Grandpa's Music

I am 25

Listening to the rat-a-tat-tat, drop of the bass

Big Band, Big Sound, It is bigger than myself

I curl up in the Romantic horns and Copper voices

Horns that pull like violin strings and at the heart

Glenn Miller is my grandfather incarnate

If sound could be a ghost, and ghosts could be reborn

The sounds of women with smooth curls and curves, unabashed divas with their martinis and long cigarettes

I’m tapping my foot, really swinging my hands and saying

Oh no, no baby

Handsome men, faces framed by black bowties and faded memory

It’s a clarinet toot, the wail of a trumpet or two

And sounds I can’t identify

Scoot Scoot Scoot

Then Swoon Darling Swoon

Thank you Benny Goodman

Things are trivial with age

But the smallest things are the most important

Like a sandwich and cookie at one

Dinner at five

And Big Band in between

Melancholy disappears, boredom is symbol crashed

Swept up by trombones and everything is blue

Blue as the lighting in a 1940s club

Where he escapes

Tapping his foot as I’m tapping mine now

So long modern world

Too fast, too loud, too unconnected world

In his house are pictures

The color of newsprint paper

His wedding day, 1945, a young brunette at his side

My father, his brothers

Pictures that are more like archives

They tell of greater things

His Coastguard uniform tidy, hair slicked, crooked smile

When one was proud of his country and signed up for war

Them Japs are good as dead

Bang, bang

Now it’s Grand Theft Auto

I tell my sister about listening to Grandpa’s music

She tells me she’s doing the same

The world can’t take him away from us now

Not when we’ve got the tisk of a top hat

The bellow of a tuba

The rise and fall and rise again of a horn section

So Big and so full

That it wraps us in warm velvet and cradles our heads

This is what love sounds like

What it feels like

Clicks and scratches

The imperfections of memory and age and time

I am 25

Listening to music that’s older than my parents

Listening to the echoes of ghosts and the sound of instruments

That have long been retired

I’m listening for my grandpa

My eyes welling at just the right note

There he is

And my foot starts tapping