No, I don’t crave the musical sounds you might expect. I don’t long for the Southern twang of a steel guitar, for the quaintness of the simple banjo, or even the storytelling nature that the Smoky Mountain dulcimer lends itself to. Yes, those were the instruments that I heard growing up back in Tennessee, and they call forth the Southern spirit for most of my kin. Such country instruments are my heritage, but they are not the sounds I so fondly recollect.

It is the saxophone that I find magical. This sexy musical instrument pulls at my heart and drags my thoughts to younger, simpler days. The sax brings to my mind the South that I left behind, for it regenerates the soulful music of those Southern nights and lets me replay such great memories in my mind. I feel the sway of the porch swing as I watch the sunset and rock to the clinking of the looped chains above my head. I listen to the lyrics the whipperwills pass from near to far and for the deep-voiced tree frogs singing to their lovers. I hear crickets fiddling at a tempo set by the temperature of the night air. I smell the raindrops as they fall. They tickle the roofs of tin like they were fingers caressing a keyboard’s polished ivory, announcing the cooling rains with a soothing piano lullaby. These are the notes that make up my childhood. They are all packed in the nuances of—and ready to be unfolded by—a mournful sax.

Bill Clinton hears the Old South accent of the saxophone. His Southern roots are soaked in the practical attitude that goes with the land. Open sensitivity and deep compassion are the gifts he was given, gifts nurtured by the hot sun and warm rains and cultivated in the red soil of the Deep South. His “I feel your pain” is empathy born of his experiences there. That’s the South I wish to remember as I move forward with my life in this city. The tales that I carry with me from my childhood there are what give me strength and courage now to soldier on as I make my own story.

I still have family back home who love me. I have friends there who miss me. I know lots of Southerners who are right-good-people. But the culture, oh, that culture. It calls to me, and yet my place by choice is here. God’s great gift of life to be lived and for diversity to be experienced wills it so—for now.

I trod the labyrinths of this great city by day, but it is the soulful saxophone of special evenings that hearkens back to the South I recollect from my childhood. And those sweet notes call forth the images I want to be among my final memories, no matter where I depart this life. If I had my druthers, I’d make the sax the South’s official instrument. And I’d use it in place of Gabriel’s horn. I’d use it to call my people home.

 Unfortunately, my friend—I’ll call him Matthew—now lives out west and simply can’t get away for the long trudge back home for the burial. So, Matthew grieves among foreigners who don’t understand Southern bereavement. And he feels like a believer among the lost. Now, don’t get me wrong when I say among the lost. This is no tale of Christian fundamentalism. Okay, maybe in some respects it is, but Matthew converted to Judaism years ago. He has come a long way since our Southern Christian upbringing, and so have I. But that doesn’t mean he has forgotten the old days, the old ways. Or that he pooh-poohs our heritage.

 I begin to understand his becoming a Jew when I hear him say, “If my family were Jewish we would sit Shiva for seven days. People would come, bring food and, tiptoeing, whisper condolences, and sitting on cardboard we would collectively mourn, our dead being buried immediately and before sunset.” He contrasts that with our Christian upbringing: “My sister, the evangelical who praised Jesus and foretold Gary’s healing in his name, now praises Jesus as he welcomes Gary into a better place. Funny how she can have it both ways.”  My friend isn’t one to push his own religious beliefs off on others, so he’s quick to add, “I only challenge her faith in my own mind.”

 I’ve invested time allowing my friend to grieve to me, listening to him tell me how he longs to be there. He says, “I want Alice’s rabbit hole now, to fall quietly into darkness, to be aroused by a white rabbit, to drink tea with a Mad Hatter and to confront the Red Queen.” Matthew can do all that safely by talking with me. He needs a friend as a release valve, knowing that after a while, I will reach down and pull him back up through that rabbit hole to the real world.

 But that must come later, for now he recalls his own mother’s passing, years ago. He still sees and smells the sickening, mixed aroma of those heaping bowls of food magically appearing on their kitchen table and overflowing the counters. Foodstuffs left even long after his mother was buried. Deposited even if no one was home when it was delivered. No, they didn’t lock their doors. There was no fear of neighbors who filled the now-too-silent house with macaroni and cheese. With deviled eggs. With fried chicken and other meats—mostly hams and pork barbeque. But all kinds, boiled or baked, but mostly fried. Oh and there were cakes and pies. Chess, lemon, apple, cherry pies. Peach, apple, blackberry cobblers. Food is the Southern condolence card.

