Tree Symphony

by Gina Marie Wylie

I twisted away from his touch, moving towards my favorite tree, wanting to pound futilely on it. I slumped against the rough bark, uncaring about anything, with tears streaking down my face, my mind barely registering anything.

  “Please, Kira,” my dad’s voice was soft, like the voices of the trees. “Talk to me. If I can help, if I can do anything, anything at all...”

  “Go to him,” it was a faint whisper, soft and lilting.

  I straightened, turned, and started crying on his shirt again. I felt his hand on my head, stroking my hair, his arm around my shoulder, helping hold up my weight.

  I took a deep breath, and then another. “Thank you,” I told him, mustering what energy I could. “I think I’ll be all right now.”

  I’d never be all right, never! What could I do? The resignation, the sense of inevitability was like a heavy weight, pulling me down.

  I looked at my dad and tried to smile.

  He smiled back. “Logistically, I think it would be better if I cried on your shoulder, Kira. That way you won’t have to bend over nearly double.” It wasn’t all that comfortable, but not as bad as he said. “Please, Kira. What’s wrong?”

  I motioned towards the sign. Evidently he hadn’t noticed it; he’d been too worried about me. “Progress,” his voice was both bitter and sarcastic at the same time. For a moment he looked at me, then around us. “This place means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded. Something from the back of my mind must have made itself apparent on my face.

  “I haven’t been a very good father for a very long time. Why do I think these trees rate higher in your world than I do?”

  “Not any more,” I explained. “The same.”

  He chuckled and I understood I hadn’t complimented him like I’d wanted to.

  I tried to convey my feelings. “You, Mom... the trees. Music. You are my life. I don’t want to lose anything. Not anything.”

  He waved at the sign. “There will be a public meeting. You can protest, you can do all sorts of things to try and stop it,” he said. He touched my shoulder again, looking me right in the eye. “Kira, I tell you true: you might delay them a little, but absolutely nothing stops development in Phoenix.”

  “Surely someone cares?” I asked, not wanting to think about what it would be like without the trees.

  He laughed. “Oh, they care. I’ve heard people complain about the bugs a million times. Not a few young women have been -- led astray -- here, late at night.” I shook my head, not understanding, not caring.

  Finally, we were back home. Dad made me rest; he wouldn’t let me get up until well after noon. Then I ate a light lunch before he would let me play the cello. Even then, I had to keep it short, he said. I played, my mind not really on what I was doing. I stopped finally, closing my eyes and letting my mind wander.

  Abruptly I stood up, put the cello in its case and picked it up. I walked out the door before either of my parents had a chance to realize I was leaving.

  A few minutes later I sat myself down on one of the rocks near the stream, heedless of my dress, heedless of anything. I put the cello spike down in the dirt, spent a second tuning, and then began to play.

  I emptied my mind of everything -- I just played. All kinds of things, everything I knew or could think of. Tree songs, pieces I’d heard in the orchestra, from concerts, from tapes and records. I cared about nothing except the music.

  It was totally different from the night before. Then I’d played to a large audience, wanting to say things I knew I could say. Now I was simply rambling and incoherent. Moments of deep, intense emotion and then off on flights of fancy and whimsy. The last two grew more and more common, anything to lighten the burden of inevitability.

  I stopped eventually because I noticed the light was perceptibly dimmer. I looked around. About fifty or sixty people were standing watching me, all silent. The sun was well down on the horizon. Seven o’clock? I thought so. The silence of the crowd unnerved me after a bit. It was very different from Symphony Hall. There was no applause, there was no sign of any approval or disapproval. Had they not liked the music?

  I mechanically put away the cello and stood up. I was stiff, stiffer than I’d felt for a long time.

  There were a few murmurs now from the people, but no one spoke to me, there was still no applause.

  I walked up and put my hand on the sign. “I will never let this happen. Whatever it takes, whatever I have to do... I’ll do it. Let time change this place -- not man.”

