LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Posted on 29 August 2013 by LeslieM

How to be RIGHT and WRONG at the same time

I had a dream. No, it was not a “bad” dream, where you wake up and find that it was just a dream and everything is really okay. Just the opposite. This was a “good” dream, from which I awoke and found that everything was the way I had left it: personal fears and indecisions, worldwide chaos and an America ravaged and heading for the imperial dump heap.

In my dream, I was in a band playing a guitar. The leader was a guy named Evie, who was with me overseas in WW 2, and who I liked very much. In my dream, Evie was the band leader and I was a musician in the band. The music we were playing was dreary and dull, and the audience was responding with yawns and squirming in their seats, and wondering how any music could be so dull and uninspiring.

Having been an entertainer most of my life, I knew what that band needed to perk the audience up and give them a lift. So I picked up a pair of drum brushes and began filling band sounds with rhythmic swish beats, and the audience, feeling the difference, began to swing in their seats and were immediately all smiles.

Then, I told Evie the band also needed a singer who could vocalize with power and class. And maybe a number that called for audience participation. With that, Evie got upset and brought in some musicians who made the band sound more and more non-listenable. Next, Evie told me I was fired and asked what he owed me. I was flabbergasted, but I managed to say: “A hundred bucks,” which he gave me.

Then I woke up, the dream still hanging on in my mind like leech.

I couldn’t help, in my waking mind, analyzing the dream and trying to discover what this crazy incident was trying to tell me. Having been a musician and entertainer, I knew in my mind and heart that what I had done for the band was right. I say again, I KNEW I was RIGHT.

Then, like a mental flash I realized that I was also WRONG. Evie had an idea of what a band should sound like and I had tried to change the sound…HIS sound to MY sound, which told me in unmistakable terms that, although I was right, I was also WRONG. And I had better understand that and learn to live with that DUAL opinion…in music, and in all things in life. It was proof that dreams do teach us something. This doesn’t mean I forfeited my opinion; that will always be sacred to me. But it also means that every human being (even Evie) has an opinion that is just as sacred to them. And, whether I agree with it or not, I should respect that.

Jim Moore,

Tallahassee

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