A few lines, for posterity’s sake.  I’ve got a quote (like James Brown singing, to many people’s despair, “papa’s got a brand new bag”) for my son, but first of all, an inner image of utmost delight.  PJ gets a phone call, from Helen perhaps, or maybe from his mother, or yet again from his brother.  The content of the message: you father is dead.  Perhaps I am incapable of imagining anything pertinent around this inner prospective image, besides the obvious pleasure and enjoyment I find therein.  How wonderful it would be to be able to haunt this man.  My heart’s desire, really!  First of all, send him into a blue funk of regret and remorse, then surprise him with sudden beyond the grave visits, heralded by short bursts of laughter around things that cannot be mistaken, things that hail back to the happy days of childhood.  Laughing like a devil, like an evil-intentioned devil, over the mere pronunciation of something like “happy days.”  Break out immediately into song, into the corny kind of songs the man by now detests with a passion.  Then to swoop down and begin the work of honest haunting.  O what a delight.  O happy days, not when Jesus rises, but when papa gets going to get under the skin of his undutiful son!  “I know what procures enjoyment for myself” (Philippe Sollers)  It makes no difference at all to “know” that haunting is not possible, and no doubt not even recommendable, or disirable.  I am the man will would possibilize, recommend and desire a serious, decade long ordeal of haunting.  And I would enjoy every minute of it.  That’s because of my makeup.  That’s who I am.  And not only do I have no objections to who I am, I am rather amused, (sometimes bemused) by the person I have become.  and I would wish that that person could lean on PJ, for a determinate length of time.

So here’s the quote, from “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith.  Enjoy, PJ, and watch out that it doesn’t return to snip your ankle when you’re tired one fine day, after a great or not so great concert.  It may be a dog; it may be your dad!

“Uh-huh” said PJ, because there was no point in worrying people unnecessarily.  He made his farewells, pulling on his Michelin Man coat, thumping first sister and then brother hard between their shoulder blades.  He pressed play on his IPod (the earphones of these have never left his ears).  He got lucky.  It was a beautiful song by the fattest man in rap: a 400 pound, Bronx-born, Hispanic genius.  Only twenty-five years old when he died of a coronary, but still very much alive to PJ and millions of kids like he was, at that age.  Out of the coffee shop and down the street PJ bounced to the fat man’s ingenious boasts, similar in their formality to those epic boasts one finds in Milton, say, or in the Iliad.  These comparisons meant nothing at all to PJ.  His body simply loved this song; he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was dancing down the street, the wind at his back making him as fleet of foot as Gene Kelly.  Soon he could see the church steeple ….

It would take hours to wean out what applies and what doesn’t apply to PJ “as a person.”  What matters to me is the astounding effects of music on a human body.  I think I know what PJ would do with that statement.  He’d diss it.  But I would maintain it, because it’s a truth-indicator.  (And an accurate indication of the books to be withheld from the da fe after my death.)  The man will never be able to wiggle out of this one: music, man, music, baby, that and nothing else.