Bev's Bonus Round Page

Bev's Bonus Round Pages
Communication and Discussion on
Issues of Health & Living

BEV'S STORY
Death. The Learning Experience?

The day the music died.

Isn't that what they call the day Buddy Holly crashed? The day the music died?

The phrase came back to me today when I was driving home from Sacramento. For a change I had put on something other than Bonus Round Sessions (that'll teach me) and was playing Lawsuit's first CD. There's a silly song on there called "Boxes & Boxes," which Ned wrote and which is actually on the CD twice--once with Paul doing lead vocal and Ned doing backup, with full band accompaniment, and the other just Ned singing it with guitar. I remember when they recorded the duet--I have a videotape of it, somewhere in my bazillion Lawsuit videos. It wasn't coming along the way they wanted and Ned started getting silly and started stripping. By the time they actually recorded the song, it was just the two of them in their jockey shorts, with head phones. Very silly. But I do get that picture in my head when I hear that song.

There's a line in there that says "the pain is so excruciating, it's hard to fight the tears." About the time I came to that line, I was in excruciating pain, with tears streaming down my face. That's how I feel--like the day the music died. Music has been such a huge part of this family and yes, Jeri plays a slew of instruments and Ned still sings and plays the guitar and Tom can even strum a bit on the guitar, but at the core of this family ever since the kids were little were the impromptu shows with all of them contributing something and Paul usually center stage. Even when they got to be adults, we couldn't have a gathering without Paul doing SOMETHING on the guitar.

THE very happiest memory I have of my father, bar none, was the last time we saw him, the Christmas before he died. He was a jazz piano player, self-taught, and had always been disappointed in me for not fulfilling his dreams, learning to be a pianist, and, I guess, going on to do great things. At the very least, it was a disappointment to him that I didn't share his love of jazz...in fact, I have a real aversion to a lot of jazz, mostly, I think, because of how important it was to my father that I love it.

What he never realized was that in the kids he had his dream--a family of talented musicians. But he never TALKED to them. He always brushed them off with "you can't talk to teenagers these days. I don't like that crap they listen to." He never realized that Paul was an AVID Frank Sinatra fan, that Ned picked up a lot of Latin music when he lived in Brasil for a year and loved listening to the golden oldies station, which played music of my father's era, and that Jeri adored jazz and was a talented musician.

This Christmas I think Jeri sat down at the piano and started playing, and he kind of sat down next to her and started doing a bass line to whatever it was that she was playing. Paul had his guitar and he started strumming along, then Ned found something to bang on and began playing a drum beat. Ultimately they found something for Tom and David to play too. It was absolutely beautiful. They probably played music for half an hour. My father was just glowing and kept saying "I can't believe I'm having a jam session with my GRANDCHILDREN!" If only he'd known that he could have been doing that for years. What opportunities he missed by not looking past his own perceptions of what they must like, just because they were teenagers.

Well...writing that helped me get past the "excruciating pain."

The phrase that comes into my head NOW is, "The song is ended, but the melody lingers on...."

"...If you stay in the center and embrace death
with your whole heart you will endure forever." Lao Tzu