Let's Try That Again But This Time Good

One of the textures of my life I’m most proud of is being related to my grandfather. Since I can remember, I’ve wanted to grow up to be like him in whatever ways might make sense and as I think usually happens, the further apart we’ve become ideologically the closer I’ve felt to hitting that mark. He grew up on a farm in Kansas and, after convincing my grandmother to marry him instead of her Army fiancé, headed east for a PhD in music from Ohio State and a life of conducting orchestras and teaching music at SUNY Oneonta. He and my grandmother lived for 50ish years in the same house in Franklin, NY and I spent swathes of my childhood there sledding down the back hill, reading books in one sitting on the shag-ish carpet, and eating the leftover cinnamon rolls when everyone else was asleep.

When I was in 7th or 8th grade, he worked on an experiment at the university that fucked with the structure of a recording studio in a pretty fundamental way. He and his colleagues built the walls out of tunable wooden panels and used them to create a space where recorded music’s various bruises and scrapes could be bandaged in real time. They recorded the audio through the panels themselves from what I remember, and they could alter the tuning of each panel fluidly to adjust for any instruments detuning so it didn’t derail the final product. In many ways, it was just this David Lynch meme in real time, and the project still feels semi-mystical to me all these years later.

One of the reps I work with currently to make clothes and other things for the store I run was a student of his at SUNY Oneonta towards the end of my grandfather’s tenure, and we had a huge No Way Dude moment a few months ago about it over Slack. As often seems to be the case with pointlessly ornate undertakings, the studio worked like a dream just as I remembered and nobody used it for anything.

Which is maybe a way of saying that my grandfather is a genius in some ways and not one in others, just like any genius seems to be. Growing up as his grandson gave me enough of a buffer to admire his crankiness and obsessive preoccupations in a way that being any closer may not have allowed for. He was a guiding light for me but wasn’t writing my developmental checks, so our time together was infrequent and impersonal enough to always feel important. He belted out Lacrimosa in public places without warning and ate roast beef and raw potato sandwiches every Sunday night, and he remains as one of the strangest people I’ve ever met.

I revisited Requiem in D Minor a few times this week because I was missing him. He isn’t dead, and we’re still close, but the weight of his age and the more obvious distance between myself and my childhood felt heavier than normal. I find myself still wishing every few months that I could be 6 again in my rented tux and falling asleep during a performance of this piece or something similar by his students in upstate New York. And I’m also grateful I’ve grown aware of how I shake from the same hunger to preserve the impossibility of the past that he had. Perhaps what brings us both back to pieces of music like this is the truth, whether through story or performance, that they feel like the last bits of lightning on a mountain we have both been climbing for our entire lives. The shape of it blurting itself out against the inversion of the present for a moment or two before withdrawing again into the dark.