Green Book Of Meditations Volume 6 The Books of Songs - Student ...

Chapter Ten
The morning they left I gave Juliana a new harp. The black
cherry pillar gleamed like plaited hair in the low sunlight of my
library. The knotted maple soundboard whorled, swirls and
ripples of grain on grain, eddies of foam on a long white shore.
“She is strung with wires,” I cautioned, as I watched
Juliana’s fingers quiver. “They ring differently than gut or nylon
strings. You will have to learn to finger all over again.”
“But where did it come from?” Juliana breathed.
“She is my harp, Lorelia- and older than you are too, I
might add, so show some respect!” I smiled. The harp whispered,
my voice resonating in her sound box. It sounded like a chuckle.
“You are a better player than I, Miss Spring. I think she
would rather live with you.”
Her sandy haired lover was grinning. Juliana threw her
arms around me and squealed.
Chapter Eleven
The next day my phone rang, early. I answered. For a long
moment there was nothing. Then came an indrawn hiss.
“Thrice damned Druid. I know who you are. Let me speak
to my daughter.”
“Good morning to you too, Mr. Raskin. That was a nasty
way to start a conversation.”
“You are a Devil worshiping hell spawn. Why should I be
polite to you? Your soul will rot in Lucifer’s bowels till the day
when God dissolves you both.”
“The Devil is a Christian figment, Mr. Raskin. You would
know more about him than I.”
“You are corrupting my daughter, leading her astray from
the church and her family, encouraging her in that damned music
and distracting her from God’s will. Let me speak to her.”
“Who is to say God did not give her that passion, those
dreams, the gift she has for music?”
“Don’t play games with me. Where is my daughter?”
“She is already gone. You have driven her away from both
of us.”
“Where is she?”
“I am sorry to say that is none of your business. If she
chose not to tell you herself, then I am not about to.”
“Tell me where she is! I’ll kill you, Druid!”
“’”Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord.’ You are not He,
Russell Raskin. I am perfectly willing to be judged by God. Try
anything yourself and I will see you in court.”
There came a long drawn hiss of air forced between teeth.
“You thrice damned Druid. I’ll see you in Hell.”
“Only if you are there. Good night, Russell.”
I broke the connection before he could curse me again.
Leaves swirled past my windows in their endless autumnal
Totentanz. I stood and watched them, breathing very slowly.
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Chapter Twelve
The wetlands behind my forest rose and fell with the
changing water table. A family of wood ducks moved into a
dying soft maple, and I watched each May to see their chicks take
their kamikaze leap of faith. The young ones hatch in a hole fifty
feet up the trunk and are raised there by their long-suffering
parents. When the ducklings decide they are ready to leave, they
scramble to the opening and tumble out. They then have but
moments in which to learn to fly. Each spring I sat watching in
the moss, and the terror and the joy of each plummet peeled years
from off my heart.
The young lady who had sold me her soul was making the
most of those years. While Sam drilled and researched his way
toward twin degrees, Juliana played. She studied, practiced,
improved, discovered, and soon she was herself discovered. The
fiddle player of Sheebeg Sheemore was quitting the band, and the
group’s manager had offered her his place.
“What do you think?” She asked over the crackling phone
from Seattle. “Should I take it?”
“That depends on what you want.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to be a popular, successful, possibly rich and
famous musician? Or do you want to be the best harpist in the
world?”
“I want to be the best in the world,” she decided.
“Then you know what to do.”
“Yes, I guess so…”
“Are you happy?” I chanced, just before she hung up.
“Deliriously! No worries at all!”
Chapter Thirteen
For several years after this she was traveling, six seasons in
Ireland, three in Prague. She had moved beyond what any teacher
could teach, into the boundless and stupefying realm of selfmastery.
She learned something from every person she watched,
heard, or played with, incorporated each skill into her own
playing, and blossomed. She caught wind of an archaic bard in
Scotland, of a novel percussive harping technique from Argentina.
She traveled to see and to study, sharing always what she had
learned.
A withering bout of Dengue Fever ended Sam’s three-year
tour as a village doctor in Papua New Guinea. He returned to the
mid-west and started a family clinic, eventually buying a house
with the profits. My own life and works progressed too, over that
slow decade, but this is Juliana’s story, not mine, so I shall not
speak of those.
Late one December the couple invited me to spend the
holidays with them.
“Julie is giving a Christmas concert,” Sam told me. “And…
Well, we were thinking about getting married.”
“After twelve years, I should certainly hope so!”
“We wondered if you would want to be in the ceremony.”
“I would be delighted.”
The concert taxed one’s credulity. It was said that the old
Celtic bards had three musical gifts: They could make an
audience laugh, weep, or sleep dreamlessly at will, such was the
power of their music. Juliana was almost that good. She played
moods, memories, concert pieces, orchestral segments that were
feats of pure skill, and songs that seemed dragged out of the