Music in my Father's House

The title of my homily is “Music in my Father’s House.” My original thought when I talked to Tom a half a year ago was to do a service centered on music and spirituality. I thought maybe I would weave in some music I had written over the years. But then the date was shifted to today and Stan Wright spoke in May on music and spirituality. So this became something else.

Before I get in trouble with my mother, let me make clear that my Father’s house was equally my Mother’s house. In fact, my first musical expression was in utero: my mother reports that while she and dad were listening to the Rochester Philharmonic I kicked in time with the kettle drums.

But today is father’s day, and so while I could find examples to frame my message from the distaff side of my “family of origin” in newpolitikspeak, I am going to stick with my father. If I were to look at a photograph book, more pictures than not that included my father (and he was normally the photographer so he wasn’t in most of them) would have him holding or playing a musical instrument: saxophone, clarinet, piano, trumpet, baritone, foot pump organ.

Music was and is important to my father. At age eighty-one he is still playing in concert bands. Whenever there were a few spare minutes, my father would sit at the piano and pound out some ragtime.

My parents both sang in church choir. While I was growing up, my mother was a second soprano and my father sang tenor. I don’t know how it happened, but it was natural for me to join my grammar school choir. In fact the apogee of my singing career may have been my selection in sixth grade for the all-county chorus – as a first soprano!

Somewhere around fifth grade my parents decided I was ready for piano lessons. I went to a neighborhood teacher for two years. Somewhere there is a photo that perfectly represents my interest in piano lessons: picture, if you will, a crew-cut lad at the dawn of the 1960s in full football regalia, except for the helmet and cleats, sitting at a piano bench. Practicing interfered with being outside. I’m sure there were battles over practicing, and I’m sure my poor mother was the one who had to put up with my excuses, whining and other mature behavior.

Fortunately, my grammar school had a band and I joined up. It was the natural thing to do. After all, my father played in fireman bands each year and we didn’t have to rent an instrument, my father’s tenor sax in a HEAVY carrying case was sitting next to the piano just waiting for more playing time. For whatever reason, my mother’s trombone wasn’t attractive. So I took lessons at school, played in the band and lugged that case on and off the school bus for years.

In junior high I dropped out of chorus. I think it was a schedule conflict, but it may have been embarrassment about my voice having its own mind about which octave it chose to express itself. I continued to play sax and even went to state competition a couple of times. Not that I was that good. The top couple of kids at each instrument were “invited” to go by the school. In the early 1960s one did not turn down such invitations. My practice habits from piano carried over to sax. As a result, I was an excellent sight-reader, but my prepared pieces were, shall I say medium rare, at best.

I stopped playing in the band at the end of ninth grade. My father’s recollection is that one of my friends really wanted to play tenor in the band, I was always better in the tryouts because they were mostly sight-reading, and since he wanted it so much and I had sports, I didn’t try out. I suspect I sold my parents a bill-of-goods. Such kindness feels out of character. I think it was that I’d rather be playing sports or games with friends and didn’t want to “waste” my time in band, and it sounded like a good excuse.

So does this mean by tenth grade I was neither singing nor playing sax? Not exactly. One of my father’s “things a family should do together” was periodic Sunday afternoon trips to the country. My sisters and I were not overly enthusiastic about these outings. I need to digress for a moment. Pick any spot in the United States and I will guarantee my father will have a story about the locale. For example, a couple months ago my vehicle broke down coming back from a bridge tournament in Gatlinburg, TN. I had it towed to a Ford dealer in London, KY. “Oh yeah,” my father says. “Used to be a tough town. An army buddy of mine lived just south of there in Corbin. He used to play dances up there on Friday nights and he was always scared about the hard kids in their late teens who attended.”

I told my father I wasn’t particularly worried, those tough teenagers were now tough eighty-year-olds.

Anyway, since we weren’t too interested in Dad’s local history stories, to make the Sunday trips go faster we would sing in the car. I suspect we probably started with “The itsy bitsy spider” and “Row, row, row your boat.” But not for long. Raise your hand if you can sing “Down by the Old Mill Stream” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

Which reminds me of two related stories. In 1965, I was gaily singing “I’m Henry the Eight, I am” when my father starts singing with me. What I had thought was a new Herman Hermits song, was in fact a remake of a 1911 ditty. So thirty years later I’m driving my five year old son, listening to his favorite radio station and I start singing along with him to the tune on the radio. “How do you know that?” he asks. “They just started playing it.” He was as shocked as I had been when I learned the truth about Henry the Eighth to find out that (1) “Help me Rhonda” was thirty plus years old, and (2) all the songs he loved were from an oldies station!

