THOUGHTS THAT INTRUDE
ON MY ENJOYMENT,
ALTHOUGH THEY DON’T ACTUALLY
RUIN THE CONCERT FOR ME

• a. This should be fun.
• b. This is going to be fun.
• c. This should really be a lot of fun.
• d. Obviously, there’s been a serious lack of music in my life lately. Unless you count the school assembly that featured a performance by the Hawtones, our high school a cappella group. They are known in a cappella circles for their unique medley of classic songs about New England (“Massachusetts,” “Old Cape Cod,” “Charlie on the MTA”). I’m sure it plays better on the road than it does back home in Hawthorne, in the heart of the region they are singing about.
• e. I met someone my age once who had a subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and sat in the same seat every year, at the edge of the right balcony, overhanging the musicians. He impressed me as quite the egghead until he said the main reason he liked going was to feel the vibrations against his skin. That’s something you miss when you listen to music on headphones.
• f. Gordy just gave me the quick-glance-nod-and-smile-with-eyebrows-raised. He’s obviously having fun. Good for him.
• g. I wonder what we’re going to eat later.
• h. For a while Dad was getting me to sing his favorite tenor/baritone opera duets with him, with the volume of the CD turned way up. Especially a duet from The Pearl Fishers, in which a pair of best friends are in love with the same woman. “It’s her! It’s that goddess!” he would sing in French. “She threads her way through the crowd.” And if Mom walked into the room at that moment, he would really play it up. Toward the conclusion of the song, some falsely tense music signals the strife in the friends’ relationship. It always reminded me of the soundtrack to an action movie with planes colliding or planets exploding. It’s like someone went in with a Roto-Rooter and churned up the orchestra, and you could tell the story would come to a bad end. But the two friends sing, “Nothing must separate us! Let’s pledge to always remain friends!” Slashes from the strings, and a big crescendo: “Let’s stay united UNTI-I-I-IL death!” And the orchestra does a bunch of big chords, like the words THE END rolling across a movie screen not once but four times.
  He asked me to sing that with him a few weeks before the Gordy incident, but I was just leaving for Mitchell’s to watch a movie. I see now that that happened right when Dad was first getting sick. Maybe I wish I had gone along with it?
• i. Now Buddy Guy has stepped off the stage and is traveling up the aisle with his guitar. (One of the sound men follows him with an extension cord coiled around his shoulder.) I don’t think the restaurant-networking thing is going to happen, but I do think he just nodded at me.