One side of January.

Are you all onboard with the 2016 nostalgia trend? I didn’t really get it when my daughter explained it to me. I don’t keep very good records outside of any published writing, so I struggle to piece timelines together. The number ascribed to the year doesn’t mean much to me except how old my children were, which, in 2016, was six and ten, and oh how all-encompassing that world was, their cherub faces and sweet elementary school with its garden and oak-canopied playground. That time was a world of its own, outside events be damned. 

But even though I couldn’t have put them in the right chronological place myself, I was recently reminded about some things that happened in 2016. In November of that year, I saw Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Company with the Aeolus Quartet in concert at UT. The program ended with a mournful dance by Byrd, alluding to a 1966 shooting at the university, set to a postmodern composition by Yevgeniy Sharlat. During the second movement, each musician put down their violin, viola, or cello and proceeded through a section of the score on kazoo. To me, it said something like we have wrought what we can out of nuance and complexity; we must now assert our humanity with ridiculous, mortal sounds. 

Even in its buzzy bluntness, the kazoo, in my experience, is preferable to the plastic recorder, a terrible instrument, at least in the hands of the third graders for whom it was required curriculum in my kids’ elementary school. Unlike so many other options—a thumb piano, any arrangement of well-tuned bells with felted mallets, a tambourine—the recorder requires nuance and modulation to play well, and the shrieks it makes when children blow into it are of a pitch that’s unbearable for adults. Even the teacher who assigned the recorder couldn’t handle it: My daughter tells a story of being put in time out after she accidentally sneezed into her mouthpiece. 

Luckily for us, at the start of that same academic year, the school hired a new teacher. She wasn’t hired to be the music teacher, but she taught it anyway, alongside reading and writing and fractions and instead of test prep. On her first day, she brandished a ukulele and sang a song for the kids. On her second day, she told the class, I have 30 ukuleles in my car and I need you all to help me carry them. I mark this moment, in our family and in the trajectory of the school, as a canon event. Over the next few years, this teacher shifted the school’s musical focus from en masse recorder chorus to diverse open mics and eclectic bands designed so that if you were slow to pick up the ukulele or glockenspiel, you could at least bop a large rhythm shaker on the floor, tongue in cheek with concentration, and irritate no one. Later that year, in the spring of 2016, we stayed at a vacation rental that had two dusty ukuleles on the wall, and the younger child played until he needed band-aids for all his fingers. The older child and her friends formed their own band, each member serving as both lead singer and lead ukulele, their single song eponymously titled “Wild.” 

I was reminded of all this—the tiny instruments and their powers—when, feeling like a disheveled burrow-animal daring to peek above ground, I attended my first art happening of the year, a performance inside the world of Steve Parker’s installation Funeral for a Tree, at Ivester Contemporary. Steve’s artworks are playable instruments, in this case were made of tree parts, copper pipe, sheng (Chinese mouth organs), parts of brass instruments, CPAP machines, and other medical periphery. They were mostly not tiny and not simple in construction or concept, or maybe they were, depending on your definition of “simple.” The collection was dedicated to and largely composed of wood from an oak that stood in Steve’s yard until it died of oak wilt. As a whole, the work did not say I lost an expensive and structurally important piece of my landscaping. It said multitudes are lost—the grooves, the ecosystem, the sounds, the heat retained, the broken limbs, resistance for the breeze. The point of view of the birds, who knew the tree best, was woven throughout, in distant recordings on tree-trunk records, in arpeggios and notes, in the pensive, brave movement and calls of dancers Heloise Gold and Alexa Capareda, who joined Steve in performance that evening, drawing me out of my burrow. Heloise and Alexa, quirky as kazoos and complex as string quartets, were two of a feather but each driven by her own mysteries, like the tiny creatures who inspired them.

*

The way a bird is sad about a tree seems like a rageless sadness, and an expansive one, quiet, as long as it needs to be, and without resignation. Last year, my children and I learned that the elementary school where they learned the ukulele is slated for closure. The way my now-teenagers and I are sad about this feels something like the way the bird is sad about the tree. It’s no immediate loss to us, but it’s the world gently saying, I hold no responsibility to keep records for you. When the kids from my daughter’s class graduated from their high schools—they’d dispersed to many different ones—they reunited at the elementary school to walk the halls and high-five the little kids. Afterward, they went rogue as a group, wandering the school and reminiscing. My younger child, whose graduation is still a few years out, won’t get to do it, and soon, we’ll no longer be able to drive by and point at the playground or sneak through the garden gate to take a peek. The kazoo is sad about the violin and the violin is sad about the tree of its own resonant wood. 

One of the casualties of extreme inhumanity in the world is our birthright to this quiet, expansive sadness. To individuals, multitudes are generally of a lower order than specifics. We cannot play the kazoo, let alone the violin, whilst screaming and shouting, or hiding. Thank goodness to the artists who create vessels for breathing our sadness into, like the teal medical bags at the ends of Steve’s mutant horn, or the small recorder-like instruments that Heloise and Alexa, two-thirds of the way through the performance, dislodged from the ends of its long copper tubes. Together, they oriented the tiny instruments in a common upward direction and blew. With seemingly bottomless breath, their notes were at first cautious, then reverent, sustained in wisdom. Foghorns blowing into the unseen sea, pipers summoning followers for a pilgrimage.

*

The day after the gallery happening, back in my burrow and listening to the radio in the car, I heard two Bowie songs back to back. After a fleeting worry that David Bowie had just now died, I remembered that he had in fact died, and the deejay marked the time since—a decade. Revisiting Black Star, his final album, over the next several days, I was struck by its breathiness: The glottal notes of the sax, the resonant and wavering vowels, the mournful wails. I find it all rather impossible to comprehend. I am not saying I don’t understand how a famous person could cease to breathe. I am saying multitudes are lost—the wavering golden notes, the Escheresque songs, the breath as it passes the reed of the sax, before it makes the note.