Sister Helen Prejean

I dug my saxophone out of the closet and cleaned it, got out my Mel Bay “You Can Play the Saxophone” (very) Beginner book, and tried to toot. I haven’t touched it in a year. Have to start over. I remember how I first thought my instrument would be guitar but my fingers are too short and so is my sense of rhythm. Then the idea: wind, wind, I’ve got plenty of wind. I’m made for a horn. And so I went to a pawn shop in New Orleans and got a tarnished Bundy II sax from a public school band (Lord, I hope some kid didn’t pawn his horn to get drugs) and a couple of beginner books and started to blow my horn.

It’s mostly for myself that I play. I’m not fit to play in public. I can’t perform yet for others because I’m too self conscious: “Here I am playing and people are listening… then… where’s the G? Where do my fingers go for F? Where am I?” And I start laughing and high bleeps and snorts come out, which makes me laugh more, and it’s a bust.

I play the sax for the pure joy of it, of hearing the solid note come through, of holding the sax against me and feeling comfortable like it’s part of me and I’m swaying with the notes. Time goes away and it’s just me and my horn making – every now and then – some mighty blessed sounds.

This time, though, when I started playing again I had serious problems with F and D.

Very serious because all I could get was air sounds, no note at all, just air swishing through, which is not terribly good for melody with no F and D. It took two days of trying and then I decided it must be something structural, and sure enough, there on the F key the pad was missing from the key. I found it in the case and got some glue and put it back and let it sit for the night. First thing in the morning and with great expectation I blew my horn, and ahhh…. there was F loud and clear, which meant D was okay, too, and I got my horn back.

Second discovery: lessons on video on the Internet, and isn’t this downright wonderful, this nice lady in a black dress showing me where to put my fingers on the keys, how to hold my horn and blow full breaths, how to get a tight embouchure (make a little smirk with your lips) and how not to get discouraged when low D has a mind of its own and wants to keep coming out high.

Now, every day, as my reward for writing (writers need little rewards to beckon them at the end of a day of writing) I get to play my sax and I’m ripping through ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ and ‘Three Dizzy Rodents’, and even a bit of the folk song, ‘All My Trials, Lord’ that Joan Baez used to sing so hauntingly and with that clear, bell-like voice.

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San Benito Monastery
Dayton, WY

At last. No more speaking and traveling for awhile. I’m here for the summer to write my book. Haven’t touched it since last summer, so now I get to descend into writing. It ought to encourage me that I have already written and published two books, but it’s a funny thing, writing. When I sit in front of the blank page to write this book, it’s like the first day of creation.

I put up the map, the terrain I will cover in the book, up on the wall by my desk.

I’m in a postage-stamp-sized room at the end of a trailer. I look out at towering cottonwood trees and behind them the Big Horn Mountains. But when I descend into writing they fade away, and when I glance up I might see the lamp on my night table or my watercolor of the sunflower and pears and one plum and one mottled goblet that took the most work of all when I painted the picture.

But mostly it’s the descent into the current of writing.

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For weeks I’ve been writing about all the changes that came to the Catholic Church through Vatican Council II in the ’60s – especially for us nuns, who were itching for the church to join the modern world. In just four short years we went from habited, blindly obedient, cloistered beings to intellectually curious, self-possessed, self-directed women ready to plunge in to help a hurting world.  Quite a ride, I tell you.

It kind of feels funny, when you descend for two weeks or so into a past period of your life like I’m doing now, and all you experienced – the way you get right in there again and feel what you felt, remember the big insights you got, the parts of books you copied, the friendships that lasted, and even the songs…”yellow bird, high up in banana tree… you sit all alone like me” and… “where have all the flowers gone, long time passing…”  “today while the blossoms still cling to the vine, I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine…”

Writing is one heck of an interesting experience. It definitely does a number on time.  Today I spooled out words for three hours straight and I was back in Canada when I went to school in London, Ontario, back to Marcel Gervais’s scripture class on the Book of Jonah and the humor of the biblical account and what a hoot Jonah was, who was supposed to be a prophet but ran away and ends up getting a free ride in the belly of a whale to the place where God told him to go in the first place.

Tongue River Canyon in Wyoming where I went to write yesterday. Flower is Indian Paintbrush.

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Amazing how much you learn about yourself when you go back and trace how you got to be a cogent, confident self.

Early on I realized I couldn’t make it as a celibate nun without a close friend. The first great gift of friendship in my life was Sister Christopher. I realized you have to work at friendship. It doesn’t just happen. Chris and I cultivated our friendship like a garden – weeding, planting, tilling the soil, and wasting time, giving hunks of time to being together.

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Writing the book these last few days have been slogging days. Trying to bring the reader into the seismic shifts of consciousness brought to Catholics by Vatican Council II, which means I’m into stacks of books, refreshing my mind on content. Then, the challenge to keep my book from being “bookish,” and that’s where fresh, lived experience comes in.

In a few short years I went from being a nun who relied on authorities to direct my life’s work and all I had to do was to be obedient… then the realization that the self of me had to search, to discern, and then to choose work from the needs of people. It was their suffering, their pain that enkindled my conscience, my heart and mind to respond.

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