It was an easy class.

We knew it and wanted it in the rushed fury of that summer that had continued into the fall and spring and spilled into our second lives. No homework. No thinking. Pure attendance and class participation.

We needed it, badly, and really didn’t give a damn about what it was about. Some old guy playing piano and some old black and white films and some old music.

It was open, it was easy, it was there.

“The Sound of Silent Films” they called it, some attempt at beauty and eloquent wit. The first day we were given a syllabus with only a course description. Where are the class times? we had asked, pointing to the neat line of TBAs.

We’ll be meeting according to Mr. Johnson’s availability, the professor had replied.

Great, we all thought, some old man’s incontinence determining our class schedule. The worst kind of canceled, because we have to drag ourselves there to find out – and then we’re actually ready and just pissed at the irony of our attendance and preparation.

But in the furor and haze we all knew this was better than actual education and that was ok.

The man was ancient. We could see it in his eyes, sad, empty, cataracted. In his limp, flaccid arms supporting the old newspaper skin, yellow, brittle, heavy, wrinkled, the years hanging from him in flags that swung when he played. We laughed when he wasn’t looking, but always choked it back when we felt him turn those doleful, painful eyes on us.

And we always stopped when he played.

He was archaic, silent life full of sudden noise. His empty, clawed, shaking hands had forgotten nothing. The lights off, the silent play of light across the screen broken only by the clicking of the projector – we were back, that dark silence took us back, back to the toned gray memories of an old, forgotten era. We left the lecture hall, traveled to a dusty theater filled with deep black mahogany seats with lighter ebony cushions, plush gray curtains, slowly raising, a pearly opaqueness beyond – the screen.

And then he began to play, and it became his time again: we were softly pulled into the past, featherstrokes in our imaginations and the shades of gray became rich reds and blues and browns and sheer seductiveness.

The people on the screen and their long-dead forgotten fame became new for us. We were there at their opening, at the premiere of a wonderful, innovative greatness, instead of the tired grayness they had become.

When he played, he changed. He left behind the last tired man of another generation and returned to something that had been taken from him so long ago. He resurrected a glorious façade of grandeur, a return to the glory days of film. Before sound came and ruined the sight, before the aesthetics were swept up in the marvel of realistic representation, before the world moved on.

He became one giant theater; housed inside this old man, in the deep blue cushions and crimson curtains were vast echoes: genius cinematographers and visionary directors, stage actors who intimately knew the movements and potential of the human form, the men and women who understood the early workings of art and sight. We relived a lost generation, as he played.

And this man became our escape.

When the riots and the screams and fires became too much for us, we had his memory and his testament to the old, forgotten way, this man we knew would always be there for our flight into the past.

When they – Us – began to divide the world and everything became overwhelming, we knew that we would always have him. When life got too difficult, we had this class.

When everything felt pointless, when we cried at all the wasted everything and abandoned dead, when we felt failure and loss, we knew that we would always have his music. He kept on and taught through the fury.

That lecture hall became our theater, with sumptuous sapphire cushions and rich mahogany chairs and all the beautiful old, dead people. And underneath it all was the twine of his music.

He brought it to life – the ideals and emotion that we thought we understood so so very well – but through the music we realized that this old man knew it far more than us. He knew struggle and defiance – he knew the loss of everything he loved and lived far far more than we ever would, and the power inherent in that knowledge and failure caught us and humbled us, showed us the side to our loud, still-moving, still-born struggle that we needed.

We knew that we could always find shelter, everything still waiting to hug us back into the circle – if only we agreed. If only we renounced. If only we accepted the delineation of Others and friends.

But he had had nothing after his struggle – his struggle had been him, had been a single body before the gears of change and, to him, everything else meant nothing. His abandon was inspiring.

And so as we sat in our theater and heard him play we heard his story, over and over again, in fifty, two hundred different keys and melodies. Some sad and slow, slinking across the minor scale, some happy and full of memories of the major, some a confused, pensive mix of the two. But despite the music, despite the story he told, or how he told it, the ending was always the same.

He vanished, passed on by time.

And that day when it turned domestically bloody, when they shot those kids – the Other kids, causing trouble, so They said – and the stray bullets sought anyone, anyone, anyone; when we realized this wasn’t just a game but a war; when we realized simply being sympathetic would target us as well; when when our lives changed and we had to pick a side, truly, for real, forever  – that day we needed him.

But that day was the first canceled class of the year.

The only.

The class ended that day, because our grand piano man had died the night before, in his sleep, dreams of a failed revolution sweet in his silent mind.