Mar 3, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning

Curiously, it didn’t hurt.  It didn’t do much of anything, except to create a sense of dull satisfaction: Yup.  I knew my poems didn’t suit their needs, but I sent them off anyway.

Realism, thy name is DreamersOfDreams.

It must be because I’m almost forty-nine — the almost part is crucial.

It must be because I know how long a struggle all this is for most writers.  That’s why, I guess, they send stuff off when they’re in their twenties.

I didn’t do that in my twenties.  I was too busy struggling to find a footing, instead.  Married to an American, and finding myself on American soil for the first time at age twenty-four, I looked for work and found it in an independent record label and distribution company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Working between ten and fourteen hours a day at $4.25 an hour for the first year, standing  on concrete floors, pushing a shopping cart from aisle to aisle, picking LPs, cassettes and CDs, packing them, and shipping them via UPS, I got a taste for what it meant to be really low on the totem pole.  Forced to listen to strange LPs played by angry young men during work hours, who indulged in mindless vulgarity and obscene epithets strewn carelessly about, I winced in almost-physical pain and went home to practise jazz and Indian classical music with a loving and kind husband.

For that first year, despite the hours of badly recompensed, and mindless, labor during the day, we composed music, played together, saw movies on the weekends at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington, and ate out at an Indian restaurant once a week.   I wrote short stories, poems and songs.  He composed his music.  We performed together.  I had vivid dreams.  I felt newly born, innocent.

We owned hardly anything — just books, instruments, cassettes and LPs, and later, CDs.  I wore old clothes, dressed oddly, didn’t much care for the trappings of middle-class modes of dress and manner.  My husband and I were in love, we had music, we had a good, rich-in-music, if financially-impoverished life.  Music saturated our waking and sleeping hours, and it was beautiful.

I realized that all my ambitions of my early college years had taken a back seat to all this creative sweetness.  It was enough to do music, practise voice and guitar, get better at singing and song-writing and take long walks, after a rough day at the warehouse.  It was enough to be content.

I used to be ambitious.  It had all vanished.

This is not to say there weren’t troubles in our life.  Somehow, anything that smacked of trouble in my life simply rolled off my back.  People use the phrase, “water off a duck’s back.”  I prefer my mother’s beautiful image in Tamil — “water off the petals of a lotus.”  That was what she’s been like all her life.  Troubles, terrible troubles, financial and medical, happened to her and my father.  She withstood it all, and seems to grow every year into a more beautiful, complete person.

We had our troubles too.  I don’t remember them, not much, anyway.

Over the years, my husband and I grew in music.  We went back twice for a year at a time to study with our beloved Indian classical vocal teacher, Pandit S.G. Devasthali (now “late,” to use the classic phrase used by Indians as well as Batswana people, like the fictional Mma Ramotswe).  We performed Hindustani classical vocal together.  I wrote many songs, composed surreal music, arranged them for sax, ‘bone, bass, guitar and drums (my husband’s ensemble, Antigravity), and later for sitar, dilruba, flute, Indian violin (with our dear friends playing those instruments, in the Indian version of Antigravity).  I played my songs in coffeehouses and the streets of Harvard Square, as well as the subways and made grocery money. We slept on a futon bed and used milk-crates with cushions as chairs in the living room.  Drank a lot of black coffee.  Ate veggie-lentils and rice. One can do that in one’s twenties.

I continued to work at the company.  Rose in wages, rose on the totem pole, not dramatically, just steadily.  Then, came the urge to get settled –that dreaded phrase, which smacks of middle-class ambition and morality.  The urge to become a teacher had become paramount.  I enrolled in an M.Ed. program at Lesley College, now Lesley University, got my degree, worked as Teaching Assistant in a Cambridge School, while doing my college courses in the evening, got my license, got a job at a nearby school (while finishing the last of my graduate courses and graduated), and have been at that suburban school ever since.

Then, came the house and the grinding work of rebuilding a wreck of a place, while living in it, dust and all.  Then, came our daughter.  Now, it’s all about teaching, being domestic and homeschooling.  I love it all.

And I also miss all that music and creative writing that I used to do.

Ambition is making a comeback, rather late in my life.  I’m not crazy-ambitious, just enough to want to publish my three plays, all those short stories I’ve written, all those poems I’ve poured out, and at least one novel before I die.

I want to write, just write.  I don’t want to do much else, sometimes.  However, I also love to teach.  I love singing and playing music.  I love bringing up my daughter.

So, I’ll try and fashion a life in which all these strands are inter-woven, and they’ll create a tapestry which will make sense for me.

And I won’t let any rejections get in my way.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Cambridge, Harvard Square, looking back, Massachusetts, Rejection letters, Rounder Records, Writing