Music, My Dad and Me
My father was a musician. For a while, well before I was born, he played tenor saxophone in a band. He loved music, especially music of the big band variety. Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman were two of his idols. I think Dad learned to play in high school. I'm not sure where he found the time. He had after-school jobs from the time he was about 13, working at the Farmers' Market in Rochester, New York, and helping his father deliver coal. But he learned, and he kept that saxophone even after he quit the band to make a more reliable living.
My parents made sure that their children learned music. My mother never played an instrument, but she loved to sing, and would sing to us on car trips and at home when we were very young. Our family had a piano, and Mom and Dad signed my sisters and me up for lessons around the time we each entered first or second grade. They didn't have a lot of money then, but they must have seen musical skill as something they were positioned to provide and that would bring us joy throughout our lives.
I enjoyed piano lessons for a while, but after four years I told my mother I wanted to quit. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t. But while my piano lessons ended, my musical training did not. From fourth to sixth grade, I took saxophone lessons and played in the school band, using my father's tenor sax. The other boys who took lessons with me played alto sax, and I often envied them as the tenor was a pretty big instrument for a pre-adolescent boy to lug to school and back. But I managed to carry it during those fun band years, until I needed braces to fix an overbite and the orthodontist told me I’d have to give it up.
And so I ventured towards guitar. An avid Beatles fan, I wanted to learn guitar, and my Dad bought me an inexpensive starter guitar for Christmas one year. My cousin Tony knew how to play and gave me a few lessons with the Mel Bay beginners guitar book to get me started. From there, I learned chords with my friend Bob, who was a few months ahead of me on the learning curve, and we continued to teach ourselves better and better ways to play. It helped that we both had taken piano lessons, so we knew enough about music to jump right in.
In those early years I owned a few cheaply made guitars, including one or two different types of 12-string models. One was so bad that the tension on the strings started pulling the neck off the guitar body. By my sophomore year in high school, I let my parents know that I wanted something better. I had a chance to buy a small, used Martin six-string, a 000-18 model. Dad knew I couldn't afford it, so he let me trade- or cash-in his saxophone to cover most of the cost. Although I could no longer play the sax, he could, and we’d often hear him play at night from his office in the basement of our house, taking a break from the work he was doing to play some songs from his big band days. Dad gave up his music so that I could have mine, and it wasn’t until much later that I fully appreciated the sacrifice he had made.
By the time I was a high school senior, I upgraded from that little Martin to a brand new D-28, using money I had earned from a part-time job. It was one of the best acoustic guitars around, and I got a lot of mileage out of it. It’s still with me to this day.
Like my father and his saxophone, I pick up my guitar only rarely now. I let it fade amidst a busy life, easily forgotten because I have no close friend to play with and I get bored repeating the same old songs. And of course, it just doesn't seem as important today as it did when I was young. I still love to listen to music, old and new, and will even sing along with an old favorite tune when I hear one. But my performing days are well behind me, and I’m okay with that.
Tonight, as I sit at my computer, listening to the radio station play some good old-fashioned blues, I feel a void that only music can fill. And I miss my Dad and the sound of his saxophone rising up through the floor boards, bringing smiles to our faces, filling our happy home with love.