Music is a math problem without a calculator.  Or without a right answer.  Or without a remainder?  I don’t know what music is or how to solve it.  I quit my trumpet 10 years ago like she was cheating on me for my impotence.  It’s not my fault – I was raised on the B flat blues scale and could rif mindlessly on it like 2+2.  Then one day my 2-D world grew shadows and I saw angles that made no sense.  For the first time I was sincerely lost in the room I grew up in.  The piddly little scale sounded like Mary Had a Little Lamb.

This song introduced me to the 3rd dimension.  To shadows.  To real symmetry – that is to say, it introduced me to asymmetry because every note I played was over-thought-out and wrong and slow and behind and did I mention it was over-thought-out?  A7 means A dominant 7 which means A C E G-flat – is that right?  tickticktick G-flat sounds weird, should I think of it as F sharp?  What’s the normal way to call it? tickticktick How can I connect this to an F tickticktick shit.

This is another language problem.  So many problems.  Problems like arithmetic.  Problems with remainders.  Problems with formulas.  Problems with answers and guesses that are right and wrong.  Problems with answers I already know but can’t yet communicate.

I miss my trumpet.  I am sleeping with a 49 key Yamaha so that someday I can come back to her.  But this is going slow.  I’m playing Mary Had a Little Lamb in Bass Clef so that I can someday play the thing I am already hearing in my mind.  Same with Bangla – I am squeezing out elementary phrases so that someday I can say what I mean.  I know what I know but can’t communicate either of them.  It is a math problem – I have the formula.  I have the variables.  I even have the answer.  I have trees and squirrels and bad metaphors and brooks and beavers and beaver dams but not yet do I have a forrest.

That was horrible.

As I finger Mary Had a Little Lamb (single entendre) I listen to Mendelssohn.  I was just handed sheet music to a Chopin song I can play (ostensibly).  Playing it drops me in the shadows of this 3rd dimension.  I am touching the sounds buried in my brain – the sounds I can whistle but can’t play.  I am touching them through the finger tips on those 49 electric keys.  I am feeling the curvature of their geometry and I am surprised and confused by the shape of things.  I am not trusting that feeling yet scared of wasting even more time in this struggle.  Both of my linguistic battles are stuck in muck.  This is why toddlers scream when they can’t say what they really feel.