Sweet Music From an Old Piano

We got this man here in Harper, Uncle Silas Wannaborough, that plays the piano by ear. It beats everything the way he can hear a tune one time and go right to his old upright piano and bang out the right notes. I mean almost anything. I was helping with the Food Bus program the other day, you know the one that has hot meals delivered to old folks, and Uncle Silas was on my route. When I got on his porch I recognized the tune he was playing as Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. You know the one that starts out with bang, bang, bang before it smoothes out into beautiful melody. I waited until he hit the last note and knocked real loud on his door, he's kinda hard of hearing, doncha know? Kinda like Beethoven before he went stone deaf. I remarked on how pretty his music was and asked him if he had the sheet music for the piece he was playing. He said no he was just watching an old movie last night and they kept playing that tune throughout the whole show. He said he couldn't wait to get to his piano, an old upright with yellowing keys, so he could reproduce it. I asked him if he ever ran across a tune he couldn't duplicate and he said he couldn't get the notes right for songs by Rocky Manoff because he just couldn't understand where his music was going, or where it was coming from for that matter.