There's God in the mountains and the people living under the sea

After a long post-Thanksgiving, post-Thanksgiving-leftover-lunch nap this afternoon, I woke up in the disorienting gloom of an early fall evening to the sound of piano music drifting through the thin bedroom wall. As I slowly regained consciousness and listened more attentively, I realized, with some surprise, that the music was coming from an actual piano, not a recording or a TV. It was some kind of ethereal, slightly saccharine opus in the minor key, the kind that might accompany a particularly reflective scene of a B+ Hollywood melodrama -- a cold off-season beach, wind blowing through the skeletal scrub grass, a woman with a colorless face and an oversize knitted sweater sitting on a sand dune, staring reflectively at the droning surf while loose strands of hair whip across her face.

Whoever was playing the piano was competent but either rusty or uncertain, because the longer the melody continued, the more frequently a jarring misplaced note necessitated the restarting of each coda, breaking up the swell of emotion that might otherwise have led the audience to wipe away a sympathetic tear for the lady with the colorless face and the comfort sweater (perhaps there is also an incongruously cheerful dog at her side and a wedding ring or a small ringlet of a child's downy hair dancing nervously in her hands -- Meaningful Symbolism).

What amazed me, though, laying there in the encroaching darkness, was the inexplicable power of those notes, played not by a tiny system of pulsing electronic signals but by human fingers, which I envisioned with uncanny clarity as they fumbling over the polished ivory keys. It didn't matter that the melody was a little sappy, or that the anonymous player was less than a concert-grade performer. There was something infinitely relatable in that sound, in spite (or perhaps even because of) its faults. It was fragile and almost too painfully real, but protected from over-saturation of awkward too-human humanness by the darkness and the thin plaster wall.

The feeling I got from hearing that music made me remember something from the night before -- a quiet moment before the turkey came out of the oven, before the bottle of bourbon and the game of drunken charades. All it was was me, tipsy, happy, sipping wine in a dark warm living room with happy drunk friends hovering nearby, listening to an old record player lovingly work over some 70s hair metal, first an early T.Rex and then Led Zeppelin. It was the perfect distillation of distance and proximity, joy and melancholy, camaraderie and solitude, and all those other slightly banal antitheses that make life so amazing and dynamic and interesting. Those peaks and valleys that are worth savoring, before time smooths everything over like flat, colorless sand.