For the Love of Bluegrass

Banging on the Walls of Time

2010-01-10T20:57:00.001-05:00

This is the kind of day I’ve known was coming. The rush of the holidays, the frenetic re-organizing to put everyone back on a schedule for work and school gives way at the first opportunity to the gentle unpacking of things hidden in the mind’s boxes.

This has been coming. Coming on for a while, perhaps. Little signs, like my surprising if slight disdain for the distinction of “Comedy” for “It’s Complicated,” the holiday movie that should make every happily single woman wonder.

Then there were other things, like a couple of friends who spotted a Top Ten Bluegrass Albums List for 2009 – this slipped by me like a greased pig. I was touched that they both mentioned it; Doc even took a minute to type it up and send it my way. (I don’t think he really needed the Bluegrass tutorial that followed but maybe he can pass it on to a banjo fan or something.)

Little things, like putting away the Christmas decorations to a bluegrass album and having to stop every few minutes, tune the mando, and sing along.

Little things, like pulling out a few old poems to send to a friend who is holding down the fort, making a last stand for a poet laureate of my hometown.

Little things, like how long its been since love came calling, or since I sent her out to play.

I opened my eyes this morning after a great show at The Kent Stage last night and the sun was bright. I slept much longer than usual since I stayed up past my bedtime watching videos of first-run Sondheim shows. In my mind I was already going back in time. Today I went back further and it knocked me on my ass for a while, but it was needed.

It’s been coming on.

I believe I spent the last year entirely engulfed in some sort of numbing state, under the spell of survival. I also got into a very comfortable place that put a lid on the amount of exploration I allowed myself in almost every area of my life. I blame this on a false preoccupation with many things, none of which is ever as important as nurturing the authentic self.

After today, I realize that the exploring I need to do is not necessarily the kind best shared. Some of it is about the path forward and what to bring along. I thought I was done unearthing all that in 2002 and 2003; it turns out I wasn’t finished.

All things in the perfect time, is what the Dalai Lama would say. It’s all perfect; things happen when they need to and because we’re ready. Even the bad stuff is “perfect”. Whatever we do, where ever we are at the moment, is what it is and therefore perfect in that way.

So I guess in that regard, today was a perfect day. It was the perfect day to acknowledge that I have a fireplace that goes unused and unshared too often. It was the perfect day to acknowledge that after spending the last several years pimping bluegrass, I have friends who now want to indulge and that I need to get my ass in gear to do that. It was the perfect day to acknowledge that I need to find a way to sing, long and loud and blue. It was the perfect day to retype up old poems and send them to a friend, acknowledging the process that went into those, the person I was then. Resurrecting the author.

So I guess I spent the better part of the day knocking on the Walls of Time. I am not one to look back; once it’s done, it’s done, and most of the time for good reason. But this was different; I peeked inside boxes I had not looked into in a long time, and it was purposeful. Rather than shuffling the boxes around to suit my routine, I opened them up, and pulled out the contents. That stuff has been in there since long before bluegrass stole and then broke my heart. Now it’s all together, out on my table, and I am piecing it together so that this year I can put forth the most complete person I can.

I’ve been in and out of my CD collection this weekend since I still haven’t settled on an appropriate dock system for my iPod. One of my favorites is the Pete Rowan/Tony Rice recording of a couple years ago, “Quartet.” Some small part of me is in love with Pete Rowan, his shadow and his beautiful unique voice, and his long love affair with the music. He formed his first bluegrass band in high school when he was thirteen. In the mid-1960s he played and sang with Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys. He’s the real deal with a side of Just Be Yourself, a traditional sideman with a side of groundbreaking for progressive bluegrass players.

This is probably my all time favorite Monroe era song, “Walls of Time.” As Rowan tells in this clip, he wrote it with Big Mon. Its mournful and almost seductive trail has that high lonesome sound imbued with a longing and desire that belies the roots of bluegrass, not as Sunday Jamboree playlist fodder but as the music of a people who lived and loved hard and long and were not easily torn apart. This is a wonderful rendition by Rowan supported by the unmatched Tony Rice.

If I recalled anything today, it’s that I come from those people. My family came off the boat from Cornwall and then crawled up from the tidewater of Virginia through the hills and mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This was their music, and now it is mine. Maybe they’ll hear me through these walls of time, and help me as I try to reach back through time to make myself whole and useful and unapologetically loving in this world before I go.

Winter's Come and Gone (if only)

2010-01-08T21:41:00.001-05:00

Clearly I am getting back into this blogging thing in fits and starts. I suppose it's better than none at all, and it feels fun when I do finally set myself down and write a word or two.

Not seven or eight feet away is a heap of Christmas lights on my floor, and the cruel winter wind is howling outside my window. But I got distracted. Some of you who are parents may be familiar with the children's books based on a little mouse..."If You Give A Mouse a Cookie," "If You Make a Pig a Pancake" and so forth. Well, I'm a bit like that little mouse. I had Donna Hughes in the CD player, and started singing. Then I started trolling the web for Donna Hughes. When I found a short vid of Donna Hughes at an IBMA showcase, then I wanted to see all the videos for IBMA showcases. When I saw the IBMA showcases, I saw a video for Dailey and Vincent. When I played the Dailey and Vincent IBMA performance from the last IBMA I attended, I got curious about a list my friend Dr. Don and my neighbor both mentioned about the Top Ten Bluegrass Albums of 2009. When I remembered that, I wanted more Dailey and Vincent, who made the list with their second Rounder release, "Brothers from Different Mothers." And then I wanted a song from the CD to share with all of you.

Today was the first snow day of the year -- and it was a big disappointment. My daughter was desperate for her first night of skiing, but with school canceled, no ski club. And while the wind is howling and we did get fairly pounded with snow last night, there's little swirling around now. Just the cold and the drear as the Christmas lights lay in a heap on the floor.

But this little old much recorded tune will warm you right up. Dailey and Vincent are tops in harmony singing; I've often said here and elsewhere that Jamie Dailey has one of the most beautiful voices anywhere let alone in Bluegrass. Paired with Darrin Vincent (Rhonda's brother), they really have hit the mark. This probably explains how they swept the IBMA awards in 2008.

Enjoy this short, sweet little tune, "Winter's Come and Gone," something most of us can only dream of. And if you have the chance to catch this duo, you won't be disappointed. And if you hear Dailey and Vincent, you'll probably want a little more bluegrass. And if you want more bluegrass, feel free to circle right back here and check out some of the older postings on this blog.

Blue Moon, Blue Decade

2009-12-31T21:52:00.001-05:00

I don’t think I’ve talked to a single person or know anyone who is sorry at all to see 2009 ushered out. For most of us, it seems 2010 can’t come quickly enough. Between the economic crisis, major life changes, or just the exhaustion of tiptoeing along the precipice of employment, home ownership, or simple liquidity, this was probably not the year most of us expected. In fact I haven’t yet seen the year I’ve been expecting. But if the last few weeks is any indication, 2010 might finally be it.

This is not to say that there weren’t some good things in 2009. There were. It brought lovely things for some good friends—one friend in particular outdid us all by getting married, pregnant, and relocated cross-country all within seven or eight short months! Like many of his cousins before him, my son became a Marching Band Kid, alto sax, doing his grandma proud. After a wobbly trial run last year, my daughter blossomed in her second year of gymnastics, with a serious I’ve not seen in her before. At the crossroads of three different jobs I led my first full solo search, and by all reports it was wildly successful for the client, which couldn’t make me happier.

The year 2009 also saw for the most part an end to some of my generosity and tolerance. I am hardened in new ways, my open heart and compassion tested and broken. It’s not my way but I had to get real. Life was tenuous and uncertain enough and the news around the world got worse and worse. Like many folks, I was tossed several unnecessary loads of crap, as were a few other close friends, and I regret now that I put up with it. So when it happened again as my dear sister-in-law was beginning chemotherapy and as my own sister was beginning immunotherapy for a list of newly discovered allergies a mile long on top of hitherto undetected severe chronic asthma, the trick was laid bare like my own bare and open heart, like a sin I’d been accomplice to. Inside, the snap was almost audible, like a thrown switch in a dark theatre that brings the lights up. That’s the end of that soliloquy.

Life in any decade has its moments, its pitfalls and victories, gains and losses, status quo stretches and life changing ordeals. Each year we grow, we adapt, we learn, we see, we are given countless opportunities to succeed or fail and to see each of those through our own eyes. So even when it sucks, life is rich, even glorious.

Tonight is a blue moon, a second full moon in the same month. How fitting for the New Year’s Eve of one of the most tumultuous decades in history, and the most tumultuous yet for me. I lost a baby, a mother, a mother-in-law, a marriage, but gained or regained so very much – wisdom, freedom, consciousness, clarity, soulfulness, self-esteem, self-sufficiency, the glorious gift of an opportunity to share my authentic life with my children, and my own true self. For all of these and for the friends and family who saw me through and help me realize them, I am deeply, deeply grateful.

I am so pleased to share with you this video of Vince Gill, whom I was lucky enough to catch in his return to bluegrass mode last year at IBMA (which I won’t be missing again). He’s a fine mando picker, and I’ve always loved his voice. This night I think about this song and the music and how completely transformed and restored I am because of it. Tonight after a lost year I rededicate a part of myself to its success, its people, and its rightful place in our cultural heritage.

My true wish for you and your loved ones is a healthy, meaningful, and prosperous new year and new decade.

Like It Or Not, Christmas Time's A Comin!

2009-12-12T22:50:00.001-05:00

Well, it's officially the holidays. The tree is up, one kid has already done his school concert and another is this coming week, just about all the gifts are acquired and some even wrapped, and this evening I wandered into that fourth dimension where I do my baking. All last weekend we ushered in the season with good friends and food and some laughs together. Despite everything -- the war, the economy, a most trepidatious year of my own, and the inexplicable constant and extremely annoying presence of Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney, neither of whom are Vice President -- I find myself in a merry mood. Not a whole lot has changed, but maybe because it's been such a hellacious year I feel it's more important than ever to make the best use of these precious holiday times.

Everyone who knows me knows I love to bake. It's a sickness in my family, actually, but I'm trying to be a bit more restrained because it is a lot of work and I don't want to be in the kitchen the entire brief time the kids are home before Christmas. So I determined to kickoff the baking tonight while listening to WKSU. At some point I decided I needed a little more mando in the kitchen monitor and was poking around, and stumbled across this good old bluegrass Christmas tune sung here by just about my favorite Person of Bluegrass, Tim O'Brien. That's a fine lineup there with Bryan Sutton, Ol Danny Barnes on the banjer and Mr. Dennis Crouch on the base. While I line up my recipes for tomorrow's marathon, grab yourself an eggnog or a dance partner and turn up your speakers!

Let's Find Out

2009-12-08T21:53:00.003-05:00

Well, MandoMama asked Santa for a GPS this year, but he couldn't find one with Buddy Woodward's voice.

That's ok. At 44, I'm finally enjoying life with a little less navigation. Lord knows the last year has been full of twists and turns for all of us, but for me anyway, at the moment the road seems to be evening out just a little, either that or I'm just a more confident driver. Maybe it's a combination.

There's something to wandering, to getting a little lost, that is a little terrifying and yet, we want to know, to find out, whether we can make it. The meltdown of the economy was a tragic but near-wholly preventable catastrophy that led to the ruin of many everyday Americans. It also called into sharp relief how even the perceptibly stable can be pulled under by what might be a minor health crisis in a normal economy. Data show that more bankruptcies are being sought because of medical bills than any other reason. YOu can have a good job but still not be able to pay your medical bills thanks to the insatiable greed of the pretend health care system of HMOs.

So you just have to keep going. Everyday people who do good work and keep their heads above water and pay all our bills on time, we're just always some crisis away from disaster. I stopped looking back a long time ago, although I don't take kindly at all to people who try to make it any harder than it has to be, that's for sure. And there's always someone who'd like to see you have it just a little bit harder, who'd like to see you fail.

And what if you do? What does that mean to you? What are your expectations? Mine are to take the lessons of the last year and completely transform my relationship to work. Unless a match is made in a heaven I don't know about, I will probably never work for another pasty monolithic corporation. Don't let them fool you. It's all about the headcount. And my ability to contribute was completely, entirely dismissed. We've made more progress in the last two months than we did the last twelve with the supposed help of a giant company. It's crap.

There's been a lot of attention paid to the fact that after taking it in the arse for their fat and happy corporate masters, some folks are biting the entrepreneurial bullet, and loving it. Sometimes, you just have to try to make your own way and be the bread on the table. That takes a lot of risk, but you know, musicians, the folks who make our lives bearable and who put themselves out there day after day, sweating and toiling in the studio and on the stage to make us smile for a couple of hours, well, that's how they live.

The last year took a toll on me not just financially but because I was so focused on preventing an overdraft and juggling what at one point was three different but related part-time jobs under one roof, my involvement in music had to take a back seat to keeping the trains running and making sure my kids were whole. In fact I'd say it sat several rows back as events, concerts, and even my quiet time with the mando slipped away. That's starting to turn again. I'm finding that I missed talking about this music, dragging all of you along for some musical journey and sharing the joy that music brings me and so manyh others. I am still committed to contributing to a roots music community with more vitality here at home, building awareness and interest and most importantly participation. It would be fun to play and actually, to sing again. The veil of worry and doubt over my eyes last year would never have allowed me to think that way.

But nothing is cut and dried. You can make all the plans you want but in the end you control nothing. Not a thing, except how you react to what happens to you and what you do with what you're handed. It's all about the journey and what you make of it not just for yourself, but for others.

The Dixie Bee-Liners gave us a spectacular new effort this year. Susanville is the Bee-Liners' brand new, bold and brave adventure, a regular road trip through the complex emotions of the constant cycle of being lost and found again. That's another way to describe the road we're all on, the road of life. You might think you know what's around the bend until you blow a tire or you get sick or someone you love leaves you along the way. You might stop in some little town for a quick bite to eat and end up staying 20 years. You might unpack your new place only to realize it's not where you belong at all. You never know. You just have to find out. It's a lot more fun with good music so take the Bee-Liners along on your next adventure.

Find Out

from Susanville, released on Pinecastle Records, Nov. 2009

You can take the girl out of the Rivertown...

2009-12-06T14:34:00.001-05:00

I spent Friday night enjoying a spectacular show by this two-time Grammy nominated band The Greencards. I hadn't been out to hear enough live music in the last few months to put in my pinky finger, so the show was a really great treat.

