Luck

Luck. Is there such a thing? I don't think so. I think "luck” is a cop out. It's a word we've treasured word over time. We cherish it because it implies hope. Luck suggests that there are powers outside of ourselves that work in our favor; elves for ourselves.

The truth is that things like winning the lotto, missing a flight on a doomed plane, or even
meeting the love of your life is more about probability and statistics.

Most of the goodness comes from hard work and the decisions we make. We strive to get what we want in life. We make decisions, big and small and we have to live with those decisions. Sometimes we make mistakes but sometimes we thrive.

I haven't always felt this way. Like the rest of us, the years have taught me plenty. I went from having a sort of a hippie-dippy ideology where everything was up to chance and that we were fools to think we had any hand in shaping our own lives to realizing the power of simply being aware of good opportunities.

Also, perspective has a lot to do with the existence of “good luck” or “bad luck”. In 2005, my brakes failed and I T-boned into another vehicle. Both cars where totaled but neither myself or the other driver had a scratch on us. Were we unlucky merely being involved in an accident at all or were we lucky for surviving it?

Sometimes it’s truly scary. It can be nerve-racking to try new things, go places you’ve never gone, and meet new people. However, it is essential to progress in our own lives. We need to feed off our own experiences and grow from them and one another. We need to evaluate what we go through; the things that turn us on and the things that brake us down. It's how we respond to it speaks to who we are. That's our power. Be a victim or a warrior for our future.

I no longer blame bad luck for my mistakes. I stopped making excuses. I no longer say someone is lucky just because they're more “successful” than I. It’s definitely not easy. Nothing that is worthwhile is easy. It takes hard work and patience.

Sure, coincidences can sometimes shape part of any situation as well as circumstances, people’s personalities, and many many other factors. However, luck isn’t any of those things. I think we often mix up the word “luck” and the word “coincidence.” Or even the word “luck” with the concept of probability.



If I believe in luck at all, it is as a mindset, a self-fulfilling prophecy that begins with what we tell ourselves. So much of what happens in our lives is a direct result of what we are constantly focusing on. If we are constantly saying “I am lucky” or “I’m unlucky”…either way we are right! When we listen to the whispers of our souls we live well with or without “luck”.

Toilet Paper Fantasy

I stood aimlessly at the check-out stand embracing a six-pack of two-ply toilet paper. The clock reads 8:15, as I itemize the groceries; I toss them on to the conveyer belt. A woman about 70 or 75 cuts into line, two steps before me with a package of ravioli and a loaf of French bread. Dinner by 9:30 and bed by 10:00, I figured as I observed her. No children, no hips, no husband, no ring, a dog, no a cat, I presumed, sits curled on barely worn paisley sofa waiting her lonely owner's return.

Standing behind me was a twenty something girl. I remembered a young me. Then I realize that my own daughters were older than she is. I clung the toilet paper rolls to my chest.

It’s in the cold, brightly lit grocery stores where life gets very real. I glanced at the Cosmo propped precociously in its wire shelving. I always feel a little resentful at magazines like these make money by attempting to make women feel like they’re not good enough offering topics galore on how to diet, have better sex, or just seize the day. Reality cracked through my preoccupied brain as a child squealed, an employee was paged, register scanners beeped, and an old man rattles two stuck shopping carts apart..

I step forward with my tissue. I like to call it tissue, it is a softer sound. "Paper" is not a thing you want touching those tender secret flower-like places. I can’t help it. I was brought up in an age when advertisers provide a world of toilet paper fantasy. If aliens are watching our television signals from outer space they'd never guess what we really use TP for, I think as I step up to the counter.

"Anything else mam," he asks. I look up into the unexpected depths of icy blue eyes.

"Mam?" he asks, “is this it?”

"Yes," I say stealing several seconds to add him up eyes and all. He's too old to be a checker, which means what?

“Unaccomplished”, mother would say,

"Unfortunate" my best friend sighs from her ever present presence in my cerebrum.

“Who cares” I think. They are just pretty eyes; eyes for old ladies with aching backs, eyes for young ladies with small babies; eyes from behind the scanner and eyes for me when I pass through.

And as the wide doors of reality slide open before me I step out to into the Ralphs parking lot carrying one slightly brimming bag of Toilet Paper Fantasy.

Halfway To the Abyss

 As the day looms and time marches on, sometimes the smell of my fear becomes more pungent.

While my determination to make middle age an era of opportunity and adventure, there is just something about actually crossing over the great divide  that I can't not wrap my mind around. A moment in time, a mere second and here I am halfway through my fifties.

Sometime overnight I’m going to cross the great abyss of sixty. Logically, I know, that if the fates allow,  I’ll wake up in the same bed, in the same body, but sometime during the night when the moon steals the light from the sun, time will steal from me another decade.

I have no need to mourn the loss of perky boobs or a thin waist.  My confidence and body have now finally crossed paths and whilst there’s a few things I would tweak, I’m certainly not crying over the loss of my twenties’ body.

Sometimes I look at people the same age as me and am overcome with the sensation that I am surrounded by old people. Not that age has anything to do it with per se, but I wonder if they look at me and feel the same. I sincerely hope not. But it did stun me the first time I realized that I am actually older than the President of the United States – go figure. 

There are times, when I look outside of myself and again remember that getting older is a blessing. When so many have to fight to stay alive. Then I feel small and petty and draw in in a grateful breath. 

So, I move forward smug in the knowledge that there’s another five years to go before I have to worry about the great abyss. I expect to do just as well at processing that as well.

"Getting older...", as my sweetie always says, "...it beats the alternative."

Taking It (My attempt at story writing)

