SELF-PORTRAIT IN A SNOWSTORM

Cleveland is supposed to receive between 12 and 18 inches of snow in the next 24 hours. My next-door neighbor has invited me to hike through the blizzard to go to the wine bar in our neighborhood. Could be fun! Or very cold!

LAST RITES

I live across the street from a significant cemetery, the final resting place of a number of nineteenth-century notables, most famously John D. Rockefeller and James A. Garfield (Ephs, represent! Or, um, not!).

One day, as I walked to work, I saw a woman walking on the other side of the street along the cemetery walls. She seemed to be in something of a hurry, but she was a short, somewhat elderly woman, so I was keeping up with her. From a distance, at least, she appeared relatively normal -- not dressed in rags or visibly crazy. Except for the fact the she was carrying a dead raccoon by the tail.

On the one hand, I wanted to cross the street and get a closer look. On the other hand, I wanted to stay as far away from this woman as possible. For a block or so, it wasn't clear where she was going, but when the two of us had both reached the intersection where the ornamental stone gates of the cemetery are, it was clear: she was taking the dead raccoon into the graveyard.

The obvious scenario is that she was going to try to bury to the thing somehow. But there are other possibilities: maybe she was going to leave the corpse as an offering to her departed, roadkill-loving spouse? Or maybe she was going to feed it to the pack of wild dogs or cougars of something that roam the cemetery at night. Or perhaps it was just part of a black-witchcraft ceremony. Who knows.

In any case, I was so enthralled with the woman that, just as she disappeared into the gates, I almost ran headlong into in a young black kid walking in an oversized sweatshirt towards me in the opposite direction. He wasn't watching where he was going either, since he too was staring at the roadkill-undertaker. "Did you see that?!" he asked, as if to confirm the he hadn't just imagined it.

"That..." I replied, momentarily at a loss for words, "...was disgusting."

È LEI!

So in the evening of the very same day when I first heard her voice, I met my singer neighbor! Actually, to be precise, that's not true, since it was well past midnight.

I arrived home from the office rather late Sunday night, not because I was working, but because it's more pleasant to work in my comfortable, well-furnished and air-conditioned office than in my muggy, largely furniture-less house filled with cardboard boxes and strewn with the crumpled newspaper that until very recently wrapped my dishes. When I got to my front door, there was a note saying "Greg(?) - Party in Apt 8. Drop by! D—" The question mark after my name indicated that we had only met once in the laundry room, and she wasn't sure of my name.

Sure enough, there was a party downstairs from me, with D— and her friends in the midst of a spirited game of Jenga. D— is an elementary school art teacher. Also there was the neighbor from apartment 2, who works at the wonderfully-named Plain Dealer. We all drank beer.

I stepped outside to do a bad thing. A thing I only do socially, I swear!. And as soon as I stepped outside, a very small woman with her very big boyfriend staggered their way up the walkway. She was barefoot, while he held her shoes. (And they were beautiful shoes—kitten heels in a jewel-tone blue and green brocade.) It became clear in out earliest exchange that she was the singer whom I had first heard about, then heard. She complained about her music theory placement. She explained her fach. She encouraged me to come up an accompany her on the piano sometime. She was very drunk.

She asked for a cigarette. I looked quizzical, her boyfriend frowned. "I haven't touched one of these things in a month! Today was my audition! I can celebrate now!" I had heard her, that morning, doing final preparations for the auditions to cast all the opera productions for the whole term. She had, it seemed, been celebrating all night. She visibly enjoyed the cigarette.

And that melody that sounded so familiar, but I just couldn't place? Somewhere between Britten and Schubert? It was "Trees on the Mountain" from Carlisle Floyd's Susannah.

QUAL VOCE LONTANA?

This morning I started to unpack boxes, and then became discouraged and frustrated, and decided to curl up with the New Yorker and a mug of tea instead. (Speaking of: I am almost out of PG Tips. Where, oh where, in Cleveland can one find more?)

And through the walls floated the voice of my neighbor, the soprano. I've heard of her, but not yet met her; we do not share an entrance. This was the first time I'd heard her sing. She has a very beautiful voice, or at least, a voice that became very beautiful when filtered through a wall or two. I could not tell if she was actually practicing, or just noodling around. Maybe a little of both? It seemed to me she was just vocalizing on "ah," but I'm not quite sure, and I kept hearing snatches of melodies I thought I recognized. Was that Britten? Schubert? Handel? I could never pin any one thing down.

It was like the best performance of Salvatore Sciarrino's "Cantarellando" ever, except better. In "Cantarellando" (which means "Singing to Yourself") a trained operatic singer appears on a stage and sings bits and pieces of whatever pops into her heads while she does something else, like a crossword puzzle, or a flower arrangement, or washing dishes. This morning was like that, except the body of the singer seemed far away, and I was cocooned in my papa-san chair, with a mug of PG Tips reading Acocella on Dante.

And, just then, everything was perfect.