Between my freshman and sophomore years of high school I became a professional musician – professional only in the sense that I was paid. My father asked if I wanted to join him in the fireman’s band. They had a need for a baritone, so he had borrowed one and was learning to play, making the sax available. From late spring until early autumn the regional fire departments sponsored fairs – rides, games of chance, beer tents, etc. Usually on Friday night all the area fireman’s bands, plus the sponsoring town’s scouts and so on held a parade through town ending at the fair grounds. Pay was $10/parade, which in the mid-sixties was better than I was making mowing lawns. So I wore a uniform, marched and played music, and often caught a ride back to the car on a fire truck. And I got to keep the whole $10; Dad would buy the pop and hot dog afterwards.

That fall, Dad asked if I wanted to sing in the church choir. My voice was no longer opportunistic about embarrassing me with squeaks. The choir had one true tenor, and Dad and I were baritones who could reach the tenor range, so we made three. With my father next to me, I learned to sing tenor and secretly in my heart of hearts I long to be a tenor still. As I became more confident, we changed the seating. The true tenor had the voice, but was a little iffy on notes sometimes. If Dad and I each sang in one ear, he was solid. A subtle lesson about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Because of choir, I enjoyed church. The choir loft was up front and I was certain to stay awake since the whole congregation could see if I nodded off. I continued to be active in the Senior High Fellowship (which met Sunday evenings). In my senior year, I was ordained as a Deacon of the church and I presented my first sermon – at the Easter Sunrise service. In their turn my sisters also joined the choir.

When I moved to Cincinnati in 1993 and searched for a UU church, one of my major goals was to sing in a good choir. It had been twenty-five years since I had sung in a choir.

My parents have been members of the same church for over fifty years. They have both retired from choir in the last few years, but my younger sister and I both sing in church choirs lo these decades later and my other sister has sung in a community choir. Both of my children sang in their high school choirs. Coincidence?

Muse sang Gibran’s words: “You can house their bodies, but not their souls.” I was kidding my mother recently that they had brought up three children in the Presbyterian Church and ended up with a Unitarian Universalist, a high Episcopalian, and a nontraditional Catholic (excommunicated priests and female priests). “Go figure,” I said. “What went wrong?”

“True,” my mother replied, “but you all are active members of your churches.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Hmm.”

I got to pay my parents back a few years ago. I recruited them, both my sisters and my daughter to sing in our church choir for Christmas Eve service. For years afterwards Cathy Roma, our choir director, asked me if my family was coming to visit. Yes there was music in my father’s house.

My grandfather was spectacularly handy in fixing almost anything. Whether my grandfather never taught dad, or was impatient or dad wasn’t interested because he was off playing in a dance band or whatever, my father is not very handy – or at least that is the impression I always had. He taught me everything he knew.

And yet, the first tuner/amplifier we had was a “Heath kit.” Hard to imagine a put-it-together project like that in today’s microchip technology, but back then dinosaurs roamed the earth, you had tubes and soldered wires and glued sides. And he had an abiding interest in trains – steam engines and HO gauge model railroads. I shared my basement bedroom with a layout he built that took up half the room. My personal motto is “I’m very handy – I write all the checks all by myself – by hand.” I become frustrated whenever I try to fix something and I can’t figure out how. My second language gets its workout then.

The Heath kit was a bit quirky and was replaced eventually by manufactured components. Saturday morning was when Dad did his financial chores: paying the bills and tracking his stocks. The radio was on, either to the Canadian Broadcasting Network (very similar to today’s NPR) or music – all kinds of music – classical, Dixieland jazz, ragtime, traditional band music, pops. The music was on while he worked. That’s just how it was done.

I was interested by Dad’s stock charts. Each week he would graph the closing price and then color in the difference between current price and book value. I learned about stock splits, dividends, preferred stock, short sellers. (He who sells what isn’t his’n; buys it back or goes to prison.) Dad still keeps track of his stocks weekly. And for years, so did I. I’ve weaned myself from such anal behavior. Now I do my balance sheet only monthly! And as long as I’m not going to be disturbing Jan, I have music on.

When I earned money for the fireman’s band parades or mowing lawns, shoveling snow and if I was desperate, cleaning the kitchen stove, I always put some money away for “a rainy day.” Anyone remember the twenty-five cent coupons you could buy at a bank to paste in a book. Once you had, I think $17.25, you turned in the book and got a Series E bond. Waste not, want not. A penny saved is a penny earned.

I do not wonder that on average I saved 30-40% of my income each year I worked. And yet, while we talked about the mechanics of the stock market, and brokers, we never really talked about money.

