When The Music Stopped

- Rhapsody -

Give me nothing to do all day and I’ll gladly spend it listening to music.

The classical kind.

And yet, this is not the kind of music I grew up with.

Far from it.

I had piano lessons from a young age. I got pretty good but was ambivalent about it, because none of my friends knew how to play.

So instead, I turned my attention to what they were musically interested in.

A library of grunge and alternative. One of my happiest days was finally learning the chords to About a Girl by Nirvana.

A new set of friends. Bumping Tupac while riding around town, calling each other the day the news came out that he had been shot.

Next came college, next came whatever-my-new-peer-group-listened-to.

When I think back to those days, you could say that the music was always on–but I hardly remember listening to it on my own.

Strangely, that didn’t change much when I declared myself a piano major.

Even though classical music now occupied the central role, I was only interested in performing it–any listening I did was just a means to an end.

I had something to prove to myself and hammered away at the keys.

But my fingers never took me to where I wanted to go.

• • •

After college was over, reality set in.

My piano practice time dwindled to near zero.

My friends grew up and I fell out of touch; they had lives of their own that I was no longer part of.

But I didn't want the music to stop.

I wanted to write. I wanted to spend time with my dogs.

I wanted to listen by myself for once.

• • •

One day I had nothing at all to do, so I spent it listening to classical music.

Beethoven.

His symphonies.

The ninth.

When that familiar chorus began, I had never heard anything so glorious.

My neck tingled and I lay down as my body went limp.

I never felt so full before.

I had on one of the happiest smiles of my entire life, but that's not what I remember the most.

It's that I couldn't stop crying.