What Broken Trumpets and Missing Arms Taught me about Myself

Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet was sat upon in 1953. A drunken fan or an awkward land-mover stumbled upon it as it sat placidly and very much alone on the band stand. Dizzy picked it up, played it, and he loved it. Can you imagine? Someone sits on that part of you that is metal and pipe and button and has become your best tool of self-expression and instead of hurling the broken thing at the wall, or perhaps more appropriately at the oaf who rubbed his butt cheeks upon it, you play the damned thing. You play it and you like it.

I don't know exactly what this means. I don't own a trumpet. I am not a musician. But I do know that sometimes I feel sat upon, and often my instrument of self expression feels destroyed.

Once, when I was traveling in Brazil, I left my journal in a bus. No one stole it from me, no lardy oaf purloined it from my purse. But the loss of this journal, filled with the “me” that I thought could exist solely through its dog-eared pages, filled me with rage and loss. I didn't write for months, staunchly preferring silence over self-reflection.

I still can't remember what I thought or how I felt during those months of silence and I still hate that bus for speeding away even as I waved my hands wildly and jumped up and down like a very bouncy gringa, the realization of my stupidity hitting me a second too late.

There was a man at the airport who was missing half of his arm. He had tiny fingers connected to his elbow; wriggling little things that reminded me of the drowning heads of worms poking through rain-soaked soil.

How did he lose it? Was he born without the feel of a forearm, the knowledge of what it's like to clap hands after a play, the heat of a woman pulsing through her sweater against both his hands, through one, and out the other? Or did he lose it in an accident, the luckless victim of chance as a metaphorical fat man misplaced his center of gravity and sat? And how does he deal with it? How did he respond? How does he survive without the all-important hand, used literally and symbolically, an instrument that connects us so deeply with ourselves and others?

I am twenty three years old and I have never known true disappointment. My life's most crushing defeats were being wait-listed at snobby east coast colleges and not winning the swing dance Halloween contest this past fall. Who can teach me to synthesize defeat with hope?