Sam Kapp was a sax player. He was an Aspie, which means he was afflicted with the mental disability known as Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. A lot of people know about it now, but not when Sam was growing up. Nobody could put a finger on what was really wrong with Sam. Everybody concluded that he was just basically slow because he didn't try to play touch football or baseball or even hopscotch and although he hardly talked at all, when he did open his mouth and respond to teachers or waitresses or secretaries, it was always something odd. It was odder than odd. It was so off-the-wall weird it often made people uncomfortable. His parents feared he was retarded but not stupid enough to be committed so, through third grade, he sat on the bunk bed in his room looking at pictures in National Geographic and Dr. Seuss; Cat in the Hat, or naked African virgins. Sam  watched TV. He couldn't actually work the TV. He avoided the run of cowboy shows and cartoons his brothers watched evenings and Saturday mornings. Nobody was sure why but sometimes his mother noticed he was lured into the room by a catchy theme song or final credit music but then remove himself at the first sound of gunshots, or explosions. Sam didn't like noise, that was certain. No one knew what Sam did like until one Saturday when his brothers, Jake and Andy, left the TV on and went outside. Lawrence Welk came on and was playing the 5:00 dinner music of the day. Sam drifted into the room. He sat transfixed for an hour without moving a muscle. Sam's mother took note and the next Saturday and thereafter, Sam got to watch Lawrence Welk; then Singalong With Mitch; then Roger Miller followed by Jimmy Dean. Then came the PBS symphony orchestra broadcasts. Sam listened. Sam watched. His eyes were brighter after every performance. Sam's parents couldn't decide if he were going to Hell or not. They asked their minister and he said it was too soon to tell. The age of responsibility was thirteen. They had five more years to wait and see. Sam's parents loved him but they didn't like him. Nobody did. One Sunday evening Sam and his family were attending a neighbors house for dinner after church. Sam was nine. Obligatory admiring comments were made about the new glass light fixtures illuminating the still-unfinished-dry-walled entryway. After coats and scarves were neatly hung on hooks, and Mr.Neighbor, as Sam would refer to the host, briefly outlined his plans for finishing the entryway, Sam was wisked off to the Neighbor's boys' room. Jake and Andy were already buddies with Jeremy and Abe so they quite naturally paired off in an enthusiastic round of lego castles and air rifles. Jeremy was the oldest of the four. He had just having entered junior high that September and everybody had to take music or shop, and he was tragically, allergic to sawdust, so he ended up in band by default. Sam would hear him talk about learning and not learning arpeggios and embouchure and “...a bunch of other French and Italian stuff...”. This confused Sam because he thought that 'band' was about music. But he was used to not understanding. Jeremy had casually cast his new alto saxophone into the corner of his room. It was out of the case so he could pretend he was going to practice it soon. It was partially covered up by a pair of muddy denim blue jeans and a tee-shirt.The glinting edge of it's brass caught Sam's attention. He inched his way along the hardwood floor toward it very slowly until he was a breath away from its golden shine. "Hey you, booger-head, get away from my saxophone.", Jeremy barked. Sam flinched violently at the attack, and tipped over on his side in a defensive fetal position. Jeremy snatched up the horn and slung the neck strap over his head. "Hey guys, look at ME!" And he gave a great blast into the mouthpiece, screeching horrifically, then threw his head back, laughing in mock stardom. He tried again to seduce humor out of the horn. This time by sucking on the mouthpiece, and the results were less satisfying, and certainly less loud. Then, as Jeremy was doing his Elvis Presley hips routine causing him to almost crack his new two dollar reed, dinner was announced. The saxophone was tossed back into its corner, and they all swarmed out of the room in a tumble;all except Sam. Solemnly gathered around the long table were Sam's family and the Neighbors. All heads were bowed in humble thanks to Jesus for this good food amen, and nobody noticed that the fourth place at the card table was empty. Nobody noticed the absence of Sam. A sound came sweetly floating around the corner from the boys room.  It sounded like a bare bones version of Some Enchanted Evening. "Jeremy, I think you left your radio on," said Mr. Neighbor. "I din't leave no radio on!" said Jeremy. "Jeremiah, you get up this instant and go turn off that-" "Wait!" interrupted Sam's mother. The room was silently attentive, as Some Enchanted Evening purred against every table leg at once. In a single fluid movement they rose together and surged toward the bedroom, Mrs. Kapp holding Jeremy back with wordless reprimand. Nine pairs of eyes crept around the corner and peeked through the half-open door. There sat Sam, on the edge of the bed, his back to his audience, coaxing liquid, clinging notes out the beginner saxophone with the almost-cracked reed. He would miss a note here and there and his fingers had never touched a saxophone before. He took a moment to penetrate the mystery of accidental sharps and flats. His mind saw through the logic of the keys, his heart laced together strings of grace notes that disguised the mistakes like the most accomplished jazz musicians do as they make expressive virtue out of error. His tone was wonderful, warm and vibrant, and filled with the sort of harmonic density, and confidence that usually comes with maturity but came on the instant for Sam. In Sam's mind he placed himself in all the perfomances he had been absorbing from a distance. This spoke to Sam's tremendous ability to focus. Something his family and those around him never noticed; never noticed until now. "Hey!! He's got my saxophone!" whined Jeremy. There was whispering among the children. The parents said nothing but raised eyebrows from Mr. Neighbor were answered by shrugs of "Beats me," from Mr. Kapp. "Has he ever--?" pointing with his eyes. "No." Head shake, slowly. "How does he--?" eyebrows again. "Beats me," shrug again. Once again heads turn, the wonder of the music turning to suspicion of Satan's work in the midst. "Sam, honey," crooned Mrs. Kapp, deflating the burgeoning moment, "it's time for dinner." The beautiful, radiant high note Sam was just then leaning on, shattered in to chards of shrieks, as he became aware of the crowd behind him. Jeremy glared daggers. Sam, of course didn't notice. "Okay, Mom," he mumbled, and ever-so-gently placed the saxophone on its couch of denim. He slunk to the edge of the dispersing crowd. His mother touched his shoulder. Sam joined the group and ate in silence. Dinner conversation progressed in a subdued, falsely pleasant tonality but nobody commented on the miracle they had just witnessed, as though, if they ignored it, it would go away. Dessert was finished, the dishes stacked, and the Kapp clan took their leave. On the way home, silence hovered above the hum of the 1956 Studebaker's tires on the asphalt street. It was a short drive, but the pressure of the miracle weighed oppressively on the family. Oddly, law-abiding Mr. Kapp was slightly speeding. Sam knew he had done something wrong. He sat forlornly in the front seat, between Mom and Dad, worrying and waiting for something bad to happen. As the Studebaker turned onto the last block before home, Mrs. Kapp leaned over and and whispered,  "Sam, honey. . . how could you? How did you know how to play that music? "I seen it," was Sam's whispered reply. "You saw it?" "On TV. I seen 'em play." "You mean Lawrence Welk? You saw them play saxophones on Lawrence Welk?" "I seen 'em. 