We’d lie or sit scattered around the floor or on the couch in our bungalow’s living room at night, a light from the dining room casting shadows behind us while Beethoven, Tchaikovsky or Brahms caressed the air.
Previously, we’d gone with Dad to Polk Brothers to pick out the records. There, he’d given us some idea of what different pieces might evoke musically: serenity, curiosity, surprise, or maybe the thunder of war. At home, he and Mom would cut the lights, set the needle gently on the vinyl disk, and turn the tuner’s dial where they wanted. We’d go quiet as the music filled the forward space in our Berwyn home.
A shadow is not the same as darkness: It’s enabled by light, and forms as a murky, visible shape behind or beyond something solid. The murkiness and unplanned appearance can provide intrigue in what a shadow might reveal. It might signal that something needs attention. Nested in music as were ours, the trickery of a shadow can be stirred by dark melodic passages or surprising harmonies.
Decades after those private concerts with the family in the parlor, I wrote of a shadow hovering overhead as I saw it cast by the light of the moon. My poem’s final stanza said,
Mystery moon in mystery’s air,
Surrounded by mist, hauntingly
You cast a shadow, a chill, a stare
That in dampness thirsts me tauntingly.
The moon above created shadows whose shapes stirred feelings within.
Around that time, with the guidance of Jungian analysis, I was coming to an understanding of a shadow as something living inside me, as well as a shape hovering above or near me.
To Jung, the shadow is a living part of the self, containing repressed aspects of the personality. I learned as a middle-aged adult that after I left Berwyn for college, and then set out on a professional career, I had relegated certain parts of my youthful, Berwyn self to my shadow. I had come to see that kid from 15th and Clarence as backward, limited by his working-class perspective and embarrassingly guilt-ridden, due to his traditional Catholic upbringing.
To get beyond him, to grow as a planner, to earn a doctorate and make it in the progressive social circles that came with those career moves, I pushed him into my unconscious. But he had too much to offer to keep him there forever. And the challenges of life pushed me eventually to honor his strengths and bring him back into the light.
In the series of pieces I’ve been writing in recent years, I’ve been reflecting on my life as a kid south of 12th Street and my existence as an older guy north of it. I grew up there, left the area for 20 years, and returned with a family to Oak Park, where I’ve been since 1996.
Much of the Berwyn self has blended with the Oak Park self in a conscious effort to be whole. Some of my life still involves music, much of it with my wife, Maureen: singing in the Ascension choir, taking in performances of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and enjoying the Lyric Opera. With our choir, we traveled to Spain last year to sing in old churches and cathedrals rich in shadow life. Making music in a place like Sagrada Familia raises an awareness of men and women who’ve worshipped there. Gaudi himself is buried in the crypt, his spirit very much alive in the prayers and songs drifting about.
And now at home when I listen to music while the lights on Marion Street cast shadows of the trees onto our windows and walls, there are times when those hours with Mom and Dad 60 years ago come forward, and we enjoy a symphony together once again.