Keeping Time Over Time

 

Clap, clap…. clap, clap… clap, clap.  Our small child hands mimicked those of the teacher on the third floor of an old sandstone building that housed the Brampton Police on the ground floor.  When I was young, my parents would drop me off with another older child on Saturday mornings at the curb outside of this old fashioned building.  I didn’t know this boy but I now guess that my parents had made an agreement with his parents to drive him to class. He and I would climb the circular stairs past the police whom we could see through a window, up into the turret.  It always felt slightly dangerous to my five-year-old self to be out in the world with police and criminals, climbing up into a turret to listen to music and clap out the rhythm.

These classes were soon replaced by piano lessons with a teacher called Mrs. Stone.  She thought it was hilarious that I was “small for my age” and that my parents were from England.  She repeatedly called me “Sharon old bean” followed by harsh laughter.  I didn’t like this woman but I quietly tolerated her judgements of me.  This time the classes were down some stairs into a dark basement with an old dark brown upright piano and a menacing woman who seemed to me to be quite large.  Mrs. Stone taught me to count out the rhythm as I played the notes.  One and two and three and four and.  Or one-two-three, one-two-three for a waltz.

My father’s first and last love is music.  That is where he finds beauty in a world that is often ugly and unfair in his view.  As a child I was routinely asked “pop questions” during a meal.  “What is the time signature of this piece?” he would ask out of the blue.  Or “Who is the composer?”  I was the dutiful first-born child and so I did my best to get it right.  I gradually found myself figuring out the time signature of music just in case I was quizzed suddenly.  In fact, I still do find myself silently counting out the time signature when I listen to music.

When I attended high school, my father required that I sign up for music class.  To my great dismay, I was assigned a clarinet.  I remember sucking on the reed before it could be attached to the mouthpiece and the horrible feel of it against my tongue.  It was the oral equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard and I still shiver to think about it.  The recorders we had been given in grade school were a bit of an introduction but getting the correct embouchure was difficult.  Because we were using our mouths to blow into the instrument, counting out loud was impossible and we were taught to tap one foot to keep time.  With the piano of course this was impossible because the feet were used to work the three peddles.  It felt somehow naughty or perhaps vulgar to be tapping one’s foot but dutiful still, I learned to do it.  Our Polish music teacher Mr. Liedke disliked me as much as I disliked the clarinet and after 2 ½ years I quit that class and the clarinet.

It was in high school that my father gave me his old classical guitar.  Since the music I loved was accompanied by guitar, this was a big gift.  I learned the chords from the chord charts in the music books and I could learn the melody by playing it on the piano.  Gordon Lightfoot and Cat Stevens taught me the rest as did some friends.  I had sung all my life at home and in a few choirs so that was no problem.  Suddenly music was freedom.  I taught myself and played music that spoke to me.  I learned to use a capo and transpose chords to match my voice.  I had finally found my instrument.

I played and sang in various places over the years, but mostly at home.  I still played the piano occasionally.  I learned to lead others in singing and worked to improve my singing voice once again on my own. A natural mimic, I learned to sing by copying other singers.   In my fifties, I decided to get a djembe and joined a drum circle.  The African call and response rhythms were fascinating and I discovered that after a lifetime of “keeping time”, that I could do it without thinking.  I found that I would relax as I drummed.  The rhythm bypassed my conscious brain as if my ears were directly connected to my hands. I could easily copy any rhythm.  I also discovered the inclusivity of rhythm instruments.  Anyone can join in.  I enjoyed the fluidity of a drum circle and learning from the other drummers.

In my sixties, I joined an Indigenous hand drum group and learned how to play a hand drum and sing songs in Anishinaabemowin.  We use either a single drum beat or a double heart beat.  This is where I learned the power of people drumming together like one drum, like one heart.  Once again, I found that I could join in with others without thinking about it, allowing me to learn the songs and the words.  We often played outside and I learned the freedom of singing loudly in that space, sometimes over the sound of cars on the road.  Our circle can include everyone, it is just a matter of stepping back a few steps to make the circle larger, more spacious, especially if we are outside.

My father is now ninety-four and confined to a wheelchair.  I visit him and play classical music from my iPod into the microphone on the hearing device that the nursing home supplies.  I watch his hand moving ever so slightly, keeping the beat.  Now, I ask him, “Do you think this is ¾ time?”  He pauses, listens and then agrees, “I think it is.”  He still asks me who the composer is, because now he’s not sure.  Except for Bach.  He always recognizes Bach, his favourite.  I have sat for hours doing this over the past five years.  Time enough to feel gratitude for those rhythm classes he drove me to as a young child and the piano lessons he paid for, the symphony concerts, an opera and a ballet that he took me to.  I now see it as a huge gift that has accompanied me throughout my life. 

The first rhythm that I heard was my mother’s heartbeat as I developed from a fetus to a baby.  And perhaps I could hear my father playing the piano while I was still in the womb or my mother singing.  Her heartbeat, the rhythm of my breath and my footsteps and the music that is always playing in my head, the rhythm of the Earth’s heartbeat, my electromagnetic field, the sound of horses’ hooves and the waves crashing on the shore, I am surrounded by rhythms externally and internally.  They keep me steady, they keep me alive, they bring comfort and they remind me that we are connected to everything else by rhythms.  This I have learned over my six and a half decades.

And so, on this Thanksgiving weekend, I am thankful to my parents for this gift.  And I am thankful for all the rhythms that I am aware of and for those that I am unaware of, for this sign of order in the chaos, for these metronomes of the music of my life.