Invisible in Plain Sight
As a freelance harpist you come in contact with a surprisingly diverse cross section of people. But this encounter I was not expecting as I headed to a corporate office downtown for a holiday lobby set. As I circled the tower for the fourth time unsuccessfully finding a place to park, I pulled into the bus lane and hoped unloading a harp would generate adequate pity and I would be spared from being run down just as long as it took me to drag the harp, my stand case and seat backpack up the main stairs. Upon using my glutes evenly and lifting the harp carefully up each step, I discovered at the top of the stairs the doors only opened out and my only other option was to take the harp through the revolving doors. I have never tried to squeeze a concert harp through revolving doors, and given I still had to find someplace to park, I decided not to try. I left the harp outside, went inside and asked a teller at Wells Fargo if she could please hold the door for a second since she didn’t appear to have customers.
She said, “Why don’t you use the revolving doors?”
I said, “because I have a harp”.
She said, “Well you can still bring it in.”
I said, “Yes, but I may get stuck in there for the rest of my life”.
She did not follow, and did not offer to help.
We went round and round like that a few more times, and I started to think maybe navigating the revolving doors would have been easier.
So, I propped open the doors that only opened out, balancing on one leg and doing the Half Moon yoga move (which it turns out comes in handy once in a lifetime) with my other leg straight out just catching the edge of the door with my boot toe so I could reach the harp and wrestle it through the door. At which point the teller came out from behind the desk and said, “Ohhhh. You have a harp!”. Yes. Exactly.
Now she became extra helpful and gathered not one, but two security guards to come and watch my things while I began the maddening process again of trying to locate the one way street with the parking garage opening adjacent to the building, but not the other one way street with construction, or the third one way street with bus lanes only, or the fourth street that only allowed pedestrians, buses and trains. My contract had specified valet parking was included, but it had become clear I was the valet.
I instinctively ducked as I went underground into the low ceiling-ed garage and found my way to an elevator that had a touch screen and no apparent buttons for floors. Already a bit wary about encountering any more doors that only opened one way, I was feeling like I might get trapped forever in this very isolated underground dungeon and they would only come looking for me weeks later when no one came to claim the harp. I was feeling a bit like I’d got on an Alice in Wonderland slide to another dimension when, without being prompted, the elevator delivered me to the lobby, apparently the only floor it serviced. When I stepped out, a woman in uniform with a manegerial walk approached me and said, “I wish you would have contacted me before bringing this harp in here. You could have brought it up the service elevator.” I said, “Yes, well that would have required that I find the parking first, and since my contact is on a floor I can’t access and didn’t answer her phone, I was just wingin' it. Sure wish though I had your number!”
The security manager, shaking her head at the apparent inefficiency of it all, also now became very helpful. She gave me a code for the bathrooms, grabbed my harp covers and stashed them who knows where, grabbed two waters, and set me up in the center of a circular space lit with natural light and windows high above just showing the top of the gilded Clocktower where I’d gone for Dirty Pierre’s cabaret show in the basement theater for a birthday celebration with my honey when I’d just started walking without crutches after my heinous hip surgeries to correct hip dysplasia a year earlier at 38. This would be one of my first performances on the pedal harp after my leg was paralyzed for months due to nerve damage. I wanted to do a good job.
It took many months of physical therapy to develop the neuro-pathways again to operate the three positions of the four pedals on the right side of my harp. Though it still irritated my hip flexors badly to play songs with a lot of pedal action and made my leg go numb as though I’d been driving a race car for hours in an Enduro 500, I was pleased to have the use of my foot at all. My surgeon had suggested I could end up with permanent drop foot, but he said it wouldn’t be a big deal, since I could just wear a shim in in my shoe and on my ankle to lift my foot. (I thought, Right. it might not be a big deal for you!) Since I had not shown much progress in eight months of physical therapy, they were all starting to get worried, but eventually my limp faded and I was able to operate my harp pedals again. So here I was, ready to play for Corporate America.
But, it was only 11 am and most people were not taking their lunch breaks, so as I started my set, there were just a few people walking through to get their mid-morning coffee fix at the cafe. I was only half way through my first song “Deck the Halls” when I heard the familiar clicking of crutches across the marble floors. There were a few community work tables and some high tops, but I could see the crutching man out of my left peripheral view struggling to get settled in to the mod low couches that anyone with limited mobility dreads.
Since my hip flexors were already irritated from the stop and go traffic of the last hour, I decided to get up and stretch between each song for a minute or two since I’d be playing for two hours. After my first few songs I approached the man who looked to be in his forties and said, “Thanks for listening. It’s nice to have an attentive audience. I’m Erin. What’s your name?”
He said, “Ted” then looked at me with a blank expression.
I said, “How long have you been on crutches?”
He said, “Two years.”
Then I felt guilty for asking him immediately about his disability which gets really old when that is the only thing people see in you, but since I only had a minute or two, I had to cut to the chase.
I said, “Wow. That’s brutal. I just finished a year stint myself. Well it’s a good thing you’re handsome, because with those blue eyes you can definitely pull it off.” Then, since I don’t wear my wedding rings when I play and people always assume I’m for the taking, I awkwardly added, “Blue eyes, just like my husband and two young sons. You should always wear blue. It suits you.”
