Parents Say the Darnedest Things

On the way back from dinner, Dad fires up the satellite radio, where Pharoah Sanders is playing a wonderfully squawky solo over a soulful beat...

ME: Ahh, Pharoah...
DAD (reading screen): Are you familiar with Pharoah Sanders?
ME: Very much so. I've even seen him live.
MOM: So is he dead now?
ME: That's not exactly what I meant.

Nephews Say the Darnedest Things, Part 2

During my recent trip to Austin, I was watching a Rangers game on TV with my youngest nephew, who has recently started playing Little League himself. When Rangers manager Ron Washington went out to change pitchers, the name on the back of his jersey was quite visible...

NEPHEW: His last name is Washington?
ME: That's right.
NEPHEW: He must be George Washington's son.

(I reminded him that George lived in the 1700s and Ron was in his early 60s, so they probably couldn't be father and son.)

Nephews Say the Darnedest Things

My oldest one posed an interesting question at dessert time last night...

NEPHEW: Which would you rather have--ice cream with wasabi sauce, or chili with orange juice?
SISTER: How much orange juice?
NEPHEW: Lots!

Feel free to comment with your own answer...

Nephews Say the Darnedest Things

As many of you know, I adopted a cat over the summer. His shelter name, which I kept, was Austin, which is also the place where my sister and her family reside. I was talking at dinner with my oldest nephew about the newest member of my household.

NEPHEW: You have a cat?
ME: Yeah, I got him at the end of the summer, since the last time we saw each other.
DAD: And you'll never guess what his name is...
NEPHEW (after a long pause): Kevin Jr.?

Parents Say the Darnedest Things?

A few hours ago, my dad and I were undertaking the potentially futile mission of buying a gallon of milk at a little before 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and the usual places were all showing as closed...

DAD: Oh, look--that gas station has a convenience store. Maybe they have milk..
ME: They might, but you'll pay out the wazoo for it if they do.
DAD: That's OK, we'll check anyway. And I'm bringing my wazoo in with me when we go.
ME: To pay out of?
DAD: That's right.

This Day Belongs to Moms

Just got off the phone with Mom. She and Dad have been back from Italy for a few days now (yeah, yeah, rough life) and seem to be over the jet lag and all that. It's back to life as normal for a while.

As I said a year ago, I'm one of those who is fortunate enough to have both my parents still around. The communication often takes the forms of emails now, along with the occasional IM (though Mom doesn't care for multitasking), but it's great to be able to get some pearls of wisdom and just stay in contact long after the normal period of "parenting" has passed.

Last year, I linked to a tribute to Moms from Dan Collins of Protein Wisdom. I just reread it, and it's worth linking again.

If your mom is still around, and you haven't picked up the phone today, you should do so. You won't regret it. (And a happy Mother's Day by extension to the two other moms in my family: my sister, a mother of three, and my Aunt Nora, who's not only a mom but a new grandmother this year.)

Leap Day

Since February 29 only happens once every four years, I feel an obligation to post even during a fairly busy week.

The last time this day occurred, I was a fairly new blogger, so I got into the act as well. One of the biggest parts of the post was a tribute to the old family dog, Sassy, who was born on a Leap Day. (A day later, I would have a little fun running the Sassy story back and forth through the Babelfish translation engine a few times.)

But as entertaining as it was to have a Leap Dog (a status to which she would occasionally live up by jumping back and forth between the sectional couches), I always wondered what it would be like to be a person whose birthday only technically occurred every four years. The 2004 post told of a guy born in 1908 who was celebrating his "24th" birthday (I wonder if he made it to both the quarter-century and century mark simultaneously yesterday), and this afternoon, a friend told me about his English teacher in middle school who celebrated her "16th" birthday while he was in her class; we figured out that she still wouldn't be "old enough to drink" yet. Heh.

Have you ever known a Leap Day person? Do they handle their odd birthday with humor, or is it a source of annoyance to them? And has their often-nonexistent birthday ever fouled up a computer database or anything?

Here's hoping that the extra day is going well for you.

