​DONNY ONE-NOTE
 

A lady in my Sunday morning Yoga4Everybody class holds her Om
            3 or 4 seconds longer
than her fellow yogis. While the rest of us are contemplating our inner
            Oms, she's still belting out hers –
her alto mmm vibrating the studio windows and taking me out
            of the moment
 
and into the memory of my father holding out the last note of every song
            at our Thanksgiving dinners
decades ago when after a few bourbons and a full plate of meat 
            and potatoes, the Irish relatives
would start chirping. Uncle Johnny would request “Anchors Away”
            or Dad would launch into “My Way”
 
and the table joined in slurry harmony – a cacophonous chorus
            that scared the dog –
holding out the last word until they dropped one by one and it was just Don
            riding that note
while the rest of us caught our breath, sipped our coffee and swallowed
            a forkful of pecan pie.
 
An aunt from Long Island dubbed him Donny One Note and he wore
            that moniker like a heavyweight belt.
So I let the lady om away. I think – my eyes are closed, of course –
            it's the drama teacher from the local college
who can't let 30 years of diaphragm training go to waste, can't resist
            projecting her om to the poor yogis
 
in the back row. Later that day Zak – who at twenty-two has started
            pulling boxes of photos                                                                             
out of the closets at my mother's retirement home and cataloging them
            and tracing the family tree on-line –
hands me a folded piece of blue-lined paper filled with a list in my father's
            square-lettered script:
 
Dr. Siefert thinks I had a stroke. Tests confirm. Bills getting harder to do.
            As if he was leaving notes
to himself like the tattooed man in Momento that he can find later
            to piece together his life
and I tell Zak about Donny One Note and the cherry-handled Peterson
            pipe Dad loved to smoke after dinner,
           
that I swear I smell sometimes on walks in late fall, and the red
            leather chair he loved to settle in
to scan his minions (his books and us) and I can almost hear that
            Waaaaaaaaaaaaay
one long a held until the windows begin to hum. He climbs into the note,
            settles into that red chair,
 
maybe stuffs the pipe with Bond Street Tobacco and nurses it into a burn,
            watches the smoke curl to the ceiling,
up to the notched-wood beams he'd picked out himself, and stays
            right there in that moment.