This is one of my fave tunes from the night. Over the summer I reconnected with a lot of folks and family downhome who finally hooked up with Facebook (really, I'm not much for all those games but it's nice to check in with the nieces, nephews etc). As far away as I feel it amazes me that there are people I grew up with who still live in my little river town. This tune is for them, and for all our conflicted love of the place we just can't ever quite get away from completely, probably because we don't really want to.

Hey Tiger, Take it From the Greencards--There Must Be 50 Ways to...Well...

2009-12-02T18:57:00.001-05:00

I'm so disappointed. No need to say more, right?

Gonna put down my nine-iron and head to The Kent Stage this Friday night to hear this kick-grass sensation, The Greencards.

8 p.m., Tickets $20.

Thankful to Be Closer to Throwing 2009 Over the Cliff!

2009-11-29T21:10:00.001-05:00

Haven’t been here in quite a little while. Autumn has raced nearly away. Here we find ourselves already at Advent, which I used to usher in as part of a choir that did a proper Lessons and Carols (and a proper Sherry a few weeks later to listen to the tapes and drink, well, lots of sherry). There’s been no advent wreath on my table for quite some time, but I still look forward to the change of season and the music that comes with it. We even woke up to a bit of snow on Friday morning after Thanksgiving, which was perfectly seasonal.

I am going to be glad to say goodbye to 2009. With all the good there’s been an equal amount of trouble of one kind or another, and in some cases not so much trouble as constant motion. But as the year winds down there are mostly good things in view. Work looks to be generous and all for us; earlier in the fall, the firm we joined last year left me for dead and my boss with an ultimatum to move to a smaller office and he emphatically declined. The relief we all felt at being loose of that ball and chain can hardly be described. Even my kids were thrilled. And I am too, as I love to be gainfully busy.

At the same time it’s been a really wonderful year for my children, who extended their horizons a bit and enjoyed a few new pursuits. Whatever else is going on in the world or in my life, my only real concern is that they are happy, healthy, and growing inside and out. So far, other than a few speed bumps, so good.

We just celebrated our Second Annual Pajama Thanksgiving. It’s the one day out of the year when the kids and I just stop everything and hang out together. Sure, I do a lot of cooking, but everybody helps. That leaves more time for games, talking, watching a movie, whatever we feel like doing. And we generally do it in our pajamas. It's the perfect way to ring in the holidays, and even better knowing we'll still be stuffed and fast asleep when the crazies get up to shop at 2 a.m.

Those are golden moments, and moments like now when I’m sitting in my quiet house writing and listening to Alice’s Restaurant. I can’t remember the last time I heard this, but it’s a pretty wonderful romp. Better with a slice of leftover pumpkin pie and a little wine, perhaps. So grab yourself some leftovers of your favorite kind, too, and welcome in the holidays with a bit of this Guthrie classic.

Anyone for pie?

Down River

2009-09-17T21:29:00.001-05:00

There are things I have seen or heard these last few weeks that no person ought to see or hear without having been properly sedated. Mark Twain wrote that when we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. Unfortunately, I've come to that point in my life when much of the time, I don't really care to have an explanation, so the mystery and the madness are just more things I could do without.

Life remains essentially good. if parts are yet unexplained. Other parts of it are tiresome to be sure, but that's always the case. With the start of school came new energy, a shift toward achieving whatever can reasonably be achieved, from keeping whatever jobs one has to trying new things. In our little home we seem to be in constant motion. But it's fun, most of the time. My oldest is now in the marching band and it is as wonderful to watch him enjoy it with the other kids as it is to appreciate how great they sound. The younger one is acclimating to a new school, new feelings, new ways of expressing herself, new routines, growing older and accepting all that comes with that. It's been a time for change to be sure.

I have missed writing. I've had plenty to write about, but not the time, or the quiet, or really the proper space, mental or otherwise. Last week while on a business trip in Hartford, I had a few minutes to walk the grounds of Twain's home, and that of his neighbor Harriett Beecher Stowe. This was a good moment for my tired little soul. I didn't have quite enough time to tour inside either home, so I visited the Stowe center, found my way around the Nook Farm neighborhood, lingered a little in the Twain bookstore (well guarded by a life-size Lego figure of Twain), and stood in a little awe of that famously red Victorian beauty with the deep porch and the atrium in the back filled even today with lots of lush green plants. It suddenly occurred to me that here in this very northern town -- much of my previous day had been replete with Rhode Islanders and the accent that goes with them -- was at home a man born and bred alongside the Mississippi, whose heart was all about riverboats and the songs that go with them but whose mind worked best here in this nook-and-cranny Yankee hub. I had to stop, and admire that. He was at his most prolific there in that Hartford home where he also was beset with such tragedy as might kill the rest of us.

Just before my trip I spent a wonderful weekend in the mid-Atlantic with extended family. They are happy and prosperous. I decided there is no reason not to be. And so setting out on my New England adventure just two days later, I determined my trip should be easy and successful, and it was.

The rest isn't that easy. People are unpredictable, and the things that happen to us, just as unpredictable. We don't wake up expecting to hear good news or bad news or something just so downright stupid that it alters the course of a day. But that's generally what happens. We just forget. And when something good does happen, we don't believe or accept it because we're so used to being suspicious or afraid of our own success.

When I think about someone like Mark Twain, I think too about all the pain he had in his life. He could have been a complete failure, and I think he tried for this a number of times. But his humor and his enormous passion never let him down. He had an open heart, that man, and a wit to make the most of it. Someday I'd like to visit Hannibal, Missouri to see where he spent the early days of his life, his formative years. There is something about growing up along the river that changes a person. It makes those of us who did a little bit impossible.

Music, in particular string band music, seems to set right with Twain and other river-bred folks. Although he is a literary man he's got a heartful of my kind of music. He wrote: "When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!"

Can't say it any better than that, really. And I can't think of anyone to celebrate the notion than the late, great Mr. John Hartford. Here he is, so much younger than I've seen him, with a modern concoction called Steamboat Whistle Blues.

If Hartford and Twain had been contemporaries, I imagine they would have been friends, too. I wish I had such heroes now, but maybe they make better muses.

Another Year Taller

2009-08-05T21:17:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow when I wake up, my baby girl will be nine years and one hour old.

Kids are the greatest lesson ever invented. As my mother warned both my sister and I, having a daughter is the most amazing challenge and gratifying experience a mother can have. So far her words have been proven true. Headstrong like every other woman in my family (and after a few in her dad's too!), she definitely marches to the beat of her own drum. For pretty much every minute of the last nine years, she's kept me on my toes, even when she wasn't right under my nose (or feet).

Now she is truly coming into a new age, a silly, leggy skinny thing with a voice we all recognize as a cross between Greta Garbo and Ed Asner. She somehow dances along with the winds of fate. By that, I mean, on a path paved with bird poop, she is humming and dancing along to the tune in her head (it could be anything, really) and still manages to miss the poop every time. Lordy if only we all had that skill.

Blessings on you, little one, getting taller every day. I know you'll stay forever young.

Judge Not

2009-07-14T21:11:00.001-05:00

A man rejects the opportunity to be near his father while his mother lay dying. Years later he chastises his father for living.

We all have had the misfortune of bumping into the occasional self-appointed Moral Arbiter of the Universe. Mark Sanford is my recent favorite public persona of this unbecoming dread archetype. Sanford, a blistering right-winger from the deep Bible belt, campaigned vigorously against the Stimulus package and rejected the funds that his citizens sorely needed. He also vocally led the impeachment cry when Clinton had his missteps. And now he’s a weeping mess, all strung out over his soul mate while his political career disintegrates before our eyes.

Eventually, we all have to pay the price, and for some it will be steep. The process of projecting our mistakes, our choices, our misshapen values and secret lives onto the real lives of others happens all the time when we are troubled or uncomfortable. I’ve been either subject or witness to this phenomenon more frequently in the last several months and when I realize what’s happening, it literally turns my stomach.

Recently I had been called to petit jury duty, but was never asked to report. While I was a little disappointed, I was more relieved. The idea that a stranger’s guilt or innocence might depend on my ability to judge him or her based on evidence, and not circumstance, was worrisome. The juror has only the facts presented to work with, or so I assume. But that wouldn’t stop me from wanting to understand the mitigating circumstances, the whole picture. For some, the whole picture amounts only to a sliver of what the rest of us might see, but it’s the sliver that they know best and so therefore it’s become their truth -- the limiting belief upon which they hang their decisions. If we all continued to limit ourselves to our own perspective in such a way, we might still be convinced the world is flat.

As I get older, the one thing of which I am quite certain is how uncertain I am about most things. My dear son gets quite vexed with me when I tell him I’m not sure what it is I believe about religion. He wants me to declare myself, and I can’t get him to quite understand that certain things are more journey than absolute. I am wary of absolute. There really are very few things that fall into that category, and I would wager most of my belongings that our frail human judgment is not one of them.

We have all these recent deaths of famous people who represent various archetypes – the Pitch Man, the Iconoclastic American Beauty, the Tormented Artist, the Star Athlete (sorry, I can’t really think of one for Karl Malden) and then we have the figurative death in Mark Sanford’s career and the death of the traditional Southern GOP platform with it. As disgusted as I was by some of these, I never once felt the urge to pontificate as I might have even a few short years ago. Who the hell am I to do so? I’m nobody, and everybody, plenty far from perfect. Outside of the guidance I try to provide my kids on the decisions they make as they emerge into adults, I have no control over anyone else’s behavior, nor do I have any claim to authority over it. At the end of the day we all poop about the same (with a few exceptions I’ll spare you here). And we all end up the same, eventually, although opinions vary widely on what happens after that.

A few weeks ago hanging out with my dear family and friends, we dug a good many Indigo Girls tunes. This one is off their latest effort, "Poseidon and the Bitter Bug,' which has acoustic versions of all the tracks. This is one of my two faves, hope you enjoy it, even if the banjo is missing.

By and By

2009-07-01T21:14:00.001-05:00

Halleluia the kids and I are getting the hell out of town. there are about a hundred and one things that have been on my mind that I've been wanting to write about, but there just hasn't been the time. So much seems to be going on. But just because I'm trapped in the hamster ball doesn't mean I'm not paying attention, no siree.

Meanwhile this weekend brings a long awaited and very badly needed visit with my dear sister and her family along with some of my best friends, my extended family, people so special to me it's like having an extra couple of siblings. When I get to worrying about things and start to complain I stop and count the blessings in my life. The people I'll be hanging out with this weekend are in the top six.

I miss writing. I miss taking a part a subject that matters, or that matters to me. I miss introducing people to music and artists. But I'll get back around to that. I even picked a bit with my brother and another guy from his band last weekend. Meanwhile it's get through each week and try to enjoy what's around us all. This song goes well with that, It's really right now about the by and by. We all need to let it go and just do what we can each day to get to the next day. By and by, as it were. No drama, just living.

Have a happy Fourth. I'll be celebrating my independence and wishing America a better birthday next year.

All Worth It, for a Night Like This

2009-06-11T16:44:00.001-05:00

I've missed this legend every time he's come through Cleveland. And I'm not going to miss him again. As my summer plans turn into what largely constitutes a staycation situation, these are the escapes that keep me in one piece.

If you are unfamiliar with the extraordinary contribution and talent that is Richard Thompson, do check him out.

Tomorrow (June 12), The Kent Stage, 175 East Main, Kent. 8 p.m.

Rearview....Clear View

2009-06-02T20:34:00.004-05:00

Now. Tell me how many of you really did NOT see Susan Boyle's breakdown coming?

For the last week or so I've been reminded why I don't really hang out with TV anymore. Sure, I miss Keith Olbermann and a few other choice delights, and I do try to remember to plug in for 30 Rock and the occasional episode of somethingorother. But the last week, with the American Idol drama ("Will the REAL gay singer please stand up?"), the Cavs hype, baseball, that Joe and Kate family (honestly, I didn't know who they were until a friend explained it to me over the weekend) and the hockey frenzy, you really can't swing a hard-cover book without smacking someone who's all uptight about something that happened not in their life but that they watched on TV.

Poor Susan Boyle. Exhausted? No shit. So am I, by America's endless, driven hunger for bullshit. A genuine bonfire of vanities. So much of it so meaningless. I know that a lot of people really enjoy that but the degree of real despair over one or more of these televised events is what disturbs me.

I wonder if that's what got Susan in the end. Suddenly pushed over the precipice of success, she was driven nearly mad by the demand to continue to perform. The world of the unsung flung its Shadow over Susan, the great hope of the underdogged talent, but she withered under its tremendous weight. It's not the first time we've seen this happen. She's lucky she got off the ride when she did. Just today there was news of more Marilyn Monroe photos. Will we ever let that poor, miserable woman rest in peace? I bet I know what you're thinking: "Why...so....serious?" Precisely.

If Americans were less concerned with other people and their success, if we all just stuck our noses back into our own business and started to dig out of the holes we'd dug for ourselves, what a country this might be. But we continue to be a country of blamers, a society in which nothing is ever really your fault -- it's the fault of your parents, your teachers, your ex, your elected officials, your poor fortune. Some days, I wonder how we manage to wipe our own arses.

Let's stop this. Just for one night, turn off the damn TV and read a book, play with your child, sing a song, WRITE a song, take the dog to the park, make pancakes for your sweetheart for dinner, pick a tune. Make it your life for a change, a life that is genuine and beautiful to you. Quit chasing, waiting for someone else to come along and light up your night, fix your problems, make you happy, let you get away with fooling yourself. Do the work yourself, enjoy the rewards, learn from the pitfalls.

When you look back, at least you'll know, this life was genuinely, authentically, yours.

In My Life

Make A Bee-Line for the Beachland This Thursday

2009-05-31T21:15:00.003-05:00

It must be all the pollen in the air because the Dixie Bee-Liners are coming back to Northeast Ohio this Thursday night, June 4, after they warm folks up over at the legendary Ark in Michigan.

These fine folks have so much going for them and have written or co-written some wonderful songs, but last they plowed through Ohio in January, they pulled off some old standards that had me up and outta my seat--in a good way. The Bees also gave themselves permission to dazzle us with some instrumentals so I hope if they're out there they'll do it again! This one, "Walls of Time," is to me, as loyal musically motivated readers will already know, just about my favorite all-time standard time Bluegrass tune. I can't wait to share singing it with pickers somewhere down my own crooked road.

For local folks, visit www.beachlandballroom.com for details on the 8 p.m. show. Y'all check out www.dixiebeeliners.com to find out whether they'll be buzzin' your way during their Textual Activity Tour.

See you there!

