DIED 2014
PERHAPS YOU DON’T THINK of Baltimore as a world capital of classical music, but it is home to a fine symphony and many smaller ensembles and orchestras, fed by a conservatory of some renown. For 150 years, the Peabody Institute has drawn young musicians to a city they’ve barely heard of, which turns out to be an easy place to stick around. This is how two curly-headed brothers, French horn players from South Carolina, ended up here, sharing an apartment with a view of the skateboard park. The younger one, a radiant free spirit, became friends with my son, and their love of music was not the only thing they had in common. Both were little brothers, but my son was one year older, so he considered himself the big brother in this pair. He took the young French horn player under his wing. Many long nights turned to dawn as they rocked on the porch of the apartment, like old farmers with tall tales and big schemes.
Then the boy got sick, a nasty throat infection that led to the removal of his tonsils. These days, a tonsillectomy is an outpatient procedure, forty-five minutes under anesthesia, a few hours for observation, then off you go with your antibiotics and pain medication. I was surprised to hear this, having spent days in the hospital eating lime Jell-O back in 1965, and I will not be able to tell you what happened next because all we know is that when the older brother got home from work, the boy lay dead in his room. How can that be? Every person who loved this boy, among them my son, wondered why they hadn’t been with him that day. It would have been so easy. It would have been their pleasure.
The boy was buried in the foothills of Mount Catoctin, in Frederick, Maryland. A quartet of young French horn players in their concert suits performed a requiem from Mahler, then his brother played an arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine” on a single horn. The notes leapt into the sky. The sun, that oldest patron of the arts, came out from behind the clouds to hear.