Saying Goodbye

We have stories that we can’t tell. The
reason is not that they are secrets.
It is that we don’t recognize them as stories. They lie
hidden among the debris of our lives.
Daniel B. plays “The Tempest’s” first movement. It
is the rush and loud clanging of everyday life,
hurrying to make a statement, furrowing under all
the small details that make a story, so we have
the rush and clamor, and it doesn’t
seem like a story to me. Well,
in that sense, all stories come from secrets — to secrete something —
i.e what is hidden because speed and clanking
cover it up. Now is the
time when one thinks of regrets.
Daniel B’s fingers brilliantly, independently agile.
But mine once were too, except
for those weak 4th and 5th fingers on my left
hand. But if I had kept practicing every day —
what then? Oh, nothing. Nothing. Impossible. You know that
second chances don’t mean getting what you lost or
couldn’t achieve. A second chance is
what I gave myself when, age 21, I stopped practicing the piano
and put my young-Diane, passionate focus on
a second art, poetry. But my heart,
my heart is still
with the piano. with Beethoven and Bach.
What a glass that is. How it
shatters when I say it. My glass is neither
half empty nor half full. It is
broken. No measuring left. No
numbers. The pieces
of the glass do seem unusually shaped though,
like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.