“A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.” (Muhammad Ali)
I am the youngest of Ray & Tina’s five children. The oldest siblings, Deb and Doug, are twins, seven and a half years my senior. My sisters Donna and Dale are six and four years older respectively. Doug passed away in January 2017 and Dad passed in May 2019. Thus far, the most difficult thing I’ve witnessed was my parents’ grief at Doug’s final services.
Generational similarities are often summed up by the adage, “The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Similarly, we can study the fruit and learn a lot about the trees from which it has fallen. While genetics account for many similarities (complexion, eye colors, predisposition to cancer, etc.), my siblings and I share numerous familial, cultural, and environmental common denominators. We could all make one hell of a sandwich. None of us has ever been afraid of a hard day’s work. We’ve all shared a common disinterest in sports, as both participants and viewers. We’re all familiar with Nubians, French-Alpines, Better’n Ben’s, Muffelettas, and Marshmallow Marsh. We all know that malfunctioning appliances are to be shoved up Sam Gordon’s ass. We’ve all lived lives free from criminal conviction. We all moved out of New Jersey, eventually. We make sure our cars are serviced regularly. We all love our spouses, our kids, our dogs, cooking, eating, and our time together. From these fruitful commonalities, what can be learned of our bearers? Let’s revisit my youth, through the artistically licensed lens of cherry-picked events and faltering memory, to see what might be revealed beyond the double helix of shared DNA.
My earliest memories stretch back to the summer of 1970 when my family moved from Chatham, New Jersey to our home in Lebanon Township, in the northern part of Hunterdon County, New Jersey. I vaguely recall the moving truck and watching as furniture and boxes were carried into our new home. Our house was a Cape Cod with an attached two-car garage and a roughly semi-circular driveway. There was a walnut tree in the half circle of grass that separated our driveway from the road. We had just under two acres, with rather large yards, and grass that never stopped growing. There were two willow trees, two apple trees, and two cherry trees in the backyard. It was summertime and my fourth birthday was forthcoming. This is where my memories begin.
There was a little over a year between the time we moved to Lebanon Township and my first day of kindergarten. Scattered memories from the first few years in our new home include our two English Setters, Jackie & Jill. I think we might have had a Chevy station wagon, and definitely a Volkswagen Squareback, and a few years later, VW buses. I remember a trip to Manhattan to see Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus… and the vendor selling pretzels put mustard on mine. I didn’t like that one bit. Dad wiped off most of the mustard but it still tasted yucky. Aside from a lousy pretzel, I liked the circus animals. And we always had animals while I was growing up. Chickens, cats, goats, and a horse. And with very few gaps, there was always at least one family dog. Cocoa, the dog that I grew up with, was a beautiful, chubby, mild-tempered Chocolate Labrador Retriever.
My father owned a store that originally sold gourmet foods, cheeses, and spirits but over the years it evolved into a delicatessen, beer, and liquor store. Mom attended to me until I started school. After that, she had some part time jobs before working full time at Dad’s store. Dad was always working; if not at his store, he was working around the house, finishing the upstairs bedrooms and the basement, or doing other home repairs and improvements. He also had some side hustles going on, including plowing snow and selling word burning stoves.
Dad loved music. As a young pup, the first music that I was drawn to was the traditional country & western that made up a large portion of my father’s vinyl and 8-track library. Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Chet Atkins, Hank Snow, Marty Robbins, Waylon & Willie, Hank Williams Sr, and others. I was four or five years old when I noticed my attraction to guitars and assorted guitar-shaped objects. This initial attraction stemmed from the country music that Dad enjoyed.
My attraction to guitars was reinforced by a few orders of magnitude once my sister Deb pointed out that the Rolling Stones played guitars, too. It didn’t take too many years for me to realize that in addition to guitars, the Rolling Stones had long hair, cigarettes, barrels of whiskey, mountains of cocaine, and a throng of women who seemed awfully concerned about the happiness and well-being of the band members. Overall, the Stones appeared to be having more fun than, say, Chet Atkins was having. From a young age, I knew that I wanted to be a musician… and if not a musician, maybe a rock star.
