Friday, June 03, 2005
Passings: A Musical Interlude from the Old Man
Today is day two of the Pathways to Justice Conference, which is going very well thanks for asking. I’ll be away from desks and computers all day long, till I leave the conference site for the Fillmore Auditorium and this evening’s Electric Hot Tuna show, which Kel and I are seeing courtesy of Dave and Kim, together with a dozen or so of our closest friends and several hundred of the less close variety. It seems a fitting time to post a bit of an essay about music, relationships, and continuity. Or whatever.
I don’t think Herman and my dad were ever exactly close. Herman was around 45 when Dad was born, and had a busy job that kept him out of the house a lot. Their father-son gulf was wide, and it got wider when dad moved out to the left coast with mom after grad school. By the time Herman moved to California too, I was already in my teens and had only seen him a handful of times.
What’s more (or less), I hadn’t been regaled from infancy with tales of Papa Herman, as I had been with tales of Grandpa Jerry on my mom’s side. His stories were substantially untold, and his persona was vaguely mysterious, but mostly just seriously underdeveloped. Papa and I did share one little riff, though, with dad and my sister too: clasping our pinkey fingers and reciting together the mantra, “Stick together 4-ever.” That was it - all that bound us, our entire common ground. Papa didn’t do sports, or jokes, or idle chat - at least not the Papa I knew. For us, “stick together 4-ever” was as close as we got, to a relationship and to each other.
Herman lived near to us for about a decade in the ‘70s and ‘80s, during which time he slowly lost interest in life and allowed himself to expire at a very ripe old age. We saw him on friday nights a few times a month, less often as his infirmities progressed. Sticking together 4-ever was honored mainly in the breech. He grew more distant from me, and I from him, as his sand ran out. By the end, he seemed more a stranger than a grandfather. I just didn’t know the man. I felt no connection.
Lately I’ve found myself reevaluating that relationship, or lack thereof. It seems things went deeper than I’d figured. In the course of a long tiring day, I notice that I’ve developed the habit of chanting out little tunes to myself - just three or four notes, a quick phrase, an auditory button to tie together two pieces of my life, a way to overcome momentary fatigue. A tiny perky tune, usually vaguely klezmer in nature. Yi-yi-yi; didel deedle dum. No meaning to it, nor any behind it. A swatch of sound.
Except I’ve also noticed that I’m not making these tunelets up out of whole cloth. I actually learned them somehow - and I learned them from Herman. Of the few things I remember about him, I do remember this: that he sang these little tunes too - while waiting for supper to be served, or as we drove him from place to place, or any random time. He deedled then just as I deedle now. My song that means “I am waiting for this yawn to end” was his; so is the one that means, “from one dull job to the next.” I am unconsciously plagerizing grandpa Herman’s musical segues.
Papa was no songbird, and my dad wasn’t much into those mini-refrains either (being more inclined towards Gilbert and Sulllivan, J.P. Souza, and scatalogical doggerel). Yet somehow I hear Papa singing through my voice every time one of those bits of music sneaks out of me. Despite my lifelong belief that he and I really didn’t share anything, his spirit seems sometimes to sing through mine.
Turns out Papa was once well-known in his Kansas City community in the ‘20s and ‘30s for a column he regularly wrote for a local newsletter. Stick together 4-ever, indeed.
