It’s a little thing but I’m still silly over being on the radio.
A short poem of mine just aired on 94.9 KUOW, Seattle’s NPR station, and my sister and I (NPR junkies both) had the best time today listening for it morning into afternoon—she in her house working on some new designs, me in my apartment catching up on emails. Hearing my own voice from outside my body still makes me squirm, but hearing it come out of the radio was a thrill!
I grew up in a nowhere, semi-rural, suburban neighborhood in Virginia, in a strangely isolated household where we weren’t allowed to watch much TV. (That’s the house up there in that image from Google maps.) But there were no rules about radio. So the radio became my secret place.
Mostly I listened to Top 40 stations because I was trying to give myself an education in pop music. I was almost 13 years old before I knew who Michael Jackson was. Before the radio, my Top 40 list was Chopin, Bach, Debussy; my everyday mixtape was Liszt, Schumann, Bartok, Haydn. Before I quit, I sat at the piano practicing an hour or two every day (presumably while other kids were over at each other’s houses singing along to Lionel Richie, Foreigner, Rick Springfield, Sheena Easton). The idea that the “piano” could somehow be associated with “playing” still seems a bit absurd to me. It was practice; it was work.
You have no idea the number of morose fantasies I entertained in my head while practicing pieces again and again about how my mother would find me fumbling my way up the stairs, gone blind from the nights and nights of reading music in that dim corner of the house. Or she’d find my wan body draped pitifully over the bench, no maybe splayed across the keyboard, cheeks sunken like gulches, fingertips chapped, dead finally from some mysterious virus, some killer disease stemming from so many hours of piano. The gorgeous regret that would bloom on her face! The wanting it all back so she could let me outside instead to play the way other kids played, so she could do it differently.
Sometimes—when I thought she wasn’t paying too much attention from the next room—I’d sneak out a thin booklet of sheet music I’d found in the piano bench. In it were songs from the Disney version of “Pinocchio” along with sketches of the characters: Jiminy Cricket in his bespoke vest and spats, leaning on a cane; Pinocchio before—before he became “real,” before he wasn’t tied to strings, just leaning. I’d play the charming little tunes as softly as I could—“Give A Little Whistle,” “When You Wish Upon A Star”—sometimes I sang along, but I didn’t have much of a voice, so mostly I didn’t. I just listened to myself playing.
Evening was the best time for radio. I could be alone in my room, or there with my sister who was like my twin, and listen to the dedication hours on each station while I halfway did homework. I was in love with the DJ, calling out names, reading messages from someone to their someone, sending this song to that listener, dedicating person to person. I never heard my name.
Now, hearing my voice coming out of the radio, I’m gaga, I’m giddy. It’s magic. It’s as though somehow, via the radio, I am broadcasting myself back in time, speaking to the young me there, in the bedroom of that Burke house, listening on that tiny red-and-black-checked boombox for I’m-still-not-sure-what during all those hours then. I’m saying, “Here you are. Here is your name, here, your dedication.”
portraits of women
![photo caption: Carcasses lay on the ground at the Muskingum County Animal Farm on Wednesday in Zanesville, Ohio. Sheriff’s deputies shot 48 animals, including 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions, after Terry Thompson, owner of the private Muskingum County Animal Farm threw their cages open Tuesday and then committed suicide.
[i liked it better when the story ended with a monkey & a wolf, still on the loose, hitching it out of zanesville. i’ll just keep that ending in my head.]
Wolf, monkey believed still loose near Zanesville
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20111019/NEWS01/111019002/Sheriff-48-animals-killed?odyssey=nav%7Chead
“We’re convinced that we do not have any animals running at large. [The monkey] was in an area where one of the cats actually killed one of the monkeys and we feel he could have been eaten by one of the cats,” [Sheriff Lutz] said …
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44970708/ns/today-today_news/t/ohio-owner-exotic-animals-was-deep-debt/#.TqB8zXL6NnA
One monkey remained unaccounted for Wednesday night …
Overnight Tuesday and early Wednesday, sheriff’s deputies searched the eastern Ohio woods around the city of Zanesville with night-vision gear and patrolled in pickups, armed with shotguns. Flashing signs on the highways in eastern Ohio warned motorists Wednesday: “Caution. Exotic animals.” Schools were closed, and some frightened residents said they were keeping to their homes as sheriff’s deputies hunted the lions, tigers, leopards and grizzly bears.
“Yeah, there’s a lion on Mount Perry Road. … I just drove by and it walked out in front of me and was standing there under the street light,” one caller to 911 told deputies.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/20/us/ohio-animals-on-loose/index.html?iref=allsearch
Like Noah’s ark wrecking
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-18/exotic-animals-loose-ohio/50821092/1](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltdsmqyrDD1r0yysyo1_500.jpg)
