Why Can't I Hear the Angels Sing? Part 1

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Let me tell you a story.

I was 14. I had rejected God. I danced, 7 classes a week. I played piano and flute and was beginning to feel the tug of the guitar. I had recently fallen in love with Dylan, Donovan and folk rock. I was starting to write. I had a tenuous relationship with my parents.

My dad loved the war time music still. Not so much the jazz that lives today, but Tommy Dorsey and other white pretenders. He told me if I learned to play Dorsey’s Boogie Woogie, he’d buy me an organ.

I was motivated. I bought the sheet music and I practiced for months. It wasn’t easy for me, all those walking octaves – I had small hands with short fingers, the bane of any instrumentalist. I didn’t understand swing. I had a teacher who understood it well but couldn’t explain, just played for me, endlessly, as if osmosis would be good enough for a 14-year-old whose taste ran in a rather different direction. But I was motivated, and I learned the thing.

Dad brought home a rent-to-buy Hammond L100 with a built in Leslie. Man, that thing was sweet! I played hours every day. I reworked all my piano pieces to suit the organ. I learned favourite songs by ear. I made up stuff. I improvised. I got my friends on the phone, and played for them.

Then we had the fire. I was home alone and on the phone, playing organ for a friend. I smelled smoke, hung up, and ran around the house looking for the source. Smoke by then was pouring from the crack beneath the basement door. I made sure all the doors and windows were closed, just like I’d been trained, and ran next door to call the fire department and then my parents, some half-hour away at friends’.

The fire turned out to be mostly smouldering beams from a faulty new light fixture, but the smoke damage was extensive. We got to live in a hotel for a month on the insurance company’s dime, a snazzy downtown hotel, where I would go down to the dining room and order up anything flambé.

When we returned home, the organ was gone. The Bay had forgotten to bill Dad the rental, and I guess he didn’t want to pay the back charges, especially for a smoke-smelly organ. I don’t really know; he never explained.

Funny how a thing like that can hurt like hell, forty years later.

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