Sombody Else, Not Me
When I think of all the hoopla that goes around all the electioniering and these folks running for president, I am reminded of that old Bert Williams song: "Why, it's a wonderful chance for somebody; somebody else, not me." I did not recognize it when I was a youth and it was all handed to me on a golden platter, and I didn't know it when I was a young adult who struggled my way to a hop house high that surely would have done me in if it were not for the return of the song of my life. But I can tell you now that I will forever be grateful that ambition passed me by. I will forever be grateful that when it came time to reach for the brass ring I was more concerned with falling off the horse than in retrieving it. Cause that act of reaching is all wrapped up in believing in things that removes you from the tune, the rhythm, the music of life. For me it has always been life's music that makes it all worth while, and like Louis Armstrong, I believe all music is like walking down the street with your lady, breathing in the night air, hearing the song in her voice, the taste of her kiss.
I listen to what is going on today and I sense the return of the great error of the twentieth century, where in certain circles that I knew well enough, the personal became the political, the political became the personal, and songs turned into marches and sloganeering, castrating any sense of life's natural rhythm, any sense of the song.
Politics is incapable of holding ambiguity, nuance, the shadows that are the inevitable result of sunshine. My Maggie loved me till the day she died. I will believe that until the day I go. But I also know she had stopped caring for me years before that sad day came. Do you imagine politics could ever hold such a contradiction: well music can. Every tune from some childhood ditty to Beethoven can and does each and every time it's played with care and listened to with desire. Hours before she died I took out my cornet and played our tune, a tune that she first hummed to me at not quite the age of five backstage in St Paul, as she tried to teach me a complicated tap step she knew like the back of her hand that very first time we met. I played that tune, and the smile that transcended her pain reached across those decades in a manner that no words could echo, no belief could hold, and no wrong could be left unforgiven. It wasn't the tune, for the tune was only a poor representation of the music that was in the life we lived. No it wasn't the tune, but the memories the tune evoked of a life lived well enough.
So I listen to the debate, and have no hesitancy in taking my part, but always with an ear cocked towards what can't be found there. The problem is not so much in what they are saying, but rather what they have to become to say it. That is the thing that always disappoints in the end. I think of Harry Truman who probably never let the affairs of state ruin a good game of poker, but I could be mistaken. I have met too many people of late for whom politics is like the news: twenty-four-seven. There is no music in it whether joyful or not. And I become the little seven year old sitting in the orquesta seat with my parents watching the great one shuffle in his black face, top hat, and oversized shoes giving out the best advice that can be had in any time: "why, it's a wonderful chance for somebody, somebody else, not me."
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