An Orchestra of Hands

 On YouTube, watching Ana Vidovic play classical guitar, I am struck by how her hands manipulate the strings seemingly independently of one another, with different kinds of finger motions—ten of them, each moving in its own way at the same time. (Well, actually nine fingers, since her left thumb is behind the neck of the instrument supporting it.)

It reminds me of watching the members of an orchestra playing a complex piece, directed, of course, by one person. Each player seems to be independent of the others, playing a different tune in different time, only occasionally glancing at the conductor. I’ve marveled for many years at how a hundred people could play music so incredibly synchronized with each other to create sublime sounds. I’m sure that it takes practice, more and more practice for each player, both individually and ensemble.

The same requirement holds for a guitar player who strives for perfection. Practice. Of course skill and talent are also required. Skill comes with practice, but talent seems to lie in a separate realm, not explainable even by the musician herself, a mysterious quality that only some people possess in differing degrees. What intrigues me is how individual fingers learn their timing, pressure, even vibrato so that these things become automatic and unconscious.

Watching Ana Vidovic’s left hand during a complicated passage is astounding. At the same time, of course, her right hand is actually strumming or plucking the different strings—the fingers of the left hand determining the length of each string and therefore the pitch of the tone produced. Harmony is produced by multiple strings plucked at the same time, each one set to its own pitch by the position of a fingertip pressing a particular fret.

I get the same feeling watching young Alexander Malofeev on the piano play Rachmaninoff: a human cannot possibly, I think, pay attention to all ten fingers, at some places in those concerti.

With practice, playing a guitar or piano, or any instrument for that matter, involves a lot of muscle memory—just as does riding a bicycle or driving a car—actions that become almost automatic, without conscious thought. Benjamin Zander, a British conductor, gave a TED Talk in 2008 in which he spoke of teaching young piano students and noticing that in the beginning they tended to nod on each note (“impulses”), but then as they progressed they tended to nod less frequently—on phrases, then on bars, and so on, with the intervening notes relegated to less conscious, perhaps muscle, memory.

Watching Ana Vidovic play her guitar makes this process evident. Listening to an orchestra and paying attention to separate instruments reveals the same phenomenon. Our bodies perform countless actions almost without us noticing. Our conscious minds, our awareness moment to moment, are but a fragment of what we do, whether we are skilled musicians or ordinary people doing ordinary things.

I’m coming to appreciate how miraculous this body of mine really is, without micro-managing. Even at my advanced age, I notice many actions that take place without my awareness.

Perhaps “my awareness” is given more importance than it deserves. Most of the activity in my body is beyond my control. My heart, for example, at its nominal rate of sixty-five beats per minute, goes through its cycle about ninety-three thousand times in a day. I can’t remember the last time I was even aware of its activity. Millions of microbes living in my gut process the food I eat every day, without my conscious help.

The activities I carry out with conscious intention may seem the most important in my life, but all the rest of the supporting functions actually make those activities possible. Were I to become proficient in playing the guitar or the piano, a huge number of separate and combined functions would come into play.

Those invisible functions enable me to live. I have no idea what neurological functions enable me to even wonder about them all.

Performing Western classical music, at least, requires a high degree of manual dexterity, as well as sensitivity to the emotional subtleties we call “artistry.” We can only be grateful that there are people who are willing to put in the time, effort and skill to bring to the rest of us one of the highest realms of human accomplishment.

I Am So Lucky To Be White

 I became conscious of my height about the time it peaked in my late teens. When I joined the Coast Guard at seventeen I felt, as did most of my company, innocent and confused by the demands of the institution. We struggled together to conform to the expectations of our trainers and officers. But when they lined us up to drill on the marching field, they arranged us by height, and most of the time I led my column. I didn’t ask why, but privately I felt somehow better than the others.

After boot camp, I was sent to a training school in Connecticut to learn about engines, my chosen field. I learned along with my classmates all the details of internal combustion engines; how to tear them down and put them together again. We compiled our new knowledge into notebooks, ostensibly for future reference in the field. Due primarily to the schools I had attended up to that point, I had a verbal advantage over many of my classmates. On the basis of my test scores and the elaborate notebook I had prepared, I ended the course at the head of my class. Privately, I felt better than them.

During my high school years, the United States was at war, and we were deluged by propaganda to keep us focused on winning the war. (It wasn’t called propaganda, a term that was used by our leaders to describe the efforts of the enemy countries to influence their citizens in their own agendas.) A large proportion of our propaganda stressed that we were better than them, more powerful and more moral in character. Along with everybody I knew, I felt lucky to be an American. We were better than them.

Recently, a lot has been written about racism in our country. I’ve counted myself “liberal” and morally superior to the white supremacists and alt-right nationalists that have attracted so much attention. I’ve sympathized with “Black Lives Matter” protests, and with most of the identity politics that have been written about and circulated in social media. I’ve taken the time to seriously consider the ramifications of Black reparations proposals by such writers as Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin. While I almost never encounter Black people in my daily life, I have felt confident that my viewpoints and even my actions are blameless regarding race.

It was only while reading Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility that I began to recognize my “whiteness” and my participation, however unconscious, in the systemic racism in Western culture. I may have condemned for many years the colonialism by European countries, and sometimes even the colonialism inherent in the United States relationships with places such as the Philippines and Puerto Rico. I may have cheered hearing the recent news of a possible new cure for sickle cell anemia because it could relieve a lot of mostly Black people of horrible suffering. My ego is rewarded by occasional thoughts that I’m on “the right side” of current controversies. I’m better than them.

