Like Dizzy Gillespie's Cheeks

Forty-seven

Out of daily habit, I suppose, I continued reading the obituaries, and as such, I thought of Lewis Nelken. Dead at seventy-eight. Lewis was born a Polish Jew, became a teacher, and gave it all up to pursue the American dream. Teaching wasn't making him any cash, so it was time to make some cash. He started a dry cleaning business, which soon became a very successful franchise throughout Chicago, and sold it for a bundle twenty years later. Despite never being satisfied with his financial success, Lewis always had two passions in his life: baseball and being a Jew. Which, unless you were Sandy Kofax, never shall the twain meet. He was a freak about the statistics of baseball, a die-hard White Sox fan, as well as a softball star in his own right. Being rich allowed him to further his cause by helping fellow Jews—be it through the antidefamation league, Hebrew Immigration Aid Society, or being a founding father of Beth Shalom Synagogue.

Believing that things don't randomly pop into our minds, I assigned some reason for thinking about Lewis Nelken. In particular, I saw a man with a huge heart and a focused life. He did what he needed to do, but more importantly, he did what he loved to do. Which, like everything else in my life, led me to think about Ben. Fucking Ben and his beautiful jazz life. That's all he eventually had, all that mattered. Maybe it was a sickness, or he was compensating for other things he'd given up on earlier in his life, but the fact remains, he had a gift, and he tapped into it, exploited it, and more importantly, shared it with as many people as possible. He would have been even more selfless if he would've released some of those performances or planted his damn jazz ass in a studio once and a while, but he didn't.