Evening Comes Always

Well, America has made it through President's Day weekend without fully imploding. I almost don't believe it myself, but it is only February 18.

I actually had a totally different post written this morning. I had been feeling the ill effects of no blogging time over this long stretch of week or weeks. My work situation has been pretty much foremost on my mind --having enough work, my relationship to work, and the income I've lost as a result of letting someone else control my destiny. (Of course, I'm ok with that, because someone else also is responsible for my health care at the moment.) For a while it had seemed as though I had lost my ability to dream, to enjoy the things that keep me more human, to dare. Just keeping the wheels on the bus moving is enough. Or, so I thought.

This morning I had written another boring litany of things gone wrong, things we all have to deal with now and then. But as I rode into the sunset on the way home from a pretty interesting day, I realized, it really just doesn't matter. Things will always have a way of going wrong. Right now, a lot of people just feel piled up on by things gone wrong. At the moment, it's the new normal. And at some point, they will start to turn right again.


And while I hope that we never forget, or let those responsible forget, how we all got into this mess, and hope even harder that we all find a way out of it in one piece, at the end of the day, life will go on. We will go on with it. There will be in the middle of the grayest gloomiest twighlight a moment of everyday brilliance, like the kids who toilet papered the Madoff house. We all can exude such brilliance. We all need to act more decisively like those kids. To push back a bit, call a spade a spade, not get knocked over by the inconceivable stupidity and ugliness that rears its head sometimes as though without pause. Because there is always a pause, and that's the moment that belongs to the rest of us.
Now that Valentine's Day is behind us -- and my kids and I actually had a great day, thanks -- we can concentrate on one of our favorite holidays, St. Patrick's Day. My kids have taken to the legends and music of Ireland as well as the people and the food, what little they've tasted of it. In a few years I'd really like to take them there, as part of a trip to Europe I have in mind to celebrate Son of Mando's high school graduation. Meanwhile we'll just have to enjoy our bangers and mash and corned beef and cabbage while listening to someone we adore, like John Doyle.

John's a badass guitar player, but I love him best for his renditions of old songs. He is a master, and turned me on early in my attraction to bluegrass and early American music to the Child ballads and to a magical place called www.mudcatcafe.com, where you can pretty much find any version of any lyric or song you ever knew. I hope you'll pour yourself a Jameson's or Guiness and enjoy this lovely traditional tune, My Parents Reared Me Tenderly, from John's Evening Come's Early cd. (True Irish music diehards like Fearless will point out that John was the guitarist for the band, Solas, before going solo.) Taking in this ballad, you realize that all the beauty hasn't really gone out of the world, nor from all the people in it.