Given my early affection for guitars and country music, my first album might have seemed an odd pick. I was still in my single digits, perhaps eight years old or so, and with my mother at the new A&P supermarket in Califon, NJ. I was fascinated by the bust of Beethoven on an album cover. It was The Pastoral–Sixth Symphony, from Funk & Wagnall’s Family Library of Great Music. No one in my family listened to classical music, at least not intentionally. The somewhat disheveled Beethoven on the album cover was interesting; his hair was long and kinda ratty (by my parents’ standards) yet his face had a solemn certainty, and perhaps a certain solemnity, that said, “Yeah, I nailed this one, bitch. These grooves are cool AF.” The album was seventy-nine cents with a minimum $7.50 purchase. Though my mother put up some resistance, I convinced her to buy that record for me. Over the years, I’ve devoured it. To this day, Beethoven’s Pastoral remains one of my favorite pieces of music. It is my internal pitch reference for the key of F. It is comfort music for my soul.
Nowadays country music is among the genres which consume the least of my listening time, though I occasionally enjoy some classic country music in very limited doses. Any residual affection for traditional country music stems from its sentimental value and its honest simplicity. I don’t find myself listening to the Rolling Stones too much anymore, but my attraction to guitars and guitar-shaped objects has remained strong throughout my life.
In many ways, my youth was idyllic. While our family was not rich by most modern metrics, we were well provided for. My siblings and I had our health, a very stable home life, family vacations, day trips, and quite a few camping trips. Having loving and hard-working parents who stuck it out together—for better or for worse, for sixty-one years, until Dad passed away—was an incredibly valuable asset. Among the lessons learned from my idyllic childhood was that if I ever bought a house, I wanted a very small yard because I hate cutting grass, raking leaves, and other lawn maintenance. I also knew that I didn’t want to own a delicatessen. Shark Tank investor Lori Greiner has said, “Entrepreneurs are the only people who will work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.” That phrase described my parents perfectly. Nice for them, but not for me.
As a young child, I never recall attending church. Mom and Dad identified as Christian, all of their children were christened, and they were active in the church prior to our move from Chatham to Lebanon Township. There was minimal religious ritual or apparent reverence in my family during my single digits; or not much that I remember.
I was about five years old and playing with Chris Glowacki on and around the walnut tree in our front yard when I first remember hearing about “God.” We were playing typical games that boys our age played in the early 1970’s: acting out scenes from our favorite TV shows, cops and robbers, whatever. Back then we used active imaginations, improvised storylines, and so forth. In the midst of our play, Chris started telling me about what he had learned in Sunday school. At age five, Chris was no stranger to embellishing upon reality a bit, so I stopped him right there: “We don’t go to school on Sundays. Or Saturdays.”
“It’s not at school. It’s at church,” he corrected me. “And it’s on Sundays.”
A branch stuck out from the walnut tree’s trunk at just the right height for me to reach up and grab. I was holding onto that walnut tree branch, looking up at the sky through the other branches and leaves, while Chris told me about Creation per Genesis, as only a five-year old boy could best recall it from his Sunday school lessons. He told me about how God created everything and then he created Adam and Eve and there was a snake and a great flood and Heaven and Hell… I expressed my skepticism, but he insisted it was all true. We were using our imaginations quite a bit that day. Chris had a reputation for going beyond the truth, and most of all: it just sounded completely crazy. I dismissed it as another one of his tall tales and got on with my youth.
Of course it didn’t take too long before I realized that other kids—and adults—also believed in the stories about God. Had Chris Glowacki gotten to them, too? What was it that seemed so apparent to others but eluded me entirely? Was I missing one of my senses? The extent of awkwardness that my skepticism evoked was limited by the fact that my family, at that time, didn’t actively participate in religious services. There was a copy of The Children’s Bible on the bottom of the round table in our living room. Once I opened it up, I knew the origins of Chris’s story. He must have had the same book. Despite my best prepubescent efforts, no matter how hard I tried, The Children’s Bible always read as fiction. It still does. And when I use the word “fiction,” I don’t mean fiction like Dirty Harry fiction, where the characters, setting, and storyline are at least plausible. The Bible read more like Wizard Of Oz fiction or Harry Potter fiction. Right outta the gate it sounds like complete fantasy: a talking serpent, a 600 year-old man building an ark that could withstand a sustained rainfall rate of 28 feet per hour (with two of every species on board), people living to be several hundred years old. People took this seriously?
As a young pup, I remained quiet about my disbelief. None of this really mattered. My family didn’t congregate and prayer was seldom the answer, so I never felt any point of contention or conflict. As I pushed toward my teen years, I was becoming increasingly aware of my minority status. Pretty much everyone believed in some form of god and maybe a third or so attended church regularly… and I had absolutely no way of knowing if they all believed in the same stuff. I could’ve just said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe in God, too,” and kept it moving and no one would have known any better. But I didn’t.
