Garlic and My Father

"Garlic and Appreciating My Father"
June 2000

Recently I took my first garlic pill. It's supposed to help in lowering cholesterol so Elizabeth has talked me into it.

Along with the soaring numbers from my latest blood work. As I swallowed the pill I suddenly remembered my father sitting at the kitchen table saying to me; "Are you taking garlic pills?"

"Garlic pills?" I replied with an incredulous tone, "Why would I take garlic pills?"

"To lower cholesterol."

"Nah, my cholesterol is fine. Besides, I get plenty of garlic in the food I eat."

That was kind of a typical dismissal of my fathers wisdom by me. I did it with just about anything he would offer. Take music for example. My father was a musician. He was a bread and butter, blue collar musician. He played for weddings, parties, store openings, Christmas background, local (Chicago) lounges, local TV. I was very much into jazz but not as a musician. I was a "pretender", a DJ.

I worked at stations in Chicago, Michigan and Texas and had a pretty good following of listeners. I was very hip. So when my father told me about this tenor player who played in his quartet; "This guy's as good as Coleman Hawkins." I was surprised that my father even knew of Coleman Hawkins. But I blew him off anyway considering him to be too uncool to REALLY know what he was talking about.

My father's been dead now for a little over four years. Now and then I listen to some of the tapes of his lounge work and practice sessions that were made from the late 40's to the mid 60's when he finally quit the music business.

Benny Goodman would have hired these guys. My father had a strong tenor voice and sang and played guitar on most of his jobs. One musician said of him; "He was the best rhythm guitar in the Chicago union." When he played he maintained a steady, solid beat backing a tenor man who, just as he had said, played all the licks Hawkins was famous for and added a few of his own that the Hawk could have benefited from hearing.

Later in his music career my father played drums and sang. Try that combination sometime. I actually find I can do it too and have only recently noticed that not everyone can.

Clearly I blew it. Even as he did. I didn't fully appreciate him until it was way too late. And he never got to really know me either.

What a waste. To think we could have seen just how much alike we really were instead of focusing on how different we seemed to be to one another. And it all could have started with garlic.

It's damned sad that's what it is. Sad about how a relationship can turn upon such mundane things. I loved him all along of course and I know he loved me.

And now I finally know how much of who he was has become who I am.

Coyote On Coyote - More about Coyote by Dick Prosapio

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