Serenade in the key of glee

He was so eager to make the trip, he called several times to make sure it hadn't been canceled.

"Mr. Lopez, is the pickup still at 9 a.m?"

"Yes, Mr. Ayers. I'll see you in the morning."

When I pulled up, he was standing on the sidewalk playing a skid row reveille on his trumpet. He had a small overnight bag and five more instruments -- cello, violin, French horn, clarinet and flute, meaning he had made the difficult decision to leave several other instruments home.

We stowed the gear in the station wagon and caught Interstate 5 for the long haul north. My friend Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, who had never been to San Francisco, was scheduled to be honored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Flying was out of the question because he has no photo ID.

I've never looked forward to that monotonous stretch of I-5, but for better or worse, Mr. Ayers was likely to liven things up. Sometimes he can get a tad claustrophobic or edgy, and being trapped in a car for six hours might take its toll.

In other words, I had no idea what to expect. But nothing soothes Mr. Ayers' soul like music, so I tuned the radio to classical KUSC-FM as we left Los Angeles. Mr. Ayers sat in wonder, squinting as if searching for a way to describe Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1, Opus 11.

"That's the sound of a child's heart," he said. He listened a little longer and added, "That's what God looks like."

Up and over the Tejon Pass we cruised, Mr. Ayers marveling at the majesty of open spaces. As we descended the Grapevine and hit the floor of the great valley, he was reminded of Texas, Colorado and his home state of Ohio. The turnoff for the little farm town of Arvin streaked by, and he said he wouldn't mind living in the area. "It's nice and clean here," he said. "You get back to skid row and it's filled with debris."

We passed fields of corn and big rigs carrying mounds of tomatoes, and the open road ahead disappeared into the horizon. Mr. Ayers, as I had long known, is the world's worst back-seat driver. He's a white-knuckler, bolting forward frequently to brace himself against the dash.

"Mr. Lopez, we're going to be killed," he said as a lumbering truck pulled in front of us.

I plugged in a CD to calm his nerves. Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings." Mr. Ayers, who studied at Juilliard before his dreams came unraveled, once told me he practiced that piece while standing in the window of his New York City apartment, watching the falling snow. As he listened now, he recalled his first romance in Cleveland.