My Kind of Olde Town School of Folk Music

If there not a point in my life when I get to sing sweet sweet harmony with someone else with at least a guitar and possibly a mandolin for accompaniment, I will be unsatisfied in heaven.

Now is not the time for that, though. I could not cram another thing into my life right now and still I'm trying to make some space for developing a couple of new friendships and for a crafting group at church.

However, as busy as I am with school and church, I'm interested to look back on the last several weeks and to see how many cultural events I've built into the pattern of my days. Especially considering I spent a total of 9 and a half hours on the Economics problem set that I turned in last Monday and that's only a little bit extreme for most assignments.

In the last month I have:

Listened to Angela Davis speak.
Gone to see Buddy Guy in his penultimate performance at the old location of Buddy Guy's Legends.
Attended a Super Bowl party.
Saw Haphaestus at the Lookingglass Theatre.
Saw Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.
Listened to a band at the Hideout.
Went to see Vance Gilbert.

I feel a little bad about the Vance Gilbert one. I had invited several people to go see it with me but in the darkness of two weeks ago, I cancelled on everyone because I was looking ahead in despair at one more thing that I had to do. But when Susan still wanted to come out from the Quad Cities and spend the day with me, we decided to see if we could still get in that night.

I'm so glad we did. Susan and I have been going to see Vance since we were sophomores in college. (I went Freshman year before I knew her but took her with me the next year when he came to play at the Blue Moon Coffee House again.) Since then, we've seen him together and separately all sorts of places, including Seattle, Cedar Rapids and a nice lady's house in Evanston. I have all of his albums and can sing almost all of his songs by heart. He has a heart-stoppingly pure tenor voice that also communicates soul and the poetry he writes and sets to music is of the highest order. He is also extremely funny.

Going to see a Vance show with Susan is like putting on an old pair of comfortable pajamas. It feels so good but you can get a sinking feeling of disappointment when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and realize that you look pretty dumpy. That sinking feeling of disappointment that the reality does not measure up to the internal sensation hit me when he started telling a joke I've heard him tell maybe 7 or 8 times before. "I'm so glad to see you. So many nights at these folk concerts I'm the only chip in the cookie." Vance is black. He says this to a black woman in the audience. It's a really funny joke. But I get a sense that he's clinging to old glory with it.

There are several old chestnuts that Vance serves up in a show. You're pretty much guaranteed that at some point he'll take an 8-bar as a muted trumpet and in another song, he'll hold out a note for little 3 or 4 minutes. I still haven't figured out how he breathes but he must.

But while he's doing this, my mind gets to wander into nostalgia as I look back on the last 12 years or so. Old pajamas are, above all else, comfortable. I also get to notice the nuances of his performance, like a lovely dip in intonation as he sang the word "mountain" in Unfamiliar Moon. Susan leaned over at that point and whispered, "Think of how far you've come since the first time we heard that song." She was referencing a concert at that same venue about four years ago when we heard the song for the first time and I felt like he was describing my life as he sang, "This can't be my house. How can this be home? I don't recognize it anymore. Each step to the front door is higher than I've known. It's like climbing up a mountain 'cause now I climb alone." I still picture the front steps to the house my ex-husband and I bought in Westchester with those words. One of Vance's first songs of the evening was brand new to us and it was about a woman who chooses small town life, which is Susan. He is pretty amazing at his ability to capture the experiences of our lives.

Earlier in the evening, Susan had said, "I love that this is a unifying force in our friendship. And that it has been for years." I love that Vance Gilbert has repeatedly told Susan that she is beautiful. The first year we went to see him (1997?), we sat at a table right up next to the stage and he stopped the concert to listen to her laugh. "What is that? It sounds like someone reading laughter out of a book! Hee hee hee. Hee hee hee." We couldn't breathe we were laughing so hard at being singled out. I've only heard him tell that joke once since then, so I'm fairly confident that Susan was the first. She really does laugh that way. No stretching necessary to make the comment funny. A couple of years ago, Vance said to her, "Look at you! You are what a woman is supposed to look like." He held her face in his hands with those long fingernail beds and she blushed. She blushed again last weekend when he told her she was like a whole pinchable cheek. She blushed in her cleavage and he touched her again. Both agreed that it was OK since it was as lucky as either was going to get that night. If nothing else, I love the man because he loves Susan as a fan more than he loves me.

