Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay "Distant Signals" by David Brendan Hopes (©2002 by The Sun).

Dad always gave elaborate instructions on how to use things. The thing he was cautioning me about that day was the big radio-record player combo that had sat on a black wire stand in the living room, and now— mysteriously, wonderfully—sat in my room. That was the year we finally got a TV. I suppose they gave the radio to me to get it out of the living room.

One especially vehement warning that Dad gave was to avoid "that longhair music.'' But the longhair music—whatever it was—was included in the records he passed on to me, so I realized this was not a strict prohibition, but rather a word to the wise, which implied that I was now old enough to understand such matters. There was certainly enough music to play without resorting to the longhair albums. What were the consequences of listening? I was not yet a rebellious child. I wanted things to be as they were presented.

During the day, when my parents were around, I played the jazzy records, often choosing ones they liked so that they would approve of my taste. Sometimes at night, though, I'd pull the wire stand over to my bed and turn the radio on very low. At the start, I listened to the first station I happened to tune in to; later I began turning the knob ever so slowly, starting as far to the right as it would go and moving steadily left. I wanted to hear everything.

One rainy night a station came in where there had been none before. The announcer's voice sounded a little pompous and long-winded, like on those stations where all they did was talk, and I was about to ease the knob away when the music began.

It wasn’t a song; it was much too long for that. It was—I couldn't describe it. Glorious. Complicated. Liberating. A challenge, a discovery, something you had to listen to, not merely hear. I dropped out of bed and sat on the floor with my ear pressed against the speaker. There was always the danger that my mother or father would come in and ask me why I was out of bed, but I didn't care.

When the music came to an end, the announcer said the station was CBC in Toronto. I had never been to Toronto, but I wondered why they should have such splendor when we did not. He must have said the name of the piece, too. but I had no context in which to understand it. The music came on again, and I listened. I fell asleep on the floor.

Only in the morning did it dawn on me what I had heard: It was what I had been warned against. It was longhair music.

It turned out that CBC wasn't an atmospheric anomaly, but would come in most nights—though seldom in the day—if I was very patient setting the dial. On some nights there would be just talk, talk, talk. I thought maybe this was what my father was afraid of, the talk that came along with the longhair music. I was bored by it as my father would have been, but I knew this was just because I was a child.

I was about to take an odd step. I was about to leave the ordained path. I went to the stack of almost-forbidden music, took out a big album with a brown cover and blue labels, and set the records on the spindle: one, two, three, four the stack tottering and huge. The labels said: “Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto.” Beyond the single intelligible concept “piano,” I didn’t know what that meant. The needle hit the record. I heard myself gasp. That was it, the sublime music, beautiful beyond description and to be desired beyond all cost. And here it had always been, scorned but available. I could have played it before. I could have been a longhair for six months already.

There was lots of Tchaikovsky and Chopin, some Rachmaninoff and Schubert, and a host of Romantics—though I had no idea they were Romantics, only that they were wild and huge and I loved them. Mother said nothing about the longhair music, and I was careful to be done playing the records by the time my father got home. My mind was racing. I had seen a way out of that house and that gray town, a way beyond what I'd thought were the limits of the world. A turn of the dial, and the walls had dissolved.

That night I went to bed early. I pulled the wire stand close to the edge of my mattress. Ever so carefully I searched for CBC. And there it was, one of those boring voices. But that was exactly what I wanted. As I listened, it was as though a bridge had formed between my bedroom and Toronto, graceful and glittering, upon which I would walk one day. And if that day was not today, I could rebuild the bridge tomorrow simply by tuning in a radio station. It was not a gesture of defiance. I was not turning my back on anything. I was finding home.