So how did I even get here?
A rapid-fire in media res retrospective of my slightly unusual life
Scene: A big-enough bedroom on the second story of a small house. Two dressers and a queen-sized bed on a low wooden frame take up most of the space in the room. A small brown dog and a small brown-haired person are asleep in the bed. Both are snoring slightly.
A phone alarm and a clock radio, blasting basic, possibly Christmas-inflected Classical music, switch on at the same time. The brown-haired person stirs, slaps them both irritably, and raises her head slightly. She is 43. She lives on an island. She is a wife and a parent. Her dog is very old. Her book came out six months ago. She has been teaching music and English and running the theater program on this island for 20 years. Her punk band is on hiatus.
The camera zooms in. An extreme closeup on her face, wrinkled on one side from her pillow. Her hair, which she forgot to braid last night because she isn’t used to it being long enough to braid, sticks straight up on the left side and succumbs to snarls and elf knots on the right.
Courtney: (Shouts into the void) How did I even get here???
***
My mother sent me an envelope full of photos from 1982 - 2005 last week. I have a few albums already, but these had escaped getting pinned down under a thin sheet of plastic. There were matching sweater holiday photos, school pictures, a college boyfriend, and several from a photo shoot with my first band. My hair is short and curly, long and straight, long and frizzy, long and wavy, then short and curly again. It’s gotten me thinking about all the sliding doors moments in my life that led to the specific coordinates of my bed, my house, my island.
For instance: My father is a doctor, but he’s also a musician, and he and my mother prioritized music in my life. Also, I was too small to play anything in school band other than the trumpet, which I loved and became my whole personality. That meant that I wound up in my college marching band, where I met both the boyfriend I had for most of college, and my sister’s future husband, who was his freshman roommate. Said college boyfriend convinced me to take a music theory class (I was studying biology and theater), and then to join a performance ensemble that focused on contemporary concert music (in the John Cage family). In this ensemble, I performed the twelve-tone piece “Wie bin ich Froh” with my favorite professor accompanying me on the piano.
Fast forward a few years to my Boston era. Post college and pre graduate school I worked in the sheet music department of a small music store. I worked on the second floor, but I often went down to the first floor which was the guitar department, because the people who worked there were cool and also very attractive. I also wasn’t currently playing music, because I went from being a big fish in a college pond to a small fish in a huge and somewhat unfriendly pond. But there was a poster on the door advertising auditions for backing singers for a “naughty doo-wop glam band”. I thought, I can do that, and I auditioned in the drummer/hoarder/junk salesman’s crazy basement, and I got in. I built a whole identity around it and became a platinum blonde who wore makeup and heels (only on stage.)
They called me Kitten Pearl
We were booked on a bill at a clam shack in Quincy (not an obvious venue for naughty doo-wop glam) with another band whose guitar player was very small and very cute. We were introduced. A few months later, on the Boston music message board (because it was 2003 and we communicated in such ways and it was heavenly), the same guitar player made a post that was just the lyrics of “Wie bin ich Froh” - the weird song I had performed in college. It’s like a dog whistle for music theory nerds, which it turned out he was. The front man for my band and I went to see his composition showcase concert, because it turned out that’s what he did when he wasn’t playing the guitar. He did not recognize me because I was out of rock drag and was a brunette with no make up wearing sneakers, but then we became friends.
Fast forward again! Over the next year and a half he joined two bands I was in. I got a crush on him. He and his girlfriend broke up. I shot my shot at a party and he left. I got a grad school boyfriend. Other hijinks ensued. We finally got together.
Two months later, leaving a recording session, I had a message on my cell phone (a gray, brick-like Motorola that I still miss). The message was from the superintendent at the school I work at now, so spoiler alert. He was inviting me to apply for the job I currently have.
How did the superintendent of an island school in Maine get my cell phone number in Boston?
Well…see above. His stepson was in the performance ensemble with me in college. He suggested that I, as someone from Maine who had music and theater degrees (I ditched the biology department for the music department when it became clear that organic chemistry was beyond my comprehension), might be interested in the job when applicants were thin.
Bonus sliding doors moment: I had actually been to the island before, visiting someone I was dating who was acting in a play there.
I asked my boyfriend if he wanted to move to an island off the coast of Maine, and he said:
“Sure.”
Kind of a wild answer! But we were 24, under employed, and school loan payments were looming. And frankly, so many coincidences and conjunctions and other cosmic bits and pieces had to align for this opportunity to land in my voicemail, that I went for it. Applied, got the job, we moved there in August.
And somehow, on an island whose population is in the 3-400 zone, I met:
My co-author
My bandmates
And we bought a house and had a kid, things I believe would not have happened had we stayed in the city.
I’m not sure how to wrap this up, other than to marvel at the clarity with which I can identify specific choices that led me to this life. I’m also curious to know which choices I’m making now might tip the next big domino. After all, I wound up living in the middle of the ocean with a book and a family and a house and a dog and several cats and a lizard and a wonderful band. What else is around the corner?