Lox. Black licorice. Small talk. Incense.
When I was a very little girl, my mother enrolled me in violin lessons with a teacher from Japan. Her name was Mariko. After that, I took lessons from Harumi. During those years I learned to point my feet in rest and play position, to bow, to walk around the room holding a violin beneath my chin, to play infinite variations on the theme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and a good deal of Japanese, to boot.
One by one, my teachers moved back to Japan. Most of our communication had been in the form of their hands positioning my fingers on the bow, of nodding, smiles, of music. I missed them very much.
What would we do next? The local community of violin teachers was, to say the least, a free spirited folk. Lots of silver jewelry, batik clothing, clogs. They taught at an abandoned army barrack on the edge of town.
...Now I feel I should be discreet in the unfolding of this memory, and let's be clear it is a childhood memory (this coming from the girl who can barely account for her weekend), so with that in mind I will refrain from using actual names...
How I loved Miss Amy's studio! Candles, chimes, prayer flags, my teacher with her pale blue eyes and silvery blond braids wound around her head.
And always, the heavy, languorous perfume of incense.
The incense I did not care for as much. On warm days, or if I arrived at my lesson early, the scent would smother me like a pillowy aunt until I felt my mind buzz and the room begin to sway. My teacher closed her eyes and smiled.
Years later, when I attended university in Ottawa and lived in a coed dorm that personified every urban myth associated with coed dorms and then some, I walked into the room of a friend of a friend one night and found myself thrust back to a visceral memory of childhood. The smell was so familiar. How strange, given everything about that moment seemed patently unfamiliar: kids passing around a small, handrolled cigarette, the music of an electric guitar, a window cracked open, and over in the corner a tiny cone of incense winding its hypnotic curl of smoke into the darkness.
For a moment there, I could have sworn I was back in the army barracks, knocking at the door of Miss Amy's studio, waiting for her to open it and favor me with her gentle, beatific smile.
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Dear reader, it could be I'm going to take a few days' break from Tollipop. Just needing to get some things done, that's all. But I never know if I really mean business when I say I'm going to take a break. So I want to leave my options open, either way.