The Christmas jazz music blasts through the overhead speakers at the Sacramento Airport terminal, and it’s like taking an axe to the chest. It’s one week before Christmas 2021, an hour before my flight, and six hours after my dad, the saxophonist, died of COVID-19.
I had barely eaten anything all week, and I didn’t really care—which is unusual for me, someone who inherited her father’s hearty, if problematic, Southern appetite. But the ritual leads me as I float like a ghost through TSA and the Newsstand, where I buy a twelve-dollar snack box and a bottle of water. I drift to a vacant corner of Terminal B, slide into a wide seat, and find myself staring down into the plastic snack box filled with soggy pita squares, four grapes, and moldy yellow cheese. I eat around the fuzzy bits, trying to recall if that’s what you do with moldy cheese or moldy bread. I give up after a few bites, sliding the N95 back on my face so I can cry into it without anyone noticing.
A jazzy rendition of “Frosty the Snowman” twinkles overhead, saxophone replacing the vocals. Is it an alto, soprano, or tenor? My dad would know. He’d diagnose the make and model of the horn, what kind of mouthpiece the player used, probably even the type of reed. Synthetic? Cane?
I’d like to speak to the airport manager, the keeper of the speakers. Don’t they know this is a dreadful season for many people, that this music can instigate deep sadness? I need them to change the music to something harmless. Something by a blond pop star.
I sit in the terminal and think about how time does weird things when someone you love—adore—dies. It stops becoming something to look forward to and instead becomes something that drags me somewhere I don’t want to go. A room with a person-shaped hole carved out of it. I check my watch every thirty minutes, which is really thirty seconds. Time has bent, stretched, warped.
I think about the taste of mold. Does mold taste as rotten as I feel? I watch the travelers of Terminal B. They laugh and carry on, heading toward holiday plans. No one makes eye contact, and I don’t want them to. Crying silently is a high-effort and embarrassing activity, worse than holding in a sneeze. I’ve been holding my tears in for the duration of this second week of December, tending to the duties and rituals of death that no one has prepared for, that no one is helping me with—we are all children hoping that an adult will step in and tell us, And now call the crematorium with these precise details. And now write the obituary with details about when your father graduated from college. His first job. And now try to understand what it is to move around in this world.
It all happened so fast. And now I have to go home, back to Seattle, to deal with the job I had started two weeks before my dad, who would never be sixty-six, went into the hospital. There was nothing else I could do in Sacramento, at least for now. The crematoriums are backed up. The paperwork will take weeks that turn into months.
This saxophone wailing “Frosty” is all I can hear, cracking my chest wide open. I get up to throw away the moldy snack box and keep my head down. Frosty begins to melt and waves goodbye. Don’t you cry, I’ll be back again someday!
This saxophone, this airport jazz, is a séance bringing my father back to me—again and again and again.
One-two-three-one-two-three.
Saxophone (noun): one of a group of single-reed woodwind instruments usually ranging from soprano to bass and characterized by a conical metal tube and finger keys
My father and I both grew up in a small town in Alabama about thirty-five miles east of Birmingham and fifteen miles west of the Talladega Superspeedway. The house he grew up in, at least until he went to live with his grandmother, was ruled by an alcoholic father with a heavy fist. My house, though it was only eight-hundred square feet and a fixer-upper that was neither fixed nor upped in any way, was filled with music. My earliest memories are of music: my dad, in the den-turned-bedroom with the door closed, practicing his saxophone for hours every day. My dad, scanning endless rows of CDs to play through enormous flat panel Magnepan speakers that my mother never stopped making him feel bad about buying because we had no money, even though they were magnificent. Regal. Over six-feet tall, nearly grazing the ceiling. The sound, sharp as a needle, trained me to never be satisfied with cheap headphones or Bluetooth speakers.
I wasn’t allowed to touch the Magnepans because my sister had nearly pulled one down on herself when she was a toddler. They were to be admired from afar, which gave them even more power.
