Saphrezdako and Her Origin Story

Chapter 2 - Age Seven to Age Eighteen

Sora Sanduregost started first grade at age six at a Manhattan public school on East Sixty-Seventh Street on the Upper East Side. The school taught students from first grade to eighth grade. One day she when to the New York Public Library on East Sixty-Seventh Street to do research for her Latin class. Sora was learning to speak and write Latin at age seven. Then, when she was reading comics, graphic novels, and nonfiction books on science, social sciences, health, and mind and body at a reading table, a young boy came over and sat across from her. They started to talk about different things and became best friends. Sora was age seven, and her new friend, Zack Faoughkal, was eight.

During the summer when Sora was eight, she went to visited Rai and Kira in Kameyama, Japan, located near the Suzuka River, and she learned about breathing meditation that can overcome stress and help to find balance. Sora also learned asana postures called Padmasana (or lotus pose), seiza, Hankafuza (half-lotus), and Kekkafuza (full lotus), with and without using a round cushion (called a zafu) and a typical kapok-filled zabuton.

Kira and Rai taught Sora meditation and basic ki, also known as chi, and afterward, they gave Sora a nickname Saphronia, which means wise; she also used saffron with fish a lot. When Saphronia was in Japan, she also learned more Japanese, and when she got back to New York, she took classes at the Japanese Cultural Center in Midtown Manhattan. Also, when Sora returned to New York that summer, her mother, Kaylee, gave her the nickname Sophrona, but Sora made that nickname shorter and turned it into Sophia.

When Sora was nine years old and in the third grade, Alexander taught her and Kaylee a traditional Japanese martial art called Hojojutsu. Also when Sora was nine, she started reading books about music theory and martial arts theory at the library. She learned about the musical alphabet, scales, intervals, chords, and key signatures from the music theory book, and the book on martial arts theory talked about the definition and conception of a battle or fight, strategy, tactics, technique, method of training, and assimilation. The book also had stretching techniques for martial arts, such as dynamic stretching, active stretching, passive stretching, and isometric stretching.

Sora finally became old enough, at age ten, for other martial arts, which Alexander then began to teach her. The Japanese martial arts he taught was aikido and jujitsu.

Also when Sora was ten, and she started in the fourth-grade band, playing the drums. She met a new friend named Anna Rayathsam, who plays the flute (also known as the western concert flute). Both Anna and Sora had the same fourth-grade music theory class, and they learned about musical notation, expression, form or structure, harmony, chords, melody, rhythm, consonance and dissonance, scales and modes, pitch or tone, tuning,

intervals, counterpoint, durational proportions, composition, orchestration, and ornamentation.

Anna gave Sora another nickname one day—Inez. Anna said that Inez meant pure. Anna and Sora liked to hang out at Saint Catherine's Park on First Avenue between East Sixty-Seventh and East Sixty-Eighth Streets on the Upper East Side.

One day after school, Anna's mother, Ivy, took Anna and Sora to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Ivy played a portable digital piano, without the use of a keyboard amplifier or loud speaker; Sora played a drum set; and Anna played the western concert flute. The three played in Washington Square Park for two hours. Zack Faoughkal and his dad, Christopher, came by to see them play.

Little did Sora Sanduregost know that she could channel enthusiastic, magical energy through the drumsticks and enchant most audiences that listened to her play. This magical only affected about thirty people, and it had to be unamplified and not transmitted electronically.