'And now, a medley of your favorite tunes from South Pacific. Anna wonna anna twowa. . .'" At that moment the car pulled into the driveway and Sam scrambled over his mother's lap and out the door in a combination of moves so sudden that the sight of him blurred with speed and disbelief together. He was running hysterically toward the house and the safety of his bunk bed, when something stopped him in his tracks and he lurched to a stop and slowly turned back toward the car as Jake and Andy raced past him. Sam cautiously approached his mother as she got out of the car. She looked down at him, over the car door, as his mouth moved. "What?" she whispered again, leaning down. He placed his lips against her ear. "Want one." "What, honey?" "Want one. Wanna sassapone." "You want a saxophone?" "Anna wonna anna twowa. . ." The introduction of the saxophone into Sam's life constituted the awakening that his parents had so looked forward to, and so dreaded. After that, he became a trained monkey who periodically performed Abide With Me at funerals, and O Holy Night at Christmas services. He never learned to read music but he could play anything he had heard once, in any key. He did eventually learn to read street signs and bus route maps and he could recognize his name on the business cards his mother had printed up for him, before she was taken by breast cancer when he was twenty. It was thought that he might become a dazzling prodigy after he performed the Ibert Concierto da Camera, with a music-minus-one recording of the orchestral back-up, at the State Solo and Ensemble Competition in Springfield. He played the 3rd movement of that difficult piece effortlessly and flawlessly, turning many heads of important members of the state-wide cultural community. After that brilliant premiere, several distinguished music professors from the university had tried to take him in hand and develop his talent into something like that of a professional soloist but all in vain. Sam was a phenomenon to be sure, but he was unteachable. What he could do, he either already knew from hearing a piece, or would never know. He was like a human tape recorder who could hear something once, then play it back with every nuance and refinement recreated just as he had heard it. He could not read, he could not count and could not follow the hand motions of a conductor to save his life. Everything was by ear with him, and although his ear was infallible, it seemed disconnected. When he played, he entered a dream world that hovered just near enough to the material plane that he could play with other people but not so near that he could adjust to anything new or unexpected. The recordings in his head could not be modified on the fly and he performed every piece in his repertoire with perfect but indelible precision, every time exactly the same. The so-called "human" element remained hopelessly unaccounted for. Nevertheless, Sam's performances were such perfect representations of the original, that one wonders if the human energy of the music's source were not truly made manifest, after all; perhaps Sam's personal humanity consisted of merging his with somebody else's. When he was only twenty, directly after his mother's death, he got on a bus to Chicago. His father stuffed three hundred dollars into Sam's pocket and a detailed sheet of instructions on how to get to Aunt Maxine's house on the north side. He paid the bus driver an extra $20 to see that Sam got there safely, which the driver forgot about after the first two miles. Sam wandered out of the Greyhound station and across the street to the giant Picasso smiling complexly at the poor lost boy. He sat beneath the sculpture for awhile, then took out his saxophone and played Someone to Watch Over Me over and over for about an hour, until a cop came up to him and ordered him to stop. Eventually, the cop got the idea when Sam stood mute before the confronting tirade of hostile authority and took out the instructions to Aunt Maxine's and offered it to the cop. Sam made it to Aunt Maxine's place on the predominantly Jewish north side, and then to a near by restaurant Aunt Maxine frequented, where he settled in a small corner to play unaccompanied broadway standards and an occasional hora, three hours a night. They tacked up carpeting at right angles in the corner to keep Sam's sound from vibrating too much with the customers' spaghetti and meat loaf; it lent a comfortable, unobtrusive background quality to Sam's sound, that mysteriously made the spaghetti more exotic, and the meat loaf warmer. It was now 1985 and Sam was thirty-something. He sat there every night for over ten years, until Benny Goldstein, Yiddish theatrical agent and music contractor accidentally discovered him and moved him over to the Hyatt downtown, to front Morty Friedkin's "Mellow Four." Sam was really a find for the ailing trio of middle-aged burn-outs, who had just lost their lead player to a touring band on the Winnebago circuit, and were glumly facing the imminent prospect of finding day jobs. Sam's note-perfect readings of Charlie Parker alto solos, in addition to the more nightclub-friendly Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young tenor solos transposed to the proper key, gave the band a vast repertoire of standards to choose from, and the Hyatt management was pleased to see a large and faithful following develop almost immediately. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, the liquor would flow in the growingly crowded hotel bar and quite often extra chairs had to be set up as Sam's eager fans spilled over into the adjoining restaurant. Good music meant good business and the "Mellow Four" kept their gig. Every once in awhile, a music student or another pro player on his night off, would come to check out the rumor that there was a jazz genius playing for peanuts at the Hyatt. Sometimes they would notice that Sam's playing sounded just like something they had heard before, and sometimes they could even name the album but Red Taylor, the piano player, always minimized the implied absence of originality by extolling Sam's respect for tradition and his penchant for 'occasionally' playing an homage to whatever jazz great he happened to be copying. And Sam's repertoire was so extensive, that they could sometimes go weeks without repeating a tune. If Red got a request from one of the regulars for a favorite tune that Sam had recently played, it was not a problem to whisper in Sam's ear to play an 'alternate' version...somebody else's version. Sam was gigging three nights a week and living alone at the St. George, not far from where  Aunt Maxine had first put him up and here was Morty Friedkin, bass player, Red Taylor, piano player, and Joe "Sticks" Jones, drummer, playing for the past two and a half years at the Hyatt Moonrise Room to a growing audience. Morty in paticular was affected by all of this. In his mind, his career as a musician had just about peaked out, and was suddenly revitalized by an idiot saxophonist who could play like fucking Charlie Parker...who musically was Charlie Parker and Lester Young and Kenny-fucking-G if he wanted him to be. Morty got greedy. Morty started looking around for other venues for the band, specialty venues, concert venues. There was one slightly more upscale nightclub than the Hyatt a few blocks away on Michigan Avenue called "Al's Place".  Rudy, the manager was interested in trying out the group on their dinner theater stage and he was even willing to book them for a Wednesday so the group wouldn't lose their Thursday through Saturday commitment but he felt that the purely instrumental constitution of the band would not hold a paying audience for a whole evening's entertainment without a featured vocalist. "Work a singer into your act, and we'll talk again," he told Morty, over the phone. "But listen, man, our saxophonist is a motherfucker, man," objected Morty. "Our guys plays all the--" "Yeah, I get it. I've heard your demo, and he really wails, but my people need the words to keep them interested. Also tits. You can feature the sax player all you want, but you need a singer, to play here. Why don't you call up Goldstein? He's got a list." Morty hated Benny Goldstein, even though Benny was directly responsible for prolonging the professional life of the "Mellow Four" by bringing them Sam. The paltry 10% he was still taking out of Sam's cut every week was no skin off Morty's nose, since he wasn't paying anything, but the idea of beholding to him piss him off and getting into him with another obligation offended his stingy scruples. But Benny's understanding of the "Sam Situation" would probably color his suggestions. "Okay, okay," he bitches at himself, "call up god-damned, motherfuckin' Benny god-damn Goldstein."After a half-hour of conflicted indecision, he called up Benny. They held