I ran my hands over the piano keys, then stood and walked around it to trace the glossy black curves of the huge instrument. It seemed as long and as wide as Daddy’s black car. Mother had explained that the instrument was what was called “a concert grand,” and much larger than most grand pianos because it was built to grace a large stage. I’d certainly never seen such a big piano. Somehow the palms of my hand could feel something special emanating from the piano. As if the curvy black box were vibrating. The touch against my fingers was something almost like breathing. This piano wasn’t just wood and metal and ivory as my mother had explained. To me, this piano was alive.
I moved back around to the stool, then turned in place to look carefully at the whole room. My gaze sought the long sweep of the royal blue velvet of the draperies, then took in the marble busts set about the room upon marble columns. I rubbed my right big toe into the royal blue plush of the deep carpet. Truly a lovely room, but the real object of my adoration was the black Steinway.
I sat down on the bench, smoothed the satin of my dress, and nodded as I poised my hands above the keys to crash downward and in that instant I was lost in the ecstasy of endless creation. The sounds clanged and echoed and vibrated through the large room, filling the adjoining solarium of rubber trees and other exotic plants with my untutored noise. The sometimes ugly sounds returned to beat against my ears. I loved it. Chord after chord swept from my fingers, but no one came to stop my “composing.” It wasn’t music yet, but they were wonderfully loud sounds and I knew I could learn to make real melodies here if I worked at it. Already I was beginning to learn which keys sounded best when played together. The first thing I’d learned was that playing two keys right next to each other made a really messy sound, something my ear couldn’t like. I kept on working to gain mastery of the giant Steinway.
When my arms tired and my passion for sound was spent, I lifted the long green skirts to hold them in one hand, so I could go to each column, there to stand on tiptoe to kiss the marble lips on the busts of Mozart, Beethoven and Lizst. I felt love for each of them but Lizst was the most difficult and I was repelled because of the large mole near his mouth but I didn’t want him to feel left out so I kissed him nevertheless and simply avoided the mole as well as I could. Then I sank to the carpeted floor. From my place on the floor I could look up at the curving lines of the piano, my beloved piano. I let my eyes caress each curve on the instrument. What was it mother had said about my love for the piano? Oh, yes, she’d called it “obsession” and I guess that was the same as love. I wanted to compose and play great works.
During the next few weeks I never missed a day in the music room. Nobody seemed to mind that I spent hours alone there. Except that one day I found that I wasn’t really alone.
At first it was just the piano that I loved. Then I saw something, or should I say someone, who changed my life. One day, after I’d played for awhile, I kissed the marble faced composers, as usual trying to avoid Lizst’s marble mole, then I sank to the floor to relax into the plush blue carpet. In moments, seated at the Steinway, an image began to form. It was a man, a man who was playing my piano.
It was as if I were listening to music from a distance, piano music, music as transparent as the man as he took shape before me. As he became more solid, so did his music.
He was there and he grew even more real as I watched. Even so, I guess I knew he wasn’t truly there, because I understood that even if I couldn’t see through him, I knew that if I tried to touch him, my fingers would touch nothing. Every time I finished playing in the days following, I lay on that blue rug to watch for him, to wait for him, to listen to him.
He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, in his severely tailored long coat of black velvet over his black velvet trousers. The coat buttoned high to his throat and his angular white face showed to the best advantage in the light from the windows. Above wonderfully high cheek bones, his huge dark eyes appeared to be stealing glances at me even though he gave the piano his full force and attention. His long face was framed by wind-blown, chin length dark hair. Even now, after all those years I can remember his striking appearance.
I waited for him each day after that.
But the man never again came to my music room. In the year that we stayed with my Grandfather I waited for the man to come again but he never came. I think, perhaps, even then I knew that I would spend the rest of my life looking for the starkly elegant man who had, one day, played the piano so beautifully for me. In my heart, love had welled up for this man. I loved him even more than I loved the composer’s busts. I understand now that, even though I was a child, I was experiencing love as a woman feels it, a deep, deep, unforgettable love.
Shortly before we left Grandfather’s house, one more thing happened. The piano had been moved to an inside wall for the sake of the sounding board. I still “composed” and played the Steinway each day. As I played this day, a beam of light focused through the tall windows and onto the treble portion of the keyboard. The glancing white ray spotlighted my hands and the keys and my body for several minutes. It wasn’t the sun. I don’t know what it was but I could feel the brilliant illumination on my hands and on my face.
Something happened to me then, I know. I just don’t know what it was.
Chapter 5
ALMOST A GROWN UP
Grade school in Oklahoma turned out to be fun. I got along pretty well with the kids and the teachers at Union School, which was an independent country school district just outside Tulsa. Nothing unusual or earth shaking happened to me during those years. I learned that I could make people laugh. Teachers and students all seemed to agree on that. Whatever I said, they laughed like crazy. I kinda liked being the center of attention, especially since I knew they weren’t laughing at me but with me.
