The Music Underneath

A little Christmas magic, like every time we imagined what was on the other side of the hidden wardrobe, or down a secret staircase that revealed itself. Nancy Drew, or better, Peggy Lane - the actress/detective who found a theatre in the pink and white hardcover Peggy books that were the reason I wanted it to rain when I was a kid, so I could stay inside and read.

This tiny lacquered wooden table was in my Atlantic Ocean house in Winthrop, Massachusetts. The house of my youth. I don't remember the table not being there. It was my mother's sewing table, which is ironic since she didn't really sew - Nana Anna did all the sewing - but my mom had this table filled with needles and spools of thread and silver thimbles. Opening it was a ten-year-old's best thrill because there was sometimes something surprising that showed up, like a small exotic coin or a scrap of gold ribbon, the kind that might be a clue for Peggy that would lead her to a theatre. One she could call her own.

When I moved to Hawaii a dozen years ago, this table came with me. A piece of my childhood connected to memories of mismatched buttons and what the world was like when people still had Remington typewriters and record players with 45's, and telephones with rotary dials.
     
Now the table sits next to a chair in the living room of this Pacific Ocean Hawaii house and it holds things that aren't significant, like remote controls for the ceiling fan and Roku.
     
But last night, Steve and I opened it and took everything out, imagining magic at a time when magic is needed. It's the third night of Chanukah and Christmas Eve and Sean is back in Hawaii for the holiday and I said, "What if there's a secret compartment?"
     
And Steve, because he believes in magic too, and he knows how to take things apart and then put them back together, opened up the table and saw that there was a piece of wood that might have a world under it... and he pulled it up. I held my breath... my beloved table... but there it was.
     
My mother's sewing table, the one I had opened countless times in my life, is actually a music box.
     
Steve and I looked at each other - two kids who discovered the secret stash of chocolate truffles hidden high up in a closet, on a shelf you aren't supposed to be able to reach.
     
Steve turned the table over and saw that there was a hole where a winding key to the music box used to be, but it's gone now and the tiny gears of the mechanism were dried up and a bit rusty, and Steve, who knows how to navigate these things, used a drop of WD-40, and small pliers that he waved like a magic wand, and there was the song.
     
It's a classical song we didn't recognize, and it was a symphony orchestra in that moment.
     
When we find a key for it (the pliers will strip the threads if we continue to use them) and we play the song again, we'll figure it out. Or I'll post a recording here and someone will recognize it. 
     
A once-upon-a-time song played by a table that was used to hold needles and thread and thimbles but is also something else. Something through the hidden wardrobe and down a secret staircase.
     
And after all these decades a magic table really is magic after all. The bliss of something precious revealing itself as even more precious because music was waiting underneath, and it was there all along.
     
​A Christmas story. ❤️