A Sonatina for King

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I often find myself missing music most during sleepless nights, when the creeping fingers of 3 AM thoughts poke their way in. I think, sometimes, of my instrument - a Baldwin piano, slightly out of tune - in the living room of my mother's house far away in Michigan. When I think of my piano, I always picture an open lid, the light atop the lace doily my great-grandmother stitched, the keys collecting a shallow pool of the yellow light. I picture it this way though I know the lid remains shut, heavy as a coma, in my absence.

I ache for the dulcet sounds to lift up the living room's high ceilings to the second floor alcove where my grandmother spends most days watching Persian talk shows. In these memories, she pads to the balcony, calling again for me to play her favorite song, "Golden Dreams" by Javad Maroufi. These days, months go by between each time I touch a key, and my muscle memory, a moth-eaten sheet, must undergo new stitching. Though during each visit I must undertake the tender reconstruction of each sonatina, each minuet, I never forget how to play this song.

Yes, on those nights I daze. I play Bach on the hard wood of my writing desk. I daydream of grace notes, the mystic breath of the pedal. And though the two things seem at first unacquainted, when I find myself missing the piano I also find myself missing King.

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People speak of music as a universal language. We cross cultures in the crook of a verse, defy the limit of tongues tucked in the elbow of a quarter note. In music, we find our own primordial stirrings. The vibrato of a predator's growl, the deep bass of a storm, the flitter of bird song - ancestral fragments of a time when silence meant some toothy, clawed thing lurked in the woods.

People speak of music as a universal language, but can music stir something in the animals we make our companions? Whales have been known to sing, yes, and birds, but does a cat think of sunshine when it hears a fantasia? A dog? A gerbil?

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There isn't much in the way of typical doggy things that pleases King. King does not like walks; he'll sit down and refuse to budge if we go what he deems a distance too far from home. Often, this is the fifth house in either direction. King does not like fetch. Throw a ball and he's more likely to fix you a look demanding to know why you're throwing things than he is to actually go after it. The things my curmudgeonly little spaniel loves can be named on one hand: belly rubs, chicken kabob, licking the fingers of strangers, people-watching on a comfy chair near the dining room window - and the piano.

I sit at the bench, the lid of my piano a mouth of exposed white teeth. I graze a key, and it echoes through the house. A small red and white head lifts from a nap in a patch of sunlight in the kitchen. I play a note, and it acts as summons. I tuck into the first bar of Debussy's "L'Orage". From the kitchen, padded paws scurry to take a seat in the audience of empty sofas.

I play a song, and from anywhere in the house he comes to sit in the living room behind me. He sits on an ottoman or sprawled across the Persian rug, tail swinging like a metronome. I play, and he listens, and we think together of times I'd carry him, like a backpack or a piano bag, to my lessons after school every Tuesday so he could play with my piano teacher's dogs. We remember that her house smelled like baking cookies, that the yard had a magnolia just behind the patio door. I would trace its branches while I tried to play from memory.

When I come home, I practice sometimes for hours to untie the knotted mess my memory has made of the notes. King, for hours, sits on the carpet, the couch, the ottoman, and he listens.

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I hear a nocturne, and think of the dizzy nights during a Michigan snowstorm. I hear a tarantella, and I think of the weathered white stable near the building where I took piano lessons as a child. I hear "Golden Dreams", and I think of the dust motes of Farsi that drift down from the second floor alcove. I wonder, when King hears a sonatina, does he think of me?