I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Every place has its own music.

The beach, the city block, the woods.

In the suburbs, the summertime symphony is birdsong,

cicadas, car engines, lawnmowers, and kids playing and laughing outside. In the winter,

it's tires on the wet, slushy street, and snow shovels scraping the asphalt, but the birdsong

and sounds of kids playing remain.

For a few years, a father and his teenage daughter lived across the street from us,

and the daughter played the trumpet.

I only knew this because I heard her practicing almost daily,

the notes rising from their screened-in porch and reaching

my office windows. I pictured the notes like balloons floating over the traffic from one side of

the street to the other.

Sometimes when I walk my dog to the next block,

I pass the house where a woman gives piano lessons.

Through the open windows,

I hear kids practicing their scales or trying a simple song, starting again when they make a mistake.

The sound of perseverance is beautiful. It always makes me smile.

There is music everywhere, played from the stereos of passing cars, sung by unself-conscious walkers wearing

headphones. There's the slamming of screen doors, the barking dogs, the occasional siren,

and those noises are a kind of music too.

The title of today's poem, Pinesse Angelicus, is Latin for Bread of Angels, or Angelic

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