Chrissy Upstate

“Pops” Goes The Trumpet

This album.

“Pops” Goes The Trumpet, by Al Hirt and The Boston Pops Orchestra under the direction of Arthur Fiedler. Originally released in 1964. The one album Dad never found on CD.

It is among my earliest and most treasured memories of music, because it helped to teach me a deep appreciation for musicians able to play their instruments at the virtuoso level. Listening to this record was truly a treat for me.

Dad abandoned the old turntable in 1986 when he bought the family’s first CD player. Thus, the search for “Pops” Goes The Trumpet on CD began.

He searched every record store, pretty much everywhere he went. When the Internet was born, I took the search global in an attempt to score the best birthday present ever. But a CD copy couldn't be found. My cousin Mark had this machine that could convert records to cassettes, so he gave Dad a copy. It was nice, but not quite the same.

About six months ago, I finally subscribed to Spotify​. And today, look what I found. “Pops” Goes The Trumpet.

I can listen to this album, this musical staple of my childhood—along with Al Hirt’s ENTIRE catalog—anywhere I want, for 10 bucks a month. Super Jazz 1. Al Hirt Live at Carnegie Hall. Cotton Candy. Our Man In New Orleans. It’s all there. For 10 bucks a month.

Sunday Dinner Stories: Part 2

Colorful abodes are playfully scattered like a child's building blocks on the hills that swell over a cobalt sea. The lights of a modern age shine on the water, casting the shadows of structures from bygone eras on the vibrating tide.

Somewhere in those hills, tangled inside the windows and winding streets, or perhaps in the rolling fields just beyond—lay the places where my family first lived. 

Someday, I'd like to see Naples and Calabria for myself. But for now, I have nothing but these pictures. 

The images make these places feel like dreams—the actual greener grass we always talk about finding after years of toil, where we go to live out our final days, full and tipsy and happy. 

That's why it's hard to understand why these are the places my great-grandparents so desperately wanted to escape. 

As my father's family story goes, my great-grandparents left these places for America, specifically New York City. And like most of my father's family stories, there was some drama along the way. 

"Your great grandmother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner," my father would say. "Your great grandfather, on the other hand, was a gardener who tended the grounds on her family's estate."

The two fell in love, but my great grandmother's family forbade them to marry, believing she should marry a man of higher societal stature with enough financial means to take care of her and the family she would give him.

Desperate to be together, the two of them got on a boat and ran away to America, where they settled in New York and married.

I honestly don't know if the story is completely true. Honestly, I don't care. 

It was the first story to teach me that home isn't the room where you sleep, or the table where you eat, or the backyard where you play. Home is the people you love the most. 

Naples and Calabria were the places on earth my great-grandparents knew best, but had they stayed among the kaleidoscope of buildings and waves of grass and sea, the colors would have faded. There would have been no beauty or purpose living in surroundings they couldn't share with one another. 

Music You Need In Your Life: Chapter 1

“Hey Hey What Can I Do” by Led Zeppelin

You might disagree with me on this, but, you know, I’m your mother, so I don’t care. Led Zeppelin was pretty much the best rock and roll band to ever exist. Ever. That includes bands that might exist now that I don’t even know about.  

And while the list of my favorites from this band is long, this song tops it. The band strips down a bit for it, sticking with acoustic guitar (and “stripping down” is quite appropriate, considering the song is about a whore), and as usual, Robert Plant slays the vocals. 

Every Sunday after mass, my grandparents came for dinner. After the meal I'd help the women wash dishes, while secretly wishing I could be with my father and grandfather as they watched sports.

My mother, grandmother and Aunt Annie washed and dried, while my grandma Margiotta (dad's mom) sat at the kitchen table cleaning silverware, placing each polished utensil in the long wooden box my mother always kept in the bottom drawer of her china cabinet. 

Grandma Cavaliere turned for a split second and...CRASH. One of mom's serving plates fell into a million pieces on the floor.

Aunt Annie seized her opportunity.

"Helen! Why can't you watch what you're doing?? Clean up this mess!" she barked. "What a clumsy fool you are!"

Everyone scrambled to help grandma clean, except for Aunt Annie, of course. Grandma Margiotta continued to calmly clean silverware. Aunt Annie approached her. A poor decision on her part.

