Three Songs, Six Tales

Music and Reading for Sunday Coffee

“Foggy City,” by Alanna S. Graboyes (ASGraboyesArt.com)

THREE SONGS

We’ll take a break today from economics, healthcare, AI, statistics, eugenics, etc. Just some music to hear and stories to read over coffee. I composed the music in 2022 and have been telling these stories for decades.

“Stones of Antiquity” consists of three atmospheric compositions for choir and assorted instruments. The titles come from quotes by poet William Wordsworth (“An Eye Made Quiet”), naturalist John Muir (“How Glorious a Greeting”), and artist Andy Goldsworthy (“A Stone Is Ingrained”). The video gives details on each song as the music plays.

Below the video are six brief tales—all odd, all true: “One Man, Two Graves,” “Queen of the Street,” “Apartment of the Damned,” “Urban Python,” “American in Almaty,” and “Songs in Sequence.”

SIX TALES

One Man, Two Graves

In my late teens, riding a Trailways bus across the broad expanse of Virginia, I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me. I asked what she did for a living, and she said she was owner of a cemetery. (Before that day, I had never thought of a necropolis as an entrepreneurial endeavor.) I said, “That line of business must provide you with some interesting stories.” She smiled and nodded, with eyebrows a-flutter. “What’s your most interesting story?” I asked. After thinking, she said (and, of course, I paraphrase after 50 years): “I once came very close to selling two side-by-side plots to a man who believed in reincarnation. He wanted his future self to rest beside his current self." She and he discussed this plan for quite a while before the man reluctantly gave up and opted for a single plot. The snag was that neither of them could figure a method by which the buyer’s current incarnation could let his reincarnated self know where the plot was. Nor could they figure a legal means to transfer ownership of the second plot to someone who would not be born till after the buyer’s had died and whose identity could not be known in advance. RIP x 2.

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Queen of the Street

In the early 1980s, my then-girlfriend, now-wife, Alanna, often found herself riding New York subway cars loaded with eccentrics—some intimidating, some comical, some tragic. Once, she sat near a homeless gentleman applying black shoe polish to his socks (not his shoes) and attempting to shine them. At some stop, the door opened and another street person entered the car—an older African-American woman, seemingly carrying all her worldly possessions in a large set of shopping bags. After she seated herself, the sock-polish man looked at her and shouted, “Queen of Sheba! I haven’t seen you in ages!!!” The woman took on a look that suggested confusion and mild alarm at this man calling attention to her.

Some months later, Alanna and I walked down Upper Broadway and spied a woman sitting in the doorway of a church, her possessions by her in a set of store bags. Alanna tugged sharply at my sleeve and said, quietly, “That’s her. That’s Queen of Sheba—the woman I saw on the subway.”

In the months afterward, I occasionally saw her sitting in that doorway, always quietly minding her own business, seemingly traveling in her own world. Somehow, I learned that “Queen of Sheba” was, indeed, her street name. One day, as I walked down that stretch of Broadway, I heard singing—a fine, high-pitched, perfectly in-tune voice giving an ethereal performance of a Gershwin tune. (“Summertime,” I think, but I could be wrong.) I turned, expecting to find some Juilliard voice major busking for change on the weekend. Instead, it was Queen of Sheba, sitting in that doorway, singing to herself and to no one else. I stopped to listen—discreetly, so as not to obviously invade her privacy. Ever since, I’ve wondered who she was, how she ended up in such circumstances, and what someone with that gift of a voice might have been had life taken a different turn.

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Apartment of the Damned

In college, I visited the apartment of a young woman whose name has long-since fled my memory. She lived in a nondescript five- or six-story apartment building with doors leading out onto open balconies like a 1960s Holiday Inn. At some point, I asked whether she knew the other tenants in the building, and she proceeded to describe one hallucinatory vignette after another.

She had never seen her immediate neighbor, save for his right hand. Periodically, the hand would emerge from the door, holding a cat. After depositing the cat on the balcony, the hand would retract, and the door would shut. Somewhat later, the process would reverse, with hand emerging to retrieve the cat, followed by the shutting of the door. Down the hall lived a young man with whom she occasionally chatted on the balcony. One day, he invited her into his apartment, and she found herself standing in an expansive living room with no furniture, whose only contents were a bicycle and a periodic table of the elements pinned on a wall. Another resident, she said, was well-known to the other tenants for his habit of climbing a tree behind the building, rattling a chain, and making ghostly moaning sounds. She told perhaps five more tales of equally bizarre tenants, but I’ve forgotten those. Some months later, I ran into her again and asked what was new. “Well,” she said, “I moved.”

