Why I feel the way I do about music, probably

A: My mother plays the piano, though she will only play religious music - not because she's declared some kind of fatwa against secular music, but because it was all she ever learned to play growing up. The cds she has accumulated - the half of them that weren't gifts from me, tentative and mostly wrong-headed guesses at things that might spark new interest in life in a person of her age and exceedingly withdrawn temperament - are a scattershot collection of albums made by people she knows (her mandolin teacher from ten years ago, her church's organist, her son) plus whatever completely random flotsam managed to wash up on the remote shores of her appreciation of modern popular culture.

She bought the Bodyguard soundtrack, for instance - five years after everyone else did. When you think about it, almost all of the music in her life has been visited upon her as a kind of assault.

B: By the time I was old enough to be interested in music, my father had lost the hearing in his right ear. Having only one working ear makes music a distraction, something that prevents you from hearing the things you need to hear. What I saw as a fuel was a pollutant to him. Neither one of us could see things from the other's perspective.

C: I have inherited a fair number of vehicles from my parents, including the one on which I currently rely to get me around every once in awhile. Without exception they have all come into my possession with a blown driver's side speaker.