The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music by Steve Lopez

Author:Steve Lopez [Lopez, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Composers & Musicians
ISBN: 9780399155062
Google: FphYAAAAYAAJ
Amazon: 0425238369
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Published: 2008-07-14T12:00:00+00:00

16

The kids stood weeping at the airport window in Cleveland as the plane pulled away from the gate. Their father waved from his window seat, and Nathaniel remained silent as the plane taxied away and took off for California.

It was 1962. He was eleven years old and didn’t understand any of it.

“Why can’t I go?” he asked.

There had been signs of trouble. His father smashing a phone down on the floor the night his mother said she had to work at a fashion show. The Sunday ride to church when Jennifer got bumped to the backseat to make room for her father’s lady friend. But Nathaniel was too young to give meaning to any of that. Through the eyes of an eleven-year-old, things could not have been better.

His dad worked at the Willard battery company and his mother ran Floria’s Beauty Lounge on St. Clair, primping the women whose husbands worked in the factories that had fed the city’s children for decades. The salon was a short walk from the two-story family home at East Ninety-fifth and Seminole, and Nathaniel darted in and out of his mother’s shop, did homework there and was happy to charm her customers with his wide-eyed chatter and proper manners. Flo’s boy had character and poise, and he easily fell under the spell of the music his mother played on an old RCA radio. Whether it was jazz standards, classical or pop, the mellow sounds that filled the shop would sometimes put the youngster in a trance.

Mr. and Mrs. Ayers were never flush with cash, but they did just fine and believed a proper upbringing should include exposure to the arts, especially in a city that could boast one of the great orchestras of the world and a grand performance hall situated on nearby University Circle. The Ayers family bought an upright piano for their living room and arranged for Del and Nathaniel to have lessons with a Mrs. Lockhart, and it became apparent, as Nathaniel worked through the John Thompson piano course books, that their son seemed to have a good ear and nimble fingers.

But Nathaniel was too busy to get very good at it. When the hard Cleveland winters would thaw and the gray city came back to life, Nathaniel ran over to his uncle Howard and aunt Willa’s house on East 111th because they lived across the street from a park. Nathaniel played football with neighborhood kids and chipped golf balls with Uncle Howard, who topped six feet and seemed a giant to Nathaniel. If there was nothing doing in the park, Nathaniel scooted over to the lake to gaze at the steaming tankers, check out the activity on the docks or chuck stones into the lapping surf. When he charged along the shore he was Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns. When he cocked his arm and let a stone fly across Lake Erie, he was Mudcat Grant of the Indians. He listened to ball games on his transistor radio and read about them the next day in the Plain Dealer.

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