I’ve been a Steely Dan/Donald Fagen fan for more than 30 years, but I never was the sort of fan who gets into biographical stuff. I never cared where Fagen grew up or who his girlfriends were. I just knew I liked the music without wondering much about why that might be so.

This morning, however, my e-mail included one of those you-might-also-enjoy… messages from Amazon.com. The suggestion that interested me was a book called Steely Dan: Reelin’ in the Years—part biography of Fagen and Walter Becker, part discography and part band history. As I sometimes do on Amazon.com, I clicked on LOOK INSIDE!™ and read some of the book.

The selected passage was the story of Fagen’s high school (class of ‘65) and college years (class of ‘69). It was like looking into a mirror. In high school, Fagen was this alienated kid, more interested in jazz than Top 40 fluff, who hurried home after school every day to play the piano by ear for hours on end.

I did the same thing (high school class of ‘64, college class of ‘68).

Fagen could read music, I guess, because he played a horn in the high school marching band.

Ditto.

Fagen settled on majoring in English in college because he just didn’t want to be the kind of professional musician the music department was determined to produce.

Yup.

There were some important differences, of course. Taken together they explain why, 40 years later, Fagen is an internationally known star who has sold millions of records, while I am an amateur musician who sings barbershop in nursing homes. Here’s a partial list of those differences:

• In high school, I played a couple hours a day; Fagen probably played six or eight. It makes a difference.
• My father hated my music, and I couldn’t play it while he was around. Fagen probably wasn’t constrained in quite that way.
• In those days, the radio station choices in Portland, Maine were Top 40, country and “easy listening.” Fagen lived in New Jersey, just south of New York City where jazz broadcasts were all over the radio dial.
• My alto sax teacher had been on the road with a well known big band and was a hell of a jazz player, but he was my only direct contact with jazz. Fagen had all the jazz clubs in NYC in which to soak up the music, the personalities and the life.
• In college, I found the dope smokers to be self-important and boring. Fagen apparently joined in the fun and found fellow musicians and an audience in the process.
• I was damn good, but Fagen in my opinion was and is a genius. That also makes a difference.
• But I’m still better looking. I’ll give you six out of seven, Donald.

While still in high school, I learned to play many of the chord voicings Bud Powell had pioneered. I’d love to write about what made those harmonies so unexpected and new. You’d have to know some jazz theory to stay with me, however, and if you know some jazz theory you already know about Bud’s harmonies. Bud was the guy who figured out, for example, how to play a C7 chord that sounds like a C7—except there’s no C in it anywhere!

You still hear Bud’s chords, now at least 60 years old, any time you listen to piano jazz. My father, however, considered these harmonies to be particularly egregious, and he sort of had a point. Bud Powell, according to many accounts, was crazy, and his harmonies were crazy for their time.

Bud Powell also wasn’t the whole story, of course. I knew about Dave Brubeck, but no one told me about Red Garland; and I didn’t discover him on my own until many, many years later. Fagen, however, was a huge Red Garland fan from the beginning and apparently spent long hours trying to learn Garland’s rhythmic sense, his particular style of using his right hand to hang languidly behind the beat that his left hand maintained scrupulously.

Fagen’s cover of Ruby Baby on The Nightfly turns Dion’s silly puppy love ditty into a jazz-infused R&B classic and shows that Fagen did his homework. Listen to Fagen’s piano solo, starting about 1:45 into the track, and see if you don’t hear Red Garland inspiring Fagen’s wonderful melodic line. I certainly do.

No wonder I’m a fan.

The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.

—William Faulkner

I live in Portland, Maine. Until well into the 20th century, Greater Portland was served by an extensive streetcar line. Iron rails were set into the cobblestone pavement as if the streetcars would run for a thousand years.

With the advent of automobiles and mass transit by bus, however, the streetcars faded away. They were gone completely by the time I was born in 1946.

By the 1970s, most people had had enough of trying to drive on cobblestones, particularly on streets where the old trolley line rails were still in place. As the city could afford to do the work, the streets were paved over with asphalt.

The only cobblestones deliberately left as pavement in Portland, as far as I know, are found in the downtown area known as The Old Port, a tourist mecca marked by small shops, law offices and more restaurants and bars per acre than anywhere else in Maine.

Yet the old cobblestones aren’t really gone in other parts of the city. We have had a punishing winter here, and the combination of freezing and thawing ground with the repeated pounding of heavy snow plows, storm after storm, has fragmented the asphalt pavement of many Portland streets.

