December Never Felt So Wrong

I died listening to George Winston driving around on a rainy Tuesday night. The piano keys struck, "ba da da ba, ba da da ba," staccato, yet fluidly, and I knew the artist so fluently articulating "Carol of the Bells" immediately. Not suspecting that this would play on Bing Crosby holiday Pandora, I didn't see the light come toward me, because of the headlamps and street lamps reflecting the glittery rain turned sequins on my windshield. 
When it's dark, the total absence of light, it's equivalent to being blind, but when light is so powerful that you can't see anything, is that being blind too? Or is it not that we cannot see; perhaps we are not meant to see what is so light, or so dark, so we wander the muddled mess of the two on this spherical mass in space.

It's rotating, like the vinyl on the record player I sought out for my best friend for Christmas. When the shop owner tested out the purchase for me, he picked up leaning in a stack on the floor against a mini fridge, an album for a band I'd never heard of, "Loverboy," saying, "you probably never heard of Loverboy," which I hadn't, but I did catch a glimpse of the album behind it.

Autumn, by George Winston, in all its 12-inches of phonographic glory, encased in the worn and granulated cover--amber waves of grain sheltered under a seemingly endless blue sky. I asked the shop owner, a retiree who only accepted cash and cut me a sweet deal on the modern Victrola, "Do you think we can listen to Winston instead?" 

"Oh, you're not going to get the same sound out of it, but sure."

We chatted about Winston visiting at the end of the month a nearby town  in Pennsylvania, and I told him that, "my favorite album by him is the Vince Guaraldi cover album. 'Winter' is good, too."

"Yeah, 'December' tends to be one of his more popular records," I wanted to kick myself just as he said it; I knew it wasn't 'Winter' right after the sentence slipped out. Such a pompous early 20-something hipster in a used appliance shop in Levittown, in all her cultured baccalaureate glory, kicked down by the Veteran retiree more knowledgeable about an artist typically lauded by new-age, jazzy cats. I own "December" on cassette. How stupid of me.

The light in front of my eyes dims, and I keep driving on the first Tuesday of December, "ding, dong, ding, dong, hark blah blah bells," I'm singing. I said I died, but just as dark is the absence of light, isn't death the absence of life? I stopped living right then, to the stroke of the keys playing a song so familiar that in absolute light could shatter me to shards of piano keys and strings, like a baby grand dropped 22 stories.