My mental circus, inside and out.

the violin

This is how utopian Emma's neighborhood is.  After a long day of work, struggling with non-English speaking students, Emma comes home to find that the power has cascaded off, probably because everyone has turned on their air conditioners in this first really hot day of summer.  This is a good thing.  There is nothing electrically powered, including computers and televisions and stoves, that Emma really feels like dealing with anyway.  She lounges on her blue tie-dyed futon on the sun porch, reading Will Self's The Book of Dave, studying her daughter's latest work of art pinned to a board out here, talking to her son about the brilliance of The Sopranos and other media events,  eating a sandwich, watching the squirrels, the cardinals, the wasps, the tall trees on the perimeter of her property, which is not so far away, 25 feet maybe?  Suddenly, she hears music.  A violin.  It sounds good but not really professional.  She thinks, "Has my son (the only person in the house at the moment) suddenly learned how to play the fiddle?  Her mind is hazy, befuddled from the heat and two glasses of white wine.  It sounds country, folk, like something you'd hear at a contra dance.  There is clapping, maybe three people at most. She realizes that here, at dusk, someone is playing music in a backyard, close by, maybe the yard across the way.  She calls her son down.  "I think we are having an impromptu concert."  "Yes," her son says, "I see him through the pine tree there, just his elbow, can you see it?"  Yes, a man, an elbow.   He seems to be walking by himself, in his backyard, playing the violin.  Who is clapping? The other neighbors?  "It sounds like the soundtrack for the Civil War," her son says, "Like, the Battle at Gettysburg."  He's right.  It is like a soundtrack for a Ken Burns's film, except that this neighborhood, so quiet, without any war in its immediate experience, or any experience, more like a John Cheever story, with the suburban man suddenly bounding across the lawns to swim in every pool.

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 25, 2007 06:56 | link | comments (2)

Comments:

#1  25 May 2007 - 19:28

 

Sublime slice of life here. Thanks for sharing!

InMyLife

#2  26 May 2007 - 10:08

 

Very cool. In Everglades City a year ago last Christmas a young woman sang Christmas carols on a flatbed trailer behind a pickup truck. She had a beautiful voice and it was an amazing experience. Sadly, last Christmas she was too sick to sing and we don't know if she's OK.

mafidl

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