Proud Daughter of a Saxophone Player

This past Thursday I posted a poem by Timothy Cook, an Asheville poet who wrote an amazing poem about his father entitled "Proud Son of an Honor Roll Student." See my blog post "One Poem Leads to Another" to check this poem out.  Timothy's poem is quite moving, written in what is called an enjambment style, revealing the life and influence of his father.

It prompted me to start writing a similar poem about my father, which has taken me three days to get in shape to share to post here.  I was up early this morning determined to finish this poem for today's blog.  Although certainly not the caliber of Cook's poem, I feel I have achieved what I set out to do.  I also dug out a couple pictures to share as well.

Cousin Dan Zola with my dad, hamming it up

Proud Daughter of a Saxophone Player

Both hilarious & confusing was the final visit

with my dad. He was in the hospital

expected to recover; yet little did I know then he

was on the way out.  Seems obvious now. He was

looking to have a beer, some Hershey

Kisses.  Kept asking me when I was leaving

and what time it was.  Said the raindrops on

The window looked like stars.

We prayed together: the Our Father, Hail Mary,

and the Guardian Angel Prayer.  When I left at 6:30,

promising to return with those Kisses, he told me

“Make it sooner, rather than later.” 

He had become a chemical engineer

at the insistence of his mother, a good

career she had been told, and she was

paying for it, after all, with her factory job.

Five year program at Ohio State University.

It was never his true intention, but later I heard

him say he could not imagine his life without his knowledge

of chemistry: what substances go into the melt to make the colors

found in beautiful glass objects.  I have his notebooks, his math

figures scrawled in his familiar style.  I like to 

picture my dad as a student, living in a boarding

house, walking to classes, up late writing papers and

meeting my mom at  Newman Club picnic. 

The first college graduate in his family.

I sense his greatest disappointment was not fully pursuing music. 

He had wanted a music store of his own, where he

could be a teacher of music, surrounded by

gorgeous instruments, talking tones and rhythms,

refrains and phrasing with all manner of musicians,

Playing gigs at night.  Instead, his music was part-time

A member of his cousin’s big band, popular in our area.

The after dinner saxophone riffing up in his bedroom,  the soundtrack

of my life – the jazzy scales, the improvisation, playing along with

Boots Randolph, filling our home.  A comfort.

When in fourth grade I expressed interest in playing the

clarinet, he immediately bought me the best one on the

market – a Selmer.  On holidays, he and I would play little

duets for the family, he on his saxophone and me squawking

along on the clarinet.  I was first chair, but it didn’t

keep me from quitting band in seventh grade because

it took place during recess, and I preferred

to help the first grade teacher with her grading.  I thought

he was forever disappointed, but when I mentioned it many

years later, he wrote me a letter saying it was perfectly okay, and

that he has always been “in awe of the inclinations of children.”  As a

teacher now, I can see I was following my inclination back then. Somehow

he knew that, even though it would take me decades to know it myself.

I remember my mother telling me

my dad never got over his parents’ divorce.

He was ten-years-old, the worst age.  My father never spoke

of it, but the shadings of melancholy were always there, and his

efforts to always be in our lives noticeable. In December 1975,

he received word that his father had passed away – a man

whom had married again and had a whole new family.  I went

with him to the funeral home  during off hours on a cold and clear

winter’s day, just after Christmas. I remember my father standing

by the casket of his father, but I do not remember any words that day.

 As a family we had already suffered the loss of my little brother earlier

that year, and we were being held together by some kind of fragile faith,

as we climbed through the wreckage of that year…together.

Too often we dwell on that which has been left undone;

the things we could have said, the effort we should have

made, maybe something we would have said if we knew time was

short.  When I think of my dad, I know that none of that matters.

What matters is consistent caring and loving actions: tossing the ball

with the boys after dinner,  laughing uproariously at some television show,

taking us to the bike shop or an Indians game or Big Boy,

adding his own substance to the color of his children’s lives,

sharing the joy of a little drop of chocolate wrapped in silver, and

playing bravely on a summer night, his magnificent melodies  drifting

from the upstairs window, filling the neighborhood with magic.

hms 6/16/2013

Dad telling a story at a family gathering in our kitchen, July 31, 1994