Choosing football over music

My wife and her friend Barbara Parramore had just rushed out the door on the way to the Saturday night N.C. Symphony concert. Why was I feeling guilty for choosing to stay home and watch the Wake Forest vs. Virginia Tech football game on TV?

I reasoned that I've always pulled for the Deacs, except when they're playing the Heels. And when have the Baptists gone into a game with a 9-1 record?

Also, it was easier to sprawl in front of the TV than ride to downtown Raleigh, scramble for a parking space and endure a chilling hike to Meymandi Hall.

Nevertheless, I knew that watching 22 guys knock each other around, fumbling the ball here, dropping a pass there and suffering interceptions, etc. is not as elevating as losing oneself in the sweet strains of a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart concerto.

I grew up in the foothills where, except for the annual visit to the high school by Dr. Benjamin Swalin and the N.C. Symphony, I was exposed primarily to the likes of the Grand Ole Opry, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow and the Carter Family. Bill Monroe turned me on musically long before I met Mr. Mozart. Mine was primarily a diet of "somebody done somebody wrong' songs, as opposed to the lilting strains of a Strauss waltz or the vigor of a Beethoven symphony I came to enjoy later.

Actually it was not until after World War II, when I was a student at Mars Hill Junior College, that I came to appreciate the classics. For that, I have the late Miss Martha Biggers to thank. A tall, sweet-faced spinster of uncommon serenity, "Miss Martha" was the head of the music department. Every day, on my way to class, my path took me past Miss Martha's second-floor studio in the Music Building.

"I looked out the window one day and saw you, and God said, 'Pay attention to that young man,' " she once confided during our long-term friendship. Miss Martha was one of the very few saints I've ever known close up.

Pretty soon, I was listening to symphonies, boning up on the plots of great operas and attending Civic Music concerts in Asheville. She enrolled me in a music appreciation class and even talked me into taking piano.

The latter came to naught, as I was too lazy to practice and was too often successful in talking the teacher out of teaching and into accompanying me to Ray's Sandwich Shop, where we would sip coffee and chat aimlessly while a lovesick member of the football team kept feeding quarters into the jukebox for repeated playings of "Near You," the current hit tune.

Despite my teacher's endearing young charms, I dropped piano at midsemester. Miss Martha made no silk purse musically from the sow's ear God had sent her. But her gift to me of good music enriched my life.

A favorite short story is Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee." In it, the narrator, Clark Hamilton, tells about his Aunt Georgiana, a Boston musician and piano teacher who married a young farmer and moved to the desolate, dreary outback of a Nebraska farm. During 33 years of bleak existence, she was cut off almost entirely from music.

When, late in life she took a train east to collect a small inheritance, he took her to the opera.

After the cascade of soaring sound from Siegfried's funeral march had faded, Aunt Georgiana sat in her seat. Even after the hall emptied and the musicians had left the stage, she still sat there. Weeping.

"I don't want to go, Clark! I don't want to go," she moaned piteously.

The nephew understood.

"For her, just outside the door of the concert hall lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house with weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door."

Football and great music have something in common. Both stir the emotions. While football appeals to our baser appetite for physical violence and the insatiable longing for winning, the music of the masters opens the window to our souls. It lets in a light that enables us to momentarily escape the wasteland of the ordinary and return to it refreshed and feeling that the ordinary is somehow now less ordinary.