The Infamous Stringdusters - Rivers

2009-05-16T10:32:00.001-05:00

Wow, where have I BEEN? Just found out these favorites of mine are playing TONIGHT at THE WATERLOO CAFE, up near the Beachland Ballroom, in Cleveland. Show time 8 p.m., only ten bucks. That's recession-friendly bluegrass.

Just a couple weeks ago I felt a little down having drifted away from music as I've been on the hamster wheel or waiting for the other shoe to drop. I've already called off my IBMA trip this year in favor of a couple badly needed new appliances. But yesterday morning early, before I went to work, I answered the call of my mando and pulled it out to pick a little while before it was time to go. It's time to get back on that, and to take a look around to appreciate all that's happening right here in Ohio. More could be happening if I put my mind to it. Ohio's got plenty of bluegrass and bluegrass fans. It's going to be fun getting around and meeting more of them, and maybe pickin' a little this summer.

This is a tune I can appreciate. I grew up in the Valley by the River, so to speak, and I guess it makes sense that I can't get enough of this music. Be sure to see these guys when they come to a waterin' hole near you.

And I Thought They's From Virginia!

2009-05-14T21:18:00.001-05:00

Well it's just about the end of another week on the hamster wheel. I've been too busy to sit down and tell you all about the surprise of my life Saturday night when I headed over to the Kent Stage to check out the John "I grew up in Solon" Cowan show. Prior to John's show the audience was treated to a set by JP and the Chatfield Boys, who hail not from Virginia but from the Southwest side of Cleveland. But these bluegrass cats play like they are straight from Clinch Mountain. I was mighty impressed and although this vid isn't the best, I hope you will check them out. I certainly plan to catch up with JP and the C boys whenever I can. Get on over to their MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/chatfieldboys to hear more genuine fine pickin' and barn-burning bluegrass grown right here in Northeast Ohio!

Angel Eyes, John Cowan Band

2009-05-09T11:12:00.001-05:00

Or, try this...

Time for a Music Break

2009-05-09T07:05:00.005-05:00

Here it is, the Saturday before Mother's Day already. Where is the time going? Man, when you step off the hamster wheel for even a moment it feels like you'll never catch up. But if you don't get off that crazy thing, there won't be any you left to do the catching up.

It's hard nowadays because if you're lucky enough to have a job or two you don't want to appear as though you're not grateful for that. But the flip side is trying to stay human. Some days I feel like I don't work hard enough, and others I look back on the last few months and ask myself where I've gone.

But then there are moments like this one, early on the weekend, my daughter finishing up her breakfast and talking about what happened at school, like the duck that just had 12 babies. That's a lot of babies, and fortunately that duck has a bunch of devoted third graders to help out.

At some point this week I told friends that my anxiety about the economy is tied to the fact that while on paper I technically should be doing fine, it's the knowledge, or fear, that at any moment, more than half of what is on paper will dry up in a hurry. That's what makes this era different. And it's an era I've been living in for six months. To think that I know people who have been out of work for more than a YEAR -- how in the world are they coping? It didn't occur to me to acknowledge this very real fear and how it colors my perception in approaching most every decision that involves any money. And yet, there never have been any guarantees, for anyone, regardless. Does the knowledge I have now of the way things are, or the fact that I've experienced partial job loss, mean that those possibilities weren't there before? Of course not. Like most people I ambled through my days doing a good job and hoping that the stability of my industry would hold up. It didn't. And it may get worse before it gets better. Most of my days are spent with my colleagues trying to figure out how to prevent that.

I still worry about the near future, but I'm trying to take a deep breath. I did my resume last weekend, and it reminded me that I'm really pretty good at what I do. I can probably do some of the kinds of things I do for different kinds of organizations, too. Or I can try something new. The other shoe may still be out there somewhere; we are likely to scale back our summer plans to accommodate my unease. At the same time we drink in the beauty of now, and try to take advantage of the ways we can enjoy all that's in front of us.

As spring wears on and brings longer, warmer days to my part of Ohio, it's hard for even the grownups to stay focused. So it is that I give myself permission to live just a little. This weekend that means a trip to the Kent Stage to see one of American music's best-loved voices of .... well, I'm not sure he has a genre. John Cowan can sing just about anything he puts his mind to. You can sample some of his fine singing here on his MySpace. John is best known to bluegrass folks as the bass player for New Grass Revival (the Sam Bush-Bela Fleck-Pat Flynn operation that gave this music a kick in the grass). The first time I saw John was actually while he was standing in line two or three folks behind us at the Southwest counter a few years back in Nashville. The first time I heard John sing was a life-changing experience. He just put it all out there, nothing to hide really, which is what singing does. It exposes you. Having sung for many years, I think that knowing you have to make that connection through the instrument that is in you physically makes you feel a little more vulnerable, but if you don't over come that and put it all forward to deliver the song, you might as well not be up there at all. I wish I had the opportunities to sing now that I did when I was younger and didn't understand that as much. I just took it for the stage jitters.

I hope if you're in the area that you'll get on out to the Stage tonight to see John. Check out his tour schedule and catch him when he's coming through your town. He's got such a rich history, some of it fairly loaded, but he is devoted almost entirely to what he does musically.

There are so many tunes to choose from, I decided to go with one folks will recognize. I hope you enjoy John’s version of this goofy love song, Angel Eyes.

First Dragonfly

2009-05-04T20:47:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I saw a dragonfly for the first time this season. It was warm and sunny and the little bugger zigzagged right around me before zipping across the path. To me these critters are full-blown summer fliers. It seems so early! I love to watch dragonflies. Their blue tails, their near gossamer-wings, long thin bodies are like little airplanes, like the first airplanes.

Spring is a time of invention. Pieces are coming together as we invent, or reinvent, our lives and ourselves. Spring here in the north feels especially fertile and strong after a long, deep winter. In these troubled times, confusion and loss, uncertainty and deprivation give way to a little hope.

Cold is over. New is now.

Things that might have bothered me in the past are now too expensive or too uninteresting to keep my attention. There are so many things that must be done. Now. First, survival. Then, success.

Shoo fly. Don't bother me. We got stuff to do.

The Blue Tail Fly

(Bruce Molsky, fiddle. LOVE THIS FIDDLER.)

Spring is Sprung, the 'Grass is Riz...

2009-04-27T13:14:00.006-05:00

What a glorious weekend we had in Ohio. It was far warmer than usual this time of year, sunny and bright, if a bit windy. We enjoyed a wonderful and long overdue romp with my family, and spent almost all of the day outdoors yesterday. I remember trying to fall asleep and thinking, “I never thought it would be this warm again.”

My mother used to utter this little saying, "Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the posies is?" My best pal from high school recently used that ditty in one of her promos. I had forgotten about it. I do wonder where, after all this time and trouble and this long winter, the posies are for most of us.

I met the weekend weather with a fair dose of disbelief. Part of me was incredulous that my room was not only warm, but stuffy. Part of me suspects I also didn’t anticipate still being in this 15% pay cut situation – forget the other 50%, I’d welcome that second $200 a month off the top back with open arms. Looking down the barrel of summer and the child care expenses that go with it, I’m already bartering with my other part time employer on how I can juggle some work from home.

A giant number of Americans like me don’t show up in the “unemployment” numbers. We are the underemployed, the few and the steady who cobble together two or three jobs where one used to do it all and more. I understand musicians and actors and seasonal construction workers are rather used to this way of life, but for the rest of us, living is getting mighty thin. Still, we hang on to the jobs we have rather than foray into the unknown – nobody wants to be “last in-first out” at this stage in the game. It feels like a game of roulette, and it’s easy to feel trapped.

I have decided to take at least one small step. I’m going to devote some time coming up in the next couple of weeks to developing a personal strategic plan of some sort. Nothing is going to change unless I take action. So I am making myself a priority for a couple of days this weekend. If I can help all these other folks advance in their career development, it’s probably time I spent a little of my time and talent on me. The folks who know me best, also know I suck at this, but I gotta give it a try.

I don’t even have a current resume. I started to work on one back in late fall when the first round of cutbacks took place, but I didn’t get very far. My motivation was a job that turns out most likely not to still be out there given what I’ve heard about the employer. This is what makes me nervous. It would be hard enough to imagine finding work that offered the variety and flexibility I now enjoy – I am hard-pressed to relinquish the support and understanding of an extremely family-friendly workplace that has also allowed me to excel and manage and grow my own client relationships. Cash flow and flexibility run a pretty close race in my circumstances.

There are lots of things I can do, and do well, building on the investment I’ve made in the last five or six years. The one thing I do regret about this downturn is the way it’s taken my attention away from music. There will be no IBMA for me this year, and fewer concerts and outings. There’s been much less time to play since I’ve been working two part time jobs, one of which follows me home more than I like. One of the things I need to spend time thinking about is how I can start a picking circle. Summer is the perfect excuse—and it might give me a chance to meet that banjo-playing Phi Betta Kappa I hope is out there looking for me.

So I gotta tend my own little life and career garden all the while letting the blue-grass grow under my feet and into my fingers.

Here's an old standard for the travelin', it suits a lot of folks right now. It's a comfort, even for an old-fashioned nonbeliever like me. I do believe we all have a lot more ability to see through the darkness and travel further on than most of us give ourselves credit for.

I believe that may be Mr. Ricky Skaggs joining Emmy-Lou Harris on this fine traditional Gospel tune. Hope you enjoy it.

The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn

Seven Generations and One Great Spirit Later...

2009-04-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year when we recognize and celebrate "Earth Day," when companies like Clorox or P&G roll out new "earth friendly" products, Chevy touts its ginormous"hybrid" Tahoe, and we all reflect as we reduce, reuse, and recycle.

For my part, I get to reconnect in a semi-annual fashion with some very good friends who have been presenting Ohio's largest Earth Day celebration for 20 years. Twenty years! I've been working on this since I was pregnant with my son, who is now 14-1/2. My first EarthFest, 15 years ago, was a beautiful, stunningly warm Cleveland afternoon. It was overwhelming if a lot of work, especially at 6 months pregnant. The main musical act of the day was a little known vocalist named Sheryl Crow.

This past Sunday my friends and I pondered how things have and have not changed in 20 years since the first EarthFest--and the nearly 40, yes, 40 years since the very first Earth Day. In the mere months since the 2008 election, I have seen such a proliferation of interest in, literature about, and experts on "sustainable business practices" as to boggle the mind. Suddenly everyone wants to be green, whether it's easy or not. Not days after I suggested that we ought to be recruiting "Chief Energy Officers" I saw the term used in an article. Some of the municipal sustainability officers I talk to report that they get dozens of calls a week from recruiters or companies looking for people like them.

It's all moving so fast. Do we know why? What is the prize? What's different now that wasn't there 10, 20, 30 years ago? Doesn't everyone use Borax to clean their toilets, or lemon juice in their laundry?

Last night I turned on "We Shall Remain" in the background as I tried to organize my week. If you haven't seen it in your viewing area, watch for it. It's the PBS series that explores the histories and legacies of various Native American Nations. Last night's was, appropriately enough, about Tecumseh and the Shawnee, whose communities spanned the area from where I grew up in the Ohio Valley and west, all the way North to Michigan and Indiana before being obliterated by William Henry Harrison's hungry Kentuckians. It was said that they mutilated Tecumseh's body so badly that even those Americans who knew him could not identify him.

What Tecumseh was fighting for was a certain sovereignty, the dignity of his nation and the land they lived on. The Native Americans were our nation's first environmental stewards. The new Federalists, their country but a few decades old, saw no progress without dismantling the native tribes. Thomas Jefferson, for all his romanticizing of the "noble savage" and all his intellectual grace, ultimately regarded the nations as something of another educational project to roll out. He laid out his purpose in his second Inaugural Address: "....Now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter's state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts, to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence and to prepare them in time for that state of society which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals." Righto. In other words, since we've taken all the land they used to hunt on, they'll have to get with our program mighty quick if we're going to be able to tolerate sharing space with them.

How is it that the human psyche can move so quickly from romanticizing a situation, to condemning it? And then, we return to romanticizing it. The values of living in balance with nature up until the early 1800s were supplanted by the values of progress and capitalism very soon thereafter. Now that our economy has disintegrated and we are embarking on Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society, suddenly less is more, balance is king, low-maintenance is cool, and everything green is good again. I would guess that we're the only species that possess this unique faculty of inconstancy.

We are living in times where we are observing indesputable scientific fact. Yet my own sister encountered in one of her organizations a blatant nose-thumbing at the well-evidenced climate crisis. To make matters worse, it's an organization purportedly devoted to horticulture. From my work, I was able to assure her that yes, her colleagues are indeed crazy, as a position arguing that climate change is hooey is entirely out of step with the entire discipline of horticulture and arboreta. But ultimately I'm not sure it was much of a comfort. People are human, and will work hard to preserve whatever reality works for them at any given time. History has proven this again and again and again. If it weren't proving it now, we wouldn't be in this mess.

I just wish that taking care of the earth, thinking critically, living more lightly, nurturing a healthy habitat, and protecting living things less capable of their own self-protection were less of a fad than it's become. Yes, I was impressed to learn that Wal-Mart actually convinced Betty Crocker to straighten out the noodles in Hamburger Helper in order to reduce packaging waste. Yes, I thought it was kind of cool to learn that the Empire State Building is going to get a green retrofit makeover from top to bottom. Sure, I think it is something of a delightful upset that Ohio is poised to make such a splash in wind and solar, given that we don't yet really have the bench strength to pull that off. Even then, while I am morally and ethically committed to getting myself off the grid, my interest in Ohio's wind and solar industry is also more than a little self serving: I have to lay bets that these companies will need the kinds of people I'm uniquely equipped to find, and I hope like hell that they'll pay me to find them.

Unfortunately, my position is not entirely in step with Tecumseh's Great Spirit. We have lost touch with our essentials as we scramble to create a new future where we are all healthy, prosperous, and less encumbered by stuff, not only because it's chic, but, because we can't afford to buy any more junk, and our landfills can't handle any more crap. Did you see the Disney sleeper hit, Wall-E? The movie's blobby, lazy skyship passengers float around on anti-gravity Lazy-Boy loungers in a prescribed and sterile world free of touch and human interaction, while the home planet collapses under the weight of consumer waste. All I can think of is that old public service message with the lone Indian overlooking the pollution and waste, the camera zooming in on the tear trailing down his cheek.

