On the very hot summer nights I lay in the dark on the cot in my caretaker’s shack with my head on the pillow, ear phones set just right, CD going in my walkman and, for a little while at least it’s like the old days.

Not my old days, of course, the very old days before even I, ancient relic that the camper kids shy away from, before even I was born. Mainly I listen to the real old music, the dance bands, the root jazz of the thirties and forties, and in the darkness I quietly envision myself on the stand with those guys, the ones I only met once or twice if at all before they went on to that big jam session in the sky. I listen to the Goodman Carnegie Hall Concert of 1938. I listen to it over and over again on these steamy nights and sometimes I hold the mouthpiece against my chest and it’s me and Ziggy Ellman and Harry James. Me and the greats up there wailing away, the guys whose records I wore out as a thirteen year old, when the world was vinyl.

There isn’t a note of those twenty-three songs that I haven’t heard a million times and ridden to the ends of the universe and back again. The music starts to fade. Beautiful, sexy Margaret Tilton does her beautiful vocal in the opening of Bei Mir Bist du Schon, the last note lingering, a collective sigh from the audience and a pedaled base-drum lead-in by Gene Kruper. The sigh still lingering when Ellman’s Klezmer rip tears through the old concert hall with it’s quirky, slightly less than sane jubilation and audience explodes in applause as Tilton comes back in to wrap things up with a last vocal refrain.

We also recorded that once, me and my second wife, the folk singer I tried to turn into Margaret Tilton or Helen Forest or some other kind of singer that she wasn’t. The pure, beautiful young thing I turned into a pill popping drunk, like myself. The album, Tribute, was my only financial dud. And the only one I ever liked. Oh, you should have heard me on that thing, doing Ziggy’s rip to perfection and those fast runs Harry James was so great at. I was Charlie Shavers with his bell toned perfect sound and Bunny Berrigan too, with his poetical soft solos. I was all the old timers, all the guys who were already long buried and forgotten when that album came out, all the greats who were remembered by only one, perhaps, and he was trying to sell it to an unwilling public.

The music fades, to good to last, and makes it last stand with that long, long performance of Sing-Sing-Sing, Christopher Columbus. Yes, we had that one on the disc too. My musician friends loved it, one fan had this to say about it, “Man, you gotta leave that dead stuff dead.”

So, I died.

Like my first wife, the socialite, the socialite I played the piano for. The one who sat to my left on the bench, out near the edge so I’d have plenty of room for moving around the keyboard. The rich girl with her socialite friends and exclusive dinner parties where I’d forget the trumpet and instead would play Chopin for her.

It started as a joke. The hired pianist took a break and me, only a little high, going over to the piano to jam a little. She followed, that petite Helen girl I hardly knew at the time, and in a mischievous voice she said, “So maestro, I suppose it will be, what? A jazz number of some sort?”

“It’s up to you, lady.”

“Some take off on Chopin would be fine with me.”

I nodded, “The lady wants imitation Chopin, the lady will get--” I gave her his Opus 24 Mazurkas and when I was finished she sat beside me for the first time and asked if I knew any of his waltzes. I did, of course, and I played a few and week later we were married.

It was the happiest year of my life. I loved her, and loved all the other women too and a month after our first anniversary she went to bed with a bottle of pills and never woke up. Seems I have that effect on the ones who get close to me.

But I don’t need to worry about that these days, nobody to get close to out here but the various crawly things and tree huggers and a bunch of spoiled brat rich kids. So I lie here alone at night listening to Teddy Wilson on the piano and Lionel Hampton on the vibes, Gene Krupa doing more with a drum set than anyone before or since, Benny playing a clarinet better than anyone ever had a right to play one, and my childhood idols leading that incredible trumpet section.

Safe and thirsty, not a bottle of whiskey for miles, not even a can of cheap beer. The guy who runs the place assured me it was that way, and maybe when the last kid goes home and I start preparing the place for winter I won’t feel that hot thirst anymore, not ever.