I really loved being an regular kid in a regular house, going to a regular school. No one from the great globes in the sky came to visit, but I’d expected that. In fact, I felt rather clever. I’d been very careful never to tell them where we were going.
I never saw the man at the piano., either, but I looked for him everyday. of course we didn’t have a piano in our house in Tulsa so I wasn’t too surprised that he didn’t come to visit me.
When I was ready to enter High School, Mother and Daddy wanted me to take advantage of one of the better high schools in Tulsa so we moved into the Will Rogers District. At that school they put great emphasis on art, drama, music and other arts. I loved it. One of the art teachers from another school, a man named Mr. Bartholic, commented on my talent in front of his and our combined classes during an outdoor field trip on drawing and sketching. I was just in heaven. I loved my drawing and sketching and painting courses and I loved my modern dance class even more.
In the new house in town, I’d found one special feature of the structure that pleased me greatly since my parents had made the rule that my sister and I were to be in our house by dinnertime every night. We usually ate at 8:00 PM. Most of the other kids had dinner with their families at 6:00 PM and then went out again. But my sister and I had our own ways of compensating for our aloneness. I used dance and music.
My bedroom had French doors that led out onto my own private balcony. I thought of that balcony as my own elegant stage much in the way I had thought of our front porch as my stage when I was just a little kid in Missouri.
In the meantime, mother bought me a piano and offered to let me take lessons. I yearned to take the lessons and promised to practice until I learned to play the Moonlight Sonata. She’d told me that I could quit lessons or keep taking them after I’d learned the Sonata. That wasn’t a hardship for me. I really got back into music. I memorized music from records, song sheets and operas.
I also danced. Each night I put some of my classical music records on my stereo, then danced alone for hours, sometimes in my room but more often on my second floor balcony which connected to my bedroom. I was so driven to dance under the moon that I rarely missed a night.
All alone. My only companions were my glorious records and the bright stars against the velvet of the Oklahoma sky. I didn’t know who, what, or why, but I had to be on my balcony dancing, hearing music, and longing for something. I felt compelled to be enveloped in that classical space and my longings focused upon a definite person... I just didn’t know who. I had the most terrible adolescent longing for love so I focused that love on the stars.
Both my Mother and my Father asked me privately why I stayed in my room so much of the time but I don’t think they really minded so long as I seemed happy. Maybe they were relieved that I wasn’t insisting on running around town with the other high school kids. They certainly knew where I was, which is what they wanted.
But as secretive and sober as I was at home, I continued to be the comedienne in school. I really didn’t intend that, but it was just as it had been in grade school. All I had to do was open my mouth and I had the students and the teachers rolling in the aisles. Some of the kids called me the “Lucy” of Rogers High. Maybe I needed that reaction since I was always so dead serious at night.
All that dancing at Rogers prepared me for my major at the University of Arkansas, where I enrolled in the modern dance program. After only three semesters I was recalled to Tulsa because of my Father’s illness. Nineteen years old, I’d decided I was through with school and ready to be on my own. That was the year I left the nest.
# # #
I put one of my own paintings on the wall of the studio apartment, all the while thinking, my first picture, my very own, first apartment. A bubbly feeling of pride swelled in my chest.
“It may not be much,” I twirled to look at the single room, which my landlord called a “studio,” then flopped onto the old couch with the saddle shaped cushions. There was no way to keep from smiling at the rest of the space. “But it’s all mine.” I spoke the words aloud and jumped up to run to the window to look down on Denver Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the city. Life’s drama was playing itself out only one story below me. I watched darkness take hold of the evening as the sun settled into the hills a few miles west of Tulsa. I knew that darkness would soften the facades of the scarred brick buildings that lined both sides of the avenue.
Night. My most favorite time. I looked up into the sky and focused on the faint image of the moon. I thought of home, of mother and daddy and wondered what they were doing just at that moment. They were only a few miles from my front door but it seemed a world away to me. I had to do something to help myself learn to be an adult, to be on my own.
For a second I could hear my mother’s voice echoing in my head. “No Barbara. Must you move out of the house?” And when I had just kept putting my things into boxes she’d said, “Nineteen is just ... well ... you’re so young.” It hurt me to hear the pleading in her voice.
I’d answered, “But Mother, what can happen? I’m a grown woman, now. I need to be on my own. I’ll get a job. I’ll call every day to let you know what I’m doing.” She’d sighed and given up, then she’d given me the money to get that first apartment.
The bubbly feeling returned to my chest now, and with the tip of my fingernail, I lifted a tear from the corner of my eye. I hated to admit that I was having an attack of homesickness, even though I’d left my parent’s house only this morning. I took a deep breath of the night air. The cool breeze seemed to radiate some emotion I needed to understand. I’ll take a walk, I thought, a walk’ll feel good. Cheer me up, maybe.
Even though I carried the fantasy of meeting the man from the piano with me at all times, I seldom gave any thought to the strange encounters I’d had as a child. I always looked at tall, dark haired men with interest but I hadn’t yet met up with my fantasy man.
