Remembering Melissa

2493 Richton, in Detroit, is the oldest place I know. It’s not the address that I was born into, but when I think of “home”, the place my roots lead me to, a place where I always had a place, it’s that house that I think of.

Richton was the home of my Aunt Bernice, my mother’s sister, and her family. It was also the hub of my extended family; the place my brother Rhett and I vacationed almost every summer after we moved to New York, and where so many other family members – some so distantly related that the connection was not always clear – lived for a time when they came north from West Virginia or the Carolinas.

Aside from Aunt Bernice, the person I most associate with this most cherished home of my heart, is her daughter, my first cousin, Melissa. Melissa was the eldest of the small bunch of us cousins growing up together. Her brother Jeff was the youngest. In between them were Rhett and I, and Linda and Terry, whose father Earl was our mother’s closest cousin. The six of us spent so much time together, mostly on Richton, with Melissa presiding over and guiding us. She was only three or four years older than Rhett, but her maturity and confidence made her almost adult in our eyes. Certainly, she was the intermediary between our childhood worlds and all that lay beyond.

I have three standout memories of Melissa. The first dates from our earliest childhood, when the six of us, and a couple of the Spielman kids from across the street, would gather at Richton on a Friday night, left by our parents into Aunt Bernice’s care. Melissa was, among other things, a great entertainer and story-teller, and the bunch of us never tired of Melissa taking us into the basement, turning out the lights, and thrilling us with a scary story.

Our favorite, for which we clamored every time, was about Johnny & the Liver. Looking back, it’s such a gruesome and ridiculous story, but we never tired of Melissa’s re-telling. It’s about a kid who is given a dollar by his mother, to go to the butcher’s for a pound of liver. Johnny decides to keep the dollar, to buy candy or something. So, spying a bum lying unconscious in an alley, Johnny takes his utility knife and cuts out the man’s liver, wraps it in paper, and takes it home. After dinner (and no, I can’t remember how Melissa covered that part!), Johnny goes to bed, where he’s soon unsettled by disturbing sounds outside his window. After awhile, he hears a hoarse whisper, rising to him from the back alley that runs beneath the sill. It says, “Johnny! I want my LIVER back, I’m on the FIRST step!” This was the point at which we kids started to squeal and quake and poke each other in the dark. Melissa would build up the tension, with details of Johnny’s efforts, first to ignore the voice, then to somehow barricade himself against the inevitable retribution stalking him in the night. I won’t even try to duplicate the level of gleeful terror that Melissa would have inspired by the time the vengeful spectre reaches the tenth step, and Johnny meets his fate. Ah, what fun that was!

My second memory finds me at about fifteen, during one of our summer stays in Detroit. Melissa had blossomed musically, and was playing piano and singing in the church choir. I’d started dabbling in music myself, and was sitting one day, trying to pick out the piano part of “O Happy Day”, the gospel tune by the Edwin Hawkins singers that had become a hit on top-forty radio. Melissa heard me going at it, and sat down and taught me a wonderful version of the tune, with the left hand banging out the strong, rhythmic baseline that made the piece so dynamic. Melissa was so patient with me, but also, as excited as I was, as I gradually caught the energy and flow of the song.

My third memory is from just before my 20^th birthday, when I’d dropped out of college to bounce around the country for a few months. Over the years, 2493 Richton had seemed to diminish, somehow. We cousins were branching out, trying to discover our own paths, the elders were older and less active, and I remember a feeling that perhaps something that had been alive and beautiful was now dead and done. But I arrived to find Melissa, not long married, and with her baby daughter, Ramana, just on the verge of learning to walk. I instantly fell in love with Ramana, and seeing my cousin, now married and a mother, was transformative. She’d always been like an advance scout for my generation, into the world of maturity and adulthood. And here she was – ARRIVED! Melissa was still the same young spirit, loving and fun and creative as she’d ever been, and at the same time, she was a married woman, with a child, and an entirely different future to grow into.

But the key thing about that visit was seeing how Ramana’s very presence created that future, not just for Melissa, but for the entire family. We were all in love with Ramana. And I remember my mother, also visiting, and aunt Audrey, the matriarch of the family, great aunt to both Melissa and I, who was living at Richton at the time, and so many others in the family, sitting around for hours at a time it seemed, watching Ramana’s every move, commenting on her every gurble, delighting at every expression and exploration, seeing the future emerging in front of our eyes, bringing new life, new hope, new possibility.