You know the saying--whatever we do today will still be felt seven generations down the line. Based on my own experience, I'm not sure humanity has seven generations left. But I'm willing to give it a try if we can somehow harness this critical mass of interest in the green craze and turn it from a mere marketing success into something truly sustainable. We have come so far and yet haven't moved. We need to take a hard look at the lessons left by our ancestral neighbors who tried hard to sustain a simple, grounded, meaningful way of life despite the machine of progress that rolled over them. We need to keep them near us, listen deeply, and redevelop our intuitive leadership. We need to think creatively and act wisely and respectfully with regard to the enormous yet simple resources available to us. Unfortunately this is harder than it sounds.

Simplifying life and lifestyles is not always popular. And it can be hard; one of my dear friends and favorite people lives even more purposely thinly than I am really capable of (that, and I could never give up cheese). It’s a path that can get pretty lonely at times, even when you are surrounded by people who are supposed to be supporting you.

When I stumbled headlong into Bluegrass during what was arguably the most difficult period in my life, bluegrass was a good companion. It was straightforward, unadorned, invigorating, and it goes with just about everything. It struck a chord at the deepest core of my origination at a time when I had completely lost contact with the values and vision that make me worth the oxygen I use on this planet. After all the education I’d had and the work I’d done and the children I’d begun to raise, bluegrass brought me back to basics, and back to me. From the friends I’ve made in Bluegrass, it seems to be a common experience.

So this Earth Day I wish for you the discovery, or rediscovery, of the most fundamental things that you treasure. Take a moment to pay some homage to the generations that came before and those ahead depending on you now.

Here’s a longstanding favorite tune of mine about the Trail of Tears, performed by one of the great Bluegrass spirits, Mr. Peter Rowan. His generous presence and beautiful, honest voice get me every time.

Trail of Tears

Now What?

2009-04-18T11:51:00.003-05:00

It's a glorious day, an unusually warm, clear, sunny Ohio Saturday. It's the first Saturday in quite a while that wasn't chock full of activity although it's been a fun run. By the time I delivered the kids unto their father yesterday afternoon, it was time for some recalibration. An actual workout (without interruptions or kid-related delays), a healthy salad, some serious catch up and an evening with the neighbors was a good end to the week.

Here it is the middle of April already. At some point I had kept the month of June in mind as The Month of Change. The question is, change to what? With circumstances being what they are, is that really such a good idea? What would be considered "stable" in this economy? The other day in an interview, a candidate proclaimed that her job was "secure." Ultimately she pulled herself out of the search because she felt a move at this time would be less secure. That's kind of how I'm feeling now. I'd be no more "secure" in a new job with what's available in a 40 mile radius than I would be hangliding without a helmet.

I wish I didn't love my work so much. I enjoy it, and I'm quite good at it, at the research, the people and relationship building part. I wish we had a ton of work, I would love to be as busy every week as we were last week.

Musicians feel the same way, I imagine. Their entire world is like one long recession -- sometimes you're doing well, and sometimes you're living off your rainy day fund. What the rest of us are experiencing has been somewhat a way of life for a lot of people in the entertainment business. Bluegrass folks are accustomed to living pretty simply as it is, so when times are thin, it's just a matter of ingenuity. I dunno, maybe Doyle Lawson isn't golfing as much but my sense is he's doing ok, too.

With all the distractions of Yarn Slut's wedding and the holiday out of the way, it's crunch time, reality time, what-next time. I hope that things pick up where I am, so that I don't have to pick up and go. Unfortunately though it's time to get my life back, which isn't going to happen unless I go out and get it. There are classes I can take, spare jobs I can pick up (Shameless turned me on to the perfect part-time remote job with the Change folks and I haven't followed up yet), and also fun to be created and had. Either it's time to reinvent myself again like much of America is doing, or a new more profitable day will dawn in the world I live in now.

In the meantime there's plenty of music to play and listen to, especially Bluegrass, and most especially on a downright beautiful day like today. My daughter proceeded to tell me earlier this week how they had learned a dance to Cotton-Eyed Joe. So I played her a version by the Freighthoppers, and then another version by Big Mon which she recognized as the one she had learned. I ended up listening to that old Monroe-Bluegrass Boys recording the rest of the way through. I had forgotten how much I like this particular barn-burning butt-kicker and so I share it with you all now. Here's one to get you going, called Wheel Hoss.

Love Too Big to Fail

2009-04-06T20:29:00.004-05:00

Back in snowy, REALLY snowy Ohio after a busy weekend packed with travel and a very special wedding, it's life back to normal. As weird as it is to go from toes in the sand yesterday to toes back in the boots today, I was actually kind of glad to get home and get settled.

There wasn't really much time for reflection but I took a moment where I could here and there. On Saturday morning, the Big Day, my friends skipped off for some shopping while I decided to chill out with a run before a lovely treat from the bride during her pre-nuptial salon experience (I am now the owner of ten beautifully pedicured toes that stood proud and bare in the warm sand during the ceremony but will not likely see the light of day the rest of this month).

We were all ensconced at a beautiful harborside resort on the Gulf. This is not, you might imagine, my usual kind of trip, so I tried to make the most of the rare opportunity for some self-spoiling. I skipped off in one direction and then another, and finally found a little woodsy/swampy nature trail. It was such a treat to be outside and enjoy the fresh warm air, see flowers richly in bloom, watch pelicans swoop in for a catch. It was also a little odd to be in this oasis while the rest of the world goes to hell in a handcart. But that's the whole point of a wedding away from home -- truly, all of us forgot about any troubles we were carrying and had an absolutely joyous time celebrating with the bride and groom all weekend.

Being in this unusual environment in stark contrast to my accompanying music was quite interesting. For my adventure, I chose Tim O'Brien's and Darrell Scott's "Real Time" effort, recorded in a garage over a similar weekend of food, family, and fun. The songs on the album bear the gritty hallmarks of Scott's direct songwriting style along with Tim's humor and fondness for old ballads which lighten it up.

The album also bears one of the duo's most popular, and almost lucrative, songwriting efforts: "More Love," a tune made famous by the Dixie Chicks a few years ago. To me, it's the perfect wedding tribute. Fairy tale romance is nice for a while, but sustaining real human love requires enormous effort, communication, and unwavering commitment in the face of difficulty and sometimes in good times, too, when it's easier to forget to take care of the relationship. My newlywed friends are madly in love but they are also realists. They'll be just fine.

The song also goes well with the enormous love that filled the small but enthusiastic crowd of friends and family the entire weekend. The poignancy of the date (it was my former in-laws' wedding anniversary) and the gravity of missing some important people (my former mother in law, the mother of the bride, passed away just a little over two years to the day, and a few weeks later that same year the bride lost her Grandmother; not to mention that a host of varied and unfortunate circumstances prevented a mess of other very special folks from being there) make it even more important to recognize and celebrate and, frankly, generate more love, enough love, as much love as necessary.

So I send this song out to my travelin' newlywed friends who at some point late this evening while most of us are fast asleep will arrive at their tropical honeymoon destination to rest and restore themselves and begin their lives together. And the song is for all of us, all of us who have love, give love, desire love, model and teach love. If I believe anything, it's that real human love nurtured and tended and given freely to friends, family, and even -- or especially -- people we don't know, can overcome the most ferocious of detractors, the most miserable of situations, the most daunting circumstances, and the most unlikely allies. Here's to a love too big to fail.

More Love
Performed here by Tim O'Brien on "A Tribute to John Hartford: Live from the Mountain Stage" (Blue Plate Music 2004)

Get Out There and ....

2009-03-29T21:31:00.003-05:00

Busy crazy weekend after a strange and busy week, which ended with a thud as poor Son of Mando contracted The Crud. He is still illin' with a fever and a head cold to beat the band. I'm hoping to hold it off at least a week so I can listen while Yarn Slut and her Pizzie take their vows beside the Gulf. None of us can quite believe the time is here!

But if The Crud catches up with me, I guess I'll just do what I gotta do to do what I gotta do. At some point, we all gotta Get Out There and Dance, just like Tim says in this wonderful little tune from his latest effort, Chameleon. Dancing to this one with Daughter at Tim's solo Wheeling Jamboree appearance last October, watching as she made up her own steps and at how she glowed and giggled for days after she met Tim is what I'll think of when I listen to this song.

Why can't we just all live lightly and see things like an 8 year old kid listening to someone sing a song like it's just for her? Nobody's watchin, nobody cares. Live your life, step by step, to whatever sweet little tune makes you groove.

Get Out There And Dance

Pickin' On A Big Ol Jet Airliner

2009-03-26T20:33:00.002-05:00

I had intended to wind down my Pickin’ On week with a Steve Miller tune oft performed by my beloved Dixie Bee Liners. (This just in, new to me—the Bees will be at The Ark on June 3 and right here in Cleveland at the Beachland on June 4.) Such an MP3 does not yet exist, and so I intended to substitute this rendition by the Sawtooth Bluegrass Band, which just isn't the same.

But nothing beats the original. No, not Miller, but Paul Pena, the man who wrote the tune Jet Airliner. Here’s a ‘Tube of Pena performing the tune live. Incredible. Pena was born in Massachusetts, nearly blind at a young age but born a musician through and through. Before his death in 2005 after a long battle with a pancreatic illness, Pena left a musical legacy of extraordinary depth and reach.

Some of this music journey for me the last five or six years has brought some interesting discoveries and grateful lessons like this. Exploring American music uncovers a lot of untold stories, like the man who wrote Jet Airliner who was also the subject of a documentary film about his journey to Tuva. That film won a Sundance Film Festival award and an Oscar nomination. But that was probably the most recognition he ever received, and even then he was just a character in his own story.

Pickin on the Music In My Life (So Far)

2009-03-25T20:01:00.004-05:00

A friend of mine introduced me to this exquisite ukelele artist over the weekend. I had heard his work here and there but never just sat, and took it in.

I don't imagine many of us are accustomed to thinking about ukelele quite the way Jake Shimabukuro plays it. But actually it figures pretty heavily in the string bands of the Ragtime era, so it's not quite as far flung from bluegrass music as one might be tempted to think. It's a handy little instrument with a sweet sound not too unlike the mando.

Today brought a lot of kerfluffle and the temptation to deviate from living and enjoying my life. I'm still not sure how I'll be moving ahead but I don't have to decide today. For the moment it's best to just acknowledge the first 43 years and the many people and experiences who have been a part of the journey. Every single encounter has taught me something in one way or another. Most of what I know sure didn't come from my expensive Denison education. But that's ok. That era was important too, it brought a number of important people into my life and in a roundabout way, my children.

There is a lot in the news right now about how so many people are deciding to recreate themselves. It's unfortunate that this is treated most of the time as a negative, probably because of the stress related with having to do it in the worst economy since FDR was our POTUS. But my guess is that many people will find new meaning in working, new ways to be creative, new opportunities to put otherwise unused talents to use, and new networks and social groups to bring their passions and interests alive. When we are open to even the most daunting changes, life has a way of working out.

Of all the things that bother me, change really isn't one of them. My mother was one who seemed to roll with the punches and although she was less flexible and more hardened later in her life, she always believed that things happen for a reason. Even though I've abandoned pretty much anything else that suggests we're not entirely responsible for our own actions, I will always feel there's a little truth in that mantra of hers.

Before life brings you more daunting changes, take a moment to enjoy young Mr. Shimabukuro perform this instrumental. I know a few of my friends from The Martins Ferry Beatles Years and beyond will appreciate this little tribute to long evenings at my mother's house talking with June Anne and listening to the Beatles. Those were pretty neat times. It's good to know that some of the best things in my life were in some of your lives, too.

Pickin' on WHO?

2009-03-24T21:35:00.002-05:00

In the spirit of my Pickin' On theme this week I thought I'd throw this one out. Readers and listeners will recognize it as one of the main themes in the Ken Russell movie, Tommy featuring Roger Daltry and the music of The Who.

I'll be in Florida the weekend the Rock Hall induction here in Cleveland. I have to say it's an impressive and well-curated place, but I'm glad to be making the journey away for the weekend, or I might be tempted to go down to E 9th and gawk. When I worked downtown, we'd wander over to Tower City and run into famous folks all the time. It was kind of fun but also a little odd. Our world must have seemed strange to them, too.

I have lots of fun memories of watching and deconstructing this movie with my good friends. And it's hard to beat the Who, even the bluegrass version. I don't know what Ann Margaret is doing these days, but my guess is, she's not a big bluegrass fan, like a lot of people. More for us!

See Me, Feel Me/Listening To You

Nothin' But Flowers (And Bluegrass!)

2009-03-23T20:28:00.002-05:00

I had the most interesting experience over the weekend. The episode of bringing my son together with Jim Morrison kind of kicked it off. The rest of the weekend I just kind of spent poking around in my musical attic and remembering joyfully all the good stuff I used to listen to, and kind of amused at how eventually it all makes sense.

Part of my musical flingfest has to do with the fact that in a couple of weeks a number of us will be heading to Florida for the wedding of a very good friend. This is a wonderful couple of people. I've known the bride for just over 20 years now. She was there when my babies came into the world and for at least one of the ones that got away during one of my miscarriages. The day before my daughter was born she walked and walked and walked with me around the block because I knew something was up (now we call that, "labor"). She got up in the middle of the night and brought my son to the hospital when my daughter was about to be born. On the flip side, I kept her company through a hernia surgery or two and at least one of those laser eye thingies: I even got to gawk as they sliced and lifted up a little piece of her eye and put it back. We both lost our mothers in the last few years. We've certainly had our ups and downs -- for most of the time we've known each other to this point, we had been in-laws, and had entertained a few family dramas sandwiched in among the lilies -- but it is a privilege and a joy to have the chance to be there with her while she takes the biggest step of her life so far, marrying a smart, funny, creative wonderful man we all like more every minute.

So needless to say there's a lot of celebrating going on in the midst of taxes and worrying about the economy and all that stuff. In times like these it's critical to be able to laugh, to embrace the journey and say, "Feh, damn the rest of it. THIS is what matters."

That might be what put the little spring in my step on Sunday morning, when I decided I needed desperately to track down some Talking Heads. (I know...Doors....Talking Heads....what next??) Which, I did. My niece had played this tune, Nothing But Flowers, on her Pittsburgh radio show and for some reason I woke up with it in my head yesterday morning. It's impossible to restrain yourself when you hear it, you just have to wiggle at least a little. So it led me to wonder, if there are bluegrass versions of Doors tunes, I'm sure there are bluegrass versions of Talking Heads tunes.

I didn't find a purely Bluegrass Byrne tune, but, I learned that David Byrne is one of the headliners at the formidable TELLURIDE BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL in June.