Vance was followed by Rani Arbo, a sweet-voiced and sassy woman with a great blue-grass funky band. It is she who makes me ache to sing tight harmony with someone. And I can actually see a point in the next five years when I'm comfortable in a job when I can give one night a week to jamming like that. The evening ended with a song from their upcoming children's album. It was a play song in which she would call out an item of clothing and if you were wearing it, you were supposed to stand up and dance. So, Susan and I danced in our blue jeans and sat it out for button-down shirts. For the final iteration, I stood and turned to dance with Susan because I was wearing underwear. I danced all the more joyfully as Susan stayed firmly seated on her chair, looking up at me sheepishly.

Vance Gilbert and a lot of metaphors

Dearest Esther,

I am behind in updating your milestone book and I don’t want to wait until I have written up my notes on months 5 and 6 before I put last night’s adventure in writing.

(As an aside, here's a video of how much you like your Obasan right now.)

Your Obasan and I have been through a lot together.  As freshmen in college, she taught me to laugh out loud, even when it would make people turn to look at us.  Junior year, she broke my heart and transferred schools.  We stayed on the phone and she came back to see me graduate; then I returned the favor a few years later.  We have evaluated each other’s boyfriends and comforted one another through break-ups.  She has answered the phone often to nothing but silence as I gasped for breath through my sobs.  She was my maid of honor and she went with me to the courthouse when I finalized my divorce.  She signed the ketubah when I married your dad and she helped me give birth to you.

Through all of this, we have had Vance Gilbert.  Tonight, we took you to his concert.  I was very nervous that people would give me the stink eye for bringing a baby to a concert but since your Obasan loves spending time with you and you are such a pleasant child, I was willing to try it out.   You know, because urban babies wear black and go to concerts.  But they sit in the back, just in case.  We had taken you to a klezmer concert during Hanukkah and you were brilliant. 

Obasan and I spotted Vance when we walked in with you and giggled to each other, “There he is!”  He smiled at us but I worried he would think we were being disrespectful of his talent and hard work by risking the effectiveness of the performance and communication with your potential cries.

As we took our seats, though, people smiled at us, chucked you under your chin and called you sweet pea.  Most of them were grandparenty in age and I wonder if they thought that life was too short to waste on worrying if a show will be ruined by a cute baby.  Because seriously, there’s a cute baby to smile at. And there are never enough chances to do that in our short lives.  Concerts come and go, right?

Still, I wanted you to behave. 

So, you sat on Obasan’s lap and watched the stage as Vance walked up on it.  Rapt.  The word is, “rapt.”  I wanted to take your picture because it was such a perfect image.  But I’m a terrible photographer and the lighting would have never translated.  So, I resolved to tell you this story the way I know how.  You dipped your right hand into the little bowl of cheerios like you were eating popcorn in a movie theater.  You were like an adult in miniature, perfectly replicating our mannerisms even though I know that you were just being yourself.  I love imagining how you must be experiencing these situations so differently than those of us who have completed the language acquisition stage of development. 

Although you have the pincer grip to get cheerios to your mouth most of the time, eventually, you just let the slobber on your right fist pick them up for you before you jammed the whole thing in your mouth and sucked off what you could. 

After awhile, you turned to me and patted my upper arm.

It kills me when you do that.  Just one or two pats while you look me in the eyes, as if to say, “Yes, you are my mother and here you are.”  Usually you turn back to whatever else had previously had your attention. 

