Mark Grube's blog

My daughter Johanna is living in Finland for a year as a Rotary exchange student. We stay in touch through email and Facebook and Skype - options unavailable and words unrecognizable to my parents 26 years ago when my sister went to Finland, also through Rotary. Johanna left her cell phone behind, but her info is still loaded into mine. I was zipping through my contacts yesterday and there she was. I paused and found myself actually touching her name on the little screen with my finger. Kinda pathetic maybe, but I do miss that kid. I guess I was trying to feel what’s not there, like when you lose a tooth and compulsively tongue the empty socket. Absence is felt. I thought of Debussy’s quote about how "music is the space between the notes."

I went to a funeral last week. As everyone filed out, they played a song I’d never heard called “On Eagle’s Wings.” An older couple behind me sang along, their voices low and close in my ear: “He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn.” The next day I got a voicemail from my mother. She sometimes calls and asks me to look up something on the internet.

“The rain carried on falling, keeping customers away. The rain fell softly, then heavily, then softly. Static hisses on telephone lines. Jimmy Cobb’s percussion on ‘Blue in Green.’” The record shop clerk in David Mitchell’s “Ghostwritten” thinks a lot about music. It makes a place in his head, refuge from a bustling Tokyo.