upbeat@upbeattimes.com Whatever Happened To…


Glenn Ellen, CA. ~ I used to take a music class at the JC where I would play the piano in a student concert every semes- ter. I have to work very hard to get a piece right. I don’t have a solid sense of time value, my fin- gers are clumsy and slow, and my under-sized hand never manages much


more of a spread than past an octave. I have a terrible case of stage fright. My heart begins to pound and notes that I swore were always there suddenly disappear.


It’s impossible to


play expressively when my fingers have dissolved into Jell- O. So when I take on a piece, I need to practice very hard. It takes me hours, days, weeks, months and I must work two hundred percent to get it eighty percent right.


One semester I had a concert


at Newman hall at 2:00 in the afternoon. I was prepared to play a few Beethoven baga- telles. I arrived an hour early and went to the library to kill some time. I got to Newman hall at 1:30, and tried to keep myself calm and optimistic. I was around fifth on the pro- gram.


The program started


and the second player was up on stage when I happened to


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glance down at my music along with a few notebooks I had in my lap. The music was gone! I quickly snuck out of the au- ditorium and rushed to the library. I must have left it in the bathroom, but when I checked, noth- ing was there. Back and forth, like a rat in a maze, I went to the front desk


and kept going through the li- brary, thinking that if I looked enough times, my Beethoven was bound to show but— de nada! I went back to Newman auditorium and whispered to my teacher that I had some- how lost my music. He said there was a possibility there might be a copy in his files in our classroom. Amazingly, he fiddled through his key chain and produced two keys—one to the door of the room, the other for the file. Dashing like a madwoman, I set a world re- cord for sprinting to his office, looked around and miraculous- ly, unbelievably, impossibly, found a copy of the Beethoven. Clutching it like the treasure of the lost ark, I arrived back at the concert on time. Despite my frazzled emotional state, I managed to give a creditable performance. Now I look back and won- der what ever happened to that music. How could I have lost


what was for me, the most pre- cious thing in the world at the time? Whenever I have a con- cert to play, I nervously look at the music clutched in hand and wonder if it will vanish be- fore my eyes. Where could that Beethoven piece have gone to? Where is it now? Is it in the same place where my daugh- ter’s precious gold watch or my husband wedding ring are? Or where I managed to lose two brand new coats one winter? Okay, jewelry and coats might have slipped off or might have been left somewhere, but what about my favorite pair of jeans? You don’t just take off your pants somewhere and go home without them, or do you? What about the shirt and tie I bought for my husband one day, hung them in the closet, and couldn’t find them the day after and nev- er saw them again.


I understand that the uni-


verse is mostly all space and very little matter—-that if you were to take out the space of all the atoms that make up the Empire State Building, you’d be left with only a grain of rice worth of material. So perhaps one day, when I cross into the fourth, fifth, or sixth dimen- sion and gingerly step into the warped and bending space/time continuum, I’ll discover, peer- ing into a little piece of rice I’m just about to bite into, my music, pants, shirt, tie, coat, and jewelry and I’ll finally be reconciled with the mysteries of the inexplicable.


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