This time, you made it clear that you were ready for me to hold you.  We nursed and your Obasan and I passed you back and forth until you landed in my arms, standing on my lap while turning turning turning like you do because you know I’ll help you get your 360 degree observation of any room we sit in for an extended amount of time.

I like it that you are cute but I am so relieved that you are curious.

During quieter moments between songs while Vance talked, you began growling at him.  Sometimes your dad and I call you Grumbledore because of these growls.  I was really nervous when you started doing this because there is no way to quiet you since you’re not upset.  You father and I began preparing to take you out into the hallway.

But Vance laughed and started talking about you.  He asked your name and connected it to Eostre, the goddess of rebirth.  This type of exchange actually happened a couple of times and I began to relax.  He hummed a Vancified version of Brahm’s lullaby and pretended to speak with your voice in disgust that he wasn’t a bigger star.

However, as you got more tired, you got more cranky and when it seemed like you were going to start crabbing at me, I got up to go out into the hallway until I could rock you to sleep in your Ergo carrier.  I knew it had to be me since you won’t fall asleep with anyone else.  At least, not quietly.

Vance actually stopped me and asked me not to go.  “Don’t take her out,” he said.  I’m terrible in improv situations and couldn’t say anything witty in response.  Finally, I managed to protest, “But it’s going to be a pretty song.”  Since he had asked, though, we stayed, standing near the stage because that was where the exit was.  The pretty song that he had already begun playing while he told the story was one that he had written for the children in his neighborhood, so it was particularly apropos.  He called it a tone poem and it’s called Come Here My Love. 

Of course, I cried as he sang, “And my eyes linger too long on your face / It’s like staring at the sun / And you see a good in me / The world don’t seem to recall.”  You have given my life such direction and purpose, even in the midst of my dithering about my changing identity from professional to homemaker.  He kept looking at us as he sang and all of my fears about whether or not I should have brought you finally melted away.  That’s what it actually felt like: a hard candy shell was melting away and I could relax. 

I remembered that part of why Vance Gilbert concerts are so special is that each one is unique.  He is really engaged with his audience and the space he's playing in.  One day, I'll tell you about the show with his good friend Ellis Paul and how they had to improvise the second show since most of us from the first show just stayed through.  We keep going back because he's not just doing a set.  He's communicating.

I mouthed, “Thank you,” when the song finished and we went back up to our seats where I stood in the aisle and rocked you until you fell asleep.

Esther, my love, you will stop needing me so soon.  We will not be this entangled in each other for very long.  I have been the protagonist of my novel for 34 years.  Right now, you are a supporting character but soon, you will have your own novel and I will become some archetype to help you in your own hero’s journey.  I know this.  You will not always have the burden of being the sun that lights up my life.  But you’ll have lots of little narrative cycles before the big trip to the cantina in Mos Eisley to find a pilot with a ship that has made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.  I intend to notice and be present for every one of them.

Vance shifted that song to sing directly to you, wishing aloud that you will grow into a good girl and clarifying in verse that good didn’t mean doing what was expected of you but meant being good to other people.  He also riffed on an earlier joke that we were setting your partner preferences by exposing you to him this early and that you’ll probably marry a black man someday.  He also blessed you, saying you will be special since your parents take you to see “cool shit.”  So, as you begin venturing out from my lap, I’m so gratified that Vance Gilbert – who has meant so much to your Obasan and me- affirms that what I can do is show you some of the settings that my own story progressed through and give you access to many of the other characters I know.  After that, I promise let go and simply read the parts of your novel that you share with me.

And it will be good enough to be a bestseller.