Beneath the asphalt, the cobblestones and trolley tracks remain. Now that winter is over, a lot of cobblestones that haven’t seen the light of day for decades are visible. They will disappear again as street repairs are completed, but they’ll be back again to greet a new generation of Portlanders every time a winter of this past year’s magnitude finds southern Maine.

Cobblestone streets and iron rails come as close to true permanence as anything human ingenuity has ever devised.

This evening we’re in the middle of what feels like the first real spring rain of the season. The rain started this afternoon as I was finished the first phase of a project I’ve been putting off since the day we moved into this house in 1996.

We’re the third or fourth owners of this house, but no one ever landscaped the lot. For years, I have been irritated by a low spot in the front lawn. And this is the year I finally do something about it. Nobody ever really seeded our front yard either, and after a massive attack of grubs last year there really isn’t any front lawn to speak of. Uneven grass is one thing; an expanse of bare dirt is something else.

But in trying to reestablish the lawn, I was determined not to seed a hole. So, in order to fill that hole I’ve started moving dirt from an inconspicuous spot out back. This of course is creating a hole in the back yard.

When I was on the phone with Marge earlier in the day, she asked what I was doing. “Moving a hole,” I replied, “with a wheelbarrow and shovel. I would have preferred to tie it to the rear bumper of the car and tow it to its new location out back, but I couldn’t seem to make the physics work.”

Right-handers are all alike; every southpaw is left-handed in his own way.

It is almost always true, but In the fall of 2003 I met a person who is left-handed in almost exactly the same way I am. I was surprised for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, I had waited 57 years to meet such a person. For another thing, the person in question turned out to be a 17-year-old girl. Having waited only 17 years to find someone similarly sinistral she was a whole lot less excited about the discovery than I was. Or it may just have been that 17-year-olds are so often bored by almost everything except each other.

Anyway, if you are of the right-handed persuasion, you may be wondering what I’m talking about. The fact is left-handedness is very rarely absolute, although my daughter Elizabeth may be an exception. She says her right hand and arm are there mostly for symmetry, but we lefties are made of exceptions. Left-handedness is a continuum, and the term left-handed therefore generally applies to any hand preference that is in any way not pure right-handedness. This means that left-handed has the same relationship to right-handed as black does to white in American racial politics.

I won’t even get started on the bum rap lefties have always gotten in general. The French call left gauche; the Romans called it sinister!

Trying something new has always been an adventure for me. Sometimes I know right away whether I will do a thing left or right, but sometimes I have to try it both ways. Here’s a partial list to show you what I mean.

Grooming:

Toothbrush: right
Razor: left
Comb: right

Tools:

Hammer: left
Saw: right
Screwdriver: right
Pliers: left
Axe: left
Drill: right

Sports:

Throw: right
Bat: right
Tennis racquet: left
Bowling: right
Pool: left
Archery: right
Rifle: left

Miscellaneous:

Write: left (with chalk, ambidextrous)
Eat: right
Computer mouse: right
Guitar: right

Although many things change in education, some things do not. For example, no one teaches lefties how to write. We’re on our own. There doesn’t seem to be an explicit penalty for left-handedness anymore, but I came along in school at the very end of the days when teachers believed that everyone was really right-handed. Some of us just needed to have the fear of God put into us to realize it.

Faced with this kind of pressure, left-handed kids adopted a number of strategies. I suppose there were the faint hearts who knuckled under and learned to write right-handed, but I never knew any of them. And that wasn’t my response. I developed a peculiar way of gripping a pencil that enabled me to write with the forward slant of a rightie without having to turn the paper upside down to do it. My grip, in fact, was almost exactly like the one shown in the picture. I didn’t know that anyone else held the pen the same way I did until I did an image search for this post.

Anyway, years later, I realized the downside of this grip. The result of my frantic, yet forward-slanted, note-taking while I studied for the bar exam after law school was a neurological injury to my left hand from which I have never fully recovered. Over the last few years, I have grudgingly begun using my right hand to write. I don’t enjoy it, but I find that I can do it. I imagine my second grade teacher pursing her lips triumphantly and saying, “This is precisely what I hoped you could avoid, Peter.”

“Yes, Mrs. Sterling. Of course, Mrs. Sterling.”

Another change is recent. After using a computer mouse for more than 15 years, I have developed a repetitive strain injury. I am now coming to terms with mousing with my left hand. I don’t like it much, but I can do it. It’s exactly the kind of switch that those of us of the left-hand continuum can accomplish without much fanfare.

But how can it be so damned hard for a leftie to learn how to do something left-handed?

My headline today is a twist on an inside family joke of sorts. For a long time, Marge has referred to hot flashes as her “personal summer.” I sympathize without the ability to empathize. “Manopause,” my own stage of life, does not include personal summers.

