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William Matthews - The BluesWilliam Matthews - The Blues
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What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinet and boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons? I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelve you think the heart and memory are different. "`It`s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,` the Queen remarked." Alice in Wonderland. Although I knew the way music can fill a room, even with loneliness, which is of course a kind of company. I could swelter through an August afternoon torpor rising from the river and listen to Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson braid variations on "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the room with me the force and weight of what I couldn`t say. What`s an emotion anyhow? Lassitude and sweat lay all about me like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless, but I was quick and furtive as a fox who has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolism to burn off as ordinary business. I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few bars they were enough of music. Looking back, it almost seems as though I could remember but this can`t be; how could I bear it? the future toward which I`d clatter with that boy tied like a bell around my throat, a brave man and a coward both, to break and break my metronomic heart and just enough to learn to love the blues. Anonymous submission.
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