Indulge me, if you will, and click play before you scroll down to begin reading. I'll try to make it worth your while.
I taught a piano lesson this evening at a huge farmhouse several miles out of town. I didn’t have classes today, and I was a little bit grumbly about having to teach a lesson on my day off, but truth be told I love driving in the country.
My music of choice as I fly around the bends in the road is the soundtrack from the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I’m something of a connoisseur of movie music, and the music from the Pirates movies is among my favorites. I do listen to the kind of music you’d expect from someone my age, but I’ll admit that I don’t get the kind of enjoyment from it that some people seem to. I can only listen to it for so long before I need something soaring and mellow, something lovely with a hint of longing in it. The music from Pirates is like a splendid sigh, deep and filling, and it makes me a pirate captain in my silver Camry.
As the fields fly by, the sweeping melody sends me to the high seas, and I am on some great adventure under a sky that is full of cloud-ripples, the sort of thing artists paint and which never seems possible until you are out under a real sky that is equally impossible. Every cymbal crash is a wave breaking against my ship, and one moment I am watching the sun set over the ocean, while the next I see it slipping behind hills and dancing between the trees.
I arrived for the lesson without mishap. It was a trying half-hour for my student, who had some trouble with a tricky eighth-note rhythm (if you have any experience with eighth notes, you will understand). We did eventually wear the eighth notes into submission, and my student told me as we finished that their goats had given birth just that week, and would I like to see them?
This farm, which I visit once every week, is practically infested with animals. The family of my student keeps horses, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, goats and one very friendly boxer. I may be forgetting some. Today their three-car garage was empty of cars and full of mother goats and kids.
Baby goats are much cuter than they really ought to be. It is hard to see how their faces can be quite so sweet, and how they can be so small and charming and yet grow up to be as bothersome as their large, irritable mothers. I heard their names, none of which I remember, although I can tell you that one was given a French name, perhaps to make up for his being the only boy among the newcomers. I departed into the twilight quite impressed by the cuteness of it all.
The sunset was by this time reduced to a vivid line on the horizon. There were fewer clouds than before, and the ones that remained were sprawled out across the sky, taking full advantage of the extra room. I reentered the frothy waters of the open road, and sailed homeward at about fifty miles an hour. The pirate music crashed over the bow of the ship.
Perhaps I was still thinking about the goats and had no room in my thoughts for another kind of animal. But in my defense, it was getting dark, and it wasn’t very sporting for the deer to all come at me at the same time. There were four of them lying in wait for me. When I got close to them, they all jumped out, and some of them hesitated for a fraction of a second as they tried to determine exactly what I was and whether I was going to hurt them. When they realized that what they were doing was really rather unsafe, they picked up the pace.
Trouble on the high seas! The brakes on my ship swore angrily at me, but they served their purpose well enough. My furry sea monsters disappeared into the dark, and I continued home undamaged and with a little drum inside my chest.
There are adventures on country roads that you may never fully appreciate without a full orchestra playing as you drive. There are dangers whose drama will pass unrealized and beautiful skies with stories that can only be told to music. The high seas beckon. Any vessel will do as long as she is seaworthy. Life is an epic that we miss too often, but it can be glimpsed through the cracks of a symphony and the long notes of a bow drawn across the strings of a violin.
Bon voyage!
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