I do, however, have a personal spring, and it arrived yesterday. The pile of snow at the end of the driveway, at least six feet tall back in January, is completely gone. The last patch of it trickled away some time around 3:00 o’clock yesterday afternoon. I doubt that anyone except me marked its passing.

Last winter there was a lot of snow everywhere in Maine, so I’m not exactly sure why I have attached so much significance to one particular pile of it. It must be partly because that snow pile made backing out of my driveway hazardous for months. It was still chest high when the calendar announced the official arrival of spring last month. It was also the last holdout of winter on this street. Somehow I haven’t been able to feel spring in my soul while that snow pile was still visible.

Here in northern New England, of course, it is always necessary to qualify the word “spring” in some way. This is a three season place. The reality is that we move from late winter to the season of spring yard work. Spring yard work gives way, around Mother’s Day, to black fly season, which we share with our neighbors to the North. By the end of black fly season, summer will have begun. In Maine, we enjoy summer, fall and winter. We have no spring, at least not of the sort known in much of the rest of the country.

Maybe that’s the real reason I’ve made up my own.

It was only three days ago that I wrote enthusiastically about our new dog Mike. And now the story is over. This morning, I drove him back to Bethel.

I wish I knew exactly what went wrong. Instead of adapting and adjusting to living with us, Mike got more and more anxious. By last night, when Marge took him for a walk, he was afraid of people, other dogs, and even blowing leaves. Last night, he again refused to climb the stairs and spent most of the night whimpering downstairs because he was alone. By this morning, he wouldn’t go out on the back deck. Except when he was actually touching someone, he was whimpering.

On the way back to Bethel, he began panting and whimpering in the backseat of the car. I stopped the car, thinking that I needed to let him out, but that wasn’t the case. Once outside the car, Mike dropped into a crouch, shivering, panting and acting for all the world as if he feared being abandoned. That wasn’t right either, because then he didn’t want to get back into the car!

When I left Mike with the breeder, I said, “I feel terrible that we couldn’t make this work. I hope you can find a good home for Mike.”

The breeder’s response was icy: “That won’t be a problem.”

I wonder. Marge and I love dogs, and we have a lot of experience with Labs. As far as I know, we did just about everything right. Yet Mike was consumed by his own anxiety in less than three days. Maybe he can find a home with no stairs where he never has to be alone.

We drove to Bethel, Maine, this morning to look at a couple of adult Labrador retrievers who needed a home. We drove back to Portland early this afternoon with a brand new friend. Mike is 5½ years old and is about to spend his first night in his new home.

So far, so good. We’ve learned in the last few hours that Mike doesn’t like puppies and that he won’t climb stairs. The first is not a problem. As much as I love dogs, I have no intention of ever starting with a puppy again. I’m told that most people shy away from taking older dogs, but, as I told a woman who spoke to Mike while I was walking him this afternoon, “I’m kind of an older dog myself.”

As for the stairs, well, we’re going to have to reach an accommodation here. My home office is upstairs. We sleep upstairs. Somehow we’re going to have to teach Mike how to climb stairs. But not tonight.

We haven’t had a dog since August of 2005 when the vet had to come to the house and take poor Dougie away. Doug was a black Labrador with so much personality that he was almost human. When the time came to make that final call to the vet, I cried as if I were losing a child.

It’s probably no surprise that I’ve been holding out for a long time, saying I didn’t want another dog, saying I couldn’t stand to have another dog put down. And those things were true. About a week ago, however, I realized that their truth was becoming less important every day. Last Saturday, we spent a few hours online visiting dog rescue sites. Then Marge made a couple of phone calls and connected with the breeder who had Mike. We made the appointment to visit today. There were several dogs we thought we were going to look at, but Mike went right to work and knocked out the competition in short order.

When Mike’s owner Dave brought Mike into the room where we were waiting, Mike came to me so that I could pat him, then he sat beside Marge and put his head in her lap. The whole bonding thing, at least on our part, was pretty much a done deal at that point.

We really have to work our way through the stairs issue, however. And now, as I am writing this, Mike just tried to get up on the couch beside me. That’s a non-starter in this house. Mike’s look of surprise and disappointment tells me a lot about the life he has led up until today. After all, people have different standards that apply to statements such as “He never gets fed from the table” or “We’ve never allowed him on the furniture.” Sometimes I think those statements mean little more than, “We never fed him from the table or let him up on the furniture even once without remembering that some people think those are bad ideas.”

For now, we’re getting to know Mike and he’s getting to know us. We’ll take things one day a time and pretty soon Mike will be ours and we will be his.

