How Yo-Yo Ma Changed My Life
Once, when I was nineteen, about a year before my mother died, she asked me If I knew what I wanted to do when I graduated from college. So I told her my dream. I imagined, I told her, that I would live in a big, warm barn, and in one corner there would be an old wooden desk and my tall black Royal typewriter. In another there would be an easel and a table filled with paints, crayons, pencils, and brushes. In another there would be a piano and my guitar, and a box filled with extra picks and packets of fresh strings. In another, there would be a big double bed where a man who loved me and whom I loved could spend enthusiastic time. And at some point, in another corner, there would be a crib as well. And yes, I knew that that was more corners than a customary barn had, but so be it. Having everything in one place would allow me, I said, to be all these things: a writer, an artist, a musician, a wife, and a mother.
I remember exactly where we were when I told her this dream. I was lying across the foot of the king-sized bed in my parents’ bedroom — lying chest down, propped up on my elbows, and wearing my favorite pair of overalls, which were very much in fashion then. My mother was sitting on her side of the bed, wearing her orange lipstick and smoking a Pall Mall, and as I looked up at her, I saw that she was crying. This was only the third time in my life that I’d seen her cry. (The first was when her mother died; the second was when Andy Williams sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at Bobby Kennedy’s funeral.)
So, naturally, I asked her why she was crying now.
“Because,” she said. “I just love you so much.”
Did she love that image of me in that barn? Did she love me for wanting to be so many things? Did she love me because somewhere in that fantasy I had described one of her unfulfilled dreams? I don’t think she knew she was dying then. (If she did, she would never have told me.) But if she did know she was dying, was she crying because she knew she wouldn’t get to see me do any of those things?
I don’t know. I just know that I was too young to understand that there were some serious problems with this dream. For one thing, even in the best-case scenario, I would not be able to do any one thing well enough if I tried todo them all at once. For another, no matter how many corners I added to that barn, I felt a bit uneasy about the whole structure.
Ambition in our family was an atmospheric condition: We were supposed to breathe in inspiration and exhale accomplishments. But though the expectations ran along literary, journalistic, and artistic lines, I wondered if I shouldn’t be trying to do something more generous than making art or even making a family. I knew I couldn’t be a doctor (too squeamish) or a social worker (too shy). But the thought that I should find a way to be helpful only intensified as I watched the doctors and nurses who unflinchingly took care of my mother as she was treated, unsuccessfully, for cancer.
I was in my senior year of college when she died. Back at school after the funeral, and for the month that followed, I could only eat if I was alone in my dorm room, watching sit-com reruns on a tiny, 10-inch, black-and-white Sony TV. Food tasted like cotton. The air seemed to sway. Night after night, my mother visited me in my sleep, told me she wasn’t dead, and asked why the hell we’d given her clothes away. Morning after morning, I woke up devastated that she was still dead. I barely passed my final exams. I lost fifteen pounds. Other than sparing my siblings and father another loss, I truly saw no reason to live if my mother was never going to come back.
I had been dating a guy for three years, a guy I thought I would marry, a guy whom I loved to distraction. (Too much distraction, it turned out, and he would break up with me several months later.) But four weeks after my mother’s death, he was still a source of care and comfort. In an effort to get me out of my dorm room, he bought tickets to a benefit concert on Valentine’s Day. Three recent graduates were playing: Lynn Chang on violin, Richard Kogan on piano, and Yo-Yo Ma on cello.
The program for this concert is one of my treasured objects. It’s really ugly. I don’t remember what color its paper was back in 1981. Today it is the palest possible shade of green. Or possibly yellow. Or blue. It’s hard to tell. It looks a bit like putty. It’s just an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, folded in half and photocopied on both sides. On the cover, Yo-Yo Ma’s name is mistakenly printed without the hyphen. Inside, the concert selections are typed in italics. (That was still a cool thing then — when you could change the font ball on your IBM Selectric.)
The concert took place at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, an exquisitely wood-paneled 19th-century hall that made you feel you were inside a stringed instrument. In those days, during concerts, some audience members would often be seated on the stage around the musicians, and David and I were among the lucky ones that night.
I’ve kept the program not because it commemorates my last real date with that boyfriend). It sits on the shelf behind my desk because it commemorates the night I found a reason to live. It was the night I realized there would still be joy in the world, even without my mother to experience or know about it.
As a writer, I think the only thing harder to describe than sex is music. So I won’t really try to explain what happened a few minutes into the second movement of Beethoven’s trio in Bb Major, op. 11. Except that the cello played a simple lyrical melody that the violin then took over and lifted an octave higher with a series of notes that climbed into something just celestially beautiful. For a moment, I forgot. I forgot the days of waiting at home for it to happen, and the nurse who told us when it was over, and the men who took her body away after giving my father her wedding ring. I forgot the funeral and the cemetery and the sound of dirt hitting the top of her casket. For a moment, I was not a grieving daughter. Something beautiful that someone had created nearly two centuries before had pushed the grief in my heart aside just enough to let something like hope squeeze in. I was twenty. I desperately wanted to live. I wanted to make one person, somewhere, someday, forget her grief as I’d been allowed to forget mine.
It would be another year or so before I decided which corner of my barn was where I should start. But at that moment, I re-entered it without embarrassment or regret. Clutching the concert program, I understood that if I was ever going to help even one person, in even the smallest way, it was going to have to be with something I created. Several weeks later, in the midst of a slew of depressed and depressing journal entries, I wrote: “When I sat on the stage of Sanders Theater last month, and listened to Yo-Yo Ma play Beethoven, I remembered that art is the only thing that makes time bearable, and it is a sacred mission.”
After I graduated, I got my first job at a magazine, and I began to write fiction on the side. I would eventually get married and have children and do arts-and-crafts and co-write some songs. But it turned out that the corner of my barn with the typewriter was the one where I kept landing and, not incidentally, the one that gave me my best chance of success. Three years later, my first novel was published. In those days, there were local papers, and local book reviewers, so I got to fill an entire album with reviews, but I received only a handful of letters from actual readers. It wasn’t till many years and quite a few novels later, thanks to the blessing and curse of the internet, that I got to hear what real readers thought — and felt — about what I’d written.
I got to hear that I had made some people cry (yay!) with happy endings and cry (yay!) with sad ones. Sometimes I got to hear that a novel was fun or funny or moving or inspiring. Of course I got some terrible reviews too. (Worst one of all time came from a Kindle reader who, on Amazon, gave one of my novels one star out of five and wrote: “I can’t believe I paid for this! I want my money back!”) Then, decades after the concert, I received the following Instagram message from a woman who was a complete stranger:
“I am in Dayton, Ohio, where we had a mass shooting at one of my favorite places. Your book came to me at a time where I needed something to help me escape from the tragedy. Thank you for this gift.”
I won’t pretend that as a novelist I haven’t felt rewarded by recognition from my peers; that a good review in a prominent place hasn’t given me — and won’t always give me — a deeply felt thrill. But the woman who wrote “thank you for this gift” clearly gave me a better gift. Her words were a concise, precise fulfillment of my long-ago wish. Of course there are nobler and more immediate ways to help people. But you do what you can do. And at any sad or difficult moment in my life, I can always look over my shoulder to let that concert program remind me that there will always be joy in the world, and I can keep trying to make some.