My dad would play music that terrified me but that he needed to listen to—repeatedly—to study their recording techniques. In the early ’90s, he was recording his first jazz-meets-gospel album, Heaven. I think of the early ’90s as the Dark Side of the Moon and “creepy organ music” years. (I later ask Dad to tell me what that album was and discover it to be one I enjoy as an adult: Modeste Moussorgski’s Pictures in an Exhibition by Isao Tomita).
And then he’d play jazz. The Magnepans were their best when they were teaching me the history of the saxophone: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz, Michael Brecker. I couldn’t keep up. To me, they might as well have all been my dad.
He would lean in, wave a finger like a conductor, and bob his head. “Listen, listen! Doesn’t get better than that,” he’d say. It was like growing up as a test subject of a social experiment: what happens when you raise a kid in a tiny house in the South and fill the air with jazz, and saxophone, and jazz, and saxophone?
Embouchure (noun): the position and use of the lips, tongue, and teeth in playing a wind instrument
The saxophone is the only instrument capable of sounding like a human voice. It cries, it sighs, it sings. It is a voice for the player that might otherwise have none.
It also seduces, worships, and relieves—it is an escape.
It is salvation, it is damnation.
At the peak of its popularity in the early-to-mid–twentieth century, jazz birthed a powerhouse of saxophone players. The Storyville era of New Orleans gave the genre space to experiment and evolve until systemic racism drove its pioneers north. The saxophone has never been kind to its players; more than a fair share of its notable ones lived on the margins of society and were hooked on something other than their horns. Addiction, poverty, and lack of access to health care saw them to their graves.
My dad looked down on heavy drinking, having come from a long line of mean drunks. But he did live on the margins, seeking any job that would allow him creative freedom and a space to practice. He was addicted to not letting people down—of not giving up on his dreams or his abusive wife who drove him to bankruptcy and homelessness—no matter how much it cost him.
For five years, my dad worked for a combination church and school outside of Sacramento. He worked six days a week, year-round, because the church school used shady tax loopholes and archaic rules that allowed them to hire full-time employees and not provide health insurance, retirement, or paid time off. He made twelve-thousand dollars a year and received an under-the-table rent allowance. He was the minister of music for the church and taught whatever school classes they threw at him in addition to the band. If he didn’t show up to play his horn and lead the music for church on Sundays, the preacher—his boss—charged him five dollars. During the record-breaking hot summers, he was tasked with manual labor. He dug up asphalt in the parking lot, painted classrooms, and replaced rotting wood stairs—whatever the preacher deemed necessary. It was a job that would have broken a twenty-year-old, let alone a sixty-five-year-old with bad knees.
But the church school did give him a free practice space. You can’t play a saxophone—or any loud instrument—in an extended stay hotel, where he’d lived for a couple of years before moving into an apartment in my name. Both places made him so anxious that he carried his horns with him everywhere he went. If he came to my apartment, he’d leave them at the door like shoes.
In such toxic environments, his horns were his only voice.
He was browbeaten by the church and also by my mother. I tried to convince him to leave her; she had been violent with him on more than one occasion. I told him he should apply for other jobs—he wasn’t giving himself enough credit. He deserved better! Didn’t he know how amazing he was? How could he put up with it?
“Nobody wants to hire an old man,” he’d tell me, his voice full of defeat. “And this way I have a place to play my horn. And they understand what it’s like dealing with your mother. I’d get fired anywhere else.”
He caught COVID-19 from a coworker. The church school made their teachers come to school sick. They didn’t hire substitutes.
My dad had just turned sixty-five and qualified for Medicare. It hadn’t quite kicked in yet when he got sick. He was afraid of medical bills, of admitting that he needed help, of having to leave my mother to fend for herself for a few days (unacceptable). So he did what he always did. He didn’t do anything.
Rhythm (noun): an ordered recurrent alternation of strong and weak elements in the flow of sound and silence
I spend my father’s last week in Sacramento, at a new hotel in midtown, close to the hospital with many windows. I recognize the location. It used to be a bar I frequented with the local baristas I had crushes on in my twenties. The hotel gives me a discount because of my situation. One of the saddest things that can happen is to be given a discount because of your situation. The ICU lets me stay as long as I can tolerate sitting in the personal protective equipment, and they overlook the hour-long visitor limit. When the rules don’t apply to you, nothing good is about to happen.
