88

Colonel Charles Luther Lowell served as a pilot in WWII. He is eighty-eight years old. He married my grandmother on March 21, 1943, and they had three kids: my mom and my Aunt DJo 11 months, two weeks, and a day apart, then my uncle David 15 years later (oops). Chuck and Wilma lived happily ever after until the 11th month of the 49th year of their marriage, when she left him. We won’t discuss the details, but I’ve always marveled at her courage. He married his feisty second wife a few years later, and they lived till death did them part in March of ’07, when she died of cancer. Shortly after that, he crushed three vertebrae in his back and he had a heart attack, and in the last year his health has deteriorated to the point that he no longer feels like it’s worth it to go on. So, last Wednesday, he stopped all his meds.

My Aunt and Uncle and their significant others, my mom, my sister, and I are here in Denver to say goodbye. One of the things they’re working on is going through his lifetime of pictures and papers, piecing together his story.

It has been making me think. Maybe I should get organized with my own story, which I’m already having trouble piecing together. If I wait 50 more years there will be no chance that I will remember the kinds of things I want to remember. The thing that struck me in all of it, though, was the absence of audio in all his memorabilia. Whereas my Grandmother was the source of almost all my musical training since age 3, he doesn’t seem to have much attachment to music of any kind. I was thinking that it would be hard for me to construct my own story without it being punctuated by music I was either learning, playing, performing, or writing. The songs I wrote, themselves, are like those tattered photos with the embarrassing hair and gauchos (did anyone else wear gauchos?). I went for a brief hike at Red Rocks this morning with my friend Andrew. [Aside: I went to my first ever rock concert there - Howard Jones]. He independently offered the idea that I should be taking biographical notes over and above the blog I’ve sporadically kept over the last 4 years. Without such notes or some kind of cheat sheet, I’m not sure anyone would be able to make sense of the random collection of stuff I’ve got in drawers and cupboards, and much of my music is as yet unrecorded.

I’ll get right on that.

Anyway, tonight was my last night here with him. My aunts and mom were sitting on the couch and Pa was in his chair. [Aside: Have you guys seen the awesome technology they've got these days for old people? This chair is amazing. It reclines. It massages. It lifts him up when he has to "wee wee." [Aside-inside-aside: that's actually what he calls it: "I have to wee wee again."]] Mother said I should show and tell my new Tenori-On. I went and got it, gave them all a little tour, and then they asked me to play something. So I stood up and plugged it into the stereo and played them a few little sketches. My grandfather goes, “what’s that?” I said, “It’s an instrument.” “What’s it for?” he asked. “Making music,” I said.

They kept asking for more, so finally I played a whole song that I’d written and saved with various layers and a real song form. When it was done, everyone was quiet, and then Pa said two words:

“That’s NUTS!”

We all laughed. I said, “You don’t like it, eh, Pa?”

“No.”

Aunt DJo explained that it was new music, (“You know, Daddy, like SWING?”) and he doesn’t have to like it. He kept asking what it was for – what was the purpose? I asked him what was the purpose of music at all. He said he didn’t know, but he definitely couldn’t see any purpose in this. That made us all laugh some more.

Anyway, it’s nice that one of my last memories with my grandfather has to do with music. I can’t remember any other musical memories with him except from two days ago when DJo and David showed several long “movies” they’d made with hundreds of his old photos, narration, and a sound track. She asked my mom and David to provide her with their favorite songs or songs that meant something to them, then she went and found other music native to the countries in his photos (Guam, Thailand, Germany, Turkey, rural western Colorado). She put them together with a bunch of stock samples like birds, ocean sounds, river sounds, and children saying “yaaaaay!” and then we spent two hours watching them together with him.

After my Tenori-On demo, David went on an ice-cream run to Dairy Queen. Pa ordered an ice-cream cone. We all sat together in the living room, ate ice-cream, and listened to the “kids” talk about their ice-cream memories growing up. At one point, Pa says, “OKaayyy…I’m taking my hearing aids out.”

That was our cue that he was done for the night. He was already taking them out as he said that, so by the time I was alone with him (everyone else cleared out because I’m the only one leaving tomorrow), I wasn’t so sure how well he’d be able to hear me. I knelt down beside his chair and I couldn’t keep from crying. He kept saying, “Oh God…” I told him I loved him. He said he loved me too. I thanked him. I wanted so much to ask him to make amends with my grandmother, but I didn’t. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want to prolong things or make things difficult for him. He asked me to have a safe trip back. I said I would. He told me to be good. I told him to be good too and he said he would. I laughed the kind of laughing-while-crying laugh. I asked my mom to take one last photo (I’ll attach it tomorrow when she sends it to me).

Then I went in the other room and cried and hugged all my family members long and hard, took a few more photos, and that was that.

I’ve never said the Big Goodbye to anyone before. As hard as it was for me, it must be much harder for him. Maybe I’ll send a recording of the song he hated in for the next NAPcast.