Stunning poetry

Many of you know that a man named Vance Gilbert is one of my favorite performers ever. Apparently, while I've been doing my Walden-thing, he has come out with both a DVD and a new CD. Daniel was a great brother and got me both for Christmas, plus he downloaded a CD of one of Vance's concerts at Schuba's that both of us apparently missed. At two previous concerts that he and I attended, I was reduced to tears by the utter poetry of the song "Unfamiliar Moon." For awhile, he did not record it, because he was trying to get a pop singer to buy it. Therefore, when he sang it at concerts, I could not sing along in my head and got to be struck by the words as fresh and new. While the version on the new album is lovely, it is missing the stark simplicity of the live version, which is just voice and guitar and performance, which always brings out nuances of emotion, especially at a Vance concert. As he says on the live disc, "A Vance Gilbert concert is like the elusive butterfly of love. Good luck." I thought I'd share the words with you.

Unfamiliar Moon
from Unfamilliar Moon
Unfamiliar moon
Stars are out of place
Everything is new
Everything is changed
Like a baby child
Just has to cry
When he sees it for the first time
And he don't understand
Now that there's no you
Everything is new
Like this unfamiliar moon

That can't be our song
Those aren't the words I know
The melody's all wrong
But the DJ says
"That's just how it goes"
Like a child has to learn
On his own
You get too close to a bird
And she'll be gone
Now that there's no you
Everything is new
Like this unfamiliar moon

This can't be my house
How can this be home?
I don't recognize it
Anymore
Each step to the front door
Is higher than I've known
It's like climbing up a mountain
'Cause now I climb alone
Now that there's no you
Everything is new
Like this unfamiliar moon

Oh my my - Oh hell yes

It is a beautiful thing when someone you respect has you on the list of people to tell right away when something momentous happens.

I am constantly amazed when people want to be my friend. Much of the time, I am not a nice person to the people I am close to. If I feel safe with someone, I let my guard down sometimes and the queen bitch who is constantly fighting me for control of my tone of voice and observations of people's weaknesses slips loose.

So few people make it to the point where I feel safe with them in the first place that the law of averages demands that the dice haven't been rolled often enough for snake eyes - in the form of someone who then sticks around - to reasonably make an appearance.

But Susan called me the afternoon after the evening she got engaged. I'd say that makes me pretty special.

I kind of avoided Susan for the first semester of freshman year when she lived in the room next door. She was just so . . . happy. All the time. And she had these tight little blond ringlets that were just so . . . cute. I couldn't handle it.

But one day in the bathroom she backed me into a corner wearing her bathrobe with a towel on her head and demanded, "Did you do DDA?" When I hesitantly responded that yes, I had competed in Dramatic Duet Acting in high school forensics, she yelled, "Ha, I knew it. I saw you perform at State as that Holocaust survivor and you made me cry." I think she then quoted a few of my lines of dialogue to me in that awful Polish/German Jewish accent that was ubiquitous on the speech circuit in the early 90s. Or worse, she made me recite some.

When I told Daniel that story, he shook his head knowingly, recognizing instantly why I would let my guard down with this very perky, intrusive girl: flattery.

As a girl who didn't make many friends, I was (and probably still am) vain of my talents. If people didn't like me, I figured they should at least be impressed by me. So, when someone came along who actually lived up to my expectations, well, it must have been love at first sight.

I actually don't remember what happened after that. I cannot plot out for you the opening steps of our friendship dance. Ultimately, though, I got pulled into her group and finally had someone to sit with in the dining hall for meals. A lot of it may have had to do with the fact that the other girls in the groups were already paired off with their roommates as BFFs (best friend forever) but Susan's roommate was absolutely nuts so I filled that niche in the group dynamic, which I did not mind in the slightest. Outside of my family, I've never felt like I filled a niche in my life, except for that phase and later on during my first years teaching when my colleagues treated me as the baby sibling and picked on me a lot. So, I was actually pretty overjoyed to be something other than an after-thought in a group. Susan needed me. That was all that mattered. Also, I think we had Practical Criticism class together and although it was torture for her, I loved it and woke her up most mornings to make sure she got there. (Our reactions to the class say more about me than they do about her. Everyone thought Prac. Crit. was torture.) I was young enough that I never had a moment when I realized that she was family. She just always was. I can't remember ever feeling like I had to be something other than who I was with Susan. That's my definition of family. Susan and my ex-husband are the only two people in the world that have ever felt comfortable hanging out with my actual family when I wasn't there. That's a pretty good indicator that's she's important, as well.

