AFTERWORD
One of the first things people ask me about Ghost of a Chance is whether or not in writing it I experienced a catharsis. The answer is yes. It changed me. And I didn’t expect that. According to close friends, family, and associates, I behave differently now. They say I am mellower and more philosophical than before. My band tells me that I’m easier to work with—which makes me wonder how horrible I must have been pre-book.
The most curious, and unanticipated, result of writing the book—at least for me—was that I discovered that I could actually spend a series of days and nights totally alone without a sense of foreboding. In fact, I now look forward to being by myself in my place in Connecticut—playing the piano, gardening, reading, or just listening to music. Of course I had spent a certain amount of time alone in the past, wandering around the woods at Harriman when I was a child, or practicing the piano in somber basement rooms when I was a teenager. Later, when I was on the road with the band or in some wilderness fishing camp, I had been alone in a personal sense. But I had never sought out solitude; in fact, I consciously avoided being alone if possible.
I assume that these changes have come about because I finally fitted together the many pieces of the puzzle that constituted my past. For the first fifty-five years of my life, I had totally repressed all painful events from my childhood. Then, as I was slugging through the research for this book, Brooke, who had been through it all before when she wrote Haywire, suggested that it might be a good idea to find a shrink who would be able to help me sort out any emotional problems that might arise from all this digging into the past. Even though at the end of my first session ever with a psychiatrist, the doctor, a highly regarded Freudian, announced that I was not remotely in need of therapy, I wanted to continue, and I asked him if he would mind if I brought Charles Michener, my co-author, to a few sessions. Charles could take notes and maybe also frame the necessary questions better than I could. “Highly unusual, but an interesting idea,” the psychiatrist said. And thus an unusual three-way conversation began.
To satisfy my wife, I even went to a psychiatric hypnotist in order to jog what Brooke kept calling my “repressed memory.” This was a fascinating experience, but I didn’t follow up on the hypnotist’s instructions to practice self-hypnosis. The TV screen he wanted me to see in my mind never appeared. In the end, it was the occasional visits to the shrink, coupled with incessant prodding from Charles and Brooke, that forced me to face the losses that studded my past. Now I feel that a great weight has been lifted.
The responses I’ve gotten from readers of the book have been astonishing and gratifying. Apart from all the people who’ve come up to the bandstand to talk to me about it, hundreds of strangers have written letters saying that they were moved to write because of a particular memory of my parents, or of Ma and Ave, from many years ago. A lot of the men who wrote had run into my dad during the war, when he was serving in the Navy in the Pacific. They remember him playing the piano in some bar on some island. Or perhaps they had gone on shore leave with him and had a few beers. Many have said how upset they were to read that Dad never talked to me about his experiences, and they wanted to make up for it by telling me what they remembered of him in combat, or as an officer onboard ship.
Almost all the letter writers have expressed nostalgia for something valuable and unique that has disappeared from American life—something to do with glamour, with good manners, and a sense of fun. Many of the correspondents seem to mourn the loss of Society—the kind with the capital S—which is a word that you don’t hear much anymore. I do hear it from time to time, because I’m often told that I’m what’s known as a “Society bandleader.” Just the other day a young journalist asked me what that meant. I shook my head and replied, “Frankly, I don’t have the slightest idea anymore.”