I was tone deaf all my life, up until one day, it was in the fall, I fell out of my crow’s nest and awoke with perfect pitch. There are no other cases in the annals of the supreme being or in their executive summaries.

In the beginning I could make nor head nor tail of it, but when the nor’westers came to blow, and the trees began to sing, I heard that Forty Mile Creek was in the same key as the Magic Flute. Down at the switching yard, the locomotives were idyling in C, but not a well-tempered C. Though the vibrations are arbitrary, the harmonics are pythagorean. On that note, abstain from beans.