Crazy, right? That someone who was in love with medicine and science has a heart that belongs to the arts. I don't think it's that crazy. I remember that day so clearly. I was in the car, my mom was picking up from the high school and we were circling around to pick my younger sister and brother up at our local elementary school next door when she asked me "Paula, what are you doing May 12th?" and I asked her, "I don't think anything, why?" And she said to me: "Because you're playing at Carnegie Hall!!" And that's it, because the only thing I remember after that is how I felt. And it was indescribable.
After that, I moved forward, got involved with my studies, with the college process. Moved piano teachers a lot, lost some of my skill, stopped competing because I injured my hands and wrists from overexertion and I entered college as a double major in nursing and piano performance. And after two years of a grueling eight to nine classes a semester and double midterms, double finals, and seventeen-hour days of classes, rehearsals, private lessons, clinical labs, and more classes... I had to make a decision. Keep the music major or let it go.
And I let it go.
And that was the right decision. And I really didn't miss it. I reveled in the free time that I had to finish my work, in the extra down time I had between classes to eat lunch, at how early I got home from classes because I didn't have nighttime music lectures or late-night rehearsals with my ensembles. I didn't miss it at all and I threw myself into the world of nursing and medicine and science with no regrets. And I can still say there are none.
But in Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep, a young woman left as a single-mother by her Navy husband begins a music program in East Harlem, teaching fifty students the violin. This program turned into a permanent part of the East Harlem school system and still exists today as Opus 118. And even though it was acting, I remember what it was like myself to take Suzuki Book No. 1 and strum through "Perpetual Motion" and "Twinkle, Twinkle" or Bach's "Minuet No. 1." I even played the piano parts while my sister played the violin. And I cried. But not because of the events in the movie or because someone died (no one died) or because something awful happened, no. Those weren't the parts that made me cry. The tears came when I saw Carnegie Hall and realized that it looked exactly the way I remembered it.
The feeling is indescribable. Because how can you love something more than breathing or living or waking? Unimaginable, seemingly unattainable. And I ask myself often whether or not I would have done it differently. Then I ask, why is it so hard? And how is it possible to love humanity and the arts so much but only have room for one in your life?
I want to be a doctor. Unfortunately, doctors don't graduate from Julliard. In another world, though, I would do anything to play on my favorite nine-foot concert grand piano in front of those silvery blue velvet chairs, the click of my small half-inch heels (at just the right height to rest on the pedal) and the whoosh of a home-sown floor length skirt on that stage for the rest of my life.
I guess I miss it more than I thought.
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