From the American Cancer Society: In 2023, about 297,790 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed in women. About 55,720 new cases of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) will be diagnosed. About 43,700 women will die from breast cancer.
The musical background to the late-night show that I was watching sounded familiar to me. I activated the application on my phone that allows people to identify music that is being broadcast. The app, called Shazam, searches a vast musical database and shows the user the name of the song and the artist. When the singer’s name appeared, I went to check my iPod, and found that I had Regina Spektor in my song list.
After having set fire to my first marriage, I rented an apartment in Jeffersonville Indiana, just across the river from Louisville Kentucky. Louisville had a radio station that broadcast jazz music in the late-night hours. I grew up with jazz: My uncle was a trumpeter and a leader of a band, and my father managed the band. I have written before of my older, amused memory of having been introduced, at the age of eight, to a man named Dizzy. It would be years before I knew who the magnificent jazz trumpeter, James Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, was. But on this night in Jeffersonville, I was lying on the floor of my apartment, my head between the two Pioneer speakers powered by my Kenwood receiver, which was tuned to the radio station that played jazz. And I was awakened by the sound of an instrument that thrummed through my supine body and brought me awake to its wonder. I listened to the song, then called the radio station to ask the identity of the musician. I had neither Shazam nor a cellphone in 1983, and the DJ told me that I had been listening to Ray Pizzi play the bassoon.
I have been listening to music as an aid to sleep since I was young. My first bride became accepting of the habit, and my second did, as well. My son — he is the child of my second marriage — (sorry Paul) used to ask his mother to tune the radio to “smooth jazz” as his own aid to sleep. I do not know if that was because he had heard his father’s music coming from the other room as he and his sister lay down at night.
My current apartment has not been organized in such a way as to accommodate my penchant for late night music, but the fault is not in our stars, but in myself. (Sorry, William, and sorry, John.) I have four devices in my front room that deliver music to my ears, and none in my bedroom. Two of the devices can be moved to my bedroom: The Sony Bluetooth speaker that I can link to my iPhone and the Bose SoundDock that powers my iPod, but only one of those two — my iPod — can deliver the music that I have listened to in the thousands of midnights of my life.
Music has powered my life. I sang in church when I was a child, I sang in high school when older. I wrote a song for the “beautiful ladies” of my life and sang it to my first bride and our daughter. No one who knows me is unlikely to have heard me express the Donkey’s “song in the air,” nor the R&B group, the Temptations, “song for you.” To steal a line from René Descartes: “I sing, therefore I am.”
And when midnight comes, I want the music to be there to ship off me to sleep.
cjon3acd@att.net