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Urban Python

When I worked at Chase Manhattan Bank in Lower Manhattan, one of my young colleagues was a woman who lived high up in an Upper East Side apartment building. One of her apartment-mates worked in finance and the other in fashion. One morning, her roommates called her—shrieking and pleading with her to return to the apartment. One of the other women had been lingering in bed, when she happened to glance down toward her feet. There, coiled up on the bed, was an enormous python. She thrashed, frightening the snake, which crawled over her legs, descended from the bed, and disappeared into a previously unnoticed hole in the wall. She and her roommates opted to stay with friends while the building’s management investigated the peculiar occurrence. Somehow, a “snake-charmer” was located. (You could find anything in the yellow pages of a 1980s Manhattan phone book.) The charmer coaxed the serpent from its hiding place and wrangled it away in a pillow sack. All was quiet again on the Upper East Side. 

Eventually, it came to light that the proto-bros who had previously lived in the apartment had kept the snake as a pet. But sometime before they moved out, the snake had vanished, and they chose not to mention this to the management when handing in the keys. Do New York rental contracts have lose-your-snake and forfeit-your-deposit clauses?

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Your author at Shymbulak, Kazakhstan, 2000.

American in Almaty

In 2000, I visited the Republic of Kazakhstan for the first time. My luggage decided to remain in Atlanta for a day or so. I was wearing heavy boots and a very long navy blue woolen coat that looked vaguely military in design (see above). It was March or April and still cold, so one of my hosts lent me his papakha (Russian fur hat). I had no razor, so I had not shaven for maybe 36 hours—giving me an especially dark countenance. My interpreter, a young doctor, took me for a walk around Almaty. At some point, I said to her, “My ancestors came from all ends of the Russian Empire. If family history had gone a little differently, I could have been living in Kazakhstan. I’m dressed the part today. So do you think I blend in?” She assumed a look of pity and said, “There is not a single person on this street who does not already know that you are American.” … “Why is that?” I asked. … “Two reasons. You look straight into the eyes of everyone you pass. And you’re always smiling. Don’t do those things.” … So, I put on a grumpy face and stared down at the sidewalk. … “Congratulations,” she said. “Now you blend.” (In truth, it was pretty much the face that I used when walking the streets of New York City.)

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Songs in Sequence

Lance Hayward was a blind Bermudian jazz pianist who should have been better-known than he was. One evening in the mid-1980s, I thought I might have irritated him with a triple song request. Later, I had reason to think I hadn’t.

Born in 1916, Hayward’s bio said that, “Frustrated at the lack of opportunities for musicians in Bermuda and the prejudice he felt as a black, blind man, Hayward moved to New York City in 1966 where he worked with influential musicians and up to his death enjoyed a loyal following as the house pianist at the Village Corner in Greenwich Village.” In Bermuda and afterward, he regularly performed with stellar musicians like Marvin Gaye, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Buddy Rich, and George Benson. He had a wide range of styles, straddling gospel, blues, bepop, and sometimes wending into classical. (Links here to Bye-bye Blackbird, Just a Closer Walk with Thee, and an early album of Bermuda jazz.)

While I worked in Lower Manhattan, colleagues and I occasionally went after work to the Village Corner. The only time I ever spoke to Hayward, I had been developing my own piano improvisations of three songs. (I played occasional restaurant gigs in those days.) I stopped by Hayward’s piano and asked whether he would mind playing any of the three songs. One of them was “Secret Love”—best known as a Doris Day vehicle. I don’t remember the other two songs, but I do remember that both were also kind of Doris Day-ish. Hayward nodded slightly, but I sensed that he wasn’t pleased by my choices. Not his kind of songs, I feared.

In fact, he did brilliant jazz interpretations of all three songs, one after another. I thanked him afterward and, as audibly as I could, left a tip. But I still worried that my choices had displeased him.

The next time I visited the Village Corner was perhaps six months later, and Hayward was playing again that evening. None of the employees knew me. Hayward couldn’t see me. I sat at a distant table, so my voice was not within Hayward’s earshot. A few drinks into my stay, Hayward began playing, “The Secret Love”—which raised my eyebrows. (“Maybe he doesn’t mind Doris Day,” I thought.) When he finished, he went straight into the other two songs I had requested on that long-ago afternoon—playing them in exactly the same order. I wondered whether he had been playing that three-song sequence for all those months or whether this was just an uncanny coincidence.

Decades later, a bit of web-surfing told me of his generous spirit. In 1984, right around the time I saw him perform, Hayward, who had known rank discrimination, organized a choral group—the Lance Hayward Singers. He died in 1991, aged 75, but his singers continue performing to this day. As their website says, “Lance, who was blind from infancy, created a chorus which was a true reflection of himself—eclectic, with members ranging in age from early 20s to early 80s, white, black, Latino, Asian, sighted and non-sighted. Would that we all left such a legacy.

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.