sometimes prayer is like those souvenir coin machines. you put in your twenty-six cents and the gears start to turn, and the arms and levers begin to pump behind the glass, and you watch as the whole mechanism churns and creaks, and you try for a minute to find where the penny is. but the trick is practiced and ancient, and it hides the penny from view, and with nothing else to look at, you become engrossed in the mechanics, in the shine of the brass wheels, in the size and strength and intricacy of the parts necessary to melt and press just this one, insignificant coin. you start wondering about who invented this technology and why--was it only for entertainment value, or does it ever perform some greater task? was this a source of genuine wonder for people at an earlier point in history? how much of it is really for the sake of pressing the penny, and how much is just for show?

and then the gears stop, and the penny drops out, and you look at its stretched and flattened backside longer than the newly embossed side, because more fascinating than what the penny has become, is comparing that to what it used to be.

why life is funny

it's one of the more obvious statements you can make, and i'd discourage its use. but sometimes the truth of it presses so heavily that you have to either laugh, or scream, or exhale it. life is funny. it's a fucking gut-buster.

not long ago, while i was in the middle of a busy afternoon at work, i learned from a coworker that i had somehow become the center of a really pristine little scandal, as childish and cute and nearly innocuous as a kitten yet to be declawed. it remains an utter mystery to me how this rumor ever got started, since i tend not to confide in coworkers. i traced it from my source to her source, the floor manager, who informed me of the breadth that this scandal had reached--"everybody knows about it," she told me, "everybody's shocked."

"it's not true!" i told her. it was so untrue that i was laughing as i told her.

it's all one, her shrug indicated. "well, everybody thinks it is, and they're shocked."

i learned that her source was the general manager, with whom i have the most spartan of all my work relationships. his speculation was the funniest part of all to me--if i had anything of an intimate nature to confide, i would sooner whisper it in the ear of the geriatric pervert who sits in a camp chair on the sidewalk outside our building, sipping old-fashioneds and listening to smooth jazz while assessing the curvatures of women passing by, than to my high-strung, machinistic GM.

so i enjoyed another hearty laugh and assured her that it wasn't true, at all, and that if she heard the rumor again she should let the tattling parties know the latest and final word on the subject. i thought about telling the other person that the rumored scandal involved--because, of course, there was another person--but i decided against it; i simply hugged it to myself.

upon leaving work, which i did just as the sun was setting, i came around the corner and saw two men working on a boat. this sight was remarkable not only because it was on an urban side street, with no bodies of water larger than a parking lot puddle for thirty miles in any direction, but also because the boat was an arresting hue of turquoise green, and the men were an oddly matched pair--a guy of about forty with strong shoulders and sandy hair, and an overweight Asian guy with protuberant moles on his neck and a certain cast to his eyes that i took to suggest some feebleness of mind. (first impressions are necessarily judgmental.)

i liked the color of the boat, so i let my head turn to admire it as i walked past. of course i smiled politely when i met the eyes of these men working on it. but as i passed, i heard, "hello! excuse me!" i turned around and the feeble-minded Asian man lumbered toward me.

(i can't help it--i thought, "rabbits!" and felt a little bit of panic--blame it on john steinbeck.)

"what's your name?" he asked me. his voice was deep and thick.

"my name's bird," i said. "what's yours?"

"kingsley," he said. in addition to his moles, he seemed to have a few polished wooden claws, as long as my little finger, protruding in a pattern from the base of his neck. i can't explain that one--i didn't want to stare.

but he was staring, like a puppy at a pork chop being dangled over its head. "you're a beautiful woman," he murmured to me.

i almost started to laugh. "thank you," i said. "that's kind of you to say." and then i felt about ready to pop, so i turned around and booked it to my car.

i was trying to explain this to a friend i saw later that day. i said, "life is funny," but when he asked me why, i couldn't tell him--not completely. i couldn't tell him that i have spent my life feeling inconsequential and ugly, and to be confronted with big Lichtensteinian scenes indicating the contrary was absolutely ticklish to me. my insecurities were the backbone of the whole story, the canvas behind the Ben-Day dots; without them, the story was incomplete.

this is what turned life's funny on its edge, that summer evening, when hilarious began to be ironic, when the petals fell, when the rust spots started to show.

