The Emotional Sneak-Attack

One of the elements in life that can be jarring is the emotional sneak-attack. We can think, as much as we want, that we have filed our experiences into their appropriate cabinets and closed the doors; that everything is shuffled into its respective folder for permanent storage. But experiences are less like files put into a cabinet than they are like animals stuffed into cages; and a caged animal will try to get out.

I was in the car, a few days ago, when I remembered an incident with my dad, a little while before he died. He was in the early grips of dementia. My mother had needed surgery, so I went to their apartment, while she was in the hospital, to stay with him, because his mind just was not right.

That night we had numerous "conversations." One of them had been about how my father "knew what was going on" between "[my mom] and [so-and-so]." Clearly, my dad pointed out, they were having an affair. For the record, he was about as wrong as one can get: [so-and-so] is my mom's brother and, he's gay. 

But I would sit and listen and do my best not to patronize him -- to make the conversation as real as possible; to endure the sadness it brought upon me to hear him struggle with a partial understanding that he was making no sense and his efforts at defending himself as sane: "I know -- you think I am crazy..."

Finally, it was bed time. As I was getting him settled in, he began to tell me about the noises he was hearing at night; that he thought there might be ghosts in the place. My dad had always, even when lucid, had a belief in the possibility of supernatural phenomena, so I was not surprised that he now believed there might be some retirement community haunting going on.

I did my best to dismiss the sounds he was "hearing" -- a loud heater; the refrigerator motor -- and he was pretty well tucked in. As I left the room, he said, good naturedly, "Do you want to sleep in here? Like, in the bed, here?"

"Dad..."

"I mean," he said (and pardon the direct quotation from a man of another generation who would, in life, never have discriminated against even those for whom he used politically incorrect terms), "It's not like we're faggots..."

"I know, Dad," I said. "It's not that. It's just that it is seven o'clock and I am not really tired yet."

"Oh," he said, clearly disappointed. "Well...maybe when you are tired..."

"Yeah...maybe. Good night."

Well, I didn't go in there when I was tired. I slept on my mom and dad's awful couch. In fact, it threw my back out of whack for about three months. Maybe that was payback for my insensitivity...

....because, all I could think, last week, when this event of about four years ago popped into my head, was: couldn't you have just gotten into bed with your dad? After all the irrational fears he talked you through as a kid; after all the comfort he brought you in the late hours, after a long day's work, when he would rather have been asleep? 

I can still see his face in a flashback to my childhood; I can see him in silhouette, sitting on the edge of my bed, on a night of sickness or of irrational childhood fear, looking down at me. I can feel him gently squeeze my arm and say, "If I could, I'd take this from you and onto myself, I would. I'd be sick or scared for you, if I could..."

But I couldn't inconvenience myself when he saw a monster in his closet...

Maybe a better metaphor for this is that memories are sharks down below us, cruising around, waiting to clamp onto our legs. This one got me good.

A Footprint in Time

Last week, we attended the "Night of the Arts" program at my sons' school. My boys are in the choir

and in the band and their performances, under the new music teacher, who is excellent, were outstanding. At the end of the night, though, a slight problem: the handle on my son's trumpet case had broken.

Let me tell you about the case, and the trumpet it contains. When I was in middle school, my father, who made his living as an arranger and a trumpet player, decided to buy himself a new horn. He went with a Bach Stradivarius "'73 Lightweight." It was an very expensive instrument; today, to give you an idea, the trumpet lists for around $4,000 to $5000.

My dad played it for awhile, but decided, in the end, that he liked his Yamaha horn better and he went back to that one. So, when it came time for me to start playing trumpet in the school band, he handed me the Stradivarius and said, "Just be careful with it." I have to say, deserving of it or not, I played it for quite a few years, and not a dent.

My son received the treasured (and expensive) family heirloom with the same instructions, and he is also doing well with it.

When the case handles broke, I went to look online for a replacement case. The case my father had (a Bach case), in an updated form, costs $300, so I decided to simply look for replacement handles. I found them and ordered them, so, problem solved.

Before I ordered, though, I wanted to measure the broken handle. For this, I needed to take it off of the case. As I unbuckled the ends, I had to pause. That handle had also been a replacement for the original one. It struck me pretty hard: the last pair of hands to buckle that handle onto the case had been my dad's.