So I heard the message about saving well; I missed the message about spending well. Perhaps it was too subtle for me. I had an allowance, but I wasn’t represented by a bargaining unit. As with most jobs, I took the conditions offered because I had no perceived alternative. I clearly understood the tie between work and income. I had to do my chores to get my allowance. My parents showed me budgets. So much for school lunches; so much for weekly church “contributions.” I had my own box of envelopes and everything: white ones for the fifty-two weeks and additional colored ones for special offerings. I didn’t make those; they weren’t in my budget. Only as I was writing this sermon did I recall that my budget called for a pledge of 5% of income. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t reattain this level of generosity until just a few years ago.

I also learned that as long as the bosses didn’t have a company store or independent auditing, they could not be assured there were no variances between budget and actual. Muse sang: “You can give them their love, but not their thoughts. They have their own thoughts. They have their own thoughts.”

Church contributions had the independent audit by the church treasurer. Not so school lunches. Milk cost; water was free and the difference added up over time. If my parents read this some day, it will be another of my secrets bared.

Although children have their own thoughts, what we do and how we do it often has a significant bearing on choices children make – even as retired adults.

I live in the woods between Amasa and Michigamme on the eastern shore of an inland lake. My family spent summer vacations in an unimproved log cabin on the eastern shore of Chandos Lake, three plus hours northeast of Toronto. Why did I insist on the eastern shore of a remote northern lake for my current home rather than, say, the Jersey shore where some of my friends spent summers and now own places?

We do not learn behavior in a vacuum. We learn through experiences – our own and – because we are of genus Homo species sapiens (meaning wise) we learn from other’s experiences. We learn whether or not we consciously choose to; we teach whether or not we consciously choose to.

My daughter was born by C-section and while the doctors attended to her mother, I got to hold Dael. She was becoming sleepy and she fought to keep her eyes open. I thought it was so endearing: her wanting to take in her new world. It lost its charm in a hurry when for the first two years she needed (or at least got) only about 2/3rds the normal amount of sleep. When she was older, she hated to go to her room to take naps. But sometimes, on a weekend afternoon, she would drag her pillow to the couch and ask me to turn on the TV to sports. I didn’t matter what kind. She would immediately fall asleep.

That wasn’t taking a nap; that was watching sports on TV – as taught by her father.

As I was in my thinking stage for this homily, I read From Pieces to Weight by 50 Cent (the rapper a.k.a. Curtis James Jackson, III). In it he says:

“Kids will pick up on things early. They’re going to want to do whatever they saw on TV. If there’s gymnastics on in the house, the kid’s going to want to do gymnastics. If you have Superman on all day, that kid’s going to want to fly. If a kid watches a show with a lot of fighting and flipping, that kid’s going to be running around the house doing all that shit.”

It is not just parents and children. It is also communities and visitors. When someone new walks in MUUC’s door, what do we teach them about our community? Remember, it’s not just how we act; it’s equally how we don’t act.

Because of my father’s interests, I am an eclectic reader, enjoy sports (although I’d rather participate than watch), am an amateur ornithologist, civil war buff and enjoy train rides much more than the average bear. I even have been known to take Sunday trips into the country, although so far Jan has not chosen to sing duets of “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” I was never smitten with model railroading and while I am interested in our family’s genealogy, I do not have my father’s interest in digging it up. He exposed me to all of it. He never pressed me to do “his” things, but he opened the doors. And later when I had shut a door, he propped it open again to see if I had changed my mind. And he didn’t object to interests I had that he didn’t share.

When I tell people where I live, I am often asked, “Youse hunt?” My answer is, “No, I never learned to as a kid.”

MUUC is in transition. We’ve had them in the past; we’ll have them in the future. During Kayle’s time here we have been exposed to lots of different things. To some extent we were like kids on a free trip to the candy shop, why choose if it’s all there for free. Thought provoking, or humorous or educational sermons. Counseling. Professional leadership. Adult RE, and much more. With her leaving it feels like there will be a void.

Like my father, Kayle has sprinkled us with her interests. Which do we choose to carry on? Which are central to our existence, like singing has been for me? Which are like my father’s genealogy: great if someone else does the work, but otherwise not really worth the effort?

Our beloved community is like that tenor section I sang in long ago. We each have different talents and interests. Some have the strong voice, but occasionally need a little assistance from people quietly singing in their ear. Some aren’t true tenors, but that’s where the need is, so they’ll stretch. Occasionally the result may be less than perfect. Some would like to try, but are waiting for someone to ask them. And some have an idea they haven’t voiced – and we haven’t yet learned from that wisdom.

Talk about the opportunity for each one of us to grow and to grow as a community. I can’t tell you how excited I feel for our prospects. I can’t tell you, but I can give you a hint from the song:

There was music in my father’s house

There was music all around

There was music in my father’s house

And my heart still feels full with the sound.

James Montgomery Jackson
June 18, 2006