Oido

The house of my childhood was always
packed with noisy guests in summer—
vacationing aunts who played mahjong 
all night, cousins who chased each other 
around and under the dining table. The rest 
of the year, we had boarders—college 
students from Thailand. They wore 
miniskirts and T-strap sandals, and 
taught me how to play Chopsticks 
and Blue Moon on the piano, by ear,
plus improvised variations. My father said 
playing music by ear, intuitively, without 
benefit of notation,  is called oido—
only, he pronounced it wee-do, and so 
for the longest time I thought it was spelled 
w-i-d-o-w. Was this the reason the lonely
singer crooned Blue moon, you saw me standing 
alone/ Without a dream in my heart/ Without 
a love of my own? Drawn into its wistful
longing, I made up a narrative that perhaps 
she'd lost her love to death, but now was praying 
no longer to be alone. Oido, wee-do, how else 
could I explain the ability, in the absence of notes, 
to make music in one's head? It tries to embody 
a whole world of things which are separate and 
distinct from us, until we find a language 
to bring them almost close enough to touch,
almost close enough to pull into our arms.