chapter six

The search for the seed had come just as Orville had finished the mission for the cunning scotsman who had disappeared in the bagpipe factory. That was a long one, he reflected. He had plugged his ears for weeks after trying to dislodge the squeals of bagpipes that he had in his head for three weeks. For days afterward, he walked around with the same squeals still locked in his head, rubbing his knuckles against his ears trying to free them and let them tumble out. But they were there as much a Scottish reminder of where he had been as much as if he were participating in a caber toss in a kilt in Glasgow.
Orville among his other, (many people who tried to put it delicately termed them eccentricities,) had a talent or curse, depending upon how he looked at it on any given day, for memorising and then repeating music in his head, whistling it out in a careful, a tuneful and exact reproduction, octave for octave and note for note. He had once Handel’s Hymn For the Messiah in his head for nearly two and a half months after the xmas season. Grocery stores were the worst for him, he often had two or three of four tunes simultaneously warring for the aural space in his head and the satisfaction of being hummed aloud. He tried to stay away from muzac when he could.
Orville Newton Leone’s mother tried to send him to music lessons when he was young, sensing a certain aptness for music, piano, violin and one disastrous meeting with a piccolo solidified his faith that he wasn’t cut out to be a musician, much as though his mother wanted him to be and he had tried. He had the raw talent, but within his musical mind, too many tunes were waiting in a rowdy queue to be played and played long. It was worse than a soup line when everyone who had a bowl began to throw it around and curse and then soon noone had eaten the soup, but it was everywhere just the same. On the walls, the floor, on the ceiling fan, behind the cupboards and worst of all, between his ears.