Into My Ears

I'm doing some preparatory listening this week. Tyler and I plan to take in a local production of "Into the Woods" this weekend, so I'm listening (and listening and listening, over and over again) to the soundtrack.

And prompted by PianoLady's recent book list, I'm listening to "The Time Traveler's Wife" again, to prepare for seeing the movie soon.

I am smitten with clever writing. I am in awe of writers who—after pondering and thinking and moving words around—come up with an amazing twist of a phrase to delight the reader.

"Into the Woods" takes several fairy tales and mashes them together. You learn the back story of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella. The phrase that made my brain smile comes from the song "Maybe They're Magic". After the Baker sells Jack the beans, the Baker's Wife reassures him that "If the end is right, it justifies the beans." Isn't that supremely clever?

(Want to read more about the musical? Look here and here.)

And in the prologue of "The Time Traveler's Wife", there is a quote from Derek Walcott:

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

I have the talent to be able to memorize a piece of music after playing it three times. Throughout my childhood piano lessons, I didn't really know how to practice, so I would just sightread a piece three times, and then it would be memorized, mistakes and all. I knew those pieces—and those mistakes— by heart.

So the thought of a person knowing me by heart struck me. I'm in my year(s) of starting over again. Having left all my friends behind in Tucson and Washington, I've been borrowing friends left and right until I can craft some of my own. Yesterday I had a long phone chat with one of my best friends in Tucson. She knows me so well, she knows instinctively how lonely I am for friends with whom to go out for drinks or dinner. We shared so much in our friendship, from our Pima Canyon homes to a love of glass and clay to nights firing pots with raku glazes. She knows what I think and feel without my telling her. She knows my heart; she knows me by heart.

May your life be blessed with friends who know you by heart!