(By the way, when I say that Susan't roommate was nuts, I really do mean nuts. She used to plan her outfits in a little notebook months in advance and actually took pictures of them, so she wouldn't repeat elements.)

Susan and I were roommates during our sophomore year in a room so small that we could hold hands across the space between our beds as we slept at night if we wanted to. We shared the same tolerance level for mess and also shared a love of Target and the China Star. It was perfect. I threw whatever was handy when she snored in the middle of the night and she backed away slowly when she came home and my head was under the pillow with Pearl Jam (what she deemed "scary music") was cranked on the stereo. She taught me how to use chopsticks and shared her food.

I can't give you reasons for why Susan likes me or what I contributed to the relationship. I know that in my own insecurity, I mocked her lack of worldliness that was the product of a Geneseo upbringing. I assume I lorded my intelligence over her at various times. Hell, I stuck my head under the pillow and cranked Pearl Jam. That's reason enough to abandon a friendship, in my book.

But let me tell you why I loved Susan:

Susan laughed. Loudly, freely and often. The panicked darting of my eyes around the dining hall as I looked for a place to sit were calmed because I could hear her laughter while I was piling my tray with Turkey a la King and cake. Her laughter gave me the freedom to laugh, to throw my own joy defiantly in the face of the social judgment that felt so restrictive to me. That year, almost ten years ago now, we went to see Vance Gilbert for the first time. We sat at a coffeehouse table right in front of the stage and at some point, he stopped the story he was telling and peered down into the darkness demanding, "Who laughs like that? Hee hee hee. Like she's reading it out of a book. Really? That's your laugh?" Of course, once he singled her out, she about fell out of her chair, gasping for breath with tears running down her face. I've heard him tell that joke again in the past couple of years, but I swear to you that ten years ago, he was coming up with it for the first time with Susan as his inspiration.

Susan cried just as frequently. We had to put her out of the room one night when we were watching Anne of Green Gables because she sobbed so hard that we couldn't hear the next bits of the movie. But her tears were just as liberating to me as her laughter. Life was intense for Susan. She didn't protect herself by waiting until she got home to her mom to react emotionally to things. She didn't rationalize and explain. She just was. Life was full for her. It was an amazing thing to be a part of.

Susan had a completely different experience of life than I did and it was interesting to me. She grew up in rural Illinois with lots of different foster siblings, she had a car, she spent a year in Japan her junior year in high school which ratcheted up my admiration for her since I knew that I never could have done it. She dated several men who turned out to be gay and I was honored to go through their coming out experiences with her. She had been rowdy in high school, drinking and such. All of these were just enough different from my own religious Chicagoland suburban experience that she held my attention as absolutely as any book ever had.

Susan liked me. For whatever reason. I felt valued by her and could do nothing but respond in kind. With her radiant internal joy, she had her choice of people to be friends with and she picked moody, arrogant, difficult me to be her friend. How could I not love her? What's more, she let me be intelligent by wanting to learn about things I knew. She let me be funny by laughing at stories I told. She let me be worldly by deferring to my experiences. Once, we spent an evening synchronized vomiting, sitting up in our beds that were so close, because I had drunkenly told her that she needed to drink more. She explains that since I was always right, she drank more. Not only doesn't she hold any ill-will toward me for leading her astray that night, she changed my sheets when the garbage can I grabbed turned out to have a huge hole in the bottom. She's the perfect friend.

Junior year, Susan broke my heart by transferring to another school. The fact that I neither went all self-protective and cut her out of my life nor let our friendship drift through the apathy that distance almost always induces is telling. I don't know who was responsible for keeping up the relationship, but there are plenty of pictures from graduation to show that she thought I was important enough to come back to IWU for at least a day. Again, I'm baffled.

