So what’s Keith been up to?
(Continued from http://www.epibound.com/)
The feeling of aloneness found odd relief in late December 2009 when, in my sixty-sixth year, sixty-five birthdays behind me, a kindling acquaintance banished me as “nothing but a bitter old man.” The words raised a need to defy augury: I must seek a newer world.
Renewal seemed best sought in song, so I posted an ad for “accompanist/arranger, my key.” Somehow Bálint Sapszonnoticed and responded, the “newer world” project evolving from a happy compatibility, incubating as the multi-dimensional musician toured France in March 2010. On his return, we went to work, and one thing is clear: Nothing good could have happened without the touch, care, and sounds of Bálint Sapszon.
To seek a newer world is dedicated to Mike Hendrickson and Glenn Fish, two schoolmates killed in Southeast Asia in 1968; remembering too a teacher, whose gravestone notes only his war service:
I remember Mr. Teddy’s teaching: how he wakened me in the early ’60s to worlds never imagined, including Milton, whose poetic strains were “of a higher mood.”
For further info, please see my Liner Notes, where one footnote merits mention here too: I’m proud to have met and talked with Bud Kingsbury, a pilot and real-life Odyssean whose B-17 was shot down in 1943 over the Tyrrhenian Sea. As a boy Bud loved to swim Lake Michigan: from Chicago’s Navy Pier to the Cribs, and back, up to eight miles round trip. A good thing. When shot down he was fully prepared for the long-day’s swim to Italian shores, never a doubt in the 30-hours-plus that he could make it, not ’til the final yards when weariness finally sank him. He used a Great Lake technique to surrender to the sinking, then bounce from the bottom at a forward angle, again and again until collapsing on shore, soon waking to the sounds of girls walking and chatting nearby.
His crew of nine died, four lost at sea after parachuting, he alone escaping to tell us.
Bud’s epic feat is doubly exciting because he was entirely unware of Odysseus, whose raft in the Odyssey was shattered by stormy Poseidon, forcing him to swim unto the third day before collapsing onto Phaiakian shores, later waking to the sounds of Nausikaa and maids playing ball on the river’s shores. Nor had Bud any awareness of Pip alone in the heartless immensity, meaning he had faced epic challenges without benefit of epic heroes, knowing just one thing: He had to find his own strength to endure.
In my case, I could not have survived without fixating on epic ideals, so Bud’s strength is all the more admirable: He thought mainly of his wife and baby girl, whom he had seen in a Chicago hospital shortly before flying overseas, and damned if he was gonna let himself die when he had them to go home to.
So here’s to you, Bud, who died in 2009: less a war hero than a human hero. May your spirit ever endure.
© 2010 Keith Fahey, All Rights Reserved
