A Tempo

In music, as in just about everything else, time is the final container. It’s the biggest Russian doll because everything goes in it and it doesn’t necessarily go in anything. You can play in time without playing in harmony—by keeping the beat, for instance—but when you play in harmony you inevitably play in time as well, since the notes you play ring true only in relation to other notes sounded before, after, and at the same time. Making music is as simple and as complicated as playing in time, which turns out to be the model for, well, just about everything.

Making music is an embodied competence, and some significant proportion not only of joy and satisfaction but also of knowledge and understanding comes from embodied competences large and small: making a pie, building a house, singing a corrido, riding a bike, executing a pick-and-roll, managing a passable foxtrot when the deejay plays “The Way You Look Tonight” at a wedding reception, driving home in a storm with the kids sleeping in the back seat and carrying them like tranquilizer-darted marmosets—one by one, safe and sound—up to bed. Tech companies spend untold millions to convince you that happiness comes from watching other people do things on a screen—the more choices you have for what to watch and the faster it loads, the happier you’re supposed to be—but they’re shining you on. Doing things satisfies in ways that watching does not. You don’t have to be great or even particularly good at something to enjoy the feeling of embodied competence, and let’s acknowledge that there are few types of people more horrible than those who insist on being seen as formidably expert at everything they do. So set the bar nice and low, at not making a frustrated, mountingly enraged botch of it.

Playing music is the competence that serves as my template for all competences: teaching, being a husband and father, conversation, basketball, moving through the world under my own power, you name it. When I’m tempted to grouse about having to prepare class or grade papers, for instance, and have to remind myself that only by an absurd stroke of good fortune do I get to make a living by teaching, I tell myself that teaching is like playing music. In the classroom we get together to make something beautifully functional, fashioned collectively in the moment as we react to each other, an improvisation possible only because each participant has diligently prepared on his or her own. We all have to practice, practice, practice—do the assigned reading—to be ready to go where the encounter takes us. The mechanics of teaching feel similarly musical to me. I’m trying to draw everyone’s best work out of them, finding ways to combine our various contributions to make something greater than the sum of its parts, identifying the tricky passages and breaking them down, feeling for a groove and trying to get in the pocket, listening alertly to others in the room but also accepting that there will be times when I should offer my own playing as a model that they can emulate.

My classes go best when I treat them as something between a rehearsal and a jam session. I decided long ago that the best way for me to try to get better at teaching is to work on discussion-orchestrating chops rather than on preparing piles of content to deliver in formal lectures. This policy began in graduate school as time triage—to counteract the anxiety that usually leads new teachers to let teaching prep expand to squeeze out writing time, I intentionally limited the time I had available to prepare class—but it soon led to a positive craft commitment. Repeating and experimenting over time have made me better at staying tactically flexible while pursuing my strategic purpose (that is, going where students want to go from minute to minute even as I make sure that we cover the essentials I’ve mapped out for the class meeting), making it clear at all times what we’re up to and why we’re doing it (“Okay, it sounds to me like we’re feeling pretty good about our reading of X in Part I, so now we need to reckon with Part II, which at first glance seems to be saying Y and not X at all”), leading students to speak directly to each other’s points but jumping in just enough to give shape to the conversation, and other such techniques that must be executed a tempo in the give-and-take of class discussion. I want to set up students to handle the methods and substance of the course and I want to pay off that setup by responding to their efforts with sufficient alertness to get all the juice out of what they say, all as opposed to my coming up with the most brilliantly complex analysis of the subject at hand and dumping it into their minds. As a teacher, in other words, I aspire to play crunchily inviting rhythm guitar—listening and reacting, midwifing a groove, exploiting openings to play the fills and supporting figures and chord voicings that set up others to play well—rather than blasting my own fearsome red-hot lead licks for chorus after chorus.

