Kitchen music

For my birthday, Mike bought me an old-school clock radio that I've placed in the kitchen. It's because when we were in NYC, I instinctively tuned a similar radio in our hotel room to WKCR.

We're talking terrestrial radio -- the kind you might have cranked up when Casey Kaseem was still broadcasting -- and so we can't get WKCR, Columbia University's venerable station. Not from the kitchen in Connecticut.

But what comes in good is a local college radio station that plays classical music most of the time (and occasionally Portuguese folk music).

So we're good. Because tuning into WKCR amounts to a bid to dial up my father and the result is the same with any kind of classical music, since that was what he listened to almost all the time if he wasn't listening to jazz. 

That was the kind of music at the concerts he and my mother attended assiduously on Long Island and in Manhattan (a few times even Vienna and Milan!).

That was the music on my father's old radio, the one perched on the sill of the open window of the garage, just to the left of the basketball hoop, which would accompany him as he wandered his garden in Hicksville in search of petal perfection.

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Shoot -- maybe he could have even been a classical music show host.

Plus, it's nice to hear music. Especially after a long stint of silence.

And maybe, as they say, classical music will help shape the young mind in our care.

One day, while Chopin was playing on this new clock radio, Leo wandered into the kitchen and turning toward the sound remarked appreciatively, "Ahhh ... piano music." 

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