auditions at the Moonrise Room in the afternoon, in half-hour slots, before the bar opened. Benny sent over a selection of middle-aged 'female performers' figuring the older generation would relate better to the middle-aged rhythm section and the predominantly 30's and 40's repertoire. The women he knew were mostly not regular nightclub singers, they were more like wedding/bat mitzva singers, occasional performers with day gigs, and teen-age children. There was a black lady who showed promise, with a sultry version of Stormy Weather, but it turned out she only knew a few songs, she couldn't read any better than Sam could. Everything she sang sounded like the blues. She also made the mistake of trying to give Sam some direction. She suggested he put in some fills during a few of her long notes in the chorus before taking his solo. Sam was not used to any kind of personal interaction with the people he made music with, and her comments not only didn't compute, they upset him. He got that frozen look on his face, just like the first time Jeremy shouted, "Hey you, booger-head, get away from my saxophone." He stood still for minutes with his eyes wide. Red made some hasty excuse to the singer, and ushered her out. Benny had taken a chance sending over another young girl, fresh out of the Roosevelt University Music School. Her name was Susan Wright. Suzy Wright. Miss Wright. She had soloed with the college jazz band, and had worked with the opera group for a few semesters. After graduation, she was keeping it together with a waitressing gig, and tutored a few private students. Benny didn't hold out much hope for her as a fifth wheel with the "Mellow Four," but he liked her voice, and would be pleased if he could manage to help her break into the business. Red led her to the bandstand and shoved a pile lead sheets onto the music stand in front of her. He asked her if she wanted to do something prepared, or could they just jump right into the band's material. Sure, fine. Okay, how about Lover Man? Great. D minor? Whatever. The night before, Red had given Sam several recordings to listen to, including the Rosemary Clooney Lover Man. "Learn the guitar part," he had said, which was good, because the Joe Pass guitar part included not only a nice solo in the middle, but a rhythm accompaniment part, which would give Sam something to do while the girl was singing. They launched into the intro, Red tickling the ivories in much the same manner as the truncated opening of the Clooney version. I doe no why, but I'm feelin' so sad. . ." she was singing now Suzy got their attention in a hurry. The voice, young still, was leaning into the lonely, resonant, siren sound of Rosemary Clooney with a depth of expression you don't usually get at 4:00 in the afternoon. She was captivating from the first note. She reminded them of Sam in the way. She disappeared into the music and became the music. But she kept her self-awareness and anchored in the here and now. In Sam's eyes you could see nothing until the tune was over and he returned to us here on Earth. When Sam went finished his solo, Suzy kept on going. She gave him just enough space to dominate the stage but also took back the spotlight momentarily while here and there filling between phrases and joining into some of the passage work with her own improvisations. She was a talented improviser. She added a complexity and substance to the saxophone solo that not only didn't interfere with it but, rather brightened its effect. And when she took back the lead, there was not only a tenderness of character  but also an authority, a confidence. Then something amazing happened. Sam noticed Suzy's background fills. , his first reaction was to furrow his eyebrows and drop his head down. Morty, Red and the rest of the guys started to panic. Then slowly, Sam lifted his head to a beaming grin. Gone was the usual dream-like uality. He was fully present and joining the reast. He showed emotion in his playing for the first time anyone had ever heard. He and Suzy were sounding great together; in how the sounds went together. At a certain point in the duet, as it was winding its way to the climax, Sam did something he had never done before: he changed a note. The counterpoint Suzy was making up was working really well but as the peak of the phrase approached, she was into a line which, if taken to its natural conclusion, would have clashed with the Joe Pass guitar solo. Only Sam knew this because only Sam knew where the Joe Pass solo was going, and by some miracle  intuitively knew where Suzy's counterpoint was going. So he changed a note. In fact, he changed a whole phrase to fit with Suzy's line. He had never done that before. Red noticed right away, because he had reviewed that recording himself the night before and had the guitar solo fresh in his memory. It was not an insignificant change; it was noticeable. "Listen to that," Red sighed. They all rallied around the music with renewed creative attention. Suzy was having too much fun with music to notice that she had opened a door in Sam that the "Mellow Four" had been hoping would open for two and a half years. She didn't know that, for the first time in his life, Sam had fallen deeply in love. The mistake was in having the tryouts at the Moonrise Room, because, just as they were finishing up, and were about to offer Suzy the Wednesday gig, Jim Meyer, the manager of the Hyatt strode in and, in two words, booked her for his lounge on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. "Morty, I love this new band member. She's on for an extra hundred a night. That okay with you, sweetheart?" A hundred bucks was a little better than the going rate for a side man in Chicago at that time; it was good money. He was gone before the chins all round had ceased to nod. "Well," said Red. "Well," said Suzy. "Well," said Morty, "I guess you're hired. You see that Gershwin set in there? Yeah the second folder. You know any o' them songs? You feel like doin' them off the cuff tonight?" "No rehearsal?" "Nah, you sound great, we been here since noon, gotta be back and play at 8:00. Okay?" "Su-sure." "Okay. Hey Sammy, time for lunch. "Lunch," said Sam turning to his case. Sam took his break over at the park near by on Lake Shore Dr. He spent a lot of time there on afternoons when he arrived at the gig hours early. When he stayed home he felt restless and pointless and anxious to be close to where he would be making music pretty soon. He also went there on days when he wasn't playing at the Hyatt at all. He liked being near his haven of musical release a haven. On rainy days, he went inside to the cafeteria, smuggled in his bag of egg salad sandwiches, bought a coke, and found a table as close to the far corner as possible. On clear days, he sat outside under the bronze lions. The bite of Lake Michigan wind never deterred him. If there was time, whether he ate outside or at table, he wandered into the museum but he often got no further than the Rodin in the lobby, the Lovers rising on wings of passion out of the white rock; the first time he attempted to walk past it, he had spent two hours standing in front of it, sort of blocking the walkway, until a guard rousted him out. He also spent a lot of time in front of the Jackson Pollock upstairs. Something about the Picasso's down the corridor always reminded him of Someone to Watch Over Me, but he didn't know why. All the guards knew him by now, and let him loiter harmlessly in front of whatever painting he became transfixed in front of. To them he wasn't any trouble, just a poor dumb kid. Always carried that case into the museum; quiet kid, no problem. This paticular night, Sam was sitting on the steps under the south lion with egg salad clinging to his lips. His lips were moving in that slow ballet tempo of his. It was hard to say but he felt as though a thought were forming in his head and he was trying to grasp it. Words were not hard for him. He knew a lot of them but thinking, like talking, required the same improvisatory faculty that would have enabled him to improvise music if he wanted to. Putting words together in a different order than he had learned them was a huge task for him and he was unpracticed at it. Still, he remembered the miracle at the Hyatt. He remembered the exact notes he had changed the guitar solo to, just as he remembered the exact notes of the guitar solo he didn't play. In whatever syntax Sam