Henry had a piano recital this Saturday. It was his first, and for it he wore a shirt that wouldn’t stay tucked in and a visage that said, Please don’t talk to me I am very close to vomiting. I should mention that on Thursday morning I slipped on the ice of my driveway, banging my head hard against the ground. I got up. I went inside. I felt all right. But then, in the kitchen, putting the dishes away, I started noticing little fragments of thought, little pieces of memory, little familiar ideas, or dreams, and couldn’t figure out where they had come from. I wanted to follow them up, follow them to where they had started. The light was gray in the kitchen, cold and dim, and I suddenly realized I was standing there, frozen, trying to make my way through my own brain. At the hospital they took a film of my brain and the neurologist, the next day, said I had suffered a minor brain trauma. I was better within a day.

Still, or so, there was a crystalline quality to Henry’s recital that I have rarely felt anywhere. The room was vivid, the colors intense, the light golden and warm, in contrast to the darkness outside. The children who were performing sat in a section by themselves, away from us, and so I could only see Henry from a distance, and I felt him strongly there, away from me. David and John and I sat with Henry’s babysitter and her husband, and my parents, and my youngest sister and her boyfriend. My childhood friend and her family were there, also, to hear her older son play.

Most of the children were unknown to me, but as they took the stage and played their pieces it seemed that they were saying something important about themselves. My friend's son, one of the youngest, played simply and well. Henry played seriously, making a line out of the music, as his teacher had told him to do. One little boy, dressed neatly, sat down and played some crazy Romantic rhapsody badly, but with such enthusiasm that you knew something within him had been waiting for this music. A little girl had so many problems with her Clementi that I felt my father, sitting behind me, grow worried, and sad. The last girl to play, the oldest player there, played two pieces flawlessly, so beautifully that it pierced through the lights, the colors, the darkness outside, through the skin of the evening, and into its heart.