No idea why but a memory came back to me just now:
It was late, well past the dozing hours and into the deep hours of sleep. I was up, because I can’t help but try and stretch each day to the breaking point and, being unemployed, waking and sleeping held no regiment.
I was on the back porch, sitting on an uncomfortable outdoor sofa (not one designed for living outdoors but a sofa made extraneous, after it had been replaced, repurposed to live outside until Florida did to it what it does to all things in time: moistens and dampens and rots them until they become another uneven patch of the endless swamp) that had been “fixed” by inexpertly placing a slab of plywood inside it, taking no consideration for aesthetics or comfort into mind, smoking another cigarette (for I always managed to scrape enough money or goodwill together to keep smoking) and reading. I think it was Hemingway.
Anyway, it’s quiet, for a Florida night, only the thrum of the patio ceiling fan above and the chirping of frogs or insects or etcetera sounding, when something foreign breaks through. Brassy and stated. At first it might have been a peculiar car horn or an odd toad, but it gained in volume and variance as it approached. Once it was loud enough it was clear that it was a trombone. Notes sliding between each other, blending into one another rather than sharp like a saxophone or the taut marching of a trumpet. A one man band walked down the side of the road beyond the tall brick wall ringing the yard, playing a tune of its own to an audience of the night, the wind, the wild, and me. A walking beat, jazzy but stated, moving its way down the road and rambling off into the distance.
I stayed up the next two weeks deep into the night to try and catch it again but never did, never heard it return. Never caught a sound or simmer of the song since, not in daylight or afternoon or evening. Never saw anyone who could have played it. It lives on in memory, a joyful solo performance with no expected audience but those it found, in the thick of the night, like me.