The Girl Above Our Apartment Who Plays the Organ

Our apartment has pretty thick walls. If Jacqui is in the bedroom yelling to me, I can usually barely hear her. If our neighbors are in the halls screaming about who put their clean laundry on the ground and arguing who is more “ghetto” I have to put Jacqui’s stethoscope to the door to get all the details. Both our neighbors to the right and left of us are tiny old women and don’t seem to make too much noise.

But there is one apartment somewhere in this building that I can hear almost once a week, and usually at nighttime (not while I’m asleep, though). My guess is that they live above us, but really, I don’t have a clue as to where the sound is coming from.

I hear someone playing an organ. It’s a bit creepy, kind of cool, and sort of soulful, simply because that’s the way organs tend to sound no matter what kind of music is being played.

I don’t mind the occasional organ notes that squeeze through the walls and into my ears. It gives me the opportunity to do some daydreaming. Let’s me ask questions that will never be answered, that I don’t even want answered, to tell you the truth.

Who is the person playing this organ? Are they just some kid who has to practice? Is it a big organ, comedically huge, taking up most of the apartment? It is a tiny electric keyboard that is simply set to sound like an organ?

Does the sound the organ makes touch the person playing emotionally in a way that other instruments can’t? Do they sing while they play? Are they any good at singing? Maybe they’re just practicing for church? Maybe it’s one of my older neighbors after they pop some Aleve. Maybe it’s an old man who drinks too much, an artist who never made it.

Maybe it’s a pretty young girl who, when around her friends, talks about Lady Gaga and Drake and Bob, but when she gets home, after copying her friends math homework, gets soulful on the organ for a little while. Maybe her parents work late and her organ and the cat by her ankles are her only two friends.

Maybe she wants to go to school for music, but her father is realistic and logical and tells her that’s a stupid idea and that she should go to the same business school that he and her mother met at. Maybe she’ll listen to him and forget how to play, or maybe she’ll become a runaway and her only way to survive is by setting her electric piano to organ playing painful love songs and making tip money.

Or maybe Mom will convince Dad that music is their daughter’s passion and that it is only right to encourage their daughter to pursue her dreams, and she gets accepted to Julliard and become a world renowned organist in a small international organist community, where she goes on to teach herself how to speak other languages to communicate with her fellow organ players of the world.

Or maybe I just heard a neighbor’s favorite TV show’s opening and closing credits.