How crazy serendipitous and cool is that, and so lovely to see that other people see music the way I do. Byrne will be joined by Elvis Costello at THE premiere "green" bluegrass festival in the country, celebrating the summer solstice. It's on my bucket list.

To honor Byrne, and flowers, and crazy welcome springs in steps, here's Moonshine Still with their rendition of Nothin' But Flowers. Gives me a reason to pull out my mando again, it does, and if that doesn't work, I'll throw my hands up and dance.

You got it. You got it.

Light My Bluegrass Fire

2009-03-20T21:32:00.001-05:00

Well, it looks like I’m not going to get the Mother of the Year award, but I did have a fun week, and am crazy happy about all kinds of things like the fact that it’s Friday, I’m getting a haircut tomorrow, I don’t owe the Feds OR the State anything this year, and the high school band is doing a Doors medley.

Yes, a Doors medley. Never mind that there are probably PARENTS who don’t get the Doors.

I spent a lot of time talking on the last post about my younger kid, but my older kid is pretty awesome himself. He’s always got the keenest observations, the most thought provoking questions, and the smart-assest comebacks. He’s not afraid to talk about anything. This makes hanging out with him a pretty interesting activity. Our main event of the week was watching “Hotel Rwanda” – he had seen it at school and really wanted us to watch it so we rented it from the library. His observations were quite astute for his age. He’s a lot of fun but he’s a deep cat, too.

He also loves to play the sax. He’s in the concert band at the high school. In the somewhat typical random fashion our conversations follow, as we were throwing dinner together Thursday night he posed the question: “Do you know the song, ‘Touch Me’?”

My eyes lit up, and my head spun around. I suddenly found that I had in fact turned into Tina Fey right there in my kitchen as I rendered each of the songs in the Doors medley being tackled by the high school band. My son appeared both mortified, and relieved that this music might actually be pretty cool.

The band director had asked the kids to listen to the songs. So, in keeping with my poor parenting choices, we pulled down YouTube videos of Jim Morrison and his crew doing several of the numbers. (One of them was a Smothers Brothers show—those guys were so ahead of their time and SO COOL!) What better way to expand your child’s musical horizons? Sure, Jim Morrison died of a heroin overdose, but what the heck, he was a great poet. And kids like that he’s buried in Paris. Buried in Paris is kind of cool.

In honor of the Twinsburg High School band’s brave Doors endeavor, I share this magical bluegrass version of “Light My Fire.” If this doesn’t get my kids taken away from me, I guess we’ll be good for a while!

BooBoo with the Windy Yellow (Ok, Mostly Brown) Hair

2009-03-10T15:31:00.002-05:00

My daughter is the best surprise trick anyone ever played on me. (I guess, technically, I played it on myself.) Although she sometimes drives me to distraction with her willfulness and yes, occasionally, even whining, I would not trade her for all the wide world, not even for a second. I adore both my children, and everyone who knows me at all knows that I am devoted to them irrevocably. I relate to each of them differently. They’re also fairly far apart in age so my daughter is still quite young despite her tenacity.

In the last week I was sideways accused of paying “too much attention” to her. Now, if I even knew what that meant, it’s still the dumbest and most offensive thing anyone has said to me in a long, long time. My kids spend every other week with me. She gets a bit of one-on-one time with me in the mornings before school, although usually I’m working or doing chores while we get ready for the day. In the evenings, my son will hang out with me for a while after my daughter goes to bed, time he uses either to try to convince me to buy a PS3 or elicit any evidence that my views on the afterlife or some ancient civilization have changed. Other than that, they have school and their activities and I have meetings and other goings-on, and most of the time just getting through the day catastrophe-free is something of an accomplishment. Though I think about them on the weeks they are not staying with me, I don’t call them or interfere with their time with their other family unless there is a logistical issue or a family emergency of some kind.

This isn’t boot camp, it’s a family. I’m not The Great Santini, I’m a mom – and a really good one. While keeping my home and having a job is up there right now, nothing is more important to me than to see that these two young people are healthy in every way, and that they get the love and attention and opportunity they deserve for my having brought them into this mess of a world in the first place. I don’t take this job lightly, and I don’t put it back on my kids to raise themselves. If some folks feel that’s too much attention, that’s really too damn bad.

We are a throw-away society. Despite all the warning signs and the many horrible stories we see in the news about children in despair or getting into trouble, we still parent based on convenience rather than meeting kids where they are, being there for them. Not a week has gone by in the last seven or eight years that I haven’t felt I should go back to school. Because of the kind of work I do, I would love to get a nonprofit masters degree, and more than one person has suggested law school. The problem is I don’t have anyone to raise my kids while I do that, so I choose not to right now. It’s not brain surgery. This isn’t a lack of ambition, or laziness. It’s a conscious choice to be whereI believe my eight year old needs me now, and for that matter, my 14 year old, too.

Yesterday, I learned about a horrible thing that happened to a little girl outside of Cincinnati. This past Saturday afternoon during our bout of warm weather, young Esme Kenney left for an afternoon jog and never came home. Her body was found in the woods about a block from her house at around 3 a.m. Sunday morning. She was the friend of a little girl whose mother is a friend of mine and a fellow former La Leche League leader-- and one of the people who supported me both as I got my credentials to help other moms and as I evolved into a mom myself. She is devastated.

No doubt the man who killed Esme Kenney was thrown away at a young age. He probably didn’t do well in school. He probably didn’t have anyone to redirect him, or get him the help he cried out for with every expression of his self-loathing and turmoil. Someone probably just told him to “get over it” and figured he would. And he didn’t, and now Esme is the latest casualty in the perpetrator’s war against himself.

I recently stumbled across a Peter, Paul and Mary concert in which Mary performed this beautiful piece, which sums up the way I feel about my daughter perfectly. It’s a joyful reflection on motherhood. My daughter spins and flips and argues and sings and dances and runs to her own beat, but her little hand still finds mine when we are walking, and she still needs a song now and then before she falls asleep. I will always be happy to oblige.

Here’s Poem for Erika/For Baby. I dedicate it to all the amazing, fearless, loving women in my life who are mothers of daughters, and a good many friends and family who may not be mothers but who are loving aunts who share a special love with other people’s daughters.

Poem for Erika/For Baby

Putting the " ' " in O'Bama

2009-03-02T07:01:00.006-05:00

Friday night after the kids and I watched a movie (Princess Bride, for those who care), I flipped on PBS which was running the last third of the Gershwin Prize show and presentation at The White House. As I sat back and enjoyed the lineup of performers delivering their renditions of favorite Stevie Wonder tunes, I felt so glad to have a POTUS again with a soul, and some groove to boot. On Saturday I got an email from my friend Earl of Ohio announcing the AMAZING news that John Doyle and Liz Carroll will be performing at The White House on March 17.

Green is cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1hDq7zV7rM&feature=related

Punches to Ashes

2009-02-24T21:53:00.006-05:00

Here we are, Ash Wednesday. As I get older, when I think about it all coming down to ash once more as the sum total of my existence will be blowin’ in the wind, I think about what, if anything, I’m leaving behind. When my son, in his contemplative moments after 10 p.m. or anytime we're in the car more than five minutes, starts to ask me his cosmic questions about faith and God and life after this one, I always bring the conversation back to what we can do while we are here. I try delicately to make the point that frankly, I don't know that there is anything after this. And if this is all there is, what’s the best use of it? I don’t need some invisible deity or the threat of eternal damnation to tell me that the most important thing we can do here on earth is try, in the end, to be good to each other.

Yesterday I was talking with a woman who came into our office for a meeting. She works for one of our region’s burgeoning health care empires with locations in the Middle East. Apparently, jobs for these locations come with a giant rulebook that includes not speaking to women. Most of my friends can’t imagine me surviving long in a place where you can’t say “hello” while you’re walking down the street. A world where human interaction is legislated to that degree is a real drag.

People make things difficult. People make rules. Now, sure, we need some rules. But some people make up their own rules and expect the rest of us to fall in line even if they have nothing to do with anything else. These are dangerous rules--set-ups. These are the rules that the Wall Street CEOs or Southern Governors want to live by, not the rules the rest of us have to live by. Everywhere and all the time, people are waging some kind of heated and unwinnable war of “Because I Said So” in governing their communities, their businesses, and their own lives, using the best ideas or people closest to them as weapons. Can anyone really believe that woman who just had octuplets actually has those babies’ best interests at heart and not her own self-aggrandizement—including her own doctor? We all do it to ourselves, too, we all get lured into something and before we know it we’re part of the problem. But it’s hard not to be in this largely constrictive and shortsighted world of “either/or” instead of a world of possibilities where it’s safe to offer a different approach.

Fortunately at least in the world I spend most of my waking hours, I do encounter a lot of folks who don't limit themselves, who choose not to limit themselves in the way they solve problems. It’s exciting and refreshing and and I feel very lucky to have met so many creative leaders – and by creative I mean not just performing arts types but also the business men and women whose unique approaches and styles have revolutionized the way their workplaces operate. Frankly it has been a big influence on my own ability to overcome the hurdles I place in my own way. There is always, always a choice, always. Now, we might not be capable of making that choice because of our own limitations or because of a law preventing us from doing so, or because of some lie we’ve told ourselves. But that doesn’t mean there is no choice.

I liked Obama’s reference to a Day of Reckoning in last night’s speech, appropriate for the eve of Lent, the season of sacrifice. Life does not go on forever, and very few of us are living on the best possible terms with ourselves, our families, or our neighbors. The choices we make will always have consequences for someone, maybe even so far down the line that we can’t possibly know them. I still battle with my rash and hasty retorts at times, and every now and then I woefully and embarrassingly misrepresent my best intentions. Those moments always are followed by sincere regret. And, sometimes I fire something back that does represent my best intentions – but it still isn’t very nice and not always necessary.

Should I care, when so much of the rest of the world is mean and nasty? Of course. Sure, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But I have an irrepressibly optimistic view based on my experience that most people are not jerks. And it sure feels like more work to be a jerk throwing punches than to be kind, and certainly the rewards are greater. Which means that being good to each other, at Lent or any other time of year, whether you believe in only now or the great hereafter, should hardly be considered a sacrifice.

One of the many good people I am so very fortunate to have in my constellation of special friends near and far sent me a little something in the last week and it contained this tune. I had not heard of Collin Herring but this song grabbed me just as I was winding up to throw another punch. There’s no point to it, as the song points out. Pull yourself off the warpath long enough to listen to this one.

Punches

Colling Herring, from the 2008 release, Past Life Crashing.

Of Tulips

2009-02-21T22:23:00.006-05:00

As the evening has worn on, the wind outside my window is howling the way it did a month or so ago, when the temperatures had plummeted below zero without wind. It is cold again here, and snowing, and we're all growing more tired of it every minute.

But just now as I looked up, I saw on my TV screen a scene with tulips. Tulips. I remember tulips, and daffodils, and forsythia. I remember green grass that is thick and shiny. And green leaves on the trees, and some trees filled with blossoms so thick they look like clouds on sticks.

The weather here only compounds the generally cranky nature of Northeast Ohio, almost as if the long cold dark winters and the attitude of Clevelanders feed on each other in a symphony of codependency. As the week wore on and I watched the news and spoke with my dear sister who has been enduring a number of burdens where she works, something became gradually more clear to me.

The icing on the cake was the news that a number of Governors -- South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, to name a few -- were thinking about turning down the stimulus money. Never mind that these are not states that typically turn down a Federal handout. But they don't want the money largely because they can't do whatever they want with it. News to you, boys: we did that already, with the banks, and it failed gloriously, so unless you want a full-scale revolution, don't go there. If you don't want the money, and your citizens don't hang you for turning it back, Ohio will gladly take the extra bucks.

The South really is a stuck place. How I wish that were not true, but just as I think each winter I will never make it through another, one election season in the Carolinas and I might actually feel like hanging myself. My poor sister, who has lived there most of her adult life, has confided in me enough that I realize that the South is chock-full of equally-angry people who still want to be their own country, full of leaders who are suddenly more concerned for their power relationships than playing by the rules to get a few billion dollars in hand to help the people they were elected to govern and protect.

Look, nobody knows where this thing is going. There's no guarantee that the Stimulus bill will do half of what it sets out to accomplish. At this point, will I take half? Probably. That $13 a week doesn't sound like much, but at the end of the day it just covers school lunches for my two kids every other week. Is it going to keep me in my house which I financed with a conventional 30 year mortgage? Not by itself if I lose one of the two part-time jobs I am holding down. But otherwise, sure, it helps some. Over 52 weeks, that $13 adds up to $676, enough for someone else to buy a new washing machine or range (or dishwasher!).

I still want the South that I dream about, the lovely June nights in Virginia, the hills and mountains and woods, the energy of Nashville's music scene, early spring, the aroma of boxwood in the heat of August, the footprints of Washington and Jefferson. And that place still exists. But so does the other South, the one as my sister says is still trapped in the failure known as the Reconstruction.

I plucked these tunes out of my past playlists this week as I slopped to and from work in the endless snow. They were like the salve on the sting of the reality I was facing. My time for daydreaming, for pretending things are different than they really are, have long passed. But I still have tunes like this one that call me back to a place I felt sure I belonged, where some part of me will always be turning toward no matter where I find myself, no matter how illogical or inconsistent the notion. Ancestors on both sides came up through Virginia and so, I will always wonder whether my longing doesn't mark some unanswered question about where I really came from, and from whom. Maybe what I really fear is finding out.

Sweet Sunny South

Sung by Tim O'Brien; from the 1996 recording, "If I Go Ten Thousand Miles" by Dirk Powell

Evening Comes Always

2009-02-16T21:51:00.008-05:00

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.

Groundhog Daze

2009-02-05T07:55:00.006-05:00

Old Punxy Phil told us this week that we've got another six weeks -- or better--of this mess of winter. We're all exhausted as it is. 'Tween the snow, my addiction to Facebook, and constantly wondering when the other shoe will drop, I've not sat down to blog in a while. My sense of urgency -- about life, music, my children, whether or not I'm going to lose any more income -- has a serious case of ADHD. Everything is a crisis, so nothing is a priority. We're on to yet another great idea at work, but I'm starting to fray around the edges. Among the few bright spots in the week, however: there are in fact a few jobs out there that I could actually compete for, a couple of folks have asked my boss for permission to approach me, and the big finance execs won't get any bonuses until after we get our money back.

