John Steinbeck was my best friend.

This is a real nice jig, this one. I can feel it in my chest. I know almost all of the notes by heart...

I wonder what it used to be like, playing this a few hundred years back. Dirty little beggar boy by the name of Johnny Dhu, and he's playin' this better than I ever could. He's tapping his foot, and the people are dancing and laughing and passing around a flask of what must be whiskey. They're peasants, the lot of them, dirt poor and they-just-don't-care.

Spilling out of someone's cellar, they are.

I can see their flickering images in black and white...

But then I falter and it's just me again, playing in the corner of a photograph-plastered room.