This blog post is dedicated to all the Olympians, whether they have competed in the past, will compete in the future, are competing in this year's games, or have arrived and for whatever reason, found themselves fully trained and ready and then not able to compete. They have a skill that I can only equate to a Super Hero's agility, ability, strength and fortitude.
I play violin as my primary instrument and have for most of my life. But my step-mom has this idea that everyone should play at least 2 instruments, and one should be piano. I don’t disagree with her, and I grew up with enough privilege to be able to take violin lessons from 4th grade through about 10th grade when we moved, and also to take about 2 years of piano lessons.
An interesting aside - violin music consists of 1 line of music at a time. You just follow one line from left to right, then go to the next line. It’s just like reading a book in English. Proceed from left to right, go down a line, continue from left to right.
Piano, on the other hand, is reading 2 lines of music at a time. (And if you’re accompanying someone, I imagine the pianist is likely reading 3 lines of music at a time!) So you’re not simply reading from left to right - you’re reading up to down for every single chord. It could be 3 notes with your right hand and 2 notes or 3 notes with your left hand. That’s just “one note / one chord.” Then you read the next one. It’s all reading from top to bottom and then proceeding to the next chord on the right. I never could master reading all those notes. I now know it’s because of my tunneling, and I’m working on it.
My vision therapist told me I needed to widen my range of vision and she worked on it with various exercises. I really need to blog about the baseballs and the pencil exercise (one is pencil pushups, the other is writing lines with both of my hands at the same time).
Anyway, so I would master each hand alone, so I could mostly play the music more from muscle memory, then just sort of play both together. It took hours and hours of practicing. Like I said, I had been a musician for so much of my life, and after about 18 months of learning piano with a private teacher, I was able to play George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, so I wasn’t too shabby. I love that song.
The first time I sat down to play it, my dad heard me trying to swipe my right hand across all the keys over and over and over. He was making pancakes in the kitchen. He suddenly came out of the kitchen, saying, “is that Rhapsody in Blue??” He was so excited and I was bewildered that he knew this random piece of music. My dad knew all kinds of music just from a few notes. He was awesome like that. (I miss him every day.)
Well, I have to tell you about that Rhapsody in Blue sheet music. My piano teacher would go through when I made mistakes, and circle things with her blue BIC brand pen. If I still made the same mistake the next week, she would circle it, again, in red pen. Blue happens to be one of my favorite colors and I was happy about it. But it got to the point that I ignored all the red pen circles. I wasn’t sure why, but I realized I never saw them, for whatever reason.
That music got so marked up so quickly, with her pen, that one week she replaced it with new music. No pen marks. And began again with new circles. I had worn out the first copy by turning pages, and she had worn it out with pen marks. 😂
I realized over the years that I really never saw the color red. Like a teacher writing with red pen. I figured it must have to do with the piano teacher writing in red pen. My teacher was very nice by the way, and I never resented her for doing that. It wasn’t like I was being rebellious. I just never saw the red pen and couldn’t articulate that.
Recently, I was looking at a picture from a game I like to play from Nintendo, “Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.” It’s a fun game. I enjoy it. Every season or so, they do a new opening screen for folks to “find the differences.” It’s a fun mini game while you wait for your game to load.
It takes me weeks and weeks to do these puzzles. It’s something I enjoy, and sometimes I get so frustrated after like 3 months of not being able to spot the 5 differences, that I will screen shot it just so I can have more time to spot the differences.
One time, I showed it to my son and asked him to help me find the differences. In that case, the sky was 2 different colors. That drove me bonkers. 😂. Another time, he found the beams on a building were different or something. This current one was driving me crazy, and I asked a friend to help me. My friend spotted one thing that is probably obvious to most everyone who is reading this blog. It was one thing I didn’t see. I wonder if I would have ever seen it?
Here is the graphic from Nintendo’s “Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp” (it’s a game you can play on your phone or tablet).
I don’t know about you, but there are too many times in my life when I go back to old memories and rehash them over and over. I am learning, as I get older, that this can mean to my brain that it “hasn’t learned what it’s supposed to from an instance, so it’s examining it to figure out what it can learn from it, so that it can rest after figuring it out.”
I have other things to say about this particular phenomenon - ruminating endlessly on things. But this isn’t the blog post for that.
I find myself lately going back to a memory from 8th grade. I went to a very small, private school at the end of 7th grade and for all of 8th grade. My 8th grade class had 6 kids in it. The 7th grade class just behind us had a very big class - somewhere between 25-30 students.
