SONGS
IN THE KEY
OF
SEPTEMBER
By Mark Jeffery Koch
Copyright 2010 Mark Jeffery Koch
All rights reserved.
Published for the Internet by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0014-3
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is dedicated in loving memory to
To my parents
Daniel and Bernice Koch
who taught me how to love and to give,
but most importantly that love involves sacrifice
and it’s important being there for those you love not only in the good times
but when times get rough as well.
Songs in the Key of September
INTRO: Winter 1958
When I was growing up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania my parents would take me and my two sisters to synagogue services on Friday night, not every Friday, but a lot of Fridays. On a cold winter night, a day after a major snowstorm my father took my two sisters to services at our synagogue and because my mom was a bit delayed in getting ready, she and I left about fifteen minutes or so later. I was only eight years old, all dressed up in my little sports coat and tie with my winter coat and gloves. As my mom and I were walking to the synagogue she slipped and fell on the ice. Fortunately, there were other people who also were late in coming to services and they saw my mom on the ground and offered to help. She was in terrible pain, and it turned out she broke her right wrist badly in several different places. While someone ran into the synagogue to get my father who immediately came and took my mom to the hospital others took me into the synagogue where I found my sisters and sat down next to them. I remember crying for quite some time. It was the first time I remembered watching a loved one in pain, watching and feeling totally helpless knowing that I could not do anything to end their pain or make them better. It was a feeling that would come back later to haunt me, almost fifty years later.
PART ONE: Christmas Day 1984
CHAPTER ONE
There are certain days in your life that you will remember forever. I was thirteen years old in 1963 attending elementary school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when the principals voice suddenly came over the intercom telling everyone that President Kennedy had been assassinated. School was let out early and all of my fellow students quietly and somberly went home. Like so many other Americans I remember sitting with my parents that entire weekend transfixed watching the events unfold on television. I remembered the caisson that bore the casket, the riderless horse, and the salute from the President’s young son, John. At that time my folks had an old black and white t.v. with about a dozen or more tubes inside, that my dad, whenever it would stop working would kick, and somehow, miraculously, the t.v. would then start working again. Most everyone had a black and white television in those days and the anchorman we followed most was Walter Cronkite. I remember sitting in the sun parlor of our home with my parents watching the civil rights march in 1963 on television and listening to Dr. Martin Luther King deliver his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech. I remember working in my office on September 11, 2001 when I received a phone call from my mother telling me to turn on the television, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and I watched, with horror, along with millions of others, as the second plane suddenly crashed into the World Trade Center. I remember going to lunch that day at a very large restaurant full of people. The only sound you could hear in this normally very noisy restaurant was the small television the owner had put on the counter where you paid your bill, which was tuned in to the live coverage of the days horrible events, and I sat with dozens and dozens of other patrons eating silently in a stunned, surreal setting. It was a day and time when you knew that whatever innocence we felt as a nation was now gone forever.
When I was growing up in the 1950’s Americans had faith in their government and trusted their government to do the right thing. After the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Report polls showed a significant number of people didn’t believe their own government. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, escalated the war in Vietnam into an seemingly endless conflict that resulted in the loss of fifty-five thousand soldiers, and college campuses all across the country erupted in protests and several ROTC offices were burned down. Some men burned their draft cards and some moved to Canada. Johnson was followed by Nixon, and Watergate seemed to be the exclamation point in the American public’s increasing distrust of their own government.
Growing up in the 1950’s and working for so called “blue chip” companies many Americans had the “cradle to grave” belief that once you started working for a company you would retire with that company and your pension and retirement from a lifetime of hard work would be your reward. The seventies and eighties and beyond saw these same blue chip companies cutting payroll, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, with some companies going belly up with no money in reserves to pay their workers pensions. The America I woke up to on Christmas morning 1984 was far, far different than the America I was born into in 1950, and distrust of government would increase, distrust of business would multiply, and the third tier, faith, would later be shattered by the thousands of reported cases of abuse of young boys by priests from the Catholic Church. Government, business, and faith were the three pillars you could count on when I was born, but not any longer and things would, in the coming years, only get worse.
On Christmas day, December 25, 1984, in Burtonsville, Maryland, a suburb in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area where I was living, after calling friends to wish them a Merry Christmas, I decided to have an early lunch and was preparing my lunch when the telephone rang and I heard the voice of my parents. I used to speak with my folks, who lived in my hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, every Friday evening. I had moved from Philly to the Washington, D.C. area in June of 1978 about a year after my divorce was finalized. I felt stifled and held back in Philly and felt it was part of my past and that it held no future and no hope for me. I was hurting from my divorce and badly needed a change. Some folks leave their hometowns for better job opportunities, some for college and wind up settling elsewhere, some get married and leave, but for me leaving was to break from the past, the hurt and bitterness, and the sense that I would never find happiness and fulfillment if I remained.
In early December of 1984 on one of the Friday evenings when my folks called me my dad said he felt weak and was going to the doctor to have some tests. The following Friday my dad told me the doctor thought he had anemia and prescribed some medication to help manage it. The very next Friday, when I spoke with my mom and dad, my dad told me “they want me to have a bone marrow test.” I realized then that it was not anemia that my father had and that it was something far more serious. On Christmas day, 1984, at 11:30AM, everything in my life (and my parents lives) changed forever. The day before, four days before their forty-third wedding anniversary, the doctor informed my parents, in their visit to his office, the results of the bone marrow test.
CHAPTER TWO
I
