Maybe (Maybe Not) (14 page)

It was true—they didn’t need a conductor.

What they needed was a minister.

I knew how to do that.

By looking at the orchestra through the lens of ministry, I saw the obvious—namely, that musicians appeared to be a great deal like people I knew well.

It’s easy to be fooled. When you sit out there in a great concert hall and these handsome, beautiful, formally dressed, talented people walk purposefully onto the stage with their shining instruments, they seem like minor gods. Not a care in this world.

If you go to a closed rehearsal, where only the
musicians are present, you will find a raggedy bunch of people not unlike those you see in a checkout line at a supermarket. They have come to work—to do their job—and go home. Since they are overworked and underpaid, you quickly learn that the beautiful black outfits you see from the audience are, upon closer examination backstage, likely to have been assembled from the local thrift shops.

They had children, wives, husbands, homes, hopes, dreams, and all the rest. All had committed their lives to the hardscrabble road of the professional musician at some sacrifice to the usual quality-of-life standards. They made sacrifices to make music. Anybody who was interested in their lives was welcome.

I learned that within the core group of the orchestra, there were a couple of divorces in progress, a mother dying of cancer, a family in financial crisis, some rivalries and jealousies, a drinking problem, and the tension of us-versus-them between the regular players and the extras hired to do the Ninth.

The orchestra wasn’t feeling good about itself. The musicians’ humanity was somewhat in disarray. So when this fool amateur conductor showed up and said “Teach me,” “Help me,” “Give me your best and I will give you mine,” their mood changed from depression to amused distraction. They needed respect, and great respect was surely mine to give.

First rehearsal.

I stood on the podium, raised my hands, and, with crazed confidence, gave a hopeful downbeat. And they played!

For the very same reasons that everything goes haywire at times, everything works sometimes. Like this time. It wasn’t great—we stumbled and fumbled and lurched along, but we hung together and it was done. I couldn’t believe it. The orchestra was amazed. The conductor was dumbfounded. And I was ready to pack up and go home. Once was enough, thank you very much. The thought of three more rehearsals and three performances left me limp.

The conductor, on the other hand, felt rejuvenated. What impressed him was my apparent lack of reliance on the score—I never looked at it. Yet I seemed to anticipate every entrance of every instrument. I was focused like I had radar working. He couldn’t believe it.

“But that’s nothing,” I said. “If you watch them, just before they are about to play, they hold up their instruments in the ready position, and you just wave at them—COME ON IN—and they do. I thought you knew that.”

He was always checking the score—he’d never noticed.

Professionals don’t know everything.

Well, we came to the first performance. The World Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota—a full house. Whereas I had once looked forward to wearing the white tie and tails of a maestro, I now knew enough to know such dress would only compound the joke. Holding a baton was like holding a moon rock—a simple item that represented enormously complicated human capability. I now knew the truth of the statement that only 10 percent of conducting is conducting.

So I didn’t look much like a conductor, dressed in a business suit as I was. And I didn’t come from backstage, but from out of a seat in the second row of the audience. I explained to the audience that I represented them and anybody among them who had always wanted to conduct. I apologized for not carrying a conductor’s baton. Every time I had used it in rehearsal, I had thrown it into the chorus.

I turned, stepped up onto the podium, inhaled enough oxygen to approach hyperventilation, and gave the downbeat. For better or worse, we were off. I felt the way a surfer must feel slicing along inside the curl of a mighty wave.

My problem was that every time we came to a change of tempo, I experienced an adrenaline rush and came in waving my arms at a speed about ten beats faster than normal. Once, at a place where we were supposed to go from a slow 60 two-beat to a fast three-beat, I whipped in at about ninety beats a minute—the
upper limit for strings for a sustained passage. We were smoking. Moving like a runaway train. I told the orchestra later it was a powerful moment.

A
religious
moment.

Because I’m thinking, OHMYGOD, OHMYGOD, and I look down at the first cello madly sawing away, and she’s looking across at the first violin, who is likewise pumping his fiddle for all he’s worth, and she silently mouths “Ohmygod, ohmygod” at him.

The next day, one of our critics called the performance “crisp.”

We had got through the Ninth in record time.

Truthfully appraised, the performance wasn’t good or consistent or even competent. But I, the trained seal from Seattle, had balanced Beethoven’s ball on my nose while clapping my hands in time to the music. For what it was, it was what it was, and what the people came to see: the Maestro Fuljumowski on a roll—leaving the audience feeling any one of them might have conducted at least as well.

Came the final night of a three-performance series, I was in trouble. I didn’t think I could do it again. Drained, exhausted, and oversatisfied, I was also worried about the value of what I was trying to do. Just doing barely well enough to get through this thing was an insult to the greatness of the music and the talent of the musicians. Nobody had to tell me that. I
knew. I remembered that most of the musicians had never done the Ninth before. This might be their only chance. And because of me, they would have done it only in a half-baked way. They might never know what it was like to do it at the top of their form. Now that I really knew what I was doing, how could I possibly do it? In the attic of my secret life, my committee was giving me a beating. Who did I think I was?

There was a larger consideration, too. Here we were in the World Theater about to do Beethoven, and in the theater of the world great dramas had recently taken place—events that called for this music to be played. The Berlin Wall had come down. Mandela had walked free. Democracy was brewing in China. We were about to play the music associated with great triumph—the “Ode to Joy”—played when barriers fell, when freedom came, and humanity touched glory for a moment. Music made out of Beethoven’s defiance of his fate of deafness and old age.