Our routine goes like this.
When I arrive, my father had been intubated for one day. The staff tells me they are surprised he is still here. They say this every day. My sister drives up from Southern California for one day and then leaves when her family catches colds. My mother is convinced she also has COVID, just as bad as my dad (“but no one cares!”), so she can’t come to the hospital. It isn’t convenient. Then it’s just me, driving the few blocks, parking in the garage, walking around to the front entrance of the hospital in order to follow strict COVID protocols. I show proof of vaccine and put on a new mask. Follow the hallway to the right and then another right and through a snaking hallway that leads to the double elevators. Take it up to the ICU. Go through a set of doors. Pick up a receiver on the wall, dial the desk. Tell them who I’m there to see, and my name. Someone fetches me. Eventually, they just buzz the door open before I can finish the sentence.
They help me get dressed: throw away the mask acquired in the lobby, put on a new N95, then a surgical mask over that and a plastic face shield to cover both. A white hairnet and matching shoe covers. They tie a yellow disposable gown around my waist that I can’t figure out how to do myself because my hands seem to not work anymore, and I’ll feel wasteful throwing it away after each visit to his room, because the sleeves are made of soft white cotton. Cotton that was added to this scratchy, paper fabric as though the manufacturer knew its wearer needed to feel some kind of softness. Then I put on two pairs of blue latex gloves. One pair gets thrown away while inside the room, after taking off the gown and throwing it in the trash. The second pair, the “clean” ones, are what touch the door on the way out, lessening the chance of contamination. Then they go in the trash. Then I wash my hands with industrial soap. I sing the chorus of “Jolene” in my head because I know it meets the twenty-second hand washing rule.
There’s no bathroom in the room or in the ICU corridor, so I ignore my thirst, hunger, and bladder, for seven days. It is a steady and sure rhythm. Everything here is practiced, synchronized, an orchestra of losing people and praying to whomever for miracles.
For the next year, I will recoil every time I put on a mask because it smells like the worst week of my life.
If I could see the nurses underneath their masks and shields and—sometimes—hazmat suits, I might see pity. Exhaustion. I apologize because I know they must be at their wit’s end from watching people die this way, dozens—maybe hundreds—of sad daughters shuffling through this unit over the past two years.
COVID has a rhythm of its own. First, the breathing goes. Then the pneumonia comes. Then the lungs shut down. Then the other organs follow. There’s a point of no return. No solo. No encores.
Sometimes the nurses hug me even though they’re not supposed to. I let them because there’s nobody else to hug. One nurse tells me, “Humans need four hugs a day for survival. Here’s one.”
I go into the room, navigate the tangle of tubes and beeps and whirrs of air purifiers. There are at least ten bags of liquids on a pole outside of the room, tubes taped inside the doorway, the heavy door that must be slammed shut.
I speak so loudly that I don’t recognize my own voice. It’s me. I’m so happy to see you.
I do the same thing for the next six days: I play him music through my phone. I read him Rick Bragg essays. I do everything that I can to make him laugh if he’s listening.
I tell him a joke he used to tell when I was a kid. He would get red-faced, laughing so hard he’d start coughing: “A snobby rich guy goes into a bar with his snooty wife. He sits next to a man that’s three sheets to the wind. The drunk guy rips a huge fart. The rich guy turns, says, Sir! How dare you fart before my wife! and the drunk guy is so embarrassed, and he goes, Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t know it was her turn!”
From my dad I get two gifts: a penchant for obsessing over pointless devotions and the tendency to deflect sadness with humor.
“Everyone is so doom and gloom.” I pat his arm with my gloved hand. “What do you say I read this Bragg essay about nearly getting eaten by a gator?”
Every day is another rhythm, and I let it carry me.
Riff (noun): A musical motif or idea that is repeated in a song and has a well-defined rhythmic pattern. When learning to play the saxophone, one might play the same riff over and over.
