2013.10.11 01:00 - Goodbye pork pie hat

Wol Euler was soliloquist for this session.

Wol Euler: So I woke up this morning with a particular song in my head, Jeff Beck's original "Goodbye pork pie hat" from 1976.
Wol Euler: I first heard this, in common with a lot of music that I now greatly enjoy, through my uncle Albert who was a world-famous jazz fan, known in the clubs of London, Paris and New York.
Wol Euler: At the time, I couldn't hear it, because I thought it was jazz and that meant that it must be ... well, not bad as such, but irrelevant, old-fashioned, trivial.
Wol Euler: Anyway.
Wol Euler: The song stuck in my head and wouldn't go away, even as I sat down to meditate.
Wol Euler: So I decided to make it the jumping-off point for a sally.
Wol Euler: (Footnote for those who haven't been following closely: a sally is the term we used in PaB retreats for visualization during meditation.
Wol Euler: Starting from an image or a sentence, visualize that and then just follow the logic of the visualization and allow things to happen.
Wol Euler: There's a path? walk along the path. A staircase? ascend it. Just see what happens, where it all leads.)
Wol Euler: I let the music bring me to the door of the living room of Albert and Pat's apartment above their shop in a small town on the Thames.
Wol Euler: (I haven't been in the apartment since she died in ... 1988?)
Wol Euler: I stopped in the doorway and looked into the room, which was fully furnished but neither of them was there.
Wol Euler: I let myself remember how it had been, where the furniture was, how the plants were arranged on the windowsills, the shape of the trees through the net curtains, the vague hum of traffic immediately outside.
Wol Euler: There were records everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of them. I wonder where they are now? Hopefully gone to deserving homes.
Wol Euler smiles.

--BELL--

Wol Euler: I just remembered something else. The dark wood surface that I took to be a sideboard, on my right against the short wall as I walked in, was in fact a foldaway table on wheels. We used to pull it out and set it lengthwise in the room for dinner.
Wol Euler: It was a really small apartment, but they had made it very comfortable.
Wol Euler: I remembered that the south (windows to street) wall was lined with a long low shelving unit for less commonly played records, with a thick firm cushion along the top. It had a scratchy thick-weave orange and light-brown patterned cover that I couldn't bear to sit on with bare legs.
Wol Euler: I sat there now, and looked around, and saw Albert's bongos on the floor by his chair. They were glossy black, well polished; the skins were worn nearly transparent from use.
Wol Euler smiles.
Wol Euler: I had no time for this when I was a kid, I thought it was silly for a grown man to sit on the floor and play along to his favourite music.
Wol Euler: It's that thought which seems silly (juvenile, uninformed) to me now, of course.
Wol Euler: Forty years later, seeing them in the sally, I remembered that he had been a drummer in local pub bands in his youth.
Wol Euler: Or did I imagine that? It's hard sometimes to tell the difference between a remembered "true fact" and a remembered misunderstanding.
Wol Euler: Our memories aren't fixed like ink on a page, whatever we might think. The mind edits and re-edits them to make a consistent story.
Wol Euler: If it were true, if he had been a drummer, it would put a different meaning on his playing the bongos as an adult married man.
Wol Euler: Shades of "Rosebud", even. He would have had to give that up to get a "real job".
Wol Euler: I was thinking as I wrote this just now, that I'd have recognized from his playing whether he was a musician or just a guy trying to be hip.
Wol Euler: But that isn't true, because I never really listened. I tuned him out because I assumed that it had to be a foolish attempt at being cool.
Wol Euler: And to my shame I must recognize that I thought he was trying to be cool to impress *me*.
Wol Euler sighs.
Wol Euler: Anyway. How could I find out whether Albert was a drummer in his youth? He's long gone, as is Pat. Many of their friends, a high percentage of whom were musicians, are still alive but I have no idea how to find them.
Wol Euler: There is nobody who could give me first-hand corroboration of this idea.
Wol Euler: Not even my father, because he wouldn't remember. He's lost all of his past, and with it some of mine.

--BELL--

Wol Euler: It's gone, lost in time.
Wol Euler: Like tears in the rain. *wry smile*