 Matthew knows what’s in store for the widow, his niece-cum-sister. Through it all—from the wake with its interminable wait, to the funeral with songs like “When the Role Is Called Up Yonder,” and on to the solemn procession with headlights blaring and cars stopping respectfully all along the route to the cemetery—the bereaved will endure with Southern grace all those weak attempts at consoling her. “He looks so natural,” someone always says. But nothing feels natural; there is no feeling at all except a sensation of bottomless emptiness. The emptiness of a huge hole that, over and over, wells up with a lava flow of despair. “Honey, time heals all,” says another. She doesn’t want to be healed; she wants the father of her children, her husband, friend, confidant, sparing partner, lover.

 Matthew just wants to be there. To say nothing. To wrap his arms around her. To hold her close to his chest as she sobs. Offering quiet comfort like Abraham’s bosom.

Yes, I did know that name! This was the Pete I remembered and had tried unsuccessfully to find more than a decade ago; but, in my recollection, I knew only his nickname. Without recalling his actual name, which he’d never used at school, I had been unable to locate him. I had searched for Pete when the Internet was in its infancy. That was before search engines had become the supped-up, all-in-one reference resources they are today; and software for networking utilities like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Plaxo was still a dream—if even that.

Soon, I would learn that Pete had legally changed his name to his preferred moniker “Peter” shortly after college, as part of his becoming the person he pictured himself being. But, wait. I’m getting ahead of the story.

I added Pete as a friend, and we “rebooted” our dialogue after a three-decade hiatus. Many memories of our time together as college friends have been reviewed now. And, we have started to fill in the gap of that missing time. For instance, we’ve discovered that we both chose to leave the South; he went west and I went north. Our conversation is just beginning, but already I’m remembering things I’d forgotten—or buried. And, I’m finding out things about myself that I never knew—like how I was perceived then and how I’m perceived now, by Pete and (through deduction) perhaps by others.

However, we find that much data is missing and needs to be restored—events in our lives that happened during that interim in which the dialog was frozen. Thirty years of loves found and lost; thirty years of adventures in our lives; thirty years of dreams created, and then realized, abandoned, or still pending—these are the topics that will require careful attention to detail and nuance as we key it all into that ethereal mainframe that holds our joint memories. This extended metaphor works best for what has been, but what of the future?

Any decent story has a protagonist. And, there is no story unless there is action. Moreover, that action—the events that unfold through time—must show character development, which brings me back to the protagonist. Who would like, or even finish reading, a novel or short story in which what happens to the leading character has no effect on that person at the center of the story? Change must take place—not just around but in central characters. This transformation is a process that is in addition to, but also essential for, the plot. And so it is with Pete and me. I hope to be learning about today’s Pete; but, I also want to learn about today’s Larry. Who am I and how did I get here? And, what of tomorrow’s Pete, tomorrow’s Larry?

Pete says he’s impressed that I made it to New York. “The Larry I knew would never have even considered moving there,” he told me. He wants to learn what events in my life led me here: where I got the idea and then the courage to carry it through. I don’t have those answers right now. Like another Southerner, Scarlett O’Hara, once said, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

Sadly, that Old Gray Lady, perhaps suffering from declining hearing, paid no mind to my call for consideration—other than thanking me for my submission and reminding me, with a matronly poke of her dagger, that many letters are received but space (Ha! Make that inclination!) permits use of only a few. Well, I liked it when I wrote it, and I believe it still shines, even though Father Time has spent these past few years testing its mettle. See if you agree that it’s worth a read. The gist of my letter follows:

I grew up just a few miles from Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of the Jack Daniels Distillery. When I read “Whiskey’s Kingdom (Pop. 361),” by R.W. Apple, Jr., published March 17, 2004, recollections stirred in me. I wasn’t thinking of the whiskey itself, as I have never been a connoisseur of fine spirits—I was recalling a droll incident with my grandmother who has long since passed away.

As a young boy, I recall the mischievous chuckle and the relish with which she told the tale of touring the facilities at Jack Daniels and accepting a sample of that Tennessee Sipping Whiskey! My grandmother was a life-long Baptist and for me, not yet knowing much of the ways of the world, this tasting was totally out of character. (Sadly, since the distillery is in a dry county, this free sampling was halted many years ago.)

As I approach the age my grandmother was at the time of her “indiscretion,” I have come to realize that a few excursions outside the boundaries of ordinary life can be good things. After all, life is for the living, and for living—fully.

As for the dead, I’m sure my grandmother—perhaps with the welcoming of each new family member—has grand, midday Southern dinners, held like our old-time family reunions, replete with fried chicken, stone-ground cornbread, creamed potatoes, garden-ripened tomatoes, fried okra, and hand-cranked ice cream for desert.

Oh, and what of that heady, perfumed evaporation that lingers in the air over Lynchburg, which the article calls “the angels’ share?” My grandmother is undoubtedly partaking of the angels’ share that is always offered-up in Heaven at such joyous occasions. (#2)

To read  Mr. Apple’s fine article in the New York Times, copy the following URL and paste it into your Web browser:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE6D61731F934A25750C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all