I was listening to Mannheim Steamroller when music changed for me. A sound arrived, and things changed. It was a gentle sound but so sudden and close that I was sure it was coming from somewhere or someone around me, not from my mother’s CD player. I started like my brother had just snuck up to me from behind that armchair of corduroy blue, but I was alone in the living room.

I sat forward and laid my arms flat on the ottoman where I’d been coloring. Would it happen again?

After many minutes I couldn’t grab onto the sound inside the music, that 1984 album, Christmas, but when I paused the track, the sound was altogether gone. All I could pick out was the spinning whir of the disc in the player, maybe a faint click when the heater came on in the basement.

That black plastic volume knob only spun as far it spun, but I let it fly. I was alone, after all, with my parents out doing some gray December shopping and my older siblings occupied elsewhere or otherwise keeping their distance.

Maybe I’d never spun that knob so far before. The stereo’s plastic casing shook a little with the effort. I wanted to find the sound, and maybe I could walk around in the songs if the stereo could make them a little wider.

There was something in there, in with the notes of flutes and clarinets and I didn’t know what else —I wouldn’t have known the names of a piccolo or an oboe let alone anything strung besides a guitar. I aspired to one day play drums in the fifth grade band, but even the clicks and clacks I heard of percussion instruments were a mysterious array of just that to my ears—clicks and clacks.

I’d almost given up when one of those Christmas lullabies came on, “Silent Night” or “Bring a Torch.” They weren’t any quieter for this high volume, still resounded in the room. No driving beat like Mannheim’s rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” but soaring notes so sweet.

And there. I could have cried to realize that the sound was between the notes, could only have been between the notes. The suck of air. The sound I couldn’t place was inspiration. The mystery still held me because it was so ordinary. Music comes from musicians, I thought, with a laugh at my own obvious shock. And suddenly there were people sneaking up on me in the room. A whole orchestra, for starters, but I tossed my head around from my place on my knees on the carpet. The writers that wrote those novels my mother loved, stacks of murder we found at the used book stores. The other albums piled by the stereo.

Today I don’t know so much. I know so beautifully little, not like that kid, alone and surrounded, in that ranch on the cul de sac.

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