Alexander's Ragtime Band

Walking to school this morning, the headphones played "Alexander's Ragtime Band," Guy Van Duser's excellent version with Billy Novack. It gave me a strange rush of -- what? -- referred nostalgia. It was my father's favorite song, bar none, and when I was in grade school, practicing the clarinet, he would embarrass me hugely by grabbing the horn and trying to play that old song. Which came out all squeaky -- you have to stay in practice to keep your "lip," embouchure -- and tainted my reed with the flavor of bourbon.

I would give a lot to hear and taste that again, of course.

The song had special meaning to him. When he was a surgical resident -- "resident" would be in quotes, because his office was all over the territory of Alaska -- he would go out to remote Eskimo villages to do emergency surgery under marginal conditions, and flying out with the bush pilots in those sputtery accident-prone Piper Cubs, he could hear that favorite song in the drone of the propellors' wash, and it would help keep him calm.

I tried to hear it in helicopters' roar forty years later, but couldn't. Maybe the occasional crackle of gunfire was too distracting.

My dad was a quiet private man, who didn't leave me a wealth of memories. It's good to have that, though.

Joe