In the middle of last night it occurred to me: I’m so lucky to be white. Like being tall, it’s not because of anything I’ve done, but it brings me advantages and prestige. I don’t have to face some of the things that non-whites encounter every day. I don’t have to live with the daily fear that Nina Simone spoke of in a recent documentary. When I am stopped by the police for a minor traffic violation, I can be polite and expect them to be polite. I don’t have to be afraid of being beaten or shot. I can rent a car or buy a home or walk through a neighborhood without being watched through closed window drapes.

I need to pay more attention to the plights of others not so lucky, and do what I can to nudge the system in the right direction. It isn’t easy because most of it is invisible to me. It’s just the way the world works—for a white man.

I need to remember more often how lucky I am. I need to become more aware of my part in the injustices of the world.

Face Down

I turned my face to the side to see a pair of legs appear in the middle of the street. I let my head rest on the edge of the curb, watching blood drip over the edge into the gutter.

“Oh, my word,” someone said, “call nine one one.”

Judith had a hand on my arm and she was crying. “Oh, Don! Oh, God!”

I could remember tripping, my left shoe getting caught between my right shoe and the curbing as it swung forward, and in the next instant my face smashing into the curb. I didn’t remember falling.

Judith tugged on my arm. “Can you sit up?”

“No,” I answered, “I want to stay here for a minute.”

“Okay. Let me have your glasses.” Then she said she was going to get something for the blood. I could see that a small crowd had gathered in the street, everybody talking. One pair of legs ended in bare feet, with bright red toenails. With some effort I turned my head enough to see people’s faces, some I recognized as our neighbors. Blood continued to drip profusely into the gutter.

We had begun a morning walk with a bright sun and a mild breeze. Judith loves to get out on mornings like that for a walk around the neighborhood. The temperature was about seventy degrees, and I had breathed deeply as we started out. We were about a block from home when I tripped.

It happened so fast! One instant we were walking, and then the next instant I was on the pavement, my face feeling the rough concrete and pebbles.

Soon Judith returned, breathing hard from running. She handed me a small towel , and I held it against my face. I heard someone say, “Here they come.”

I looked back up the street to see two men approaching, carrying heavy bags over their shoulders. I wondered where they came from. Close to me, they began asking me questions. “Did you faint?” I said no. “Any difficulty moving your feet or your hands?” No. “Can you sit up?”

Still holding the towel to my dripping nose, I struggled to sit up on the curb. Somebody gave me a hand, and in a moment I was upright. One of the men opened his bag, took out a blood pressure monitor, and wrapped the cuff around my arm. “That hurt?” No. “Do you know your normal blood pressure?” About one fifty.

When he finished, he said, “One fifty two over ninety.” We agreed that that was good, and he removed the cuff. I showed him my finger, which I had noticed was badly torn open somehow. He wrapped a Band-Aid around it. “Have somebody look at that. It’ll probably need some stitches.”

I looked around at the people nearby, nodding when they spoke to me, but my mind was still foggy. I heard somebody say that the ambulance was on its way, and somebody else say it wasn’t necessary. I think that was Judith. “I’ll take him to the urgent care,” she said. “I’ll get the car.”

The emergency crew waited for her to drive up to us, then one of them took my arm as I struggled to stand. I felt someone else grasp my other arm, and they supported me while I made my way to Judith’s car. One opened the door for me. “Thank you,” I said.

“No problem,” he replied. I thought of all the times I had seen the EMT trucks in our community. Ours is a co-op with 350 residence units, all of which are owned by people over 50 years of age. Emergencies are more common than in most neighborhoods.

The crowd was still standing there as we drove away, passing the big fire truck that was parked a couple of doors down, its engine idling loudly. I hadn’t seen the truck arrive.

I was feeling pampered. My forehead and nose ached, and I was still dripping blood into the towel. Judith handed me a face mask. “I remembered our masks, at least,” she said. We’d been walking without covid masks, as we usually do since there are seldom very many people out on the streets.

“I can’t put it on this way,” I said, with the mask in one hand and still holding the towel to my face with the other.

When we pulled up at the urgent care office, it was closed. “It’s Saturday morning,” she said. “Why are they closed? The sign says they should be open.”

We sat there for a moment, and then I remembered that there was another urgent care facility a few blocks away. When we got there, it was also closed. “Because of covid,” a sign said. Judith took out her phone and Googled for other nearby facilities. Finding one in Brighton, about twenty minutes away, she called them and found that they were open.

Inside, there was one other patient in the waiting room, but when they saw me they immediately escorted me to a treatment room, where they directed me to sit on an examining table. The bleeding had all but stopped.

A doctor came in and began inspecting my face. “Are you on a blood thinner?” No.

He gently mopped my abrasions with alcohol-soaked gauze, then with a glue dispenser touched several places on my face and glued together the torn finger. He said he needed to sew up my lip, and brought a kit over to me. “Lie down,” he said.

Other than a sharp poke with a thin lidocaine needle, the procedure was painless. He took only a single stitch with a very fine suture. “In a week, have your primary care doctor remove the stitch, or come back here and we’ll do it,” he said. “You can take Tylenol or something similar if you need it.”

Turning to the door, he said “You’re all set. Wait here for the nurse.”

The nurse came in and took my blood pressure. “One thirty-four over eighty,” she said. “That’s better than you got from the EMT, isn’t it?” She gave me a sheet of paper with details of the visit, and escorted me to the exit. “Your wife is waiting in the car,” she said. “I hope you have a better day from here on.” She smiled and held the door for me.

I put on a mask and went out to the car.

Later, Judith took a photograph of my face to show me the extent of my purple “raccoon eyes.” My forehead, nose and upper lip were badly swollen.

“But my glasses were not even broken,” I remarked. Indeed, they didn’t even show a scratch.

My face after two days