used to think his translucent thoughts in, he wondered what had changed in him. Then he remembered Suzy. "Name Suzy," he thought. "Name Suzy," he whispered. "Suzy singer. Suzy singer?" The lion wasn't telling. Thursday night was borderline funky. It had been quite awhile since Suzy had sung that many songs the Real Book, which is basically held a number of popular compilations of lead sheets for jazz tunes. The Mellow Four simply referred to it as 'the folder'. In the dim light of the bar, it was more of a problem to see the words than to remember the tunes. Sam was shy with her. More than once, he would drop out for whole sections at a time, leaving a hole for the instrumental solo that Red had to fill. Red was okay as a rhythm player. He had good chords and played all the time-honored substitutions and, most importantly, he had a good formal sense. He could feel when a climax was coming and could support the soloist dynamically. But he wasn't as a soloist himself. His solos were always pretty basic, pretty reserved, spared, understated, even at times somewhat clumsy. Suzy couldn't always harmonize with them because the melodic logic was so erratic she couldn't get into the flow. All jazz solos are chains of stylistic cliches strung together in something like an original order but Red's melodic utterances were so random it was impossible to anticipate what the next melody would be. It was like trying to sing along with somebody who keeps switching tunes every two bars. Fortunately, that only happened a few times, and only in the early sets. Toward the end of the night, Suzy had been able to review the songs thoroughly enough during breaks to get free of the page and Sam started getting used to the new ensemble experience. He mostly adhered to his prepared solos and Suzy mostly gave professional but fairly conservative readings of the old standards. During Someone to Watch Over Me. Red had trained Sam on the popular Nelson Riddle arrangement of this song recorded by Linda Ronstadt. This was a solid, no-frills arrangement with some good counter-melodies for Sam to play during the head (the music before the solos) but it was kind of glitzy; kind of Las-Vegas-meets-Ethel-Merman and Suzy was going for a more intimate, more felt-from-within sense of it. The potential clash between these two interpretive perspectives was softened immediately by the way Sam altered his tone quality; another miracle. He and Suzy had found some middle ground and it set off her whispering sighs with a tender tremble in a fluid vibrato. The two parts merged in pristine perfection like lovers get after they know each other's personal rhythms; each others inner music. When the solo came, Sam switched versions and went into an old Lester Young solo he had learned years before. The little lost lamb peered out from that corner of Chicago, from behind the striated breast of the Picasso, with a wide-eyed innocence and longing that made the listener both comfortable and desperately sad at the same time, It was a self-pitying, nostalgia for that which is invisible not because it doesn't exist but because it has just turned a down distant side street, blown by the cruel breath of the windy city's last and final farewell. Suzy was tempted to try some of those counterpoints she likes to do but changed her mind and let Sam have the spotlight. She marveled at the subtle sophistication of his nuance and felt how perfectly the lead lines matched the sentiment she had attached to the song during the head. Then, when it came time for the final reprise, she leaned over and whispered in Sam's ear, "Take it." He switched over to the main theme without the tiniest hesitation while she sang the words to the last phrase in a poised and plaintive manner. The room was hushed as Red's concluding scaling hung in the smoky air. The quintessence of the moment could be read in the shapes of dissipating cloud. The silence was the ultimate stab of lonely desire as lamb lay herself down to weep and sleep. Then the room erupted in an ovation the like of which had never before rattled the wine glasses of the Hyatt Moonrise Room. To The Mellow Four, it was Carnegie Hall; the moment, the drama, the applause...all of it. The manager, Jim Meyer, was standing at the end of the bar congratulating himself as he watched his $100 extra overhead turn into an easy $600-700 in extra revenue. The wine was flowing like a waterfall. He didn't mind that there was also a river of twenty-dollar bills flowing into the tip cup, because he knew that his up-scale clientele had plenty of money for both booze and gratuities. Enthusiasm had a tendency to spill over into all available corners of the context, and he knew that if they were stuffing money into the short-stemmed cognac glass, they were also stuffing money into his pocket. Yet another  miracle was the music critic for the Chicago Sun Times, Elliott Stokes, walking into the Moonlight Room at precisely the right moment; just as Suzy and Sam had eased into Someone to Watch Over Me. Stokes was not on the job. He had heard the Mellow Four many times and although he had a lukewarm appreciation for Sam, he was underwhelmed. He was not a jazz man for he reviewed symphony concerts and Orchestra Hall recitals and the like. He had not come to hear the band. He was just dropping by for a nightcap before retiring to his apartment nearby. He pushed his way up to the crowded bar, ordered his drink and then forgot about it as the music gradually insinuated itself into his consciousness. He was not struck by the quality of Suzy's voice, nor the tenderness of the interpretation but he did notice a tonal sonority coming from the two of them like pastel colors of jazz. He heard how Sam and Suzy radiated an under current of attraction that grew on him with each successive phrase. He was captivated by the sound world of the duet. He saw the melodic lines as shapes in air, intertwining spires of energy emanating from the stage, exerting a magnetic pull that drew him in, that enraptured and entangled him in its smoky coils. He applauded along with the crowd adding his, "Bravi!" to the shouts of "Yeah!" and "Smokin'!" When the band began to pack up for the night, he went over to Morty and got the correct spelling of everybody's name and luckily, got wind of the future performance scheduled for next Wednesday at "Al's Place." His rave review of the band appeared as a short but glittering sidebar in the Friday "Chicago Nightlife" section of the Sun Times. Sam didn't know from newspaper reviews. He didn't really understand when Red showed him the Stokes' column before the Friday night gig: The sophisticated vocal stylings of Susan Wright, reminiscent in sound quality of a young Ella Fitzgerald  and in improvisational quality of the best of Sarah Vaughan, merged with the wonderfully understated undertones of saxophonist Sam Kapp, in moment after moment of ecstatic epiphanies. They brought a fresh depth and emotional intensity to old jazz warhorses which made them live again in the Chicago Hyatt Moonrise Room. Sam didn't even know what to do with the extr a $200 Morty stuffed into his case that night after the gig. He didn't appreciate it as a good thing. Sam lived down the street toward the North Side at the dilapidated St. George Hotel. Aunt Maxine was still paying his bills for him and even making his egg salad sandwiches. He knew about money, (he had to pay the bus driver on his way back and forth to the Hyatt, and he knew how to buy cokes at the Art Institute), but he wasn't very good at arithmetic, and reading a calendar, a week at a time, stretched the limits of his ability to see into the future. Each week, Sam went to Aunt Maxine's place for Sunday dinner, handed over the weeks earnings in cash, and she took care of the banking and rent paying. Over ten years, Sam had accumulated over $30,000 in savings, but he wouldn't have had any idea what to do with that money if somebody had given him a list. He was always paid under the table, so he had, so far, never ponied up any income tax for Uncle Sam. Sitting there under the lions, a passerby could have just as easily mistaken him for a homeless bum rather than a somewhat famous local saxophonist with a sizable bank account. To many, Sam seemed like a  village idiot, incapable of understanding language structure, abstract concepts, or even the simplest of social interactions. He may appear to be an autistic