"I know I sound like a broken record, Tommy, but please try and keep up with me!" shouted a beloved but cranky Uncle Jimmy.
The unlikely pair, handsome and tall Professor James Harris and his chunky teenaged nephew and helper, Tommy James, were heading toward the airport, on foot. They had left the college earlier in the morning and had already weaved their way in and around a series of hallways teeming with bodies, student bodies. Up stairs, down stairs ... down not a few up staircases. The hallowed walls of New York, New York State seemed higher and more forbidding than usual to the squat, puffing Tommy, as he tried desperately to keep up with his sure-footed and fleet-of-foot uncle.
As he lumbered and sweated his way through the loggia, he grasped frantically at the stack of important documents and records that seemed continually to reassemble themselves and slip through his ever-tightening grasp of crisscrossed arms. He peered through the fog, which came out of nowhere, and saw Uncle James, yet further ahead than was possible. Now he was panicked. His short-tempered uncle would give him a well-deserved tongue lashing for being so slow. If those items he begged to carry for his reluctant uncle didn't make it on the flight out that day, his uncle's deal - whatever it was (Tommy always saw and understood things vaguely, at best) - would be down the tubes. Tommy knew the disaster that would affect him primarily was the one from his uncle's tongue - and hand.
Tommy, increasingly anxious as his uncle had disappeared completely from view, began choking, sobbing, his eyes darting about the looming walls that, from out of nowhere, began closing in on him. Light-headed, pains in his arms and chest, he collapsed to the pavement, everything of importance in the world crashing to the pavement, shattering ...
"Mr. James, Mr. James. Are you up yet? It's housekeeping." Amelia, an amiable and warm-hearted old darling waited a few moments more, then took out her key to Tommy's apartment. Letting herself in - a somewhat customary thing at this point - Amelia called out again but received no answer. Her brow furrowed, yet no actual sense of undue concern troubling her, she peeked into Tommy's bedroom.
"Ah, poor, poor Mr. James. The Lord finally came for you. I'll miss you, dear one, but it was time."
As the little lady pulled the coverlet over Tommy's face, she glanced to the side of the old man's bed and saw papers and old phonograph records scattered all about the floor, a 78 rpm broken in half. It was his and his long-deceased uncle's favorite by Tommy Dorsey, "I'll Never Smile Again."