Novelettes, Snipers, and Other Signs

You never know how random events in your life may set others in motion.  I thought when I decided not to attend the University of Texas at Austin (UTA), a school generous enough to offer me a full scholarship to its Music School, that I had closed the door on the summer I spent studying piano there.   

At the insistence of my piano teacher--who had a vested interest in my attending that particular college--I agreed to spend my last high school summer attending an intense piano workshop at UTA.  It was a good opportunity to experience college campus life as well as to expose me to a wonderful faculty of desirable piano pedagogues.  Several attendees of this program had already decided to attend UTA and were using the summer to get a head start ingratiating themselves with the piano faculty.  The prize was to land in the stable of the great John Perry; he, however, was busy with graduate students and paid little attention to the high school kids.

We were a tight group of kids split musically into two groups.  In one group were the hopefuls, using the summer to find the secret inspiration that would elevate their playing to the next level.  In the other were those of us who already had command of a great repertoire.  We were college bound as music students; what remained was a matter of where.  Among this group was a pair of acquaintances from Kansas, Kevin and Darrell.  Together they made the perfect whole.  Darrell was intelligent and full of interesting conversation.  He had been admitted to Yale, but was considering UTA for financial reasons.  Kevin was. . .well, pretty.   

It was a luxurious summer of practice, lessons, master classes, and performances.  We stayed on campus in student dorms, having only a short walk to the Music Building.  Unlike other parts of Texas with which I would become too familiar years later as a traveling executive, Austin had hills and a soft breeze which made it tolerable even in the heat of the summer.  Kevin and I took long walks around campus and ate french fries at Jack in the Box; Darrell and I discussed Schumann Novelettes and Bach Fugues.

Austin had an interesting culture.  I learned about the great Governor “Big Jim” Hogg who proudly named his daughter Ima Hogg.  Miss Ima, as she was known, was born in 1882 and was considered the “first lady of Texas.”  She had studied piano herself and was a well-respected benefactor of the arts locally.  Sadly, Miss Ima passed away on the last days of our workshop.

It was also fun to climb to the observation deck of the clock tower, until I learned of the 1966 sniper named Charles Whitman who killed 16 people from there.  The infamous tower offered a wonderful vantage point by which to see the entire campus and the State Capitol Building.  But it's tragic history made me cringe as I walked passed it each day from the dorm to the practice rooms.   I could clearly imagine the bullets raining down over innocent students.   I wonder in this day of random violence and terrorism whether they still open the observation deck to the public.

It was a great summer for me musically as well.  I had the opportunity to vastly improve a Chopin Ballade, a Schubert Sonata, and a horrific piece by Liszt.  But the real treat was exposure to the graduate students, who used the off days between our performances to give impromptu recitals of the “project pieces” on which they were working.  Thus, I saw my first live performance of the complete Chopin “Funeral March” Sonata—by Dean Kramer, who had just captured the top prize in the National Chopin Competition, and the only performance of Pictures at an Exhibition in the original piano solo version I have ever seen—by Dikram “Dickie” Atamian.  Seeing the “distance” between very good high school pianists and graduate school artists was eye-opening, to say the least.  These guys possessed a level of technical mastery that I’ve rarely seen.

Having had a much more enjoyable summer than I expected, I bid a final farewell to Kevin and Darrell—urging Darrell to reconsider Yale seriously.  I told him I hoped to go to Harvard, and wouldn’t it be funny if we met again under some Ivy League musical circumstances?  During my freshman year at Harvard, when I visited my dear friend Anne at Yale, I combed through the student directory in the hope of finding Darrell.  No luck.  He chose not to go.

Years later, after I graduated, I took a year off in Cambridge to gain some required work experience before attending graduate school in health policy and management.  Although I completed an undergraduate degree in music, I had long before concluded that a career in music was not for me.  Happily, I sat in my office at the Student Health Center, processing student health insurance enrollments and claims.  My mind was wandering, thinking about the tall red headed dental student I had met on the shuttle bus a few weeks before.  He kept calling and asking me out, but I knew so little about him that I could not decide whether or not I was interested in pursuing a relationship.

My office was across the hall from the poorly named lunch room.  If anything, it was a “stale coffee and vending machine room.”  People would congregate there and make a lot of noise, often making it necessary to close the door to my office while discussing personal medical events with a student.  On this particular day, one of the popular doctors from our clinic led a parade of students into the lunch room.  You could tell they were students because they wore crisp short white coats—not the well-washed long lab coats the real doctors wore.  One of the students looked strangely familiar, so much so I kept my eye on the door in an attempt to intercept him as they left.  

An hour went by.  Then another.  This was more than a lunch break.  The doctor was holding some sort of a class.  Finally, the work day was over, so I moved across the hall and just hovered in the doorway as the students made final comments to the doctor and left one-by-one.  I focused my eyes on this familiar-looking kid’s name tag, seeing only that he had a two-part last name just as I had expected.  Conscious that he was being watched, the student seemed uncomfortable at my constant scrutiny.  He looked at the ground, then back up at me.  Then the light went on.  “Do I know you?” he burst out.  “I think you do!” I answered, smiling.

It had been over five years since I had last seen Darrell, in another place and another context.  We had both been serious music students in Texas and now we were both in Boston—doing what, exactly?  I explained that I had decided against pursuing music, choosing instead to do graduate work in Public Health.  Was he really in medical school?  “Well,” he said, in his slow Kansas drawl, “I am actually in Dental School.  We take ‘Introduction to Clinical Medicine’ with the medical students.”

“Dental School?” I asked, amazed at the coincidence.  I had never met anyone from Harvard Dental School before, and now I had met two dental students in a matter of weeks.  “Do you know a guy named Tom Dodson?”  “Yes,” Darrell said.  “He’s in my class.  He’s a really nice guy.”

Darrell’s words were just the encouragement I needed.  I accepted Tom’s next appeal for a date, and we have been together since.  Next month we will celebrate thirty years of marriage.  As for Darrell, he is a successful orthodontist in Corsicana, TX. 

Tomorrow's blog:  From Passion, Excellence