24/365 Did I Hear You Say You Love Me?/All I Do

My sister owned Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July, and I listened to it a lot in the spring and summer of 1977. Mostly up in my room. My favorite moment in the album is when they run the end of the first track—“Did I Hear You Say You Love Me?”—right into the second—“All I Do”—with no pause whatsoever, but no overlap either. It’s that tiny breath of no silence I’ve always loved.

And for some reason, it makes me think of that spring in ninth grade, even of a particular day. I’m in gym class with Pat. They call this class Lifetime Sports, making an attempt to offer us only-here-cuz-we-gotta-bees something beyond mangling team sports. Pat and I are off to hack away at some golf balls in high grass, and I think Lee is with us, and his cousin Vince. There we are: me, the saxophonist, two trombonists. Is it the instrumentation of the moment that makes Stevie go through my mind?

See, the thing is, I’m wrong. A couple of years ago I picked up the Hotter Than July CD, only to find that the album wasn’t released until 1980. OK, I guess that whole locked-in-my-room thing applied as easily at age eighteen as fifteen, but the ninth-grade-gym-class-with-jazz-band-
musicians thing? All I can figure is that “I Wish” was playing a lot on the radio that spring. I hope.