So often when I stop at a red light, I find myself beside a vehicle pimped out with bone-shaking audio—always cranked up to the max. I can’t tell what music is being played because only the bass thumps its way to my car.

My response is typically a brief prayer: “Thank you, God, that I am sitting in this car and not that one.” This is only to say that I’m aware of a cultural and generational chasm between people like me and those who like their music played above 100 dB.

~ C. Hubert Parry ~

When you’re sitting next to the thumping car, it’s pretty easy to assume that the driver is young and the music is rock, or one of the 180 sub-genres of rock that Wikipedia enumerates. Both assumptions seem fairly safe, and I imagine they’re usually right.

And yet, the other day I was the driver of the thumping car. Was I listening to Blackened Death Metal? Psychobilly? Pornogrind? Screamo? J-ska?

Nah. It was C. Hubert Parry’s classic I Was Glad, as recorded in 2002 by our church choir. It has a huge pipe organ thing going. Those 32-foot pipes will shred speakers with the best that rock has to offer. I had ol’ C. Hubert cranked.

The driver of the car next to me at the red light of course had no idea what I was listening to and was probably imagining one of the 180. He stared at me until I turned and met his gaze. As we made eye contact, his expression changed to something almost quizzical.

He seemed to be asking, “Aren’t you a little old for this?”

For most of my life it irritated the hell out of me to hear someone say I looked like my father. I just couldn’ see it, especially by the time I reached my twenties. He had this gigantic hooked nose; he had serious hair loss; he was 50-75 pounds overweight. End of story, right?

Then, somehow for the first time last night, I saw side by side the two pictures I’ve included here. On the left (circa 1971) is yours truly at about 25. On the right is my father (circa 1940) at about 25.

My first thought was that now, in 2008, I’d be much more likely to put on the suit the old man wore to the photographer’s studio in 1940 than those snappy, disco-ready threads I affected for my photo op in 1971.

My second thought was how striking the resemblance is between us—although he was clearly better looking than I. To get the pictures ready to display here, I used Photoshop to convert both images to the same sepia tone. That was partly to make it easy to conduct an apples-to-apples comparison of the faces. The more pressing reason, as you might suppose, was to suppress the colors in the pictures of me.

Yeah, that tie is white. Sepia won’t do anything to hide that. What you probably can’t deduce from the sepia, however is that the stripes on my jacket are gold and white. The shirt is what is now called “rich maroon.” Worse, the shiny polyester from which the shirt was made had roses woven in. I have no idea what I wore for pants with this rig—orange and lime checks, for all I know. I do suspect, however, that the pants were bell bottoms. This was also the period when I wore “earth shoes,” the ones with the negative heels.

Anyway, it was probably the difference in styles that blinded me to how much I did look like the old man. There was also the fact that the picture of me was taken at a time when my father and i didn’t have much to say to each other. The circumstances of that make another story which, with any luck at all, I will never get around to telling here. The point is that I believed I did not look like him and therefore could not see that the old “physog” is pretty similar on the two of us.

Looking at the photos together last night, Marge agreed that the resemblance was strong, although, she tenderly opined, “you look more hapless.”

Thanks for your input, my treasure.

l. to r., Joe (tenor), Pete (lead), Bill (bass), Dave (baritone)

4 - 1 = 0. The equation is quartet math. With a quartet you have to have all four parts. If even one part is missing, you have nothing.

I’ve been singing with these guys since 1997 when a local high school chose The Music Man as their annual musical production. The director tried valiantly to recruit four high school boys to be the barbershop quartet the show requires, but she had no luck. Finally, she turned to parents, and Joe, Bill, Dave and I stepped forward. I knew the other guys already since we all sing in the same church choir.

As I understand it, the director said something to the kids in the show to the effect that they should be grateful that parents were willing to support their production. The kids responded by giving us our name: The Grateful Dads. In the picture here, I’m the beardless one.

I have said many times (and meant it every time) that quartet singing is more fun than a person probably should be allowed to have. My vocal range is what is called second tenor. In quartet terms this turns out to be lead—I get to sing the melody almost all the time!

In the beginning we stuck to traditional barbershop. It wasn’t long, however, before Dave got the itch to write arrangements for us. With Dave’s arrangements, we began branching into doo-wop (aging white guys singing the music of young black guys of 50 years ago). Then came Elvis. Then came the Beatles. One of our doo-wop numbers is Gene Chandler’s classic Duke of Earl. As lead, I get to do all that swooping falsetto business at the end.

When my daughter Elizabeth first heard us sing the number, I wanted to know her opinion of the performance. She thought for a moment and said, “It would be worth the price of admission for me just to hear my own father make a noise like a little girl on a roller coaster.”