Love Notes

Magnify

Dear John,

We have more in common than you might expect. You and I grew up in the same small town, a North Carolina furniture and hosiery mill town, where my grandfather, a doctor, tended the sick, and yours, a preacher, tended souls. It’s possible that my granddad—the town’s only surgeon at the time—operated on your kin. And it’s possible that your mother and aunt, who worked at the country club where I would spend summers playing tennis, waited on my grandparents, maybe even my father as a boy, when they came for Sunday lunch. Years later I would have my rehearsal dinner in this same country club. I knew of you by then, but not about our hometown connection, and I didn’t fall for you until years later, after I was married and you had long since gone.

You needn’t worry, this isn’t a typical “Dear John” letter. It’s a love letter from a secret admirer. A thank you note from a neighbor you never knew, a girl who walked the same downtown sidewalks you once walked, and now, on return trips back home, jogs down them grooving to your tunes.

You see John, over time our connection has grown deeper. I knew you by name but didn’t know anything substantial about you until college, when I took “Intro to Jazz” my senior year, mostly because my boyfriend at the time was taking it, and it was supposedly an easy “A.” Easy, maybe, if you had a musical ear, but not for me, a tone-deaf gal whose harmonic expertise maxed out at John Denver and Sonny and Cher.

Our professor was Paul Jeffrey, a heavy-weight saxophonist who once played with Thelonious Monk and other monumental “cats.” Jeffrey’s gig now was teaching over-privileged college kids, most of us white, the finer points of improvisation and how black guys jamming at Birdland and the Village Vanguard changed the musical landscape forever. Cats like you, Coltrane, a preacher’s kid from High Point, who’d head to Philly after high school and go on to become a revolutionary jazz legend.