So yes, my strongest memories of Melissa aren’t just about her at all. They are embodied in her children, in those of us she taught, and those of us she guided and cared for. Her life was never just her life, it’s always been the life of an entire family, of a community, of a place that was home for so many. And so, of course I will miss Melissa. But she’ll never be gone, really. She, like love and life, is everywhere. She’s as deep as roots grow, as long as memory, as eternal as hope and possibility, and as satisfying to the spirit as being scared and thrilled in the dark, because, after all, it’s your mother/sister/cousin telling the scary story,  and you know that the light is just up the stairs a way.

Thank you, Melissa.

Last Days

     I received word of two deaths just a few days ago. Both passings were on Easter Day.

     I only met Bill Brown once. He was my very first visitor to Cloud, stopping by because our mutual friend Shadow, from whom we bought Cloud, had thought to connect us. He was pleasant and welcoming. He was a musician, and we'd hoped to play together sometime. For various reasons, Bill and I never managed to actually meet again. Shadow says that he went in peace.

     My friend Jacquie died on Sunday as well. I've used a superlative with Jacquie that I've never used for anyone else, often calling her my all-time favorite co-worker. She was that for at least three reasons. She was passionate about her work with our homeless and mentally ill clients when we worked together at Dixon Hall. But it was a very natural passion, not rooted in philosophy or professional posture, but in her simple, human appreciation and connection with people.

     The second reason she was my favorite is that she extended the same caring to me and to our other colleagues as she did to our clients. She mothered us. When I wore sandals to work, she used to declare her partnership with my wife in declaring war on my dry and rusty feet. And she egged me on about my writing, saying she wanted to see me on Oprah when my as yet unwritten novel was chosen for her bookclub.

     The third reason Jacquie was such a favorite is that she was completely irrepressible. If something was on her mind, if she felt something about a situation, it was going to get said, no matter the consequences. This didn't always lead to "polite" interactions, but it was powerful and effective. I admit that she won me over with this trait at our very first meeting, which was at my interview for a position at Dixon Hall. Jacquie would/could not repress her positive reaction to some of my responses, practically cheering me on, depite the efforts of the department manager to enforce an objective and impartial formality for the occassion. And Jacquie was equally ready to argue a point when she felt I'd made a wrong call.

     My heart and my condolesces go out to the families and friends of Bill and Jacquie. They will be missed.

Brother Love

I have a unique relationship with my brother, Rhett Preston Kirby. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s better than other brothers, or that he does and provides what other brothers do not, though I feel that those things are true. I don’t place much value in comments of the type: “My brother, father, mother, wife, school, country, teacher, cat, chili recipe, etc. is the best that ever was!” Because, well...how could a person  ever really know? It’s meaningless for me to say he’s the best, without offering solid evidence. I’ll pass on the superlatives and just say why he is what he is in my life.

So, what’s so unique about him, anyway? First of all, unique defines his role in my life. Rhett is the only person I’ve ever known who is like him. Sure, you say. So he’s a unique individual. Aren’t we all? Well, it’s deeper than that. And here’s why. My brother and I are about as different as brothers can be. We have different likes, inclinations, personalities, ways of engaging the world. We have different skills and foibles, different things we strive for. We’ve carved out our places in the world using wholly different tools and maps. You could even say that, with all our differences, we inhabit different worlds, and that would be substantially true. What it comes down to is that, without the accident of having been born into the same family at approximately the same time, there’s little chance I’d ever have come to know him. And, it’s why I’ve never really known anyone like him. Which is what makes him so unique to me, as I believe I am to him.

It took me a couple of decades to realize this, and to begin to appreciate Rhett in a very special way. In the sphere of my life, he has perspectives on things completely unlike those of friends, colleagues and partners I’ve attracted over the years. And, because I love him, and he me, I am able to interact with this alien intelligence in ways deep and intimate enough as to instruct, enlighten and inspire me.

Of course, I exaggerate our differences. We come from the same parents, were born in the same city into similar circumstances, and through most of our pre-adult years, our physical and social journeys were parallel. And all these similarities, all that we share, is essential to the love and bond between us.

That bond has always felt absolute and unconditional. We have our disagreements; we used to fight often enough. As adults, we’ve mostly lived far apart, sometimes not seeing one another for years at a time. We’ve hardly ever exchanged Christmas or birthday gifts, and the odd time that something is given, one to the other, it never sets a precedent of creates any kind of expectation.

