The Return of the Symphony

Going to see the Milky Way

Rattling around this morning, the idea for this kept jumping out of reach. Then I got Carol’s email about the Milky Way.

The symphony is back in the east, tuning up around 9 or so. That’s music happens. That’s when I’d go on, shoes sticking to the rarified black and while tiled floor in the bar, delighted and lighted by a cheap stage can.

Now that bar is far away, although the guitar hangs on the wall, always ready to “play some Skynyrd.” (What else is a guitar for?)

But this is the symphony. One has to be quiet. No electric guitars here. Electric. That’s the problem for the symphony. It’s drowned out by Dollar General and Target and the doubly fake artificial lighting, as if they hydrogenated the margarine again and forged the incandescent light bulbs in some infernal factory where even the drawings of the sun are made with crayons of Yellow No. 5 and now the light hurts extra.

The glare and the blare and boomboxes on poles blasting the devil’s music I tell you now nobody can hear Beethoven.

An escape of this becomes a remembering, a recollection of breathing and fresh air as the hills climb into mountains. The streetlights grow isolated, surrounded by green, and look silly, like men in suits trying to catch a frog, splashed by what’s real.

Hurry, hurry, it’ll be dark soon. The symphony–the Milky Way–will be rising in the east, Antares sounding a brassy note, Hercules tuning up, and the crowd settling in their seats. Ophiuchus, once the stuff of legend, Pentecostal preacher in his mountain retirement, takes the podium, flings the snakes away, and takes up a baton.

We all fall dark, and wait.

(Dig these photos of the symphony that Carol sent.)