Almost two years ago now, one of my best friends, from a past life growing up as a country girl in rural northeastern Ohio, passed away.
The summer he passed, I was a new Ohio State graduate, broke, living out the rest of my lease in Columbus, Ohio. I was busy trying to save up money from working promotions in order to pay for a poorly planned, almost-sure-to-fail, move alone out to Las Vegas, Nevada. I couldn’t make it home for his funeral, because I was working a summer long promotion for these new Kool-Aid tablets that fizzed up in water, and I really needed the 13 or 15 or whatever they were paying me an hour. Actually, I ended up being fired from that job, as seems to be the case with almost every job I’ve ever held, and I could have made it home for the funeral, but I didn’t know that until it was too late. This time, I maintain that I did nothing wrong to be fired and was, in fact, the victim of a jealous harpy’s wrath. Other times I’ve been fired from jobs, I have not been nearly so innocent. I seem to have problems following rules and respecting authority figures…
“Write something about Paul McCarty,” my father cajoled me over the phone. “You always do such a nice job expressing what we’re all feeling.” No, there wasn’t time, I had to hock Kool-Aid to the thirsty masses, and more profoundly, I didn’t have the words I needed to express the depth of what I was feeling. He’d been so very special to me, and I feared anything I wrote at that time about my dear friend would sound contrived.
Paul McCarty was my high school band director, and for years, for a minimum of an hour and a half, five times a week, under his fatherly gaze, I’d honk away on my saxophone. (Alto, tenor, bari - I’ve played and loved them all.) The first 45 minutes would be the regular band, those just then learning instruments or filling a credit, and then they would leave, and the last 45 minutes was all that Jazz. The Pymatuning Valley Jazz Band, the real music geeks, those of us in it for the love of playing music worth playing, would stick around for the real fun.
He had blond hair, and glasses, and a big jolly Santa belly. He played the trumpet, which is the coolest wind instrument – after the sax obviously – and I loved him – we all did. The man was music, and there’s not a single thing I don’t love about music.
“It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind,” he’d say with a mischievous head bobble whenever his beloved children, his PV Jazz Band, would complain about a change in song selection or whatever modification he’d flippantly made at the last minute.
He told us one of the silliest, most inappropriate, most band geeky jokes of all time, and of course it’s remained one of my favorites and most oft told to this day.
“What did the flute player say to her saxophonist boyfriend?” Carty asked the entire jazz band with a twinkle in his eye.
“I dunno Carty, what did she say, oh King of the Band Geeks?”
“Ouch! Pull out! You’re sharp!” Hahahahahahaha!
If you got this joke, then take comfort that at least you’ve got rhythm – you’re a band geek through and through. Additionally, this joke is the only way I’ve been able to remember how to correctly adjust my mouthpiece to get my instrument in tune. That dirty old man sure knew how to teach.
One year, he took us to see the jazz legend, trumpet player, Maynard Ferguson and his band play. What other band director from such a small isolated area could possibly be so groovy?
I was the only little Jewish girl in my farming community, and every year I’d complain to Carty that we only played Christmas songs and never any Hanukah songs.
“It’s religious intolerance, is what it is. I feel persecuted,” I’d say to him while skipping class, hiding out in his office. (He’d always be game to vouch for me and sign fake passes saying that it was regrettable, but necessary, that I skip calculus to sit joking around with him in his office.)
My junior year of high school, I lived for a year in southern Brazil as an exchange student. I don’t know how lonely all of you were during high school, but at that time in Brazil, my Portuguese was still so-so, and it doesn’t get too much lonelier than not only not being able to fit in but, literally, not being able to speak the same language as your classmates. That December, I received a package from Paul McCarty in the mail. Inside there was a CD, and recorded on that CD was the entire band, having rehearsed for months, playing the song “The First Night of Hanukah.”
“Happy Hanukah, Leah!” A world away, Paul McCarty had used his authority as our teacher to have the band shout for me, wishing me a happy Hanukah. Bless that man. In the days before Facebook and Skype, when I felt very much alone at sixteen on the other side of the planet, he made me feel loved and missed.
And I sat down today to write something else, but with jazz playing in the background, I had Carty on the mind, and I wrote this without thinking, in an improvised style, because I finally, years later, knew what I wanted to write for him. Hopefully this will appease my father.
Rest in peace, Paul McCarty, my dear friend, the man who taught me to love jazz – you are not someone easy to forget.
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