Introduction
As the Color Fades Away: New Colors Shine Through
Since fifth grade, I have been known as the girl with the orange backpack. It is not quite as bright as it once was, but the dirt-stained cloth still stands out when heaped into a mass of bags around the school. My entire life, I have surrounded myself in color. My room is a rainbow; from the yellow walls, to the turquoise curtains to the orange shag carpet, all of ROY G BIV is represented.
Fall is my favorite time of year. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the fading of the lively shades of green in the leaves can reveal vibrant oranges and yellows from beneath. This year has brought lots of changes. Every year I am amazed by the path to adulthood. It seems that I am naive in so many ways, but can’t place them until I look back from the viewpoint of a year passed. With each year, I trade some of the liveliness from my childhood for some of the vibrancy of the new shades of adulthood. The biggest challenge of growing up is keeping that same optimism and excited energy that I possessed as a young child. I too often find myself saying, “This was so much more fun when I was little.” The biggest shame of being a teenager is that things no longer excite me as much.
I’ve realized this year that being in High-School is mostly about building self-confidence. This year was difficult in that respect; with the increased workload and intense level of stress, it was hard to cheer myself up when I didn’t succeed as easily as I had in the past. I constantly felt jumbled about; bombarded with so much work that I had a hard time focusing on the things I really love. I only attended three voice lessons the entire year, and went to countless piano lessons having not practiced a note the entire week. I’ve had a hard time coming to grips with the idea of sacrifice. Is it really worth it to not pursue my interests in order to study pre-calculus (subject matter that I doubt I will use later in life)? And the road seems never ending. I keep telling myself only one more year, but rarely am brave enough to think past that; past college and graduate school and the classrooms and books. The real world (whatever that is).
So I bring myself back to the present, and what do I see? I’m a seventeen-year-old girl who is completely lost; but isn’t that what every seventeen-year-old should be? That’s when my friends come into play. They help me build a perspective. I am far from alone. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned this year is not being afraid to ask for help. I was hesitant to drop my moody teenager mask to get a clear look at the people around me. As soon as I did this, I found my family standing beside me, willing to guide me along the way.
Nothing amazing happened to me this year. Instead, I realized that it was the little things that really made me happy. Over winter break (when I actually had some free time on my hands), my Dad and I began looking through his old song books. He always gets very excited at the suggestion of us playing music together. So when he asked me to come and sing with him one night, I felt like I couldn’t let him down. He picked up his guitar and started strumming a few chords.
“Oh! Wait a second!” He rushed into the kitchen, and I could hear him opening one of the hall closets. I groaned when he came back into the dining room carrying his infamous ‘harmonica belt’. If you ever want to completely embarrass a teenage girl until she wants to bury her head in a sandbox, try wearing a harmonica belt in public—it’ll do the trick!
I opened a book called A Peaceful Easy Feeling and started leafing through the pages. I quickly found one of my favorite Joni Mitchell songs, ‘Both Sides Now’. My dad started to look at the music, and we tried playing through it a couple of times.
Two months later, my friend Natty announced that there was going to be another Showcase (an open-mike-night performance at my school) in a few weeks. I asked my Dad if he wanted to perform the Joni Mitchell song with me and his face lit up.
The night of the performance, I was standing near the door of the chorus room at my school, nervously shifting my weight back and forth, and periodically peering down the hallway at the front entrance. Where could he be? I thought to myself. Showcase was about to start in ten minutes. It was typical of my Father to be late. Trying not to panic, I finally saw him rush in through the door, guitar case in hand and the harmonica belt slung over his shoulder. I relaxed a little, greeted him, and went to take my seat next to my Mom. A few acts in, I went out into the hallway to make sure my Dad was ready, but he was nowhere to be found. We were up next and I didn’t know what to do. I got a hold of Natty and told him to put us further down on the list because I couldn’t find my Dad. He gave me a confused look.
“You can’t find him?” he said. He immediately went into the hallway and started to look around. Just then, my dad emerged from an empty classroom across the hall.
“Where were you?” I scolded. “We’re up next!” My dad looked slightly disoriented.
“Well I’m here now.” He smiled. We heard clapping coming from the chorus room.
“You guys are up!” Natty said, ushering us through the door. We went up to the front of the room. The lights blacked out the audience so that all we could see was the orange and blue lights blaring at our faces.
My Dad began to play way too fast. I tried to get him to slow down a little, but he didn’t listen, so I just started singing. The room went silent. I was acutely aware of every sound that came out of my throat. In the middle of the song my Dad played a short harmonica solo. When we finished, the audience erupted into applause. I gave my Father a hug and we walked off stage. I stood beside him outside the door while he put his guitar away.
“You were really nervous, weren’t you?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m sorry I started playing so fast.” He looked up at me and smiled. He had that sentimental look on his face that could bring me to tears in seconds. “Thanks for letting me play with you. It was a lot of fun.”
Moments like that seemed to make the year worth while.
So, here I am. It’s the end of the year and it’s so close to summer I can smell it in the air. I wonder where I will be this time next year, and how I will look back on the events from this year. This project has definitely let my creativity thrive, although it would be more enjoyable if I weren’t so busy. Making a blog is some combination of extremely exciting and horribly frustrating. I absolutely hated using the Penn Charter blog server, and really wished that I understood computers more so that I could do more with my blog. I guess that’s what the summer is for. I feel like fifty percent of this project was just doing formatting nonsense, and I think that was extremely discouraging. If I had to do this project over again, I would have started posting papers earlier, because it took much longer than I expected. I would also have added more podcasts and music files if it wasn’t so horribly frustrating to do. Overall, I enjoyed this project, and to you, Mr. Franek, I wish you luck on your endeavors as a writer. Thank you for such an enjoyable English class.
