Black Radio

It was a Zenith Trans-Oceanic, with rows of red-orange push buttons and serial black tuning knobs that said the path to Wonder commenced with a frequency indicator floating like the bubble in a carpenter’s level. My father listened to WSM, the Grand Ole Opry, on Saturday nights, drifting to sleep to Hank Snow or Roy Acuff or a bluegrass band he could tell you the history of. Sleepwear consisted of a t-shirt and J.C. Penney pajama bottoms. When he and my mother yet slept together, she would be awake be on her side of the bed— propped up and reading, an L & M burning in a crystal ashtray. Telling him Turn it down! until the singer’s voice was a whisper. Whatever happens when we die, suffering will have to be explained. Maybe God will pass out the Trans-Oceanics, and the dead will huddle around the nearest set, listening to Heaven’s version of a fireside chat. Maybe she’ll find him—my father—and they’ll argue about the volume. Despite all the hoakum I like to think there’s more than breathlessness and the tumult reduced to sleep in a dark so total you’d want a radio. I like to think we’d have hands to tune the notched knobs. Eyes to judge where the Nashville station is clearest and the voices of hearts absolve us and death is a song we automatically sing, knowing nearly all the words. Maybe we’re dead and the trespass of living rises like so much smoke.