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stick in your head from when you’re a kid, but you can’t remember seemingly more important things for shit? The place she lived in was divided into a bunch of apartments, and her place was on the second floor.
    My grandmother was an amazing person in many ways, but her complete immersion in music influenced the young me most—she was certainly one of the primary reasons that I became interested in playing it. She was so delicate and one of those people who had a natural talent for everything musical. As a five-year-old I used to sit on her knee while she played piano, absorbing every sight and sound in complete fascination. As if to confirm that I might have been a musical instrument aficionado while still in the womb, I even remember the piano itself. It was one of those stand-up types—don’t ask me the exact model. She would just sit there and casually play along to Joplin and Charles Mingus—cats like that—as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and that added more to the amazing mixture of music styles that I was being exposed to as a child.

    AT THIS TIME, something my young head didn’t fully grasp was just how sick my dad actually was. You don’t analyze it when you’re young, I don’t think. In fact I suspect all of us—Dad included—were in denial about just how bad things were, and I think all of us felt that if we didn’t talk about it, it somehow wasn’t there. But it was there. And because Dad was worried that he’d lose his job if his employers found out how sick he was, and that he might not be able to fulfill his daily duties, his ill health was never really discussed, and especially not outside the four walls of the Brown household.
    So as a young kid, I’d happily go off to school while mom would drive him to the city for treatment, and I guess I just thought that he was in the hospital getting better when actually he was dying, his body systematically eaten up by cancer. Back in the ’70s there wasn’t the technology available to catch cancer early enough to stop it spreading like wildfire—they just dealt with it when they found it, often too late. And when they did find it, all they had at their disposal was chemo or radiation, so Dad had to stay in the hospital in the city, getting dosed with one or the other. I remember going to visit him and because of how sick it made him feel, the only food he could taste and enjoy was fried catfish washed down with Budweiser, so we would always sneak some in there for him. Sounds like a weird combination I know, but it was all he seemed to want.
CHERYL PONDER

Daddy was diagnosed in April of 1971 and had extensive and immediate radiation for six weeks, which didn’t seem to slow it down much. Because it was cancer of the nasal pharynx, it seemed to be hard to contain. Then in the summer of the same year he had another biopsy and it was still spreading.
     
    Although I was young and he was sick for most of the time I knew him, my dad and I did have a close bond. When you consider that my sister is seventeen years my senior, it’s easy to see why, too. Because Cheryl and I had basically grown up in two separate generations of our parents’ lives, and he just adored me, even though I suspect I was one of those mistakes after they went to the country club and got drunk one night.
    I have dim memories of us sitting on the couch in the afternoons watching golf together. He loved having me for company even though I clearly knew very little about golf. Something about the game must have permeated my psyche though and the Colonial tournament sticks out in my mind particularly—probably because it was played locally in Ft. Worth, and he stressed that very fact to me at the time. I know that he would have been really proud to know that his son would get invited to play in it in later life.
    Even while he was very sick he would still drink Budweiser like it was going out of fucking style. So at the age of five I probably tasted my first beer, and