Tall was important because I’d inherited many of my mother’s features. As a model she’d had to be tall. I was taller. I didn’t care much about such stuff and I really am uncomfortable talking about myself but my co-author insists on including a few remarks about my looks.
I’d been told that I had Mother’s slim but shapely legs, her high cheek bones and her well defined chin. Some of the people at the university in Arkansas had even called me “beautiful,” but caring about personal appearance was as distant to my mind as were UFOs and alien beings at that moment. I pulled the sides of my too small cardigan together in front to ward off some of the coolness of the breeze.
I wasn’t at all aware that by taking that walk, I’d embarked upon a journey. What happened that evening, the occurrence which appeared to be coincidental wasn’t coincidence after all, but rather synchronicity. A lot of unrelated events came together in that place and at that time, dovetailed, and wove themselves into the fabric of my life. Blind chance ceased to occur for me. Everything that happened to me from that moment on, everything, everyone I met from that moment on, all the people, all the happenings from that evening, each and every part of the coming events soon fit a purpose in my life.
Of course, I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that I was free, young, and open to the experiences that life was going to offer me. I had to keep myself from smiling as I hurried to the corner clutching my ugly, worn-out old high school sweater across my chest to ward off the autumn wind.
Chapter 6
THE STONE HORSE
I turned the corner and looked at the street ahead. Lights from inside the drug store splashed a series of parallelograms across the sidewalk in front of me.
Guess they’re open, I thought. I paid no particular attention to the man who came from the shadows on the opposite side of the street to walk into the drugstore. I followed him in.
Inside, I looked for the stationery supplies. There must be something there that I could use, something I could afford. I knew I couldn’t spend much so I was pleased when I reached for a small green moldable artwork clean-up cube. As my fingers touched the rubber eraser another hand beat me to it and lifted the artist’s eraser from the shelf. I stood and stared at the disappearing object.
“Barbara Simon?”
I turned and met the eyes of the tall, blonde haired man who’d taken my eraser, then spoken my name.
“Yes?” I answered and wondered how this good-looking stranger knew my name. “Oh,” I felt my face flush warm as I finally recognized the tall, slim, teacher from the rival high school, the one who’d complimented me on my work while I was still a student. “Oh, Mr. Bartholic.”
“Bob,” he said, “Call me Bob. After all, you’re not in school anymore, are you?”
“No. No, I’m not.” My tongue suddenly felt large and awkward inside my mouth just because I was talking to this sophisticated, older man. “I’ve graduated,” my dignified tone backfired and sounded childish to my ears. My cheeks grew even warmer. “I even have a year of college.” I was almost stammering.
When he asked me to have a cup of coffee with him I gave him some kind of excuse and fled from the drugstore back to my tiny apartment. I raced up the worn wooden stairway to my place, as if something really bad were after me.
When I turned the key and stepped into my room, my mind was in a whirl. Acted like a fool, I thought as I wrenched my ugly sweater from my shoulders and flung it at the couch. Why..., why didn’t I have coffee with him? He must think I’m an idiot. Well, I consoled myself, I had at least given him my number.
When he calls... if he calls, better not act like a c
hild again. Damn. I sat on the couch, pulled my knees up and hugged them to my chest. He’s good-looking though, I told myself and I smiled and focused on the air in front of me. And he’s an artist. It was at times like this that I wished I had a girlfriend to confide in. No one would ever believe that a teacher, an artist, a real artist, had asked me out.
Two evenings later I opened my door to find Bob Bartholic on my landing. He had just lifted his hand to knock on my door.
“How about a walk?” he’d asked.
That was the same casual tone he’d used at the drug store and the spontaneity of his invitation captured me. I had always enjoyed unplanned events. I don’t know what happened. Suddenly I felt the insecure feelings rush through me just as they had two evenings before.
“I... I can’t... I... I didn’t know you were coming.” I looked down at myself. I was wearing the same old ugly sweater I’d had on at the drugstore. “I’m not dressed to go out.” I tried desperately to think of some excuse, any excuse, to drive this man from my door. “I can’t go out tonight.”
“Well,” Completely undaunted, Bob smiled and tried again. “Well, what’re you doing? Were you going somewhere?”
“Oh, nothing really, I guess. I was going to walk down to the drugstore.” I felt goose bumps raise on my arms as Bob’s gaze went from my jeans to my gray sweatshirt, to the hated old sweater tied around my shoulders.
“You look great to me,” He shrugged and gestured. “Come on. Let’s just take a little walk together.”
There was nothing else to say. I swallowed, nodded and followed him down the stairs.
# # #
That evening and through the daily afternoon and evening strolls that followed, I felt my defenses fading. We walked and talked for hours on end. I felt my closely guarded walls-against-the-world fall away, a layer at a time as we delved into each other’s most personal thoughts and ideas.
Barbara: The Story of a UFO Investigator Page 3