I’ve been teaching for more than thirty years, and for the past few I’ve also been a student of music, taking lessons on the lap steel guitar after many years of self-taught playing on conventional guitar. Having worked my way over the decades into a minor pentatonic blues rut, I welcomed the switch in instruments and the novelty of lessons as an opportunity to branch out into music I had never played, especially country and jazz, and also to finally learn some music theory. You have to know something about intervals and chord construction to be able to play steel guitar at all, since you’re limited to the notes you can play with the tone bar, notes that must therefore fall in a straight line on the guitar neck. You can slant the bar, and you can bend a string with the fingers you’re not using to hold the bar, but it’s all modest to the point of austerity when compared to the promiscuous way you can use pedals and knee levers to bend at will as many strings as you wish on a pedal steel guitar, which is to the lap steel as the church organ is to the harpsichord.

These lessons are not only a pleasure in their own right but also a useful reminder of what class looks like from the other side. I practice, I have some natural ability, and I have listened to a lot of music over the years, so I’m not without resources as a musician, but I’m the opposite of a prodigy. Understanding comes slowly; I usually have to circle back a few times before it sinks in, and it takes even longer for mind and hands to grow accustomed to acting in fluid tandem. When I finally do get it—realizing in a rush of horror that it was hiding in plain sight right under the bar the whole time—I’m mortified by how I could have been so confused about such a simple thing or made such an elementary mistake or been so wrong about what I thought I knew. And at times I quail in the face of the most elementary tasks. I will glaze over and skip a passage, telling myself that it’s tricky and I’ll figure it out later and it’s better to keep going—even though I know that the real reason I’m putting off reckoning with it is because in the sheet music there are a lot of high notes written way above the staff and I’m too lazy to count lines and figure out what they all are. I hope that all of this, including and especially the weaknesses, makes me a better teacher. There’s nothing like being a B student to build intellectual empathy with one’s own students.

My teacher, Kevin, is a magnificent guitar player with a conservatory pedigree, though self-taught on the steel guitar. I haven’t yet found a style he doesn’t play with a native speaker’s virtuosity—honky-tonk, Western swing, gypsy jazz, bebop, blues, Hawaiian, you name it—and his touch and tone are so ripe that it happens from time to time that he plays a gorgeous lick I want to add to my repertoire, I ask him to break it down and show it to me, he does, and I realize that it’s a lick I already know how to play. Somehow it sounds different when he does it. He’s a first-call steel player, the kind of teacher who has to postpone a lesson because Rosanne Cash flies him out for a gig or he’s part of a crack team of pros assembled to back a local hero who’s opening for The Who at Fenway Park. He would be terrifying if he wasn’t such an ursinely cheerful beauty-digger, blessed with the disarming gift of being able to take pleasure in music at any level, including those far below his own.

We’ll be walking through a scale at a leisurely pace, talking about how it sounds over a particular sequence of chords, and he’ll say, “You hear how nicely that falls over the F-sharp minor with a flat five? Let’s do that about ten more times. I’ll play the chord and you play around with the scale and try to be as musical as you can with it, and let’s just hear how cool that is.” His infinitely deeper understanding of the convergence of scale and chord matches the excitement of discovery I feel as a novice, so that he ends up enjoying the exercise as much as I do—at least, he makes it feel that way to me, which is one of his skills as a teacher. This fellow-feeling resonates with the chip-on-the-shoulder camaraderie that grows from our shared love of an esoteric instrument that sobs its heart out in the long shadow of its overly popular prom-queen cousin, the regular old boring conventional guitar. It all encourages me to treat the distance between our respective abilities as an opportunity to step up in class by training alongside a great boxer, and not as a reason to despair because I’ll never be good enough to fight for the title.

“Autumn Leaves” is the kind of standard I have loved for as long as I can remember but never had the patience to learn on conventional guitar. I would always end up concluding that there were too many damn chords and go back to playing the same old string-squeezing blues licks in A or D. I learned how to play “Autumn Leaves” not long after I picked up steel guitar, but I used tablature, which, unlike sheet music, tells you exactly which fret on which string to play. I memorized the tab patterns and could therefore play the song, and even worked out a passable solo, all of which gave me joy, but I didn’t really know the chords or the harmonic relationships between them, so I didn’t really know the song and couldn’t really play it with anyone else or depart from my memorized sequence of moves. It was like driving somewhere guided by the GPS on your phone: You get there, but you have no idea how you got there. So I decided to go back to “Autumn Leaves” and really learn it: break down and reassemble the chords one by one, figure out how to fit the melody over them, understand the harmonic flow from minor ii to major V to I to IV and so on.

