The Roaring Brook Fiddler: Creative Life on the Wings of an Empath

By Julie Lyonn Lieberman

What does it take to live a creative life of conscience? To transition from a loving cocoon out into a harsh world that seeks the rational above fantasy, snubs creativity, and seeks money above all else?

Julie was gifted a loving, close-knit artistic family of activists. Her education was supported, and her spirit, nurtured.

But Julie's life path roared into the dark depths, forcing her to strip away all illusions about marriage, success, comfort and security. Only one pawn in a failing planet, determined to make a difference, she fought to keep her muse alive as she rode hurdle after hurdle into a new life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667891057

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I believed I could save the world through music. But midway along my life’s journey, I found myself trapped in a relentless wave of loss and disappointment. Everything I’d spent decades fashioning crumbled and the forward pathway became hidden by degree. Survival instinct gradually squeezed my sensitive artist’s soul into a thin, numb version of the person I knew as Julie, until I no longer recognized myself.

I scoop up the heavy stapler and hand it to my husband, who’s standing in pants that haven’t been washed for a month and a gold sweatshirt that’s streaked with dirt. Len is perched on a hand-built wooden platform in front of a one-hundred-year-old wall.

He covers it patch by patch with meticulously cut rectangles of pink insulation.

Next, he calls out in a brusque voice. I automatically hand him another square.

If I look around too much, depression competes with self-blame. After all, I chose to move here, exhaust my great-grandparents’ and parents’ savings on this likeness of a home, and give up all that’s familiar.

There’s no need to look much further than the dusty wall to be reminded we don’t yet have heat, electricity, a kitchen, or much in the way of plumbing. I’ve been washing up and flushing a broken toilet with a hose Len has mounted that pours ice-cold water from a one-hundred-year-old well into a bucket.

Though I’ve become an expert at focusing my eyes on the tasks at hand, my mind is like a wild horse: It races through my past looking for the moment I turned left instead of right, right instead of left, straight ahead instead of …

THE SORCERER

Julie 1956

According to my mother, I popped out of her quickly. She’s meant to become a dancer, Mom speculated when she saw my big feet.

But my maternal grandmother, Nanny, knew differently. No, she’ll be a musician.

I remember my first flash of self-awareness at about age four while seated on the floor of our dining room. My legs sprawled along the rigid wood in front of me, imprisoned in clunky hard-leather shoes attached to metal poles to force my knock-kneed, pigeon-toed limbs into straight lines. I held a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my right hand and in the other a mustard-yellow wooden block. Certainly, I have vague memories of earlier day-to-day details, but this moment was different. Parked in front of my father’s old stereo cabinet, I was swathed in an ocean of sound and, for a brief, suspended moment, I awoke to something larger than hunger … beyond day-to-day sensations.

An orchestral performance of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice boomed, and a male voice spoke to me through a big speaker that sat near my head. He told me about a little boy who’d tried to perform magic while his teacher, the sorcerer, was away. But then the boy’s magic went wrong. Tired of doing his chores, he split his broom in two and had them fetch water to clean the workshop more quickly, but the power of the two brooms overcame him. He couldn’t reverse his spell, and the brooms fetched buckets of water faster and faster, until the room began to fill up.

The music charged through me, swirling and pumping, dense and wondrous. I gave myself to this latticework of sound. I was so absorbed in listening that I confused one hand with the other, and bit into the block instead of my sandwich. Surprised by the sudden clash of my baby teeth on their hard surface rather than soft bread, I jolted into a new awareness.

Although I could feel my physical body seated on the floor, I also felt it as if hovering near the ceiling, looking down. My sense of self was both magnified and released from physical boundaries. I was sound, and sound was power. Power to do, to be, to feel … anything … everything. Suddenly, I was so much larger than the body called Julie, and I liked that feeling.

Then the music ended. I looked to my mother, but she was busy in the kitchen.

I ate my sandwich.

