Written By: Darrell A. Harris
Narrated By: Kara Lea Kennedy
In my earliest days as a music industry executive, our contracts were four-finger, hunt-&-peck documents, hammered out on a primitive, portable typewriter.
But that manual typewriter gave me a mystical quickening . . . Feeling the velocity of the keys as they traveled from machine to paper; the uneven rhythm of their sound was somehow deeply satisfying.
I have also owned fine fountain pens—like Mont Blanc and Lamy—that carried their own quiet pleasure in the way ink flowed from the pen onto the paper. It confirmed that I was actually creating something.
Come to think of it, that little love affair between heart and paper probably started in 1st grade with my red Big Chief writing tablet and my No.1 pencil.
In my self-absorbed little boy reverie, I would finish some letters with a kind of snail-like, curlicue filigree. My 1st grade teacher, unable to dissuade me from my embellishments, enlisted the help of my mom to get me “in line.” She must have succeeded because that’s all I remember of that moment.
Today’s keypads do not deliver the same pleasures of the soft lead of a beginner’s pencil, the flow of a fountain pen, or the staccato mechanics of a typewriter. Perhaps it’s just as well that for many years I was more drawn to music and cinema than to writing.
But somewhere along the rise of the keypad, I stumbled into poetry.
It all started one day when, at fifty, I revisited a jazz composition I first heard at ten and had not heard since: Blue Rondo à la Turk by The Dave Brubeck Quartet. After forty years, I was transfixed all over again—captured by the prestissimo propulsion of the piano, the spritely movement and lilting legato mews of the saxophone, the pizzicato bass, the splish-splash of the cymbals, the peculiarly phrased, riveting pulse of the 9/8 time signature.
As I began it drink it all in, I had to write. I was compelled, called by the music, to describe both the piece itself and the visceral response it stirred in me.
Something like lightning struck. I could feel the impact of poets I had read over the years—Milton, Vachel Lindsay. James Weldon Johnson. Gabriela Mistral. Alan Ginsberg. I felt their love of language pulsing through my veins.
And my humble keypad became a kind of accomplice. It gave me the ability to cut and paste, to rearrange phrases with precision, to work with words the way a sculptor works with stone.
Blue Rondo à la Turk, and the poets who had formed me, begat my own Blue Rondo . . . though as a Texas kid, mine was probably closer to Blue Rondo à la Big Gulp.
I often think of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who wrote, “Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental,” and Woody Allen, who said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
So I keep showing up, following my nose in pursuit of my Creator’s beat.
Like jazz, I adapt as I go, moving through the swirl and improvisation of constant change. The universe still hums with possibility. And every so often, if I’m paying attention, another small happy accident appears—like a phrase of music I didn’t know I was waiting to hear.
A husband, a father to two and grandfather of six, Darrell A. Harris enjoyed twenty-five years in the music business and nearly another twenty-five in chaplaincy ministry. He is now retired and writes poetry, essays on various subjects and the occasional song lyric.
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