I struggle slowly through this kind of work, pausing often to figure out what a note is and why it sounds right, making progress like a mule train on a winding mountain track in a blizzard. Because I still don’t read music fluently on any guitar, sometimes I have to play the notes of a sequence all on the A string, the third from the top in the A6 tuning I use, for the embarrassing reason that I happen to know where all the notes are on that string alone. Only after I’ve done that, going up and down the length of the fretboard to find each note in turn, can I find a more convenient place to play them in a compact cluster distributed across several strings. Then, having worked that out, I will add the double-stops, slides, and shimmers that impart the signature steel-guitar texture to a tune. I save up my questions for the next lesson, and I can never predict what vertigo-inducing vistas Kevin’s answers to them may open before me.

“Now we’re really getting into it,” Kevin will say when I ask whether it would work to play this note over that chord. “This is where it gets deep. If you’re going for more of a major straight-ahead feel it might sound off, but if you’ve got a more chromatic Western swing thing going on, then you can use it if you don’t land on it too hard.” So, can I play it or not? “It depends on what you’re going for and what the bass is doing, and even if it sounds wrong it can sound wrong in a cool way.” 

This happens all the time. I think I’ve learned something and ask what I think is a yes or no question to confirm it; he comes back at me with a new way of conceiving the music, and I find myself dumped once again onto a disorienting game board where the black and white squares have been transmuted into amoeba shapes in shifting shades of gray or all the colors of the rainbow, depending on how you look at it. This round of incremental accomplishment followed by chastening recalibration—one step forward, one step off a cliff, repeat—reminds me of a book I read as a kid, Jerry Kramer’s football memoir Instant Replay, in which Vince Lombardi keeps telling the Packers not to get too excited about their latest victory because next week the big push begins in earnest.

With enough time, I can figure out almost any musical problem I encounter in working out a song, especially if at the next lesson I can bring my confusions to Kevin, who patiently helps me sort them out when he’s not slipping me doses of musical mind expansion. But of course, by definition, when you’re playing in time you don’t have all the time in the world to figure things out and ask questions. Only when playing blues or honky-tonk are my steel-guitar instincts developed enough that I don’t have to think and can just play, having internalized the harmonic relationships that pattern the music. I’m nowhere near that state when playing songs with more than three or four chords that are not in standard I–IV–V form. Because I can’t think fast enough on the fly, I have to work out arrangements painstakingly and stick to them. When I feel myself unable to process quickly enough whatever I inchoately want to be playing, I tend to default to sliding up to a nice fat voicing of whatever chord comes next, which sounds lovely on the steel guitar, an instrument on which the simplest things can sound the best. But settling for that can make me feel as if I’m fudging it, failing to realize potential beauty, leaving aesthetic money on the table.

And I am acutely aware that there are literally millions of people who regard as child’s play all this basic harmony that I, with my teapot-scale sorrows and triumphs, am only now haltingly learning to navigate and often can’t yet manage at real-time tempos. Can I really be still so limited as a musician that even at the age of sixty I can still read music on only one string? How is it even possible that I can’t do better than that, when I can keep several competing interpretations of a novel in my head while leading thirty-three freshmen through a free-ranging discussion of any passage in it, all the while making sure that this student talks and that one doesn’t talk too much and this other one gets to finish a thought she couldn’t quite articulate last week and this other one gets a little nudge at just the right time to help him overcome his skepticism about the whole interpretive project? But it’s a fact of life that a harmonic problem that feels to me like working out a proof of Fermat’s last theorem feels to more competent musicians like reciting multiplication tables they know by heart, which they can do effortlessly while playing “Autumn Leaves” at a breakneck pace.