Just kids, none of them with a clue about who I am, just the old guy who does the maintenance work. Except that one boy knows something now. They were all supposed to be off playing softball so I took a minute and sat at the old out of tune piano and only meant to limber my fingers a bit. Except it never happens that way. You can’t just touch something you’ve loved your entire life and walk away from it. No, I sat and played and played and closed my eyes and had Helen sitting at the left edge of the bench as I played one Chopin mazurka after another for her and, when I opened my eyes she was across the piano from me with a smile on her face. I’d finally died for real and now I was in heaven. Not that I had much right to end up there.

But I hadn’t died, of course. I was still breathing, still at that inferno of a summer camp in Florida playing Chopin the best I was able on an old standup piano. And that boy was the one smiling at me.

He didn’t say anything. Not at first anyway. My own smile vanished in a near rage. He wasn’t supposed to be there, none of them were supposed to be, they were supposed to be off at the ball field and then the swimming pool and, unless they had better hearing than most dogs, unable to catch any of my little wildlife concert.

His face turned to a frown when he saw that he’d angered me, no fault of his own, but he had no way of knowing that. And me, I’m not so inhuman yet that a frowning twelve year old can’t get to me. So I got up and did my best to rush off to my tool shed for a pair of work gloves.

“Who are you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Honest, mister, who the hell are you?”

He plays the trumpet, that kid. I listen to him practicing while the others are out on the canoes and he isn’t too bad for a seventh grader. Hell, truth be known, he’s pretty good. I enjoy hearing him learning on all the same old intermediate pieces I played so long ago, except he hasn’t got Ziggy Ellman or Harry James in him. He’s never heard of them, I’m sure. He hasn’t got Louis Armstrong or Al Hirt or Miles Davis or Kootie Williams either. No Clark Terry or Winton Marselles, at least not yet, but if he keeps working at it, who knows? So I do my quiet work while he’s alone in the music shed practicing. Every once in while he hits a clunker, like he did yesterday in The Toreador Song from Carmen. I remember playing that, once, a million lives ago, and everything in me wants to go over and show him how to play those things so he’ll be able to hit the hard passages fresh and with filled lungs instead of tired and half out of breath. Except, I can’t, of course. That part of me is dead and, as the man said, better to leave the dead in their graves.

I think about that sad faced boy and his many fine passages and occasional bad ones that he’ll take years to work his way through on his own and I wonder if perhaps tomorrow I’ll offer a tip or two. Yes, maybe.

My eyes grow heavy as Martha Tilton sings Loch Lomond, as Scottish in this one as she is German in the eighteenth song, Bei Mir Bist du Schon. The band follows the vocal with the sixteenth selection of that long ago concert, a minor instrumental masterpiece called Blue Room.

The next day comes and the boy, his name is Bradley, can’t do a thing right. He’s trying a new piece now, Leroy Anderson’s Bugler’s Holiday, easy in it’s quartet, trio and duet arrangements, but a bit rough as a solo, which is what he’s attempting. I watch as he becomes frustrated and drops the trumpet on a chairs cushion.

“You’re phrasing is wrong, that’s all, Bradley. If you time your breaths a little differently and learn how to double tongue those eighth notes--”

His right arm goes up in a frustrated bratty gesture, “Oh, yeah, the great pianist clean up man janitor. I suppose you’re some great trumpet player too.” He points at the instrument, “Go ahead, be my guest Mr. Know-it-all fix-it-up bozo.”

Sure I ought to be angry. Especially when he points to it again and says, “Go ahead, I don’t even mind if you spit all over my mouthpiece!”

“I won’t,” I say, unable to resist.

“Damn right you won’t!”

And I can see it’s because he thinks he’s called my bluff. But he hasn’t, of course. I take my own mouthpiece slowly from my pocket. “I’ve got my own, Bradley. Looks like yours is a five C and I’ve always preferred a seven.”

His face breaks into an unwilling grin as I change them and bring the trumpet to my lips. It’s a pretty good instrument, a Khan, and I’ve got no intention of playing that piece he’s been stumbling at. No, instead I close my eyes and whatever happens, happens.