Now that I think about it, aside from the year and a half at school, Susan and I have never lived in the same place. Nearly ten years later, I still consider her my best friend. A year and a half doesn't seem very long at all to build the foundation for the friendship we still have.

Although Susan is still my best friend, I am not hers. And there is no sadness in this. Her friend Jess lives nearby and shares the day-to-day closeness that creates best friends. In the beginning of their friendship, Susan would always refer to Jess by her first name and referred to her often enough that I suspected something was up. But by the time she slipped and referred to her as her best friend, she got all weirded out and embarrassed, but I just shushed her and told her not to worry about it. Me! Little Miss Sensitive-and-Insecure! I'm that confident, though. She said it best after I shushed her, "We have history."

I can't give you reasons for why Susan still likes me. I asked her not to bring her boyfriend to my wedding, I still mock Geneseo, I barely and with reluctance admit that she was right when she said the Indigo Girls were lesbians, even though I insisted that she shouldn't just assume that intelligent, artistic, strong women were lesbians. For awhile there, I only called her when I was in tears to the point that she would have to wait for me to calm down enough to speak before she was sure that it was me. Have you ever had to wait for the person that has interrupted your life with a telephone call? Isn't that annoying?

But let me tell you why I still love Susan:

Susan still laughs and cries as easily as she ever did. I take comfort that sometimes life is predictable and that these emotional outbursts are what I can consistently expect means that life is actually pretty good.

Susan has been through some shit. Whereas I rolled along the expected path for a young, intelligent strong young woman and then crashed into a tree when I was 25, Susan veered off the path into the underbrush soon after she transferred schools (and I never once felt even the slightest tinge of shadenfreude) when she was 20 or so. She's had to hack at the hanging vines and tear through the brambles to get where she is now. I just had to pick myself up off the ground and shake the stars out of their orbit around my head. I think we've both found news paths that are relatively clear now, but, man, has it been tough to watch her sometimes. But . . .

Susan impresses me. She has spent the last ten years moving forward with grace and panache. Once she realized what she wanted, she sucked it up and went back to school to get it. She's starting her student teaching in the fall and will graduate next spring. You better believe that on May 27th, I'll be there to have my picture taken as a testimony to how important she is to me. She has coached speech for her high school, and loved it, a baffling achievement to me. She acts and directs in community theatre, not caring at all that sometimes the dinner theatre performances take place in a truck stop. She still doesn't care a whit for restrictive social judgment.

Susan cares for me. Just as she held my flowers so I could dry Dennis' tears when I took my wedding vows, she held my heart for me so I could answer the judge without crying when I got divorced. When I couldn't make the decision to leave the island, even though I really needed to, she compared my experience to her pivotal time in Japan, which put it all in perspective for me and let me move forward. She is often the person I call first when I'm so full of something that it must come out. For instance, when I was driving to a party full of people that I didn't know, I let out a giant fart at the very same moment that the traffic light I was stopped out went out. Since it lit back up as soon as I was out of the intersection, I couldn't stop laughing for the thought that I had blown out the stop light. But if I went to the party without telling someone who already had her mind made up about me, I would have told the story to strangers and the dice would have jumped back into the cup before they even hit the table. So, I called Susan. And she laughed.

Susan is beautiful. We went to see Vance Gilbert again (he's a running theme in our lives) at a house concert, so at intermission, we just walked up to him in the woman's dining room to talk to him. He reached out and held her face in his hands as he said, "You look like how a woman is supposed to look."

