New York. I'd known it was big, but I still didn't expect the jumbling, towering, rushing, squishing-in size of it. Nor the noise—the sirens and horns, the belch of bus exhausts and the rumbling roar of subways beneath my feet. Sound after sound startled me my first days there, and I wanted to cling to Mom's hand like I was a little kid instead of a twelve-year-old girl.

"You'll get used to it," Mom told me. "In no time you'll feel at home."

I figured I'd get over being frightened, but I doubted I'd ever be at home in a place so different from what I was used to. Even the air felt different, hot and sticky right through the night. Where I was from, no matter how hot August got, things cooled down at night.

And I didn't like looking up at buildings instead of sky. I missed mountains. I missed Dad. I missed living in a house big enough that I could go off by myself when I wanted to.

The apartment Mom and I moved into just had a bathroom and two rooms: a tiny one that Mom took for hers and a midsize one that served for everything else. One end was the kitchen; one end had windows that looked out on a street always jammed with traffic; and the space in between was both our living room and, with the sofa folded out, my bedroom.

Mom stayed away for hours every day arranging things like telephone service and finding out where to buy groceries and how to cope with getting them home without a car I'd have gone with her if she'd let me, but she said I needed to prepare for meeting my new violin teacher.

I tried, but for the first time in years I practiced with an eye on the clock, wishing for a morning or afternoon to end. I felt disconnected from my violin, and I felt shut in by the little apartment with its windows closed against street noises. More and more I wished we hadn't left Montana.

Finally I got up my nerve to say, "I don't like it here. I want to go home."

"Please trust me, Tessie," Mom said. "You'll feel different after your lessons start. And you're going to love Manhattan. There's so much here."

"I haven't seen anything," I told her "You don't even let me leave the apartment."

"That's just for now, until I can teach you how to get around." Mom squeezed my shoulders. "What would you think about taking the day off? I saw an ad for tours of Lincoln Center We could see where some of the best music in the world gets played."

"Will there be a concert?" I asked.

"Not on a Saturday morning, but we can get a sense of the center After all, maybe one day you'll play there."

"Mom..."

"I said maybe. Right now we'll just go enjoy ourselves, like any other tourists."

I WAS SURPRISED to find that Lincoln Center wasn't one huge auditorium, the way I'd pictured, but several buildings. The three biggest were huge, glass-fronted halls that each faced one side of a great plaza with a fountain in its middle. Banners proclaimed the hall on the left to be home of the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera. The building at the back of the U was the Metropolitan Opera House, and our guide said the American Ballet Theatre also performed there.

"The largest venue in Lincoln Center it seats four thousand nineteen," our guide told us in the droning tones of memorized spiel. "Performers sing without the aid of microphones."

I asked, "Is that where the New York Philharmonic Orchestra plays?"

The guide frowned at being interrupted. "Of course not. The symphony plays in the symphony hall. Avery Fisher Hall. That's next."

I didn't know exactly what I hoped to find in the symphony hall, but its vast space was disappointingly empty except for a woman distributing papers among music stands.

And then a man carrying a cello walked out. He sat down before one of the stands and began playing all by himself drawing out notes so clear and pure it didn't seem possible that a person was playing them.

Nothing on any CD I'd ever heard and nothing anyone had ever told me had prepared me for the sound of a master musician playing live in a hall built for a symphony.

And Mom ... Mom reached over and took my hand.