Place and Time

Last night a man on the radio, a still young man, said the business district of his hometown had been plowed under. The town was in North Dakota. Grass, where the red-and-gold Woolworth sign used to be, where the revolving doors took him inside Sears; gone the sweaty seats of the Roxy-or was it the Princess- of countless Friday nights that whipped his heart to a gallop when a girl touched him, as the gun on the screen flashed in the moonlight. Grass, that egalitarian green, pulling its sheet over rubble, over his barely cold childhood, on which he walks as others walk over a buried Mayan temple or a Roman aqueduct beneath

a remote sheep pasture in the British Isles. Yet his voice, the modest voice on the radio, was almost apologetic, as if to say, what's one small town, even if it is one's own, in an age of mass destruction, and never mind the streets and stones of a grown man's childhood- as if to say, the lives we live before the present moment are graves we walk away from. Except we don't. We're all pillars of salt. My life began with Beethoven and Schubert on my mother's grand piano, the shiny Bechstein on which she played the famous symphonies in piano reductions. But they were no reductions for me, the child who now remembers nothing earlier than that music, a weather I was born into, a jubilant light or dusky sadness struck up by my mother's hands. Where does music come from and where does it go when it's over- the child's unanswered question about more than music. My mother is dead, and the piano she could not take with her into exile burned with our city in World War II. That is the half-truth. The other half is that it's still her black Bechstein each concert pianist plays for me and that her self-taught fingers are behind each virtuoso performance on the stereo, giving me back my prewar childhood city intact and real. I don't know if the man from North Dakota has some music that brings back his town to him, but something does, and whatever he remembers is durable and instantly retrievable and lit by a sky or streetlight which does not change. That must be why he sounded casual about the mindless wreckage, clumsy as an empty threat.