What It Takes

The music that plays while I am wait­ing on the phone brings me closer to homi­ci­dal than almost any­thing I can think of…until the voice (I’ll call her Joan) comes on to remind me to look for upcom­ing spe­cials and to con­tinue to wait. Then I am more homi­ci­dal. The music is like a deep water drill bit sink­ing in to, all the way inside of, me. It hurts. But, of course, hang­ing up means they win. I won’t let that hap­pen. I have already entered my account num­ber so I have a spot in line, and even though the per­son who might even­tu­ally inter­rupt Joan, will def­i­nitely ask me for the num­ber again (mak­ing me beyond mad, beyond words, actu­ally almost bring­ing me to tears, but not quite – the anger finds a way back), I wait and I listen.

I start won­der­ing about who the peo­ple are who are play­ing the instru­ments that makes this sound that I am hear­ing. Maybe it is all a com­puter. I hope so, because I can’t bear to think about the guy play­ing the sax on one of these cuts. He car­ries his instru­ment to a stu­dio in Indi­ana prob­a­bly, or North Car­olina (noth­ing against Indi­ana or North Car­olina. In fact, check out this pho­tog­ra­pher from both places. Here is his blog, here is the web­site and here is a photo of his that I love. His name is Stephen Jesse Tay­lor. Don’t know him and I didn’t ask for per­mis­sion to talk about him, but he does write and make pho­tographs and he spells Stephen cor­rectly so I have taken lib­er­ties. Check him out, add his blog to your reader. He’s good.) because the price of doing busi­ness is favor­able for the com­pany that records this music. So he arrives, exhal­ing his last drag as he walks in. When he sits down next to his tired col­leagues to both see and play for the first time while being recorded, the inane ver­sions BJ Thomas songs, all he can do is sigh, close his eyes, and wet his reed.

The music way out­lasts my short story about the sad musi­cian, how­ever. It is like time itself or the end­less rains that carved out the grand canyon. It is patient. I start think­ing that the music is actu­ally eat­ing my brain. Parts of it (my brain) feel gone as I am lis­ten­ing. I remem­ber that in malls the music is cho­sen to dis­cour­age fights – happy, light, like this music on the phone, actu­ally. As mad as I started out feel­ing, I am now, again, feel­ing the anger melt away. The sound has taken root in me, it is part of me now. I am docile and polite and ready to give the nice man my account number.