heard	Mark Isham			Tibet
			Mark Isham			Miles Remembered: The Silent Way Project
			Animal Logic			Animal Logic
			California Guitar Trio			Pathways
			Queensryche			Greatest Hits

Trumpets Along this road Goes no one; Autumn eve is falling. I (11-21)   "The use of Haiku in this work stems first and foremost from a perception of it as music." -Mark Isham I could not have defined the change -- Conversion of the Mind Like Sanctifying in the Soul - Is Witnessed - not explained -- -Emily Dickinson, "I think I was enchanted (593)"   Dented bugle, full of earth. I thought you were a toy   M y father played trumpet in his high school's band. I have no idea whether or not he was good at it. I don't know if he played the instrument for fun, or if he sought solace in its music. I don't know if he followed the greats, or simply played the instrument as part of a class. All I know is that one day he showed us the trumpet in the case. Dented at the bell, brass faded from ages without play.   "Mama," Wangero said sweet as a bird. "Can I have these old quilts?" II I saw things in that trumpet. I saw that if you held it a certain way, it looked like a gun. I saw that the valves could be removed and then put back in backwards (you had to force em, and it left scratches on the finish, but still…). I saw that the bell of the horn could be used as a shovel for moving dirt around the backyard.   I used my father's trumpet to bury my favorite toy -- a Nylint Ambulance -- in the backyard (I had a thing about burying my toys back then). When I went to go dig it up, I couldn't remember where I had hidden it. and I never saw it again…   My father had an acoustic guitar, too. He never played it (At least I think he never played it). When I was in my 'air guitar' phase, I had my father build me several wooden guitars to play with. He did not hesitate when I asked him to paint his guitar red, nor did he protest when I used a saw to put a cutaway into it so that I could pretend to play the higher frets easier. Like so many of his tools my brother and I used as toys, the guitar and the trumpet sort of faded from something he kept into something that I manifested with my imaginations. He never hesitated. He just gave them to me.   I never understood his trumpet. Never saw it the way it was meant to be seen. And yet, it was an age for trumpets. Doc Severenson every night with Carson; Jackie Gleason's big band sounds; Herb Alpert, Chuck Mangione, and of course - Miles, Miles, Miles… I never really got it. I liked guitars. I liked the way they looked. I liked the way that guitar players moved. I paid the trumpets little attention. It is so much of youth, I suppose, to not look at what you are pointed towards. To not see what is important when it is there to be seen, only to find it's value later on in something else, something you consider your own. How strange it seems to end up on the same page with someone who showed you the page years before, when you weren't interested in seeing… "The truth is," I said, "I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas." She gasped like a bee had stung her. "Maggie can't appreciate these quilts!" She said. "She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use." III   I listen to Miles Davis' In a Silent Way now and then. It is a gorgeous album. A landmark in jazz. And as I strain to hear the rhythms between the beats, the tonalities underneath the half-tones, the feelings that Miles wanted us to see with that album… I think to myself, "I just don't get this." I can listen to All Blues all day long. I adore that song, I adore adaptations of that song. There is Miles that I adore for what Miles and his velvet horn sounds do to me inside. But sometimes I hear the horns, and it flies right over me. I don't "get" Miles yet. I don't think that's a bad thing, as Miles Davis' music isn't always the easiest thing to understand (even for a musician). Even when he does hit me right, I am not always completely sure why. The same sense of confusions applies to my ability to appreciate John Coletrane, Dexter Gordon, Thelonious Monk, or the outside curves that a young Dizzy Gillespie occasionally throws my way. It sounds cool, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you why. By contrast, I am absolutely sure of the reasons that Kenny G makes me want to vomit, which in a strange way makes all of this more confusing. Because if the overwrought melodies and 'seagull caught in the fan belt of a 1978 Pinto' solos that permeate his music make me ill, then what I like should be just the opposite, right? That rationale makes sense right up to the point when I hear Branford Marsalis turn a soprano saxophone melody into a slice of heaven, doing many of the same types of things that have made Mr. G obscenely rich…. but Branford is doing them right,… you know?   I do not yet fully understand why Jazz makes me feel. I am just thankful that it does.   ***** We're piling into a big red rental car for the next few days, driving to Illinois to show the baby off to Kim's family. It will be a mixture of happy reunions and political negotiations. It will be a return home for a woman who was once was a girl, and sometimes still is. It will be cold winds, strange food, exuberant embraces, baby talk, photographs, and old stories. It will be an escape from all that is Florida, all that is the South, and all that is my family. And yet it will be the same. Exactly the same. It will be remembering those who have passed -- missing them, cursing them, aching for them all at the same time. It will be old friends she has not seen in years, connections still strong even after all this time. It will be the smell of the air, the changing color of the leaves, the taste of the water. It will make her want to go back there and live forever. It will make her want to leave and never come back. I will be a part of it. I will feel far away from it. I will again feel that itch to travel the country, and I will again feel that yearning to be back home. It will be wondrous. It will be bittersweet. It will be Javan and Suzy all around us, yet nowhere to be found.   She will cry, and I won't be able to make it stop.   …and the baby will look away, not yet realizing what it is that we are trying to point out to him.   My father let me have his trumpet and I misunderstood. I buried my favorite plaything in the ground and I never found him again. _____________________________________ I Quoted from "Haiku Vol.1, Eastern Culture" by R. H. Blyth -- 1949 II - III Excerpt from "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker -- 1973