It’s an overcast Sunday in May, graduation day at SUNY New Paltz, a slight chill in the air, typical of upstate New York on the cusp of spring and summer.  The sky is not so much threatening as it is filled with anticipation. At least it’s not raining.

The keynote speaker does what all keynote speakers do well in reminding the graduates that endings and beginnings are all of a piece.  Today is a really, really important day, the beginning of the rest of your life. College was a set-up, at its best the tightrope strung just high enough above the safety net; at its worst the safety net too torn and tattered to even catch an illusion.  When you’re twenty-something, anxious to move on after four (or more) years of studying (and partying), all those speeches and awards, the music and the marching, can feel endless. When you’re sixty-something, a guest at the ceremonies, that sneaky suspicion – if I only knew then what I know now – creeps up on you, demanding that you listen with a little more attention.

There is humor in the keynote speech, an allusion or two to pop culture,  an appeal to always value the importance of art in our lives, and a kicker phrase –

What would you try if you knew you could not fail?

To my niece, and the friends graduating with her, there’s no time like the future, even in a world threatened by a disregard fueled with greed. You can see the way it registers in their faces: I made it this far, what’s to stop me now?

A man puts his hand to his forehead, a salute as the national anthem is played.  In the row in front of me is a family – mother and father,  sister of the graduate standing next to her grandmother.  Everyone wants a better view, cameras at the ready.

I get up, take a break, walk around. An usher hands me a card.  I ask if I need it to get back in. “No,” she says. “It’s for your memory.”  I’m so in the moment I assume there’s something on the card that will help me find my way back to my seat, in case I wander too far.

For my memory.

This is the reason I’m here.  For someone’s memory, even if not my own.  For the bittersweet joy of it all, the shared rite of passage, this one with its ringing reminder that possibility is more a see-saw than an endless sea of hope.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

I learned to play piano on a cardboard keyboard.

Three panels that folded in on themselves, easy to tuck between the books and notebooks I carried back and forth to school, spread out on the table at home when I needed to practice. This is not the voice of nostalgia, just simple reality, the way it was.  Piano lessons were being offered at school, in the mid-1950s. I wanted to learn to play, so we met every week, a group of like-minded music lovers, taking turns sitting at the piano in the auditorium, the real deal, ivory in place of cardboard. If I showed enough interest, maybe I’d get a piano one day.

A good friend of my father’s had a son who was blind. It amazed me to listen to him play, sound and touch rolled into his fingers, nothing he needed to see, except what he pictured in his mind. He was musically gifted. I would practice hard, become good enough. One day, maybe months into my lessons, I came home after school, no expectation that it would be a day different from any other, a snack before homework. Certain surprise moments are indelibly imprinted, this one as vivid in memory as the day it happened, an upright piano, a gift from my grandmother, imposing itself in the living room.  The upright would one day be replaced by a spinette, more compact and richer in sound.  A small plaster bust of Beethoven would sit on the piano, a reminder not only of genius but also of poignancy and the power to imagine. If I could not fathom composing music without actually hearing the notes, all I had to was look over at the statuette.

Practicing scales on the piano in a small Brooklyn apartment takes more courage than one might imagine.  Hard to pretend you’re not being listened to. “Play ‘Pagliacci,’” my mother would call out, by which she meant “Vesti La Giubba,” the heart-wrenching aria about the clown crying inside/laughing on the outside; and this from my father, a regular comedian: “Do you know ‘The Road to Mandalay’? Take it.” Nobody had to ask me to play Chopin, my favorite. And all bets were off re: who’s listening? when my brother began playing drums.

I left the piano behind when I moved out on my own, the apartment I first lived in too small and my distractions too great.  The time would come, and with it the space, a larger studio, when my spinette, unplayed for too long would find its way back to me.  My mother would rather have shipped me the Baldwin baby grand she was forever beating herself up about not buying when the opportunity came her way.  The price, a deal if ever there was one, was no match for her daughter’s resistance to a large piano in a small apartment.

Marriage, a child, another move, it was all too much for the spinette. And yet, irony of ironies, one day I walk into my house, no expectation that it would be a day unlike any other, to find a piano – a Baldwin baby grand, to boot – in the alcove where it was always meant to be.

Sometimes when I would sit down to play, my dog would come over, place her two front paws on the piano bench, lift one to my arm.  What sounds beautiful (to me) is too much for her sensitive ears.  So maybe I don’t play as much as I like to, but I do play. The dog is gone now, yet somehow I still feel her paw on my arm.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

A large hatbox, tattered and patterned in flowers, sits on a shelf behind a wall where we store things. Today is the day I decide to throw it out, move its contents, old photographs, to a sturdier box.

I take a handful at a time, determined not to be sidetracked by curiosity, almost reflexive in the way it directs me to stop and peruse.  Memory is jarred, the recognition of faces that play tricks with time in revealing younger selves poised and posed.  It takes a certain patience to label and organize photos. The ones still in envelopes from the photo lab where they were sent to be developed years and years ago, negatives intact, at least comprise a grouping that defines some event, the smiles and hugs and candid camera moments brought back in a flash, living color even if a bit faded.  The ones in a jumble, mostly old black and whites, some sepia, edges perforated, fascinate me most. They are the ones taken by my father, or my mother, or some aunt or uncle or friend of theirs, passed along, tossed into the box, proof of those moments dimmed by time and the crush of memories. If I look closely, I may recognize a face, marvel that I can dwell on a scene from a past that belongs to me, in a way, even if I never had any part in it.  Feel a certain sadness at the simple truth it reveals: without my father, or my mother, or an aunt or uncle or friend of theirs, I am no more than a stranger to the story revealed in the photograph. I can only imagine it, and I do that well.

Here’s one: my mother sits on a chaise, my father on another. She is smiling, almost laughing, happy. So is he. On the back of each photograph, in the clear slant of her handwriting,  are words that place the photographs in time and space. Miami Beach, Florida. Hotel Embassy. Nov. 27 to Dec. 11, 1948.  She has even taken the time to write an address – 30^th St. and Collins Ave.  – and, for no other reason, I imagine, than to make the record complete, she has put her name (Florence) and his name (Larry) in the bottom-left corner of their corresponding photos. This would have been their honeymoon.  A year later, on December 12^th, they would celebrate my birth. Many years later my mother would make a request, no more anniversary dinners, no more cards or gifts on Nov. 27^th.  All the more reason I take a child’s pleasure, and a woman’s, in seeing them young and happy and vibrant, maybe even in love.

I place the photos back into the box, no idea what I’ll eventually do with them, struck by the unsettling reality that whatever sentimental value Florence and Larry on their honeymoon may have to me will be lost on my daughter, who barely knew them.  We all have our ways of cataloging our lives, reference points for some late-night reminiscing or the belief that a future generation will be glad for this glimpse of us, made easier, if less tangible, by the digital world.  Right now it’s easier for me to hedge, move the photos from box to box,  let time and circumstance play their part in determining which things demand being held onto and which beg to be let go.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .