Making the most of our gifts

July 3, 2008

Dear Leslie,

As a child you think you can do anything, even fly like Superman once you figure out how. To know what flying feels like you jump out of trees and off cliffs and somehow survive.

My Aunt Jane was a secretary at the local high school when I was a boy, so some wintry Saturday mornings while she worked my cousin Danny and I played on the same court the Central High School basketball team played on. Though barely strong enough to heave a basketball 10 feet in the air we never tired of dribbling the length of the court and pretending we were one of the heroes whose names were emblazoned on the scoreboard in those days: Alan Kesterson, Greg Neihart, Paul "Nugget" Banks, Curtis Williams, Ron Wright, Paul Ebaugh, Steve Mosley, Roger and Jerry Suedekum, Kermit Meystedt.

We imagined becoming one of them.

I grew up in a household filled with music, especially big-band jazz. If I could have been anything in life it would have been a jazz musician in black Armani, cradling a saxophone and blowing holes in the back wall of some smoky room filled with people who came to listen, who understand a universal language aliens could understand, sounds that reverberate in your bones, that often only acknowledge a melody, that communicate soul to soul.

But I came as close to becoming a jazz musician as I came to playing baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, which is to say not in the ballpark. I blame math. Musicians synthesize the left and right sides of the brain better than most people, but as right-brained imaginative as music can be, it is essentially mathematical. Pythagoras, the mathematician famous for his theorem setting us straight on the nature of right triangles, also figured out the law of harmonic intervals. He found these harmonic ratios in the elements and in the movements of the planets. He used music to heal people's bodies and souls. He found a correspondence between musical notes and colors. Math, it seems, could explain the nature of existence.

If it did I would miss the mystery.

Mathematicians and musicians have a skill for ascertaining patterns, a logic in abstractions and sounds. Others find the gist of being alive in images or in words -- or in everyday deeds. A retiree I know works as an aide in a classroom of developmentally disabled children. On an outing at a park one of the little boys wet himself in the bathroom and was ashamed to go back outside, so this man splashed water on the front of his own pants and together they walked back out into the sunshine.

We may not live out our childhood fantasies, but resurrecting their playfulness is a boon to adulthood. We have the gifts we do have for a reason, I am convinced.

Be grateful and use them and all Creation will sing.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.