Our minivan stereo has had a CD stuck in it for longer than
some of my children have been alive. As an anniversary present to Nicole, I
replaced the stereo with a new one. This first communal working CD player in
years has prompted a joyous rustling through old boxes to pull out dusty CD
collections. In this rummage, I uncovered an old black disc titled “The Faratos
Jazz Band.” In 1996, my eldest sister lived in Barcelona. My parents and I spent
three weeks visiting her there. We stayed in a second story room, not a far
walk from the palace where Queen Isabella received Christopher Columbus upon
his return from the New World. Our room overlooked a medium-sized public
courtyard below. On weekends, the plaza would fill with local artists selling
their work. In the evenings, a small jazz band would play, accompanied by a tap
dancer. I remember laying in bed and listening to the trumpet and tap bounce up
from the stone pavement, off the plaster walls, and to my ears. One of my
souvenirs from that trip to Barcelona was a CD of that band. Perhaps to the
chagrin of my children, the first CD to enter the new car stereo was The
Faratos Jazz Band.
The day
before I installed the new stereo, I returned from a camping trip. It marked
the resumption of a family tradition. Each June, the men in our family make a
pilgrimage to the race track in Watkins Glen, New York, where we park our
campers as close to the racing circuit as permissible, and cheer the roaring
Corvettes, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis in a six-hour sports car race. After a
hiatus during the pandemic, the trip marked a return to normal. As I bustled
among the crowd of thousands to make a path for a son or nephew to get a
driver’s autograph, or a photo with a favorite car, I said goodbye to the days
of being uncomfortable when there were more than three people in the same
grocery aisle. I reveled in the humanity of the crowd, delighted to bunch so
close with others that I could smell their sweat. It was a shunning of
isolation, and a celebration of life returned to normal again.
While
the pandemic was a time of separation from others, with strong feelings of
isolation for many, for me it was a time of almost constant human contact. I
thrive on solitude, but for nearly 18 months I was almost never alone. Those
months carried a great deal of stress. Not just the stress we all shared, but
significant health issues in our family. One child underwent surgery, leaving
him bed-ridden for nearly two months. Another had chronic, often extreme,
stomach pain for almost eight months. It was a time of high demand, and little
replenishment, supercharged amidst pandemic life. When my in-laws began to
offer to watch the children again, I eagerly took them up on it; and the day
after installing the new stereo, I drove across town to drop all of my
children off.
My
in-laws live along one of my favorite stretches of road. It winds and bends up
and down hills, round and about through dense forest. When I was 16 or 17 my
best friend and I would borrow his brother’s Volkswagen GTI and in the middle
of the night drive that section of town as fast as we could, one at the wheel,
the other anxiously keeping lookout for deer. One evening, I had a
white-knuckled grip on the passenger door when my friend lost control on a
right-hand hairpin. The car spun in circles across the road, eventually coming
to rest astride the double-yellow lines, headlights shining into the forest,
highlighted by the smoke from abused tires, pointing to the hundred trees which
could have smashed the car and our bodies to oblivion. That was perhaps the
first time I fully understood that the grace of God is not getting what
you deserve.
It was
only a few years later that I came to love the road slowly. At the wheel of a
police vehicle, I would patrol the town for hours, and one day noticed the
beautiful damp green of the forest overstretching the pavement as the sun
filtered down through the leaves in shafts of light hanging thick in the summer
air, creating splotches of yellow on the gray road below. There was peace in
it, driving slow and quiet through the waves of sun and shade, climbing up the
hills away from town. And so, as I left
my children with their grandparents, I drove home slow and silent, rolling
through the splotchy light, the smooth jazz of an ancient band lulling my
memories.
The
pandemic paid a wage of chaos we heeded not. It would always be so, but we did
ourselves no favors. It was a thing which should have been nothing more than an
adjustment for a time, but became a beast beyond our control, because we
are beasts beyond our control. I drove and pondered life turned upside-down, as
some of the people and institutions I had come to love and trust acted in the
most petty and childish ways; and those which my cultural cocktail had taught
me to fear proved the most reliable. I pondered those who used to shake my hand
and call me brother, yet would not return a simple phone call when I felt
fragmented and alone; and those who once seemed distant, yet took risks, made
sacrifices, and created marvelous innovations to care for us all. I pondered the terrified frustration of
watching society dismantle itself over such a simple thing; the disappointment
as some of the self-proclaimed purveyors of faith, hope, and love reduce those
noble proclamations to parody, becoming the prophets of rumor, conspiracy, and
fear; the quiet background of the dead, occasionally breaking through in the
sharp pain of a name too familiar; the harsh truth that I carry equal guilt for
the division; the harder reality that we know no other way.
I drove
through the forests of an old patrol beat, listening to a band in Spain play
the tunes of black America’s wonderful invention and wondered at the bizarre
cocktail that is life. My story is a strange patchwork of unexpected pieces,
thrown together to somehow make a cohesive, beautiful whole. As I drove and
listened and thought, I came to realize that there is room in that puzzle to
fit at least one more odd-shaped piece. And in that moment, I moved the chaos
from the category of “is” to that of “was.” The time will come to make meaning,
to reconcile some relationships, to mourn others. For now, we have a time to
say goodbye, a time to hope and dream of a new building amidst the rubble, and
a time to heal.
