The Real Me: Joanne W. Iverson

Dance with me.

Don’t mind my skips.

I don’t like this music anyway. 

You have other thoughts too complicated for me to understand.

Search through the stars until they find me a partner where the white bird’s approval would be real to me.

Forever.

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I was on a cruise ship, sitting with my friends in an empty bar. After passing some time, one of them got up and went for a walk. I stayed with my thoughts.      

Presently I heard beautiful music. It was coming from the piano in the empty bar. I reveled in its loveliness, with tapping twinkling quills or calling to her spinet with its thin metablic thrills.

I thought about Tolstoy’s expression of the nature of music itself, both its power and its perils: “What is it?” he would say. “Why is it that a certain combination of sounds impresses you so much, stirs your emotions, sometimes brings out the best spiritual forces concealed in your soul?  I can’t explain it.”

I thought, too, about a lovely poem, written years ago  by Oliver Wendell Holmes, called “The Opening of the Piano.” It describes in detail the opening of a new piano, with its smell of varnish and flash of ivory keys, a tender harpsichord. 

Then in the poem, the smallest child cries, “Open it! open it, lady!” For she thought it was a singing creature, caged in the box she’d heard. 

“Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!”

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A guy advertised online for a place to live in Germantown. His request, of course, included his profile picture, which showed himself and a little animal – which could have been a Chihuahua or a Goat.

This photo reminded me of the time, decades ago, when my first husband and I kept goats in the walled garden when we lived at the Paley Mansion in Chestnut Hill.

Now my husband Millard is convinced the little dog in the photo is a Goat – not a Chihuahua! So I said he should send back the following response:

“A Goat?! Here in Germantown?  My wife kept two in Chestnut Hill, so what’s the problem with goats in Germantown?  Maybe you should explain which species of animal shown in the photo is looking for an apartment in Germantown.”