Over the next decade there would only be momentary tastes of that euphoric experience, almost always inspired by music. But this one potent moment gave me a glimpse of who I was, my essence. It impressed upon me the promise offered by music. I didn’t have words for this deep sense of self, but it was enough to make the ordinary day-to-day tutelage on how to navigate the material world and earn my land-legs as an American-Jewish girl tedious.

The only thing I was certain of was that my path would be in the creative arts, and that I would fulfill my responsibility to the family code: I was expected to live a life filled with important accomplishments. I was expected to help change the world. My parents supported and nurtured my creativity but did little to prepare me for or protect me from the physical world, since they, too, navigated the day-to-day while their hearts and souls were elsewhere.

VIRTUAL WHISKERS

I am five years old and dreaming. A large, multi-colored bird comes to me in the night and leads me up a narrow path to the top of a mountain. The bird and I are the same height and our climb is effortless. I am certain I have seen this path before and feel a mystical, age-old clarity as I commune with this beautiful creature. Standing side by side, we look out over the world and in that moment, I understand who I am. The bird becomes my icon, my guide.

Julie 1960

Though my knock-kneed, pigeon-toed legs had been corrected by wearing braces since the time I learned to crawl, once removed, a new physical challenge emerged. When I turned two, a high fever from chicken pox activated a dormant gene inherited from my father’s mother, Grandma Ida. My right eye veered into a life independent of my left eye, and I was diagnosed with strabismus, commonly called lazy eye. I was oblivious. Busy with important matters. Like how to make my cat Tawney purr. Or the ongoing stories I made up as I sat in the sandbox and changed voices for each character. I lacked depth perception, and my knees were scarred from constantly bumping into objects around me, but I thought that was normal.

I suspected I might be different when Mom would take me with her to buy groceries. Shoppers scrutinized one eye, then the other as if trying to decipher something distasteful about my face. This was extremely different from when my parents or my sister Jeannie looked at me. My family’s gazes made me whole. Normal. Loved. Strangers’ stares were cruelly invasive.

My parents managed to find a specialist in NJ. In second grade, I became one of the first two girls in the United States to participate in a new eye therapy just developed in Switzerland.

Do you see an image of a butterfly? Asked the specially trained vision therapist at the clinic.

Yes.

Put these 3D glasses on, Julie, and look again at the page in this book … Now show me how far off the page its wings are.

What do you mean? It’s just a flat picture on a piece of plastic.

Use your index finger and point to the wings.

The wings are right here. I stated emphatically as I touched the plastic with my right forefinger. But I could tell this was the wrong answer.

I squeezed my eyes tightly together until I was cross-eyed, hoping to see like others. Nothing changed.

Julie, the wings should not look flat. They should look as if they’re coming off the page.

Without the visual coordination to generate depth perception by looking with both eyes simultaneously, I could not see like other people. No matter how hard I tried, my butterfly’s wings would not fly.

At the end of the session, after a few more equally disappointing tests and exercises, the therapist placed a patch over my left eye and handed a box of brown patches to my mother. Your daughter will need to wear a patch every day over her dominant eye, she droned as if I wasn’t there. This will help strengthen her weaker eye."

The idea that using my right eye all day long would stop its tendency to wander off into its own private world made sense, but my visual problems, and particularly the patch, branded me as an oddity in school. In self-defense, I retreated into my family and the creative arts: writing, dance, theatre, and music. A few months later, the doctor operated to shorten and tighten the muscles in my right eye. I woke up in a small hospital bed, my head wrapped in bandages.

The surgery made me look normal. But, according to the various eye doctors my parents took me to, my eyes still didn’t work well together. Each doctor performed the same tests again and again. The harder I tried to figure out what they wanted from me, the more broken I felt. I just wanted to be left alone.

Every test, every eye exercise only taught me to further distrust what I saw through my own eyes. But I gradually learned to navigate the objects around me by growing my own set of virtual ‘whiskers’ that operated not so differently than those of my orange-and-white striped cat, Tawney.

At first, my virtual whiskers helped me maneuver in the physical world. But then they acted more like antennae. I began to observe those around me differently. I started to notice that I did not see through my eyes like everyone else, nor feel through my sense of touch—though both were fully active. Nor did incoming information register in my mind with words.

