By David Shapiro

At precisely 1:20 p.m. for four consecutive days last week, I heard a disembodied voice speak to me when I was alone in the house.

"It's a long, long way to Pittsburgh," the voice repeated about 20 times, followed by a few bars from Beethoven's "Für Elise."

Perplexed, I searched for the source of the sound, but it hung in the air and I couldn't zero in on where it came from.

I thought better of any impulse to report this odd occurrence. If certain legislators found out I was hearing voices, they might get some unfortunate ideas about where my writings about them come from.

And I remembered poor Dan Rather, a fellow journalist who was ridiculed in 1986 when he reported being punched and kicked by a man who kept asking, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

People wondered about Rather's frequency. R.E.M. made a song about it, and Rather became a butt of late-night jokes for a decade until a mental patient who thought signals were being beamed into his head admitted to the assault.

I decided to look for clues in the meaning of the words that were being spoken to me.

I've been to Pittsburgh twice, both times in the early 1980s when I was working for a national news service in Washington, D.C. Had something happened there that offered subliminal direction for my life today?

The first visit was when former U.S. Rep. Cec Heftel was in a bad car accident and was airlifted to Pittsburgh for emergency surgery by a specialist.

The doctor refused a phone interview for a story on Heftel's condition, insisting that I travel to Pittsburgh to talk in person.

I rushed to National Airport in mid-afternoon, arrived at the hospital just before the doctor departed, did a half-hour interview and was back in Washington in time for dinner.

There was nothing especially eventful about this trip except that I had to look at X-rays of parts of the congressman's anatomy that I never would have wished to see.

A few years later, I returned to Pittsburgh to conduct a newswriting workshop at a suburban newspaper.

The big event was that I became distracted while looking for the newspaper building and wandered into an intersection against the light. I was broadsided by a Cadillac, my compact car was flattened and I was lucky to escape with only a crushing headache.

My head still throbbed when I arrived at the newspaper, where my first writing session was with one of the paper's best reporters.

"I want you to give it to me straight about all my weaknesses," she said.

"Well, you don't really have any weaknesses," I said. "My only suggestion is that you liven up your ledes a tad."

With that tiny bit of criticism, she burst into distraught tears that continued for 30 minutes as I fed her tissues. I recall thinking, "It's a long, long way out of Pittsburgh."

The fifth day the voice spoke, my wife was home and heard it, too. I was so relieved that I wasn't crazy.

She found buried among our grandson Corwin's toys a cheap talking pedometer given me by one of the multiple sclerosis drug companies.

(Don't ask why they gave a pedometer to a guy who uses their product because he can't walk.)

Corwin had been over that weekend and apparently programmed the pedometer's alarm to sound every day with a message he found amusing.

It's a long, long way to getting his trust fund.

David Shapiro can be reached at dave@volcanicash.net.