This paragraph depicts young Joey Fusaro's recollection of the last time he had seen Phineas Biggers, as he returns from graduate school to attend the funeral of the 80 year old black jazz pianist who had become a kind of surrogate father to him during a difficult childhood.


"The old man stopped-didn't say a word for the longest time-just stared off into the distance.Joey sensed he was retracing his steps,following a path that had begun on the back roads of Georgia and wound its tortuous way across the country from one juke joint to the next ,until finally dead-ending in an insignificant little northern river town where he had sat at an old ebony colored piano and,night after night,played a kind of music that came not from any store bought sheet,not even from any hastily written bit of paper with nothing but lines and spaces and an occasional chord symbol,but straight from the heart--the music itself, a kind of distillation of all he had ever been---all he would ever become."