Another bright spot was the Dixie Bee-Liners show last Saturday. They're doing swell! It was terrific to hear the band pull off some instrumentals, and one heckuva take on "Workin' on A Building." My little girl got to hear one of her favorite tunes first hand while snapping photos, and the kids got a kick out of the shake-and-howdy. The buzz is that there's a concept recording coming out sometime this year.

My older kid took me out for a ski lesson on Sunday. It was my first time, since I wouldn't count my one previous attempt more than 20 years ago at Seven Springs, a resort near Pittsburgh, PA. Son of Mando was quite patient and I managed to get through the afternoon without incident or injury. Even X pitched in a moment or two. As reluctant as I have been to join up with this activity, it was exhilarating, and despite the reports my Son doled out, by the end of the day I was doing reasonably well, and without poles.

I think that's how life is right now. No poles, a slippery slope, someone waxed the soles of our shoes, and we're going uphill--and pushing a boulder.

I will admit that at times I wish I had help with my boulder. But, I don't. So it's inhale, exhale, and keep on moving. Thank golly I know spring is coming, and with it warmer weather and hopefully happier times when I'll feel more motivated to enjoy the things I love, like music, visiting friends and family, maybe a little time away.

I am at the point where I feel downright guilty about not playing music. I haven't picked up an instrument in two weeks. At this rate, I'll never learn any of them. It's a sign to me that I'm really much more overwhelmed and out of sync than I have admitted -- learning new tunes and playing old ones always brought real relief from my bouts of anger and frustration and sadness. Like making it down the hill on skis while still standing up, it's time to bring the music back and put my brain and fingers to work on creating something while other parts of my brain work out these other problems. Couldn't we all use an extra sense of accomplishment?

I think on my list for this weekend will be a fiddle tune by Bill Monroe, one I dearly love, called Roanoke. Most versions are just a little faster than I like, but it's a sweet double-fiddle number. Oh my, but how I long for sweet Virginia. When I make it through the proverbial forest of my trials, I'll be heading down old Interstate 81 to wander off the beaten path along the Crooked Road when it's about 85 degrees in the shade. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll be lost there forever among the great ghosts of Bluegrass, and my snow-shovelin' days will be over.

Roanoke
Performed hear by Herschel Sizemore.

Workin' People's Music by Busy Bees

2009-01-25T19:31:00.005-05:00

OH how I've been missing summer, and better days, and not worrying myself to sleep every night, and so many pasttimes I've enjoyed, like blogging and learning tunes and keeping my sad little MySpace up to date. I've been thinking about my pals The Dixie Bee-Liners all week long because I've adopted one of their songs as a sort of personal worksong. Little did I know that while buried in my personal drama, they've been planning a visit to The Kent Stage for THIS SATURDAY. The show is at 8 p.m. and tickets are a steal for this bunch -- you'll have plenty left over to buy their CD and buy a cold beverage!

What a treat. I had hoped to venture out last weekend to see that pied piper of my soul, Tim O'Brien, but at 14 below BEFORE factoring in the wind chill, my kids and I decided to remain cozy indoors with blankets and lots of Tim's music. And over the course of the time since then much has happened in our country and in my slightly rocky, uncertain little world. Everyone in my company has been asked to take another 15% paycut to help prevent layoffs. We all agreed that 15% is better than 100%, which is what tens of thousands of Americans give up every week.

It did my heart good to see the news last night and watch Obama's cabinet report to work at the White House on the first weekend of the new Presidency. Since I had to work and I know a lot of other people did too, it was reaffirming somehow. It's been another batshit busy week punctuated by a surprise project for another organization that needs it in a hurry. I'm delighted for the opportunity which could become a new line of business and certainly will help me re-establish greater contact with the local nonprofit world, but I spent a lot of the weekend working on it. I hope it's successful.

Despite the news and the fact that I probably won't exhale until May or June, I'm trying to remain focused and optimistic. There wouldn't be another job out there waiting for me unless I dreamed it up myself, so my best hope for doing that is just to stay the course and keep existing clients happy while doing meaningful work that still allows us to eat. In the meantime, my sister and I both agreed it might be good to practice our flagging skills. (We both look good in orange so I'm not worried, really.)

It's interesting that we find our country in this enormous economic morass in the dead of winter. This evening's news heralded another major storm poised to take out more heat and power lines. Never having been a fan of winter, I've tried to be patient, but of course it's wearing thin. To learn of the Bee-Liners visiting was like a summer breeze blowing through my tired, worried brain. Just here in July with Blue Highway, it was one of the warmest nights we'd had, and the house was quite full.

I'm pretty sure my favorite tune off of their album, RIPE, is Yellow-Haird Girl. I can see it as my soundtrack whether I'm working out (it got me through several sets of weights last week), banging out a grant application for a client, or standing in the middle of the road with a big ol' "STOP" sign directing traffic, and feeling the sun beat down.

Here's to America getting back to work as quickly as possible with whatever music it takes, and to meanwhile making it out as often as possible to support live music in your neck of the woods -- or mine!

Yellow-Haired Girl

In Ahhhhgural

2009-01-20T22:04:00.003-05:00

Finally, it's over. We've been through the roughest campaign I can remember -- Gore's loss notwithstanding -- and managed to get through today without incident. I held my breath with every step those little girls took on their way to their spots for the swearing-in. I did the same as the President and First Lady strolled confidently along the avenue, though flanked on all sides by a protective force unlike any we've ever seen. It all went off without a hitch as far as we were all concerned. At the office we celebrated the departure of the Bush family and the swapping of the family photographs with a potluck also unlike any I can remember. We managed to get a lot of work done, too, and that's what we have to do every day for the next four years and beyond.

Before that happens, however, there are lots more songs to be sung and dances to be danced. We're in the middle of the inaugural party circuit. One performance makes me feel pretty proud. Bela Fleck was featured on the lineup on the Eisenhower Theatre stage at the Kennedy Center. I didn't research this terribly thoroughly, but the last time a banjo was involved in an inaugural celebration to my knowledge is the Nixon parade, in which Flatts and Scruggs played one of their last gigs together.

Bela of course is a banjo player of a different stripe. Like his sometime collaborator Yo-Yo Ma, his music is fairly boundarie-less. He has gone from being part of the original Newgrass Revival lineup to releasing his own full-length classical recording, Perpetual Motion, with other notable classical artists. He didn't have the opportunity to play this afternoon with his fellow American treasures Ma, Itzahk Perlman, and Anthony McGill. But he'll take the stage tonight and leave a five-string mark on inaugural history his own way.

In honor of our new President who does things his way, here's a short little Bach diddy featuring Fleck and his Flecktones. Here's hoping we're all inspired to think, learn, and act in new ways to get the job done.

Fugue from Prelude and Fugue in A minor by JS Bach (d. 1750).

NO EXCUSES (Not To See TIM OBRIEN)

2009-01-15T21:27:00.002-05:00

What's red, and blue, and keeps you warm on a cold January Ohio evening?

Why, an evening with Tim O'Brien at the bestest venue EVER, the Kent Stage!

Tomorrow night, Friday Jan. 16, 8 p.m. at the Stage on Main in downtown Kent, Tim takes the stage again for a hearty weather-braving audience.

I've been struggling with this all week. Unfortunately, most of the excuses I was making are slowly being deconstructed. Fearless called and twisted my arm on tickets just as I came in the door (although at heart I REALLY wish the show would sell out, because Tim deserves it, and, the last show he did at the stage was durn close). Then, when I mentioned on my Facebook (oh stop!) that we're supposed to have a HIGH of NEGATIVE SIX DEGREES and it might be too cold to drag the kids, two of my friends, SoUncreative and Pie, asked me if the show is outdoors. Ha, ha, ha. Even my sister in law told me I didn't have a good excuse.

So, at the moment, providing my car starts tomorrow and I make it home from work, we're going.

AND SO SHOULD YOU. Kent is a fun little town, and if your car doesn't start you can come home with me or find one of the cute little spots to crash there in town.

Here's one from Tim's latest release, Chameleon, in celebration of the forthcoming REGIME CHANGE ON TUESDAY.

Hope you can make it out tomorrow, or if you can't, you'll cozy up with a good drink, someone to keep you warm, and lots of Tim tunes.

When In Rome

Making the Crossing

2009-01-11T22:17:00.004-05:00

The holidays are more officially over now at my house. Right after the New Year we had to focus on the next event, Operation Surprise Shannon, a belated birthday party to bring Shannon together with all those folks who couldn't make it to Vegas (and the one person who did) to watch him turn 40. Donny and Marie couldn't get in because of the weather, but plenty of folks turned out, and he is still surprised.

Putting together the evening was tons of fun and no small feat with the guest of honor occasionally throwing us for a loop. We, in turn, managed to throw him off the trail with a fake invitation asking him to join the Yarn Slut for her birthday (which was in fact on Friday and so thanks are due to her for allowing us to hijack it for this occasion). Donny and Marie were with us in spirit, and my sister joined us from Nashville late night for a truly whirlwind literal 8 hour visit (you'd be surprised at how many people are at the Cleveland Airport at 5:30 on a Sunday morning -- I was!).

Of course, yesterday was also the brunt of one of the worst storms we've had in a while. Suffice it to say that added a layer of excitement to the Day of Adventure. We nonetheless all forged ahead. As I drove across the Turnpike to the party destination, this very appropriate tune came on, one of Tim O'Brien's most famous fiddle tracks, "The Crossing."

This weekend really does mark movement solidly in the new year. Despite the lack of sleep, I felt today that I was back on track. Our friend Shadow/J starts teaching tomorrow, we start a new contract at work, and my house is starting to look and feel like home again (with a few lingering Yankee Candles and festive lights on the mantlepiece for comfort). Daughter started up her ski lessons again last Sunday so is back in her element there. Yarn Slut is planning her wedding, yet another big day to look forward to. The economy is still railing and the world has much work to do as do we all, but life goes on and we must go with it.

Speaking of moving on, I would be remiss not to mention the crossing over of mandolin virtuoso Butch Baldassari, who lost his battle with brain cancer this weekend. He was 56, and probably would have had a few good rolls left in him.

So I'm just wishing you all one more time a truly happy, satisfying, engaging, give-it-your-best-shot New Year. You never know when it will be your last. Hold on to what you still have to lose, let go of the crap that isn't working, and reach into untapped resources you may have forgotten you had. As the saying goes, the best way to predict the future is to create it.

Happy Crossing into 2009 -- And Oh, Hey!! Come see Tim O'Brien 8 p.m. next Friday, Jan. 16 at -- where else?! -- The Kent Stage. We can't wait. What better way to kick off the inaugural weekend?! Maybe he'll play us this one to welcome in the new year, new administration, new deal.

The Crossing

Title track from the 1999 release.

This Ain't No Barn Dance

2009-01-05T21:19:00.003-05:00

Tonight marks the official end of holiday vacation at our house. Unlike most of the kids in our region, mine had today off. In a bid for one last hurrah, my daughter and I headed to the fitness center with her swim gear and my hopes of getting in one workout this week not hemmed in by a kid activity. The place was packed. It's always busy on Mondays, but it was busier than usual, although we were earlier than I usually go by almost an hour.

It looks like everyone is ready to get back on track. I've been ready. Shovel-ready, work-ready, ready to be back on the track to figuring out and achieving my potential and ready to see something happen, to see something good finally happen. Looks like I'm not alone.

I didn't really make any resolutions this year because my aspirations for the next three months are pretty thin. My first goal is simply to not miss a mortgage payment. Beyond that I will have considered the year a success, and once again I doubt I'm alone. Now, I've gotten a little more ambitious, a little antsy, pissed off enough about being back near the bottom of the rung despite how good I am at what I do, that I am actually going to bring in a bit of business myself. Maybe I'll make enough to employ people to put new floor covering in my house and clean my home before the holidays. If I can't imagine such extraordinary good fortune, it won't happen. It would be an honor to take what I make and put some of it into someone else's bucket for a hard day's work.

So this ain't no barn dance. It's business, the business of people and the business of getting folks to part with their money for the work I and others do so extremely well so that they don't have to do a half-assed job and end up calling us anyway.

I hope you're rested and ready for the new year. Blueberry made an excellent point in her last comment. There's really nothing wrong with having to turn business away. Here's hoping we all should have such a problem this year.

Enjoy this long instrumental from one of my favorite bands, Mountain Heart, a bunch of talented guys who take themselves just seriously enough to be hyper-successful considering the business they're in. They're good, too, not for everybody, but they're trying to find their voice. And when that Jim VanCleve is fiddling and Barry Abernathy is doing his banjo thing, it's just amazing. One of my favorite show-offs, Adam Steffey, left the band last year to hook up with Dan Tyminski's gig, but he's here on this track called #6 Barn Dance. It will get you moving, guaranteed.

Now I'm going to get moving, to bed. Tomorrow we are back on our regular temporary routine; my son will head off to school at 6:15 and it will be another two hours plus before his sister and I head out. The extra time in the morning with her is nice, but it's a mixed blessing brought on by my simple protest: latchkey care is a work-related expense, so I've cut out the morning care to save money. Make it worth my while to pay someone else for the privelege of hanging out with her that extra five hours a week, and I will. But not before. This is kind of the soundtrack to that attitude.

#6 Barn Dance

Bad Luck, Good Luck, No Luck

2008-12-29T21:46:00.002-05:00

The end of the year is just a few days away. While I am in the choir singing Good Riddance, I'm also starting to feel a bit annoyed that I spent the last four weeks of the year doing mostly the same thing at work instead of drawing the line I should have drawn. I can see what is going on around me, and so if my results are lower than my expectations, I've only myself to blame.

What combination of skill, hard work, and luck do I need to change my game? I'm not a good gambler, so this is tricky. I'm not sure what the proper ratios are, given that I've always worked hard and consider myself skilled. So it would appear that I'm left with luck, which for me has been typically fair but never what one might call, "good".

If it weren't for the Shuffle feature on my iPod I might miss out on some of my favorite Greg Brown tunes, like this one, appropriately titled, "People With Bad Luck." After the many posts and comments back and forth over the last few months about what the right course is and whether or not this bailout or that one was fair, I was totally struck by how brilliant this tune is in summing up most every exchange that's centered around the nagging theme of money and luck, Wall Street fat cats and Main Street bums. At the end of the day we're all pretty much in the same boat. Unfortunately, it's the Titanic, and a lot of unlucky passengers are going down with the band.

I hope you thoroughly enjoy this tune from one of my favorite singer-songwriters, a big dude who looks like a biker but sings like a whipporwill. I do love Greg Brown and his smart, funny, tender songs from an America other than the one hopped up on post-holiday retail sales and white-knuckling rides up and down the Dow. This one is from a terrific album, "In The Dark With You."

