DAD'S SAXOPHONE STRAP

“The thing that really transported him was music. And he was an excellent musician himself.”

My father was such a good Catholic, the nuns who taught him thought he’d grow up to be a priest, but Dad always wanted to get married and have a family. Maybe he aspired to be a loving father to recreate what he’d missed as a child. Three months before he was born, his own father died suddenly, at 40, from a ruptured appendix, and my grandmother never remarried. That loss wasn’t just a cloud that hung over his childhood; I’ve always believed it shaded all his years on earth.

He was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and lived in the same house his entire life. He worked in Paterson too, as a high-school English teacher. He liked staying close to home. He never went on an airplane and in fact never left the East Coast. Although he loved the ocean, he never learned how to swim. He went to Mass and communion every day and led us in the rosary before dinner every night. Dinner for him was not an occasion for adventure. A hamburger suited him just fine.

So you could look at my father and decide his world was small (even his handwriting was tiny!), but it would be a mistake to think he lived a small life. He taught thousands of Patersonians, including a future superintendent of schools, and was the favorite teacher of many. He helped the famed jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli graduate (long story). He took pride in his students and found humor in his fellow faculty. (I still recall the germophobe who wore gloves to grade papers.) As English-department chair, he mentored hundreds of other teachers. From him I absorbed much of the wisdom I took into my own career in the classroom.

Dad’s world was broadened by poetry, which he taught and loved, from Joyce Kilmer to Wordsworth to Shakespeare. But the thing that really transported him was music. He loved listening to Broadway show tunes and jazz standards and swing. And he was an excellent musician himself.

He was an accomplished pianist—he’d had lessons way back when—and when I was a girl he gave me lessons too. On any given piece, I often had the timing wrong. “That’s not it,” he’d say, and I’d scoot over so he could sit next to me and show me how it should sound. He played beautifully, his hands gliding over the keys. The piano bench was filled with complicated sheet music that made perfect sense to him.

As a young man Dad had also taught himself the saxophone, and when I was growing up, he went out on Saturday nights to play sax in a popular New Jersey swing band, the Alison Barton Orchestra. They broadcast live on the radio from a ballroom in Little Falls. I wasn’t old enough to go see the band or stay up to hear the show, but before he left I got to see him all dressed up and handsome in his dark suit. We had the band’s records and played them on the Victrola in the hall. No one else’s dad looked as sharp as mine. No else’s dad was on the radio or on records.

My father died in 1999. The church was packed for his funeral, the Mass concelebrated by three priests. Afterward we had a police escort to the cemetery. On the way, the hearse paused in front of our house. Dad loved that old house, and I loved him. I'm glad to have this strap he wore around his neck to hold his saxophone while he played. I imagine him wearing it as he swings with a celestial band.

—Kate Walter

Dad’s high-school graduation portrait. Sharp, right?

The father Dad never knew.

The family (that’s me, my sister, my brother and our mom) Dad always wanted.

---

Kate Walter is the author of the memoirs Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing and Behind the Mask: Living Alone in the Epicenter (both published by Heliotrope Books). Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Next Avenue and elsewhere.

---

For a different reading experience, The Keepthings’ stories can also be read in their entirety on Instagram @TheKeepthings.

Have a story to share? See the complete submission guidelines, including photo guidelines, at TheKeepthings.com.

---

---