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I was sitting in the cafe car when the train paused in Rocky Mount, so I turned around and said to two strangers, both around 25 years old, sitting at a nearby table, "Hey, this is where Thelonious Monk was born." The black woman pretended to know who he was, but the white man admitted he had never heard of him. In any case, they were impatient for me to stop bothering them with irrelevant information.

I overheard that she had graduated from U of NC, majoring in administration. She was reading a brightly covered paperback, the type you buy at 7-11. He was talking about how nice he smelled whenever he wore his girlfriend's coat.

Monk stopped playing around 1976, so of course I never saw him, but I have seen Charlie Rouse, his longtime sax player, in concert.


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