I like to imagine myself to be an exception to the pervasive time-sensitivity I see all around me. My colleagues and friends typically describe themselves as perpetually flat-out, racing the clock to squeeze in all their highly specialized work and play, and they tend to regard with moral suspicion anyone who isn’t similarly slammed. In my household, one daughter has had to learn to cope with dyslexia, which slows her reading pace and used to make her very anxious that she’d fall behind in school. When her high school tried to come up with solutions for students like her who face a challenge in keeping up, the default tendency was to make the work easier. But the complexity of works of art, problems, games, machines, processes, ideas, and people constitutes their main appeal for her, so she hates it when others try to simplify things for her. “I don’t want to drop down into a lower-level class and I don’t need extra help,” she told us. “I don’t need them to explain stuff to me. They don’t have to do anything special. I just need more time.” The other daughter places time pressure of any kind in the capacious category of “stress”—even if it’s, say, being stressed out by her parents merely thinking, without actually suggesting out loud, that she should do something she doesn’t want to do. And my wife, who has a work ethic so exemplary that it would cause a Calvinist divine to weep with envy, is happy to chug along in perpetuity at a task as long as she can do one thing at a time, but she can grow peevish when the constraints of time force her to divide her attention—writing a book and teaching classes during the same semester, for instance, or talking to her husband while she’s cooking from a recipe.

In the face of all this time-distress, I try to keep foremost in mind that this world is full of beautiful and true things rather than reasons to watch the clock and become anxious, and one should be grateful rather than oppressed by opportunities to encounter them. Like Kevin, I’m a hardcore beauty-digger, though I mostly keep it to myself and try not to make things worse for everybody else in the house by smugly lecturing them on how unnecessary much of the suffering caused by their time-anxiety seems to me.

In the face of all this time-distress, I try to keep foremost in mind that this world is full of beautiful and true things rather than reasons to watch the clock and become anxious, and one should be grateful rather than oppressed by opportunities to encounter them.

But when I play music, which is the thing I do that comes closest to the pure ideal of digging beauty for its own sake, I feel their pain. When I’m comping behind a singer or soloist, I can usually trace the chord progression without getting in the way, but I yearn to get further inside the music and play something more engaged with its essence, the kind of single-note fills and chordal chunks that lead the ear from one chord to the next with understated behind-the-scenes countermelodic virtuosity. Just playing the plain-vanilla chords feels like settling for mediocrity, so punting—which, while it means you’re giving up on this offensive series, also requires consummate finesse—may be the wrong athletic analogue. It’s more like being a novice skater, staggering across the slick surface of the music with arms flailing and torso jacking as I overcorrect to one side and then to the other so that I don’t lose my balance and fall on my ass.

If I’m actually going to get inside the passage and play it, as opposed to merely surviving it, I’m going to need more time. Fortunately, that’s what happens when I practice, all but stopping the mental metronome so that “Autumn Leaves” slows to the geological pace of John Cage’s “Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible),” a composition that will take 639 years to play in its entirety in an ongoing performance on a purpose-built organ in a church in Halberstadt, Germany. The piece’s next scheduled “impulse,” or change in the music, will occur on August 5, 2026, when an A will begin sounding. That note will cease to sound on March 5, 2030. Now there’s a pace at which I can work things out—play arpeggios built from the defining tones of each of the chords in the sequence, identify which of these tones best delineate the relationships among these chords, figure out where on the steel guitar’s fretboard those notes line up in ways I can take advantage of, construct strings and knots of notes that connect the harmonic dots these tones represent, tinker with the rhythm of this assemblage so that it fits the groove of the song.

After I’ve done all that, I can gradually speed back up to real time, playing and replaying the figure I’ve fashioned that will work over this sequence of chords. But if, when I’m playing at tempo, I try to play something other than what I’ve so painstakingly assembled, I’ll white out and get stuck again and have to unwind the clock and come up with something else. It’s wildly frustrating that I can’t go any faster, and yet there is compensating craft satisfaction in slowing down the music and working things out. I’m like my dyslexic daughter that way. We can figure out pretty much anything if we have enough time, which means that sometimes we need more of it.

So I know what all those time-crunched people around me are talking about: the rising panic and sinking sensation of imminent failure that come when things are moving too fast for me to handle, there isn’t time to do the job properly, I realize I will have to settle for something doable and mediocre, and I become aware that frustration and shame are rolling their shoulders and sharply tilting their heads first one way and then the other to crack-loosen their necks before they set about me.