"People With Bad Luck"

People with the bad luck
Lookin at the people with the good luck,
And they're goin, "Ooooo-ooh-ooh...."

If you got the good luck
It's hard to figure out
What the one with the bad luck
Is carryin' on about
What would just enough of the good luck and money
Or the lack of it do
Make a young man of 40
And an old man of 22

Maybe someone you thought was very kind and true
Turned around and did somethin just plain mean to you
And it might make you cry, and it might make you real mad
And it might get you to thinkin about the kind of luck that you both had

People with the bad luck
Lookin at the people with the good luck,
And they're goin, "Ooooo-ooh-ooh...."

Don't we all want to laugh a little,
Don't we all want to cry
Don't we all want to live a little before it's time to die
If ya got the good luck
It sure might seem that way
But if you got the bad luck you
Just cannot make it through the day

People with the bad luck
Lookin at the people with the good luck,
And they're goin, "Ooooo-ooh-ooh...."

Once I had me a good friend,
He was funny and full of cheer
But his luck was always so bad
And he's no longer here
Sometimes in this world I'm wonderin that
We ain't grateful for every breath
Sometimes in this world I'm wonderin that
We don't all just drink ourselves to death

People with the bad luck
Lookin at the people with the good luck,
And they're goin, "Ooooo-ooh-ooh...."

Through the Looking Glass

2008-12-26T20:20:00.003-05:00

Ah, the holidays are waning. I have always loved Christmas, but in a quiet way, not in the manic, get it all done way. I love being alone in the kitchen late at night concocting something, or even doing dishes, with the radio humming low with an old carol of some sort. I don't love the constant work that admittedly I make for myself -- someone has to cook and clean up and in this house, 80% of that work goes to me and the other 20% is farmed out to an underage crowd, who complete about 10% of it. But that's ok. We had a glorious time making cookies and enjoying a little down time. Yesterday was indeed a bit magical. And last weekend at the end of a day of baking we made a beautiful pot of turkey soup and watched "Silent Night", a movie about a little German boy whose mother moved them closer to the American lines and found themselves with a houseful of American and German soldiers one Christmas Eve. That got us to thinking how lucky we are to have such a bountiful feast all the time.

The last few days were hectic though wonderful, and now that all is quiet and I am finally back to my usual lower-wattage existence, I'm reflecting on this life I have alone. It has many perks to be sure, but drawbacks, like no extra person to run an errand or wrap Santa's presents. But most of the time I just worry that I'm not making the most of it and merely growing old while trying to keep my kids from turning into tyrants or misfits or serial killers. I just want them to be, you know, morally centered. And to help clean up without my asking once in a while.

Other than that, and trying to navigate the very murky and choppy waters of what started to be a fine career before I entertained the corporate sector, there isn't a lot left over for much else. It's only 8:30 now and I'm fairly exhausted. We had a lovely breakfast with family and to my surprise, rather than fighting the movie crowds, the kids elected to hang out with me and play a new game from Shameless and her family (Shameless, tell D and the girls that the kids "opened up a big can o' whoop-ass" on me!) before I delivered them into the hands of their worldly father.

At some point this morning I was alone and in the car and listening to one of my favorite albums, Darrell Scott's 2006 effort, The Invisible Man. It's a terribly painful album but beautiful despite its edge. I adore Scott, love to hear him sing and his songs get me every time. They call to my own Shadow with the way they shed their light on some of life's most difficult but meaningful experiences.

Growing older, now matter how we spend the time, is one of those experiences. Not difficult in its own right, it becomes moreso as we look down the barrel of the years unlived and behind us at the life we let go of every day. As Scott says in this song, we still have trouble living in the moment and taking in the "today" part of the deal. I've come a long way with that, but worry still comes a callin' now and then.

I wish there were a bailout for singer-songwriters. What AIG flunkie has ever given us something as pure and perfect as this song? Where is Darrell Scott's $4 million retention bonus? Oh, he doesn't need a retention bonus, because he knows we'll still love him and countless artists will continue to record his songs. He's actually one of the best at what he does and is excruciatingly underpaid. Those AIG guys, those Wall Street jackasses, they've never done anything this beautiful. They're all dead inside except for the bright shiny objects that catch their pitifully short attention once in a long while. I wonder what they must see when they look into the looking glass. It is not, I imagine, what the rest of us see.

This song is an end-of-year wish of begin-again hope for everyone -- especially Blueberry, Don, Pie, Fearless, Shameless, Shannon, Boring, Yarn Slut, Shadow, and Ipsissimus, and a few silent unnamed readers, friends and family who I'm grateful are out there somewhere.

Looking Glass
Darrell Scott; from The Invisible Man, Full Light Records 2006

Feels like someone's looking over my shoulder
I turn around, and no one's there
Lookin' glass is looking older and older
Lately I don't care
Looking Glass, can't you see what I've been through?
Slowly giving myself away
Run from the past, run for the future,
Miss the sweet smell of today

I play this song on my own piano
Helps make sense of the shape I'm in
I open the doors on a cool rainy morning
Songs come riding on the wind
Take me away on the clouds of sorrow
I guess I'll write it one more time
Go through the deluge to get to the promise
Songs are rainbows in the sky

Human longing, inspiration,
A woman painting canvas across the street
Got an old slouchy hat and a coat like Renoir
I think I'll bring her a cup of tea
Maybe light is the absence of Shadow
Maybe Shadow needs a place to sleep
We shine as much as we're going to
The rest the cats and angels keep

Me and this song we got a lot in common
Neither knows quite how to end
Just follow along, like a leaf on the river
We always can begin again

Grateful (Humbug) Still

2008-12-18T22:43:00.003-05:00

It's been a manic week. I'm working as hard as ever, but the nagging reality of not getting paid is starting to work on my psyche which occasionally lashes out. I'm terrible at setting boundaries so I pay the price in dread. On top of the workload, the holidays are barreling down, so I've tried to make sure things are in order before the kids arrive home. Trying to stay merry, but mostly I'm a bit frazzled, and under the weather, and worried.

This evening I committed myself to making a small dent in the clutter and mess. In the process of tossing what seemd like a ream of unimportant papers, I managed to unearth some family treasures that were simply hiding behind the mess. An old plate from France, two very old handpainted teacups from England (with some kind of fancy bird painted inside the cup!), a fist-sized ringerless brass bell bearing the names of the evangelists, a beautiful hand-blown bottle/vase from a friend I no longer hear from. Pictures of friends, children of friends, late parents and grandparents, great great grandparents.

On the top shelf of my hutch, a 1950s Pennsylvania House colonial piece that, along with the dry sink and dining room table and chairs, is a piece of wood on which is painted, "IMAGINE."

That's what we all have to do. First, imagine. Second, act.

I've chucked my Thursday evening "ER" time in favor of a computer, one small light, and in the background classical holiday tunes on WKSU. I'm sitting at the same dining room table that for so many years was host to long evenings sitting around drinking coffee or tea or George Dickel, talking late into the night and listening to music of all kinds. I know that my brothers spent Christmas Eve 31 years ago around this table with my mother, the first Christmas in 30 years without my dad. Years later, many summer afternoons and evenings were spent around this table playing cards with friends who would make the pilgrimage with us to spend weekends with my mother, who adored the company and the opportunity to make something delicious when she still could. And always, always Christmas eve, Thanksgiving, so many holidays. Thanksgiving was always homemade Mexican at mom's, and then the coffee, too much dessert, and then the drawing for the grandkids gift exchange only a few weeks later at Christmas.

Tomorrow evening this table will be called into service again, host to just a small pre-holiday, catch-our-breath dessert mostly in honor of Shannon's birthday (we couldn't make it to Vegas, but you can relive the whole thing on his blog!) and just to be together to say, isn't it good that we can be together?

So sure, I am frustated, and a little underemployed, but grateful that I can still sit around this table, with all its ghosts to lead us on into these winter evenings of quiet conversation with dear company. I wish you could all come to my table, so many of you whom I miss and so many I'd enjoy getting to know even better. My table is a place where I don't have a lot to offer but we all have a lot to say, not the least of which is how good it is, still and despite all, to be here.

My mother's favorite holiday phrase was "Bah, Humbug." It was used many times around this table. So I consider it a sign that when I went to look up a good Tim O'Brien song to go with this blog, this tune was LITERALLY the FIRST ONE at the TOP of the list. So how could I not share it with you? I even had to call my sister! It's just the kind of song that we might have listened to, sitting around this table, over and over again, like the way our parents were obsessed with "Santa Claus and His Old Lady." This is WAY better. Oh Tim, bless your heart and Merry Christmas to you and your sweet family. If you knew how much we loved you and how happy we feel to know we all came from the same place, you could fire up Stifel Center with all those happy vibes. Thank you for this. (See you Jan. 16 at the Stage!)

Ok, where was I? Oh yes, the perfect Holiday tune, from my table, to yours.

Bah Humbug

Merry Nonetheless

2008-12-13T17:33:00.003-05:00

Boy, was I pissed off this morning. Actually, I was pissed off last night after reading this and other articles about the GOP rejecting a Big Three Bailout because it didn't include enough auto worker concessions. The CEOs of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, beggars in blue suits, fly to Washington on private jets to ask for an allowance, and the Senate wants the line worker to take a paycut? I'm sorry, Senator? I don't think I heard you. You see, it might be that American autoworkers for Nissan, Honda, and Toyota have a different arrangement. They also make fuel efficient cars that are extremely reliable. I haven't driven an American made engine in 14 years. And that's not the fault of some guy on the assembly line. Try the folks up in engineering, or marketing, or general accounting. They'd be who you need to talk to.

Anyway, I was already riled up when this morning, this little tidbit came across my screen. The Fed Reserve says it doesn't have to tell you or me who got $2 TRILLION of our tax dollars. Um, excuse me, YES, YOU DO.

As a reminder to readers, please do not forget that despite all that's been shoved down our throats, it doesn't have to be this way. We pay for the government. And every day, we are closer to, if not upon, taxation without representation.

At the end of the day, Mr. Bernanke works for us. You, and me, a petite middle-aged, single mother of two who just took a haircut herself and is hanging on by her fingernails along with most of the rest of America to see what Bernanke, Paulsen and their minions of geniuses do next. So far, most of us aren't impressed.

I recommend everyone take a minute to think about this. You know, maybe just make an adjustment. Add an exemption. Or, several. Just three months. Send a message to Horton on the other side. "We are here! We are here! And we have your revenue!"

Once I got to thinking about this after a conversation with my sister, I started to feel downright merry. I don't know what's holding us back. There are kids in this country with no food or healthcare, good workers with no jobs, and ordinary people all over getting closer to the edge that their less fortunate neighbors were shoved over months ago. We should be making some basic demands. If the GOP can say no, well, sure as hell so can I.

And it's with that thought that I skipped out and finished most of my holiday shopping, followed by the procurement of most of the ingredients I'll need to commence the holiday baking. Despite myself and the best efforts of The Powers That Be to put a bullet in my will to wassail, I nonetheless look forward to wrapping the little presents I am grateful to have bought today, hiding some of them, sending others away. Nothing fancy, just a few small and I hope meaningful reminders to stop once in a while to think of all that is possible, to find out all that we are capable of, whether it's through solving a puzzle or reading the inspirational words of a leader who changed the world.

Both can be you this Christmas and all the time.

Upon returning home with my festive bounty, and before I made myself a beautiful salad with pecans, figs, and blue cheese -- a gourmet treat I have been denying myself in the tradition of Bob Cratchet -- I gifted myself with Mary Chapin Carpenter's first holiday effort, Come Darkness, Come Light. It's quite an album of the times. I share with you one titled simply, "Christmas Carol." I don't know if anyone could have given us a song so timely -- as if months ago in the studio she could see this past week coming with all its dreary and otherwise unbelievable news.

So after a little tidying, I will open a Sam Adams winter lager, drag out the paper and bags and bows and tape and scissors, and turn up the music. I hope that as you begin to create your own kind of holiday, you'll find a way to reinvent the things you want to change, all the while finding that little piece of candy in your stocking.

Christmas Carol

Mary Chapin Carpenter, Come Darkness, Come Light: Twelve Songs of Christmas

Hopin' for Brighter Days Ahead

2008-12-03T22:03:00.003-05:00

Consciousness sucks. Anyone who's ever experienced it during a downturn knows that. Now that I am poised to lose up to half my earned income before taxes, consciousness means choosing. I can choose to take a chance on the same horse, or I can change horses, or enter an entirely different race altogether.

I'm really at a crossroads. Yogi Berra said that when you come to a fork in the road, take it. I've just learned that's not as easy, or as funny, as it sounds.

I took some new uncharacteristically holiday-ish tunes with me tonight to work out. Yo-Yo Ma's recent Yo-Yo Ma & Friends: Songs of Joy and Peace called to me a while ago, at a time when maybe I thought there might be writing on the wall but I couldn't see it clearly. I'm glad I caved in and ordered it because it is an absolute delight. It's really sort of a winter album draped around recurring versions of the "Dona Nobis Pacem" hymn tune. There are a couple of notable exceptions such as the Ma and James Taylor rendition of the classic "Here Comes the Sun".

I hope it will lift your spirits as it did mine. It is going to be a long, hard, cold winter, but spring always comes, and with it hope and renewal. And in between we have things to celebrate, like our freedom, and love, and dignity, and our creative spirit, and the magic of watching all kinds of things unfolding -- kids growing up, our own ripening in mid age, little kids in the White House again, the Ford CEO getting paid a dollar, people finding jobs again, bread and milk at reasonable prices. Today I passed my usual gas station and the price of regular unleaded was $1.63! That's both good and bad news -- we live in an age of paradox. But no doubt through it all the sun will continue to rise and set in a dance with the moon. Enjoy this dance between two American treasures, Ma and Taylor, to warm you from the inside out with visions of joy and peace. (Note: especially therapeutic when combined with a purring cat on lap.)

Here Comes The Sun

Another Perfect Holiday

2008-11-28T13:52:00.004-05:00

Well, following what was the perfect Thanksgiving -- spent cooking, relaxing, eating, and playing games in our jammies but only after an early-morning trip to the fitness center -- we are now sitting around with no game plan. Several months ago, I had asked X if I could have the kids for the full weekend, so that we could make a trip to see family out east. By the time he got back to me it was too late to press on with any elaborate trip, so we decided to settle for something closer to home. That hasn't panned out either, along with most of the other ideas that I've had in the last hour, just trying to come up with something.