As an adult, I’ve considered how different my beliefs might have been—and if they would have changed—if my first brush with Christianity had not been from a friend with youthful credibility issues, but from family; from those I trusted the most. And what if those lessons had been cultivated and reinforced with regular ritual, reverence, cathedral, congregation, and offering? Would I have questioned those answers at some point in life? If I had been steeped in religion and later lost it, might I have held a grudge against those who had instilled it?
Ms. Huray was my fifth grade English teacher and her husband, Mr. Huray, was my seventh grade math teacher. I really didn’t care for Ms. Huray; she seemed unnecessarily bitchy. I tried to be the quietest kid in her classes. And it was in Ms. Huray’s classroom that we learned about the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses of past mythologies. In an unusual inquisitive act, I asked Ms. Huray what had happened to the gods and goddesses from those mythologies. Though I don’t recall the exact phrasing of her answer, the essence of it was that once people stopped believing in those gods, they went away. “Were they ever there?,” I wondered.
I was becoming increasingly aware that there are so many different religions and scriptures and temples and cathedrals and chants and hymns and ritual dances and costumes and ministers and, well, there seems to be a god for everyone who believes in one (or more, though the major players in today’s religious markets are of the monotheistic variety). If everybody stopped believing would their Gods just go away? How would we know?
Though incapable of articulating the concept so concisely at such a tender age, I realized that if n represents the number of all the gods ever known to man over the ages (God, Allah, Brahma, Thor, Zeus, Osiris, Neptune, Vishnu, Venus, Izanami, etc.), most people currently disbelieve in n – 1 gods. That is, they believe in one god, and remain largely dismissive of all the others. I disbelieve in n – 0 gods. I’m an equal opportunity disbeliever. Even the most faithful among us are just one god away from joining us on The A Team.
I also realized that I wasn’t entirely alone in my disbelief. I wasn’t missing one of my senses. Though few and far apart—especially in the homogenous, white bread with mayo environment in which I was raised—there were others who shared my disbelief. And there is even a label for us: atheist. An atheist is someone who disbelieves in n – 0 gods. Nothing more, nothing less.
A non-believer is not unlike a non-smoker. Just as believers are typically partial to a particular faith, sect, and congregation, most smokers are partial to a specific brand. Like the faithful, smokers seldom switch brands, even though many others are available. A smoker of Newports is most likely also a non-smoker of Camels, Marlboros, Winstons, and all other brands, but a smoker nonetheless. Conversely, a non-smoker is as much a non-smoker of Newports as she is of Camels, Marlboros and of all the brands. With this analogy in mind, one can think of atheists as “the non-smokers of religious offerings.”
I was not only quiet about my atheism; I was quiet about a lot of things. My parents didn’t like that I offered little along the lines of dinnertime conversation. Shortly after learning the name for my condition—at about age twelve—I decided to engage in some simple conversation at the dinner table. I asked my parents the question for which I already knew the answer: “Is an atheist someone who doesn’t believe in God?” Upon confirming my feigned uncertainty, I shored it up with, “Then that’s what I am.”
Whatever conversation, discussion, debate, or follow-up questions came in the wake of my announcement didn’t matter much to me. For many centuries, many people have believed in many different gods and adhered to a wide variety of mythologies and religious doctrine. The believers were evident, but the gods—all of them—remained curiously absent, at least by any testable, objective standards. When people stopped believing in those gods, as Ms. Huray had suggested, they just went away. Easy.
When I look back on that innocuous attempt at dinnertime conversation, I can’t help but imagine how much my parents’ hearts must have sunk with the announcement of my atheism. No, we were not a “religious family” at that time. We seldom attended church services. But my parents’ belief in one almighty being named God—creator of the Universe, chief engineer and architect of the Master Plan, as described in the Holy Bible—was not shared by their youngest son. Ouch. Could I have made any announcement, true or otherwise, that could have more effectively ripped their hearts out? Might I have been less effective in ruining their dinner if I had told them that I was gay? Or a Democrat? Or a jazz listener?
