"George," I said to him during a break one night, "I can't get any sound out of this clarinet. Will you take a look at it for me?" He looked up from his steaming cup of coffee and grinned.

"You gonna learn to play that horn?" he asked as he took it from me.

"I hope so."

"You play jazz now, hear? Don't you play no rock and roll." He put it together and blew one of his lyrical phrases. "Reed's too hard for a beginner. Get yourself a soft reed. You get a reed you can play, then you get on the streetcar and come by my house. I'll learn you a few little things to help you out." He did.

In those six years, I had learned the clarinet. I had gotten to sit in with some great bands at Preservation Hall, and had worked frequently with the Olympia Brass Band at parades and funerals. I had gotten to know and love these noore old men and had been through some unforgettable experiences with them.

I thought about all this as I sat by George's hospital bed last fall. He had just had a heart attack three days before that, but he seemed to be stronger now. His face looked healthy; it had a tautness and tone that I hadn't seen for a long time. When I first saw him at Preservation Hall, every muscle and vein in his face tensed and pulsed with his music.

He had been asleep, but woke up soon after I came in. He smiled his wonderful smile. His eyes were brilliant. "Hi, Tommy," he said. He showed that stoic indifference to death which he had lived by for most of his life. Possibly no other man who ever lived has been so close to death so many times.

He started telling me about his heart attack. "It was like a little pain in my chest. And then a great big pain like that," he clapped his hands suddenly, "and I was out." He smiled. "That would have been a good way to go, too. So fast." A nurse had given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and a chest massage and saved his life.

ONLY A YEAR before this, I had gone with my father to visit him at his home and found him suffering from a severe asthma attack. His daughter came to the door in hysterics. We found him lying flat on his back in bed, wheezing and gasping for breath. He could only talk in spurts when the attack eased momentarily. My father grabbed the phone and called a hospital, and I was left alone in the room with George. He gasped for breath, stared at me. "You the one now, Tommy," he said suddenly. He thought he was dying. "I had a good life," he gasped, "I made history." He thought these words were to be among his last, probably. "It all come on me so fast," he said, "so fast." He couldn't breathe.

We couldn't wait for an ambulance, so we carried him out to our car and sped off for downtown New Orleans, across the river from his home. His daughter carried his 99 pounds in her arms like a little black doll. I thought he would die on the way to the hospital, he was gasping so.

When we finally got him into the emergency ward of Touro Infirmary, the doctor treated him very routinely, as if he didn't know just who it was he was saving (although he claimed to).

"You'll be playing again in a month," the doctor told him cheerfully.

"You think so?" George said. He managed a weak smile, but he knew it could go either way. He had been through it all so many times: the speeding rides to the hospital, the life-saving injections, the gasping, the confrontation with death. He was playing a month after that, but here he was in the hospital one year later facing death once more.

The phone on the beside table began to ring. George leaned over and picked it up himself. After awhile, he hung up and lay back in bed. "That was the news about the Patterson fight. He beat the hell out of that boy in Stockholm." Geore grinned.

"You have any money on it?" I asked.