  I carried the cello in my hand, my mom and dad on either side of me. No one spoke, except in whispers that I couldn’t hear. We got home and I got out a polish rag and cleaned the cello. My parents didn’t say anything either, not the whole time I worked.

  I finished and looked at them. “Do you think I’m crazy?” I asked them straight out. Then I gestured back towards the trees. “Do they?” I was thinking about it one way; they took it quite another.

  “No,” Mom said, “anything but.” She shook her head. “You have to try to stop things like this. If you think it’s right, you have to do something to stop it.”

  Dad agreed. “What’s crazy is seeing something you think is wrong and doing nothing.”

  “I don’t think they liked my music,” I said. I was a little petulant, angry about that too.

  Dad shook his head and my mom snorted in disgust. It was my mom who spoke. “Oh, I don’t think like or dislike comes into it. What you did... Kira, I don’t know how you do it. You go places, you do things with music...” Mom shook her head and sighed. “I look at my daughter and I feel this pride -- this overwhelming pride -- that you are who you are.”

  “I’ve always heard,” Dad said in his quiet voice, “that different languages have words for things you can’t say in English. I took Spanish in high school, and then French in college. A lot of times they would say, ‘Oh, you can’t translate this word into English very well,’ and then they tell you pretty much what it was supposed to mean.

  “This afternoon....” He shook his head. “You said a lot of things there aren’t words for. And I don’t think you could express what you said with your music in English if you spent a million words on it.” He smiled at me. “Did you see the policeman?”

  “A policeman?” I asked, confused. No, actually I hadn’t seen anything.

  “A policeman came. I’m not sure if someone called them or what. But he came and listened for a moment, said something into his walkie-talkie, and then joined the rest of us, just listening. After a while, he left.”

  Later we had another light meal. My parents wouldn’t hear of me doing anything but eating and then going to bed. I was tired, but the trees were talking more like usual. I laid in bed listening to them. They’d liked the music, and they liked me playing it right there for them. There was still the underlying resignation, but they seemed to keep the emptiness away from me.

  In the morning, before school, I simply told my parents. “I want to know what I can do to stop this. Please, I don’t know anything about how to do it, but I want to learn. And stop it.”

  Mom shrugged, but Dad nodded. “I’ll talk to some people at work. Tonight we’ll go to the library and look some things up.” He eyed me carefully. “This will be a lot of work.”

  “Music was a lot of work,” I told him. “I did it. I’ll do this, too.”

  IX

  Trying to save the trees really was a lot of work. The one thing that helped was that I was no longer preparing for the Arizona Symphony concert, just the final Youth Symphony concert in late May. I was going to be the principal cellist, but the music had been chosen long before and it didn’t feature cello. So, I was just another musician, lost amongst more than a hundred others

  For two weeks Dad helped me with research. I had never realized that he knew law and accounting as well as Rachael, Mr. Gora or Mr. Ford knew music. Even so, there wasn’t much we could do. We filed a written protest, to go with other public comment that would be heard at a Planning Com
mission meeting. I’d seen the date for that, and I was glad it didn’t conflict with anything musical. It was going to be the week after the State Orchestra Competition, so that was all right.

  As new as all of the land use and property things, there were still new things in music as well. Taylor Ford and two men in suits appeared one evening at our house. My parents were expecting them, so they were all dressed up. So was I; I had, in fact, gotten so I rather liked wearing a dress.

  They talked about music rights, copyrights and the like. Mr. Ford had gotten together with Mr. Gora and sent in Tree Symphony to ASCAP, the music registry. These men were from a publishing company, people Mr. Ford knew, who were thinking about publishing Tree Symphony. There was quite a lot of back and forth -- mainly Dad talking to them. Mom sat silent throughout, only once asking a question, and she addressed that to Dad.

  I hadn’t understood most of what the conversation was about. I knew it was legal stuff and even though I’d started studying legal things to fight for the trees, this was different. After an hour and a half one of the men suggested that I should leave.