He looked at me again with another blank stare. Then his lips twitched and his eyes crinkled and he gave me a surprised half grin. It was obvious he’d never been told he was handsome. And I wasn’t just blowing smoke. He was handsome. While playing my next few songs, I thought if it weren’t for the giant blue water-proof coat he was wearing and the heavy hiking boots, he certainly could have fit in with the hipster “Man-ver” (the new colloquialism for Denver, since there are so many fit, eligible manscaped men in the city) types walking briskly by. He even had the wild quaff on top with the tight shave around his ears that, if he was also wearing tapered dress pants and glossy adorned brogues, would have been mistaken for an expensive haircut.
Getting a bit shaky as I hadn’t played longer sets in a long time, I walked across the cavernous echoing lobby and purchased a stupid expensive vegan-green protein-vitamin energy-infused smoothie. I asked Ted to make sure no one walked off with my harp or iPad which contained all my music. I knew of course he couldn’t defend my harp and I also knew he couldn’t walk off himself with my iPad since he couldn’t carry anything. When I returned he still had his leg propped on the low coffee table but had dropped his crutches and they were out of reach. I could certainly relate, as I’d dropped mine hundreds of times and felt helpless, unable to get down or up.
I handed him his crutches and asked if he had family in the area.
He said, “I just returned from Alaska where I was working as a volunteer for six months. We were building financial security systems, not military ones, but we had to work on the base so our information couldn’t be stolen. There’s a lot of people who want to steal our information”.
Though what he said was true, many hackers across the world have caused havoc with our financial and political systems, I sensed, as he got more and more agitated and glossy eyed, that we were getting into conspiracy theory territory, so I steered him back to his mom.
“You said your mom had cancer? I’m sure she’s happy you’re home”.
“Yes” he said with the accent on the S. “But she says I have to Honor her. And it’s hard. Honoring. Church helps. They pick me up in a bus. But I’m trying to make things right with her, you know, before she goes. You know people don’t listen. No one listens to anyone. It’s the secret, to really listen. So you can make things right.”
I felt like a jerk, having finished my break I had to get back to harping at that moment and cut off his listening insights. As I sat back down he said, “I’m sorry I said that. I’m not supposed to talk about her. My mom. She’s sick. I’m trying to honor her and make things right, but it’s hard. You know what else is hard? Trying to keep a roof over your head. This land has already been bought a hundred times over but the rent keeps going up and up and up. I don’t know how anyone lives here. I don’t understand it”.
I said, “Preach on brother”.
I wondered how he got there. Where he came from. But most of all, since he seemed so child-like, just like my two young sons, I wondered why there was no one there to protect him. And where he would sleep that night.
As I wrapped up my second set and was finishing my last song, “O’ Holy Night”, Ted nearly fell over several times trying to get to a standing position, then, hunched over and lurching forward, he said not a word and slowly disappeared out of sight.
I skipped the repeat and wrapped up the second ending quickly as I wanted to give him some pointers and see if I could adjust his crutches to the proper length, or offer him my mobi-legs, which protect your wrists and shoulders from nerve damage with long term crutching, but when I walked around the corner, there was another man carrying rattling bags walking across the expansive marble floor talking to himself. Another man with a long gray beard wearing a dirty Santa costume swerved his electric wheelchair through the suits and clicking heels. It seemed there was a flash mob of homeless, physically suffering and mentally ill humans dancing around me that only I could see, and now that they’d all vanished, I wondered if I’d seen them at all.
As a harpist, you become accustomed to being seen. As a centerpiece or background entertainment, you become part of the scenery and like a barista serves, you play, people tell you their stories, they want to know yours. You might not always be very well heard, but with a giant beautiful instrument, you’re never invisible. I felt certain though, I was the last person who would approach Ted for his story today, maybe this month, or this year or next.
After loading up the harp using the very convenient elevator that zipped me right back to the parking garage, I went outside to get some fresh air and stretch, and if I’m being honest, to look for Ted. My hips ached and somehow Plantar fasciitis has returned to my heel and I’d developed a limp. People were ice skating across the street and I wandered around a pop-up German holiday market. A woman at a bakery handed a homeless man a slice of warm apple streusel and when he offered payment she declined. Another man stood on the street playing a mean jazz flute with a scratchy background track. He yelled out to passers by, “Are we having a joyful Christmas or what?! I can’t hear you? Girl, you look joyful to me. Bring it in here and don’t be stingy.”
I stepped into Anne Taylor Loft for a minute to see if there were any fun blingy tops on sale to bring in the approaching new year and new decade but I was Soul-tired and couldn’t really get excited about bling. I was followed in by yet another homeless man carrying a clip board. He was the only man in the store besides the man behind the counter, and there were no papers on his board. The cashier asked the man with the clipboard to leave. The man with the clipboard said, “I’m looking for something for my mom. For Christmas”. The cashier said, “If you don’t hand me the earrings you just picked up and hid behind your clipboard, I will call the police”. The homeless man said, “Ok you got me!” And he laid the earrings down and walked out. I guess he won’t have anything for his mom.
I could not shake the sadness that had washed over me as I played for the Haves and Have-Nots all sharing the same space, but not seeing each other. It occurred to me, no matter how down and out your life becomes, no matter how the world sees or doesn’t see you, we all have something in common. We all had a mom once. And many of us are just trying to get back to that place, when things were simple and if you asked her for a band-aid, she could always stop the bleeding.