He's gone now, but, that small thing he did remained done until that moment. A moment, from the past, overlooked and, in the grand scheme, unimportant was preserved. That moment in which he simply fixed that case was preserved as long as that handle remained buckled. A silly thing, isn't it? But it always seems to be those things are the most profound evidence of a person's existence -- things from the everyday that endure like footprints in time.

It feels a little like I brushed my dad's hand when I took that handle off -- like we touched each other, if only in the most brief and ethereal way.

On Celebrity Deaths

I hope no one sees this as a critique of their emotional ractions, because it is not meant to be. If anything, maybe it is a critique of my own. Perhaps I'm insensitive...

But, with the passing of David Bowie, I am once again reminded that I really don't get very upset when celebrities die. I hear people talking about being "heartbroken" by the loss of a celebrity -- a lot of this went around with Robin Williams -- and I feel a bit callous.

Sure, I always have a moment of "oh, what a shame..." Then, I continue eating my sandwich. I don't drag through the day.

I had a lot of respect for Bowie. I was never a big fan, but I always respected his artistic integrity and even his sense of humor. He seemed like a good guy. I guess if he were one of my musical heroes, it might have hit me harder...

No sarcasm intended: one of my
favorite acting performances by Bowie.
He voiced the character on the steps.
(Note the different-colored eyes.)

I have to admit that when Arthur Miller died in 2005, I was driving and I felt upset enough to pull over to the side of the road for a minute. I suppose that when John Williams, the composer, dies, I will have a similar reaction. But these people contributed to my growth as a musician and as a writer. They affected me directly and deeply. That feels a bit different than if, say, an actor I really like dies.

Maybe I am underestimating the power of art. Maybe I am being something of an artsy elitist. I am questioning the connection of the artist to the common audience and chalking that connection up to something less than the connection of an artist to an artist. I probably shouldn't do that.

Still, I remain skeptical that there is a lot of hyperbole out there on the social media sites... I'm not saying everyone is overdoing it, because, surely, many people really loved Bowie (and maybe even Alan Rickman) but, there has to be a little over-dramatizing going on out there.

All I know (all any of us really knows) is the world inside my own head, and, in there, the losses of celebrities who haven't profoundly affected me are simply not that deeply felt, no matter how much I liked them.

"Soul" (Why I Don't Miss My Dad So Much)

Many of my fairly regular readers know that my dad passed away in December of 2013. Ever since then, I have been very much aware of people online and in life posting and talking about missing their deceased parents, every day -- even parents who have been gone for decades.  I see memes about the "hole" in the lives of children who lost their fathers and mothers and I feel a mix of guilt and puzzlement, because I don't feel that way.

Our view. A little bit of loss of the strings'
presence, at times, but a visual feast for the
boys' impressionable minds -- and mine.

Should I feel slightly emptier without my dad in the world? Strangely, I feel just the opposite.

I have long thought that people who have an extremely hard time with life after the normally-timed and non-tragic loss of their parents (that is, excluding those who lost their parents way too early or whose parents were eaten by escaped zoo animals) might be wrestling with regrets. I do miss my dad from time to time, but that is all. I sometimes miss his presence. For us, there was nothing left unsaid; there was no movie-plot father and son headbutting or dark competition between us. He loved and respected me and I knew it; I loved and respected him and he knew it.

So, there's that.

Corny as it may sound, though, real connections cannot be broken even by death. I think of Donne's great poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and though his poem refers to romantic love (and even makes some bawdy references) the general idea can apply to familial love, too, especially when the speaker says:

My Father's Transformation

If you are anything like me (and for your sake, I hope you are not) you spent a lot of time in your early life wondering what it was going to be like to lose a parent. It was so bad, for me, that I would lie in bed at night, when I was a boy, doing math -- I would try to figure out how old I would be if my dad or mom died at this age or that age. The goal, there, in my young mind, was to determine whether I would be "old enough to handle it."

This was all prompted by my grandfather's too-early death. He was only in his sixties. I guess it got me kind of paranoid.

Well, my dad made it into his late seventies and he died about five months ago. Am I old enough to handle it? I'm forty-six.

I remember, in my bedtime calculations, I once worked it out that, if my dad died at a certain age, I would be 30 -- I'd be "a man," by then, so things would be okay, I reasoned. Well, at forty-six, it was still hard, but...I'm okay.