Something else was going on, beyond anything I could describe or even consciously acknowledge. And no one else appeared to see what I perceived. At least no one was talking about it.

The first time I noticed my virtual whiskers was when a friend of my parents dropped by for dinner. After he left, Mom and Dad commented on his profound political wisdom, but I had seen his hidden world of loneliness and how he disguised it with lots of big, important words. There was a vast gap between his outer noise and inner despair.

Shortly after his visit, we packed to leave for a camping trip and without thinking about it, I went down into the basement, took a handful of nails and placed them in my miniature purse. When we reached the campsite, Dad exclaimed, It’s going to rain, and I forgot to pack any nails to attach a tarp over our eating area.

I have some, I called out jubilantly. My family joked about my purse, asking me what other treasures I had hidden inside of it. I forced out a few chuckles as they laughed. I couldn’t explain why I had thought to pack nails. I had never done that before.

My parents didn’t notice my hidden world. Only my cat Tawney was privy to my rituals and secret thoughts. I taught him how to read and write. I’d lie on my back under the kitchen table with Tawney nestled on my belly and guide his right paw to help him trace invisible letter patterns on the underside of the wooden table. I knew he understood everything I told him when, after complaining to him about my sister, he calmly walked out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and scratched her. I heard Jeannie shriek from the first floor. Tawney came back upstairs and rubbed against me, purring. Thank you, I whispered as I rubbed behind his ears.

The deeper I retreated into myself, the more I began to ‘see.’

It felt like there was a specific place inside yet simultaneously outside my body that provided a current of information and sensation, with little communication between the Julie who used words to express her thoughts and feelings and the Julie with ‘whiskers.’ There was only an extremely flimsy filament running between the two. Just enough for me to know I received information differently than those around me.

One extremely cold day after school when I was eight years old, I walked the few blocks home to our front door and discovered it was locked. I pounded on the door with my lightly gloved fist. Mom, where are you?

Tawney stared out the window at me from between the curtains.

I paced up and down the three front steps trying to figure out what to do and walked around the house rattling the side and back doors as I cried from the bitter chill. Then I heard a car horn.

My grandmother, Nanny, pulled up, tooting her horn. I threw myself into her arms before she was even halfway out of her little red car. She had the keys to the house. Once inside, she seated me in the green Lazy-Boy chair with a blanket wrapped around me.

I was in the middle of cooking applesauce, she explained, when I suddenly grabbed the key to your house off a hook on my wall and jumped into my car to drive here. I don’t know why. I didn’t even think to call first to see if anyone was home.

As she busied herself making me hot chocolate in the kitchen, I wondered if there was an invisible string running from Nanny to me, our own private keyhole through which she could see me. Did she, too, have invisible whiskers?

Over dinner, after numerous apologies for getting home late, my mother jokingly called Nanny, whose first name was Liz, Saint Elizabeth.

It was just a whim, was how Nanny described her impulsive rescue mission. There’s no other explanation.

Maybe Nanny could hear my cries for help in her mind, I suggested, eyes focused on my food.

There’s no such thing as ESP. It’s just a hoax, Dad chimed in. When I was a journalist for the Newark Star Ledger before you were born, the paper sent me out on an assignment to cover several public personalities who’d advertised their ‘psychic powers.’ I proved they were all swindlers.

I didn’t know what to say. Maybe the people he interviewed were fakes. But I knew my father had missed something important, though I could not find words to argue otherwise. I hadn’t even thought about it out loud within myself. There was the Julie in the room. She was small, and her voice was uncertain. And then there was this other Julie, who was strong and confident but couldn’t speak. My experiences with my legs and eyes had taught me not to trust my physical self and to keep ‘Julie-with-Whiskers’ hidden.

