Busy, Busy, Busy

So I'm in the library finishing up a project, and I hear the doorbell go off. It's the first three notes of a major scale, then the first note again, do, re, mi, do if you're down with solfeggio. And suddenly my mind is flung in an opposite direction from what I'm doing, as if it were a jai alai ball—those notes are the second phrase in a famous aria that is now playing in my head, and it's one of those damnable deals where I either don't know or can't remember the name of it.

To these library folks I'm sort of a town character and they know me, so I get up to look for the director, who I figure might know the aria if I whistle it to her. It's famous, probably by Puccini, from the general sound of it, and I'm optimistic she'll know. But she's not in her office. Hmm! Then I realize one of the circulation people is a music student on break from college. Nope, she doesn't know it. Another kid who works there happens to walk in, and she's a very knowledgeable person but no luck here either.

And now a woman is leaning across the circulation counter from the other direction. Her son might know, she says. He's over in the music section of the library right now. She leads me over, and a kid of about 12 or so is there, flaming red hair, and I whistle the piece to him. He doesn't look at me; he just leans in and mumbles to his mother.

"But do you know it?" she asks. "Yes," he mumbles to her in a rasping whisper, "but I'm very nervous." Something's up; I look away and gaze at the books on the shelf near me, trying to be less obtrusive, but it doesn't help, so I drift away out of the racks and go to another part of the library. The mother will find me if the kid tells her, and after a minute she does. She's got a name of an opera that turns out to be Giani Schicchi; from there it's a moment's work to find that the aria is O mio babbino caro. The woman mentions in passing that the kid is autistic, and I smile and shrug with what I hope is a kind of sympathetic nonchalance. Some people call every form of mental handicap a "difference," as in "differently abled," and sometimes that's a pathetic euphemism. But there are types of autism in which it's really true; people can be extraordinary able in some ways, but they deal with other people and react to certain stimuli very, very differently from the average person. Nobody would wish for their child to be autistic, not in any of its forms, and I was feeling that, standing there by the catalog terminal. But how many boys that age could have listened to a melody and placed the opera it came from? I couldn't begin to guess. It was strange, the randomness of it, how my little niggling question had been answered by this extraordinary kid and the mother who was a sort of ambassador between him and the world and had been dealing with this profound situation every day of his life. Very, strange, the circumstances that fell into place, to answer my little question.

If you've read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, you know that "Busy, busy, busy" is what devout Bokononists are required to say when they're struck by the complexity of the world. So I said it to myself. And went home, and found Kiri Te Kanawa singing the aria. It was easy, once I knew the name. So listen.