Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 69th post, Helena recalls a jazz concert she attended with her son in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Enjoy!
A changed world
I’d gotten tickets to the Tilles Center. Sonny Rollins was playing. We lived ten miles from C.W. Post. The Tilles Center, on Post’s campus, had become A Place. A Venue. A Spot.
Galen, my son, was in his twenties. He’d found jazz—entered my musical world; something else we now had in common. He was practicing on the pianos at Sam Ash, and at Post’s music department’s studios, at night, using his friend Mike’s student ID.
The guard liked Galen, and who wouldn’t? I’m his mother and I know my son. Sincerity is disarming, and Galen is that. Then there is his playing. Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, all there with Galen’s piano. And Galen told me the guard was a genuinely nice guy. Just once, just the first time Galen showed up, he looked at Mike’s face on the ID card, he looked at Galen, and he smiled. All those pianos sitting in the silence of Long Island’s Route 25A in the middle of the night. I’ve always trusted Galen’s sense of people. He knows when to stay away, and he knows when he can approach. Galen practiced at Post every night, around midnight, musician’s hours, when the music studio was open and empty. The only musician who showed was my son.
Two planes had flown into the Twin Towers. Our cousin, Doug, who worked one floor down from the top was dead. The war in Iraq had just begun. What did it take to know we were lied into it? Eyes. It just took eyes. I saw it in the press, the president, the Powell bullet point presentation—I was heavy with depression, despair. The world was suddenly inside out. I had the misfortune of not being a group thinker. A gift, yes, but one with a heavy toll: isolation. But depression hung over New York, Long Island, the country, the world. Everyone had seen the thing that couldn’t have happened, the images, again and again, the first plane. By the second plane everyone knew the world would never be the same.
A miracle between strangers
I can’t remember what car I drove then—the blue Volkswagen square back? The Nissan? We’d parked in the Tilles Center’s garage. I was driving and the garage was underground, though it was not the city. I was claustrophobic in underground garages, even before the Towers were bombed. But this was Long Island, and I could feel the clear night air, and still had a view of the lights beyond the garage’s entryway.
I pulled into an empty spot. Another car pulled in next to me. I didn’t notice yet that it was a Karmen Ghia, olive green and orange, well-kept, perfect, it looked brand new, beautiful. I opened my door and somehow tipped the Ghia driver’s back door. He erupted out of the driver’s seat. A woman got out of the passenger seat. The guy inspected his car. I liked his face. He looked like Galen’s father, and also like Mark, who had installed my woodstove upstate. Mark looked like Galen’s dad, too. It’s tense to do business with a man upstate—or maybe anywhere. But buying the woodstove from Mark felt like a healing. He had a beautiful heart, and later, I learned our politics matched.
So, though the Ghia guy was furious, his face red and twisted with outrage, I couldn’t help but like him. And thankfully there was nothing, not a scratch. Though a major violation of space, a potential catastrophe, my door had thankfully barely tapped his, and he couldn’t recover. He said things I can’t remember, but his words were scary. The woman with him stood quietly by and watched the scene—from here she seems a shadow, a dream figure, but I read that she’s on guard—tense, waiting. Galen was out of the car. His face was pale, taut; I was stunned to see his protective instincts. I could see he was ready to jump between us, between the driver and me, his chin out, looking square at the driver. My son is not an aggressive person, but I had learned, when he was a child, he wasn’t passive. Now his eyes were glittering and he was leaning forward toward the guy.
An alert stillness, a quiet, had descended on me, around me, some kind of gift of grace. It had taken me over. I felt completely myself, at peace, clear. Faith had found me early, in childhood, amidst my terrors, that’s all I can really make of it. Something had accumulated, something in the mystery of me, through the practice of meditation, in the experiences that had been revealed to me of, what to call it? The name, God, seems a shorthand. A certainty rose in me at that moment. The certainty that I loved that man, that driver of the Karmen Ghia.
I stepped in front of Galen, put my hand, first, gently on Galen’s arm. Then I moved close to the driver and did the same. “There is no damage,” I remember saying. And may have said, Thank God, though I probably found a way to avoid the word God—maybe I said, Thank Heavens. I was thankful, I was overcome with gratitude in that stillness where I moved with some kind of command. A sense that all was well. There was no danger and there was no restriction on love. My hand remained on his arm. I know I was smiling, a smile almost not my own, gentle, loving, entirely open to him. I could feel that smile in my face, my hands, it had taken hold of my body.
“And if there was damage,” I said. “Would it be worth this?” I took my hand from his arm and moved it between us, from him to myself and back again, a gesture of making two people one person, a movement that described a flow between us. Then I made a parallel to the abomination in Iraq.
His demeanor changed. He was now in that cloud of love.
I was so grateful my son was there to witness this miracle happening between ordinary people, strangers.
Sonny Rollins
Once inside the theater, we saw each other again. He and the woman he was with were seated in the front row just off the aisle. Galen and I were back about eight rows on the same side of the aisle—the only seats I could get. The man turned and saw us and smiled. The woman turned, saw us, and smiled, too. I was smiling, and I saw Galen smiling. It felt as if we were all friends. They turned back around. The lights were dimming. Sonny came out, old now, snow white hair. I could see the effort it took him to walk. His horn looked gold in the spotlights. There were empty seats in the first row, next to the driver of the Karman Ghia, whose name I never learned. He turned back to us and gestured for us to join them. Galen and I moved forward.
The air was enchanted, electrified with what I can only call the love that moved between the four of us, who had experienced something so other than the war, of such a different order than a world of folly—maybe an atmosphere we ordinarily move in, a kind of sleep, without knowing it, until a rise, such as the experience that lasted all that night and comes over me again as I recall it.
And there was the great Sonny Rollins, who was part of it, who had also entered that transcendent place, who knows when? Maybe in his years of depression when Coltrane came onto the scene and Sonny stopped playing out, stopped recording, but played his horn on the Brooklyn Bridge at night, when traffic was scarce, and the water could hear him, and maybe a few fortunate people in passing cars in the wee musician’s hours. I think Sonny already moved in and out of that world, the real world, by the time Percy introduced me to him all those years before, when I was sixteen.
He was there now—walking the way I walk now, his body laden with his years. Someone had walked him out onto the stage. We were applauding, cheering him. He stood there, quiet. Sonny stood there in the middle of the stage. He was waiting. The audience fell silent, this group of jazz people who had come in out of the terrible events of the last weeks, having bought tickets months before those planes, before so many people on Long Island were killed in the Towers, maybe accounting for the empty front row seats.
Then Sonny spoke. “I’m having a hard time too,” he said. The bond was established. We were now all intimates. Then Sonny lifted his horn to his lips and played like an angel. The lightness of Islands, where Sonny was born, still singing in his tunes, in his, what can I name it? In Sonny’s Jazz.
We were all gone, Sonny and all of us that night. He had no body, nothing weighing him down. The music rose to the stars, to that word we have, though it’s so small, to God, to the All, to the The Most High, to the thing that surpasses human understanding.
Sonny’s Love. When it was over we all walked slowly out. Sonny Rollins had gone, as my friend Percy might have said, high, and brought us with him.
Back in the garage, the Ghia’s driver and I shook hands. I think we all did. Galen and the woman, me and the woman, Galen and the driver. We said our names, but they’ve slipped away. The moment remains.
From time to time my son and I talk about that night. And I’m always grateful the two of us lived it together.
Have you ever had a tense moment with someone that you were able to diffuse with kindness? Or have you experienced the transcendence of music and collective consciousness? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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