Two wishes

I have two wishes about my life and they both relate to experience with my mother.



First, I wish I had not been afflicted with asthma as a child. The agony of not being able to breathe is enough to have to endure without the additional consequences, both physical and mental, of being confined to the home, alone in trying to keep breathing, for longish periods of time. And the humiliation of feeling you were the only one in your school class experiencing this kind of suffering. There were no support groups then. My mother told me once, as consolation, that at least it kept me out of the military and perhaps serving and dying in Vietnam and this is true but, if given the choice again, I would take my chances with military service or look for a way to avoid it.



Second I would wish that I could have been a musician in the mode of say, Isaac Stern: a serious musician yet a showman who could also appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Not someone who functioned only in the elite world of classical music, but a kind of Everyman performer who could bridge the gap between the sublime and the ordinary, between the concert hall and the music hall. I wish I could have appreciated all classical music, the slow movements, the atonal and opera as well as the swirling symphonies of triumph and celebration: Mahler as well as Mozart. Yes...I would have wanted to be a more mature person.

But we have to live with the personality we are given and make the best of it. Sometimes, thinking back, I can't believe how callow I was in youth. I can only hope I'm a little better now and that those I hurt or disappointed forgive me.



Music relates so much to life and expresses the ineffable more convincingly than words as anyone who has ever experienced the rush of exuberance from the overture to a Broadway musical (like Fiddler, like the Lion King) knows. And there are almost countless others, too, with each individual having their favorite.