savant, gifted in one thing, and debilitatingly handicapped in all other things: and this would not be quite accurate. Sam had as much mental capacity as any other average man on the street but the rub came when he was put in a situation where he had to act like an average man on the street. He basically knew what he was supposed to say and do in any particular social situation, passing by the hotel night man, ordering a coke, even reading a bus schedule, but it was making himself execute these social formulae that was his undoing. Asperger's Syndrome manifests in various degrees of intensity, distributed on a continuum, some closer to outright clinical autism, some further away but all aspies' cognitive functioning is defined by one qualitatively common psychological weakness. They have to work a lot harder than normal people to make their personal inner world connect with the outer world. Normal people think, feel, and decide in a mental environment of psychological approximations; assumptions about what is true. This invoves a circular thinking process that allows them to access ideas from a scattered array of literally conscious and vaguely intuitive impressions. Aspies can't do that. They have to have all their ducks in a row; each thought leading, with impeccable logic, from one to the next like stages of an algebraic equation. If one step in a mental process is even slightly out of order, the whole construct falls to the ground. Normal people can get from point A to point B through any number of roundabout routes but aspies can only get there in a straight line. Stepping outside the straight line can be done, aspies can learn, especially with patient and understanding help but it is a tremendous effort and costs the aspie much in terms of the emotional pain that is always associated with any momentary mental disorientation. Also, social catch-phrases visual ques, or subtle tone of voice, are totally invisible, undetectable, and incomprehensible to an aspie. Countless times, Sam can remember being taken by surprise when some emotional outburst of frustration or rage was visited on him by his father, his brothers, his teachers or his classmates over some misunderstanding; the precise nature of which he never actually became aware of. The will to learn, the will to reach out, the will to try and make sense of the bewildering plethora of nonsensical social emanations, had been lost in him; and he suffered from this lack, but he was also protected by it. He snuggled in his cozy cocoon, isolated but safe, lonely but safe, disconnected but safe. If Sam had known there was anything for him in the outer world, he might have considered coming out of hiding, but he didn't have a clue, and had learned not to want to from his father. Sam's tendencies were pounced on by his too-conventional father. He was ridiculed and berated as unacceptable. Mr. Kapp soon came to attribute Sam's eccentric mode of expression to a deeply rooted and sinful character flaw. What kind of soul won't even answer a simple question? "Good morning, Sam." Silence. "How are you this morning?" Silence. How am I? "I said, how are you this morning, Sam?" "The curtains wiggle." "What?" "The window. The curtains wiggle." "What kind of stupid thing is that to say!" "How am I. The window curtains are wiggling." "Lord help us. The curtains are wiggling."  It never occurred to anybody that there was no such thing a s simple question to Sam. The family prayers at table and bedside never lacked heaps of heartfelt entreaties to Jesus to heal Sam's willful and stubborn dedication to the devil's work. At a very early age, this abusive insensitivity drove deep down inside him Sam's will to respond to anybody in words. To an aspie, reaching out into the world of men is not a natural process but a calculated act of logic and will and Sam was slapped down by his own father so many times in his formative years that he lost the power to rise to the occasion. For years, the words would percolate in his mind, striving for verbal expression. It hurt his heart to fill in the blanks of a socially interactive stock formula; the phoniness, the one-size-fits-all fuzziness of it. It frustrated his propensity to sequential linear think toward pristine clarity and honesty.  Why suffer the pain of drawing the false and impersonal response out of himself, just to suffer more when his father found fault? He was blocked  by his own deep-seated fear of his father's caustic abuse. The saxophone gave Sam a way to reach out into the world to a place where there were no wrong answers; no recrimination, and no pain. It might be said that Sam loved the saxophone, insofar as love may be defined as a  connection between separate entities. But the emotional parameter of love, the visceral physicality of love, the pulsing, the human, red-blooded heart of love, was foreign to him.  Such feelings as rage, or jealousy, or sadness or even affections, like attachment, dependence, or sympathy, were unknown to him. The one emotion that he knew well was fear. It was fear that kept him incarcerated in his self-made prison of disconnection. It was the saxophone that offered him momentary flights of freedom from this prison. With the saxophone he didn't have to give up the safety of his cell in order to experience sympathetic resonance with the outer world. The saxophone made sense and it was the sense of the saxophone that became his self-expression. With the saxophone he could send out little carrier pigeons of sound that carried the message I am to any who cared to hear. Mostly, it was Sam himself who heard this message, bouncing back to him off the ceiling of his cell at the Moonrise Room or out on the street underneath the Picasso. It didn't matter which. And until Susan Wright, this had been enough. The gig on Friday night went even better than Thursday, and the bar was packed to capacity, thanks to Elliot Stokes. On Saturday, it was ridiculous. There were people lined up out in the lobby, creating a fire hazard, and spilling booze on the carpets in front of the elevator. Red programmed a tour of a bunch of the old classics they had been performing with Sam for a couple of years, and Suzy managed to fit right in as Sam learned to make way for her lead solos. He was still performing by rote. But he was also learning how to transpose different learned chunks, taken from various classic versions, into the form of vocal arrangements improvised on the fly. Most of the time, right before they started to play, Red would whisper little hints to Sam about the source possibilities for each tune. Sam would resurrect musical treasures buried deep in his phenomenal audiographic memory by giving perfect renderings of melodies quoted alternately from sometimes, three or four different recordings, taking into account the key and tempo of the live version they were doing at the moment. But sometimes Red would call up a tune and before anybody could say anything else, Sam would launch into it without preparation forcing Suzy to find her way into the mix, crowding Sam out of the way at the appropriate moment. The mellow three got nervous whenever Sam did this because they feared that Sam might not make way for Suzy but he always did. Sam was learning at an amazing rate. Altogether, including Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, four hours a night, from 8:00 till midnight they had gone through a long set of more than twenty Gershwin standards as well as many by Cole Porter and  Rodgers and Hart. In every case, Sam had found a way to make his part fit with Suzy's and on the rare occasion when he proved rigid in his Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins version, Suzy would find a way to complement him. It was a happy situation musically and financially speaking, the tip cup was adding an average of $200-$250 per night. Jim Meyer had to put out cognac glasses in three different locations in the bar because people kept tripping over each other trying to get up to the bandstand to stuff their twenty-dollar bills into the pot. The level of noise would sometimes rise in direct proportion to the intensity of the music, and that was okay with Suzy because it covered subtle glitches in the changes. But she was a perfectionist at heart and her understanding was that this performance at Al's Place was to be more of a concert situation. She needed to feel prepared for a formal occasion like that. She