"What an idiot! Can you believe her?? " Aunt Annie said to Grandma Margiotta.

Grandma calmly looked up.

"See that broom over there?" she asked, pointing the steak knife in her hand toward the far wall.

"Yes!" Aunt Annie snapped.

"If this were my house, and you talked to me that way, I'd take that broom and shove it five feet up your ass." 

Aunt Annie just walked away, stammering.

Grandma Margiotta went back to cleaning the silverware.

2003

Stories about spaghetti dinner fundraisers are supposed to be uplifting and sweet.

Then again, he was supposed to be like any other little boy.

This was supposed to be a story about a dinner, being held in town for a boy who was supposed to be on his way back to running and jumping and launching himself off ledges and breaking bones. He was supposed to be getting dirty and making up secret handshakes and smiling.

Instead, this was a story about a spaghetti dinner being held for a boy who lay trapped inside a contorted human shell, propped in a special wheelchair, offering the outside world not much more than a hollow stare. There would be no recovery. Only death.

I would have never known this if I had decided to just call instead of visit.

A Christmas tree stood in the living room, decorated with red, purple and pink lights and hearts for Valentine's Day. He liked the lights, his mother explained. So, she left the Christmas tree up all year, changing the decorations for every major holiday. I felt guilty for wondering how she could tell he liked the lights. He wasn't even looking at them.

As I studied the perfect cuts of the paper hearts, she started to tell me about the first time her boy stopped breathing.

She was driving through town. Her older daughter was in the back seat with him. She stopped her car in the middle of traffic and, with her daughter's help, began performing mouth-to-mouth, right there in the back seat of the car, as people sped around and honked their horns. She successfully resuscitated him, got back into the driver's seat, and continued on her way.

By the time I'd met her, she was routinely resuscitating him at least once or twice each week.

She applauded every twitch, every scant eye movement.  She praised her older daughter who, despite her young age, seemed to fully understand she had to take a back seat to her brother's needs, and always did so without complaint.

This little girl spent much of her time praying to God to keep her brother alive, and the prayers seemed to be working: He'd already faced death once that week, but made it through. It was a miracle he was still here.

Her husband loved their boy, but didn't know how to cope. He buried himself in work and left his wife to handle much of their son's home care. Looking at the dark circles under her eyes and her gaunt face, I guessed she didn't have much fight in her to protest.

The death scares were routine. She recalled them as if she were reciting a shopping list. She never knew which breath would be his last. But she did know that behind those vacant eyes was her little boy, that little boy that was supposed to be like any other.

I asked her how she managed to stay sane. She told me she'd ran out of tears to cry a long time ago. She'd decided not to waste the time with tears when it could be spent with her son. After all, she never knew how long it would be until death would inevitably take him. She smiled at him, stroking his frozen face, fixing wild wisps of thin brown hair.

I looked down at my notebook, and realized I hadn't written anything in about 20 minutes.

This was supposed to be a story about a spaghetti dinner to help raise money for a little boy's medical bills. This was supposed be quick and simple and make people feel good.

I looked back up at the mother and simply said, "I'm sorry."

Then, I started crying.

She just smiled. "It's OK," she said. "It's OK."

It was the only time I ever cried during an interview. This was something you just didn't do. At the time, it made me feel unprofessional. Now I know something would have been very, very wrong had I not cried.

2003

If you didn't know the road, one false calculation could swallow you.

All throughout town, people spoke in foreboding tones of its roller-coaster dips and turns, the absent lights and lane markings, the tangled forest hugging every bend. It was dangerous even for the stone-cold sober. Drunks were basically IEDs.

I was just about to leave after a 12-hour day when the report crackled over the scanner:  Motor vehicle accident, two cars, possible entrapment -- on the infamous road. As if she could smell the blood, my editor asked if someone could go down there. I shot up my hand, grabbed my notebook and left.

At about 9:30 p.m, I was first to arrive. I parked at the southern mouth of the street in front of the barricades police had already set up, and proceeded down the road's steep first hill on foot. The cops made me turn around to wait by the barricades for an official statement. This meant one of two things: bad injury, or death. I edged toward the latter.

A reporter from a competing newspaper showed up next. Then, a camera guy from a local TV station. We paced and hovered like circling vultures—not to relish the carnage, but to stalk the official confirmation. This was the job.