A Celebration of Time and Love

I'm back from my parents' anniversary reception, and I have to say that the whole thing was great. Everybody really liked the band; the standards that we played actually had some meaning to the mostly-older crowd, because a lot of it was the music of "their day." It was a challenge to keep focused sometimes, because a lot of my parents' friends (many of whom I hadn't seen since my sister's wedding ten years ago) came up to talk to me when I wasn't soloing; this resulted in some longer bass solos than expected, but it was all good.

I met some people who had spent quite a bit of time involved with music, including a former big-band tenor player who had toured with some "name" bands and even fronted his own for a while, as well as a guy who sang in a rock band for 28 years. I also had at least three people tell me that they had a daughter who used to play tenor in school but had given it up to concentrate on piano or changed interests or whatever.

But the coolest thing about the reception was just getting to celebrate Mom and Dad. Everyone who's met them always commented on what nice people they are, and the 100+ people who descended upon the country club over those three hours to celebrate with them are living proof of how many lives they have touched. Seeing some of the fruits of their time together--such as my sister with my two nephews and one more "in the oven," as Dad said, and me with my music, the training for which was heavily bankrolled by Mom and Dad--just drove the point home even more that these were two people who were meant to be together for all time.

We got some serious chill time at Mom and Dad's house afterwards, and then we had to leave way too early this morning so one of the guys could go play another gig; another guy had one a few hours after we got back, and I was off to an alumni meeting; the life of a musician rarely involves lots of measures of rest, as it were. But even though it was a whirlwind trip of sorts, there wasn't any other place that I would have been yesterday, and it was a privilege to participate.

Summer teaching starts in the morning, but I also have lots of topics to post about, so expect some new stuff on a daily basis for a while.

Anniversary in Rhythm

My parents are having a big bash for their anniversary next weekend; I'm providing the band (that's the "private function in Sugar Land, TX" listing in the Upcoming Gigs section of the sidebar), so we were talking about details last night. One of the things I'd asked them was if they could remember the song that was played for their first dance, and I was surprised to find out that there wasn't one. I knew that they had been married in Mom's Baptist church, but even though it was Northern Baptist, not Southern (being in Ohio and all), a first dance was still evidently not part of their tradition. And then Mom dropped the bombshell: The one thing that stood out in her memory was that they really liked the music of Stan Kenton and his orchestra, and one of the musical highlights of their college days was when he came to their college to play a concert.

That's right--my parents got to see Kenton perform live.

All this time that I've been a jazz musician, and all the times that I'd played at a school where Kenton had donated his entire library of music (and had a rehearsal/performance hall named after him), and I never knew that my parents had actually seen him perform. From what Mom said, it was very common for big bands to go around from college to college giving concerts (much like Maynard does at high schools these days). It's also interesting to note that the college campus is the one place that's most responsible for keeping the big band tradition alive, except that nowadays, the students themselves are the players.

With the exception of my dad's recent involvement in church choir, Mom and Dad haven't been actively involved in music since they were teenagers, but now I have to wonder if perhaps the same little bit of genetic material that predisposed them to like Kenton seeped into me and grew to humongous proportions. (It's also possible that being a Kentonphile was very normal when they were in school, since jazz hadn't quite morphed from popular music to art form by then.)

At any rate, I'm officially jealous (after all, they may have gotten to hear the original "Machito")...and now I have to figure out if I can scale down something like "Peanut Vendor" or "Eager Beaver" for tenor, guitar, bass and drums before this Saturday.

This car has all the bells and whistles...and reptiles: A Kentucky rental-car customer was rather startled to discover a snake wrapped across the dashboard. (He thought it was a rubber snake at first, so he started to drive, but he realized something was amiss when the snake started to move.)

"Dad, I'd better buy my lunch at school today; the "hash" you sent with me yesterday didn't go over so well:" An elementary-schooler in Minnesota reached into his backpack to get out a folder; instead, out came one of the bags of marijuana that his dad had hidden in there. (Dad was busted, needless to say.)