I wondered how I could possibly go through with this ego trip of mine and stumble through the Ninth one more time. And yet, that’s what we’d advertised, and that’s what the people had bought tickets to see and hear. Right up to the very last moment, I didn’t know what to do. How could I? How could I not?

The hall was packed. A black-tie evening. The orchestra and chorus filed onstage for one last go at
this preposterous task. The lights dimmed in the hall. I climbed slowly up the stairs to the stage and stepped slowly up onto the conductor’s podium, and turned, slowly, to the orchestra to ask the musicians for their attention as if we were ready to begin. I paused.

No. I couldn’t do it.

In that expectant silence, I turned to the audience and told them of the struggle going on in my mind. I talked about Beethoven’s great cry of “YES!” that was contained in this music, and about the sorrowful silence from which it roared.

I told them the story of Fulghum the wannabe conductor, who only now understood what he had got himself into. I told them about the real people who played in this orchestra. I spoke of the human triumphs going on in our time that paralleled the spirit of this music.

“I can’t dishonor this man or this music or this spirit,” I told them.

I asked the real conductor to come and do justice.

I turned to ask the musicians to give it their all. And when I turned back to the audience, they had replied to my unspoken request for their consent by spontaneously rising from their seats to stand and be as much a part of the music as they could. Everywhere in the hall the mood was yes.

The maestro lifted his baton, and Beethoven carried us away.

And me? Where was the ex-maestro while the music flowed forth?

Having never sung in the chorus on this thing, I thought I’d just go back and stand in with them. True, I don’t know any more about German than I do about orchestral scores. So what? If I could conduct it, how hard could this be?

I sang.

It was the orchestra’s finest night. The musicians were finally united. The chorus and soloists poured out a mighty sound. For a time, all of us in the hall could believe in the power of the human spirit to overcome evil. Beethoven lived. We lived. Nothing grander could be said or done at that moment in our lives. At the end, when that marbled music rumbled down the hill of the heart like a landslide, people cheered their lungs out, pounded their hands together, hugged each other, threw flowers, and wept. What a night—what a world—what a life! YES!

I
have set a bad example more than once in my life.

In at least one instance, I am pleased to have done so.

For several years I ran a fairly regular route for exercise, every other day. I actually don’t run much anymore. At my age, running hard easily leads to knee, ankle, hip, and back damage—chronic problems that could interfere with dancing.

Dancing has priority.

Fortunately, I live at the bottom of a great hill. So now I march up that hill, trot a little, walk my route, and go down and back up and down several long stairways to get the blood pumping for an hour.

There was a time when my goal was to cover this
three-mile route as quickly as possible. I carried a stopwatch. Focused on getting through each section just a little faster each day. Getting in shape as quickly as possible was the goal. Time and distance were the measuring rods of a successful morning. Just do it and do it and do it—better and better every day.

A stranger changed all that.

A woman whose schedule seemed to coincide with mine. She was usually somewhere on my route at the same time I was. We nodded. I was in a hurry. She was not.

A slim, gray-haired woman about my age, who wore comfortable clothes and high-tech walking shoes. She caught my eye for two reasons—she followed an erratic course, and she carried a plastic shopping bag. I wondered why.

When I stopped running and started walking, I had time to observe her more carefully. Over a couple of weeks, I put her route together as I saw her here and there. Though she marched along at a brisk pace, she always stopped to pick up trash and put it in her bag. She didn’t make a big deal out of it or go out of her way—just tended to her own path, cleaned up the world under her own feet.

Her route zigzagged uphill a block and then went level for a block and then uphill again. At the top, she sat briefly on a park bench to admire the morning sky and the mountains to the east.

Next she looped through the cemetery, around a
great redwood tree, pausing to read names on tombstones.

Then across a children’s playground going up a ladder and down a slide, followed by a swing through the monkey bars.

Next through a scattered grove of tall fir trees, up the stairs to the top of a water tower, around a pond where she stopped to admire the water lilies, along an alley where she looked over a fence and into a greenhouse. Out into the park again to an open field of grass where she lay down on her back for a short time.

Then down to the Episcopal cathedral—inside briefly—and out again.

In one door of the art school next door, down a hall, and out a door at the other end of the building.

Down three long flights of stairs, under the freeway, and down to the local bakery for a cinnamon roll and cup of coffee.

One morning I joined her at her table at the bakery and introduced myself, explaining that we seemed to share the same exercise route, though I noticed she added some unexpected detours to hers.

She knew who I was, and she had also been aware of me—“the man in a hurry.” To my surprise, she had been influenced by me, seeing in my morning rush a model for the kind of life she was living but hated.

She had decided not to be like me.

The woman is a family doctor.

For years she had rushed off every morning to make rounds at the hospital and make healthful suggestions to patients that she did not act on in her own life.

She began to notice death and how fast she was running to meet hers.

“Haste does not improve the quality or quantity of life, you know,” she advised me. So I had heard.

She decided not only to tend to her physical health, but the health of her mind and soul. “I lost touch with me, somehow,” she said.

Not being a religious type or interested in cults or fads or isms, she decided that common sense would suffice for devising a new morning routine. No big conversion—no big deal—just
think, then do.

To add usefulness to self-concern, she would pick up trash along her route—not try to clean up the whole neighborhood, mind you, but to do her share as she came to it.