"....with the brightest sounds..."

My grandmother had a toy record player that played 'The Blue Danube Waltz' and she used to sing along to it while it tinked and dragged over the little metal bumps that made sounds when the needle passed over them, like a giant music box. I can still remember sitting on her living room floor in the warm yellow sunlight of an Indiana afternoon, closing my eyes and imagining standing on the banks of that river.

"Hey Gran" I asked, with my eyes squeezed shut, spires and bridges and cathedrals beginning to form behind their lids, "....do you think it's really blue?"

"I don't know," she answered, "I've never been...but you should go find out and come back and tell me..."

"I'd like to..."I think to myself now, twenty years later,

though now I'm going to find out more than just the color of the Danube...but I guess she already knows that.