That’s why I treasure memories of certain musical occasions on which I managed to invent on the fly and in the moment, episodes during which I experienced playing in time as rambling in an almost limitlessly expansive present, as if my passage through the landscape of the song and up and down the guitar’s neck were so frictionlessly volitional that I might as well have had all the time in the world.

There was the evening, years before I took up steel guitar, when my wife and I went to dinner at the home of people we knew only a little, fellow preschool parents, and it turned out the husband was a gifted engineer who had built his own astonishingly lovely electric guitar from scratch. It also turned out that one of the other guests, a historian whose book I had read but whom I had never met, was an excellent jazz-guitar player. The host’s homemade guitar ended up in my hands, the historian was handed another guitar, cables and cords became plugged in and amps turned on, and all of a sudden everybody was looking at me and I was trying to remember how many beers I’d already had. Without really thinking about it, I went into a standard Chicago-style opening that wound its way into a smokily restrained ninth chord, which caused a slow-blues mood to descend like rain falling down.

The historian and I took turns on melody and rhythm, working through it, well matched: He was a much more sophisticated musician, but I spent my teen years absorbing Chicago blues guitar through my pores at the Checkerboard Lounge on Forty-Third Street. My memory of the evening is selective. We followed up our slow blues with a shuffle, as I recall, and I began to worry that our little musical encounter could be stretching to a length that wore out the patience of spouses and others in the usual guys-with-guitars way, and perhaps also made our guitar-building host regret handing me his chef d’oeuvre because now it felt like he’d been cut out of the bromantic fun. But I do remember vividly how settling into that slow-blues groove launched me into a kind of musical hyperspace where it seemed I could drift here and there at will, squeezing from the strings a nasty lick or a sweet one as the spirit moved me, falling back to chord sympathetically behind the historian’s lead, knowing in my bones where we would go next and feeling that, despite the pulsing sense of momentum that pushed the music onward even at slow-blues tempo, I had all the time in the world to get there.

And there was an afternoon I had spent playing music with my friend Phil—another historian, come to think of it—at his house, and his dinner guests showed up early and saw what we were up to and asked us to play something for them. Phil and I exchanged a glance. Uh, okay. We settled on “Are You Sure,” a stately barroom weeper made famous by Ray Price that we had worked on at some point in the past year, so it was still hanging around in our repertoire. The joy of this memory has to do with listening, really listening, to Phil play guitar and sing the song—“Oh look around you / Look down the bar from you / The lonely faces that you see / Are you sure this is where you want to be?”—and taking precise pleasure in playing around him. The tone bar was warm in my hand, the neck of my 1957 Valco Airliner lap steel yielding and kind, the alchemical match of vintage instrument and reverbed Fender amp producing a ringingly voice-like tone like that of Jotuns in their cups lamenting their rashness in picking a fight with Thor, so that the most rudimentary chords and phrases sounded fateful, essential. Knowing the landscape, knowing I had plenty of time to play a riff in D that melted into G and then slid down to E and still left room to get out of Phil’s way before his next line—it was like knowing, back when my kids were little, that we had enough time to stop at the grocery store on our morning walk to school and still get there before the bell.

“Are You Sure” is forgivingly slow, as is the nameless blues I played with the jazzy historian. Merle Haggard’s “The Bottle Let Me Down,” on the other hand, is brisk, one of those definitive honky-tonk tunes that mates heartbreak to jauntiness. The memory I treasure is of playing it with my old friend Chris late on an August night in a house by the water on a stony island off the coast of Maine. Chris was singing and playing guitar, and I was accompanying him on dobro, which is an acoustic lap steel. A seasoned band leader and sideman, Chris plays tasty, understated guitar and sings with consummate authority. So relaxed and behind the beat that it seems like he’ll never catch up until he does, he rocks without apparent effort, as if by nature, though in fact he started early and diligently fashioned his chops over the years. He’s always accommodating on those rare occasions when we play together, but his advanced command of music we both love makes me feel like both a feckless dabbler and a bookish overthinker at the same time. “The Bottle Let Me Down” is the simplest of songs—just D and A chords, alternating—and I was having a good time playing smeary chords behind him and leading up to the changes by playing fills between his sung lines. So far, so good. Then Chris got to the end of a chorus and bent down a little over his guitar, chunking out the chords with a renewed vigor that in the language of jam sessions signals I’m going to play some assiduous rhythm guitar here, so you better take a solo. 

