Lexington, KY - Now and then my wife and I think about selling our house, getting rid of an enormous amount of stuff accumulated over the years, and moving to a smaller place that requires less upkeep. Maybe a condo in downtown Lexington.
There are two or three possibilities. One of them is the Nunn Building at Short Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which has been converted from offices to living quarters. A long time ago it was the home of The Lexington Herald, the morning paper. The Herald moved out when it was bought by the evening paper, The Lexington Leader.
After that, the building was put to various uses. When I was in junior high school I worked afternoons as an office boy for a printing company located in the basement. I can still smell the ink and paper and the sweet aroma of Rum and Maple pipe tobacco.
Upstairs was WLAP, the city's first AM radio station. People joked that the letters stood for We Let Anybody Play. That was generally unfair, though one day I proved there was some truth in it.
Because my uncle played the cornet, and I imitated him in everything I could, I took up the horn in elementary school. A teacher came to Johnson School one day a week to teach us the basics. As we became passably good, we were sent one afternoon a week across town to Henry Clay High School to practice with kids from other elementary schools.
It was a big band. I think I was something like 12th chair among the cornets and trumpets. Maybe further back. Ray Rector was No. 1. Now, I envied him in this spot, though not enough to practice regularly, only because it put him up front near the band's director, Miss Elmquist. I was in love with Miss Elmquist. She was the reason I kept playing the cornet in the all-city band. She was young, tall, a beautiful woman. When she said, "Ready people?" and raised her baton, I was ready. I wished and wished that she would notice me, far in the back just in front of the trombones. There was little chance - besides the distance, I didn't play well enough or poorly enough to be noticed.
We were not a marching band. We played an annual concert in the high school auditorium, but the rest of the time we rehearsed. Except once. One winter afternoon we gathered in the big studio at WLAP to play a live concert. I don't remember how many pieces we performed, but I was doing my best because I knew my family and, I imagined, the whole city of Lexington was listening. We came to "Anchors Away" and it was a rousing rendition. I played with enthusiasm, and I guess because it felt so good, I wanted to go on, and when everyone else had played the last note, I played one more.
Miss Elmquist noticed me.
(If my wife and I were to live in the Nunn Building, would I sometimes wake in the middle of the night and smell paper and ink and Rum and Maple, and hear the ghost of an extra note at the end of "Anchors Away?")
Despite the humiliation, I continued playing the cornet, then the trumpet, through most of junior high before I quit. I was never very good, but I learned that I love to join in making harmony, and in high school I sang with the school choristers and in a quartet, and I even liked practicing because we did it together and made this wonderful sound.
Harmony is, I think, the sound equivalent of what the English Bible translates as peace. The New Testament Greek uses eirene, which sometimes can mean only absence of strife. Not quite up to the Hebrew Scriptures' shalom, which means the presence of the ideal state of life. It's what St. Paul meant when he wrote of "the peace of God which passes understanding."
The heart of God is always singing to us, and the song is an eternal love song. We enter the peace of God when our hearts hear and join in, singing in harmony.