There are limits to our knowledge, but imagination and context clues can help. For instance, I know my friend Shadow’s wife Wanda sings in the shower. It’s not great, but her voice is improved by the acoustics and the static of the water. Her body is typical for a natural thirty-three-year-old woman who doesn’t exercise or particularly care about what she eats. Still lovely, but that’s not the point, there is a shower curtain. What is of note is that Wanda has her own repertoire for the shower, songs she doesn’t play with my friend Shadow. She’s playing the new SZA record. She’s not singing, “Nobody get me but you,” or “I wish I was special,” but rather, “All the petty shit aside/ all the phony shit aside/ I just want what’s mine.”

There was a time when my friend Shadow might invent a stupid question to barge in on and ask, a crude flirt. But no more, and the door is open.

We all know the shower is a place also for thinking, thinking and singing.  Time alone, slap-naked, pores wide open mind. It was here that my friend Shadow’s wife Wanda first had the obvious thought, the one tied like a chute behind every marriage. Could my friend Shadow’s heart belongeth to another? How could this be? Of course, he was training to become a licensed cosmetologist, a field dominated by women. There had been many study sessions in the Spring evenings. He met many in their shared pursuit of beauty.

But the water was running lukewarm, and my remote vision goes dark there. If I wanted a different life, this is the music I’d play too.