Our Latin & English teacher (imported from England - with her very thick British accent) decided we should all do the Shakespeare play “Romeo and Juliet” as our annual tradition. (Note - the school did this every year. The seventh and eighth grade classes always put on a Shakespeare play at the end of every year together.)
Before she announced who would get what part, I remember her quizzing us, but I didn’t put this together
—— A break. ——- Sorry to do this, but with my concussions, I struggle so hard to write the way I used to write. I used to be able to sit down and write seamlessly. Thoughts from my brain to my typing hands flowed so easily. I struggle VERY hard now to say things as eloquently as I used to. I have other things to say about this too, but again, not the blog post for it.
—— I want to try saying all of this again so I am going to start over a bit. I need an editor for my blog. Maybe some day when I am rich. ——
—— End of break. ——
One day, our English teacher had us look at some obscure poem. She had all 6 of us “try to memorize as much as you can.” It was maybe 20 stanzas. (I am not even sure what a stanza is.) It was about a page long, with paragraph breaks. The lines rhymed in an ABAB pattern. She gave us 20 minutes to “memorize” this poem. She said there wouldn’t be a test, don’t stress, she was just trying to see something, as if she was doing a little experiment.
I got about 1 1/2 lines of the poem “memorized,” and barely that. I learned maybe 1 word in the 3rd line. And that was that for me. I worked so hard at that, and felt pretty good that I had done okay.
The teacher then had us all sit in a group of 6 (3 tall boys in the back, 3 short gals in the front) and just “say the poem.” I dropped out pretty quickly, tried to mouth a few of the words as I heard others say it, then I just gave up and sat there.
Two of the kids had memorized the entire poem. The. Entire. Poem.
Fast forward to learning about Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” assignment. The one gal who had memorized the entire thing was cast as Juliet. The one guy who had memorized almost the entire thing was cast as another major character. (A tall gal from seventh grade was cast as Romeo - she undoubtedly memorized that entire poem when her class was quizzed, too.)
I was cast as the Apothecary (which I thought was really funny, seeing as I was being raised as a Christian Scientist and wasn’t allowed to go to doctors or take medicine, and I wasn’t even allowed “material remedies” like mixing lemon juice and honey for my nightly coughing I endured a few times per year). I was also cast as “The Prologue.” The Prologue is the first one to come on stage and set the scene for the entire play. I still remember a few lines of it:
Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene …
Well, she assigned the parts. Gave everyone a copy of the book. And sent us home to go learn our lines. I remember being completely alone in the house. I don’t know where my parents or brother were. But I was alone for hours and hours, all afternoon.
I sat there, for 4-6 hours, trying to memorize the lines from The Prologue. I knew about different learning styles, and so I tape-recorded myself reading the lines and I sat there, reading along with myself, for hours. I tried and tried. I tried putting paper over the lines to learn 1 line at a time. I tried reading it to understand what the heck Shakespeare was saying, because I know I memorize better when I understand the story it’s conveying ….
I probably got about 2-3 lines memorized. Not very much.
The next day, I was in the kitchen in the private school (it’s where I had my Spanish classes and science classes, and where PE started out every session), and that was considered “back stage.” The larger seventh grade classroom was where we were having it be “the stage.”
I remember standing there, having a perfectly fine time standing back stage with a few of the kids in the small kitchen. The teacher said we were going to rehearse the play.
She called me out there, and I thought, “we will do a walk through, and I will learn where to stand, and I will memorize as I am able to, and it won’t be a big deal.”
Being The Prologue, I was the first to come out from the kitchen and stand there. I stood there. The teacher looked at me, probably exasperated to begin with. She told me to say my lines.
I think I was so out of it, I couldn’t even remember the first word. I wasn’t in that head space. I don’t know why, but I just wasn’t. I had never rehearsed a play before. Every other kid there had done the previous Shakespeare play, but I had transferred in too late to be a part of that experience (thank goodness). And here I was, first on the “stage” and I had no clue of what to do. I had no guidance, nothing.
The teacher prompted me for the first word, I said maybe the first line. Let’s just say she probably prompted me once or twice more, and I just couldn’t come up with more.
She then BELLOWED at the top of her lungs (I swear, the only time I have ever heard anyone speak that loudly is a Marine drill sergeant) “Didn’t you study AT ALL?”