I suppose I had been expecting him to sing another verse or take a solo or something—or that Norm Hamlet, Merle Haggard’s long-serving pedal steel man, would materialize to do the honors, as he does every time I listen to a recording of the song. So, because I had not devoted coherent thought in advance to taking a solo, I had to go on instinct. I found myself opening in Bakersfield fashion with a Ralph Mooney-style upward run into a slip-slidingly smooth passage from D to A and back again, loping along in the groove, not trying to do too much, concentrating on making it sing rather than playing a lot of notes. The lap steel is not an instrument for those who aspire to shred. Its virtues are principally tonal, its limitations part of its charm. If you want to wow them with speed, play conventional guitar. But the mechanics of the tone bar do create opportunities to make moves that can’t be made on other instruments. During a phase a couple of years before when I learned a lot of Merle Haggard songs, I’d borrowed from somewhere a figure in which you rapidly slide the bar back and forth a whole step over a two-fret distance, playing double-stops on the higher strings and fluid bass lines on the lower ones to create a thick, textured clot of steel-guitar sound. When you do it right, it’s like performing one of those flailing ’60s dances, the swim or the jerk, in a phone booth without once touching the glass. That figure came back to me mid-solo and I fell right into it as I went along, happening on it at just the opportune moment, like turning a corner and realizing that you’ve arrived at a familiar intersection by a route you’ve never taken before and you’re just in time for last call at the bar down a side street just ahead.

Another old friend, Charles, the owner of the house, had fallen asleep on the couch some time before, but he woke up long enough to mutter “Damn” before he went back to sleep. The episode stays with me because of his reaction, of course, but also because it’s a pure example of the ideal relationship between practice and improvisation. I’d played the bits and pieces of the solo over and over in the slowed and near-stopped time of past practice sessions, so I found them waiting there under my hands and tone bar when my mind went blank at the moment I realized I had to step forward in fast but generous company with the invisible metronome ticking. They were stored in deep memory, available not merely in rote form but as syllables I could freely recombine into words I’d never spoken before.

My younger brother, Sal, had his own warmly remembered moment of time-bending musical competence in a bar in Louisville. One night he and his fellow young lawyers clerking for an appellate court judge chose to go out for drinks at a place that happened to be holding a name-that-song contest. The category was soul and funk of the 1970s and 1980s, and the prize for a correct answer was a free round of drinks for your table. Sal, who doesn’t hang out in bars all that much or drink much and is not the kind of guy who calls attention to himself, was born in 1966. We grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and of the three of us—we have an older brother, Sebastian—Sal was the one who got deepest into the neighborhood scene. His oldest and closest friends were neighborhood guys, and in pursuing enthusiasms shared by them Sal became a serious basketball player and funk bassist. The dynamics of class and race that sorted kids into different schools and tribes increasingly pulled his neighborhood friends one way and Sal another, so that in his high-school years there were a lot of long evenings he spent with his bass and radio rather than his old pals. Now, under pressure from the ticking clock of the contest, those seemingly endless evenings and the bone-deep knowledge they conferred were supercompressed into the second or two it took him to identify song and artist well before anybody else in the bar could even begin to formulate a coherent thought. Two notes, one note, even (it seemed) the quality of the silence before the first note—that was all he needed. That’s the Brothers Johnson, “I’ll Be Good to You.” That would be Teena Marie, “Square Biz.” That’s Eugene Wilde, “Gotta Get You Home Tonight.” That’s the Gap Band, “Burn Rubber.” Come on, now, give us a hard one. (It turned out that the deejay, like Sal, was a white guy who had grown up in a Black neighborhood, though in Detroit rather than Chicago.) Sal’s fellow clerks and then everyone in the place grew ever more amazed as he swept all competitors before him. He won so many free rounds that the incoming waves of booze swamped the drinking capacities of his straitlaced crew and he had to divert the excess to neighboring tables, where foaming glasses were raised in gratitude to toast his prowess. Once strangers found out his name, they may well have chanted it.

