Dad’s apartment is lamp-lit with
the shades drawn, even though it’s a sunny day. The TV weather report is very important to my
dad, but not the weather that’s right outside his window. My father still
appears the same to me as he always did, but if I really look at him at age 83,
he is a little old man. He used to tower over me, but now we’re the same height
because he’s a bit hunched over. A
daughter and her dad the same height? But
the love in his smile has not changed throughout the years. When we hug, he
feels and smells like the daddy of my youth, and I feel so lucky to still have
him to hug.
He lives alone. His TV is always on,
and when I visit, he turns down the sound, but doesn’t turn it off. I feel it behind me, noiselessly buzzing. I’m visiting him more often since he fell and
dislocated his shoulder and hairline-fractured his spine. He walks slowly and is in pain. His mind is pretty sharp, except that he had a
mini-mixup, but then snapped out of it:
Dad: I’m 63.
Me: No, Daddy, you’re 83.
Dad: No, I’m 63!
Me: Daddy, you were born in 1928, which makes you 83. Let’s count it out.
Dad: Oh.
Anyway,
it’s good to see him, and he’s doing okay today.
We had set up a LifeStation system
in case he falls again, but the last two times I visited him, he had forgotten
to wear the little wristband button he would press if he fell. I told him to place it by his bedside and to
put it on the first thing in the morning, or just keep it on. Forgetting to wear the button is the number
one flaw with this system.
Even though my mother, stepdad, and
parents-in-law are computer savvy, my father never got a computer. He felt that it was just way over his head to
learn how to use it. There are many times when I wish I could just email him
instead of calling when I have a tiny tidbit of information to tell him; but
he’s phone-guy, and he likes to gab.
So, I was astounded when he told me
that some guy owed him money and paid him back with in I-Pad instead of
cash. An I-Pad 3, no less. I
don’t even have the first version of the I-Pad!
I’m a little bit behind the times with my old PC on my desk at home.
Me: Where is it?!
Dad: Over there in that box.
I excitedly got it. This would be
the first time I’d get to really play around with one. It felt sleek in my hands. Dad didn’t know the first thing about it, but
that guy had set him up with various accounts.
So, we emailed my sister, just to flip her out when she saw the words
“Sent from my I-Pad.” Dad didn’t even
have that much interest in holding it.
I showed him how to use Google.
What could we look up? We started with i-Tunes, searching for the old jazz artists
he loves: Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, George Shearing, Woody, Benny, Artie, and
the Bird. But we really hit the jackpot with YouTube. Dad hadn’t known that he could watch old
videos of the Greats in action, and there were tons of them. His eyes lit up, and
he took the I-Pad from my hands. He
immediately recognized everyone at their instruments. We watched videos
back-to-back – all his favorite stuff - Jazz at the Philharmonic. Woody Herman
playing live, nimbly and passionately. Ella, Oscar Peterson, Anita O’Day,
Lester Young…“There’s Prez,” dad says. The years were 1947, 1954, 1960, filmed pretty
much all in black-and-white. The band leaders’ initials on the podiums. The
musicians all wearing impeccably stylish matching suits - nothing like the
grungy rock scene that came after, rebelling against their clean-cut
predecessors.
Looking closely at the videos, I
realized that the audience was made up basically of teenagers. They just looked
older at first because of their elegant suits and dresses. Yet I could see the wild energy. These cool
cats played fast and hard; no one in the mainstream had played that way back
then
With tears welling up, my daddy
told me, “when I was a teenager here in L.A., my uncle Dave would give me ten
bucks and I’d go downtown to the Orpheum Theater and watch all these guys
perform on a stage that rose up. Duke
Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker.”
I had seen old photos of my dad as one of those teenagers in his zoot
suit, white buck shoes, hair slicked back, looking very handsome.
Gene Krupa stood out with his
animated facial expressions and messed-up hair.
He was so watchable, and a savage on the drums. In contrast, Benny
Goodman, in his nerdy wire glasses and straight look, was controlled and cool…only
his fingers moved, incomprehensibly fast and blurred, one note effortlessly sliding
into the next.
Jazz improvisation –frenetic and
seemingly out of control…how did the musicians know the correct note to play
next? Yet they were as confident and
trained as they could be. As exhuberant and
unrestrained as the soloists were, the horn-section guys, in contrast, were in
lock-step and unified, musically and visually.
What dad was watching now on the
I-Pad was the cutting-edge, ultra contemporary music and styles of his youth -
because that’s what it was back then when it was new – (sort of how I feel
about the punk rock days). But a young
person today might see it and call dad’s jazz “old people’s music.”
The I-Pad was bringing my father
back to Los Angeles
of the ‘40s and ‘50s, with its clean air, quiet streets and very little
traffic. Orange groves and empty land. The
era before I was born.
Someone thought to film these live
jazz shows with a movie camera, and now, after all these years, my dad was
holding them in his hands.
