ARTICULATE PERCUSSION

Age one to age seven or eight, my mother spent summers at Woods Hole on Cape Code, where her father undertook biological investigations at the research center. The fog horns she heard there at night scared her, until her mother described them as comparable to the talking drums she’d heard as a girl in South Africa, where her own parents were teacher-missionaries. They were a good thing, she assured my mother, enabling villages to communicate withe each other, very much the way that fog horns were aural warnings heading off water craft from perilous shores.