In high school, in the early aughts, I took two years of jazz guitar lessons from a nice, gray-haired man named Larry, who worked in a big-box music store in Birmingham called Mars Music. The guitar was the only instrument my dad didn’t know how to play. I wanted to be good at it. I wanted to impress him. I wanted to find a thing that I might do better than him. He bought me a cherry-red Fender that cost too much.
Eventually, I became unbearably disappointed that Larry wasn’t teaching me how to play Smashing Pumpkins songs or “Yellow Ledbetter.” He wanted improvisation! Jazz!
“Just riff off the arpeggios!” he’d urge, while playing a steady riff with his own Fender.
“I’m trying!” I was breathless, my fingers rubbery and aching from the tangle that jazz created. I hated the chaos of not having rules to follow.
The summer before he went into the ICU, my dad mailed me a copy of his new Christmas album. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” he said. After spending a couple of years trying to pay for it, one of my cousins in Alabama sent him money to finish it. I was hurt that he didn’t ask me. Not that I had any money. But I would have tried.
The cover of the album is white, with a crude, child-like drawing of a saxophone and musical notes done in blue crayon. The title: Emmanuel: A Christmas Ablum.
He spelled “album” wrong on purpose, because that’s something a kid would do, and isn’t that funny?
I listened to his jazzy Christmas album in July, after scavenging my apartment for a way to play a physical CD (solution: Xbox). For some reason, the album made me cry. It was a beautiful, masterful, knockout album of classic Christmas songs. “More like hillbilly bebop,” he’d say.
I remember thinking, One day this is going to make me very sad.
I texted my dad: “IT’S SO GOOD! MY FAVORITES ARE THE LAST TWO TRACKS. IT’S LIKE A STORY, WITH TWISTS, TAKES YOU DOWN TO TRACK 10 BUT THEN BRINGS YOU BACK UP WITH 11 ON A SUPER HIGH NOTE.”
He texted back immediately: “AWESOME! I LIKE ME A BURNER . . . IT’S MY ‘ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING ENDING.’”
Now, a year and a half later, I try to stop boxing my ears when a saxophone comes on a speaker, but the instrument follows me everywhere. Especially “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. At the mall, at the airport, at Fred Meyer. I lean, try to find a way in, to bring him back to me in manageable increments. I discover a delightful genre of music on Spotify called “jazztronica,” and I think to text my dad about it. He would hate it.
Improvisation (noun): playing music with both spontaneous creativity and intentional conviction.
Around the time he mailed me his Christmas album, I had been thinking about my teenage years spent helping my dad in his most lucrative job—shooting weddings at an overpriced wedding venue called the Donnelly House. He was the in-house photographer and friends with the in-house musician, a pianist named Lovell. She was a petite woman in her seventies with short, tight curly hair. She was a hell of a jazz piano player and an inductee in the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. She played weddings because being in the Jazz Hall of Fame did not pay. She played while rich people drank white wine and stuffed their faces with richer finger foods. She played the Peanuts theme song because she knew I liked it. All her songs ended the same way—an uptick. Twenty years later, I wondered why.
I called my dad. “Hey. Why do so many jazz songs end on a Dah. Dah. Dah-dahhh!?”
He clicked his tongue. “That’s a standard ending in jazz. It’s a high note coda.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just a way to end a song on a high note.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
On day five, the ICU doctor and the nurses tell me that they don’t know how much longer they can keep him going. His lungs have failed. His kidneys aren’t responding to dialysis, everything is shutting down. This is it.
I think, That is impossible, he has lungs of steel! He’s been practicing for this his entire life!
I panic—what would he want the most in his last days, besides being with his family, and maybe a good pulled pork sandwich?
He’d want jazz. All of it. As much of it as possible.
He’d want memories, stories.
I asked him to remember the first concert we ever went to and play their top hits: “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies and “Closing Time” by Semisonic. Then I realized these songs are not what my sixty-five-year-old father wants to go out to, so I played him his bookmarked YouTube videos, mostly of his alma matter, the Jacksonville State Marching Southerners. I played Boots Randolph and “Baker Street.” I played him his own music because he loved to listen for ways to improve upon it next time.
