Word: marcus
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They were not really epiphanies. The way he tells it, Marcus Roberts' decisive moments of musical inspiration -- those times when you hear a tune and your whole life changes -- were more like . . . bumps. No epic moments. Just a few small occasions of collision...
...first one -- the seminal one -- happened when Roberts was eight, and he collided with a new piano in his home in Jacksonville. He had been blind for four years, and was not so much startled as seduced. "I sat right down," Marcus says, in his soft but insistent voice. "I thought, 'This, apparently, is for me. I could work on this...
...five, picking out notes when he accompanied his mother and father to church. It was these little improvs that led his parents to buy a piano. Roberts' mother was a gospel singer, his father a longshoreman, and it was no easy thing to come by money. At first young Marcus taught himself, and after a year he was good enough to play in church. He played with one hand or the other, but still hadn't figured out how to make both work together. "Horrible hand position," he remembers. At twelve, he started to take formal lessons in doing what...
...Uruguayan tanker Presidente Rivera, en route to Marcus Hook, Pa., was loaded with 28 million gal. of medium-heavy oil when it ran aground in the Delaware. While the spill was conspicuous, the Coast Guard's marine-safety office in Philadelphia moved quickly. Cleanup crews surrounded it with booms and began pumping the remaining oil in the ship's tanks into barges in order to limit the damage. The fast response was heartening. But the U.S. really needs a way of preventing more spills...
...tour is over, but the visitor should stay for the day in Harlem, beginning with a saunter down Seventh Avenue to the Mount Morris Park historical district. Girding the rocky park, today named for Marcus Garvey, are rows of beguiling Victorian houses. Head north on Fifth Avenue for an unpretentious lunch of pork chops and collard greens at La Famille...