So, now someone else has spotted my beautiful Susan. I have not yet met Dan the Man, but I can be pretty protective of her, so he better be on his best with me. I have already sent her my favorite bridal book with an offer that she should use my craftiness and assertiveness however she needs to plan this wedding. Now, I know this whole post sounds like a bid for Maid of Honor but I swear to you it's not. And I have only been wrong twice in my entire relationship with Susan (see the aforementioned Indigo Girls and vodka/lemonade stories). Susan and I are totally comfortable with the fact that we honest-to-God don't remember each other's birthdays. She'll make the decisions she'll need to make and I will love her for every one. She tells me she is happy and that she told me the very next day is more than enough for me.

"Well I don't know but I've been told, you never slow down, you never grow old. I'm tired of screwin' up, tired of goin' down, tired of myself, tired of this town, Oh my, my, oh hell yes - Honey put on that party dress."
-Tom Petty, "Last Dance With Mary Jane"

accordions, lace & petite chablis

One of my favorite mix tapes from high school was when my brother had his stereo hooked up to the VCR and I had Han Solo responding to the anonymous rebel fighter's suggestion that "Your taun-taun will freeze before the first marker!" with "Then I'll see you in Hell!" I believe that I followed that with "Time Warp" from from Rocky Horror Picture Show which I had not yet seen but my brother had the LP and all my theater friends quoted it all the time. Actually, I had the chance to watch it on the tour bus for our choir spring break trip but I averted my eyes because it felt dirty and I didn't want to sully myself.

It's weird to think about who I used to be.

However, I still like making mixes.

So, when A. asked which of her readers wanted to do a mix CD swap, for nostalgia's sake, I jumped on the chance, even though my life is totally overwhelmed right now. I've made it as part of my sabbath rest day and it has given back my life force to be a compilation artist again for a few hours.



My mix recipient blogs at petitechablis.wordpress.com and gave me a blank slate upon which to download, writing, "I'm pretty omnivorous, and I love being exposed to new artists/genres that I don't usually listen to. My own collection runs heavily towards folk and indie rock (Dar Williams-ish)." Investigation on her blog let me know that she was a little sassy but the high frequency of references to computer gaming left me without much poetic inspiration, although I cheered when she wrote about how much she liked Snow Crash, one of my favorite books.

So, since her blog is named after a type of wine grape, I typed, "Wine" into my iTunes library and began the mix with a Tom T. Hall song called, "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine." Then, I used the technique I used in high school listening to one song (as it recorded onto the tape) and using that as inspiration while I search for the next. That guarantees that each song is related to the last but that the overall mix stays varied. I tried to throw in a few other songs about drinking, just to set a theme and used lots of strange covers and slightly obscure artists or recordings, like I always try to do when making mixes as gifts. No sense handing someone songs they already have, right? I also included a Vance Gilbert song since he is my favorite folks/indie rock artist and I love introducing people to him.

If you're interested in hearing snippets of these songs or purchasing any of them, I made an iMix and it is available by clicking on the tite of the mix below below. It's accordions, lace and petite chablis.

Air and Sun and Noodles

We praise God for the healthy delivery of Baby Shashi. She is 6 pounds and 4 ounces. She has my brother's blue eyes and Meena's nose.

Because the cord was wrapped around her neck, they needed to deliver her by c-section. All are healthy and well and already nursing.

I swear this baby was like a celebrity with everyone clamoring to have their picture taken with her.

This is my first niece. The first child of one of my brothers. I was just holding her for a little while like I hold all babies and then at some point I let myself actually think about who this baby was.

I had this very powerful emotion and can only think of the lyrics to a Vance Gilbert song to explain it to you.

There is a hope
That's been expressed in you
The hope of seven generations, maybe more
And this is the faith
That they invest in you
It's that you'll do one better than was done before.

Yesterday Daniel protested that he will fight for the right for his kid to live out the status quo.

Somehow, I don't believe he'll need to.

Thread through a needle

I have been working on a mix CD for my best friend entitled, "Aren't We Aging Well?" because of a Dar Williams song and it's got me thinking about emotions.

I have been thinking about so many mixes made in the past. Mixes made out of infatuation, mixes made out of grief. Mixes made for my car stereo and not to give as a gift because I wanted to wallow in their emotion and not feel as alone.

