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Dear John,

We have more in common than you might expect. You and I grew up in the same small town, a North Carolina furniture and hosiery mill town, where my grandfather, a doctor, tended the sick, and yours, a preacher, tended souls. It’s possible that my granddad—the town’s only surgeon at the time—operated on your kin. And it’s possible that your mother and aunt, who worked at the country club where I would spend summers playing tennis, waited on my grandparents, maybe even my father as a boy, when they came for Sunday lunch. Years later I would have my rehearsal dinner in this same country club. I knew of you by then, but not about our hometown connection, and I didn’t fall for you until years later, after I was married and you had long since gone.

You needn’t worry, this isn’t a typical “Dear John” letter. It’s a love letter from a secret admirer. A thank you note from a neighbor you never knew, a girl who walked the same downtown sidewalks you once walked, and now, on return trips back home, jogs down them grooving to your tunes.

You see John, over time our connection has grown deeper. I knew you by name but didn’t know anything substantial about you until college, when I took “Intro to Jazz” my senior year, mostly because my boyfriend at the time was taking it, and it was supposedly an easy “A.” Easy, maybe, if you had a musical ear, but not for me, a tone-deaf gal whose harmonic expertise maxed out at John Denver and Sonny and Cher.

Our professor was Paul Jeffrey, a heavy-weight saxophonist who once played with Thelonious Monk and other monumental “cats.” Jeffrey’s gig now was teaching over-privileged college kids, most of us white, the finer points of improvisation and how black guys jamming at Birdland and the Village Vanguard changed the musical landscape forever. Cats like you, Coltrane, a preacher’s kid from High Point, who’d head to Philly after high school and go on to become a revolutionary jazz legend.

I’d take notes during Jeffrey’s lectures and listen to tapes, doing my damnedest to tell a saxophone from a trumpet, or pick out a bass line, or distinguish be-bop from swing, or your style from that of Charlie Parker or Ornette Coleman. To my virgin ear, the differences were subtle, sneaky; I struggled. But my boyfriend/tutor heard it plain as day. He was tuned in, and turned on. Jazz spoke to him; he got the tonal progression, the edgy dissonance. He heard your outrush of arpeggios and signature “sheets of sound,” while I just heard sound. And so I learned “music appreciation” vicariously, through his passion, his insight.

And this, John—your music, your seminal semi-quavers spiraling up from some place deep, spiritual and subconscious, and his connection to it—is in part why my jazz class classmate is now my husband. Because he could hear what I could not; he could understand a musical language foreign to me and resonate at limbic levels with artistic genius that I could only recognize, not comprehend. It’s why 20 years later my house is overrun with Blue Note boxed sets and CDs of Miles, Monk, Bird, Chet Baker, you, ’Trane, and all the rest. The mystery still moves and amazes me—how my lover dissects and digests layers of tonal complexity that I can barely hum along to. I want to see and feel the world through his ears.

When we were newly married and without children, we indulged our jazz appetites, going to hear Art Blakey in London and your pianist, McCoy Tyner, in Boston. We’d go for late night drinks at Cambridge’s Regatta Bar, taking potluck with whatever trio or quartet was performing. I felt sophisticated and sensual, expanding my aesthetic comfort zone, but always deferring to my husband’s more in-tune interpretations.

Your music has been a constant refrain in my marriage, a metaphor for the type of relationship I strive for. Listening to your classic “My Favorite Things” and hearing how you take the sing-song “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens” to a fresh and daring expansiveness is a take-home lesson that favorite things—relationships included—require continual exploration, continual development, a playful openness to chaos and dissonance, and only then, gradually, a return to melodic, comfortable familiarity.

So now, dear John, this gal from your hometown is bringing you home. Your recordings of “My Favorite Things” and “A Love Supreme” are often the soundtrack for our family dinners, background music while the kids argue over dish duty. My girls aren’t versed enough yet to “name that jazz artist” the way they can tell (after years of pop quizzes) Bob Dylan from Neil Young, but they are hearing the plaintive high notes, the sweeping melodic freedom that was your musico-spiritual search. And somewhere down in their still-raw artistic souls, down below Taylor Swift lyrics and tunes from Glee, they’ll know this musical truth: that the heart longs to be understood, and sometimes elusive notes and incantatory rhythm is the only language love speaks. So listen for it, the soaring saxophone, the raindrops on roses, the wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings. 

Stephanie Hunt is a writer, mother and closet John Denver fan in Mount Pleasant, SC. She plans to visit John Coltrane’s recently erected statue on her next trip back home. Read more at stephaniehuntwrites.com.