There is no path not taken there is only what you do.
I have told myself this story so many times that hearing how it actually happened, in someone else’s voice, actually in the actual protagonist’s voice, made a chorus. I mean this both in the conventional sense—many voices joined—but also in the audio production sense: multiple tellings of allegedly the same thing that are not quite in tune, so the one resultant megatelling vibrates and breathes. Shimmers.
The story was sometimes a lifeline for me and sometimes a cautionary tale, both promise and risk. Now, though, it feels more complete, and because of the way in which it filled in, in these waning hours, finally, caution and risk fall away and it is all lifeline, all promise.
Can you imagine? You come to the Bronx and learn English through immersion and learn the restaurant business from your father. You learn old Italian songs on the accordion and when you play, maybe, your parents look at each other as if to say How Did This Happen, How Does He Already Know How To Do This? And they are worried about it but also: they enable your study, they say yes when you replace the accordion with a piano, and maybe that was the Kawaii baby grand that your sister will later use as an ironing board and your mother will then try to repair by hiring the cabinetmaker. They all come to Alice Tully Hall when you give your recital, the one you will have listened to fifty years later and then tell me, yesterday, when I expect you to say “it was ok, fine,” that it was actually really, very good.
Which will inspire your recollection of your mentor, who taught you for free, who brought you to concerts, who brought you to the giant apartment, top floor, park view, where the owners, patrons of the arts, offered to sponsor you, where your whole life unfolded in that moment into stage lights and standing ovations and high concert culture shouting, in Italian, not your Italian but Dante’s Italian, a convention of that space, at once so far from Burke Avenue and the cabinetmaker and the restaurants but at the same time the same, where you kept Toscanini’s baton, presented to your father at one of his restaurants after a superlative meal, everything coming full circle, everything aimed this spectacular way.
And aimed too at the selective services office, where, sponsorship just secured, you applied to extend your student deferment and where, when you gave your name the clerk reached back and there was your folder, top of the pile. And how you said, yesterday, “I never won anything” but back then your draw number was 21. 21 out of 365. Not a great number, not at all. And the deferment was not extendable, not any more, I am not sure why. And your friend recommended you take the test for the Howitzer company, I am not sure why, and no, I cannot imagine you doing that as you pantomime loading shells and plugging your ears, yesterday. You failed that test because of the parts where you rotate imaginary objects in space and yet you can read anything at the keyboard, maybe because those objects stay where they are in space. And then another rotation in space: join the National Guard, out on Long Island. Do it now, your number is 21, your deferment is over and so is your sponsorship and so is that spectacular way.
There is a version of the story where you do not join, where you do not sign, where you get to play the piano, forever. But that is not, Dad, the path you didn’t take. That was not a path. Because while the ink was drying after you signed, after you agreed to be a musician in the air national guard band, someone was folding a subway token into a draft letter into an envelope into your mailbox, which you read, and knowing you I bet you returned the token because you didn’t need it, because you were going a different way.
So if you had taken that path not taken it would have been boots on the ground in Vietnam, not concert black, back at Alice Tully. This apartment in a weird town in Minnesota goes away, fades to black, my children fade to black, my brother, the Baldwin upright where you tried to get your hands back, the way my mom held the door for you at that job you took as a stopgap, before you knew her, it is all gone. It never happened. You went, you fought. You lived or you didn’t. You came back or you didn’t. And none of what happened would have happened, that for me, your son, has been everything I know and have known.