What I really find interesting is that I feel closer, now, to my dad than I did when he was here over the last few years. He suffered from dementia and from general state of melancholy in the years before he died. These conditions altered him quite a bit -- his flawed character traits were amplified and his enthusiasm for things -- even his deep love of music -- seemed to fade. His strong independent nature became reversed. In short, he was not the same guy who raised me.

Death and Arrogance

Writers have been writing about death for centuries.

That's adorable, isn't it?

When it comes down to the event, in whatever form, we might as well be three-year-olds trying to write about quantum physics. Even if we are Shakespeare.

So I won't write about it. Maybe I'll feel deluded enough about my own abilities to give it a shot later; maybe later, I will join the halls of the wildly conceited. Today, though, I'm feeling pretty realistic.

On Earning One's Eternal Rest

I've managed -- despite having read lots of books, and despite, in the course of my formal studies, having been submerged in a sea of sideways-smiling intellectuals who think me rather quaint -- to have held on to my faith in God.

That faith has evolved, for sure. My concept of God has become more and more complex as I have grown. I've long since left behind the simplistic perspective that many hold on to until their deaths. But, it is nice to go backward, if only for the sake of exploring an idea. So, let's look at it this way:

I hope, when I see God some day -- hopefully after a good many years (Father forgive me, because I do love this world) -- he will give me the thumbs-up, because I tend to wonder if I have made the right choices. 

I toss and turn about it. I really do. I live under a set of self-imposed standards that make things difficult as hell, at times.

Wondering How I'll Die

Well, I suppose it's time to think about what kind of an old man I want to be. I'm forty-four. I'm not an old man, by any stretch, but, I'm sort of closer to old than young, when you think about it.

Nothing about that freaks me out, by the way. When I was a teenager, I used to think about being a dad some day. I used to think about what I was going to be when I grew up, like every other kid does. There was nothing weird about that -- so why would it be weird to think about being old -- or about dying, for that matter?

I'll die. I have no doubt. But I have come to two conclusions: 1) If I die, I don't want it to be my fault and (2), up to that great gettin' up day, I plan to remain a man.

Not-so-old Rocky.

There's nothing two-dimensional about my last statement. I don't mean I want to be able to beat up everyone in my class. What I mean is, I want to age with courage and grace. I want to maintain my dignity. To do this, I might well have to learn to keep my head up while people help me with things I can no longer do for myself. That will be hard, but I plan to do it if necessary. (I'd love to die of a heart attack while wrestling a grizzly bear at ninety, but the odds are against it.)

But the idea is to limit things that I will no longer be able to do. I don't plan to "go gentle into that good night."

Being a Real Man

I need to figure out what it means to be a man so I can teach my boys. I'm neither stupid nor conceited enough to think that their success as men will exclusively be a result of what I teach them; each of my sons is his own individual. But, if I don't have the definition straight in my own head, how can I teach them anything?

I know it isn't fashionable these days, but I respect toughness. I also respect courage, intelligence and honesty. (I know -- these things are corny, too. Alas, in some ways, I have just been scraped off of the cob.)

There are a lot of guys out there with forceful attitudes and loud voices who couldn't stand up for their families if a fight became necessary. There are a lot of thugs out there who pick fights to compensate for their own little-bitty...hearts. There are a lot of guys out there who think making money makes them men and there are plenty of others who make very little and act as if those who make a lot of coin are categorically "soft." I'm reminded of an exchange in Spielberg's Jaws:

Quint:You got city hands, Mr. Hooper. You've been countin' money all your life.

Hooper: Hey, I don't need this. I don't need this working-class-hero crap.

And under no circumstances does being a man depend on the volume of one's sexual conquests. (You'd think this era was as passe' as butterfly collars and velour, but over my years as a musician, I have seen it is not so for some of my fellow males.)

Kwai Chang Caine, from the 70s show, Kung Fu:
The best example
of a man ever on presented on television.
He's the one TV character
I would gladly see my sons imitate.

And "gay" or "straight" does not enter into it, in terms of conduct in the world, by the way. (It may seem strange to some blockheads out there that I think gay men are neither excluded from the responsibilities of toughness, courage, intelligence and honesty nor precluded from being considered men simply because of their sexual orientation. No one gets a break from my exceedingly arrogant evaluations. Everyone has an equal chance to be a spineless loser, in my eyes...)