Amuse Me, My Friend

 You know when you meet someone and you just know you are kindred spirits? That’s what it was like when I met Kate. We didn’t ease into the friendship, we were friends immediately. And then we weren’t. It wasn’t what you think. Let me tell the story.

I was a starving artist trying to break out in the music business. Okay, I wasn’t actually starving, I got work usually as a studio musician. But writing music was my passion. It just so happened right before I met Kate I was blocked up so badly that I could barely get Heart and Soul out of my keyboard. One day I was returning home after a fourteen hour session in the studio and there was Kate sitting on the stoop next to my house.

“Hey,” I said acknowledging the young woman.

“Hey, yourself,” she returned.

“Are you waiting for Dale?”

“No. I just moved to the area and I kind of got lost. I thought my house was on this street but this is not it.”

We started talking and it turned out her house was one block over, same address, same location, just on Laurel instead of Oak. All of the street names in our neighborhood were some kind of flora — tree, shrub, flower. After we sorted out where she lived, we just kept talking. From that day, for the rest of the summer Neveah and I were together almost every day.

Something else happened that summer. My block was not just broken but shattered. My music filled the pages of my notebooks. My compositions were balanced and vivid. My tempo was perfection. Melodies flowed effortlessly from my fingertips to my keyboard. Lyrics followed with ease. 

The time with Neveah was more than easy or pleasant, it was enchanting, magical. Whether we were hanging out or going out, I always felt at the height of my creativity. I wasn’t overwhelmed with ideas, it was more a pleasant parade of ideas when I was with Neveah. We’d Nobel talking about places we wanted to visit, Paris, Australia, Brazil, and a melody would start its crescendo into my mind. Lyrical rhymes would sprout from a conversation about the book we were reading that week.

Then, one day in early September, Neveah disappeared. One Tuesday she didn’t show up at my door. Wednesday, no Neveah so I walked around to her house. It was strange. It looked vacant. It wasn’t like someone had just moved out, it was like no one had ever lived there. I could have sworn there was a garden in the front with pink, white, purple, and yellow flowers but now there was just a patchy brown lawn leading up to a rusting iron fence. The windows on the first floor on the side of the house were boarded up and one second floor window was cracked. On the front step was a plastic recorder like you would play in elementary school. 

Flash forward to November when I’m at the museum of art with my friend Stephanie. I’m in a room with paintings of gods and goddesses from Greek myths. There’s a painting of Athena as the warrior, a painting of Leto turning the herders into frogs, and then an interesting piece. A painting of the goddess Euterpe, the muse of music and lyric poetry. She was holding a flute and standing in a lush, green meadow surrounded by wildflowers, pink, white, purple, and yellow.

On the ride home, they were playing one of my songs on the radio. It made it to number three and I had a second one that just hit the charts. I thought of Neveah, my summer muse.