Oniontown Pastoral: Anything You Want

In Memory of David Sanborn

I drive. I look. I listen. And I think.

Five days a week, I drop wife Kathy off for eight hours of oncology nursing and pick her up again. Three days a week, St. John’s Lutheran in Oniontown calls and I oblige. In short, I spend a lot of time behind the wheel.

On the commute to church I play audiobooks and consider the 140-mile round trip well-traveled. The view is lovely and engaging, the pages read by ear instructive and usually edifying.

My Erie driving is given to music. Used to be I’d listen to National Public Radio, but the news in recent years has alternated between depressing and devastating. Give me Chopin or Fats Waller. Elizabeth Cotton’s gentle blues guitar or Jussi Bjorling’s brassy tenor. Johnny Mathis at Christmas time.  

As my wife headed for the hospital door on this local morning—an arthritic hitch in her stride—I knew whose record I’d be putting on. (An aside: Kathy and I have reached the stage in life when our first steps after disembarking a vehicle must be considered limbering up. Some vital muscle group has a cramp, or a joint has locked tight after the fifteen-minute jaunt across town. Not an aside: Forty years together has a way of making a wife’s aching gait still pretty, endearing to her fortunate husband.)

Another hazard of age is enduring many passings. Loved ones die. Acquaintances give you a start when they show up in the obituaries. And strangers who inhabit your past get eulogized by The New York Times.

Therefore, a saxophone accompanied my ride home. I associate the instrument with high school, the late seventies. If the sax were a car, it would have a hood scoop, mag wheels and a Cherry Bomb.

The sax was cool, and the coolest master ever there was, David Sanborn, died a few days ago at 79. When his album Hideaway came out during my senior year, my stereo needle wore “Anything You Want” raspy. I hear it now—I hit replay four times in the car—and think, “Man, is that dated or what?” The song wasn’t disco, but it lived next door.

I put on the funky, hard-driving track with thumpy bass and chirppy synthesizer, and I was one bad male strutting toward graduation, even though I was only walking from the bathroom to the couch. I was cool, Sanborn cool, at home, that is.

Today at about 7:10 a.m., then, David Sanborn reminded me of a time when my wife assures me I was good looking and could pretend to be bad. I never was though. Awkward with the girls, I was lucky to win love from one even better than fate should have granted me.

So with Kathy’s gorgeous gimp in my mind, I drove, looked, listened and thought. Of course, the truth about songs of your youth is they raise your heart’s curtain. They do mine, anyway. Time punches the accelerator; neither you nor I can slow it down. My thumping ventricles make me dream of being saxxy, but my veins are in their seventh decade of service and feel each season peeling out into the next.

I looked and saw May 15, 2024: me, a lucky man going 35 mph in a gray minivan across a rust belt town. While the ride to and from Oniontown is scenic, Erie has rough edges. My route takes me past what Paul Simon called “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go.”

Two teenage girls, willow thin and wearing bellbottoms. Side by side on skateboards, they laughed and called back and forth with mouths open yawn-wide. I thought, “At 7:10 a.m.?” Not many kids are out by choice at that hour. Such pale complexions, such long flat hair. I wondered.

Out front of a homeless shelter, another skinny person, a man with long scraggly hair, gray like mine. He was heading out into traffic on a bicycle. I bobbed my head to the Sanborn’s principle groove, and this guy, probably my age, was head-bobbing to the tune in his earbuds. We were in perfect rhythm. No kidding.

I thought: Circumstances could put us two aging bobbers in each other’s shoes. I wouldn’t trade places with him, but we both looked happy enough this Wednesday morning. I was glad for that.

When I got home, I watched an interview with a wane David Sanborn. What advice would he give to somebody two hundred years in the future, long after he is gone? Looking forward to picking Kathy up shortly, I’ll let the saxophone maestro have the last word: “Be in the moment.” Amen.