That’s how it can go when you know something so well and feel so at home in that knowledge that time elongates and compresses, accordion-like, to accommodate your needs. This happens to me regularly in the classroom, and it can happen on a basketball court too. The seconds seem to swell, passing slower and slower as I race toward the basket with the ball on a fast break, figuring angles and velocities to determine that I can beat one defender but not the other to a likely takeoff spot, tracking the teammate running the floor on either side of me, cycling through what I know about the competence and judgment and tendencies and temperaments and stamina and coordination of both teammates and both defenders and myself, remembering what happened on previous occasions in analogous situations and considering the capacities of everyone involved to remember and learn from those iterations, processing all this data even as I pick up my dribble and rise up toward the basket with a decisiveness that forces the sole in-position defender to decide whether to step to me or hang back. I’m not that high in the air, but the interval until my shoe soles touch the floor again seems to stretch away toward infinity and I’m happy to wait and wait to decide exactly what I’m going to do next—pass, shoot, fake one and then do the other—until the others have made their own choices, which variously foreclose and open paths for mine. In dreams, I’ll find myself putting not a ball but a towel or coat or something else soft and voluminous through the hoop, and there’s plenty of time, floating up there in the air at the rim, for me to gather up the trailing material and stuff it all through.

Fast breaks are thrilling and relatively easy, but the rest of the game doesn’t come to me so readily. Unlike Sal, who used to spend hours walking around and around the block dribbling between his legs on every stride, I was always lazy about basketball, playing the game when I felt like it but never putting in the practice time to develop the mechanical basics that would allow me to parlay my modest natural gifts into a complete game. I learned how to get by when playing with serious players, which is not the same thing as being good at basketball, but I was never a serious player. I have much more natural talent as a teacher than as an athlete; more importantly, because I make a living from that craft, I’ve put in the time over the years to develop the equivalent of solid ball-handling chops and a reliable shooting stroke.

Music falls somewhere in the middle. I can feel my command building as I work and play at it, but I know I’m never going to get all the way to where I want to go. I got semi-serious too late, and my progress is too slow for me to reach a level of competence at which I can consistently play all the musical ideas in my head, especially as those ideas grow more diverse and complex in response to what I’m belatedly learning about music theory. So, even as I keep pushing to learn, I have to make my peace with falling short. That means drawing sustenance from the satisfaction of playing in harmony and in time, which I recognize with ever-greater appreciation as the point of making music at all.

You feel the end of the chorus giving way to another verse and so you play a phrase that walks up into a double-stop that gives the impression of a D chord, then you slide down two frets and slant the bar to play a fuller three-note D9, making micro-adjustments with the rounded steel bar to compensate for the fact that slanting it across narrow straight strings means that any one individual string might be slightly out of tune. Satisfying as it would be to linger there, the inherently unstable flat 7 in the D9 chord wants to resolve into the IV, so you let the D9 chord ring for an extra moment and then, behind the beat but closing the distance with a sudden swoop, you sail up through a rising figure of double-stop sixths and thirds to arrive at a lush four-string voicing of G6, laying on a vibrato so pronounced that it produces a kind of wobble—in tune, out of tune, in tune again—that makes of the passage from the I to the IV a mini-drama of tension, release, a little more tension, a whole lot of release. You play the changes, in time, and there isn’t a whole lot more to it than that.

I think now and then of a veteran conservatory teacher named Fred Sturm, a burly and deeply joyous dude who could have been the long-lost den-mate of my lap steel teacher, Kevin. I encountered Sturm years ago, long before I took up the steel guitar, when I was reporting a magazine story about jazz fantasy camp. On the first day of rehearsal for an end-of-week public concert, looking out over a big band composed of middle-aged amateurs seething with nerves as they contemplated what it would be like to fail to keep up with the brisk tempo and crash and burn in front of an audience and thus feel the joy of their annual week-long chance to marinate full-time in music curdle into humiliation, he said, “Kids don’t know how much fun it is to play in time. One of the simple pleasures of playing jazz as you get older is playing in time, just loving time.” Then he pointed the ensemble to a passage that needed work. “Okay, at number thirty-six,” he said, “and think time, love time.” A wise man, now gone. We all run out of time in the end. That it’s going to happen to me makes playing in time all the sweeter.