Arriving where we started

It has not been the best of years for quite a few people I know. I’ve been struck by how many of them have lost someone in their lives, in most cases a parent.

To some extent, I’ve had a difficult time relating to it because in my case my parents have been gone quite a while, and my grandparents … well, we lost them a long time ago.

So what some people are going through, the coming to terms with loss, happened quite a while back for me. I lost my mother about five or seven years ago and I think my father passed away something like fifteen years ago. (Yes, I have a terrible memory for dates though, strangely, I still remember my mother’s birthday, June 1st, and my father’s, December 21st … but don’t ask me what years.)

With all this loss going on for others, I’ve been thinking about my parents and what they mean to me now, and what losing them means, and I find time and memory are busy little workers who bust their humps non-stop. (Yes, that's Dad on the right.)

What I have found has happened is, while I don’t think of my parents all the time, they are not only there all the time – they’re running the damn show!

Almost everything about my life is informed by them. Certainly many of the dominant aspects are.

Give ya a f’r instance … I am an unapologetic geek. Much as I like nice things, appreciate design, like the tastes of good foods well-prepared, and the infinite variety of pleasures the world affords, I’m a book-music-movie man. And this, my friends, is directly attributable to my parents.

In fact, I miss my parents most when I see a good movie (well, a good old movie) or hear some good music.

Let’s take music … my Dad was a jazzy accountant. He loved jazz. At one time, back in the dim and murky past, he played horn in a band that toured southern Ontario. It’s almost impossible to picture him without seeing him sitting in his chair bent and rocking to the rhythm of his Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Wild Bill Davison and other jazz records. (That's the Duke on the right.)

His fingers would snap. His face would scruntch up as he did what would be his equivalent of playing air guitar (except with him it was trumpet).

So what music do you think is showing up on my iPod these days? Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins … That’s the music I’m listening to. And if the twenty year old me was around, he’d probably say, “What’s with that? I thought we left home to get away from shit like that?”

Of course, there was a lot more to my father than jazz – some good, some not so good. And an awful lot that was screamingly funny. Dad loved to talk and therefore loved an audience. So at dinner – or anywhere, for that matter – we, the kids, would have to listen to his stories.

Exasperated, my mother would say, “Laurie! They’ve heard that one before!”

And Dad would brush her aside with, “Yes, but they like this one,” and merrily continue with whatever he was telling us as we rolled our eyes.

(Minor aside: Laurie is the Scottish diminutive of Laurence, and that’s Laurence with a “u”. Dad was no Larry – I think he’d have blown a gasket if someone called him that.)

By the way, the business of stories? I think that’s one reason why I love writing, books, movies and music. Everything’s a story and I love them, something I believe I probably get from my father and my grandfather on my mother’s side, J.A Murphy, the ex-train man.

Perhaps it’s as T.S. Elliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

It’s taken some time, but I’m getting to know my place for the first time.

This post has gone on longer than I expected. So I’ll hold off on rambling about movies and my mother (and, for that matter, my grandmother – who was the perfect audience for cinema). (btw ... I don't just listen to jazz, but it's been incorporated into what I listen to in a big way.)

Tag: Family, Fathers, Loss, Memory, Jazz, Duke Ellington