I Got the Music in Me

 

When I was a kid my sisters and I used to take the bus up to my grandparents’ apartment on the Northside of Chicago. They lived in a forty-one-story apartment building overlooking Lake Michigan. The 151 bus let us off at Goethe street. Nana made sure we all knew that Goethe was a German poet and that we knew how to properly pronounce his name.

Visits to Nana and Papa’s house were my favorite. They lived on the 14th floor, and the whole front of their apartment faced east, a full wall of windows overlooking the lake. Inside it was quiet and serene, like being in the clouds. When we stepped outside onto the balcony, the noise of Lake Shore Drive made it hard to hear each other’s voices.

Nana and Papa had a big white rug in the living room that was always clean. There were two long couches, two coffee tables, several end tables and six cocktail chairs placed around the room. Even with that much furniture, there was still room for my sisters and me to wrestle and do skits on the rug.

Sometimes I’d hang out with Nana in her bedroom at the back of the apartment. She liked to listen to classical music while she read or did crossword puzzles. She had drawers full of jewelry and silk scarves that she’d let me look at and a big king-sized bed, always neatly made and ready to spread out on. I’d lie belly down on the bed, elbows bent, chin propped on my open palms, and talk to Nana while she filled out the crossword puzzle.

The back bedroom was cozy. It faced away from the lake and from the small desk in the corner of the room I could see directly into other bedrooms at a neighboring building. I used to love sitting at the desk and looking at the different windows, making up stories about the people who lived in those window boxes. 

When I was in high school Nana gave me one of her classical music cassettes — Pachebel Canon in D Major. I’d appreciated it while she played it one afternoon in her bedroom and she sent me home with it. 

My bedroom at home also faced east but between our house and the lake were the train tracks. All through the day and night, I could hear the ding and whoosh of the commuter train stopping at 57th and 59th Streets. I had a boom box in my room and usually listened to the radio or to mixed tapes friends had made me but after Nana gave me the Pachebel Canon in D Major, that became my constant musical companion.

The music was familiar to me. I’d heard it not just at Nana’s apartment but in movies, elevators, airports, the dentist’s office. The melody soothed me and gave me a sense of both happiness and sadness at the same time. For months my senior year of high school, I put the music on after dinner while I hunkered down in my big purple, pink, and orange striped armchair to read Anna Karenina, plow through Pre-Calculus equations, or work on my college essay.

The music reminded me of lying on Nana’s bed with her, graduating to that level of calm after years of roughhousing as kids on the big white carpet in the living room. I was getting older, calmer, more serious and the music acted as the perfect backdrop for this evolution. The Pachebel Canon in D Major was the music to the screenplay of my life as I moved into young adulthood.

I carried that cassette with me for years. Eventually, the only place I had a tape player was in my old car. I rarely played it but I kept it. The light blue patterned design beneath the cracked plastic case moved with me to St. Louis and then to Seattle, from dorm room to apartment to house to home. 

Last year I finally got rid of the old cassette. I hadn’t played it in years and needed to clean out space for my home office. Yesterday I had a classical playlist on my Spotify to accompany me as I wrote. The Pachebel Canon in D Major came on and it all came back. The music was still in me. Like those first memories with Nana and then in my childhood bedroom, I felt a sense of calm happiness move through me.