Bar Forty Is Where I Keep Losing The Second Violins

The three weeks that were supposed to be three weeks

I came off my bike on a gravel shoulder out past the reservoir on a Saturday in April. Nothing dramatic. A truck came wide around the bend, I moved right, the shoulder was loose, and the front wheel went out from under me. I remember the sound of the gravel more than the fall. Like someone pouring dry rice into a bowl. My helmet cracked in one spot near the back and I sat in the weeds for a while feeling like the world had been turned down a notch.

The urgent care doctor in our small city here in Ohio told me it was a mild concussion. Three weeks, she said. Rest your brain. No screens if you can manage it, which was funny, because I teach high school and screens are most of what the job is now. Three weeks came and went. The headaches stopped. The light stopped bothering me. I went back to the podium in May and conducted our spring concert and nobody said a word about anything.

Except I could not hold the score in my head anymore.

That is the whole thing. That is the entire injury, and it has taken me a year and a half to be able to say it in one sentence without dressing it up. I can read music. I can still hear it, all of it, the way you hear a room. But I cannot keep it. I cannot carry forty bars of Dvorak in my attention the way you carry a full glass of water across a room without looking at it. By bar forty, something lets go. Usually it is the second violins. They just quietly stop existing for me.

I am forty-four. I have been doing this for nineteen years.

Priya heard it first

Priya plays bassoon. She is a junior, she is shy in a way that makes adults talk over her, and she has this habit of not looking up from the reed she is fussing with when she says something important.

It was October, six months after the fall. We were working through a passage where the bassoon has a little countermelody underneath the seconds, and I had cut the orchestra off to fix an intonation thing in the cellos, and when we picked it up again I brought us in eight bars later than where I said we would.

She said, without looking up, "You said letter C."

I said I know, and I made some joke about needing more coffee, and we moved on.

She did it again two weeks later. Then a third time. Never loudly. Never in a way that anyone else caught. She would just say the thing that was true, quietly, to the reed in her hands, and I would course-correct and pretend that had been the plan.

The thing that gets me, still, is that she was the only one. Forty-one kids in that room, two colleagues who came in and out, an assistant principal who watched a rehearsal in November and wrote that I had excellent classroom presence. Nobody noticed. A seventeen-year-old with a double reed noticed.

The auditorium smells the same as it did in 2007

Our auditorium is always too warm. The heat comes up through the floor vents under the risers and it makes the whole room smell like rosin and old carpet and the pine of the stage flats. It is, I want to be clear, the smell of my entire adult life. I love it stupidly.

And after the fall it became the smell of dread. Forty minutes into a rehearsal in that warmth, with the rosin dust hanging in the light from the house fixtures, my attention would go soft at the edges like paper in water. I would still be moving. My arms knew what to do. But I was conducting from about two feet behind my own body, and the second violins were somewhere out past the edge of the map.

I started writing sticky notes. That is the part I have the hardest time saying out loud. A grown man, a department head, standing at his own kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon with a full score and a pad of yellow squares, writing "SECONDS ENTER" and sticking it to the page. "WATCH VIOLA CUTOFF." "YOU ALREADY DID THIS SECTION." I would stick them on the score, on the podium rail, on the inside of my folder. Little yellow flags of surrender, fluttering when the fan kicked on.

Dana found a stack of them in the recycling once and asked what they were and I said grading reminders, which was a lie so bad and so instant that we both let it sit there.

What the scan said

The neurologist was kind and thorough and about eight years younger than me. He ordered imaging. He looked at the images. He told me they were unremarkable, which is a word I have thought about probably a thousand times since. Unremarkable. Nothing worth remarking on.

He was not dismissive. He said mild traumatic brain injury does not always show up on a picture, that recovery is not linear, that people report exactly what I was reporting. He gave me sleep hygiene guidance and told me to build back gradually and to come back in three months.

I drove home from Columbus with the radio off. Because here is the trap I had walked into: the scan being clean meant I was not sick, and if I was not sick, then this was just me. This was just a forty-four-year-old man who had gotten worse at his job. That is a much lonelier explanation than an injury. An injury you can point at. This I could not point at. I could only be it.

Dana, being reasonable, which was worse

My wife is not a villain in this. I want that on the record, because it would be easier to tell if she were.

