The Jazz Drummer

When I was nine, my dad went away. As if overnight - he was suddenly gone. We would henceforth see him on alternate weekends. It was odd and disorienting and, in those days, not so common.

We all have our stories. Every family has its tales of ordinariness, weirdness, terror, tragedy, hilarity, joy, illness, love, hate, new birth and new death.

Phil came into our lives , along with two daughters, when I was eleven. He and my mom were married the next year. That word, "step-", came into our vocabulary. Phil was a true original and a veteran of Korea. He had lied about his age to get into the Army, around the age that most of us just begin to drive. And when he drove us kids around, he would tap rhythms on the steering wheel with the rings he wore on both hands. I was astounded at how good his little steering-wheel drum patterns were. In my secret dreams, I wished that Phil could be re-born as a jazz drummer. He loved the big bands and we shared a huge appreciation for Sinatra. When he died we had no funeral, only a memorial family get-together at my sister's house. She had sweetly put out some albums of photographs for all of us to look through. I thumbed through one of them and as I looked at the bottom of one page I was completely shocked to see one particular photo: it was a black and white shot of an Army jazz band and sitting there playing drums.......was Phil. He had never told us. Never talked about it.