But emotionally, or spiritually...no, maybe deeper than that, even... on the level of who we are, we are bonded. Maybe it’s on the level of the “story” we believe ourselves to be living, how we situate ourselves and each other in the world of “meaning”. On that level, in that place, we are deeply connected, mirrors of one another, alter egos, each a kind of harmony to the other’s melody, the chorus behind one another’s center stage. We are joined, in simple fact.

He’s been with me from my beginning and populates my earliest memories. In one of them, he’s bent over on the sidewalk in front of our house, retying my shoe lace, teaching me how to do it myself. In another, he’s rescuing me from a tree down the street. With his encouragement, I’d mustered the confidence to climb up it, but wouldn’t come down again. There’s never been any doubt of our connection. And we’ve both noted, as we’ve journeyed through life, our surprise at how few other siblings seem as solid and sure, as quietly passionate about their bond, as we are of our brotherhood.

I came to realize, as I learned to ponder the whys and wherefores of my life, that there were reasons for all of this. Our mutual commitment got serious reinforcement when we moved from Detroit to New York, when I was five and he was seven. For a few weeks or months we were shuttled here and there, sometimes with our father, sometimes both parents, occasionally with strangers, while our parents tried to settle on some place and some way for us to all live together. We changed schools and neighborhoods a few times through the next few years, and so often, we were each the single familiar face in one another’s world. This shifting went on, in one way or another, until we entered our teens. At the height of our life as wanderers, we found ourselves in East Germany, where our mother sang in night clubs and stage shows, on a series on month-long contracts. We stayed in small hotels, and my brother and I would meet the local kids, and learn their games and a few new words. Once we taught a group of boys how to play baseball, in an empty lot in Leipzig, and a small crowd gathered to watch.



Our parents were there with us, but much of the time Rhett and I felt like it was us two against the world. Not ‘against’ in the sense that there was any painful struggle to it. Merely in the sense that everything outside of us was different, and only we knew who we were and where we’d come from. And no one else could ever understand all that. Why even try to explain. We had each other. And it was wonderful! We grew up feeling that, despite any differences, we were sharing one journey, one adventure, one perspective on the big world that lay ahead and all around us. It was one long adventure, and the two of us, the ever successful protagonists in some epic saga.

We moved and moved again, lived with one parent then the other, watched them become disaffected, then divorce, all the while sharing our whispered conversations in our bedroom when the lights were out, our speculations about our fate and what lay ahead. And all the while, Rhett was my protector, my biggest fan, my confidant, my guide.

At one point, we were in a couple of professional stage plays, sharing the same rolls on alternating nights, and bringing our very different energies and personas to the roles. That experience is a great metaphor for how we felt about our connected destinies. However different we were, we knew that we shared a path unique to ourselves, and not translatable to others. Trust, devotion, love. I learned the depths of those emotions from my brother, through those years of growing up.

Eventually, our lives settled. We wound up back in New York, with our father. A few years in the same place led to a renewed sense of home, to new friends who became old friends. We began to develop in our separate and individual ways. Rhett played basketball. I joined the school orchestra. I read books. He caroused with his buddies. So there came a point during our teens when my brother and I didn’t have much to do with each other. We were each too involved in finding and furnishing our niches in life. I remember feeling that he just didn’t fit into mine very well. I went away to school first; he did the same, a year or so later. And that was when one of the differences in us really began to assert itself.

My response to, first, leaving the extended family behind in Detroit, and then, the dissolution of our parents’ marriage, was to try to divorce myself from family altogether. I decided to go it alone, to let relations with family weaken and fall away. But Rhett’s response was to develop a love and commitment to family that’s stronger than in almost anyone I know. He simply didn’t let me drift away. For years, no matter how ‘uppity’ and distant I got, he called, he tracked me down, he visited. He remained “Big Brother” – and friend, fan, supporter, guide. The comforting and mythic reality of “Us against the World” survived everything that might’ve pulled us apart.

I just turned sixty, and in July, Rhett will be sixty-two. And the bond between us remains as it ever was. Rhett Preston Kirby is the deepest expression of love and family that I know. He will forever be the most unique person in all my life. He is my only brother, so of course I have no basis of comparison. Yet and still, the heart has grounds for making claims that no logic or reason can undercut. I assert it because, in this life I have lived, it is true. Rhett is and has been the greatest brother I could ever have had. Without him...well, I just can’t imagine.

A Heartbeat for the World

Nelson Mandela has left us. The television and radio are full of reports of the world’s mourning. I have no doubt that many tears are being shed, but mourning is not a feeling I can easily associate with Mandela. The man exhibited such an enormous ability to rise about suffering that, even now, I can only experience a sense of joy and celebration in thinking of him.

