Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Read Online Free PDF

tests given to qualify as an astronaut. Could you withstand several hours in a climateless environment? The chairs were all very large, which may have been intended to make the people in them feel very small, the same way Sarah sat in chairs dreaming of the day when her legs could reach the floor.
    "What is Meshugaloo Copy?" Ira Katz wanted to know, probably noting that his name wasn't Nathan Meshugaloo.
    "It comes from a song. From the sixties?"
    He could see that they were worried about the mere mention of the sixties. Their offer had been simple—or at least that was how they'd put it. Five hundred thousand dollars for his business on Tenth Street.
    "Why do you want it?"
    "We like the location."
    "Tenth Street?" Katz could be a drug dealer. You could never tell.
    "We believe in the future of the neighborhood."
    Five hundred thousand dollars. Nathan was not good with large numbers, but it seemed that this was a lot of money But there was a problem with the Copy Katz offer. They required that he sign an agreement not to open another copy store in the neighborhood.
    He did not have to be in this business. He had gotten into it by chance. In college he had studied music history without ever asking how he would earn a living from that. He wasn't even a musician, as his father always pointed out: "He studies music, but he doesn't play."
    So much seemed fated. There was a cosmic string that started with Nathan's fascination with the life of Beethoven and carried for more than twenty years to his big mistake. Would the one have happened without the other? Growing up, Nathan had never heard anything good about anything German except apple strudel, which was said to be Jewish. German was the pariah culture and the ugly language. But then there was the music. What did the words of Schiller mean in the last movement of the Ninth? And for that matter, what wondrously beautiful things were Adam and Eve saying in Haydn's "The Creation"? Nathan wanted to read letters and criticism by Beethoven's contemporaries. Soon he was learning the ugly language to understand beautiful music, learning it with surprising ease, since the German language, like apple strudel, tasted a bit like something Jewish. Not only was it not that ugly, but it bore a surprising similarity to Yiddish, which he had been listening to, though not really understanding, all his life.
    As he left the meeting on this Friday, Nathan could not yet see how the German language would direct his destiny, but it was probably the beginning, the first opening without which the mistake probably couldn't have happened two decades later. Life moves in tiny increments, with hidden causes and effects. Beethoven's symphonies had taught him that no note or phrase is without later consequence. The gentle role of an oboe leads to a bellyful of strings, which opens the way for the rampage of a full orchestra. And the oboe had started so quietly. Nothing in life happens suddenly. There were always hidden events that created an opening, started a pathway, like invisible advance men who cannot be controlled because their work is never seen.
    Nathan's only instrument was a harmonica, which Harry insisted was not a real instrument. What was worse, he played a classical harmonica. He could play Beethoven violin sonatas on the harmonica. Harry, who not only didn't like harmonicas but disdained classical music, shook his head in despair. His other son, Mordy, also had musical interest, but, even less comprehensible to Harry than a classical harmonica, Mordy composed music on a computer that was played without any musical instruments at all. In fact, since Mordy did not have the equipment, his music was never played. But certainly to Harry it would not have been music.
    When Harry complained to his wife about their sons' music, she would burst into an ironic laugh and say, "Oboy, meshugene gens, meshugene gribbenes." Crazy parents have crazy children.
    Maybe life was entirely beshirt. Nathan recalled