Ray Charles today

No Pirates today for me ... I'll catch the box score Monday morning.

I spent the day listening to Ray Charles. I set the iPod to shuffle through all the Ray Charles tracks and we listened for half the day. Genius + Soul = Jazz, Legends in Music, Modern Sounds in Country and Western, the Essential Collection, and four or five beaten old LPs that I ripped several years ago with a turntable and a strawberry iMac.

At the end, we heard "Alone in the City" - with that haunting refrain, "Won't you help me, yeah, tell me / What will become of me" - and then it went silent. For some reason I thought there would be more but we had listened to everything we have. I got up to re-start the playlist but sat down. Of course it was right that the music would stop before we were ready, and it was appropriate to let the stereo go silent. We were half an hour or so from a thunderstorm. We sat out on the porch, watched lightning bugs, and listened to the wind in the trees.