  It was one of the few times I’d seen my dad upset in public. At home, sometimes he’d say some pretty rude things about people, but not in public. Now he simply told the man that this was my property that they were talking about, and that if I wasn’t involved, there was no deal. That was the word he used, “deal.”

  For another half hour, they talked money. If the legal stuff had been hard, the money was beyond hard. Finally, Dad simply waved his hand. “I am out of my competence here. Taylor...” Dad looked at Mr. Ford.

  “I could suggest, Dennis,” Mr. Ford said, “that Kira needs an agent. Except if I did that, these gentlemen would have kittens.”

  My mom giggled, my dad laughed, and the two men had sharp little smiles on their faces. Then I figured out what Mr. Ford had said and I giggled too.

  “I think we need to think about this,” my dad told the men. “Perhaps we need to seek outside advice. Do you have a written proposal?” One of the men produced some papers from a briefcase and handed them to my dad.

  After they were gone, Dad came and sat down with Mom and me. Mom had been looking over the papers. “I don’t understand a thing,” she told him.

  “I know.” Dad picked them up, leafed through the thick wad of paper. “I’ve heard nothing good about music publishers, although I’ve heard worse stories about the movie industry and how they do their accounting. Some very famous movies that produced revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars didn’t show a ‘book’ profit. Those who had agreed to a portion of the profits were shut out.

  “I’ve heard the recording business is worse. I know there is a writer’s guild, I imagine they have a purpose in life. The musicians all belong to unions; there’s a reason for that too, I suspect. I’ll talk to Taylor tomorrow, and see if he knows any names.”

  The State Orchestra Competition was held in Tucson, a city which is a two hour drive south of Phoenix. I’d received copies of the music we were to play; I’d gone over it with both Mrs. Walker and Rachael. I thought I was ready.

  The big thing though, was that those of us from Phoenix were offered a bus ride there and back if we wanted or our parents could drive us. Dad had been forthright. “Your mom and I will be at the concert Sunday, Kira. I promise. But... things have gotten really hectic at work. It would mean a lot to me, if you could take the bus down. We can drive you back.”

  I’d agreed. I’d never been away from home before; I’d never been on my own before. I thought it would be interesting.

  My life was very different than it had been. A few kids at school knew I played in the youth symphony; maybe a few more knew I’d played at Symphony Hall, in spite of the newspaper article. That had been a one day wonder at school... instantly forgotten, because everyone had heard about my playing under the trees the next day. But none of them seemed to care -- they all thought I was weird and playing a cello in the trees just confirmed it.

  The most noticeable change was that I was more confident and no one made fun of me any more.

  In fact, when I thought about it, I realized I was having less interaction with my classmates than ever. My grades had moved from outstanding to stratospheric. To me it meant nothing. I wanted to learn things, I didn’t much care how it came about.

  My seventh grade teacher was Mr. Grundig. I thought about him no differently than I thought about any teacher I’d ever had. He was there, in front of the class. He said things and I remembered them. I read books, wrote papers, did homework, and took quizzes and tests. He graded them. Never once did he give me a word of encouragement. In fact, he rarely spoke to me at all.

  By the time of the State Orchestra Competition, I’d grown up a lot. Before, I’d seen myself as one amidst the other students -- not someone exceptional. I kept my head down and avoided attention. Now, I didn’t have a problem holding my head high and I no longer worried about what the others thought about me. My world had expanded from self-awareness, to awareness of people around me, then to the world around me. The impending threat to the trees made me go another step further -- not only was I aware of the world, I wanted to change it. Music was another side of the same coin, I knew.

  So, I looked at Mr. Grundig quite a bit differently in May than I had in September. When I presented him with the permission slip for me to miss two days of school, he smiled and signed it.

  “What work will I need to make up?” I asked him.

  He looked at me and shook his head. “There’s nothing important. Don’t worry about it, Kira.”

  “We’re going to have an English test that Friday,” I told him. “Don’t I need to make that up?”

