When I had Bruce
in Music Appreciation I played a recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812
Overture. I explained to the class that the
composition was about an actual event in history, the defeat of
Napoleon in Russia. I asked the students to think of some major
event in their own lives, and to imagine what kind of music might best
describe it. They were to think about it for a week before
telling anybody about the event or the music. I wanted their brains to
cook and cook with music, with the lid on tight. The event Bruce
Bergeron set to music in his head was getting stuck between floors in
an elevator when he was maybe 6 years
old, on the way with a Haitian nanny to a post-Christmas white sale at
Bloomingdale's department store in New York City. They
were supposed to be going to the American Museum of Natural History,
but the nanny, without permission from her employers,
wanted to send some bargain bedding to relatives in Haiti first. The elevator got
stuck right below the floor where the white sale was going on. It was
an automatic elevator. There was no
operator. It was jammed. When it became obvious that the elevator was
going to stay there, somebody pushed the alarm button,
which the passengers could hear clanging far below. According to Bruce,
this was the first time in his life that he had ever been in
some kind of trouble that grownups couldn't take care of at once.
There was a 2-way
speaker in the elevator, and a woman's voice came on, telling the
people to stay calm. Bruce remembered that
she made this particular point: Nobody was to try to climb out through
the trapdoor in the ceiling. If anybody did that,
Bloomingdale's could not be responsible for whatever might happen to
him or her afterward. Time went by. More
time went by. To little Bruce it seemed that they had been trapped
there for a century. It was probably more
like 20 minutes. Little Bruce
believed himself to be at the center of a major event in American
history. He imagined that not only his parents but the
President of the United States must be hearing about it on television.
When they were rescued, he thought, bands and cheering
crowds would greet him. Little Bruce
expected a banquet and a medal for not panicking, and for not saying he
had to go to the bathroom.
The elevator
suddenly jolted upward a few centimeters, stopped. It jolted upward a
meter, an aftershock. The doors slithered
open, revealing the white sale in progress behind ordinary customers,
who were simply waiting for the next elevator, without any
idea that there had been something wrong with that one. They wanted the
people in there to get out so that they could get in. There wasn't even
somebody from the management of the store to offer an anxious apology,
to make certain that everybody was
all right. All the actions relative to freeing the captives had taken
place far away--wherever the machinery was, wherever the alarm
gong was, wherever the woman was who had told them not to panic or
climb out the trapdoor. That was that.
The nanny bought
some bedding, and then she and little Bruce went on to the American
Museum of Natural History. The nanny
made him promise not to tell his parents that they had been to
Bloomingdale's, too--and he never did. He still hadn't
told them when he spilled the beans in Music Appreciation. "You know what you
have described to perfection?" I asked him. "No," he said. I said, "What it
was like to come home from the Vietnam War."