I made break-up mixes in honor of my college boyfriend that included the Indigo Girls singing Love-Struck Romeo and shouting in my heart, "But it was just a scene to you!" When I left my first job bitterly, I made a mix that highlighted Ani DiFranco's Million That You Never Made. I made a mix for my ex-husband before I knew our marriage was dead with Garth Brook's Rodeo mixed with Dolly Parton's Touch Your Woman inexplicably mixed with Aretha Franklin's Rock Steady because he still gave me joy but I couldn't say out loud that he was growing distant. After the divorce, I made a mix with the Rolling Stones's Sympathy for the Devil because I discovered it helped to put it on repeat and turn the stereo up - way up - in the car. My first mix for Jacob had Thao's Bag of Hammers because I really really wanted him to stay and not get on that interstate bus when the inevitable fights came up because I was so delighted with him and wanted it to work but knew that I was was like a bee sting sometimes.


The emotions that we make mixes to reflect are powerful. They inform our day to day living. We sing songs in our heads while swimming and driving and filing and we want those songs to be appropriate to our mood so we craft little soundtracks for ourselves or as gifts for others, trying to help them feel less alone and more loved. They are big emotions.

Now that I am married, I wonder if these big emotions get short shrift. Now that the break-ups are done, what is left to make mixes about? Logically, there should be plenty of stuff since big emotions are probably pretty evenly distributed throughout life and not front-loaded to life before marriage. I wonder if I bury them under the equally large but more culturally acceptable emotions of love and contentment. We all fall into the lie that life is a Disney movie that ends with a happily ever after and I wonder which parts of that I have not been unpacking.

I'm not asking for tragedy to strike but I think I need to start noticing other events in my life that need mix tapes. I have walking around in a low-grade rage for a couple of weeks after a lovely stint of calm and serenity brought on by intensified therapy. It has had me puzzled until I started to think about mix tapes. What lyrics are speaking to me in the music I'm listening to? For one thing, the other day I realized that I had never uploaded my Alanis Morrissette or Violent Femmes albums. That should tell you something about what my sub-conscious mind is asking for. The Dar Williams song above makes me cry every time because I feel both that I AM aging well but also that I'm not. The rest of Susan's mix that I'm working on now has some pretty hard-driven funk like the Chili Pepper's version of Higher Ground and Ida Maria's I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked but also has fun dance songs like Kermit and Fozzie singing Movin' Right Along.

So, what emotions am I brushing off because they seem less important than happily ever after emotions when really they deserve their own mix tapes? Well, I have stopped engaging a dear, dear friend of mine because we had a blow-out and she insists on treating me like a monster that she doesn't feel safe with unless she hides behind email or has a mediator in the room. I can't handle being the bad guy for her anymore. There is real sadness mixed with real relief there but I don't know how to process it. Or, out of his own intense emotions, Jacob said something deeply insensitive on Friday. We have talked about it and grown closer but I find that the wound still stings. Also, I feel pretty unsuccessful in my interactions with folks in a variety of communities, like I am not navigating well the narrow line between being myself and not offending or upsetting others.

None of these powerful emotions are really attached to an inciting incident that would typically be noticed in the story arc of a normal life. I mean people all around me are having babies and moving and dealing with cancer, for Heaven's sake. I would have expected that the emotions associated with my situations would flare and then dissipate since they are not as huge as, say, getting married. They are part of day-to-day living, not events.

But as I think about mixes, about soundtracks, these little tensions inform everything I do when I succeed at being present in the now. Like the WS Merwin poem says, they are "like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with [their] color."


This will require me to change the lens on the camera aimed at my inner landscape. I'm so tired. I would love to just be. How does one take a vacation from the continual process of fitting a chipped cog into the broken machine that is this world? Maybe not so strangely, I have been finding comfort in a Vance Gilbert song: Your Brighter Day.