  He looked at me and shook his head.

  “Why not?” I asked, honestly curious.

  “Kira, have you learned anything in this class? Anything at all?”

  I was confused, of course I had! “Hiawatha,” I told him. Nothing else came to my mind right away. I loved that poem!

  “And you read it?” I nodded. “Maybe one or two others did. A few skimmed it or faked it... mostly they didn’t bother. You have poetry in your soul, Kira. There’s not much I can teach you about literature.”

  I was flabbergasted.

  “I go through the motions of teaching, Kira,” he went on. “Most of my students go through the motions of learning. You are one of the very few who learns anything and it has nothing to do with me, but with what’s inside you, driving you.” Mr. Grundig smiled at me. “So don’t worry about it. Worry about finding a school, a better school, to go to next year.” He waved around us. “This is fine for time servers and hacks like myself. You deserve better, require better.”

  I didn’t tell my parents about what Mr. Grundig had said; I just showed them the signed permission slip. On the bus ride, I thought about what he’d said.

  Music. I knew quite a bit about music now. I felt these things inside me, things that I wanted to say with music, things I wanted very much to do. I wasn’t very much like the girl who had sat down in front of Mrs. Walker and tried to make a piece of music she’d heard only in her mind sound right on a cello. Oh, there still were parts of her inside me, a girl who looked at the world as all new and strange... but I’d spent a lot of time thinking the last few weeks -- since Symphony Hall. Was this growing up?

  I knew my parents had been saving to send me to a good college. I understood Mr. Grundig’s message. My school was okay, but if I wanted to learn, really learn all the things I wanted to learn, it was going to be hard to do it there. It would be harder still, I realized, in high school. I remembered Dad installing the stereo in my room and his comment about not needing to put as much away for my college expenses as they’d once thought.

  I looked at myself in the reflection off the bus window. I wasn’t stupid. I understood how well I played. I understood music scholarships. Taylor Ford had talked of them, so had Rachael and Mr. Gora. Mrs. Walker had been helpful as well. There was, I thought, eve
ry chance I could attend any college or university that I wanted and do it on a full scholarship. But I was just twelve -- college was going to be some distant time in the future. What did I want to do in the meantime?

  I glanced around me, at the other kids on the bus, maybe thirty or forty of them. Almost all of them were high school students, I thought. I didn’t see anyone else who looked as young as I was.

  To play music. That’s what I wanted, pure and simple.

  Whatever I did, music was going to be number one in the requirements list. Be close to the trees -- that was number two. I was going to save them, come what may. The trees had been adamant about the priorities. Music they said, exists forever. Trees and people: not so. We are transitory, ephemeral. Create music, I was told, nothing else matters. Simple and blunt, trees can be.

  Music and the trees. But as much as I loved both, there were other things in my life. My parents and learning in general. I understood that while I loved music -- the trees, my family, and learning were almost as important to me. It had always been there, something I hadn’t consciously recognized, but it was true.

  So, I needed a better school. More research! I smiled to myself. I was getting good at that! Not as good as my dad, but pretty good!

  The bus arrived at the University of Arizona. We would be staying, we’d been told, in one of the dorms there. The chaperones had lists of who was supposed to go where. The boys were dropped off first and then it was the girls’ turn. I hadn’t paid much attention to the others on the bus, except to realize they were older than I was. I knew they were mainly high school students. Oh, that and I knew I dressed different than they did. I was wearing a skirt and pretty blouse while all of the other girls were wearing jeans and either a t-shirt or blouse.

  I carried my cello in one hand, my overnight bag over my shoulder. We stood in a long line that moved only slowly. I was almost at the end of the line. Finally I was handed some papers.

  “Schedules, please read them,” the woman behind the desk told me. Then she held out a key attached to a simple lanyard. “Your room key. Lose it, five bucks. Lose it twice and we seriously think about sending you home. Misbehave, we send you home. Don’t.” I shrugged.