There was a small television above the whiteboard facing his bed. I found the music channels and left it on jazz. The sound came through a tinny speaker within a blocky remote control next to his head. I turned it up. I apologized because it’s mediocre jazz, at best, but I know he’d prefer mediocre music to none. I asked the nurse if she could keep it going, at full volume, because my dad was hard of hearing after so many years of teaching beginner band and playing saxophone.
The next day, written in all caps on the whiteboard: PLAY JAZZ AT FULL VOLUME.
Syncopation (noun): a temporary displacement of the regular metrical accent in music caused typically by stressing the weak beat.
The last time I saw my dad before he was hospitalized was in New Orleans. In May 2021, seven months before he called an ambulance because he couldn’t breathe or remember how to button his shirt, I eloped in City Park. It was a short trip, and I was stunned that my parents came. It was a long flight from Sacramento, and my mother doesn’t do well with events and appointments she can’t postpone. She showed up for the wedding and Commander’s Palace dinner but stayed in the hotel room at the Pontchartrain for the remainder of the weekend.
For two days, I got to take my dad around the birthplace of jazz. It was a large time. It was unprecedented fun. I think I was more excited about getting to spend time in New Orleans with my dad—who was never allowed to go anywhere besides work or to take my mother to doctor’s appointments—than I was about getting married.
Music filled the air and rattled our chests as we walked around Jackson Square in the sticky pre-summer heat. We drank fruity drinks and ate, and ate, and ate. We stopped to listen to every busker playing a saxophone or a soulful beat. I wanted him to soak it in, the place that spoke his mother tongue.
The last photo I took of him is in Jackson Square, right outside of Muriel’s, as we waited for our dinner reservation. It’s a photo of him taking a photo of a street band. There’s a percussionist, a saxophone, a trumpet. The players were in their element, the sun hanging low and beating down on their slick heads, a five-gallon bucket at their feet to catch dollar bills. He’s leaning in, listening to the rhythm and the swing, the ups and downs, nodding his head, tapping his foot. He’s here. Present tense. He’s breathing in the warm sticky air that smells like roux, beignets, and coffee, and everything is jazz.
Coda (noun): a concluding musical section that is formally distinct from the main structure
I board the plane seven hours after my dad goes to wherever we go after this. I’m relieved there is no Christmas music pumping out of the speakers. I take my seat in the emergency exit row and agree to help if shit goes down. Something about having the worst thing happen makes everything else seem like small potatoes. Dust.
“How are you doing?” the flight attendant asks. She has beautiful skin and is wearing a crisp blue uniform. She drapes her hands over the empty seat next to me. She smiles at the other passengers as they shuffle to their seats.
“How are you?” I shoot back, not wishing to answer, because I can’t say, I am in shock, I have just lost my tether to this earth, and everyone is just walking around and laughing and boarding this plane to see their families for the holidays and don’t they know the world has ended?
“Oh, you know.”
I nod. “I hope everyone is being nice to you.”
She gives me a knowing look. At least I think she does, under her N95. I take out a Lysol wipe and run it across my seat, the arm rest, the tray table, the seatbelt, the curves of the plastic wall around the oval window. “Sorry. I’m paranoid. Used to work in public libraries. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.” I don’t tell her the real reason I do this: I am terrified of what these germs have taken away from me.
She laughs. “Oof. I can only imagine.”
To learn how to listen to jazz is first to understand that you will be caught off guard. That you must let it happen, that you have no choice. All the pieces sound chaotic on their own, but together they make something brilliant, something unique. There’s a voice in there if you’ll just hush and listen.
And returning to syncopation—designed to emphasize the upbeats, when your foot is tapping against the ground and you’re going up, down, up, down, and as it rises in midair—time stops but the saxophone comes in with this surprising little number—and no matter how much you try to anticipate it, still, it catches you by surprise.
***
Photograph by Filip Starý
