Coleman Hawkins

I like to think that salmon and lemons came into the world at the same time, 1950, the year of my birth, because it makes me happy to think this is so and provides a basis for my mistaken belief that human life is some sort of feast. The world population in 1950 was 2.7 billion, thinned a bit by a world war, and ready for serious post-war expansion. 

Coleman Hawkins was still alive in 1950, in fact he was in his prime. Aficionado's of mid-century tenor saxophone jazz could listen to Coleman Hawkins on LPs, many of which didn't earn him as much as a dime. Fast food restaurants did not yet exist, so there wasn't yet the possibility of a black person having to run away from the white cop who found him asleep in his car, after he'd ordered a double cheeseburger, and who would be shot in the back before he took a bite. This was a novel, new-fangled experiment, an improvisation of an old form of behaviror control based on one's racial profile: people of color were disposed of differently in those early post-war days when salmon and lemons were new to the world.

The world population now, 2020: 7.8 billion. 

Sometime during the years from 1950 to 2020 a lifelong friendship also began to come to an end. I should have apologized for hanging up the phone on my old friend the other night, but had I apologized the friendship, corroded by years of right-wing politics on one side and liberal humanism on the other, already terribly frayed and beyond repair, would have continued the way it always had, with his talking and my listening. For my part I could no longer hold the phone away from my ear as my lifelong friend ranted about George Soros and Hillary Clinton, the Rothchild banking empire, the dangers of communism, the terrible consequences of doing business with Koreans. He should know better, I thought, he should have known me better, listened to what I listened to, read what I read! We seemed to be victims of the different cultures we'd built for ourselves--his was centered on the past and mine on the future. We both wanted change but change is never what we think it is, change is always surprising. 

And so I hung up the phone on my old friend. It seemed the right thing to do, if old-fashioned. I followed my heart, which had been most responsible for forming the image of our friendship that I had cherished for so many years: two people born at a special time in history, each forced to respond in their own way to conditions and situations tthat seemed impossible to keep up with and far beyond rational control.

I hear my old friend now, still talking, saying that the problem is that there are too many people in the world. I don't disagree, I can't disagree, it's indisputable--there are 4 times the number of people in the world than there were when we were born, each of us held in thrall to competing mythologies.

Russian sailors march in the Victory Day Parade, Moscow, June 24, 2020. There are 11 different time zones in Russia, acc. The New York Times. Photo by author.