My Nine Volt Heart                                                                                             By Richard Wagamese
	I was given a radio when I was ten. It was an old General Electric transistor, brown with vintage 1950s look, about the size of a pencil case. The radio was a reward for doing the chores assigned to me in my adopted home. I’d been there for about a year, and that radio was the first thing I recall ever being able to call my own.
	I took it everywhere with me. It sat beside me while I trimmed the hedges and weeded the flower beds. When I did my homework it sat within my reach in case a favourite song came up, and I even arranged a way to carry it in the handlebar basket of my bicycle. Every week at allowance time I ran to the corner store for one of the nine-volt batteries that kept it going.
	I heard the Rolling Stones for the first time on that radio. I heard Curt Gowdy call the 1966 World Series between the Baltimore Orioles and the Los Angeles Dodgers. China developed the H-bomb in 1967, the first heart transplant was performed in South Africa, the United States began bombing Hanoi, Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car crash and Muhammad Ali lost the heavyweight title because he wouldn’t fight in Vietnam. I heard all of that on my radio.
It was as if the world had come within my reach. I was a ten-year-old kid in a small Canadian city, and it often didn’t feel like there was much going on. Through that radio I came to see life as larger, more brilliant more complex. But what I remember most were the nights. I would huddle beneath my sheets with a penlight and that old radio, turning the dial and searching out signals from what seemed like an endless universe of sounds, then writing down the frequencies so I would never lose them.
I discovered the blues of Chicago: B.B King, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner and the raspy, old-time sound of Robert Johnson. Another night I heard Lefty Frizzell, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and the high lonesome sound of traditional country music on a station out of Tennessee. It was the 1960s, so I heard the great developing thunder of rock’n’roll from Detroit and Cleveland. Deep in the purple midnight of my youth, I heard jazz from Buffalo and Toronto. I learned the sounds of jubilation, Melancholy and aching solemnity.
	I heard Mahalia Jackson sing gospel late one night as the rain spattered against my window. Another night, when the moon was full and the air didn’t seem to move at all, I heard Billie Holiday sing about the strange fruit hanging from trees in the southern U.S. the loneliness and loss in that voice touched something inside me, and I cried. And there is never a time when I hear Frank Sinatra sing “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” that I don’t return to my cave beneath the sheets.
	Everywhere I travelled on the dial of that little radio I encountered something that entered me. There were sounds and ideas, stories and images, people and places that my heart and ears had never before experienced. Because my life was sad then, I allowed the voice of that tiny General Electric radio to fill me. The nine-volt heart that beat in me then was a heart yearning for understanding, for inspiration and for a genuine connection to things.
	In my mid-twenties, I found a home for myself on the dial as a disc jockey, a program director, a newscaster, a commentator and an ad writer. Radio was a logical place for me to be, surrounded by the stuff that had shaped my world as a kid. Life called, and I went on to become a writer, publishing books and newspaper columns. Still, that nine-volt heart has never quit beating.
	The MP3 CDs I’ve composed most recently flow from jazz to rock to country to classical. I’ve heard a lot of music in my nearly fifty-three years. Some of it I cling to, some I reject, but I listen. I grow. That old radio taught me that there’s more to the world than what I can see, and I owe it to myself to seek it out. Learning that has made me a better man, a better person and, in the end, a better Indian.