By Joseph Milosch
One could see his burning hunger in his shirts, pressed once after washing and once more before wearing to class or on the bandstand. Joseph said, “Books and music are special. They shouldn’t be treated like greeting cards.” The hardest part of college was working at the shipyards, unloading sacks of cement, grain, or salt, and after work practicing his clarinet.
It seems studying and practice made ideas feel like prisoners. A few escaped, and the maneuvers a man created to navigate through the empty spaces their departure created either fashioned good ideas or led to a tangle of emptiness. Learning how to deal with the sudden appearance of space took hours of concentration. He said, “It was through my effort I was invited to work in the engineer booth for an Armstrong recording.†During the session, his eyes hovered before jumping from one phrase to the next like the spray of drum sticks across cymbals. Occasionally, Joseph looked at his clarinet’s case beneath the table. Occasionally, he’d massaged his fingers. Always he hoped against hope that he would be able to respond to the prayed for invitation from the master.
In the future when times were hard and he was alone in his dreaming, he’d remember the obscurity of his history: the shipyard’s light at one AM, a pattern of corn in a pile of lime. In the future this image marked the brutal landscape of a third generation Pole, learning to speak English without an accent, learning to ignore the hooked winged fear, hanging upside down in the rafters of his room. It was the same room he’d soak his hands in Epsom salt, believing it would return to his fingers the nimbleness needed to play his clarinet.
While he practiced, a vision arrived of seven flowers raising the bell of their horns and blossoming. Did he recite the Trumpeter of Krakow? Were his dreams interrupted by voices as light became an image of an arrow passing through a trumpeter’s throat? He’d practice two hours before his first class. In the afternoon he’d study before breaking to rehearse his band, The Ross Gordon Orchestra, then to the station, then to the boarding house — to the shipyards. Who could believe in a life without complications? Believe in practice – practice until sleep brought dreams of fingers touching keys as delicately as a bee leaving splintered trails across a clover field.