“He was a furious, even romantic, typist, prone to crescendos, diminuendos, dense and barbed arpeggios …” The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon.
My youngest granddaughter was sitting on my lap when a song by Michael Franti and Spearhead came on my iPod; as she listened to the opening notes of “Everybody Ona Move,” Myah raised her 10-month-old arms and bobbed them to the beat, shaking her whole body as she wagged her arms. She responds to music, and she gets a lot of it when in my care.
Music permeates my life and has for as long as I can remember. My father was the manager of my uncle’s jazz band and later in life, my mother’s good friend was the mother of one of Pittsburgh’s pre-eminent musicians, George Benson. When we were young, my brother and sister and I sang in churches about the city and when my oldest daughter was stuck for a “show-and-tell” project, she produced me, to sing a song. I have stacks of vinyl, hundreds of CDs and a large collection of iTunes music, and everything gets played, in some way, all the time. And even if I do not know all the lyrics, everything gets sung, all the time.
My youngest daughter’s friend laughed at her and asked, “Do you sing everything you say to Myah?” Lauren does sing a lot of what she says to her daughter, just as her father does when he cares for Myah. I have to check with my children about some of the songs I like these days. I am wooed by the rhythm and the bump and thump, and the words are not often intelligible to me. “Bad song, Dad,” says Lisa; “no, no no no,” says Lauren. Chris just smiles when he hears me mimicking a song, knowing that I have not broken the code. But I sing on, because it is music.
A woman I met in February 2018 at my favorite cidery is a writer and historian at a state agency. Sometimes after work Jill continues to write at the counter of Ash and Elm and I love to watch her work because of the way she approaches the task. She leans over her laptop, peering at the screen then, rears back and flexes her fingers. She waggles the digits above the keys and plunges into her typing in a way that is reminiscent to me of the acrobatic and artistic piano playing of the jazz artist Hiromi Uehara and quietly calling to mind the crescendos and arpeggios described by Michael Chabon. Jill’s playing style is of one who understands the touch, the gentle intimacy of stroking the keys of a laptop, a process at a remove from the old-time force necessary to press a key that lifts an arm tipped with a character which then pounds through a taut and blackened ribbon to imprint it onto a sheet of foolscap.
The tuneful soundtrack of my life has my sister’s voice, my duet with my dying mother, my son’s songs on YouTube, and the harmonies of my two daughters at Christmastime. My grandson’s toe-tapping time keeping as he practiced on his trombone and his sister listening to the tremolo of her voice created by her singing into the screen of a spinning floor fan were continuations of both the mournful and the exuberant rhythms of my life, which include songs I sang to their mother and her brother and sister, and now, to my youngest granddaughter, who hears music and raises her arms in dance, having been indoctrinated into the musical approach.