Neutrino Blues

Chapter I

MAGIC MAN

Matty

What is your earliest childhood memory? I think it's a dumbass question! How are you supposed to know that, huh? Little kids don't keep diaries, they don't even have the concept of time save for some key events like their favorite cartoon on TV or the time ice cream shop opens. There are eras in a child's space-time continuum such as before you learned to ride a bike and after, before you were tall enough to reach your doorbell and after - but seriously, how can you know which exact memory is your first one? What is your point of reference? Little kids don't even have the concept of self, let alone time.

First memories are important because they tell you what makes you tick. The trick is they ain't really the first ones but the ones your brain considered important enough for you to engrave them on the inside of your skull so you could still recall them in your adulthood. Not one particular memory but a group of memories, yes. Unless you suffered a great trauma as a result of a singular incident, you recall a group of memories without any particular order because the invention of calendar is arbitrary and fake.

My earliest memories revolve around music and what I'm really curious about is not what the very first one of them was about but whether it was visual or auditory. Now I have no chance of listening to music innocently anymore; when I hear instruments my mind pictures them immediately and my fingers produce these sounds in my mind's eye. It's not a matter of choice; it's an involuntary reflex. I wonder what it must have been like to listen to music without processing it and dividing it into keys and notes the way we slice time into days and months. Pure perception, no judgment, nirvana.

When I first heard my grandpa Silas play them keys I felt like I came to life for real, not just biologically. That's when I really started feeling alive and anything before it was oblivion, pre-birth, nonsense. I think the sound engraved my memories and the vision was secondary, a side-kick to the main show. How funny it is the way everything seems so huge to a five-year-old kid. The piano was the size of a twelve-wheel truck and his arms and fingers like branches and twigs of a tree. I remember fixating on the keys wondering in awe how on earth it was possible for them to produce those divine sounds. The marriage of heaven and earth.

I remember grandpa laughing whenever he saw me transfixed by his music; my mind was a blank and I was becoming this channel, a black hole ingesting everything he played, high as a kite. There was no way I could do anything else when he was playing. I didn't know about destiny back then but destiny knew about me. I remember sitting in grandpa's lap trying to follow his movements on the keyboard, but his magic was totally over my head. Any tune or scale he taught me I would practice until my hands were numb or my ma surgically removed me from the instrument. I was lucky to have fallen in love with the piano because you can play it at any age really; even animals do it. You don't need long fingers and a good grip as is the case with guitar or violin for instance; you don't need to blow hard and long like in a trumpet, you're not going to be crushed by the instruments weight the way double bass threatens because piano stands on its own feet waiting for you, inviting you, offering the incredible clarity and regularity of the keys on the board like a game, a puzzle, a gateway to heaven.

Grandpa Silas played the blues and jazz piano in a club I couldn't go to because it was no place for a kid like my ma used to say. It wasn't indecent or anything like that but people drank and smoked over there which was enough to ban me from the premises. Maybe it was defiance that got me into a smoking habit at an early age but I think it was because grandpa always smelled of cigarette smoke when he came back from work. That smell meant freedom, it was like a postcard from a heavenly island I could never visit, a token of a true musical magic man. Ironically, grandpa Silas didn't smoke but somehow that idolized the phenomenon even further in my childish brain. The smell of smoke was like stardust he saturated himself with during his shows, olfactory glitter he oozed, my super cool grandpa in a suit, tilted hat and a set of hands capable of magic.