John Romagna

Not Like a Beethoven Symphony

(For Tim Romagna: 1990 – 2012)

Being with Tim was not like listening to a Beethoven Symphony, every note, every phrase exactly where it should be, following the one before it and leading to the next. It was more like a piece by Stravinsky, notes like meteors burning up before you can tell anyone where to look, you wondering how he got such ideas, where the music will go and how it will end.

By the time he was in high school, Tim had learned to keep things to himself, as though he was the only safe place. Yes, there were moments, the time he ran out of his room wanting us to look at a video he found on YouTube, birds pooping on Captain Hook’s head, Peter Pan laughing so hard he collides with a tree trunk.

He had his room, his guitar, notebooks, art work, his art consisting of drawings, some geometric, some realistic, and watercolors. There were school books, though I wondered how much attention he paid to them.

After he died, I read his journals…Tim speaking to himself, and the rest of us, without speaking directly to any one of us, about the New Year’s Eve we took him to London, about other places he would go, about a high school classmate who had become pregnant, about what happens every time a good man dies, convincing me he could have been a writer, he said he wanted to be one, if he had been willing to keep at it, if he could be patient, if he learned to believe in what he found within himself, making that interesting and valuable for others.

 At Tim’s memorial service, his friend Derek told a story: He and Tim walked to Derek’s house one afternoon, taking a dirt pathway beside the school baseball field, Tim kicking stones off the pathway, not in anger, just because he could. He said to Derek, “…when you want to talk to something, talk to a rock. It won’t talk back.”

After he finished 9th grade, I found a school I thought he would like. More than that, where I thought he would thrive. A school in northern New Hampshire, about a seven-hour drive from home, with small classes, academics combined with mountain climbing, canoeing, winter hiking and camping, learning survival skills. He applied, maybe wanting to please me, maybe he secretly agreed with me.

The drive to the school gave me an experience that might have been the best three days with my son. For the first two or three hours, we sat in silence, each looking at the road, or he was looking ahead without seeing much, in the passenger seat wearing a headset. I listened to my Beethoven CDs. I have all nine symphonies, and after two, I’m guessing I played the Beatles, and maybe Tim got tired of my music, or tired of not talking, or maybe I needed to be with him in silence for several hours just to pay my dues. He removed his headset and asked, “Dad, have you heard the Ramones?”

“No.”

He took a CD out of his case, ejected the one I was playing, and for the next few hours, we listened. I liked their songs. He could give me the story behind a few of them, and the musicians, pulled one CD out and put in another, telling me, “You have to hear to this one!” At lunch time, we found a shopping center with a WalMart, bought two more CDs, another by the Ramones, one by Green Day. Driving, listening, talking more, never allowing conversation to overcome the music, it was as though for him to be a willing part of my world, I had to show I could be part of his.

Tim was admitted, but we didn’t send him to that school, finding one closer to home. That might have been a mistake. The trip was not, I learned to trust him more, to believe in him more. Tim didn’t have long enough to let us know who he was. I’m sure he’s not the only young man one could say that about.

Saying so doesn’t give me much consolation. Not like remembering the truthfulness, the easy togetherness of those three days driving to New Hampshire and back. For me, they are like grave goods that had been lying not far beneath the earth, and I’m the archaeologist who remembers brushing the dirt aside, holding up a sword, a coin or a ring, and it gets me closer to what I’m looking for.