This is an ongoing musical memoir. If you are just wandering onto this page and didn’t see the first four chapters of “Blues, Preludes & Feuds,” please read those first:
Prelude
4’33”..
…of SilencePart 1:
Chapter 1: Middle C is Not
Chapter 2: Prepare to Wing It
Chapter 3: Drugstore at the End of the World
Chapter 4: The Myth of the Electric Organ
Chapter 5: Pax Chicagoa
Chapter 6: Terrorist Recess
Chatper 7: Asymmetrical Warfare
As the third child, there was no pressing need to have all my shit together. That was the job of my older siblings. I could—and did—take my time. I was watching and waiting.
Amy
The least athletic of the four of us, but probably the fiercest. As with many firstborns—you didn’t want to cross her.
Though she might beg to differ, Amy, as the standard-bearer, seemed to have it all together. In fact, she went through her own ordeals, including a painful end to her first marriage that I witnessed close up. It wasn’t that she actually had it all together, but that she went about life in a way that made it look that way—at least from the vantage point of a hyper-emotional sibling, three years her junior.
The point is, she transitioned from high school to college to career (journalism) to marriage to divorce to happy marriage and kids to more career—all without much visible downtime
. Seemingly conventional, but I doubt it felt that way from the inside. She, like all of my siblings, is smart and deeply incisive about the world.
David
The quiet, reflective one—until you got him started. Then you’d have to fight to get a word in edgewise. He feared having his picture taken.
David only had it somewhat together. The shit-togetherness gene in our family mutated and increasingly lost its structure like a frayed hand-me-down as it passed from one sibling to the next. But David still had a usable garment. He would wear it reluctantly as a kid, but eventually, lacking a truly artistic personality, had no choice but to put it on—even if it never quite fit. Until then, when he too settled into a career (low-income housing development) and life with a wife and two kids, he would try out all sorts of craziness. One time in his early 20s, he hitchhiked with a few friends through Sudan and was nearly killed when the truck they were riding in veered off a bridge into a wadi. Perhaps the only way he could justify living a fairly normal life later on was to occasionally do something nuts in his formative years.
I, on the other hand, didn’t need to do anything that outwardly crazy because I knew I was destined to not live a normal life. Or, put another way, what was going on internally was crazy enough to obviate the need for exterior thrills. I would eventually vie for a degree of outward stability to counteract the inner turmoil. As far as I know, that’s the only way to make the kind of art I make. In any case, the shit-togetherness garment David handed down to me had become a tattered rag. I would flail about for years, trying in vain to make it stay on. It didn’t.
Jane
She could be overly dramatic—even hyperbolic in her enthusiasms. A lover of many things. I’d question her taste, though never in regards to her own creative work. Besides, she always loved my music and cared about it more than anyone else in the family—so what if she can occasionally be overenthusiastic?
I handed my younger sister a garment in pieces, and she became a quilter. Literally, at one point, Jane constructed beautiful quilted blankets and wall hangings. But Maker of Quilts may be the apt metaphor for her life and career as a whole because she’s seemingly been on a journey of putting something together out of many disparate parts. Some may see her moving from one career path to another as the sign of a lack of focus. I couldn’t possibly make that judgment, having never walked upon a true career path at all. I suspect that Jane would say that all of her varied paths are connected as a part of a patchwork quilt.
Of course, siblings are always in competition for their parents’ approval. That is, until they’re not. I would hope that we’re at that point now. But there’s no doubt that our personalities have been shaped by those of our parents and our inner desire to please one more than the other. We take on various parental traits that match our own needs. Or we simply take what’s available. There was no way I was going to compete with Amy at her game, so I played another.
Dad
Fiercely practical and dedicated to the well-being of his wife and children. Always worried about my career choice, but counterbalanced that with a dry, weary wit. “There’s no way I’m going to remember that. In order to remember that, I’d have to remove something else from my mind to make room for it.”
My dad, Paul Wesley Saltzman, grew up poor in Omaha. He devoted himself to getting the hell out of there as expeditiously as possible—both from home (an unhappy father who died young from cigarettes and heart failure) and from Omaha itself, which he considered dead-end boring. His path to escape involved going to medical school at the University of Nebraska, then heading to Chicago for his internship at Michael Reese Hospital. He would meet my mom in Chicago, though the families knew each other in Omaha.
After an eighteen-month residency in London—my mom, older siblings, and I were there with him—he settled into a long and successful career as a cardiologist on the North Side of Chicago. Eventually, he would move into a more administrative role at a local union medical center, then pretty much retire.
But he never completely retired. Until recently, he was doing a side gig, reading electrocardiograms for the union once a week—a little pocket money. Even today, at 85 with a healthy financial portfolio built on family investments, he teaches upcoming doctors about bedside manner. Maybe it’s just to keep active (he still plays tennis), but I suspect a part of it is that once you escape Omaha, you’re always escaping Omaha. All of his kids inherited his fear of Omaha.
Mom
So intent on quickly getting to wherever she was going—you’d think she didn’t notice the details. But she did. And she was always leading the way.
My mom, Bettylu Saltzman (née Klutznick) was also born in Omaha and would no doubt have had the same yearning to escape, if it weren’t for the peripatetic nature of her father’s work, which meant she was almost always leaving anyway. Omaha, Washington, Chicago, Omaha, Washington, Chicago, New York, Washington, Chicago, Washington, Chicago. Or something like that. I’m not even sure she knows. She ended up in Chicago, ensconcing herself in the local political life as an organizer and fundraiser for liberal Democrats. Starting out by helping an independent alderman in his challenge of the Chicago Machine, she would build outward to local, state, and national politics. Her work would culminate in playing a key role in the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008. I suspect all that moving about in her childhood, the lack of a permanent residence and friendships, made my mother strive for a connection outside of herself. Politics, which she clearly inherited from her father, was the way.
So while my dad was motivated by the practical need to make a good living, my mom was motivated by idealism. I’d like to say that I inherited each of my parents’ dominant traits in equal measure, but that would be a lie. I definitely lean toward my mom’s idealism when it comes to career, or lack thereof. I got my sense of humor, including my ability to laugh at my own idealism, from my dad.
* * *
I was neither follower nor leader. When I was young, I just went along, observing, biding my time, waiting to see who I was going to be—a voyeur of my own life. At times, miserable. At times, just fine.
But I was at least mildly troubled, somewhat introverted, and hypersensitive to loud noises. I suffered chronic headaches and stiff necks that had to be checked by pediatricians and child psychologists, to no avail. I wet my bed until I was eleven, had tantrums, and would cry at the drop of a hat if something, for whatever reason, bothered me. I was, in short, kind of a mess—but not irredeemably so.
I was basically just throwing stuff up against the wall, seeing what would stick. It’s not that I was weak, but that I was entirely undecided. I was undecided because there was a key element missing. Music. Without it, I couldn’t make an informed decision.
Music—more importantly, the kind I needed—was a reality entirely outside of my family and circle of friends. Without it, there wasn’t much for me to do but watch and wait.
Next Chapter: 9. Park On the Other Side