I’m not much given to adulation, or hero worship. We are all human, with sprinklings of Godliness, I think. We have the possibility of taming our hungers and minimizing that which is small and greedy in ourselves, and we realize these possibilities to varying degrees. One of the things I so love, in experiencing my fellow humans, is witnessing the channeling, the releasing, the maximizing of this potential greatness, this Godliness, I referred to, usually in small flashes. In the case of Nelson Mandela, there’s a particular and profound emanation of this quality that continues to astonish and amaze me more than twenty years after I first witnessed it.

How could a man be so loving and forgiving? I can hardly get my head or heart around it. Mandela was imprisoned for his belief in fundamental human dignity, and for twenty-seven years. He was separated from wife and family and denied the opportunity to pass his days and nights as he would. He experienced the passing of decades while his adult vigor faded away. And when he emerged from prison, he did so smiling, and offering love, friendship and forgiveness to those who had stolen from him all those years of his life.

I listened to a bit from an interview this evening, in which, shortly after being released from Robben Island, Mandela was asked about this lack of bitterness. And he responded – and I paraphrase – that it is difficult, when one is occupied with purposeful and rewarding activity, to give much thought to bitterness and disappointment. And he said that it is idleness that leads us to focus on our hurt and loss. Powerful words; all the more powerful in that he was a living manifestation of their truth.

I was privileged to be in Mandela’s presence once. A public school in Regent Park, here in Toronto, where I was doing youth work, changed it’s name to the Nelson Mandela Park Public School in 2001. It was being said at the time that this was the first school outside of Africa to be named for him. Mandela attended the ceremony, and I was blessed with tickets for my wife and I. What I remember more than anything was how he danced his way into the school gym to the rhythm of drums, beaming all around, especially at all the children. I don’t remember the specifics of his message, except that it was all love.

How fortunate we are to have had such a one among us.

Time Travelling on a Tune

Over the last couple of days, I found a number of new links on the internet, to my Mom’s career as a singer in the 60s and 70s.

Mom was a preacher’s daughter, born in Ferndale, Michigan and raised in the north part of Detroit. Granddad and Tootsie (the nickname an older cousin bestowed on our Grandmother) lived off of 8 mile road, and the Mt. Beulah Baptist Church wasn’t far from there. Mom was a smart, imaginative, dreamer growing up. She sang in the church, but may have had more of an interest in writing, going so far as having a small chap book of poems printed when she was still in school. I know that she and her cousin Earl talked a lot about how they intended to travel the world when they grew up.

Her first steps away from home were going off to college, to Bluefield, West Virginia for a time, then to somewhere in Oklahoma, I believe. I don’t recall with certainty what she studied, but I know that she dropped out in her final year, to marry my Dad, a charming, sweet-talking man even now, in his late eighties. He’d run off from small town Indiana to the big city of Detroit, on the night of his high school graduation, and returned there after a couple of years in the military.

When he met my Mom, he romanced her hard, taking her to clubs and ball games and shows, and had even the serious Reverend Hardwrick so won over that they had use of the family car whenever they wanted. Mom put her other ambitions on the shelf for awhile, married Dad, had two kids, and before long, seeing the world seemed the furthest thing from possible.

But it wasn’t a very happy marriage. Dad liked the ladies more than a marriage could contain, and somewhere in there, Mom began to nurture the seed of her own liberation. The story is that the seed broke ground the day she was riding in an elevator and singing a tune to herself. There happened to be an agent in the elevator with her. He said something like, “Hey babe, you got some sweet pipes”. And next thing you know, Mom is doing gigs in local clubs, then going on weekend trips to Columbus and Cleveland.

From there, things changed pretty fast. Mom got called to New York, and went. Dad, after awhile, loaded my brother and I into the family car, and followed her there. A year or so later, she got a chance to travel to Berlin, to be part of an international revue titled, “Schwarz/Weiss” – Black/White, that featured black and white performers from several countries. She was supposed to be gone a couple of months, but the show was a hit and she emerged as its star. When the show kept getting extended, our ever game Dad loaded us up again and surprised Mom when we all appeared at her hotel room door.

We were actually a good family there for awhile, bouncing from city to city while Mom developed a reputation and a career. My brother and I learned German and thrilled at being intrepid explorers in foreign lands. Those were the Golden years of our childhood, and created a bond between us that nothing has ever weakened. Ever since then, I’ve felt sorry for the vast majority of chronologically close siblings who fail to nurture any sense of special devotion between them; but I’ve come to understand that my brother and I had blessed circumstances in which to do so.

