I Will Return Again

The day my little brother died, I lost my sense of hearing.

Not that I suddenly became deaf, but rather began to notice a slow creation of space around things that I knew should have an audible component. I didn't lose the noisiness of modern life swirling around me. The piercing siren from a fire-engine. A car horn warning another vehicle in harm's way. The incessant tap, tap, tapping of a jackhammer at a construction site. It was the softer, more peaceful sensations that seemed so elusive.

Like the glide in a wind pattern as it stirs the trees, and their branches tremble sideways, dancing. Or the hum of a tea kettle warming, before it explodes into an expectant whistle. I noticed that morning birdsong dissipated into faraway notes, as if their greetings were taped and played on a slower speed. A record disc circling at 16 rotations per minute instead of the usual 33 and a third. It was the gentleness of the world that I ached to hear. Auditory pockets of air that should have been wafting past the tiniest of bones, giving notice that life was anything but quiet. After my brother died, those tender hums were cloaked under layers of fog and mist. Smothered in fields of cotton. I found myself under an ocean. Its ambient voices lost to the drone of motorboats above.

I somehow knew, had he died in winter, I would have longed for the sound of snow.

It hurt to hear music. Not just listening to songs that reminded me of him, and there were dozens, but I actually experienced a dullness in my head that I could not explain. This kind of sound loss reminded me of the year I suffered with a severe ear infection. The bacteria ate through my eardrum and into the mastoid bone behind it. The resulting surgery, to remove the infected parts of the bone, left me living in an old Simon & Garfunkel song, The Sound of Silence.

For ten days, blood and fluid drained down the ear canal and into a piece of plastic, an oval cup that covered the entire outer portion of my ear. It felt like a huge mixing bowl on the side of my head, when in reality, it probably would have fit into the palm of my hand. Those long days were a muffling of noises that sent a sharp reverberation into my brain. If you put your head flat against the end of a 2 by 4, and someone slams a hammer down on the other end of it, what your ear would transfer as sound (not the force of the blow) is the pain I experienced in my head whenever airwaves made it past the cup.

After my little brother died, music emptied out into such a void. An unknowable space.

I found this beyond insufferable, considering that all our years together were embellished with instrumentation and melodies. It became our way of speaking to each other: singsong between hugs, operatic laughter, and whispers as low as an orchestral interlude while we lay together swapping secrets in the dark. My little brother was born just two months past my fourteenth birthday. In a myriad of ways, and in my heart, Dwayne was also my son. From the very beginning, we had our own language and it was bathed in music notes.

I was there the day he came home from the hospital. I changed his diapers. I fed him when he was hungry. I rocked him in my arms and watched him dream. As he grew into a toddler, I worked in the evenings for a local florist, making deliveries after my high school classes ended. Ironically, the shop owner was our chorus director and she had an old piano in a storage room in the back of the store. I played MacArthur’s Park and Bridge Over Troubled Water while waiting for women to finish arranging vases of cuttings and load them into my van. Every two weeks, I cashed my paycheck and picked up my brother. We drove into town to a record store and bought new songs together.

I shared music with Dwayne as we took long walks together in the woods. He carried a little transistor radio. It dangled from a string around his wrist while we searched hillsides for rocks – agates, red and green jasper, smooth white limestone. We sang songs together until he knew all the words. He loved Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler and he "knew when to hold ‘em, knew when to fold ‘em, knew when to walk away, and knew when to run." Even as young as four, he begged to go with me to the grocery store or to Dairy Queen for an ice cream cone, because the one thing he wanted when he jumped into my car wasn’t food. It was music.

He either begged to listen to the pigs … or hear that song about Teddy.

The pig request was for Pink Floyd's Pigs on the Wing from their Animals album. You could literally hear pigs snorting at the beginning and end of most of those tracks. He burst with laughter every time he heard them, despite repeating the experience dozens of times. Dwayne’s “Teddy” was a tune released sometime in the early 1960s by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - Mr. Bojangles. The first recording of that song was a special version and it was not the famous one that followed for decades on the radio. The adaptation that I owned, on an 8-track tape, began with an old man in Texas telling the story of how he taught his dog, Teddy, to sing. He called for the hound, blew into his harmonica, and said, "Chord with this now, Teddy. Here, sing these folks a song." As he kept blowing through that mouthpiece, the howls got louder and louder and louder until they melded into more instruments and a voice started singing …

I knew a man, Bojangles, and he'd dance for you, in worn out shoes.

Silver hair, a ragged shirt and baggy pants ... the old soft shoe...

We spoke in tears of fifteen years, how his dog and him … They traveled about.

His dog up and died. He up and died. After twenty years he still grieves ... Please ... Mr. Bojangles ... Dance

When my brother grew into a young man, he lived with me for a short while, and began his long career as a chef. One weekend, I was making us lunch, when he slid sideways on sock feet through the kitchen door. On the countertop, I had placed a vast array of fresh vegetables, a bamboo cutting board, the sharpest knife I owned, and an empty stainless-steel bowl. Dwayne swooped open the refrigerator door and grabbed a beer. He turned to watch me cut and carve. After a long swig of Corona, he started laughing.

“What’s so damn funny?” I asked, not altogether certain I wanted to know the answer.

“You ain’t got no rhythm!” and before I could think of a retort to his claim, he glided on socks back into the living room. I knew instinctively that he was going to pop in a CD. When he returned to the kitchen, he grabbed another knife, placed a second cutting board next to mine, plucked a cucumber from the massive pile of plants on the counter, and guzzled more beer. Then, Dwayne and I became a single instrument as we swayed in time with each other’s heartbeat, all to the pulse and lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir.

Talk and song from tongues of lilting grace

Sounds caress my ear

Though not a word I heard could I relate

The story was quite clear

And with every stroke of the loaded guitars and drum, we sliced through skin and pulp, while my brother led me across a fictional dance floor.

Nuh, nuh, nuh … slice, slice, slice … Nuh, nuh, nuh … sidestep right Nuh, nuh, nuh … slice, slice, slice … Nuh, nuh, nuh … sidestep left

Nuh, nuh, nuh … slice, slice, slice … Nuh, nuh, nuh … twirl and do it again

For 8 ½ minutes, I had perfect rhythm.

But his heart stopped dancing a month before his 38th birthday. Dwayne’s body smacked the sidewalk with bone-crushing sound. When I got the call, my world exploded into deafness, suddenly robbed of all musical notation. The very cadence of my life was stolen. My brother’s absence wasn't something that could be listened to or hummed or played. It was silent. Like a vacuum in space where stardust swirls that no one can hear.

The Sunday that his obituary was printed in a local newspaper, our mother asked me to pick up as many copies as I could find. She wanted to laminate them for family members out of town. I got in my car and hit every little gas station and convenience store in a 20-mile radius. It was no small feat because we lived in the South and churches had just closed their doors after the morning service. Many folks had already scooped up the paper on their way home. I finally managed to build a stack of ten on the passenger seat. When I turned the engine over, my car radio came to life. The dial was set to an hour of jazz, in sharp contrast to the endless country music stations. But despite the mathematical improbability, the zero odds of an algorithm even leaning in such a direction, what came out of the speakers that day was not a saxophone or a piano or a bass player blending tones into syncopated rhythmical patterns.

It was an old man in Texas, telling the story of how he taught his dog, Teddy, to sing.

We experience time in music. And every once in a rare while, even when the tenderest of notes have been stolen from us … we get lucky. Something, or rather someone, amplifies a heartbeat so we can resonate again with its melody.

And you meet an old love.

And you hear a familiar tune.

And one more time, you get to dance.