MINA DIARIES: on convergence
I think I knew from a young age that I liked working with my hands, but not necessarily in the sense most people think of this concept. I didn’t want to be an auto mechanic or an electrician or a handywoman or anything like that, I didn’t have the sort of mind that was curious about taking things apart and investigating their inner workings. Mechanical things either worked or they didn’t as far as I was concerned, and if they didn’t, someone had better come around and deal with it. I knew I wanted to work with my hands in a way that they were coordinated with my mind, and in a way that they created something, perhaps even something from nothing.
My motor nerves sending messages to my hands, my hands receiving sensory input and integrating that with what I wanted the motor nerves to do next — that would be something that I could get good at. My father had done this with playing the guitar, except the input with that is primarily auditory rather than sensory. My mother was good at knitting, and I tried it out, but briefly. Eventually, because I come from a musical family, I was directed to choose an instrument. Whatever the instrument was, I would have to have weekly lessons and daily practices.
For a few reasons, I chose the drums. A drum set would be large and take up lots of space in the house, and it would be very noisy. It would annoy my parents, probably even the neighbors. Also my idol Will Smith, in an episode of the Fresh Price of Bel-Air, had said that “A honey that can play the drums is right on the money.” If I ever met him in real life, I’d be one of those honeys — I would play and he would dance one of his funny dances in his colorful Fresh Prince clothes.
So my father made a trade with one of his guitars, and got a secondhand drum set in return. Sadly, the drums were adorned with silencing pads so I could practice quietly. The friend he traded with gave me a free lesson, and before I knew it I was able to play a basic rock beat. Harder than it looks, because each hand and foot has to do something different. It only took me about twenty minutes. (It took my father three, but then my mother ordered him to let me play and stop showing off.)
So this thing where I developed my motor skills and had them coordinate with my auditory ones, it was going pretty well. I could learn most beats pretty quickly, they stuck in my head like commercial jingles, but in a good way. I learned to read music, to play along with songs. My timing was right on the money, honey.
Everything changed the day my drum teacher told me I was going to learn to improvise.
“You play the rock beat for three,” he explained, “and then on four you’re just going to play whatever you want. Just let the music take you wherever.”
I played the rock beat for one, two, three… I dropped the sticks and looked at my teacher. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.
“This is the fun part. You get to make something up.”
“Like what?”
“Like anything. Like listen to whatever you’ve got going on in your head, and just paint the drums with it.”
I played again one, two, three… waited for something to happen, and nothing did. No noise was happening in my head, I was waiting for a cue that didn’t exist. I was like an actor with a script and the next page was missing, or a news reporter whose teleprompter malfunctioned.
I tried it again later, alone, but everything that came out was discordant nonsense, dog excrement really. And I realized that music to me wasn’t what music was to musicians. I had been doing rote memorization, like reciting time tables or reading someone else’s poems aloud. I had learned how to make my mind and my hands converge in a skilled sort of way, but I hadn’t awakened a part of myself that recognized something inside and put it out into the world.
The drum set just wasn’t quite the thing that would do that for me. Maybe there was something else out there that would, but I didn’t and wouldn’t know what it was for some time. In the meantime, I had to join a percussion class and the school band.
I enjoyed the percussion class because we got to do lots of rote memorization. I had every drum beat etched in my mind — to this day I remember most of them. Band class was another story. I didn’t like being surrounded by enthusiastic kids that loved their instruments, and bossed around by a teacher I didn’t care for. I took to getting high behind the library before class, showing up late, reeking of weed. The teacher would glare and shake his head, continue his monologue, he would always still be talking — the first thirty minutes of class were reserved for his rants — until he picked up his conductor stick and started giving us various instructions.
“And you’re going to — Joanna. Joanna, are you with us? On the drums, that musical instrument that isn’t really a musical instrument, as they say?”
“What?” I’d ask. “Oh man. I can’t hear you, I don’t know what’s going on.”
“We are taking Proud Mary,” he’d say, “from the top.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. We’re always doing that, all we ever do is that. I got it.”
“If you had it,” he’d say, his lips set in a line, “we wouldn’t need to be always taking it from the top.”
Then the time came that we were to play Proud Mary in front of the school. It was a huge production. It happened in the cafeteria one afternoon. I was supposed to show up early and get the drums all set up. Instead I showed up at the last moment without a drum set and very, very high.
But the teacher had accounted for this likelihood. His lips were set in the usual indignant line. In his hand were a single drum stick and a block of wood. “You,” he said, “are to stand to the side and try to look normal, and hit the block on notes two and four.”
I stood next to the band with my block and my stick. The band began to play and everyone was watching. In the audience were some of the friends with which I’d just been smoking. “What is she doing? What is that?” There was pointing. Laughter followed. The band teacher looked relatively satisfied. Probably he thought I’d be embarrassed. So I started to wail on that block of wood. I didn’t hit notes two and four. I banged the hell out of that block, to the beat of my own drum, the one in my head. I was improvising. Damn, it felt good! Real music was finally flowing out of me, That stick, that block, they were a conduit for the song that lived inside. I may have gotten a round of applause. Or maybe it was laughter — I was too high to notice.
After being kicked out of band class and banned from the much awaited class field trip to Six Flags (I stowed away on the bus anyway and the percussion teacher snuck me a ticket, bless his heart, causing the band teacher to fly into a terrible rage when he saw me in line for the Helevator), I didn’t pursue the drums. My dad had gotten me a set of bongos, though, and I found I actually loved them — I’d feel like an ancient warrior in a drum circle, pounding out some tribal tune. And I knew — I really did want to do some kind of real work with my hands.
I think a lot of us come to our careers in this roundabout way, spending our young years dabbling in something adjacent to what we’re meant to do. Some of us end up doing the adjacent thing for a long time, maybe forever. Some of us just find a job and work hard, altruistically, out of a passion for providing. Others of us find our “ikigai,” the Japanese term for the thing we’re passionate about doing that gives our life meaning, early on, the way my dad did with music. And for many of us, it seems, we’re on a path, one that starts at the trunk of a tree and works its way upwards, flows up a particular branch and then more little branches off that bigger branch, until the path ends with the blossoming of a flower (or maybe a fruit, or even a lovely leaf or a hearty pinecone). Maybe we imagine what it would’ve been like if we’d started at a different branch altogether, and some of us even reach for that other branch. I know for myself, though, that I love the beautiful flower I found at the end of my branch, and I appreciate all the gnarled twists and turns (some apparent, others buried under the bark of the tree) it took to get here.