* * *
I started playing trumpet in the fifth grade. Though not quite guitar-shaped, my mother wanted me to play a “real” instrument (something that requires wind?) before I got a guitar. So without ever having heard of Miles Davis, I chose trumpet. The day I received my rented trumpet, our teacher, Mr. Krauss, showed us how to install the mouthpiece, the basic functionality of the horn, and to play a few notes. I took the horn home and showed my mom. She said it had been a while, but after a few squeaks and squawks, she belted out a C major scale. That was really cool.
I joined the elementary school junior band (consisting of the fifth and sixth graders) and we practiced once a week, for maybe an hour at most, and then we played our songs at Christmas and Spring recitals. The headliners at these performances were the older kids—the seventh and eighth graders—who had a slightly better grasp of intonation and meter, and got to play more challenging arrangements.
Unlike most of the other students in the school band, I had the benefit of private instruction. My trumpet teacher was Gary Ross, a music major, performing musician, and son of George Ross, who owned the local music store. I scrounged through Dad’s music library in search of trumpeters and found Al Hirt, Herb Alpert, and Harry James. Around that same time, Chuck Mangione’s huge jazz-pop hit “Feels So Good” was in high rotation on the FM airwaves. I’d finally found a trumpeter outside of Dad’s music collection, even if this trumpeter actually played the flügelhorn.
Beyond music, I was largely academically uninterested throughout my elementary and high school years. I was a decent student, but only because I paid attention and was able to grasp whatever was being taught with minimal effort. I really didn’t apply myself and I didn’t do much homework. Book reports and term papers were almost always done in their entirety the night before they were due. My mad rush to blurt out some semi-coherent bullshit would somehow satisfy the assignment’s objective and I’d usually get passing grades. But I’ve also said about my teen years, “If it didn’t have tits, guitar strings, or peanut butter filling, it probably wasn’t going to hold my interest for too long.”
I’m not exactly sure whether the next instrument that I picked up was guitar or the Yamaha organ that Dad bought for Mom. Late one April morning in 1978, I came home from my trumpet lesson and there was a guitar on my bed. It was my Donna’s guitar and after playing it for a few lessons she lost interest, so it was passed on to me. The night before getting her leftover guitar, I played the theme to Star Wars in a recital sponsored by the music store where I took trumpet lessons. Joey Perricone played the same tune, maybe a little better. Anyway, I picked up that cheap nylon-string axe and opened up the accompanying lesson books and started teaching myself guitar. A feeling came over me; I’m not sure how to describe it other than it felt right. I never wanted to be without a guitar. I never really got that vibe from the trumpet or organ, but once I got into high school and had access to acoustic pianos, there it was again.
I played both the guitar and trumpet, and occasionally the organ, into the seventh grade. But I needed orthodontic braces and playing trumpet got pretty uncomfortable with all of that metal in my mouth. So carried on with guitar, quite passionately. I relied less and less on the listening cues from my family and started exploring music with increasing independence. Among the musicians who resonated with me from a young age were The Beatles, Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, Jethro Tull, and Stevie Wonder. During my high school years, my listening tastes expanded dramatically. I was discovering Jeff Beck, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Bach. I had started playing guitar more improvisationally. My braces were removed during my freshman year of high school, and though my “main instrument” was definitely guitar, I did pick up the horn once in a while.
By the time I’d reached my senior year in high school, I was playing trumpet again somewhat regularly. My improvisational tendencies and musical curiosity led me to explore more jazz. I went to the record store and without any prior exposure to his music, I bought the album “Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965” by the Miles Davis Quintet. When I got home, I listened to all four sides of the double album set. I had never heard anything like that. This wasn’t Al Hirt or Chuck Mangione jazz; no, this was different. The next morning I listened to the entire album set again. I was fascinated and confused and intimidated and inspired all at once. Later that morning I picked up my trumpet, put the mouthpiece in, brought it up to my lips, and paused. I put the trumpet down, removed its mouthpiece, put it all back into its case, and never played again.
In short form, Mile Davis’s second great quintet is the reason I stopped playing trumpet. As with most situations, the long form is a bit more nuanced. With enormous efficiency, the concept of “being a great player requires that you be a great listener” hit me like never before. I realized that I had a lot more music to listen to before I could even imagine playing that way. The sensation of being overwhelmed by music had happened for the first time in my life. It would happen again, perhaps a decade or so later, when I made the decision to stop pursuing any career at all in music or entertainment. But at the time, I carried on with my musical ambitions, channeled through guitar and when the opportunity presented itself, piano.
davidarex.org 