“Golden Lady

“As Em finished his comment, the first understated piano notes and drumbeats of Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady” came out of the speakers. “Golden Lady” captured Skylar’s straining aspirations for perfect love, intermixing their hot and held breaths, desireful pants, and frustrated moans to form music. The song’s chorus entranced Skylar every time he heard it, causing him to shut his eyes, sway his head, and sing along. The chorus ideally expressed the passion he longed to feel for a woman, the perfection of life that such a love would bring, and the transport of his soul to a rarer, finer world that such a love would effect. His favorite pieces of music had always moved him like this, even from the earliest days when Ravel had wafted the inner him to a realm made up of wispy, whispering filaments, thudding hollows, and crisp, chinking chain mail, of hammered metal, moaning doves, and woodpecking, to a realm whose twilit air carried the sounds of divinized birds and in which all these sounds were nothing other than the shapes of feelings. “Boléro” was the first work to enrapture the child Skylar, to plainly show him that heaven existed and could be experienced. That simple, extended piece, coming to him as it did at a time when his family universe had collapsed into a black hole of despair, proved salvational: it opened up Eternity for the boy.”