My dad, Russell Lloyd Jones, died 18 years ago today, after a freak bacterial infection swiftly killed him.
It was terrible happenstance. He'd been in Florida and ended up extending his trip by one day. The night that he was originally scheduled to be back in Chicago, he ate some bad shellfish, and that was that.
I still haven't fully recovered or accepted it. After 18 years. I was still rattled by 9/11 and the Endless War that was underway. But losing a parent suddenly, before their time (he was 56; I was 22) is traumatizing. I think one of the few worse things is losing a child.
I also didn't get to spend a lot of time with him. After my parents' divorce I probably saw him, on average, once a month. He also refused to speak to me (at my stepmother's behest, to be sure) for about a year, during my high school years.
But I started seeing him more often during his last two years, and we'd developed a friendly relationship. We had shared interests.
Russ was a gifted pianist. He had his own jazz trio when he was a teenager, and was regularly gigging in lounges before he was old enough to drink. (Though he would become an alcoholic, he didn't start drinking until he was 25.) He paid his way through DePaul, where he met my mom, with money he made giving piano lessons.
He could play a bit of classical, but jazz was his first love, as punk is mine. He could not play for months, then sit down at his baby grand and tear through an Oscar Peterson or a Brubeck number blindfolded.
I wish I'd appreciated that more as a kid. I wish I'd gotten more opportunities to. I wish, when he'd gotten me guitar lessons during my freshman year of high school, that I'd stuck with it.
I got my passion for music from him. When I was young he enthused me with Springsteen, The Stones, and Michael Jackson. When I was nine (9) he gave me a cassette tape of Appetite for Destruction, which surely had a huge hand in shaping me. He bought me my first CD, Are You Experienced?
The last time I saw him we swapped CD's. I gave him McCoy Tyner's Revelations and he gave me Mahler's Ninth. He also loaned me his VHS copy of Barfly.
In any case, I've been thinking about him more lately. You can take what you want from all this, if you read it. 😄 I just needed to share. To keep his memory alive.