It stung to inhale. We chatted mindlessly in the dark. At least it passed the time and generated heat.

By 11 p.m., the other reporter bailed. Only the camera guy and I remained. At around midnight, I convinced him to push his luck and walk with me back down to the scene.

This time, no one stopped us. I found the fire chief, who relayed the official details: Two-car accident. Two men involved. One dead, the other highly intoxicated, sent to the hospital with minor injuries.

While he spoke, a mangled red car smoked in my periphery, a white sheet draped over a concave hole where the car roof used to be.

To this day, I don't know if the body had been removed at that point or not. I'd like to assume it had. Still, I'd never been that close to fresh death before. The death I recognized was enbalmed, sewn shut, dressed, dabbed with makeup and positioned properly. This time, nothing but thin, white tarp, thrown like dirty laundry, separated me from the remains of a newly snatched soul. Its wrinkled surface became a blank movie screen and my imagination the camera, playing one dismembered horror after another.

I thanked the fire chief, then left hurriedly, calling my editor on the way back to the car. As I drove off, my stomach churned. I crossed myself and said a prayer.

******

The next morning, I arrived at work dreading the next step.

I confirmed the name of the deceased with the police, then scanned the phone book, found the number and, swallowing hard, called the family.

A man answered. I told him I was sorry for his loss, and that I understood if he didn't want to talk to me, but I called because I wanted this man to be remembered as a bit more than just another victim of alcohol abuse.

Then, the floodgates opened. This didn't happen to often. But when it did, you knew to just listen.

I learned the deceased was a kind and generous man who just recently asked the love of his life to marry him. She'd happily said yes. His fiance had a teenaged son, with whom he'd forged a special bond. Before the accident, he'd been playing cards with the son at his fiance's house. Toward the end of their evening, he told the son out of the blue that if he were to die, he'd die happy, without regrets, because he now had everything he'd ever wanted in life.

A half hour later, death took him on the road home.

"Where is the son now?" I asked.

"I am the son," said the man. "I can't tell you how broken we are by this."

His voice carried so heavily, I would have never guessed it came from the mouth of a teenager.

I wondered if his youth might have been more recognizable the day before.

I thanked the son for his time, and wrote the follow-up story.

The next day, just like every work day, I stood in front of the reception desk at the police station with my colleagues from competing newspapers, waiting for the blotter. Another reporter with a good 15 years experience on me said, "Great story yesterday on that drunk driving death."

Sometimes the world makes people feel like what they have isn't enough. Sometimes it's absolutely true, sometimes not. We get a lot of mixed messages about what love means, what marriage is, what romance should look like. There's this pressure to tell a good story, to create a dramatic narrative.

When I met my husband, I immediately felt as if I'd known him my entire life, as if I were coming home. I learned from him that love—the right love—just happens, and that it is a conscious choice to work at letting it stay—by putting each other first, by never trying to change each other as you experience what life brings you. That's it. No flowers, jewelry, romantic vacations, passionate conflict or cinematic heroism needed.

That might not be the makings of a particularly dramatic story, but it's OUR story. And there's so much beauty and freedom in having a love story where it doesn't matter who reads it, who likes it, or who recommends it to others. It's the favorite novel I carry everywhere with me, that I will studiously read over and over, finding more wonderful hidden meanings every time I do. Because, as I've always found, the best stories are told from the heart.

I've resolved to change that. 

For the longest time I've wanted to get back to blogging, but I've been putting it off. Probably because this time, it's not to make money, or forward my professional career, or show that I might know something valuable about a particular topic...it's simply to quiet an insatiable need to write. 

I go back and forth about whether I'm a good writer or not. It's a constant inner struggle. But struggle or not, all I know is this: if an inexplicable force frequently arrives, quiet and unannounced, at a door inside your mind only you know about—and speaks words that compel you to immediately drop everything you're doing, no matter what you're doing, and write them down for fear you'll lose them forever—well, then, I'd say that means you're a goddamned writer. 

And who am I to deny that, or demean it because I'm afraid it isn't productive, or doesn't serve anyone, or just...sucks? Let the adjective before the noun change as many times as it damn well pleases—just so long as that noun is "writer." That’s what really matters to me. 

If one of my children told me all of this, I'd say, what the hell are you waiting for? Who really cares if it sucks? Just start writing!