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Arial photo of my grandparents’ farm in the 1950s
Do you ever stop to think of when you discovered something you were meant to do?
I played clarinet in junior high band and bass clarinet through high school in Clear Lake, Iowa. It took me years into adulthood before I figured out that music, for real musicians, is a way for them to express their feelings or the feelings the composer intended to convey. I could play “at the music” fairly well, but I never crossed the line where I was “in the music.”
Our high school concert band played Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons during summers at the lakeside, city-park bandshell. Townspeople and vacationers rested on park benches in the shade of tall oak trees listening to our music. My freshman year, Al Yeager was a senior and our first-chair trumpet player. We ended each Saturday performance with the Star-Spangled Banner. If I close my eyes, I can put myself back on stage with the band on a warm, still, summer evening as darkness settled in. As we played the national anthem, I couldn’t wait for its ending when Al would nail the high note right after “O’er the land of the free…” I still get goosebumps thinking of it.
Al Yeager lived “in the music,” and playing trumpet was something he was meant to do. He went on to be first trumpet at the Naval Academy band and later joined the Harry James orchestra trumpet section, splitting the lead.
Writing, rather than music, has been one of my avenues for expressing feelings, and I can pinpoint the time I realized it. My English professor my sophomore year at Iowa State gave us an assignment, fairly open ended, to write an essay that expressed our nostalgia for something. The year before, during the fall of 1966 when I left for college, my grandparents sold their farm and moved into town. They had worked incredibly hard and were ready to retire. I had spent my childhood years with Grandma, Grandpa, and the extended Ransom family working and playing on the farm, and I missed it so.
I spent hours writing and rewriting the 450-word, untitled piece that follows. It centered on the farm, the barn’s haymow, and conveyed my love for what would be no more. I felt quite pleased with the result, because I had worked so hard on every single word.
Grandfather’s farm lay exposed to the boundless ocean of countryside; the gently rolling waves of hills and rippled rows of crops provided an expanse for him to navigate upon. He became a fisherman of the encompassing land. His bait was seed; and plows, cultivators, and discs swept in net-like fashion over the surface. His catch, a plentiful harvest.
Such was the environment in which much of my life revolved. The characteristic white, two-story house, protective groves of pines, and scattered red buildings were loosely grouped to designate where human life had centered. But my attention focused on the barn, a towering hulk near which the other structures huddled for protection. On summer days its face served as a reflector of my rubber ball missiles that thumped and echoed, thumped and echoed. At night its eyes watched the household with mirrored moonlight while the stallion weathervane at the very peak of the roof obeyed the commands of the night breeze. Meanwhile, lying directly beneath the circling steed was the haymow.
I was not allowed to venture into the mow alone, but the tantalizing forbiddances of the premise often overpowered the likelihood of my punishment. I would sneak to the barn door, silently unlatch it, and enter a personal world of fantasy.
From the inside, the structure seemed to be constructed of cobwebs. The latticework of an endless number of spiders supported the rafters, windows, doors, and walls. Light bulbs peeped through webbed layers like weary eyes behind drooping lids. Flies were everywhere in suspended animation, hanging lifeless in mid-air while spiders cautiously tight roped to their meals. The ammonia of decaying waste watered the eyes and placed an acid taste in the mouth, and the finely ground dust on the cement floor obediently formed footsteps for my walk to the ladder.
A moment of indecision, then a blur of legs and arms as I would streak to the loft. Hay and straw were piled as high as could possibly be, and then higher. At my feet lay an iceberg of bales, so few on the surface in comparison with the multitudes beneath them. There I would sit, illuminated only by the perforated sunlight through the cracks in the boarded walls. Particles of dust hung weightlessly in the penciled rays, and the entire loft became void of air and refilled with silence. Each excited breath drew the quiet into my body until I became a part of the environment. Amidst this utopian atmosphere I sat, unable to discern reality from fantasy until the realization of time would send me scurrying down the ladder, through the barn, and into a world I could no longer call my own.
A page from the draft version of my essay
The professor gave me an A+ and wrote this across the top of the first page: “Superior in all respects. You have distinguished yourself.” I graduated with honors in math and computer science. But what this assignment showed me is that I wasn’t a mathematician, I wasn’t a programmer; rather, I had crossed the line to becoming a writer.
I welcome you to visit www.mransomwriter.com to see more about my writing.