She was FURIOUS at me. Completely furious. I couldn’t believe a teacher could holler so loud, let alone this one. I had actually liked her before this. We ate lunch together every day in our small 8th grade classroom - just her and the 6 of us 8th graders. Everyday she ate a yoghurt. Only, she pronounced it “Yoh-gurt.” Like “Yaw” or “Saw.” My son now calls it yaw-gurt too. It’s funny. This teacher had made a good impression on me and I had some fun memories of her until this very moment - a moment of what should have been supreme humiliation.
I have mentioned here before that I dissociate. I wonder if I dissociated what happened after that. I do remember walking away being unable to speak. I couldn’t speak at all. I wanted to say, “I worked at this yesterday for 6 hours! I worked HARD at this! And you’re hollering at me saying I didn’t try at all!”
I guess at this moment, as I type this, I feel devasted for younger me who couldn’t express her dismay and pain and complete shock at being hollered at by the loudest bellow I had ever heard, from a British teacher that I revered and honored.
I want to go back in time and tell her how hard I worked. I want to tell her that her horrendous yelling was the least helpful thing ever. I want to tell her what I appreciated about her and I want to tell her how she bowled me over with that furious thundering yell at me in front of my peers.
I have no concept of whether any of them felt bad for me. None of them ever came to console me or check in on me. I mean, they were seventh and eighth graders.
By the way, I had taken an IQ test to get into that school. I wouldn’t have been admitted if I wasn’t above average. It had been shown that I was smart. So how come I couldn’t memorize?
As I have been ruminating over this (I remember it every time my son says “yaw-gurt,” and we ate some peach yogurt yesterday) yesterday, it suddenly occured to me what lesson I needed to learn from this experience, so I can stop ruminating on it.
Thanks to going to Vision Therapy, I have now learned that I have no visual memory. I cannot look at something and remember what I have looked at. The moment I look away, it’s gone. Completely gone. My ADHD doesn’t help, either, I am sure.
Imagine looking at the number 17. You need to write that number on the paper in front of you. You go to look up the number, “17.” Okay. Turn to the paper to write it down, and you cannot for the life of you remember what the number was. I don’t know where I was supposed to write it, so I have to go find that space again, re-interpret what it is I am writing, realize it’s a number, oh yes, a number, what was the number again? It’s gone. I have to go through this routine several times to write down a number. It’s a time suck. It’s my normal, so I get mildly frustrated. Mildly. I can’t get hyper irritated about it or I would spend my whole life in that black hole.
Well, I had tried so hard to learn this Shakespeare Prologue of Romeo and Juliet, and even tried to learn it audibly. And I couldn’t. Hours and hours, and I couldn’t do it. I also had no help, remember, because I was in the house alone for whatever reason that was. Where the heck were my parents? how come they never helped me with homework? It took me hours and hours - an unreasonable amount of time - to do my homework. I spent hours and hours and hours at all my homework. It was always way too hard. Being a parent now, I heard all the time from the school, “if your child’s homework takes more than 20 minutes, then let us know.” Teachers want to help kids who are struggling. I was struggling in SPADES and no one ever helped me.
My dad quizzed me on vocabulary and got me through English. I remember my step-mom trying to teach me math facts and punishing me by taking away my stuffed animals (I didn’t get the majority of them back until I was a mom of two boys. They weren’t even toddlers or babies anymore - they were boys) And this is a story for another day too, not worth expounding on this blog post.
I have a learning disability. And I have finally learned, as an adult, that it’s my broken eyesight that keeps me from learning.
The pain I could have been saved if this sort of thing could have been diagnosed when I was a child. I need strategies. I have said for decades, “everything for me is so much harder than it needs to be. School was so much harder. I studied for hours and hours and my classmates could watch TV and play games and go outside, and I was stuck at my desk, struggling with school work.”
I still cannot wrap my head around this teacher hollering at me that day. I would like to stop ruminating about this and yet I can’t seem to stop. Maybe now that I have written this blog post, some people will kindly come forward and express concern, sympathy, kindness, anything.
Thank you for reading this. Sorry I don’t have a better conclusion for this post. I think I just needed to ponder it, write it, share it, and realizing the conclusion that this was all pain from my past due to having no visual memory. Life sure is “fun” isn’t it? Too challenging for some, way too easy for others, if you ask me.
I am so glad my own boys don’t seem to have to deal with this crap that I had to and have to deal with on a every day / every moment basis.
