Charts & Graphs & Caillebotte, by Lev Raphael

Paris Street, Rainy Day, by Gustave Caillebotte (France) 1877

 Charts & Graphs & Caillebotte
  
There's a famous scene in Henry James's novel The Ambassadors where his protagonist feels as if he's walked into a painting. While I've been going to museums in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe for decades, I'd never experienced anything similar until early in December 2024.

It started when I was sitting in my warm, book-filled study finishing a second cup of freshly-brewed, mild Gevalia coffee and my husband called from another room: "Hey! Shouldn't you be at physical therapy? It's 8:00."

The question was as shocking as the clamor from one of those silvery, round, old-fashioned alarm clocks with a bell on top. I've never been late for PT and I was sure the appointment was set for 8:30—which meant that I still had plenty of time to enjoy my coffee. 

Not so. A super-quick check of my Google calendar made it clear that I'd gotten the week's Tuesday and Thursday appointment times reversed.  I shouldn’t have doubted my husband was correct since he has an unerring sense of what's ahead on our calendar and even remembers dates from years ago. So if, for instance, I ask when we bought our last dishwasher or had the new front door installed, he won't hesitate: he'll reply with the year, the season, and the month.

Before this PT goof, I would have brushed off my mistake as absent-mindedness or a result of too much multi-tasking. But when I hurried into a coat and gloves, calling ahead to the physical therapist's office to say I was en route, I knew that my "number dyslexia" was the cause.

The awareness of this issue had hit like thunder only weeks before when I told my voice teacher at Michigan State University's Community Music School that I'd always had trouble with sight reading music. That's the case even though I have a good ear for music and in my teacher's words, "terrific audiation." What does that mean? I can hear the notes, hear the music, in my head. In our weekly lessons whenever he's asked me to try a new vocal exercise and he's played it on the piano, I've had no trouble singing the right notes. Maybe I need to work on fine points of technique, but my accuracy has never been an issue.

He suggested in this pivotal lesson that I might want to try what’s called "Solfège" in music. That's where you use the do-re-mi etc. labels to replace the names of the notes and this apparently helps people read music better. We spent about ten minutes working with that in the too-bright practice room where the baby grand piano loomed over a swarm of black, plastic stackable chairs and matching metal music stands. 

My teacher is tall, blond, young, enthusiastic, and profoundly encouraging. Our lessons have always been educational and fun for me—sometimes even thrilling when I do things I didn't know I could, like sing something "piano" with full and steady release of air so that the sound is crystal clear. Whether singing a song by Sondheim or Schumann, I've always feel at ease.

He often grins when he introduces something new and asks if I'm willing to try it. I've said "Yes" because it doesn't feel risky or embarrassing—even the first time he asked me to sing while walking around the crowded room. That was a bit complicated because I had to concentrate on not bumping into any of the myriad chairs filling the large practice room, but it also freed me from thinking about what I was singing. It was fun and I just sang with more expression and nuance than before.

But this do-re-mi approach was different. I felt some vague inner qualms about what we were doing when he played notes in an arpeggio and asked me to sing their Solfège names—it was like a pop quiz. 

We moved on after this brief foray into Solfège, and back to familiar territory,, I felt what I realized only later was relief. I had lots of errands to run when the lesson was done and didn't think more about it until that night in my den when I started reading about Solfège online and checking out videos from various music teachers. 

The den is my "music room," a quiet, cozy room where I replay my recorded lessons with headphones on, make notes in a weekly voice diary, and practice. The walls are painted apricot and they're dominated by a huge poster of an Art Institute of Chicago Caillebotte exhibition from the 1990s that makes the room both larger and more intimate at the same time. It's the painter's famous rainy Parisian street scene from 1877.  Considered his masterpiece, the original is monumental, with life-size figures, and it's been my first stop at the Art Institute every time I visit.  Matching French-style twin bookcases opposite that poster are filled with art books, history books, and museum exhibition catalogues, recording my grand passions and decades of museum tourism across the U.S., in Canada, and Western Europe. 

But the always-soothing atmosphere in the room was shifting as I sampled more websites and YouTube videos about my problem with sight reading and finally gave up in frustration. Then it hit me: how about asking Google if some singers might have trouble with sight reading music? Was that even a thing?

It is, and that's how I discovered number dyslexia, whose technical name is the cold-sounding "dyscalculia."

There are various levels of this neurodivergence and mine is on the low side. It has never undermined me as a writer, teacher, or public speaker, but I can't do arithmetic in my head very well and never could. That's why I love the tip percentages they show you at restaurants when you pay your bill, either in the server's handheld device or at the register. 

Multiplication tables were a particular problem for me in elementary school and no matter how many flash cards I studied with my math whiz mother, when I got to class the next morning, whatever knowledge I'd stored the night before had drained away. If I got something right, it was likely thanks to a lucky guess. In high school, any kind of chemical or mathematical formula looked like hieroglyphics to me and they all existed in some parallel universe of learning because I excelled in subjects like English, History, and French.

Nowadays, I sometimes enter the wrong figure in the correct column in my Excel spreadsheet of personal expenses, or the totally wrong date in that Google calendar. Luckily this is a joint "household calendar" and my husband usually queries me in advance if he finds something that looks like an error. Sometimes I'm off by a day, sometimes a week, and occasionally a whole month. 

When I come across a long newspaper article filled with charts or graphs that illustrate the major points, I can feel myself tuning out. They seem like castle walls I could never possibly breach. After half an hour with our jovial, white-haired accountant going over various facts and figures and examining one computer screen after another, I am barely present. It's as if I have a migraine without the pain, and I feel almost suffocated. 

That evening after my voice lesson, I felt like the lonely-looking man at the centre of Caillebotte's painting. Until I realized he wasn't frozen. Like everyone else in the painting, he was going somewhere. And that's when I decided I had to explain number dyslexia to my voice teacher so we could drop the idea of Solfège and keep working together as we always had. I was briefly embarrassed at the thought, but then decided I would enter the Caillebotte painting during the lesson and stay there as long as I needed to.

Lev Raphael

Lev Raphael's personal essays about art, music, travel, family, neurodivergence, writing and publishing have appeared in close to 90 online and print journals since the height of the pandemic, including The Ekphrastic Review, Black Fox, Lit Mag News, Spellbinder (in London), and most recently Mystery Readers Journal.