“Clear everything off your plate, take it to the sink and go to bed,” she ordered. “Now!” she added for good measure. The boy scowled inwardly but didn’t say a word, not wanting to initiate another lengthy monologue from his mother about how there were people starving all over the world and how he shouldn’t waste any food. “Don’t forget to brush your teeth!” she yelled out after him as he walked toward his room. He sighed, thinking about how annoying it was that moms never forgot some really unnecessary things like eating vegetables and brushing teeth, not to mention taking baths.
He got to his room and immediately steered towards his reading material. What had once been an enforced prerequisite to falling asleep was fast becoming a necessity, and he rarely went to bed without reading something, anything. Looking up and down the stack though, he realized there really wasn’t anything there he hadn’t already read – twice over. Resignedly, he got into bed and lay there on his back staring up at the ceiling, like he’d done a million times before. He’d almost memorized all the little imperfections in it; it was sagging a little here, discolored a little there. Soon his mind started to wander and he, inevitably, recounted the scary stories his overly-imaginative sister loved to tell him, and he knew then he’d need some help falling asleep.
Risking the strong possibility of getting scolded by his parents, or worse, he crept out of his bed and snuck out of the room, pausing momentarily at the door to make sure Mom or Dad couldn’t see him, then tip-toed over to his elder brothers’ room. Inching the bedroom door open, he peeked inside and his one brother was hunched over a desk, gutting some unfortunate electronic gizmo, its parts lying all over. As much a clown as he always was, it was impossible for this brother to be distracted from his electronics by something as trivial as his little brother having trouble sleeping, so the boy looked around for his other brother but he was nowhere in sight. There was only one other place he could’ve been that late and the boy had a pretty good idea where.
He headed to the back of the house for the back door, which he still wasn’t used to. For the longest time there hadn’t been a back door at all, but then his Dad started getting increasingly antsy at the thought of all his precious books just sitting in some boxes in some dusty back room. One day he’d had enough and had hired someone to knock a hole through the back wall, fit a humongous door to cover up the aperture and add an additional room on the other side just for his books, with its own separate door leading outside. A few noisy months later the family had a ‘study room’ and a back door. As it turned out, it was a brilliant idea, and everyone now had space for their books and such.
The little boy’s eldest brother, an aspiring musician among other things, haunted the new stairs leading out the back door almost every night. He would sit there for hours at a time with his guitar practicing new songs, techniques, genres, or just plain messing with the thing. The boy was always entranced watching his brother play – how hard he practiced till he got the notes exactly right, the way his fingers moved so fluidly, how he would listen to a particular piece of taped music on the old cassette player and learn to play it by ear. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about it all was how much he and his guitar ‘connected,’ almost like old friends would.
Sure enough, the boy could hear a few straining notes coming from the general direction of the back door as soon as he swung open that monstrous door separating the old and new buildings. Like he had done so many times before, he quietly opened the back door, walked silently down the steps and sat sideways on the second-from-the-bottom stair, looking up at his brother’s frame silhouetted in the faint light emanating from the confines of the house. His brother, used to the intrusions by now, kept on playing, only acknowledging his little brother’s presence with a wink, almost imperceptible in the gloom.
After several minutes of this he stopped strumming, flexed his fingers and smiled at the boy.
“Let me guess – it’s about that time, right?” The boy nodded, failing miserably to disguise a grin. “C’mon then, let’s do this before anyone catches you out here.”
Where it would take about 15 or so minutes of reading before the boy was sufficiently tired – or bored enough – to fall asleep, it only took about 3 minutes of guitar strings to send him off to never-never land, and it always amused his brother how well it worked. Besides, it was either sacrificing 3 minutes of guitar practice to lull his little brother to sleep or be grounded off his beloved guitar for days by their parents for keeping the boy awake past his bedtime.
The boy, safely under the covers and lying on his back watching his brother, couldn’t help but smile in contentment as the first few notes wafted through the now dimly-lit room, the reverberation off the walls making the performance sound almost ethereal. Like magic, his eyelids suddenly leaden, he drifted off into a world of warmth and trust and wonder and music and most definitely, love. There was no doubt at all that his brother loved him and that, to him, was more than enough.
Posted by performancefirst 
PERFORMANCE FIRST 