I've wondered, from time to time, how somebody so aural hooked up with somebody so visual.

As a child, his grandmother (who had been an actress in Norway) had sent him to the Episcopalian church near or on the University of Chicago campus. The really salient factor was they had a fine boy's choir and an excellent Choirmaster. By the time he was 14 and "borrowing" his father's Pontiac to sneak to the South Side jazz clubs with his friends, he was already applying what he knew of liturgical music to the jazz he found there.

That love of jazz stayed with him the whole of his life. But church music, too. And we shared an adoration of Bob Dylan through all his musical incarnations. Nevertheless, as I sort through his CDs, I am astonished at the breadth and depth of his collection.

But sound, too, was his own instrument. His voice. He viewed with real dismay the micing of actors on the stage. Felt deeply it was a result of so many tv and movie actors migrating to the stage. Those without breath or training. For him it had become simply natural. . . . I am just at the beginning of going deaf, and there is much I miss. When his voice would drop a little too low for me to hear, I'd say: Honey, I need your theatre voice, and he'd switch, without effort, or actually raising his voice at all, to a voice I could easily hear.

I'd figured this was a special gift to me.

Alas.