I HAVE A DREAM…

At five thirty a.m., in dim light, my parents and I stood alongside a large group of strangers in the cool August air in a large parking lot in Montclair, where we’d recently moved. I was ten years old and high with anticipation as we waited for the bus that was to take us four hours south. Garbage trucks groaned past us. A newspaper truck driver slowed to stare at this unexpected shadow world of anonymous people. Voices were soft, sleepy. At last, a woman with clipboard in one hand, megaphone in the other, directed our large group to a bus as it pulled into the lot. Every seat on the vehicle filled up quickly. It was 1964 and we were headed down to a civil rights rally where we’d hear Harry Belafonte, whose music I loved, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose name I’d only just begun to hear mentioned at home.

This wasn’t my first demonstration. Though I’d been too young to understand why, my sister and I had already marched with our parents down a long street in NJ yelling Equal Rights for All, where big-bellied men with red, round faces came out of a bar late morning to yell, Shouldn’t your kids be in school learnin’ somethin’? I’d wanted to yell back, It’s Saturday, idiots! But they looked scary.

Snores broke the stillness inside the bus during the first hour of the trip. Dad’s rumble from across the aisle was probably the loudest. Mom and I were wide awake.

The McCarthy-run system of justice had overtaken the United States. I nodded as if I knew who McCarthy was.

My mother, who I’d recently morphed into calling Momoishka, —I’d probably picked up the ‘oish’ from my grandparent’s Yiddish without any sense of its meaning— told me that she and Dad had many friends who were persecuted by Senator McCarthy before I was born, and a lawyer named Cohn. And, like a lot of other writers, artists, actors, and musicians, had been accused of being communists or communist sympathizers. They were all blacklisted and couldn’t find work. Her eyes opened wide as her eyebrows lifted high. The creative artists we knew weren’t guilty of doing anything other than exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech, just like we’re about to do today.

I vaguely remembered sitting in Mom’s lap years earlier in someone’s packed living room filled with fervent voices led by folk-singer Pete Seeger, my father’s voice particularly loud and off-key, while singing We Shall Overcome. The concert had been organized to keep Seeger afloat because he’d been blacklisted for singing about freedom and equality and could no longer get a job performing in a club or on the concert stage.

Your father put his life on the line and lost his only brother to fight against an evil dictatorship during the war, Mom said, as our bus rolled south. He just couldn’t bring himself to live in silence in a country that allowed a different form of tyranny. And neither could I.

I glanced across the aisle at Dad. His head was tilted back, eyes closed, large nose pointed skyward. I already knew that my father had served as a bodyguard to Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II and my uncle, his brother, had died from meningitis while serving in the army during the war. But now I understood how deep my father’s patriotism ran.

Even after Senator McCarthy was censored, it took years for Seeger to rebuild his career and some of the actors and directors I knew never recovered, Mom continued.

Two currents ran through my body. Might we get arrested, too, today, I wondered. Found guilty and… I didn’t even want to consider what might happen to us. Yet, my mother had made me feel important … chosen for something special. Energy hummed through my ten-year-old body with the realization … I am here to help make a better world.

Finally, I understood why our bedtime stories had often been coupled with reminders not to answer any questions by strangers, and particularly if approached while outside the house by men with black overcoats and brimmed hats. It was highly likely, we were told with hushed voices, they worked for the FBI or the CIA, and would be trying to find out about our frequent trips to World Fellowship. It was the only retreat during the 1950s in the United States dedicated to open discussions and political debates that publicly welcomed people of all colors and religious backgrounds.

I had sung We Shall Overcome with my family and other patrons outside the small rural prison, where Willard Uphause, the owner of World Fellowship, had been imprisoned for not turning over a list of the names and addresses of their visitors to the FBI.

By the fourth hour everyone on the bus became animated; hot drinks from thermoses were shared; up and down the aisle went tin cans filled with homemade baked goods. Our group’s organizer issued instructions: This is a peaceful vigil. We will stay together. It is important that we not respond to any opposition, just keep walking in the area assigned us. There might be people yelling nasty comments. Just ignore them. We’ve made signs if you want to carry them. I looked out the window with increasing excitement because I saw other buses with window signs, Jobs for All! End Segregated Rules for Public Schools! and Equal Rights Now! driving alongside us. Gradually, the lanes of the highway filled until there were hundreds of buses shoulder-to-shoulder spanning the highway.

