No one is home, which frees me up even more than a nice beer might. I can do absolutely anything I want, a sentence which, when uttered by any ordinary American, would end in mischief and debauchery. But I am, for better or worse, not an ordinary American. So in an empty house, I want to do only one thing, a thing I have done so little of since I left the States.
I just want to…sing. (There’s a joke in that, for my mom. But really: I want to sing.)
So I do. Every song I love. For hours. I take advantage of the the acoustics, of fact that the house is huge, and the walls and floors are all cement, so everywhere I go, I sound like Kelly Clarkson. It’s the same way you feel singing in a tiled shower, except I have something like 600 square feet of space to dance around at the same time.
For those, like, three of you who who somehow found this blog but never knew me before I started writing from Rwanda, let me make clear: I can’t sing. I can carry a tune, and most of the time, I can manage to do it in rather unobjectionable fashion. But I’m not the person you hope brings her guitar to the campfire. I’m not even the person who makes you smile when you catch her humming a tune to herself.
Still, I miss music. I miss playing my violin. I’m sure my old roommates don’t mind the absence of my halted, scratching attempts to learn to play in a new genre, or my playing the same song on a CD seven times as I try to learn to play by ear, to harmonize extemporaneously…all things my formal music education jumped past as it thrust concertos into my hands. Hell, I even miss pulling out my old orchestra parts and playing along with bad recordings of my favorite symphonies. I’m itching for the ebony fingerboard, with the same hopeless longing I invested, as a teenager, in boys I knew would never look at me.
In the meantime, I have developed a passion for weekend afternoons like this one, when the workers are all out living their real lives, my roommates are bandying about some other East African town, and I am left to indulge in melodies that, for everyone’s benefit, are better kept between me and the walls off which my voice bounces.
