(hard to put a title to)

When I was in college and sometimes felt homesick, I’d turn on the tv and watch a football game. I’d do that by myself, and I’d usually do something else in the meantime, not having the attention span for entire games most of the time. But I liked having the sound of the commentators and the crowd in the background; it reminded me of home, of being with my dad and my brother on a Saturday afternoon back when we all lived in the same house.

Even by the time I started college, it had been a number of years since that was the case, as my brother went to college a year after my parents separated, leaving my mom and me to inhabit a house much too big for us, even if you counted the dog and handful of cats who dotted sofas and armchairs on both floors. More than half my life has passed now since I last lived with those two, so I cherish my visits with them a few times a year. And I cherish the little ways you can keep people with you, like through the silly sounds of football or the particular notes played in the jazz concert I went to over the weekend.

My dad only listens to jazz, no other genre of music being accepted into his CD player or onto the stand of his piano. Jazz has always been another sort of background sound of memories for me, as I learned to love it as one way of building a new kind of bond between us—something to have in common, to enjoy together even from afar. Before I could drive, my dad would pick me up on Wednesday nights and on Sundays, and we’d wind back to his house on the other side of the city in his old Toyota or the Honda he eventually bought from his new wife. When he turned 50, he purchased the first new car of his life—a low-lying, curve-hugging sports car that he still loves to speed carefully around the winding turns of Atlanta roads. We’d cruise through the streets, dark with shade under the tall boughs of the enormous trees that fill the neighborhoods there, and we’d listen to Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Thelonius Monk, and many, many others.

Sitting in the Masonic Center auditorium on Saturday night, listening to Jarrett and his trio play some of those same tunes I’ve listened to in my dad’s car for years, I was aware of my friends seated on either side of me, but more so, I could feel the cool blowing of the air conditioner in the car and the low bucket seat pushing my knees up higher than my hips; could hear the gentle humming of the tune under his breath by my dad; could see the passing of woods, houses, and lawns as we took the music with us, took it into us, made a place for it where it could be ours together, no matter how much time or space passed between us. It was great to hear the songs of Keith Jarrett’s Blue Note album played live on Saturday, to see the man rising from the piano bench, shaking his rear a little as he cavorted all over the keyboard; but I found it didn’t compare to hearing it with my dad on a car stereo, turned low so as not to blow out the speakers; to tooling along on our way somewhere, not caring where we’re headed because the point is not the starting point or the ending, it’s simply having the time together.