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In some ways, a lifetime had passed since Professor Evory pulled out his trombone for my class, and even still–even in all that time–he hadn’t learned to bring a music stand with him on his performance days. He seemed to forget that his attempts to turn the lecture hall into a concert hall didn’t mean that music stands magically spawned, and there was no good substitute to pull together. In front of him, the students were too shocked to move or help, and while I felt compelled to say something or volunteer to just hold his sheet music for him, I found myself stuck against the wall, waiting for him to ask me for help, to invite me into that moment. And to make that easier for him, I kept my eyes lifted and turned towards his face. With one slight turn of his head, he could have summoned me as a cavalry to his aid.
I said nothing to that effect, though. I stood with my back to the board, rigid and mentally calling out for him to remember that I was there. We had walked in together. He had remembered to introduce me as his guest without going into the specifics. We had discussed as much: the nature of the reveal he was planning, and it had all seemed alright to me when it was strictly theoretical, but once we found ourselves in the moment in question, I found the unpleasantries we hadn’t considered before. I was left vulnerable by the mystery. I was positioned as the odd-one-out, this piece without a resting spot. And the bright green of my shirt seemed to beg a question that no one had yet thought to ask but was lingering in the air as Professor Evory tried to balance his briefcase on the lectern in an attempt to transform it into some sort of music stand.
The students watched as he engineered a hasty solution to his problems. But at any point, they could have turned away from him and back onto me. That frightened me. Or rather, it was the burn of the figurative spotlight that I feared. There was a delicacy to me that I knew made me susceptible to burning.
If I had something to do, I wouldn’t need to think about that. So I shifted nervously on my feet, hoping Professor Evory would acknowledge me with a request for my help. And as his briefcase struggled to not slide down the lectern’s sloped surface, it seemed like the best solution for both of us. And yet, he made no such move. Maybe he couldn’t feel the pointed glare of my stare, or maybe he couldn’t hear my mental calls to be summoned to his aide. Or maybe, I also realized as the faint pangs of familiarity rang out from my body, this might have been part of his show–this forgetting to do something that seemed so basic and then the ensuing struggle to pull together a solution to his problem. It was the sort of thing a student would encounter in life, maybe even in this class, and the instinct would have been to kick themselves for it. They had been taught that these sorts of things weren’t supposed to happen. They had been taught their whole lives that they were better than that, that this aspect of human nature was beneath them somehow. It was a scar of some kind, a deep wound that Professor Evory was trying to heal by example.
Finally, Professor Evory took a binder clip from his bag and used it to fasten the sheet music upright against what I had always assumed was the leather of the bag. At first, the page seemed to remain in place, but Professor Evory held his breath for those first few moments as his invention was tested. But in the end, the arrangement held up.
He sighed. “Okay,” he whispered to himself. “That just needs to stay up for a few minutes.”
The concert was always quick, even when he didn’t have a second act lined up. There was no need to draw the lesson out.
Keeping a cautious eye on the sheet music, Professor Evory started towards his trombone with a quick step. But the instrument remained still, on the table where he had left it. Just like before, it had not wandered off when left to its own devices. It only sat in wait, basking in the overhead lights that showed off just how diligently Professor Evory had kept the brass instrument clean. It shined just as brightly as it did when it was first made, but he had once told me the instrument was a few decades old.
And maybe that was part of the lesson too: how to endure across time.
Carefully, Professor Evory took the instrument in his hands and moved the trombone’s slide up and down a couple times, gauging the ease with which it moved. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but it seemed to be to his satisfaction. He nodded to himself.
“My esteemed guest Mia here pointed out that you might not know this song because it’s, well, old, but I think that adds to the charm.”
I jumped at the sound of my name, at that instance where he proved that he hadn’t forgotten I was there. But it also meant that the students were also reminded of my presence. They turned to me with curiosity flickering in their eyes. At that stage in their life, the sparks were easy to see from across the lecture hall. I had forgotten eyes could look that way. The sudden reminder softened a bit of the spotlight's glow.
It was hardly on me for a moment, however. The slight diversion gave Professor Evory the chance to raise his instrument and take that first sharp breath in as he set his slide into place for the note. The sudden low rumble filled the room and forced all eyes back onto him. Slowly but surely, he fell into that familiar melody, the tune of a song that lingers in the mind, that invaded the human DNA and became something we all carried after its cultural moment a couple decades back. It didn’t matter that Professor Evory took the song at a slower pace or that some of his notes came out a bit flat or sharp. We all knew what he was trying to play, but from that knowledge his fumbling became all the more apparent.
“It’s not going to be perfect,” he had said.
And he hadn’t lied. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t like he was aiming for things to not be perfect. His mistakes were so subtle as to clearly be unintentional, not planned demonstrations of a principle, but the inevitable stumbling of a man doing the best he could. He was human, he wanted to show. He wasn’t a mastermind. He wasn’t a supercomputer. Even after all of the years he had spent in that profession, he was human. And there was nothing wrong with that.
The students all sat with blank expressions on their faces. Which wasn’t how I remembered my year reacting, but I supposed I had no real way of knowing how that had gone. I was sitting in the front row. I had my back to everyone else, and I couldn’t remember what my own expression was. It wasn’t something I would have been thinking about. I wouldn’t have been trying to look appreciative or inquisitive or anything that would fit a student’s face. Instead, I would have just been confused, trying to make sense of a lesson taught so unorthodoxly while also trying to commit that moment to memory. The profound weight of the moment had never been lost on me.
I took a deep breath as the music played. “You’re not perfect,” the lyrics became in my mind. Those weren’t the real lyrics, of course, and they didn’t quite fit over that part of the song. The syllables didn’t line. But that was just the sentiment I felt in response to those notes. And it was the only thing I could feel right then.
“You aren’t perfect, and that’s okay.”
It didn’t feel okay though. It felt like any of the hollow platitudes George used to throw at me. It felt like the sort of words offered because that is the expectation, that is what fits in the spot. It’s what one has to say and what many have said before. It’s a message meant for others, that occasionally was misrouted to me.
My lips twisted. I wasn’t perfect. That much was true. But I also wasn’t a college student anymore. I wasn’t a young kid, trying to find my way. I should have known my way, especially right then, in that class, in front of those students.
Maybe there was a time when it was okay that I wasn’t perfect, but that moment might have passed. It probably passed. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been perfect, but I at least had to be better than I currently was. I had to have some sense of what I was doing or what came next. I had some books in the publication pipeline. I had some awards under my belt, along with a movie deal. I had a guy in my life who wanted to be around me. (For now.) But I also had one dear friendship being held together by the faintest thread and no standing relationship with any of my siblings. I had a strained relationship with my mother that we hid behind a carefully painted façade. I had a mentor figure whom I had tricked into overlooking my many failings and another who I kept far enough away that I didn’t even need to trick her.
But above all, I had a set of lungs that didn’t quite work anymore and a tendency towards the same sort of mundane destruction that plagued my father’s life. I tried to take a deep breath in, but my lungs tightened, refusing to inflate fully. And while I could have tried to fight them, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I didn’t want to add that to the list of my many problems.
So instead of doing anything to calm or comfort myself, I put on my biggest smile. I acted like I was happy with this faint taste of my youth. I acted like it didn’t remind me of all the miles I had not traveled and all the ground I had not covered. After all, I hadn’t moved past Professor Evory’s lecture hall. I was simply in a different spot.