Performance is tomorrow. I am almost ready.
About this time of year, when the days have grown longer, I sigh to myself when the subway car rumbles over the Charles river. This is the one point on my trip to work where we are above ground, and I can see the sun glinting off the Charles, and smile at the bright blue sky that will carry on its merry vigil without my gaze as I pass my workday, windowless.
If I were at home, or if it were a few years ago, I would, on a day like today, be composing. I like to start my composition by sitting down at the keyboard and improvising. After years of this, my fingers have begun to fall in a particular pattern. It’s “my sound” now, I suppose. I can always reproduce this; it’s not something I need even to think about, it is woven in.
But today I am not composing. Today, I am fixing null pointer exceptions. Today, coming into work, I saw a small kid on the subway this morning with a neck brace, who looked pretty much like Harry Potter. For some reason, I wanted to know the story of that kid, and why he ended up being prodded off the train by his mother as the train stopped at Charles station. He never talked, but I felt sorry for and proud of this kid.
This isn’t entirely uncommon. I’ve always enjoyed “people watching,” as my mother calls it. When I was a kid, she’d take me out on Thursday nights, and we’d always do a good deal of it. Mother and son, bonding in the act of watching other people, and wondering.
The Boston subway is a wonderful place to do this, as a huge cross-section of the population uses it every day. You see hobos, financial managers, students, and construction workers. Some people wear their identity; I suppose they have an equally strong desire to be noticed and perceived by other people as I do notice and perceive them.
Other people, like the kid in the neck brace, are mysteries. I can look at how they are dressed and how they behave, and let my mind go off on a small fantasy about their lives. I imagine who they are, where they are going, and what they are thinking about. And then they are gone.
Most people I only observe once. A few I’ve seen for a number of times, and a few of those I’ve been watching for years now. Some of them I give names to, such as Little Goth Girl and most of the subway musicians, but most don’t have special names. I recognize them by sight, note their presence, and dive back into my own inner imagination.
From a completely utilitarian point of view, I can say that it gives me something to occupy myself when I am traveling. From an artistic point of view, I could say that I am collecting new experiences to digest and synthesize into some future work. Perhaps this is my own form of social deviance. I like to think of it as a low-impact form of introducing some randomness into my life. A way to constantly adjust my rigid daily rounds, to make them shimmer. A way to grow ever so slightly.
Sometimes when I improvise, my fingers slip from their normal place, and I get a new chord. Sometimes it’s a good chord, and eventually it gets woven into my sound.