wanted to know the complete repertoire list ahead of time. She wanted to practice. And she wanted time alone with Sam. Morty was the leader of the band, in name only. He handled all the booking and money matters, which, considering they hadn't played anywhere but the Moonrise Room in three years, was a decidedly uncomplicated responsibility. It was Red who was, what you might call, the music director. It was Red who had taken Sam in hand when he first joined up with the Mellow Four. It was Red who had played Sam all those dozens of classic recordings and watched in awe as Sam had parroted back each tune note-for-note. It was Red who basically programmed every set and took care of getting copies of the lead sheets to Morty when they tried out something new. Red had bought the tape player that lived in Sam's room at the St. George and he had even left one of his old electronic keyboards up there for when he worked out his chord changes with Sam. Red was curious as to why Suzy was so insistent about working with Sam alone but he already recognized that Suzy outclassed him by a yard and wasn't going to let pride get in the way of keeping the talent happy. The reason the tape player and the keyboard lived at the St. George was that Sam did not do well in unfamiliar surroundings, especially if those surroundings were cluttered and crowded as they always were at Red's place. Sam was easily distracted by visual noise, and this problem almost ended his gig at the Moonrise Room before it really began. When Sam first started playing there, every time somebody came in or out the door, every time a waiter passed in front of the bandstand, every time the cash register popped open, Sam would lurch and hesitate. It almost cost him his job. But his talent was such that Red committed to working with him on the problem. They even tried putting Sam in dark glasses for awhile, (the Miles Davis jazz druggie schtick), but the glasses kept falling down his nose, giving him one more visual cue to be distracted by, not to mention creating an inappropriately comical scene. There was nothing like watching Sam play When I Fall in Love with sunglasses slipping over his face onto his mouthpiece. They finally figured out that all they had to do was point Sam to the right, toward Red, and tell him to focus his eyes on the piano. After that, Sam got used to the other petty distractions that come with playing music in a public place, and he never faltered again. The bandstand at the Moonrise Room became his second home and he pulled its borders in around him like a blanket and snuggled up into its private corners, with his music, only dimly aware that there were other people in the place, only marginally aware that he was playing with three other guys. When he played, he was like an infant in the cradle who can't tell where his body ends and the world began. He didn't distinguish between himself and the other members of the band; he drove them, carried them, and discarded them like extensions of himself, appendages which served his purpose for the one moment then became non-existent in the next. When he entered his trance zone, he actually stopped seeing anything but the notes of his saxophone dancing before his mind's eye, like bubbles out of a soap pipe. But he still didn't like practicing at Red's place. There were papers and dirty plates all over the place and the train ran right by the window every fifteen minutes so the noise and the movement simply did not permit him to concentrate. Red was happy to rehearse quietly at the St. George in Sam's 15x20-foot room with its single bed, plain brown dresser, peeling paisley wallpaper and its cracked window looking out on an alley. The starkness of the place was ominous except for one ray of personality; sitting on the night table, under an imitation ivory Chinese lamp, was a photograph of Sam's mother. Red was happy to give Susan Wright directions to Sam's place and warned her not to carry very much money into that neighborhood  and for God's sake don't park your car anywhere near there. Take the bus. Suzy was coming on Monday. Sam's calendar was marked. Red had come over and marked it for him and told him Suzy wanted to play with him alone. Now his calendar was marked, and he knew Suzy singer was coming over and would be in his room at the St. George without Red, without anybody else; just him--just Suzy. It would be Monday. Today was Monday. Sam's calendar was marked. He checked it three times an hour. Monday. Suzy. Three o-clock. 3:00. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Monday. 3:00. Suzy. Suzy singer. He checked the time three times a minute. Suzy singer. He took out his saxophone. He put it away. He took it out again. He tested his reed. He put it away again. He took it out again. Suzy singer. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. What will happen? He blew a note and put it away. He looked at the play list Red had xeroxed in the Hyatt office. Suzy had a copy. Sam read the names of the songs. He could read them easy and every title represented a memory of sounds and fingerings he experienced in their totality in a flash. He had all the tapes of all the songs. There were an even dozen. Red was figuring an average of eight minutes per song for a two hour show. Sam arranged the tapes in the order of the play list, stacking them one on top of the other. Several of the cassettes didn't have those flat plastic cases, so the stack fell over. He restacked them. They fell over. He set them side by side, left to right on top of his dresser, then he took out several pairs of underpants and stacked the tapes between piles of underwear. The stack clattered to the floor and Sam picked them up and set them side by side on top of the dresser. He checked each one to see if they were all properly cued. They were. And as he listened to each opening, rewound the tape, played it again, and rewound it again, the entire piece flashed through his memory again. He looked at the clock. There was underwear all over the top of the dresser. How did these get here? Put those things away. There. Three P.M. Central Standard Time. Suzy singer. What will happen? Like any pro, Suzy was there early. Sam was looking at the second hand of the clock lurching toward the 12. 2:48:56, 2:48:57, 2:48:58, 2:48:59, 2:49:00. KNOCK KNOCK. Sam almost screamed. He went to the door. He stepped away from the door toward his saxophone. He went back to the door and touched the handle. KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. He almost screamed again. "Sam?" queried a voice on the other side. "SAM," He said. "Sam, it's Suzy Wright." "Sam." "Sam, are you there?" "Yeah, okay. Suzy. (Suzy singer)." He opened the door and retreated to the middle of the room like a shy pony. Suzy leaned her head forward and quizzically peered into the room through the door. Satisfied, she breezed in. "Hi Sam." "Sam." She went straight to the electric piano, and placed her stack of lead sheets on the night table; she removed her coat and scarf and laid them on the bed. She sat down on the metal folding chair and placed the first tune of their set on the music stand. Sam stood watching these simple activities with the opaque wonder of a dog watching his master solve a problem in advanced calculus. She turned and smiled at him. "Wanna play?" She had been warned that Sam had problems communicating with people and Red had outlined the way he taught Sam music by rote, listening to tape recordings but Suzy was not perturbed or intimidated by the possibility of difficulties. She had her own agenda for this rehearsal and it didn't involve learning other people's arrangements by rote. She had another idea. Suzy was a very remarkable musician but she was also possessed of all the motherly  instincts of a born teacher and she wanted to try something with Sam that might open him up and extend his range. She knew Sam had some kind of mental disability, that he was entrenched in a mind set from which he could not reach out and which most people could not reach into but she had also felt a connection with him on the bandstand Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; a musical connection that enthralled her and gave her the confidence that there was something more to Sam than people were giving him credit for. She felt she understood Sam as well as she needed to after three nights of performing and she had a strategy in mind that