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One night when I was living in Portland I ended up at a drum circle with some strangers. I was young and trying to find community, so I slung my doumbek over my shoulder and walked across town.
I thought it was going to be a bunch of pagans who knew one another, but nobody spoke or acted known. The door was open on a big, bright living room crowded with chairs and people sitting on the carpet. The rhythm was already moving, so I found myself a spot and joined in.
My drumhead was tight but cold. My hands were soft and they ached before I& #39;d spent an hour, going where the beat went. Folks smiled and made eye contact and we moved one another the way that an ongoing beat gets people to do. But I kept hearing this sound, like a far-away voice.
Nobody was singing, that I could see. There were no other instruments being played. We went on into the night, right up against propriety in a residential neighborhood. It was nearly midnight before I stood up with stinging fingers and looked for the source of the ghostly sound.
I could feel my pulse down every inch of my forearms. My hair vibrated with the voice of the big-bellied drum in the room as I picked my way across the seated people, inclining my head and listening for that faint hint of melody from nowhere.
Around a hallway corner, away from the crowd, I found it. A white upright grand was up against a wall, keys covered, no one sitting at it. I got close and felt the beat through my socks, carried across the wooden floors of the whole house.
The pianos strings weren& #39;t being hammered, but they were picking up the vibrations of the drums, ringing and singing inside the box the housed them, faint like a harp heard in a dream.
I laid my hands on it and felt the pulse from the other room in my beaten hands, felt the carrying notes from inside the piano. I turned around to discover a long-haired barefoot man looking me over, assessing what I was about.
I don& #39;t know if it was his house, his piano. We never spoke. He looked at my hands, looked at my face, and I saw realization hit him. He knew what I was hunting down. Maybe he was hunting, too. He put his hands beside mine. He smiled at me, and we nodded to each other.