Dad may be coming across as the bad guy in this story, but it didn’t end up so. There isn’t a bad guy, or a bad gal. When our parents saw that their marriage just wouldn’t work, they did the smart thing and ended it, before the grudges and arguments could become a fixture in our lives. He returned to New York, then did a round trip a year later to take my brother and I with him. The plan was that we’d go back and forth between them. But that never materialized.

Mom’s career peaked over the next few years. She finally travelled the world, as she’d always intended. The next time my brother and I spent substantial time with her was when she came through New York as the star entertainer on the around-the-world, maiden voyage of a luxury ocean liner. It was apparently just too complicated a life – professionally and personally – for her to feel she could adequately parent us. Which was absolutely the tragedy of my young life. But, on the flip side, my brother and I were fortunate enough to have a father who, despite the entreaties of relatives on both sides to allow them to raise us (because no single man, especially one who liked to play like James Kirby, and who worked nights, should be trying to raise no two kids all by himself in no New York City!) insisted that he was going to raise us himself and love doing it.

Of course there’s lots more to it. I will always be proud of Mom that, in the late 1950’s, she, a young, black woman, broke away from a narrow and unhappy life as a housewife, and turned herself into a globe-trotting, jet-setting, diva glamourpuss! The parts of that I shared with her are infinitely precious. Among my best memories are the times I’d come from school and have long, deep, searching, anything goes conversations with her, while she dressed and made herself up for her show that night. And I missed her enormously all those following years when she wasn’t around.

So you can imagine the thrill when, every now and then, when I do a google search, I discover a missing piece of Mom’s life. The last discovery came as a result of my brother finding some long lost photographs, and that spurring me into doing a routine search. Amazingly, these last finds include a few seconds’s worth of video, close ups of Mom singing, fronting a band and wearing a sleek, glittery gown and stole, and a curly, almost platinum wig. It’s a clip from some 1970 Eurocomedy, and she’s off-screen as the camera focuses on the antics of a nightclub’s patrons. But Wow! It’s about the first moving image I’ve had of my Mom since she died twenty years ago.

I’ll have to send a note to the person who posted the clip, thanking them. What a treasure! What a lovely, heart-warming gift, to see my Mom again, smiling, singing, doing her glam-glam thing!

Tai Chi with Bruce

Isn’t it true that we thrive in large part because of our gifts? That is, whatever we have that is given, though unearned. It’s true of me, certainly.

I’ve had a gift from Bruce McDougall these last nine years or so. Bruce taught me Tai Chi, in the all-purpose Elspeth Room of Dixon Hall’s main building, where we both worked, he as executive director and me as housing support worker and later youth worker.

Bruce was a wonderful man and leader. He was kind and attentive and unflaggingly supportive of our staff. One of his ideas for community building was for those of us who had particular interests and were inclined, to share them with others. I decided on a reading club that never got off the ground – says something of my own leadership abilities. But Bruce canvassed the interested about a mutually good time, and we settled into Fridays at noon.

Soon, Bruce was leading a group ranging from three to six of us in a range of graceful Tai Chi movements, including the single whip, white crane spreads wings, brush knee, repulse monkey, embrace the mountain, stroke the mare’s tail, and wave hands like clouds. I don’t imagine I’d ever have been drawn into the practice of Tai Chi for its own sake. It’s Bruce that was the draw. It didn’t hurt to think I was learning a martial art, except that I’d seen Tai Chi, and wasn’t particularly impressed. Too slow, for sure. And it didn’t seem to achieve much in the way of power or athleticism either. But I was a quick convert.

It took awhile to learn some of the most basic moves. The positioning of the body through the sequences is very specific. Some are difficult on the muscles and joints. Most require a degree of balance, that rises as we enter deeper into the set, the foundation movements being repeated often as they segue way into others.

The strikes and blocks of Tai Chi are surprisingly and economically brutal from a martial prerspective – no wasted movement, every effort to maximum effect; lots of bone crushing and joint wrenching. But the practice of it, moving slowly, seamlessly from pose to sweep to stance, is a flowing practice, a study in all the ways the body can form a circle. It is concentrated and meditative. The bending and arcing of the body becomes a previously unsuspected medium. The 108 movements of Yang style are a lesson in balance. And balance is something that starts as a glimmer, a tickle, somewhere deep in the sensitive body, then it spreads, and it tunes and embraces the senses and limbs, to the point where it becomes impossible to fall out of balance, with anything!

