`Unplumbed Depths'

I know a guy in upstate New York who collects Dave Brubeck. He owns hundreds of recordings in every format, legitimate and bootleg, foreign and domestic, plus recordings by musicians associated with Brubeck, in particular Paul Desmond. He’s not a musician or jazz scholar, just a listener, though musicologists have come to him with questions about dates and sidemen.

Dan is married, lives in the country and has held the same job for decades, and most of the people who know him have no idea he’s a recognized Brubeck maven unless they share his interest in jazz. I knew his wife first because I worked with her, and learned of her husband’s devotion casually, in conversation. Dan is no pedant or proselytizer, and that makes him excellent company. By nature I’m a generalist, like a lot of journalists and other writers, and tend to respect people like Dan who burrow into a single enthusiasm over time and become, on some modest scale, experts. In comparison, I’m a dabbler, with interests that are broader than they are deep.

I’ve been rereading American Splendor, the Cleveland-based comic by Harvey Pekar, and came across a strip from 1999 that reminded me of Dan. It’s titled “Unplumbed Depths” and the artist is Gary Dumm. Harvey catches a bus for home. It’s Friday afternoon and he’s the only passenger. After a few blocks, the driver asks Harvey if he’d mind an unplanned stop along the way: “I wanna look at one of those trees.”

He gets out, pulls down a branch, studies the leaves and returns to the bus. Harvey asks what he was doing and the driver says, “I was trying to see if that was a red oak or a pin oak. It’s hard to tell the difference.” And, “Red oaks have seven-pointed leaves. Pin oaks have five: Two sticking out on both sides and one in the middle.”

Harvey is surprised and asks the driver if he’s “inta studying botany.” “Well, you know, sometimes you’ll be walking along with someone and they’ll want to know – what kind of tree is that – an oak or a maple?” Harvey replies:

“Wow, I never knew that about you. I think that’s great that people are inta somethin’ b’sides the score of yesterday’s baseball game.” In the final panel, the bus is pulling away and, in a typical Pekar decrescendo, Harvey says in a cartoon bubble coming out of a window, “I mean…not that I got anything against baseball.”

Meeting people like Dan and the bus driver is always a gift, even if you don’t share their enthusiasms I’m guessing they’re happier than the rest of us, or at least better buffered against tedium and time.