Facing the Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

dance into life.
    It was a life-changing gift. No matter what happened now, I knew that I would always have music. I couldn’t unlearn it. As much as I knew how to read and to write to express myself, music had expanded how I experienced the world around me.
    Back home, with my father, us girls had been moved from our country school to a school in town. For the first time ever, my sister and I would find ourselves separated during the day. Up until then, we had always been in the same classroom. Things were different in town. There were several classrooms for each grade, so we were assigned different teachers. As a result, we became more individual. She built a world with the friends in her class and I built one with mine. In doing so, we began to form a divide in our personal interests.
    My identity with music was becoming decidedly my very own, and my new school had a lot of possibilities by which to explore it.
    Unlike my country school, my new school had a dedicatedmusic room. Rather than the echoic, cold, and uncomfortable gymnasium, my new music room had carpet and permanent, tiered risers. The walls were decorated with posters of wildly gesticulating conductors and cartoons of composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. I didn’t even know who any of these people were, but it didn’t matter. They were music and the entire room was dedicated to them. No more duct-taped staves on the gym floor. Now, we had a blackboard painted with imperishable staff paper. And there were instruments, too! So many instruments, just lying around. There was a guitar and lots of percussion, like wood blocks, claves, and tambourines. I was in hog heaven! I was so ready to leave behind the childish lessons delivered by a stuffed toy frog. I wanted more , and everything about this room made my dreaming seem possible.
    However, it was the music that happened after school hours that really stirred my lust. Every day of fourth grade, while I waited in line to board the bus back out to the country, I watched as what seemed every fifth grader from my school commandeered the auditorium. I watched, green with envy, as they unpacked extravagant instruments like saxophones, trumpets, snare drums, and flutes. All the noises of their bustling and tuning in preparation of a coming Sousa march had me aching with desire. Without question, I wanted in on the action. I couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than being able to have a saxophone all to myself. I still had my plastic recorder to go home to, but this  . . . this was sexy!
    It was all I could to do imagine how I was going to survive a whole year until I was old enough to be a part of the fun. If piano lessons were out, asking my parents to buy me an expensive ­instrument and make a way for me to stay after school was goingto be a challenge of epic proportions. I couldn’t be afraid of no . I had to find a way to press on.

    FIFTH GRADE AND sixth grade blew by and, with them, what appeared to my dream of joining the band. My parents couldn’t get out of work to drive me home after band, so I had to be on that school bus every day. Through every Christmas that approached, I would plead my case for the season, hoping, at last, that my joy would be found under the tree—to no avail. I did my best to behave. I paid more than the average attention to my grades. Everything I did, I did with the motivation of pleasing my parents so that they would have no choice but to reward me. Undaunted and still yearning, I continued to keep my hopes alive. Soon, I would be entering junior high, where band was a class that I could take during school hours. It no longer required staying after school. It meant that I didn’t have to worry about whether my parents had to make any changes in their work routines; all I needed now was the horn.
    I had always imagined myself playing saxophone. It seemed similar to my much beloved alto recorder, only much more curvaceous and