My brother wrenched his tiny pick-up from street to street, from hospital to home, while his wife labored on a white-sheeted bed, in a cocoon of medical personnel. The spaces between contractions were tightening, but on his mind’s wall he’d written that the first thing his daughter heard would be Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon,” a song born for a second time into a wider world as the soundtrack to a car commercial. I knew it from the commercial. CD and player both sat like bored orphans somewhere in his apartment, illegitimate members of the birth kit. I had offered to go for them.

“You won’t get back in time,” he said. “You look for things the way an aging trombonist reads sheet music.”

I found this convoluted, but a recognizable description of myself. I offered to download the song on my phone instead.

“That would work fine,” he said, “if the song were by Ke$ha, with a dynamic range designed for low fidelity MP3s to make you shake your ass and do vaporized alcohol shots while you swim in a sea of potential STDs. This is a song designed to make you shake your heart.”

As the car flung us around, I talked (an attempt at distraction) about how “Pink Moon” was an interesting choice, remarked on the intersection between art and commerce, between obscure poetic expression and commercials, and how it was an appropriate initiation into our shared American identity, and was going to go on and ask questions like “What is a ‘Pink Moon’? and “Why should we concern ourselves with whether or not it’s “on its way”? but he turned from his driving, mid-turn, to show me eyes like two half-empty espresso cups, and say, “I wish you believed in beauty.” Continue reading “Squirrel Baby” →