I am artistic
When I was four or five
An enormous piano arrived in our household
A 1905 Kohler and Campbell
It remains in my basement to this day
Like a beached Skylab having partially survived reentry
Some institution with which
My father was affiliated
Was liquidating its practice instruments
And to my great good fortune
One of the most fortunate events in my admittedly privileged life
One or both of my older siblings were learning
The three-chord method
So that I could hear
And could soon carry off
The tonic the dominant and the subdominant
Before I could read letters
Who never learned to read music
And play any tune that employed as many tunes do
Those three basic chords
And I must have been as they say gifted
For in the primary grades I welcomed more good fortune
My kindergarten teacher must have been really into show tunes
She taught us Doe a Deer
Before The Sound of Music ever found its way to film
She had played some part
Perhaps even the female lead
In South Pacific at the Town and Gown Theater
And in first grade I auditioned and got the part
As one of the children in The King and I
And I’m embarrassed to disclose
That they dyed my hair and made up my eyes
I learned the songs and the movements
And was quite astonished after many evening’s rehearsals
To go on stage in a fancy costume
Lit by fancy theatrical lights
And sang Getting to Know You
With a full fancy orchestra
And I already a fan of orchestral music
Loving my family’s collection of classical excerpts
And for years thereafter was required
To sing on demand The Royal Bangkok Academy
And my heart truly thrilled at the march of the royal household
And my heart truly melted when the king’s wife
One of his many
Sang This Is a Man
And at the end
I returned ever more contentedly
To my books and toys and record player
And I told my father that I liked Mad magazine
Because it was so satirICKal
And I disapproved of Alabama’s poLITics
And I regretted being so MISchievous
I think I got that last one with its three syllables right
Though Sister Nathaniel said misCHEEVEEous
And my father chuckled and praised
What he called my linguistic flair
And explained that words
Do not always sound as they are spelled
And every night after supper
I would play duets with my sister
On the enormous Kohler and Campbell
I taught her an oom-pah bass
Using the three chords
And we would play I’m Getting Married in the Morning
And Polly Wolly Doodle
Those had only two chords
And I improvising though I did not know improvisation to be a thing
A zillion choruses of This Land Is Your Land
Which used all three
And which must have made my parents and Walter Cronkite crazy
And when I was eleven
My father bought a guitar for himself
And one for me
So that we could take a class at the YMCA
And I picked it right up
But the manual dexterity of advanced middle age
Did not lend itself to so fine a skill
As changing chords in time
And my attempts at private tutorial
Left my father frustrated such that
He leveled against me
The charge of superciliousness
And my mother who had arranged for me
To try out for the King and I
Took me regularly to the Jacksonville Symphony
And we heard the 1812 Overture with a real little cannon
And Beethoven’s Fifth
And the Lincoln Portrait with Copland himself conducting
And John Carradine’s resounding voice reading
My mother understood me
Though she no doubt concurred
With my father’s mistaken belief
That I was destined to be a scientist
She herself delighting in science as a child
Amid poverty and thirteen siblings
I was a bit weak in math
My mother knew me
She took me to hear Vincent Price lecture on paintings
And Willam F Buckley lecture on liberty
And she knew that even as a teenager
I disdained Buckley’s poLITics
But
I loved oratory and the stage
And the slightly underdone pancakes just for me
And a dab of dough before the cookies went in
And I picture my mother in the kitchen
Though she was a chemist
A medical technologist
When my lay teachers insisted
Themselves employed
That a woman’s place is in the home
And my mother beamed proudly
When I could accompany my singing
Of a real song on the guitar
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Thereby cementing my possession
Of that daunting instrument
Even as my father was forsaking it
I learned to bend a note
From I’m Mad in the Animals’ version
And when I listened with my big brother
To the guitars of Big Brother and the Holding Company
He said You could do that
A falsehood but a generous one
He spent his life in the library
At the university where our father taught
Soaking up history and the hipness
Of that hipster age
From The Village Voice
And The Saturday Review
And The New York Times
And Crawdaddy
And Rolling Stone
And he brought home esoteric records
Like the Grateful Dead
The Mothers of Invention
And earlier the moment it was released in ‘65
One of the great good fortunes of my life
Highway 61 Revisited
And we listened in the dark to Electric Ladyland
And in successive Christmases
He gave me Revolver and Led Zeppelin
Just before we saw the latter
In the Jacksonville Coliseum
And gave me LA Woman and Transformer
So that for a while I played at bi-curiosity
Though all I really wanted was sex with my girlfriend
Which she lovingly cunningly supplied
Our parents sent my brother and me
To the Miami Pop Festival in ‘68
They must have thought it was Newport or something
And in fact it was a pretty sedate affair
Even as we heard the blues of Fleetwood Mac followed by
Iron Butterfly’s thumping platitudes followed by
The Stooges not even kidding
But
I did not understand the last of these
And we conspired my brother and I
We can’t tell our parents that we saw The Fugs har
The Miami festival of the following year was wilder
The world having grown much trippier after Woodstock
And Johnny Winter and the Grateful Dead and Santana
Carlos prowling like a predatory cat
All this with my big brother
And I said to myself having just turned fifteen
That’s me
I’m going to do something worth a damn
And I have succeeded
I have remained obscure
But
Fame eludes even those who crave it
Even those who strive for it
And I have striven not for fame
But
Instead for something worth a damn
All striving is futile
But
I have achieved some serenity in my senility
For I have filled these obscure pages
With something worth more or less a damn