Free Home from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart Mclean Page B

Ray isgoing to teach me some of the cowboy songs that Bach wrote. Can I do piano next year?”
    “We’ll see,” said Morley.
    Sam had his face pressed to the car window. He was whistling the tune that he had just made up. The tune he and Ray had been playing together.
    Morley smiled.

Spring

“Be-Bop-A-Lula”
                    I t was study break. And, as if on cue, spring was in the air. “Maybe a record high for this time of year,” said the weatherman. Dave wore his spring jacket and sneakers to work. Walking out the front door, he felt … light. The sun warm on his face for the first time in months.

    Morley had taken the kids to Florida.
    “It’s great,” she said on the phone. “I wish you could have come. God, I needed this.”
    Dave was home alone.
    “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”
    But he wasn’t okay. Something strange was going on. It began after he drove his family to the airport. It began as a funny whirling feeling in his stomach. It wasn’t like he was sick. It was a pleasant sort of feeling. Like being excited. Or nervous. But Dave wasn’t feeling excited or nervous about anything. He was feeling … goofy.
    At first he thought he was tired. He had stayed up late helping his wife pack. At midnight he had taken the car to the all-night gas station. His family was leaving at seven in the morning. They were at the airport at five-thirty. I must be tired, he thought.
    He went to bed early on Wednesday and slept soundly,but when he woke up in the morning, the feeling was still there. Except more so.
    He felt … giddy.
    It was another beautiful day.
    “You wouldn’t believe the weather,” he said to Morley on the phone. “Everyone is outside. It’s like someone pulled a switch.”
    On his way home, he bought a bottle of red wine and picked up a video. This is great, he thought. I never get to do this. He cooked pasta and mixed it with garlic and broccoli and drank half the bottle of wine. While he ate, he listened to Paganini’s
Violin Concerto, Number One
, occasionally directing the CD with his fork. After he finished, he put on coffee and did the dishes. He was looking forward to watching his movie, but as he was putting away the Paganini, he spotted an old Beatles album, and the whirling in his stomach intensified. It was the sound track from
A Hard Day’s Night
. He hadn’t listened to the record in years. The summer he was sixteen, he had gone to England with his parents and had brought the album back with him. It was possible that he had been the first person in the country to own it. He pulled the record out of its jacket and spun it between his palms.
    That first dissonant chord filled the kitchen like an old friend. Aficionados still argue whether it is an F-major or G-major 7th. In his book
A Day in the Life
, Mark Hertsgaard writes that the swelling opening chord of the album sounds like a hijacked church bell announcing the party of the year.Dave smiled, turned up the volume, sat down at the table, and poured himself another glass of wine. After all these years. The music washed over and through him. He played the album twice and then got down on his hands and knees and pawed about and finally found
Abbey Road
.
    He killed the bottle of wine, sitting on the floor, listening tothe second side of the album. The side with the incomplete song fragments. He had forgotten how much he loved the way the uncompleted songs had been mixed into one glorious movement. Woven together like that because McCartney and Lennon hadn’t had the stomach to work as a team anymore and couldn’t finish writing the individual numbers.
    Dave staggered to bed after midnight. He never watched his movie.
    On Friday, when he woke up, he didn’t want to listen to CBC radio. He reached over and sleepily changed the station to CHUM—hits of the fifties and sixties, the music of his life. He brushed his teeth to Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome.” When he was eating breakfast, they