I Am a Music Box

Every so often we see a news blip, human interest story, or documentary on human beings with special abilities. I find these stories fascinating. There are people for whom numbers come in colors. There are a dozen or so folks who can remember every single event that has occurred in their lives day by day. There are people on the autistic spectrum who do fantastic mathematical calculations in a fraction of a second. One person flew over Rome in a plane and then drew a perfectly accurate portrait of the buildings and other objects that they saw.

I say to you, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that I am a music box. As a child I showed musical talent by playing popular tunes by ear on the piano. My mom—poor but proud in her childhood—married into a bit of money. One of her home improvement projects was to teach herself to play her new-bought piano from the 60 lesson set of the U. S. School of Music being advertised in the popular magazines of the day. I just happened to be listening at age three, and I picked up a lot of it.

But where I really first became aware that I might have a special ability was that day in the summer of 1955 that I realized that I had perfect pitch. One of my Christmas presents from mom and dad had been a beautiful Webcor console record player that played all three speeds 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm. I had begun collect a stack of LP records. I tended to listen to female vocalists like Doris Day and Jo Stafford, and I had an LP called Jackie Gleason Plays Romantic Jazz that I was fond of. And I also was addicted to 45 rpms of Spike Jones and Homer and Jethro. But one day when I was listening to my favorite Doris Day album, I realized that I knew the exact pitch that the next song would be before it actually played. I could hum it, and then, sure enough, I was right. That ability continued to grow, and in a while, if someone played a chord on the piano, any chord (within reason), I could name the notes that were in it accurately. This newfound ability wasn’t always a good thing. There were lots of out-of-tune pianos around Marietta, and I found that if the piano was more that a quarter of a step out of tune, I lost my ability to play by ear, because the sound that was supposed to be coming out of piano was off, and I wasn’t sure which next note to hit.

So I lived this whole 84-year-long lifetime listening to a lot of music: progressive jazz, Dixieland jazz, swing, the popular music and theatre tunes of the first eight decades of the Twentieth Century, classical masters as varied as Beethoven, Shostakovich, Debussy, and Liszt, and, of course, I was a nut on ragtime. And once I learn a tune, or sometimes, once I have heard it a few times, I never forget the melody or the chords. The words, meh, maybe I’ll learn them, maybe not, but it takes more work. According to one source echoic memory, or auditory sensory memory is “a type of memory that stores audio information (sound). It’s a subcategory of human memory, which can be divided into three major categories: Long-term memory retains events, facts, and skills. It can last for hours to decades.” Well, I have something like that, but it’s specifically for music.

Ok, but then, there’s the question of how much control I have of this ability. When I was a grad student in mathematics, I couldn’t get the damn pop songs of the day to stop spooling in my head. It the first half of this long life, if I heard a song that really caught my fancy, I just couldn’t stop listening to it. Fortunately, in my later years, that slowed down. Most of the time, I’ve got some tune or sonata playing in the background.

Not only that, but stuff pops up from the past in an entirely unpredictable way. For example, recently my spouse, Stephen, was in the hospital with some fairly serious problems. At one point, he was vomiting, I was holding the pan, and I was hearing “Heart of my heart, I love that melody. …” in the background. I can be emptying a urinal, and I’m hearing, full score, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, including the repeat and the development section.

Usually, I just ignore the soundtrack of my life or try to function around it. But this last medical episode was so scary and serious, that we both were thinking that maybe we had reached the end of the road, certainly of the road together, and maybe just The End. Among the many thoughts that were demanding my attention was the fact that even in such a perilous situation, I was listening to Hotel California while he was gasping for breath. I said to myself in disgust, “Jim Andris, you’re nothing but a damn music box,” because, really, this is the love of my life, and losing him would be a gut-busting tragedy for me, even after all these years of medical odyssey.

When things settled down a bit, I bethought my harsh reaction to my life’s predictable but unpredictable soundtrack. After all, nothing is an unblemished blessing, except maybe Jesus Christ or Mohammed. Maybe at the end of my life, discovering that one is a music box isn’t such a bad thing.

We took Stephen to rehab yesterday, and already today, things were looking challenging but promising. I’m ready for the latest sequel to our medical adventures and our life together. It’s not over until it’s over. And if I’m lucky, at least in my own mind, we’ll be doing it to Moon River, or Beethoven’s Sonata No. 5 for violin and piano, or Fat’s Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’. Maybe I’m just lucky to have married both my soulmate and my music.