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By Root 898 0

shoved off into the sofa bed like entering a vault. Ray was not a guy who had nothing on his mind. He knew what he thought and he knew how to express it, didn’t make room in his life for mistakes. The mundane things in life didn’t register with him. He seemed to have some golden grip on reality, didn’t sweat the small stuff, quoted the Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed. At times he could say things that had way too much edge. Once he said that President Kennedy wouldn’t last out his term because he was a Catholic. When he said it, it made me think about my grandmother, who said to me that the Pope is the king of the Jews. She lived back in Duluth on the top floor of a duplex on 5th Street. From a window in the back room you could see Lake Superior, ominous and foreboding, iron bulk freighters and barges off in the distance, the sound of foghorns to the right and left. My grandmother had only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes on weekends my parents would drive down from the Iron Range to Duluth and drop me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe. The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My grandmother’s voice possessed a haunting accent — face always set in a half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn’t been easy. She’d come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.

Originally, she’d come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea — the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine — the one that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather’s parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers.

My grandmother’s ancestors had been from Constantinople. As a teenager, I used to sing the Ritchie Valens song “In a Turkish Town” with the lines in it about the “mystery Turks and the stars above,” and it seemed to suit me more than “La Bamba,” the song of Ritchie’s that everybody else sang and I never knew why. My mother even had a friend named Nellie Turk and I’d grown up with her always around.

There were no Ritchie Valens records up at Ray’s place, “Turkish Town” or otherwise. Mostly, it was classical music and jazz bands. Ray had bought his entire record collection from a shyster lawyer who was getting divorced. There were Bach fugues and Berlioz symphonies — Handel’s Messiah and Chopin’s A-Major Polonaise. Madrigals and religious pieces, Darius Milhaud violin concertos — symphonic poems by virtuoso pianists, string serenades with themes that sound like polka dances. Polka dances always got my blood pumping. That was the first type of loud, live music I’d ever heard. On Saturday nights the taverns were filled with polka bands. I also liked the Franz Liszt records — liked the way one piano could sound like a whole orchestra. Once I put on Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata — it was melodic, but then again, it sounded like a lot of burping and belching and other bodily functions. It was funny — sounded almost like a cartoon. Reading the record jacket, I learned that Beethoven had been a child prodigy and he’d been exploited by his father and that Beethoven distrusted all people for the rest of his life. Even so, it didn’t stop him from writing symphonies.

I’d listen to a lot of jazz and bebop records, too. Records by George Russell or Johnny Cole, Red Garland, Don Byas, Roland Kirk, Gil Evans — Evans had recorded a rendition of “Ella Speed,” the Leadbelly song. I tried to discern melodies and structures. There were a lot of similarities between some kinds of jazz and folk music. “Tattoo Bride,” “A Drum Is a Woman,” “Tourist Point of View” and “Jump for Joy” — all by Duke Ellington — they sounded like sophisticated folk music. The music world was getting bigger every day. There were records by Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro,