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By Root 867 0

with my family meant going to hear my dad’s Dixieland band play in the hotels in Waikiki, on Sunday afternoons and in the early evenings, five to nine P.M. the rest of the week. The band, and the music itself, had become a kind of ministry for my dad. He’s a preacher’s kid, after all. They always attracted a group of dancers, mostly middle-aged couples, and I loved to watch the complicated steps—the Balboa, the Charleston—done with such evident ease. On Christmas Eve, they’d get couples stopping in for a few dances before going to Mass, but for other people, my dad’s version of “O Holy Night”—with the band’s singer, Sydette, in a sexy silver lamé cocktail dress, and him on cello—was about all the religion they were going to get. And people took it seriously; the dance floor would clear, the cabaret would quiet down. It was so serious, in fact, that the song occasioned the only act of violence the band witnessed in over ten years at the club. One year a tipsy couple remained on the dance floor, moving suggestively, clinging to each other more than dancing, and a bodybuilder—one of those intensely muscular men who was unbelievably light on his feet when doing the fox trot with his wife—lost his temper. “This is religious music, dammit,” he said, picking up the couple and depositing them, more or less gently, on a sofa. Sydette and my dad kept on going.

One year, on December 30, the Feast of the Holy Family, the piano player, already weakened by cancer, played one last boogiewoogie. His Our Lady of Perpetual Help medal swayed to the beat, a gold pendant shaped like a scallop shell, an ancient symbol of pilgrimage. My mother reminisced that day about her very first dance, the Fireman’s Ball in Lemmon, South Dakota, in an auditorium long gone. The vanished music, the happy dancers, herself the happiest in her first grown-up dress. The bass player, Jerry, a comedian to break your heart, got serious for a moment and did a searing rendition of “St. James’ Infirmary.” Cold, stark death, death and devotion. My dad’s gritty cornet solo brought it home.

Both the piano player and Jerry died before the year was out, Jerry from complications of diabetes, at only thirty-seven years of age. The room—the Esprit Lounge, of all things—remains fixed in my memory, a cabaret with a view of the ocean. And music that lingers in the afterglow of sunset, as the first star of evening appears over the Pacific. Living in a monastic environment all that fall had made me see many things in a new light. Dixieland jazz, for example, now seemed the most Benedictine, the most communal of ventures. Each individual in the band is recognized as such, in fact is required to play a solo, but not to improvise to the extent that the others are left out. The band begins and ends each song together.

Not long ago, on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, when the band played for a senior citizens’ dance on the waterfront, at Aloha Tower, it turned into a reunion for former fans who don’t get out much any more. An elderly black man that my mother and I remembered as a regular at the old Garden Bar at the Hilton, where the band played on Sundays for more than twenty years, embraced a former dancing partner. Then he set down his cane and danced with her. “Dad better watch it, Mom,” I said. “When that sort of thing happened around Jesus, all hell broke loose.” But I don’t know that she heard me; she was eyeing the crowd for a dancing partner of her own. A few years before, when she turned seventy, she got new ballroom dancing shoes, to replace the pair she’d worn out.

My favorite photograph of my parents, taken not long after they eloped, shows two pretty young people dressed in style, who most likely had no idea of the moral courage their marriage would require of them. They were still vain children—Mom’s showing off her great legs, Dad his rascal grin—but they soon found that matrimony would plunge them headlong into the strenuous process of redemption, in which even the worst things may eventually work to the good. It took my father a long time to settle into marriage,