From now on, I’ll never hear a Glenn Miller classic in the same mood as before.   

The Independent-Mail, our local newspaper, sponsored a concert by the present-day Glenn Miller Band, and Miss Peggy surprised me with a couple of tickets and an evening in the company of dear friends, Alan and Carol Bailey.

You can’t appreciate Glenn Miller or any of his Big Band contemporaries unless you have heard them for the first time.

By that, I mean you have to have heard them when their music was played for the first time anywhere. Only then can you be transported back to the era of World War II, when the songs evoked images of  steam-driven troop trains chuffing into small-town stations, of troop ships sailing for far and hostile shores, of boys in uniform kissing sweethearts good-bye on railroad platforms, of flotillas of prop-driven aircraft roaring over at night as constant reminders that somewhere, blessedly far away, bombs were falling.

You have to hear Glenn Miller songs as they were played before the cacophony of rock ’n’ roll in its many incarnations drowned out the gentle lilt of ’40s swing music; before modern gyrations replaced the grace of the ballroom dance and the exuberant rhythm of the jitterbug.

You have to hear it through ears that have grown dull from years of hearing unsettling things.

Miss Peggy and I, along with our friends, sat amid an audience of several hundred such ears as the present-day incarnation of the Glenn Miller Band did a passable imitation of its illustrious predecessor. The band leader wasn’t Glenn Miller, or even Jimmy Stewart, but a slender, gray-haired man wearing a red jacket.  Still, the nostalgic mix of trombone and sax conjured up the old band in a satisfying way.

It was appropriate, I think, that a newspaper was the sponsor of this event, because I imagine that the audience constituted a pretty accurate microcosm of the newspaper’s core readership: People who need bifocals to read 12-point type and who have trouble reading the words in comic strips reduced to fit a tabloid-sized page downsized to save newsprint. People who grew up looking to newspapers as their major source of news and opinion. People who waited every morning for the paper to hit their doorstep with the latest baseball scores and the latest news of action in Europe and the Pacific, with the latest adventures of Buz Sawyer, Joe Palooka and Little Orphan Annie.

In front of me was a lady whose formerly auburn hair now had an artificial orange tint and was thinner than it was when she first jitterbugged to “In the Mood.”

To her right was a pleasantly plump lady with grayish-blonde hair who mouthed the words to “Moonlight Becomes You,” “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”  When the conductor asked for a show of hands of those from Ohio, she proudly thrust her hand into the air, and sang along with the waltz, “Beautiful Ohio.”

The entire audience swayed to “Little Brown Jug,” and responded on cue with “Pennsylvania six-five thousand.” It even picked up on the variation, “Pennsylvania six, five, oh-oh-oh.” A wizened little lady in the row ahead of me covered her face with her hands and lapsed into memory as the old songs flowed through the auditorium.

And when the band struck up the inevitable “In the Mood,” the dance floor was flooded with arthritic forms. I saw one gentleman limping his way toward the floor, and I remembered a lovely lady I once knew who walked with a limp but waltzed with a grace that would have gratified Johann Strauss. Perhaps this gentleman, too, waltzed to the bouncy beat of “In the Mood” (remember Kay Starr and “Rock and Roll Waltz”? You wouldn’t unless you lived through the ’50s.)

Glenn Miller’s music has become part of the wallpaper of my life, but it’s a wallpaper adorned with good memories. It’s a string of pearls that leads me back into pleasant days of youth when the future stretched into the distance and you could look forward to a lifetime surrounded with the friends you knew and loved.

This night, a precious friend of more than 15 years dropped out of our lives.

Miss Peggy was having a headache as the band played some of the lesser-known hits, and we remembered that Miss Candi, our elderly Peke-a-poo, had appeared to be feeling poorly when we left.

So we went home to check on her. We found her in distress, lying on her tummy in her little bed, her head draped over the edge, breathing in painful jerks. We tried to comfort her, but soon realized that the dreaded moment had arrived.

Around 10:30 p.m., we called her veterinarian, who stays open around the clock. By 11 p.m. a compassionate vet eased her suffering and gently conducted her into her last sleep.

Glenn Miller music played in the background of our consciousness as we sadly drove home. Now, ever after, when I hear the notes of “Little Brown Jug” bouncing through my mind, the memory of a little white mutt will come bouncing through my heart.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, S.C. 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.