Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

For my 49th birthday last year, Mark rented me a cello. He also gave me a music stand and a beginner’s book. I drew the bow inexpertly across the strings and made a commitment to this hour-glass shaped beauty. Sound waves rumbled up my arms.

The summer passed before I managed to find a teacher and schedule lessons. Everything I’d been doing to coax sound out of my instrument was wrong. I’d been sitting wrong, holding the bow wrong. Even the size of the instrument was wrong. I rented a different-sized cello. And I practiced. Twenty minutes a day.

The more correctly I placed my fingers on the cello’s neck and the more expertly I employed my pencil grip on the bow, the more my elbows and wrists ached. The fingers in my left hand went numb. Joints in my right hand stiffened and swelled in protest.

Though I was in pain, I continued to practice. I learned ecumenical plucking: “Jingle Bells” and “The Dreidel Song.” Kids home on a visit in October asked for a concert, and I obliged. “Let’s hear that again,” they teased.

My sense of loss around the absence of Sam’s power drumming diminished. I was no longer lingering in the hall, recalling Max’s increasingly indifferent, irregular sessions on trumpet. My cello and I, we were making new music memories to fill the Big Empty.

A friend asked me how things were going with the cello. I filled her in, including details of numb fingers and joint ache. Why, she wanted to know, was I doing something that gave me pain?

“I just need to practice harder,” I told her.

“Will you listen to yourself?” she asked.

I knocked off for a few weeks. Sensation returned to the fingers in my left hand. My wrists ached less. The bow lay where I’d left it, its strings slack but still coated in powdery rosin. And I thought.

Or maybe I felt.

I wanted to fill my heart and head with vibrant sound. I wanted to try something completely new. I didn’t want any more pain than I was already experiencing.

So, this past January, I joined a choir. Every Wednesday, I retrace steps I took with my children to our neighborhood public elementary school. I climb the steps to the third-floor music room and slide into a stiff, plastic chair, squeezing in among the altos. The only pain I experience comes from climbing the stairs. That and the times I occasionally pinch my fingers in the metal clasps of the three-ring binder that holds my sheet music. Our brilliant, tart-tongued director warms us up. I take a deep breath and open my mouth. Sound waves rumble through my chest and out of my head. Our improbably named, almost 90-year-old accompaniest — Flossie — plays the first few bars of Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna,” and we’re off.

I’m not good, but I’m getting better. I have trouble tracking the line, so I’ve highlighted the music staff in yellow. My counting is often off, so I’ve written in the beats, noticing time signatures, rests, and odd rhythms. I don’t practice, I won’t be in town for the year-end concert, so there’s no public payoff. But I am fully present each week. I join my voice with the rest of the choir and experience the joy of making music.

I need to return the cello to the rental company, since the year-long contract is almost up. In a month, I will no longer punch “49″ into the touch screen on the exercise machine I use at the gym. Fifty. And what have I learned in the first year of empty nesting, the last year of my forties?

To age gracefully has little to do with skin care, hair color, sagging neck, or even productivity. The trick, I think, is to hold onto the dreams that matter most and to be creative and flexible in making them come true.

Sam got home from school last Thursday.  I picked him up from South Station.  Max arrived this past Saturday evening on a bus from New York.  Mark and I were at a party for our favorite nonagenarian, so we couldn’t get him. A friend of his ferried him to the house.  And on Monday, after she’d finished her exams, handed in her last essay, and tidied her room, Lily got an extra special lift home from Max and Sam, who had driven out to Western Mass to bring her home from college.  The three of them took a detour on their way back to collect a gorgeous ceramic bowl they’d ordered.

Each is growing — up and out and away.  At the same time, they are choosing to continue to be a part of each others’ lives.  Perhaps it’s true that we middle class mothers at the beginning of the new millennium have fetishized child rearing to the point that we’ve created an even bigger chasm between rich and poor.  At the moment, I’m glad I’ve been able to give these three a sense that making family takes conscious effort.  Because now, in this first stretch of time away from home, they understand that it takes effort to continue their relationships with one another and with Mark and me.

And guess what? They gave me that beautiful bowl for Chanukah. I am filling it with new memories, the fruits of my labor.

I’ve been cleaning, clearing, re-organizing, re-painting, even redecorating all summer. Re-claiming space with an eye toward living in an empty nest. I have come across scraps of paper from a zillion lives ago, kids’ kindergarten art projects, files from projects left dead by the road. Some of these reconnections have left me with a sense of sadness. Others have brought outright joy.  By far the hardest? The Rolodex.

For those too young to know, a Rolodex is a “rotary card file” first brought to market in 1954.  I think it’s fair to say that its history reflects significant shifts in personal organization and business. One look at the company website, and you’ll get an idea of how hard the widget makers have tried to bring this vestige of 20th-century efficiency into the modern era. What, exactly, does one do with a rectangular, plastic, flip-top bin that sits on a desk and holds paper cards? It doesn’t plug into anything.

I acquired my Rolodex in 1986, when I began as a reporter at The Brownsville (Texas) Herald. I can still elicit a giggle from Mark, whom I joined in Brownsville that year, if I repeat the slogan the City of Brownsville inked on its trash barrels: “Crossroads of the Hemisphere!” For me, it was a crossroads in many ways, not the least of which was technological. The Herald had an interlinked computer system that allowed reporters and editors to write, edit, and lay out copy digitally. We even had an early, inter-office version of “email” that allowed us to gossip through our keyboards. We had telephones — not cell phones — and, yes, Rolodexes. I filled mine with important contacts I cultivated on the two beats I covered: lifestyles, then education. And then I moved that Rolodex with me from desk to desk over the next quarter century, relying on it — like the rest of the world — even as I first acquired email and then a mobile phone.

Yesterday, I found myself staring down the Rolodex, wondering what on earth to do with the thing. Update it? Throw it out? Archive it? I started with the “As,” picking through cards to see whom I still contact.  By the time I reached “XYZ” (there is but one category for the three neglected last letters of our alphabet), I had stumbled across names of friends and teachers and doctors and service providers (electricians, landscapers, babysitters) no longer part of my life. Hardest were the names of The Old Ones, friends of my parents whose addresses I had carefully logged at the time of my wedding and when I gave birth to send thank you notes, as my mother would have asked. Almost all are gone now, their homes occupied by people whom I wouldn’t know — and who wouldn’t know me.

My recall ain’t what it used to be. If you ask me to tell you a name, I might scratch my head for quite some time. But when I come across that name, the faces and memories dance through my mind. Couples who gathered for my mom’s swanky dinner parties at which my sister and I passed hors d’oeuvres and washed dishes. Marta Rita Prince de Garcia, the retired Mexican schoolteacher who marched me through Spanish verb conjugation twice a week in Matamoros, when I worked at The Herald. Fayek Shama, the rookie infertility specialist at Yale whose deft surgical hand translated the crude techniques of IVF into what would become my three healthy babies. I tossed card after card into the recycling bin yesterday, thinking to myself that I’d need a seance, not a Rolodex, to put  me in touch with most of the people attached to these names and addresses.

I got up this morning, gathered each and every one of those discarded cards, and put them willy nilly into a Ziploc bag. I don’t know where I’m going to put the bag. Don’t know which file or box or container it’ll go into. My business with these long-losts just hasn’t come to an end. I don’t think it ever will.