The Music Store - Part 3

He was a classical composer, a music major. My job was typing invoices, which was a disaster. Waste baskets filled with crumpled paper. I think he felt sorry for me. At that time, there were only typewriters: no computers. And many typewriters weren't even electric. So if you made a mistake, it was almost impossible to line up invoices with numerous carbons and use small white erase strips to cover errors. Every day I was sure I'd be fired. Then one day, he stopped at my desk, looked into my face and smiled. It wasn't only my wastebasket travesty, but clothes that clearly weren't my own that made me seem like a lost soul.

        That's when he told the Company Owner that, as Purchasing Agent, he needed an assistant. Then he rented me an electric typewriter to practice on and do my own writing, which I did at the dining room table while the girls in the flat buzzed around and went on dates and new people came and went.

        Some days he left a small note on my desk: nothing romantic or suggestive – simple notes like "Smile," "You can win," "You're pretty." Just something to cheer me.

        He was also a night announcer on the only classical radio station in the city, and on my birthday, he'd say "This is for a special Birthday Girl," and he'd play Rachmaninoff. 

        “Rachmaninoff” he said “hid for ten years after the audience hated his first performance.” It took therapy and the encouragement of his friends for him to compose and perform again.

        Then one winter night, he drove me back to the flat but stopped on a side street before we got there, which was unlike him. He told me the boss had looked in my desk drawer, found some notes and imagined something that wasn't happening. I was fired and he had to leave as soon as they found a new purchasing agent. The owner had also called my mother. And because I had lost the job and more roommates had moved in, eating my food and waking me all night, I moved back to my mother's. But that would only last awhile until she evicted me again.

        There was one fall evening he had stopped on the way to a concert to bring me a special album. He stood in the doorway in the strange half-light with autumn trees and leaves behind him and handed me Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony. On the cover he had printed in his elegant script a Dylan Thomas lyric: 

 

 These were the woods the river the sea

 Where a boy in the listening summertime of the dead

 Whispered the truth of his joy

 To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery sang alive

 Still in the water and singing birds.

                              "Poem In October"