might enable her to get more music out of him. She was so young. Young and fearless and driven by that open-hearted sincerity that bestows on all innocents; the keys to the kingdom. She felt that she had in hand the key necessary to unlock the inner kingdom of Sam. She wasn't sure but she was by God going to find out. She knew she might be rushing onto ground where angels feared to tread but Sweet Jesus, that was what music was for. "Wanna play?" she said again. Without replying, Sam went over to his saxophone case in the corner with careful steps avoiding certain lines in the carpet like land mines. He opened the case. He was inept at putting it together. Suddenly a project that he had performed thousands of times seemed like completely foreign and unpracticed territory. He fumbled with the mouthpiece, he fumbled with the reed. He got so tangled in his neck strap, Suzy had to reach out and straighten it for him. At last he got his reed moistened and he was ready. After blowing a long arpeggio up and down the range of the horn, he went to the tape recorder and pushed the button on Benny Goodman's All of Me, the first tune on the list. Suzy reached out and flipped it off. Sam flinched with surprise, eyes wide, as though he had been shocked by 120 volts. "Let's not begin with the tape," she said and, without any more ado, she touched the keys and played a simple intro. Just then Sam's alarm clock belted out a deafening high-pitched whistle. Suzy started and Sam leaped on the clock like a leopard struggling to shut it off. After three blasts his stumbling fingers managed to silence it. She began again, this time with the ending tag in a slow tempo. "You took the part that once was my heart, so why not take all of me?" Then she started into a moderate swing vampstlye. Sam stared at her in puzzlement. He had been prepared to play Benny Goodman's famous version but this didn't jive with what Suzy was doing. He blanked. Ten different jazz solos buzzed through his head and none of them fit. "Don't know it," he said. Sam thought about crying but Suzy's smile stopped him. “Play the tune Sam," she encouraged. He took a breath and balked again. "Play a little piece of the tune, come on." Suzy continued to vamp, arching her eyebrows in anticipation. Sam played, "All of me," and stopped. "Good, now do it again, here," changing minors. "All of me." "Good. Now here," changing minors again. "All of me.” ” Good. Now put it together." Sam had never played a musical fragment so short and he had never put the pieces together by himself before. He had never chosen what to play. He had always just played the other guy's tune. "Come on, Sam, put it together." She vamped.  After a few moments of frozen silence, she leaned toward Sam and whispered the magic words that had brought forth the miracle of Someone to Watch Over Me four nights ago: "Take it!" And suddenly there he was, playing All of Me. Little threads of All of Me, like tendrils of tune reaching out to her bass line and twisting themselves into the chords. For a moment, he was playing a sophisticated, compressed intro for All of Me, tossing around sequentially transposed versions of the opening. It linked up with Suzy's simple Heart and Soul type of vamp. Then something weird happened: the excitement of the moment triggered something in his mind; a safety valve shut off. He started rattling off fragments of fifteen different versions of All of Me in quick succession with no continuity between them, like a computer searching for a fingerprint match in an FBI database; four notes of Charlie Parker here, five or six of Coleman Hawkins there, Louis Armstrong here, Billie Holiday there and the fragments rolled over on themselves and collided with each other in a hideous hysterical way. It was magnificent and horrible and desperate. Sam's tempo accelerated to a furious whirl and it seemed like he was going to careen off a cliff any second, that his mad flurry of notes were signaling a time bomb about to explode. Taken aback, Suzy witnessed the scene with the same awe with which Sam had watched her take off her coat. Then there was a flash of melodic construction that caught her attention and she screamed, "STOP!" Sam choked on his reed and took a step back. He was lost and afraid and insane. "There! Play that again." "Suzy?" "Play that again, right there." She remembered enough of the fragment to quote it on the piano. "This." Sam parroted back the melodicle with a question mark in his eyes. "There. Not Benny Goodman's tune, not Charlie Parker's tune, Sam's tune." "Sam's tune?" "Yes, Sam's tune. Your tune." "Mine." Sam used music to make sense out of the random mess of conceptual objects that cluttered the bomb-shelled, barb-wired no-man's-land of his mind. He used it to draw into his personal sphere, material from the outer reality that he could identify with, from which he could derive a sense of order and safety. But his talent had always been his ability to mimic what he heard. His identification with the music was always expressed in the second person. But it was the collective identity of all those artists that became, momentarily his personal identity. Sam was never Sam alone but always Sam in others.This was how it was and this was how it had always been. Never before had anyone asked him to create something of his own. The idea of ownership had never occurred to him. He took refuge in his music to escape the cruelty of his father, never to affirm the existence of himself. His entire strategy for living had been defensive--until now. Until now, he had never played a wrong note. As he labored with Suzy over his own version of All of Me, he honked and squawked false phrase after false phrase and this almost drove him to tears again until Suzy stopped him and comforted him with the famous Miles Davis quote, "You're never more than a half-step away from a right note." With this, Sam dove into his improvisations with renewed vigor. By the end of their session, Sam was playing with the same energy and authority with which he had quoted all the great recorded jazz solos of the 20th century. Yes, he stumbled, and yes, he painted himself into many musical corners and had to start over again and again, (like every other musician in the world) but he had the idea now and practiced on after Suzy went home, so much so that the night man at the St.George had to come up and remind him it was after 11:00, and people were trying to sleep. Wednesday night at Al's Place was a triumph. The place was packed and when the band launched into All of Me, there was a new saxophone player onstage. After the head, upbeat and perky, (a little Ella Fitzgeraldish), Sam took his first solo of the evening. He began with an attenuated, ever-so-slightly decorated version of the tune but as the solo built and built, through two complete choruses, his virtuosity became more and more brilliant and commanding until the second time through the bridge, when he stopped on a high note and held it for three measures modulating the tone through the changes, bending it up to an ecstatic ultimate note. It might be said that this note was a love song to Suzy. It might be said that this was Sam's glorious "I AM!" moment of self-realization. It might be said that Sam found his humanity in the applause clattering through the audience at Al's Place, Chicago, Illinois, Planet Earth, 8:35 Post Meridian, Central Standard Time. Then again, it might have been just a really good musical idea, imagined and brought forth into the material plane by an aspie saxophone player. He looked over at Suzy, handed it back and let her take it out. The crowd went wild. Sam smiled at Suzy, maybe for the first time in his life and as he took his bow, he took her hand and raised it over their heads, together. There was a moment between them that could never be duplicated and whose tenderness could never be surpassed. He felt himself congeal into a knot of self-absortion and sin and he sighed for so much clarity. He felt himself arriving, felt himself taking something from Suzy that was hers and his together, mostly his. And he wept. This time she did not hold him back but embraced him onstage. The audience redoubled their applause, conscious that they had witnessed something important, something historic, and something plainly, quintessentially human. When Red prodded them into their next number, Sam leaned over and whispered, "I'll take it." And he did.