The year an a half of inactivity only show for a moment, and at that only to me, I’m sure he doesn’t realize I hit the first five or six notes of my fantasy adlib sloppily because the next note is high C# above the staff and out of nowhere it’s the long dead Ziggy Ellman’s Klezmer riff with a long and sassy Harry James treatment to follow and after that, God Knows, I don’t remember exactly, except that I never played better and probably never played longer at a single stretch. And when it ends they’re all around me, all those kids who aren’t supposed to know I have a name other than Joe the maintenance guy.

They applaud. I remove my mouthpiece with a gentle twist and tip my cap as I put the trumpet down on the cushion I took it from.

The kids want more but that would be wrong, somehow, and I thank them and say I can’t, that I’ve got a lot of work to do and the counselors are saying they’ll pitch in and help and it ends with me playing the piano for them, half concert and half sing-along till the bell rings for them to have dinner.

I pack my things that night and try to decide where I’ll go next, what I’ll do next, after leaving this world of young kids.

“You aren’t leaving, are you?”

It’s Bradley, standing at the door of my shack, a good detour from the camper’s cabins.

“Afraid so, kid.”

“But – why?”

I have no answer.

“Look, if it’s that stuff I said, I didn’t mean any of it, okay? I’m sorry, okay?”

I sit on my cot a moment and he comes over and I reach out and hold him by the shoulders. If I’d had a son, perhaps he’d have been Bradley.

“You’re a real good player, Bradley. Your big problem is your temper and your impatience.”

“You can’t leave!”

I reach into my satchel, the only luggage I need these days, and hand him the mouthpiece.

“Take good care of it, Bradley. It’s seen a lot more than it should have. Perhaps it will bring you luck, maybe that’s how it goes, bad luck for one owner and good luck for the next; anyway, unless someone melts it down it’s bound to have plenty more owners before it’s through. You might want to use it when you get a little bigger.”

He looks straight into my face, the database of his young mind running through old photographs he’s seen on passing CD covers, or perhaps in a book. I believe he’s the sort of young kid who might even read about these things. And when he’s through his mouth drops open, he’s got the same look I must have had when I finally met my boyhood heroes, old and sick and not long to live.

“I know who you are. You’re--!”

I put a finger to his lips, “It’s who I was, Bradley. Some people exist in the past tense. Anyway, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say that name. He left me with too many bad memories and too many sins to answer for.”

He swallows, “Come on, don’t go, please? You can be teaching me stuff.”

I think about it a moment, about all the things he’s doing wrong that would be so easy to correct now, while he’s still young and armed with nothing more than talent, and dreams.

His mouth forms into a smile, “You’ll stay?”

I shrug, "I really can't. I have to get going and--"

His eyes get teary and I have to turn away.

"Yeah, sure, you have to go all of a sudden. You're just like my dad and all the other phonies."

He hands the mouthpiece back to me, shoves it actually, and as he turns to leave I catch him with my free hand.

"Wait a minute, I'm not like any other phony on earth so don't you start pinning that one on me. Besides, I have a lot more work to do around this dive before I leave it for the next schlep."

The boy breaks into a grin, "You're staying?"

"It's still a free country, isn't it?"

“That is so cool -- Awsome!” He wishes me goodnight and races off before the cabin lights start going off.

I unpack my satchel. Tomorrow I’ll have him listen to those twenty-three magic songs while the other kids are at the lake. When the summer ends, a day or two before he goes for home, when I really do leave, I'll place the discs by his pillow along with the mouthpiece and little note. He’ll be sleeping and by then we'll be part of each other's lives. I didn't want it that way but perhaps it's for the best. A part of me will die, again, but we get used to that after a while.

Twenty-three treasures and a brass mouthpiece with a million more perfect notes left in it. Maybe they’ll bring this son I should have had some good luck, perhaps even a bit of the happiness that left me all those yesterdays ago.