After a couple days of editing video and burning it to discs, Marv’s music is playing more or less non-stop in my head, especially when I run or ride. It’s perfect exercise music. “Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out” is a little bluesy, good for fat-burning or recovery, and “Going to Chicago (Sorry But I Can’t Take You)” and “Some of These Days” make a good soundtrack for an interval session.
A casual Googling unearths about a jillion different flavors of these tunes performed by a wide range of artists over the years. Marv seems to have taken his “Some of These Days” lyrics from an Ella Fitzgerald version. Count Basie could be the source for “Going to Chicago,” but Marv’s version has a whole lot more lyrical meat on its bones, some of which may have come from “Chicago Monkey Man Blues” by Ida Cox.
But that’s folklore for you — every story changes in the telling.
I took this still of Marv playing guitar while we shot a short video of him performing kiddie songs for his grandchildren. We coaxed him into playing a few tunes for the adults in the audience, and you can see that video by clicking the link below.
Our friend and neighbor Marvin J. Berkman died on Monday. I suppose that he had been sick since before we moved in next door, but somehow he never seemed ill, until suddenly he was. And once I had gotten to know him a little, the thought that he might be mortal never occurred to me.
In his 80s — his 80s! — Marv was in two or three bands, practicing and performing regularly on guitar; taking a writing class; driving all over town in his decrepit Volvo (and occasionally to other towns); scouring the thrift stores for useful items; grocery shopping and cooking; helping a friend keep her Manitou Springs house from sliding off its hillside; holding a position of some authority at the church he and his sweetheart Judy attended; doing some casual woodworking . . . I was 30 years younger than the man, and I got tired just watching him.
Listening to him was something else altogether. That was never tiresome. Marv was a self-described saloon musician, a gig he took up as a teen-ager in Chicago, and the stories he could (and did) tell. He played for gangsters, swells and Studs Terkel, among others; served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Aleutian Islands during World War II; worked in jewelry and optometry; and somewhere picked up jackleg carpentry.
The other students in his writing class apparently considered him exotic, as did his fellow congregants at the Methodist church he and Judy attended (Marv was a Jew). He was a storyteller who would talk to cats if no bipeds were handy, among them our Turkish, who likes Marv and Judy’s yard better than our own. And if he occasionally repeated a tale, well, so do I. His were worth listening to more than once.
We shared a driveway and a garage, and other things as well. If Marv was braising some corned beef, a chunk would find its way across the driveway to our house. If I was simmering a pot of chili con carne, a bowl would wind up on Marv’s table. Herself helped Marv wrestle with his balky Windows laptop, and I shoveled their walks come winter; he helped us navigate the health-care maze. Living as he did with diabetes and cancer, he’d had plenty of experience in that arena.
But cancer has even more time on the job, and it gradually began to get the upper hand. Judy did her best for him, but Marv came to need more care than she could provide, and he finally agreed to enter a nursing home.
That lasted about seven hours — as is often the case, the place was a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare — and after hollering for help Marv was transferred first to Memorial Hospital’s oncology unit, then to Pikes Peak Hospice, where he had once volunteered a couple days a week, providing the soundtrack for many a final episode as a hall-strolling troubadour.
It was a fine, large room, and he was among friends there. The staff remembered Marv fondly, dropping by in ones and twos to pay their respects; a quick chat, a hug, a kiss, and then tears in the hallway. “You never let them see you cry,” said one. “But if you don’t cry, there’s something the matter. With you.” Another told Judy that it was an honor to be allowed to care for Marv during his last days. A third was stunned to learn that Marv had returned not to play, but to die.
We weren’t there when Marv finally passed on. I took my cue from Marv’s reaction upon awakening from a doze to seeing a half-dozen of us, friends and family, camped out in his hospice room, eyeing him like buzzards in a tree. “Oh, no,” he muttered. The old saloon musician didn’t want an audience for his final performance.
Proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that cheap lager, nicotine and psychedelic drugs make you smart.
If you kept a journal or diary as a young person, do yourself a favor and feed it at once into the nearest shredder, wood stove or fireplace. Do not, under any circumstances, open it and begin reading. That way lies madness.
In 1974, when I was a copy boy at the Colorado Springs Sun, George Gladney — then a reporter, now a journalism prof at the University of Wyoming — urged me to begin keeping a journal, and I jotted down my “thoughts,” such as they were, into the mid-1980s. Today I have some 20-odd volumes of my musings, with the emphasis on “odd,” and I recently made the mistake of thumbing through a few to put myself back in the moment so I could write a blog post about a friend’s death.
Apparently the only reason I had any friends at all in college was that I never said aloud any of the stupid shit I wrote down. Or maybe I did and they just kept me around as some sort of science project. The University of Northern Colorado was primarily a teachers’ college, after all, and offered a degree in special ed.
Thank God there were no blogs, Twitter feeds or Facebook pages back then. If my parents or the State had had any idea of what was going on inside that hairy skull of mine, I would’ve spent the past 35 years weaving baskets or pressing license plates instead of annoying my betters in print and online. You think my little one-ring circus is appalling now, you should’ve seen it before I got all the animals mostly housebroken.
One of the downsides of growing older is that some of your friends don’t. Donna Frances Shawcroft died in her sleep a week ago today, and her friends and family are saying goodbye to her this morning in Grand Junction.
Donna and her husband, Doug, a.k.a. Mudbone, were part of the crowd I ran with in college, the venerable and infamous Mombo Club. They weren’t the first of us to get married — that dubious distinction went to Mombo himself, if memory serves — but if they weren’t first out of the gate, they certainly went the distance, nearly 30 years’ worth. Two kids, two grandkids.
The Mombo Club has since disbanded and dispersed, and it’s been years since I saw Doug and Donna. But I’m thinking of them now. Requiescat en pace, Donna.
Mad Blog Media 