We don’t choose the music we love any more than we choose the color of our eyes. 

We don’t find it. It finds us. 

My husband has a soft spot for ‘90s country because that’s what played in the car when he was just a pair of short legs in a carseat. But then he grew into a teenager and heard Breaking Benjamin and it was like knowing a language without ever having been taught. Freedom, power, the angst of adolescence—all gathered into the furious sound of The Diary of Jane. Then he became a man and heard Hans Zimmer’s score in the movie Inception. Later, he found the folk band Arcadian Wild and then the composer Kerry Muzzey. Other languages he could quote line by line.

Tommy never had music lessons and wouldn’t recognize middle C if it was the last note on earth, but he understands music fluently. 

Conversely, I grew up with some technical music training and a mom who required that I practice every day. Piano became the ambience of my childhood whether it was Rachmaninoff on the record player, my Tuesday morning lesson with Sally, an older sister at the upright, or an Emile Pandolfi recording.

Emile Pandolfi writes his own renditions of classical and popular music—gorgeous variations taken from broadway and movies like Les Miserables and Somewhere in Time. My dad kept a stack of his CDs and we’d listen in the car—the music finding us, teaching us. Many keys may try a lock, but it takes the right one to open it, and Emile Pandolfi’s music was one of our most treasured keys.

After Dad died, I would sit on the backyard swing and listen to Emile’s version of Phantom’s All I Ask of You until the tears streamed. 

The opportunity to see Emile Pandolfi’s fingers hit the ivories actually came in 2015. Not yet an entire year into marriage, Tommy had the good sense to buy the tickets and book a room at The Boxley Place Inn. We drove into Louisa, Virginia on a bright April afternoon, struck by the picturesque beauty of rolling farmland, spring green trees, and historic homes. 

Ahead of the evening concert, I took a book out onto the inn’s patio. To my shock, the next thing I knew I was watching my childhood idol come up the path.

“Are you my neighbor?” Emile Pandolfi asked with this beautiful, at-ease smile that seemed so incongruous with my understanding of celebrity. 

And I, dumbstruck in the presence of stardom, stuttered back, “No, I’m staying here.” 

He nodded politely, probably thinking, Wow, I’m locking my door tonight, and then proceeded to walk into my bed and breakfast. 

He, his wife Judy, an accompanying vocalist (the lovely Dana Russell), and two friends sat downstairs in the parlor talking music over glasses of Chardonnay, the definition of chic and cosmopolitan. 

With no other guests in the inn, Tommy nudged me towards the parlor. “This is your big chance,” he whispered.

“I can’t,” I insisted, feeling the opposite of chic as I cowered on the 19^th century staircase. 

Emile Pandolfi had lived and performed music all over the world—the Virgin Islands, England, Los Angeles. He’d done comedy club music for Jay Leno and Robin Williams, and here I was—a self-proclaimed CD-Rom Fan from the Sticks.

“Just say hi,” Tommy insisted.

Entering the parlor, I took a trembling breath and found myself saying a lot more than hi. How do you explain to someone—Your music was a shared language with a person I deeply loved. They’re gone now but I keep on loving them, and your music sweeps away the impediments of past touching present, if only for a moment. And in that moment, I’m listening with my best friend again, caught up in a deep conversation that doesn’t involve words. 

How do you encapsulate the power of a language in a few sentences? 

I have doubts that it’s every day that Emile Pandolfi listens to an emotional twenty-two-year-old babble on about childhood and death and emotional connections, but he handled it with grace. He even offered to take a picture with me and invited us to dinner after the show. Tommy and I accepted with composure then gleefully scampered back up the 19^th century staircase to hyperventilate in our room. 

The concert was breathtakingly good. Emile was a charming performer, interspersing songs with comedy and story. During intermission, we bumped into the couple that had been visiting Emile at the bed and breakfast earlier that afternoon. They offered to buy us as much merchandise as we wanted. In the absence of an Emile Pandolfi temporary tattoo, I limited myself to four CDs.

The show continued, but I felt disappointment as it meandered to a close. There was just one song that hadn’t been played and without it, the magic of the day felt like a four course meal without the steak. Strange for everything to hinge on just one song, one thread of memory that safely knotted my past to my present.

When Emile began the opening notes of All I Ask of You, I buried my face against Tommy’s shoulder and sobbed. 

I had my steak, and I ate it, too.

___

We almost didn’t go to dinner. We convinced ourselves that Emile was just being nice. What Shining Star wanted to have a post-performance dinner with a couple of kids like us? After prolonged deliberations, we finally made it to the restaurant (forty minutes late) and in extreme embarrassment, realized that two seats had been reserved directly across the table from Emile and his wife.

Tommy and I ordered a cannoli to split (poor college kids) and then I asked Emile if he would sign CDs for me and my sisters. He graciously obliged. I keep his signed copy of It’s a Wonderful World on my bookshelf—With sincere wishes for music and love forever and togetherness with loving memories of dad.

___

If music is its own language, evoking emotion, bringing clarity, speaking to us about our own humanity, then an explanation for why we love music, or how we love it, defies the written word. It is something that speaks on its own, like a sunset or the balmiest of moon-washed nights. We see, we feel, and we understand. 

Beautiful music does the same. We hear and we understand.

As an adult, I live a thousand miles away from my family and my closest friends. My much-loved piano teacher has, as she would joyfully say, “gone on to glory.” It’s been fourteen years since I last played Liebestraum for my father. 

I miss togetherness, but wherever beautiful music finds me, I still have it.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Pandolfi.