My first efforts at solo practice were a few minutes remembering the turns of my body, and Bruce’s feedback to me, always, to relax my shoulders, to mind my breathing, to be tense only where required. It soon became an almost daily practice, the first intentional act of the day, carried out every morning on my apartment building’s roof deck, before going to work. Later on, I found a group in Grange Park that I sometimes joined. Later on, it was the groups in Greenwood Park. It’s been welcoming and gratifying, to be studied by elderly Chinese practitioners, who after a few minutes of scrutiny, usually say, “Good, good. Who taught you. You have good form.” Or alternately, give me some little suggestion, how to bring a particular element of my body more alive in a sequence.

Bruce was very generous, and central to his message to us about the practice was his own benefit through sharing it. I was pleased, a couple of years later, when, after cancer and treatment, Bruce asked if I’d help him begin to re-remember the long routine. We met a handful of times, but circumstance gradually made those meetings rarer and rarer. His sudden passing in early 2009 underscored the lost opportunity to know him better.

This fall, Bruce’s wife, Kim, asked if I’d like to have his Tai Chi books and his staff. I agreed, and she and I spent time over coffee, talking about life, our jobs, Tai Chi, and their growing daughters. Emma and her French study, and her eminent semester in Paris, got me thinking to get her a copy of George Perec’s “Life: a User’s Manual”. Kendra has a growing interest in medicine.

The staff I brought home was unexpected. I’d been expecting a sword, which I knew Bruce practiced. We’d spoken about whether or not he remembered enough of the sword sets to pass along. I hadn’t known he worked with a staff. The tool, or weapon, is impressive. It’s a bit short of seven feet, so almost a foot taller than me if I stand with it. It’s made of ten slender cords of waxwood, twined around a finger thick center piece. It’s solidly constructed, hard, but with a whisper of bend to it. A very elegant tool, radiating an almost biblical authority.

I haven’t done anything with the staff yet but to heft it. I haven’t taken any steps toward learning one of the many staff sets, beside viewing some videos on the internet. But I’m proud to have the staff, and I’ll treasure it. I’ll come up with occasions to walk with it, if nothing else. In the meantime, what I intend for myself is to get back into a more consistent practice of the basic routine. I no longer practice daily, and it becomes too easy to allow entire weeks to go by without making it out to the park in the morning. I’ll have to recall to mind the tranquility that greets me on those quiet mornings, the energy I finish with, however tired when I started. The sense of balance, the knowledge of the power of flowing with, rather than struggling against. It is a vitalizing art. This practice has shaped me and increased my control, not over life per se, but over my reactions to whatever comes. As I told Bruce way back when, upon realizing it myself, he gave me a powerful tool for the rest of my life.

Abbey and Max

Abbey Lincoln died the other day. She was a jazz singer. When I was in my early teens, and living in a high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Abbey lived in an apartment a few floors up with her then husband, Max Roach, the Drum King of bebop. Max himself died about three years ago.

As an eleven year old, just getting introduced to the trumpet, with a Mom who sang professionally, and who’d played Miles and Ellington and Coltrane lps on our record player, along with the Ray Charles and Dinah Washington, along with the show tunes and soundtrack albums, it would’ve been really special to know the music they’d created and had been a part of introducing to the world. But I didn’t have a clue.

If Mom had been there, and had expressed her appreciation of the music, it might have sunk in. But she wasn’t there, and Dad’s enthusiastic explanation that these folks were “Jazz Giants” just didn’t register. I remember listening to a tune or two by each of them, but honestly, it must’ve sounded very ‘old timey’ to my young ears, which were then into the Temptations and Aretha, Kool & the Gang and soul brother number 1, James Brown.

It wasn’t until many years and a couple of life stages later that I’d begin to go backward in my music appreciation. Backward into older styles and earlier decades, to the far roots of the fusion that captured my ear in the 70’s – back to the bebop, as wild and revolutionary as any music of that or any other decade.

It’s good though that I got to know Abbey and Max simply as good people, as the friendly and generous neighbours that they were. Our father, who was a social being down to his bones, sometimes went to boxing matches or ball games with Max. And one of their nephews hung out with my brother and I one summer. But other than those indifferent listens to tunes I would only have the ear to appreciate years later, I don’t recall that my life ever ran up against the musical side of Max and Abbey’s. They were just the famous couple that lived upstairs: very grounded, at the same time very dignified, cooler than most, but regular people nonetheless.