that warm humming
Cristal Carafe and Pen Clip from Charles & Marie.
It was a few evenings ago, while I was splayed across the sage green sofa, feet in mis-matched socks and propped up on lumpy pillows, that I heard the clarinet. Twelve months into our lease and this was the first time I had caught wind of any sort of live instrument. Its reedy, honeyed intonation played half a song I didn't recognize, patiently, cunningly, without error. The highlight of listening to a clarinet (or any of its woodwind cousins) is more than just its pitch, just its melody. There's a talkative quality to it, a breathiness that carries the notes. Warm breath-inflated notes ran up the scale, jumped down, tickled the high octaves, dove deep into the low ones.
Follow along with me, imagining the impassioned musician: fingers taut and academic, back arched, eyes shielded by wrinkled lids and cheeks puffed into a necessary reserve, one end of the instrument held firmly by strained lips, the other end pointed dramatically away from the body. This is what I pictured as soon as the clarinet began its numbed solo, but at the same time, I pictured our upstairs neighbors, where the music was clearly emitting from. Even though they'd lived in the building almost as long as we had, I knew them only in passing: checking their mail, knocking on our door in seek of a phone book, walking their dachshund. And to put the two together – this image of the fervid musician (fingers flying intensely down the instrument, striking a Kenny G pose) with the image of the standard couple (the husband impatiently waiting for his dog to do his business outside, the wife laughing on the balcony with intermittent clinking of glasses) – seemed both wonderfully amusing and disparately creepy.
