Once, a fairly long time ago, when we had first arranged our basement as a place to watch movies and hang out together as a family, my son and I came across a concert on PBS. It was Yanni’s concert “At The Wall.”
Now understand, we had configured this basement viewing room with a new 7.1 surround system – a honkin’ big Onkyo amp/receiver and a top of the line JBL speaker system with 6 matched wall speakers, a matched center speaker and matching subwoofer. The Onkyo was capable of wrapping you soundly in 500 watts per channel of crystal clear audio and all of that was configured in support a 60 inch Sony HD TV with the most vibrant picture I had ever seen. When you watched it, it almost seemed as if you were sitting in front of and looking out of an open window on whatever it was you were watching. That picture and The 7.1 surround was unlike anything we had ever seen before and it was good.
Well, we came across this concert one Saturday evening, and having failed to find anything else to watch, we settled into this concert. It was likely the lush cinematography combined with the pristine sound, but whatever it was, we were there for the evening. As the concert unfolded, we pushed the audio a bit and found that it was more than willing to go wherever we wanted to push it – so push it we did. Within a very short time, the audio was well beyond loud, but at no point did it become strained or distorted; only clear and full. The beautiful color images of the musician’s and the excitement of the music as it rose and fell was entirely engrossing and we each fell into a new and singular place and time…together.
We watched and listened to that music as if we had never heard music before and as we watched and listened our total delight and enthusiasm grew and grew… and as we sat there together, I knew that we were sharing something completely unique and likely not repeatable. For whatever reason, this event had become something singular. It was so complete and as I sat and watched my young son’s eyes swell with wonder, my total joy grew larger and larger. As my joy grew larger and larger, his eyes would widen even further with great wonder and total delight. We were feeding on each other’s joy and wonder and for that brief moment in time, we were never closer or more totally synchronized in something that we shared.
Eventually the concert came to a close and the music ended. We shut off the power to the Onkyo and turned off the Sony TV and returned to the first floor where the rest of the family was watching something else on another TV. They mentioned that our music was awfully loud, but we didn’t care… It was complete. That moment was complete… And there has never been another moment with my son that was as complete.
Why Eye Write 