We’re here, I heard echoed throughout the bus by its passengers. We had just pulled into a Washington D.C.-appointed parking lot. We were given a map to follow and walked a long distance to the subway, traveling yet another twenty minutes to get to the rally.

I’ll bet the police did this on purpose to make it harder for us to reach the march! An angry voice called out from behind us.

Once we reached our stop, there were so many people, we couldn’t get close to the stage. Someone had a radio and yelled, The press is saying that only 10,000 have shown up. Such lies! We later learned it was more like 250,000.

We walked past a line-up of police across the road. They had fenced us into an area that was far too narrow to fit everyone. This slowed us down enough for me to take a long look. I had been taught in school that policemen were our best friends, but the faces of these men were frozen, and their eyes had no expression. They stood legs astride. Their bodies were stiff, and they wore metal hats held in place by chinstraps. They looked angry. I reached up for my father’s big, warm hand and wondered why, if we were all Americans, the police didn’t welcome us to their city.

By the time we reached the huge crowd of demonstrators, we had missed a number of the scheduled speakers. At first, I was too busy looking up at the faces of many colors and ages around me to listen to the words blasting through a loudspeaker near us. Everyone seemed familiar, as if we were all in the same family. The energy made me feel as tall as the adults, who, with nostrils flaring, eyes glowing, smiles and nods, exchanged silent looks of agreement and purposefulness, punctuated by rhythmically loud Amen’s, Speak it, brother, or I’m with you, sister.

And then I heard a voice through the loudspeakers. No one had to tell me who this was. For the length of the speech there was only that one voice, I have a dream …

Those were words I was determined to live by.

JUSTICE… FAMILY STYLE

Jeannie & Julie 1961

Three years my elder, my sister Jeannie had been entrusted with my care for a special outing. I was thirteen years old. She was sixteen. Jeannie and I shared the third floor of the house in Montclair. We each had a bedroom with a matching color scheme—blue, yellow and orange—and shared a bathroom.

My sister shouted from her bedroom with a bossy voice, We can’t go anywhere until you iron my hair. It was Saturday morning. We’d carefully selected our outfits to try to look as grown-up as possible. I wanted curly hair like my sisters’, and she wanted straight hair like mine. I looked at my bowl cut in the bathroom mirror, courtesy of my mother’s hair-cutting skills. Every few months, she’d place a bowl on my head and use its edges to guide her large office scissors. I had added to what I thought was a fashionable coif by using huge curlers at the bottom of the otherwise straight fall of my hair so that my mountain slope culminated in barrel-shaped bushes.

Just a minute! I called back, proud to assert myself, then walked into her bedroom as slowly as I could just to show her how much I loathed straightening her hair. She bent over the ironing board, placed a washcloth over her hair, and I ironed whatever I could reach, making sure to give an extra hard tug here and there each time the acrid smell of burnt hair stung my nostrils.

Jeannie tossed her makeup kit—the one Mom and Dad didn’t know she had—into her oversize cloth pocketbook. We didn’t bother with breakfast. We were too excited. Once out the door, we paused at the corner to smear thick blue cream from the makeup kit on our eyelids and proceeded to strut to the bus stop like the two female bombshells we believed we’d become.

This was a big excursion for us: our first shopping trip without our parents. We’d been given change for the bus and money for my sister to purchase a pair of black, dressy pants. As we waited for the bus, Jeannie pulled out a rolled-up piece of Kleenex from her bottomless bag—it was like a carpetbag; large and woven with earthy colors. We’d each purchased one at an open-air marketplace while studying art in Mexico for the summer. It had been a memorable trip in more ways than one. Now, my sister unrolled the tissue to reveal a couple of cigarettes. I was amazed. What? Where did you get those?

I bummed them off a classmate at school.

I gagged after one puff, then imitated how my big sister held her cigarette to look as if I were a smoker.