{"id":7964,"date":"2021-08-13T15:08:09","date_gmt":"2021-08-13T20:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/?p=7964"},"modified":"2022-04-13T13:38:13","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T18:38:13","slug":"bryans-ragtime-stride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/bryans-ragtime-stride\/","title":{"rendered":"Bryan’s Ragtime Stride"},"content":{"rendered":"

M<\/span>y friend Bryan Cather died on January 4, 2020 at the age of fifty-three. I attended his Memorial at St. John’s Church the following Saturday and read a poem about my memory of him afterwards. At the end of the festivities, Richard Egan from the St. Louis Friends of Scott Joplin asked me for a copy to publish on the Friends’ website. As we were obliged to quarantine soon after, I forgot to look for my poem until recently. Unfortunately, the Friends’ website has moved around in the past months. Perhaps as a consequence there’s no permalink I can post, and now the poem has disappeared entirely. But you can find the video of Bryan to which I reacted at the bottom of his obituary, here<\/a>. And here’s my poem, just to provide a permalink. Thanks to the Friends of Scott Joplin for publishing it first.<\/p>\n

Ragtime Stride<\/strong>
\n–for Bryan Stewart Cather, 1966-2020<\/em><\/p>\n

So, you\u2019re gone now–
\nand I’m chastened to have missed
\nyour company these last years<\/p>\n

remembering you knelt
\nby my pew, welcomed me to church
\nall those times ago, and we marched
\none year together in the pride parade.
\nI recall you waved a flag along the way.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how to put this
\nbut I knew you for a savant,
\nand when you started back to school
\nI cheered you on and took some almost
\npersonal pride to see you come
\ninto your own.<\/p>\n

Too, I knew you
\nfor a man like me, who favored hats
\nfedoras fall and winter,
\nstraw boaters spring and summer,
\na jaunty man–<\/p>\n

and, surprise, I knew you
\nfor a fellow ragtime traveler.
\nMy old upright, the one you
\nrebuilt me still sits
\nin my dining room. I watched
\nyou level the old keyboard with felt
\nwashers, but you couldn\u2019t tune it.
\nLike me you couldn\u2019t even play,
\nthough that was okay–<\/p>\n

because you stepped to a different music
\nall your own. Maybe, I sometimes thought
\nyou were first attracted to players
\nand the old piano rolls you loved
\nbecause they gave you the piano
\nof your dreams.<\/p>\n

Now, your obit shares
\nvideo of you playing Tree-
\nmonisha\u2019s close, that \u201c. . . Real
\nSlow Drag.\u201d I watch you pedal
\nforth and back, striding
\nthrough its rhythms\u2019 chorus bare feet slap
\nsome mythic hardwood floor–<\/p>\n

marching onward, marching onward,<\/em>
\nhappy as a bird in June . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

You\u2019ll teach it to angels in Heaven.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Bryan Cather died on January 4, 2020 at the age of fifty-three. I attended his Memorial at St. John’s Church the following Saturday and read a poem about my memory of him afterwards. At the end of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7964"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8054,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964\/revisions\/8054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}