Recently, I got a flute that I’m going to learn to play. I had piano lessons when I was very young and then played the clarinet for many years. My parents chose the instrument for me; I wasn’t very happy about playing it (I wanted to play the flute!); the summer of my fifth grade year stands out when I was forced to take lessons from a (wonderful, in retrospect) teacher at the rival Catholic grade school. I learned to play “The Yellow Rose of Texas” that summer, a song that can sound pretty horrible at the mercy of a ten-year-old who wants out of lessons. If my parents had ever not minded the song before, I’m sure they grew to abhor it with my so-called practicing sessions, complete with chipping, cracked reeds.
There is no clarinet-playing character in what I’m working on.
Archiving old email, I found this, a passage someone liked quite a lot, from Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts:
She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank. And the air round her became threaded with sensation.
You can read all of Between the Acts.
Candish paused in the dining-room to move a yellow rose. Yellow, white, carnation red—he placed them. He loved flowers, and arranging them, and placing the green sword or heart shaped leaf that came, fitly, between them. Queerly, he loved them, considering his gambling and drinking. The yellow rose went there. Now all was ready—silver and white, forks and napkins, and in the middle the splashed bowl of variegated roses. So, with one last look, he left the dining-room.