Bird on a wire

Everywhere and nowhere

Somewhere over Montana, I shudder in unfamiliar flight. My mind stalls in free fall, the soles of my feet push away awareness of the t-bar beneath them.

I almost never sleep on planes. Damn it. Behind closed lids I try to find the sky again.

Denied.

Soaring visions sucked back into droning headphones. Dry eyes open, darkness, rows of passengers unconscious, tired, drugged. Here and there movies on dimmed screens.

The reach for my phone, habit. Notifications in the timeless dark, unexpected.

Expected.

“Hi honey.” Mom sent the text an hour ago. “His struggle is over.”

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Twenty-four hours earlier, I think, I was also shoeless and high above the planet. Dozens of stories above the streets of Tokyo, the singers, pianists, conductors, musicians, directors, crew, and administration of the New National Theater Opera Studio were celebrating the success of our summer concert. Food and drink and conversation and photos and speeches flowed like water, like air, like music. We were brave through our lack of common language, the interpreters working overtime but also somehow less necessary, and at times I relaxed into my lack of comprehension with a kind of pleasure.

After weeks of effort, trust, frustration, triumph, excitement, connection, and anticipation, having made something beautiful together, our evening was one enormous outpouring of gratitude, an embrace of affection and admiration.

It was also goodbye.

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My friend Claudia once said traveling performers are like birds on a wire. We all land there from somewhere, she said. Maybe we’re flying together - we probably are - and then we all land on some wire and rest. We’re suspended for a little while, together. Then poof, gone again. Probably off to the same place. It’s hard to tell, she said.

She told me this one night in San Francisco, in the days when we’d come home after the opera and eat dinner at midnight crosslegged by the TV, watching Chinese and Korean soap operas. This night, the last before I left to move to New York, we drank too much and tried to put words to how our lives were beginning to take shape. I still remember the raging hangover of the next morning, and never repeated that mistake. But I did keep looking for home on a wire, suspended in the air as though the next takeoff might never come.

As though I could live forever on that high, thin line.

---

It will take a few weeks for his family to get here. Three continents. We’ll see you in a few days as planned. Good luck with the workshop! Love you.

Straight to rehearsal. Hugs from collaborators and colleagues. Handshakes with the performers. Then work. Listening. Doing the thing, as we say.

At one point I shook myself, jet lagged, and then was suddenly struck by how many communities intersected in that space, how many relationships. For me: Houston, New York, Little Rock, Vienna, Michigan, Cincinnati, DC. Students, colleagues, contestants, friends, strangers.

For all of us together, how many cities? how many lives?

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This time, after the good performance and the high and the embraces, there were no celebrations, just quick trips to the airport and the next places, New York, France, Italy, Minnesota. When I got to the rental counter, all they had left was an Audi, as if. I drove like I meant it to my little town, parking the ridiculous car next to the old post office. The river was high from the heavy summer rains. I checked into the Airbnb because it was too late to cancel, a tourist in my home place in a car I would never drive, tardy as always.

At Mom’s, we looked at pictures. I found one that fit one of my earliest memories, from a community theater production of Oklahoma. I was seven and Annie was five, and we both wore long granny dresses that mom sewed for us. I remember feeling fancy. I remember not knowing how life would go, knowing only just what it was.

Chuck was Will Parker in that production, paired with his wife as Ado Annie (my own dad was Judd Frye, and sang about his lonely room, but that’s another story). Chuck sang that everything’s up to date in Kansas City, in the years when he and his wife and my parents all sang in the church choir conducted by the chorus lady who would teach me a few years later how to play the piano for theater productions. Before Chuck and my mom would marry, before all my sibling’s kids were born, before all the funerals and soccer games and recitals I would miss, and the ones I would attend.

I remember the cold seats of the folding chairs in the little remodeled church, and the delicious confusion of knowing every real person on stage even as I believed with my whole heart in the made-up story they told, fascinated by their shape-shifting and trusting they would change back.

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Minnesota had family, but also work: more colleagues, students, friends, relationships shifted, deepened, transformed. Embraces, exclamations, a celebration in a borrowed space high above the city.

The class I led was in a stunning small chapel built into an addition that expanded a historic Minneapolis church. The new space, looking like the old space, held our music. The composer of two songs on the program sat in the crowd listening. Other composers and poets were elsewhere, or gone, yet they were all in the room with us because we had chosen them, all remembered and honored, alive for that moment in our embrace.

One of the duos performed a song with this poetry by Alan Ashton:

And I run trailing smoke

In the darkest night I’ve never seen

In tighter circles sending signals

To a sky that I cannot see…

…I deny I’m trailing smoke

But I am not no not on fire

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On my last day in Minnesota I went to watch my sister do a triathlon. Like last year, I was with Mom and Annie’s husband and son. The new tradition, so far, involves coffee and donuts and a great homemade sign and cheering for everybody, the fast and slow, old and young, competitive and casual. We moved around the track next to Lake Nokomis (daughter of the moon Nokomis) among the families and friends wearing matching tees, evidence of workplace solidarity and cancer survival and vaccine denial and LBGTQ love and Twin Cities stanning, and yelled encouragement to strangers briefly united by location and effort and desire.

I stood next to my mother, two times widowed, and my nephew, the age now that my mother was when she had me. I watched my strong sister run into the murky water, and remembered sitting on the cold tile of the house in St. Louis Park, cutting her hair with my kindergarten scissors, and mom in her robe in the doorway. I remember mom with the two of us in the basement during a storm singing who’s afraid of thunder, thunder’s just a lot of noise. I remember my tiny nephew in my sister’s kitchen in her first house, telling me about The Wizard of Oz in his eager, shy voice.

We stand on the edge of the lake looking for her, sister, wife, mother, daughter, lost in a sea of distant swimcaps, churning arms, and sun glinting off the lake, waiting for her to emerge again as herself, known and loved.

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The seatbelt sign went on somewhere over Oklahoma. The big man next to me closed his laptop and his eyes, straightening his right arm to brace his hand against the seat in front of him. Dramatic, perhaps, but we were in for an unpleasant few minutes. The flight attendants buckled in and fear rose under my sternum, yet the water in my plastic glass didn’t rise to so much as a mini-slosh.

Suspended high above the earth again, trailing smoke, not on fire, me and the other birds rode it out, waiting for the touchdown, for home, firm ground, and the embrace of someone close. We waited, shaken and uncomfortable and trusting, for that sweet place of repose, for a time of rest before the next departure.

Dedicated to Chuck Sandstrom; thanks for loving my mom. Thanks to Claudia and the Berg Kelly Bergs.