Dad's New I-Pad

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.