LETTERS FROM HOME: WIGGLING YOUR FINGERS AND WATCHING OUT FOR BLINDS POTS

Nov. 16, 2000

Dear Julie,

In Big Sur years ago I met a man who, long into adulthood, decided to give away one of his secrets. He had played clarinet in the band all through high school but somehow managed to do so just by wiggling his fingers. He never learned how to play the notes.

When he wiggled, certainly some people thought he was playing. Just as surely, those who sat next to him in band must have wondered why he just wiggled his fingers.

We tell ourselves people don't know our secrets. They know.

I wonder if he thought his audience would be appalled. We laughed. We liked him for befriending the only opening gay man in the group but wished he'd tell us more about himself. Telling a secret is such a powerful release because keeping it takes so much energy.

We were in Big Sur as part of the first-ever men's group at the Esalen Institute. All the men were there because they wanted to resolve some issues about being male. The women at Esalen wanted to know everything about us. Lots of them had issues with men who had issues about being male.

Mine, I was coming to realize after one relationship after another died without becoming a commitment, was a willingness to be Peter Pan. I was a boy, emotionally, trying to engage with women.

Maybe everyone is guilty of faking it in some way. And maybe music, so difficult to make and so essential to our souls, is one of the great Rorschach tests.

I must have been home not taking a big test the day the music teacher showed us how to determine the key a composition is in. I still don't know how and wonder if it's one of the reasons my family's musical gene never kicked in.

Am I stubborn or a slow learner? There have been thousands of opportunities to understand this small fundamental about musical keys but I never took them.

One of the beauties and terrors of golf is that there is no faking it. There is no team to hide your weaknesses behind, no other clarinetists to make up for your silence. It's just you hitting a motionless ball toward a target. Like music, it's difficult. As in music, an understanding of the fundamentals is essential.

Becoming a better golfer seems to me to be all about eliminating blind spots, the parts of your swing when you have lost track of the clubhead, when you are just hoping for the best. Faking it.

To eliminate blind spots means seeing your swings for what it is and not pretending something that isn't true.

The same is true when we're just being human beings. Out of pride, we insist on an idealized image of ourselves that has no flaws when in reality flaws are as much a part of us as the potential for saintliness.

To feel the humiliation of another less than your own is a sign of too much pride, the writer Eva Pierrakos says.

To eliminate a flaw, it first must be examined and accepted with an unblinking eye.

The man in Big Sur was struggling with bigger issues than his clarinet playing, but they, too, had to do with faking it. Nothing in life is meaningless. Even the clarinet.

He was faking everything.

One night we were all in the pool to learn a meditation technique in which one person is held like a baby by another person who makes a soft figure 8 motion in the water. It has the blissful effect of returning you to the womb. This was Esalen, so we were all naked, of course.

But when the clarinetist's turn came to be held, he suddenly jumped out of the pool and disappeared. The meditation teacher had seen it happen before while showing this technique to a group of men. Men who are unsure about their sexuality suddenly are faced with the truth.

Trying to understand our true natures is difficult enough. How so much more difficult we sometimes make it for ourselves and for each other.

Love, Sam