A Guest Post by Amie McGraham

Unpacking memories of her father to jazz by Lionel Hampton

Hey folks,

Today’s guest is Amie McGraham, a long-time reader and subscriber of What’s Curation? She’s often in the comment section, painting a lovely picture of how the day's song sounded to her.

Amie McGraham.

Amie grew up on an island in Maine where she summers as curator of family ghosts and memories. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including Brevity, Multiplicity, Maine Magazine, and Wild Roof Journal. Her story "Your Roots Are Showing" was chosen as the winner of the 2022 Intrepid Times “Wrong Turns” travel writing competition.

She also produces a weekly 100-word newsletter, the micro mashup.

Over to you, Amie!

---

Blue Notes

Sunday afternoon, Late June. Sky so blue it hurts. The breeze, a salty shallow breath.

On the floor, boxes of my late father’s belongings. Rolls of postage stamps and paperclips, a pair of post-cataract surgery sunglasses, tattered clippings from the Sunday Times. And a jazz CD.

First of all, I don’t think my father even had a CD player. Like, ever. And (b), who, exactly, is Lionel Hampton? Also: my father? Listened to jazz?

I load the CD, “Mostly Blues,” in the old boom box from the attic. It feels more jazzy than bluesy and so, I am happy for this reminder that summer afternoons can be carefree. Ice cubes clattering in an antique bubble glass, piano notes drifting out the windows of my island farmhouse.

This CD. An unexpected delight in the wake of grief. Both parents gone now, and me—an only child—the last of a legacy, ghosted by generations of a family of writers and artists. Ghosted by Lionel Hampton and his buoyant drums and vibraphone.

Forever, music has been part of me. When I was young, my parents played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the turntable and I played Chopin on the piano. Later, vinyl 45’s of ABBA and Elton John on my portable record player, the one with the goofy denim design my mother ordered from the Sears catalog for my tenth birthday. In my teens, Thin Lizzy and Led Zeppelin blared from the eight-track player in the beat-up Saab I drove to high school—in a tiny Maine town almost as far east as you can go before you meet Canada.

When I moved to the opposite coast ten years later, I discovered freeways, LA drive-time radio and KROQ, the new wave station that introduced bands like The Ramones, Offspring, and Gene Loves Jezebel. I also discovered the Grateful Dead, stockpiling dozens of bootleg cassettes in old shoeboxes. In my thirties, I downloaded hip-hop, rap and trance to my purple iPod Nano.

But my knowledge of jazz music is pretty basic. Wynton Marsalis, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis—I know the names but can’t match the music to the artist. I know enough about jazz to know I enjoy it. But what I didn’t know: my father listened to jazz.

III.

He was a quirky man, my father. Oceanographer, ecologist, old house renovator. He called himself a collector, his bookshelves once housing more than 4,000 volumes on sailing, Arctic exploration, cars. He stashed grocery bags in the cellar, filled with clipped obituaries of people he did not know. He insisted, energetically, on keeping all his VHS tapes long after the VCR quit. In the end, his life was reduced to only as many boxes as I could fit in the back of my old Volvo wagon as I moved him from his island cottage to an assisted living apartment.

All summer, Lionel Hampton ran in an endless loop on the boom box, replaying all the memories. Of my father. Of my family. Of our lives. And, like so many of my unanswered questions, the story of the Lionel Hampton CD remains forever untold.