little's" and "that's better's" when it's not.  Most male string teachers I have watched just tell students what they notice and how to improve, and most are generally kind about it.  I much prefer the direct communication in this way, and I have seen a few females follow this.  Those females are considered "tough", but I observe they are not "tougher" than similarly skilled males. I have occasionally wished more men in authority (and I use that term incredibly broadly) would take the initiative to create space through their communication for those who fall beneath them, to operate from a place of true freedom.)

There was a fascinating and slightly distressing afterward.  On the Friday between the first and second concerts, I was playing with another orchestra in a side-by-side, read-along concert with a few people who were involved in the aforementioned Beethoven and Prokofiev performances.  I sort of joined the outskirts of their backstage circle and listened in on their talk, contributing minor facts to the conversation twice.  They got to chatting about the Beethoven violinist.  Snippets of quickly tossed off, gossipy conversation reached my ears and took on great import in my own data banks.

"The energy was really off in the dress rehearsal.  She stopped to talk about pitch centers.... I mean, the winds and strings do sometimes pull apart, but...."

"...Yeah, some conductors refuse to work with her..."

"....kinda spectrumy or something..."

It is my long-time observation that when people who know fairly little about neurodivergence offhandedly diagnose someone, they are often accidentally astute in their suppositions if not precise in their observations.  I feel that if this last overheard remark were accurate,  it could explain a lot of the amazing things I noticed about this violinist.  Based on certain tones of voices and observed facial expressions of my colleagues at this moment, I wished immediately that people could be more generally open-minded and accepting of people's unique ways of being.

Language Change: Progress or Decay?

Another piece, written on a lined notebook in cursive with a ballpoint pen a couple of weeks ago

As a middle-schooler, I had a large paper-back tome by this title - Language Change: Progress or Decay?  It was given to me as a gift while I was in the midst of a multi-year linguistics research obsession.  Given my inability to focus on anything difficult, I never made it too far through the dense prose, and I have no idea what became of the volume in the intervening decades.  But some thoughts from it which I was not yet ready to incorporate into my world-view at the age of twelve have returned to my mind in the last decade.  It makes perfect sense now.

At that state of my development I was particularly intrigued by the fundamentals of grammar, and I spent many hours writing tables of pronouns, verb conjugations, and case endings in English, German, Latin, and my own invented language Holstenian.  In addition, I spent time looking up and researching cognates to some of the words with the oldest roots in the Indo-European language family.  I used various foreign language dictionaries and was working to trace the evolution of sound shifts across language groupings.  It was all very scientific and tidy.  There were correct answers, and this notion was aided by our daily afternoon grammar text-book study in the sixth grade and the grammar-policing of my own family, which I very much appreciated.

These days, with a a lot more data synthesized from so many areas, I think about language as a social construct.  It has, of course, a primary function as a way to communicate.  I wonder, though, whether anyone's mother tongue is really their native language.  Infants are primed for communication, but before we have words, we already experience the world intensely through sensation and emotion.  We communicate first through gesture and non-linguistic noise, and there are some who spend their whole lives communicating in these ways.

Language is a system of sounds agreed-upon by a community, following a set of rules, also agreed-upon.  But how large is that community in space and time?  And before the advent of writing, how long was our memory?  We have texts spanning fifteen centuries which we call English.  Yet even those from just three hundred years ago are nearly unintelligible to most English speakers today.  Radio and television, and before them, the printing press, standardized English to a previously unexperienced degree.  Yet, if I were to travel in some of the small towns of England or Jamaica or the Commonwealth of Virginia, I would be confronted with pronunciations, vocabulary, and grammatical constructions which would leave me entirely baffled.  Are these things all English?  We affirm that they are, and that their roots are just as ancient as the English I speak.  

I have had the same experience with German.  Our Swiss neighbor tutored me in "broadcast" German.  Yet when she answered the phone and spoke to her mother calling from back home, I could not understand a word I heard as they chatted in their Schwitzer-Tutcsh dialect.  I studied German later with a professor from Munich, eventually touring Munich with her, absorbing the Muenchner accent and manner of abbreviating certain words.  But when we visited a nearby small town in Bavaria and were greeted in friendly conversation by an older gentleman of that region, I could barely catch the gist of his talk.  I have to believe that these people were not "wrong", and the German I had learned was not "right," but rather, those in power had grown up with a certain manner of speech.  That certain manner of speech, through no inherent worthiness of its own, has come to denote power and learning for a time.  

Speaking or writing in this particular way communicates to the listener or reader: I am part of the in-group.  It's a whole additional layer of communication beyond the words, thoughts, and emotional inflections, which is invisible to those who grew up speaking "the King's English" (as I approximately did.)  We only notice when we hear others speaking with equally complex but different grammar and vocabulary.  We either think of them as advanced exotics with a higher status (listen to that beautiful accent!)- forgetting that we ourselves have a peculiar accent -, or as someone quaint but less intelligent ("childlike" or "primitive"), or as someone backward and uneducated.  We are unable to perceive the wicked power dynamics at play or remember that language has never been a fixed monolith, but an ever-shifting agreement between users to communicate in ways that gestures, expressions, and cries are not able to.  Language change is neither progress nor decay - it is merely a shifting reflection of the thoughts, needs, and tastes of the society which uses it.  It is the wobbly mirror of a pond to the clouds in the sky above.

This notion of language as power was driven home to me with great force when I recently sat by, watching my homeschooled second-grader take the standardized California Achievement Test in a version dating from the early 1990s.  When he filled in the bubbles in the multiple-choice grammar test, he got nearly every question correct according to their rubric.  Is this because we have made a special study of grammar?  Or because he is extra smart? Not at all. It is because he read each sentence and asked himself which way sounded like his parents talking.  Because his parents happened to grow up in the subset of educated and power-adjacent people for whom the particular dialect which has retrospectively been titled "the King's English" is their indiginous tongue, he "intuitively" knew what the test writers were looking for.  I was thinking of so many other children, even right in our own neighborhood, who have grown up with other dialects as historically rich and interesting as our own, who would get lots of "wrong" answers on this test, because they did it the same way my son did: by reading the options and picking the one that sounded like how their own parents speak.   And it made me sad to think how those children, in order to appear intelligent to people with power, would need to suppress their own family history and spend a lot of work at academics to get the respect their minds deserved from the beginning. 

These things must be true of all standardized academic and intelligence tests, which are culturally biased.  Human minds are so much more interesting and complex than these make us out to be, and cultures are so much more varied and full of so much more nuance and beauty.