For the first year she was extraordinary. She read things. She drove me to the appointments. She took over the parts of the household that need sustained attention, the insurance calls and the school forms, without ever making a production of it.

Then, somewhere in month fourteen, the patience started to thin. Not into cruelty. Into tiredness. Into her saying "you've told me that" in a flat voice, or a small breath before she answered when I asked her to repeat something. One night, doing dishes, she said, "I don't know how to help you if you won't just be honest about how bad it is." And I said it was fine, it was manageable, and she nodded and kept washing the same pan for a long time.

She was right and I could not admit she was right, because admitting it out loud would have made it a real thing in our house instead of a thing I carried alone in the car.

The rehearsal I do not get to forget

Late February. We were reading through a piece for the district festival. Third movement, nothing hard.

I lost my place at bar thirty-something. Not gradually. It was like a phone call dropping. One second I was inside the music and the next second I was a man in a warm room waving a stick at children.

And I did not recover. That was the new part. Usually I could bluff for four bars and find a landmark. This time I kept going, badly, and the ensemble started to come apart behind my hands because they were following me and I was following nothing. Brass came in early. The seconds stopped. Priya kept playing her line for two bars longer than anyone, alone, and then stopped too.

I put my arms down. Forty-one kids looked at me in total silence with the heat blowing and the rosin in the air.

I said, "Sorry. That's on me. Let's take five."

Then I went into the instrument closet and stood among the tuba cases with my hand over my mouth for about ninety seconds. That is where the denial died. Not in a doctor's office. In a closet that smells like valve oil.

Sitting in my kitchen with wires on my head

I told Dana that night, all of it, including the sticky notes. She cried, which I had not expected, and said "thank you" instead of "I told you so," which I did not deserve.

After that we started trying things. Real, boring things. A graded return protocol. Sleep at consistent hours. Cutting the caffeine that I had been using to paper over the whole business. A vestibular therapist for six weeks who had me doing eye exercises that made me feel carsick.

The neurofeedback came in last, around month sixteen, and I want to describe it accurately because I think people expect a story here and there is not one. It is a thing I looked into and eventually tried doing at home, sitting at my own kitchen table. You put sensors on your scalp. You sit still. Something on a screen responds to what your brain is doing, and the idea is that over many sessions you learn something you cannot articulate, the way you cannot articulate how you balance on a bike.

I was skeptical and I remain a person who is skeptical. What sold me on trying was mostly that it was not a drug and I could do it in my own house at seven in the morning before school. Dana read about how neurofeedback at home works for weeks before I agreed to anything, because that is who she is.

The reality of it is tedium. It is not dramatic. You sit there for half an hour, several times a week, and mostly you think about whether you remembered to move the laundry. I did it before the coffee maker finished. Some mornings I fell asleep in the chair. There was no moment. There was never a moment. Anyone who tells you neurofeedback therapy at home gave them a lightning bolt is describing something I did not experience.

A small partial return, and I will not oversell it

It is now eighteen months out.

In April I got through a full rehearsal of the Grieg without losing anyone. Sixty-some bars. I noticed it afterward, in the car, and I sat in the parking lot with my hands on the wheel doing nothing for a minute.

That has happened maybe six or seven times since. It is not most days. Most days I still fade somewhere in the second half, and I still keep the sticky notes, though there are fewer of them and I no longer feel like I am dying when I write one. My baseline is better than it was in February. Whether that is the at home neurofeedback, or the sleep, or the vestibular work, or eighteen months of a brain quietly doing what brains do, I genuinely do not know, and I do not think anyone can tell me. I stopped needing to know. What I can say is that I did the tedious things and I am somewhat better, and I am not going to draw a straight line between those two facts for you.

Priya is a senior now. She still does not look up from her reed. She has not had to tell me where we are since March.

I told her about all of it, in April, in about four sentences by the music stands after everyone else had cleared out. She listened. She thought about it. Then she said, "I just thought you were tired," and went back to scraping her reed, and honestly, that was the kindest thing anybody has said to me about this.

I do not conduct the way I did in 2019. I probably will not again. What I have got back is something more like a working majority of myself, and I have made a slow, unglamorous peace with it, one warm rehearsal at a time.