The Deaf Musician

On a day such as this it will have been the case that Jessie has tripped and skinned her knee. Later, she will say, "It's because of the way the sun was chasing the clouds. I looked up to see, and tripped." She will say, "I love days like that, the in and out of sun and clouds, shadow and light." She will say, "My Band-Aid had butterflies on it." And maybe this happened a long time ago, and maybe it will hap pen in the future. There were tears in Jessie's eyes as she hunkered for a long time on the sidewalk, blowing?puff, puff, puff?on her knee. If she went home, Jessie knew that her mother would paint the scrape with mercurochrome or iodine, something orange or blue berry-colored, something that stung like the dickens. Jessie knew that she herself would scream and scream, causing such a scene that her mother would send her to her room to calm down, which by then would be difficult for her. Jessie felt very calm right now, and that's how she wanted to stay. She blew and blew?puff, puff, puff? on her knee, as the clouds and the sun played hide and seek high above and shadows passed over her here below on earth. This was when Jessie was five. By the time she was a woman, Jessie had developed exquisite cau tion. It didn't happen overnight, not like once she tripped and after that always looked both ways to cross the street or paid close atten tion to such things as not walking under ladders or stepping on cracks, the carefulness was not immediate like that. But there was a begin ning to it, perhaps even that one day she scraped her knee, as Jessie grew increasingly alert throughout her childhood and young adult hood to the sorry fact that the world was a sad and dangerous place. But she also once kicked a loose mound of dirt at a neighborhood house construction project, expecting it to collapse in a poofy cloud