Classical music was a godsend for me when I was young, repressed, introverted, and needed a formal education. Devoting myself to a discipline outside of formal schooling would have greatly frightened me back then; the structure and order of academia compensated greatly for my own insecurities. The last thing I could see myself doing was after-hours entertaining in public places for money, and I left that to the professionals -- it was years I spent alternating between the university practice rooms and the library stacks. I remember that I was afraid to come out of my safe zone when my formal education was completed.

My curriculum vitae actually supplies the kind of academic credentials with which to teach as I was taught. As investments go, I could have made worse ones. It kept me off the streets. And yet, once I got to grips with myself, got some much-needed counseling and professional help, and considered the matter over again, I found that the last thing I wanted to do was to teach what I had been taught, how I had been taught, where I had been taught.

Not so many years ago, I found myself driving a car, back in the city with my alma mater, from which I had been away for decades. I took the risk of driving my car in broad daylight down the avenue along which the university campus mostly stretches itself out, taking me past the buildings with the practice rooms, the faculty studios, the auditoriums, and the libraries, seeing them for the first time in many years. I nearly had to stop driving from the shock of the triggered emotions inside; nothing distracting outside, driving conditions were quite safe. What welled up and overflowed in me was a great mess of emotion between anxiety and panic. I had to talk myself down, to reassure myself that my experience in this place was all over now, it was finished, in the past, and I need never be confined again doing what I did before.

It won't surprise anybody that I stay away from reunions....