how we appear, and how we are treated, are delicate and dangerous things, to be sure. but the things we cannot bring ourselves to tell are the most dangerous of all. they are weapons we can only use on ourselves.

magic words, vol. 9

"What was your mother? A lioness!" (Ezekiel 19.2)

left behind

i can remember this piano recital that i performed in, as a kid. i was probably eleven years old. we had just moved to a new city and i was studying under a teacher whose approach was way more intense than any i'd encountered before. he wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and always a white oxford shirt and pants that appeared as if he'd slept in them. his hair was black and unruly, and his body was lank and sort of unwashed-looking. i can remember seeing the cavity of his pale chest through the nearly transparent shirt, and thinking, "what kind of man is that?" he had two kids, little wisps of black hair and olive skin that better resembled their Taiwanese mother, with whom he invariably bickered if she made a rare appearance. the kids, too, he would maniacally hustle out of the practice room whenever they ventured down to spy on his students.

i can't remember his last name, which i'm sure is what i called him by. i know his first name was david because i would hear my mom discussing him with my dad, as in "bird doesn't like david very much" or "david's students do competitions and get scholarships." she was right in both instances. david's students were mostly little prodigies, the kind that TV movies get made about later, cipher-faced urchins whose fingers ran like those wind-up Matchbox cars, and stopped as abruptly when they were through with their concertos as if they'd run into a wall. and i did not like him.

he always seemed occupied by something outside of my piano lesson. i can remember that he never looked me in the eyes. his arms would windmill broadly as he shouted "more! more!", in direction that i was supposed to play louder, and then he would hunker over like Quasimodo and murmur "less! less!" it seems to me now that he was more occupied with the technique than with the song itself, though i couldn't have said so at the time. i would only have said that piano lessons were a drag and that mozart's fantasia in d minor was not, and was unlikely ever to be, a personal favorite.

fantasia in d minor was the song he elected for me to play at the recital, which meant that not only did i have to be good at it, but i also had to memorize it.

i'd been through dozens of recitals by age eleven. i didn't get stage fright, and if i messed up the performance it was because i got distracted or bored. i liked the applause, and the cookies at the end of the event, and i always brought a book to read during the ages and ages it took to give the rest of the students their moment in front of the camcorders. nonetheless, i dreaded this recital because i really hated playing fantasia in d minor, probably for no other reason than that it was in a minor key and had some tricky runs that david's ungentle persuasion had set me against ever playing correctly. if i got the fingering right, the rhythm was off, and if i fell into the right rhythm, my fingers buckled like a foal's knees. and the pall over the whole affair was that i didn't care, and felt the guilt that i ought to.

the recital was in the small auditorium of a high school or community college. there were dark blue velvet curtains, and the piano was not as grand as the one in david's studio. i sat beside my mom in the back rows, and propped my feet up on the seat in front of me; as the first pocket-sized soloist took the bench, i opened my book. i don't remember anything else--what i had been made to wear, what book i was reading, how i knew when it was my turn, or even setting my fingers to the piano--until i was about sixteen bars into the performance.

i can recall the slow revelation, as i was playing, that this was not only a piece, but a song. i saw that it was a very lyrical and emotional song. without knowing what in it was moving me, or why it never had moved me before, i suddenly felt myself caring about the space between the phrases, about the pressure with which my fingers fell from one note to the next, and wanting urgently to express a "more" and a "less" that had nothing to do with windmilling arms and the inscrutable lenses that shied from a direct gaze. suddenly, i wanted to know what the music was trying to say, and convey its voice faithfully. i wanted to agree with it, to cooperate in making the beautiful thing hidden in the notation i had memorized.

but then came the long, cascading runs; my heart sank. i hadn't cared, and i wasn't worthy to play them right, and they were going to let me down now--justly, because i had let them down. i limped down the network of intervals, shuffled through to the end of the piece, took my perfunctory bow with the browbeaten attitude of the prodigal son, and went back to my seat.

i found out later that the recital had, in fact, been a competition, and that david had told my mom i should have won it if i'd practiced more. as it was, some eight-year-old Taiwanese kid took the scholarship money home. my mom asked why i hadn't practiced more.

i told her, "i did practice. i just don't like him."

also, i wanted to say, i hadn't known there was money riding on my performance. and i hadn't known anything of what mozart or d minor meant, until it was too late.