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Epilogue Memoria PHANTOM PAIN. My interest in this topic began as a dissertation for a doctoral program, while my fascination with performances of all types has a much longer history. My father served twenty-six years in the U.S. Army, retiring in the early 1970s as a staff sergeant. His tours of duty included the Korean and Vietnam wars, with training that took him to Guam, Hawai‘i, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, and West Germany. His health was never an issue until he retired. He found work years later operating a forklift on an Army base in Central California. One afternoon he drove the machine down a steep grade, lost control, and jumped from the cab before it crashed at the bottom of a ramp. The truck’s fork slammed into him, requiring his left arm to be amputated at the shoulder. On the day my mother came with the news about the surgery my dad would need, I asked her whether he could grow the arm back like a starfish . Every month my brother, mother, and I caught an olive-drab bus that headed north from the Monterey Peninsula to San Francisco’s Letterman Army Medical Center, where he spent his initial recovery. After six months, he returned home. For years, he would tell us how he could still feel pain “there,” not just at the shoulder but also along the length of the amputated arm, down to his wrist. He recalled sensations of the removed limb slowly lifting and lowering as if it were still a part of him, still connected, still in pain. Epilogue • 149 MUSCLE MEMORY. My parents poured their love of music into my brother and me. Some of their vinyl LPs—Tyrone Washington’s Natural Essence, Ed Thigpen’s Out of the Storm, a Ramsey Lewis special “goes Latin” session—have become a treasured part of my collection. They would tell me of mambo’s heyday in the 1950s, when they visited Tokyo’s clubs where patrons danced in kimonos and tuxedoes. And yet just a few years before California’s Proposition 13 made it nearly impossible to continue the funding of music education in public schools, I was lucky to get started on free classes.1 I showed my parents a sheet from school that listed band instruments that I could take home. I received training twice a week from Owen Dunsford, my first music teacher. Mom circled the word “clarinet” on the page. Every Sunday night, she and my father enjoyed the “champagne style” of the Lawrence Welk orchestra that featured reed players such as Pete Fountain, Peanuts Hucko, and Henry Cuesta. I worked my way through woodwind trios and quartets and eventually became a section leader and eventually played from the first chair in junior high and in honor bands until I graduated from high school. But my passion in music found its expression through the piano. A year after I started on the clarinet, my parents sacrificed a lot to purchase a Wurlitzer upright from Abinante’s Music on Alvarado Street in Monterey. After the six free lessons that came with the purchase ran out, I recall making a visit to the store with my father, where he picked out from a rack some sheet music that I have long since associated with him: “Tenderly” by Jack Lawrence and Walter Gross. I committed it to memory and have rearranged it dozens of times for weddings (Christian and Jewish), receptions , private parties, banquets, a luau, and one Bat Mitzvah. Around this time, I began to take lessons from Heinrich von Bender, an elegant gentleman who taught out of his gorgeous home in an older section of the peninsula. Just about every room, including the narrow hallway, was crowdedwithaspinet.“HerrvonBender,”asheinsistedonbeingaddressed, claimed to be the last student of the last student of Franz Liszt. For the many years I marched in bands with my clarinet I always had to use a lyre music holder clamped to the lower barrel of the instrument. But when I started playing the piano, I rarely needed the sheet music after reading through it once or twice. “Muscle memory,” the maestro barked in his thick, clipped accent. “It’s in your hands, your fingers, your wrists now. The music has a shape, and your body recalls it when it’s time to play.” This came in handy years later when I played with the bassist Farris Smith in the piano trio we formed in San Francisco...

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