i’ve been thinking, lately, about buying a harmonium. i’ve wanted one ever since discovering the fabulous katchie gaard in berkeley, my home away from home for several years when i was writing software for a biotech company out there. katchie’s yoga classes were (and probably still are) amazing, inspirational, funny, and sound-infused, thanks to her portable harmonium.

i’ve been through a slew of instruments in my life so far starting with my choice of cello on entering the fourth grade at roland park elementary with mrs. reila. my dad had played the cello which is, i guess, why i chose it. i did and still do love the sound of a cello but as a fairly tiny girl it kinda sucked to lug around so i switched to clarinet - a nice portable instrument but one that, even then, had a little too much dork factor for me to stick with it. later, i coopted my sister’s oh-so-cool flute and played, just for fun, with my mom at home, mostly bach duets. after a completely mortifying episode during which i choked in front of a crowd gathered for my dad’s second nuptials i left the flute and all instruments alone for several years. though it’s still traumatic to remember i will confess, for your amusement, that my musical selections included take five accompanied by the church pianist. ouch.

sometime in my late 20s and early 30s i went through an electric guitar phase and a tenor sax phase. first, i bought a brand new mexican stratocaster and a fender champ. the guitar didn’t last long. i guess i just wasn’t the rocker i envisioned. the tenor sax lasted a little longer. i actually took lessons from a guy at the peabody prep in baltimore. he was a classically trained clarinet player who dabbled in klezmer on the weekends. he tortured me by making me play debussy… i am dead serious. i wanted to be an edgy bop playin chick, paying homage to my hero, john coltrane, but, instead, he gave me debussy. i abandoned the lessons but kept chugging away at ruby my dear, well you needn’t, and all blues from my fakebooks but eventually, even my beloved sax was banished to the closet.

recently, as i prepared to sell my house, stream-line my life and face up to the fact that i really hate cleaning gutters (more accurately, that i hate the fact that i *don’t* clean my gutters), i sold both the guitar and the sax and was, for the first time in almost 40 years, without an instrument. i’m not sure why this should matter since i hadn’t actually *played* either in ages. it was only a few short weeks later that i started fantasizing about buying a harmonium - a portable hand-handpumped organ-like oddity not that far from an accordion but closer to a melodian, a foot-pumped organ that my granny actually played and passed down to my mom. the melodian still sits in mom’s house though i don’t think she plays it either. we appear to be an instrument-owning, non-playing kindof family. but i have high-hopes that this time it’ll be different since i can cart the harmonium to yoga classes if i can ever muster up the courage to introduce my students to chanting. if they’re anything like me in my early yoga years (i mostly teach beginners) they will think chanting is a dangerous step toward white robes and a single pony-tail out the top of their heads.

meanwhile, as plans are made for a trip to new york for harmonium shopping, the reality of my impending move takes over and i’m left to deal with box-packing and list-making to shepherd my house to sale and me to a new apartment. as part of this daunting process i decided i’d make the switch from my $40 earthlink plan to verizon’s bargain $14.95 plan. after scheduling the move of my phone line for later in the month i hopped on verizon’s website and placed my dsl order. i immediate regretted it due to the uniqueness of my situation: my phone number was still active at my house and there is no phone yet at my apartment. no doubt, by fretting over the fact that they’d screw the whole thing up i brought the resulting snafu on myself. as my friend susan would say, i was vibrating at a very low level, inviting disaster.

as a result of some bizarre system error that noone at verizon believes is possible, the new dsl service was installed right on top of my working earthlink service making it so that no matter what address i typed into my trusty firefox browser, a maddening single page would be displayed: unable to connect to the verizon dsl network. the details of the hours spent in exasperating conversation with tech support folks assuring me that what i claimed was impossible are too dull to recount so i’ll fast forward to the point where i gave up fighting the giant machine, trying to undo what had been done. at 11 at night i decided i’d just try to install the new modem and activate verizon’s service despite the fact that earthlink still saw their signal as active. 30 minutes later i was online once again.

it was at this point i decided to call verizon and take advantage of the late hour to quickly get through to a supervisor and make sure they didn’t succeed in undoing what had been done. after all, i was now up and running. Mark, a perky guy with an upstate new york accent was determined to make me happy. i guess it’s worth mentioning that during my conversations with no less than 10 verizon support folks i was often less than… um, respectful in my tone. in light of the way things have since unfolded i’m feeling a bit embarrassed about that. that’s me, the tightly wound yogini. but i’m getting ahead of myself- back to mark - he was one of those rare customer service beings who actually wants to serve. while tapping away at diagnostics to verify my claim he tried to thaw me out. he asked me what i did for a living and which software languages i’d coded in. he told me about his history as a coder. i was annoyed. at midnight we left it that he would call me the following afternoon and get the whole thing straightened out.

as promised, mark called right on schedule. during one of the longer stints mark and i spent on hold with billing he asked me how my day had gone so far. i said it’d been good, that i’d got lots of packing done. how had his been? he said it was great, he’d bought a new instrument. i asked what he bought. he said, “I bought a… harmonium.” i cannot even begin to explain how, as he uttered those words, i knew what he was going to say. the shock was not diminished by 3 seconds advanced knowing. i was floored. i peppered him with questions and it turned out that he was a swami? i really have no idea what a swami IS but he, like me, has never played a harmonium and intends to use it in kirtan (sanskrit for devotional chanting). he told me where he bought it (www.krishnaculture.com in, of all places, houston). it’s at this point that i want to run right out to hire an existential detective, a la i heart huckabees.

i have been back and forth in my life on the questions of whether things happen for a reason. i suppose i have settled into the belief - ok, that sounds kindof fixed and it’s not - the feeling that we can either give events meaning and thus learn from them, or we can just curse the giants for screwing with our dsl.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 7:48 pm and is filed under meaning mining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.