A couple of days ago, Teranika wrote an entry in which she wondered about that moment when we become aware of the world around and away from us (�when I first realized what it meant that there was a world out there - one with other countries and peoples� is how she put it. I was struck by her entry because I had been thinking about the exact same thing earlier that morning. AJ had been reading aloud from the newspaper and I was remembering doing the same thing when I was around his age and really having no idea what it all meant. They were words, little more.

The first time I really became aware of what it meant to be from somewhere else was when I was eight. My family moved to London and our first morning there, I was wakened early by the sound of a garbage truck driving through the alley next to our hotel. I looked out the window and noticed that the license plates were all different. They were long and rectangular and took up half the bumper. I had known about the cars being reversed for driving on the left, but I hadn't thought about license plates. Later that day, when we went house hunting, my brother and I were left to entertain ourselves in the garden of a block of flats while my parents toured a flat. We were fascinated by the pebbles. All of the stones were different -- they looked nothing like the stones we knew from our former home in Connecticut. For me, the awareness came from the first hand experience of pebbles and an infinite number of other small things. Somehow I always felt that it was the little things that made the difference, not big things like monarchies, languages or driving on the left. It was the pebbles. They looked like polished glass.

I�ve been thinking about this again today as I try to write a cover letter. This cover letter is for a non-academic job that is looking for someone with my peculiar mix of experience in arts management and ethnography. It�s a job that seeks to use ethnomusicology as a tool for social reform of a sort. I�m finding the letter very hard to write because I feel so incredibly passionate about what they are trying to do. It is like the practical flip side to my much more theoretical research. Each time I sit down to try to intelligently articulate my competence and qualification for the position, I end up with impassioned polemic about how music functions to bind communities together, how cross-cultural music experiences can open doors to intercultural understanding. Because if you pay attention to the small things like songs, you can get inside the bigger things like cultural priorities and aesthetics. It�s all about the pebbles.

I remember when I was studying Russian in college, my professor mentioned in passing one day that the cadence for the delivery of a question is different in Russian, a different part of the phrase is raised. Moreover (and I may not be remembering this quite correctly after lo these many years), the cadence of our delivery of questions, the way we raise our voice at the end, was considered combative in Russian. �I wonder,� he mused, �just how many diplomacy problems were caused by a simple misunderstanding of the tone of the voice.� I thought back to my childhood in England and the discovery that questions there too are cadenced differently � the voice is raised but then dropped again at the end of the inquiry. I was enthralled by the difference and used to practice asking questions in as convincingly English tone as I could muster. My mother didn�t quite understand my studious approach to the king�s English. �They can understand you.� But I knew that. It was I who was trying to understand them. Was there some fundamental difference in the concept of question that accounted for the sound? What was I missing?

It is like that too when I am in France speaking French. I feel like I go through some kind of wild personality transplant. It is not a simple matter of switching languages. My whole physical demeanor changes. I use my hands more. I smile more. My voice gets much higher. I�m a lot more girly. Part of it is insecurity and unfamiliarity, I�m sure. But part of it is the language itself � it is not just me changing the words I speak. The change in words changes me too.

So to answer Teranika�s question, I first became aware of the rest of the world by inhabiting it. It was at that point where I was able to notice and identify the difference by participating in it that the difference became meaningful. It was then that I started to pay attention. What made the difference meaningful was the recognition of the small and personal details that were altered from place to place -- the pebbles.

6 people said it like they meant it