FINDING MY VOICE

I had my first private voice lesson yesterday. I stood beside the piano as my teacher, Annmarie, an exuberant blonde, played a scale, my feet placed apart as instructed, shoulders back, chest open, chin up, strengthening my diaphragm and singing Italian syllables from my head. When we finished the Mi Me Ma Mo Mu’s, I sang, five times, “Apes Ate All Eight Apples”, to improve the way I sing my “A’s.”

“Your voice is really pretty,” Annmarie said. “Great pitch. Great tone too.” Annmarie loves southern accents and thinks I’m a hoot. I don’t understand why, but no matter. We already like working together.

I’ve wanted to sing in a gospel choir since ’75 when I saw the movie “Nashville”, featuring Lily Tomlin as a tambourine-wielding white woman belting out spirituals with a Black choir. Forty years later, in need of something to offset my depression over the hell befalling our country, I joined a church choir where, two Sundays a month, I stand in front of the congregation and sing spirituals and sacred hymns. I can’t read music. I struggle mightily to reach the super high notes without squealing or shrieking. I lose my place a lot. Thus the voice lessons to make singing even more fun than it is now.

And it is a blast. Our choir director, Harley, is a Snoqualmie Valley treasure—a longtime, big time jazz trumpeter who later became a conductor. At Wednesday night rehearsal, he hands out a piece of music that looks like hieroglyphics and that seriously daunts and scares me. Are we really going to do this in front of people?, I think and occasionally say to a fellow choir member. “We are,” the other singer says. “Really.”

And then on Sunday, after a few hours of group rehearsal and picking out my part on my virtual piano keyboard, our choir stands and delivers, and not only do I not screw up royally, we actually don’t sound too shabby. “We fooled em again,” Harley says, smiling, as the congregation claps and shouts “Amen!”

Reflecting on my voice lesson, happy and satisfied, I remember a long ago time when I was neither. In my twenties in Atlanta, in an alcohol drenched funk, so lonesome I could cry and often did, I spent several months not speaking much above a whisper. I remember people leaning in to hear me, cupping their ears, their eyes often filled with concern at the hesitant woman with the small, stifled voice. I felt small too, like a worm to be stomped on and smushed. I’d betrayed myself for so long with drunken philandering, when my real self longed for goodness and health and monogamy, that I’d lost my sense of self—and my voice too.

I wonder what delivered me from then to now. Some combination of guts and unmerited grace, I believe, with enough stubbornness to keep me gutsy when the grace seemed elusive. The grace came from God and friends and family and my loving husband. The guts came from me, I guess, though DNA from gutsy ancestors surely played a part. My Taurean stubbornness may just be all mine. Whatever the agents, I figure morphing from a meek mute into Lily Tomlin, minus the tambourine and the beautiful black faces, has earned me a “Nevertheless She Persisted” t-shirt, which I’ve ordered and will wear with pride as I raise my voice in challenging places other than the choir loft.

Grace and guts. A winning combination. And if a wretch like me can lose her voice and get it back, maybe we can all progress in other, harder arenas, to places and stances we think we can’t. Maybe all is not lost. Nevertheless, we persist. With guts and grace, maybe we’ll find a way.

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