So, I'm pissed off, because through no fault of their own or mine, we're stuck. I'm more pissed because the company I work for is cutting me back to HALF TIME as of MONDAY, and there's no guarantee of how long that will last, or whether I and the good folks I followed into that arrangement are going to be able to pull some sort of holiday miracle out of our butts to generate business to make up for the other half. I'm pissed because I'm sitting at home with the kids, having promised them something more festive to do today, but failing to produce. I'm pissed that I had to tell them that we'll be fine for a while because their 43 year old mother is able to cobble together two part time jobs to make ends meet. I'm SO too old for that. Ugh.

I know I still have it one hell of a lot better than a lot of people. I don't live large so while there aren't many places I can cut back, I don't have a mountain of worrisome debt staring me in the face, either. There are people in my own family and among friends who are ill, who are losing their jobs altogether, who have all kinds of sadness and unpleasant situations on hand. I'm just having a bad attitude about the fact that I was just hitting a new place, a clearing in the forest where I could see that things were in pretty good shape and I could start to live like a normal person, you know, without a dishwasher with holes in it, or carpet that looks like it belonged in a frat house. But I guess I'll have to live with that a little longer. Every time I see another "news report" about people not spending money, my head feels like it's going to blow up. Given that so many millions of Americans are out of work, how exactly, is this news? I have a credit line big enough on one card to buy a brand new car, but I'm not an idiot. Look at this story. At least my job isn't to play Dr. Santa.

I know things will turn out ok and most likely even get better, and I know that one key is simply to start behaving like some of the candidates I've helped get into great jobs -- not undersell myself, capitalize on my transferable skills, not accepting anything less than what it would take to keep me whole, truly prepare myself to compete. I also have to make sure I'm not working for free--I am indebted to the good folks who gave me a shot five years ago and I'll do everything I can to help turn things around, but I've cut back my hours in the mornings when my kids are with me so that I can drop my daughter off just before school starts, allowing me a little more time with her but also saving me the expense of morning child care. To think I'm one of the lucky ones in my company? Yah. Needless to say, this concludes my experiment with the corporate sector.

I hope that all y'all are having a reasonably good holiday weekend. As crappy as things seem to be right now for just about everyone I know, I can still think of more than a few things I'm grateful for to every one thing that's got me down. I hope you can say the same, or sing it, or play it this weekend while you have a little time to yourself. As the kids in School of Rock say, don't let the man get you down. You might want to cozy up with someone you care about and listen to this tune from the Red Clay Ramblers, even if it's just your cat or your kid. At the end of the day, what we're really hanging onto is the love we have and the hope to love even more, at this time of year and all year.

One Rose/Hot Buttered Rum

Lucky Seven

2008-11-23T20:07:00.009-05:00

Ok, ok. It's been a nutty couple of days and all the while my head has been turning with the "seven" from Blueberry's tag a few days ago. So I call this the Lucky Seven because I'm lucky I got it done before the weekend was officially over. Here's the scoop:

THE RULES:

1. Post your list of the seven best albums, the seven bloggers you will tag, a copy of these rules, and a link back to this page.

2. Each person tagged will put a URL to their Blogger Album Project post along with a list of the seven best albums in the comment section HERE.

3. Feel free to post the “I Contributed to the Blogger Album Project” Award Graphic on your sidebar, along with a link back to this page.

4. Post a link back to the blogger who tagged you.

To think I can narrow things down to seven is a bit ambitious but it did get me thinking about some great albums I haven't listened to in a while. It's also, now that I'm done, a bit heavy on the Brits. Hm. What's that about? Well, anyway, here goes:

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours. This album won me over at an early age with the songwriting and some of the acoustic numbers, particularly this one, the groove of which I believe I wore clean through.

The Beatles - Revolver. Things started happening there. I love Rubber Soul too, but there was a little anger and a little rebellion that started to show through with the edge they captured on Revolver.

Tony Rice and Ricky Skaggs - Skaggs & Rice. This is an amazing collection of bluegrass tunes performed by two of the genres top musicians. It's a rare gem with both Skaggs and Rice on vocals, before Rice lost his singing ability.

Elton John - Madman Across the Water. Actually one of my mother's favorite albums, Madman features what I think is one of the best songs ever written. Levon is an American human epic crammed into five minutes of great music.

Eric Clapton - Crossroads. These are the essential recordings through the years, a premiere collection from the Yardbirds on down.

Kate Bush - Hounds of Love. I don't really know what the hell this album is about but it has captivated me from my first listen some 20 years ago. Kate Bush is brilliantly creative, holds nothing back.

R.E.M - Fables of the Reconstruction. Throughout this band's long and impressive evolution, this one has always hung on with me. I think it straddles R.E.M. the alt college-band and R.E.M. the gritty honest in-your-face band. I haven't loved all of their experiements, but I have loved them for trying, and I still have a crush on Mike Mills.

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Thank you, Blueberry, for this was actually pretty fun despite how long it took me to come up with my list. Tagged for this crazy meme will be Ipsissimus, Shameless, Shannon, The Yarn Slut, Doc, and Drew. Have fun, music fans!

Before the Magnificent Seven, A Word About A Magnificent Five Stringer

2008-11-20T21:18:00.002-05:00

How cool -- as I write this I am listening to my niece on http://www.wyep.org/ who is filling in for a fellow DJ. Clearly, music pushing runs in the family. It is blustery outside and snowing wildly again, but I feel kind of mellow -- either it's the dribble of rum I put in the hot chocolate to help me cope with the fact that I may need snow tires, or just the onset ahead of schedule of the relaxing I hope to do next week over the holiday week.

Blueberry tagged me with just about the hardest meme I think I've gotten hit with yet -- the seven best albums. OyvehcarumbaLInaYOdel I don't have any idea how I'll come up with those. But, I will try. It may take a few days, but I'll give it a go.

Meanwhile, all week as I've been moving furniture and trying to clean and get ready for the holidays, that Eddie Adcock story has played itself in my head and gosh darn it if I don't find myself coveting one of these. It's completely illogical. Definitely a want, not a need. And since the least expensive model worth having sports a price tag of about $1500, more than half the cost of the new furnace that is running right now, I'll have to stick with the snow tires and maybe the new dishwasher we need.

But it's fun to think about. Used to be you could pick up a Deering Goodtime for about $400. But instead, I think I'll just think about my magnificent seven albums for Blueberry (be sure to check out her seven, very impressive!!) -- maybe even make a handwritten list. (Oh, Blue, if you knew how neurotic my friends are about lists of songs let alone albums, you would realize you now will have us all sucked into this thing!)

Until I can get that run out, I wanted to share the playing of an impressive young woman I saw this year for the first time at IBMA. Kristin Scott Benson is a banjo player with the Larry Stephenson Band. She was part of a workshop I attended, and I heard her play Sunday morning. By then it had been a pretty long weekend for her since Ms. Scott Benson was named IBMA's Banjo Player of the Year. It was great to see a woman win top honors in perhaps the most male-dominated instrument category of a male-dominated genre. Visit Kristin's MySpace page to enjoy tracks from her new release, Second Season.

Proof that Banjo is Brainy

2008-11-16T16:52:00.002-05:00

While reviewing a web site my sister in law shared on brain health (it was her brother who suffered the stroke last week and we are all learning as much as we can), I stumbled across this amazing video of longtime legendary five-stringer Eddie Adcock. Here he is with banjo in hand and brain under knife as surgeons attempt to do a bit of fine-tuning in his cerebral cortex while he plays!

Amazing! I had just assured my SIL that while her brother has a long road ahead of him, he is not only physically fit and amazingly resilient, BUT medicine has made enormous strides in addressing brain injury. This piece is case in point. Enjoy!!

Resurfacing

2008-11-15T19:29:00.003-05:00

The last week has been something of a slow and steady race. I feel like I am still in the slight fog of a mild cold, and catching up from a typically busy week on top of which I turned 43, attended-- with two of my fave people--what appears to be a fairly successful fundraiser for one of my fave orgs, and sat working at my dining room table for about 6 straight hours while a surprisingly slight person installed a new furnace in my home. I later sashayed to the fitness center where I realized I really do lose a little ground on the weeks I have the kids and am not pushing myself as hard. That is probably true in every category, because then they leave and I spend the days following in hot pursuit of making up for lost time in all departments.

I had my music with me the whole time, I did play a little more last weekend while they were around than I typically do. But thanks to not feeling well I missed two shows at The Kent Stage during the Folk Festival. And tonight's show, with the amazing Nanci Griffith, is sold out.

But it's ok. It's been the kind of day when it might be just as pleasant and maybe even more productive to pull out the mando, tune up, and set the dial to a song like the one I'll share tonight.

This week also included some very upsetting news about a longtime family friend, my brother's brother-in-law who suffered a stroke last weekend. Only 50 years old and truly the very picture of health, this man is now learning again how to walk, move, eat, teaching one half of his body how to do things he's always done. My sibs and I found ourselves asking each other things like "When was your last doctor's visit?" and "What was your last BP?" I had just been thinking that I need to have my cholesterol checked (it runs rampantly high in my family, part of the rationale behind my more vigorous approach to exercise and more judicious, lighter carbon-footprint diet) when this happened. I found out when my brother called to wish me a happy birthday after we had meandered through many memories and stories about the places and people where we grew up.

So I guess I've been just taking some time this week to keep my head above water and figure out what's next. What do I need to do to take care of myself and my kids? And beyond that, what should I do to keep enjoying life, make more room for myself. Am I missing something? If I had a stroke tonight and couldn't dial up my neighbor or 911, that might pretty much be it. Yet this guy had a housefull of people and still ended up in the same position. Is there anything I should be doing differently?

I dunno. More than once this week I thought, "I'm pretty much who I'm going to be at this point." Not that I don't have room to grow or change, but I'm not a kid anymore, I know a lot about who I am and what I believe, and the older I get the less tolerant I become of bullies, bigots, and ignoramuses. I wasn't born yesterday, and I still have some pride. I'm proud that I have made it this far, proud of my kids, proud to be part of the family I was born into, proud of my work, proud to have so many wonderful friends, and proud that I managed to buy myself a new furnace before the old one broke down.

Pride has a certain place, like, in this song, "This Old Town." It came back to me one night as I plugged my iPod in while cleaning up, not long after my restorative visit home about a month ago. It grabbed me as so much of the stuff of the little chain of river towns I call home. I played it over and over, and learned it the best I could. Tonight might be a good night to pick it up again.

Enjoy, and take time to feel a little pride in your deeds and efforts as you inch along as we all do through life.

Beat the Clock with Dawg and Doc

2008-11-09T07:54:00.003-05:00

There aren't many mornings like this when the kids are here and I'm still the only one up at 7:55 a.m.

I may have jinxed myself, but that's ok. I love having the kids around. But there's something special about mornings when Mama is up first. Being awake and functional before either of them is different from when they aren't here and I'm awake and functional. There's a little comfort, somehow, in knowing they are up in their beds, snoozing happily away.

The holidays are coming on fast. There's always so much to do so the holidays are like an added layer of strategic planning. I've been sitting here plotting which expenses I can handle when -- trying not to go out and blow it. In addition to the new furnace, we need a new printer, a new dishwasher (I'll post photos of the rusted out door for the nonbelievers) and a new range. While I'm glad that the previous owners have gotten the good use they had out of these appliances, the thought of taking on the holidays with a 30 year old range is like begging for trouble. At the rate my life is going, there doesn't seem to be any likelihood that I'll be moving out anytime in the next four years, so why not make the time I'm here more functional?

You know how you get, though, when you start thinking and planning ahead and getting a little carried away. Everything starts to look old -- my carpeting with its frat-house-like stains will be the next to go -- and you start to covet, covet, covet. I've gotten pretty good at living with what is but I'm kind of excited about a new furnace. I mean, it's like a really grownup thing to have to do. I'm so lucky to have a reason to need one, you know? And even luckier that I can find a way to replace it before I have to. Life is really, really good. My cup indeed runneth over.

But it's always better with music, isn't it?

This fun little medley includes a tune called East Tennessee Blues -- I don't think it's very bluesy but it's cute and fun to play. I've been learning it a little and played it for the rowdy kids last night who also thought it was pretty cute. I don't play it very fast -- I'm not one to believe everything in Bluegrass or in life needs to happen at top speeds -- but these two fellas do it just about right. How about one from the great Doc Watson and infamous Dave "Dawg" Grisman to go with that Beat the Clock game?

Best to all y'all this Sunday morning!

East Tennessee Blues/Tennessee Wagoner/Beaumont Rag

Election Stomp

2008-11-06T21:50:00.002-05:00

Well, that was quite a week. I'm still pinching myself, trying to grasp that it's over, that the GOP is getting a time-out, and that I get to keep my ovaries for four more years. (I was going to send them to "John McCain" since he seemed concerned about the "health" of the mother. Seems like they mean more to him than they do to me.)

I've been enjoying fooling around with some older bluegrass tunes on the mando. I have a book put together by Roland White, whose workshops I've had occasion to attend at the last few IBMAs. The book is fun; it's got the tabs for a few dozen tunes, a pair of cds, and fun pics and stories. I had been listening to the old Monroe recording I have on my iPod and a few tunes really stuck out, like this one, Bluegrass Stomp. It's definitely got that "Stomp" style swing to it--akin to Rag, it's a popular blues format after the early black string band tradition. I don't know how Big Mon credited those influences, whether he acknowledged the roots of some of the music. I know Kentucky is not particularly into the whole diversity craze, never has been. But Bill certainly was his own person, and a bigger-than-life figure in a rather small corner of the music world.

Anyway, I sure have fun playing this one, called Blue Grass Stomp. I play it with a lot less apprehension now that I don't have to pack to move to Canada. Enjoy.

Is It Over Yet?

2008-11-03T21:41:00.002-05:00

No, it's not. It doesn't really even start for another nine hours. I'm going to sleep for as many of those as I can, then pretend to work all day, then go to the fitness center and try not to hyperventilate. Then I don't know what I'll do.

I'm just ready for it all to be behind us so we can get on with the business of living again.

If you're voting, please remember, you're not voting for someone who is going to make you happy or solve your problems. You are voting to select the next leader of the United States, to represent all of us to foreign countries, to populate the United States Supreme Court, to declare or not to declare war, to invoke executive order to do many things without the blessing of Congress. You are not electing a celebrity, a drinking buddy, or someone who will solve the mortgage crisis or reduce Hamas to a sorry little heap in a matter of days. You are voting, and someone will win, and that someone will not act alone but will appoint a Cabinet to carry out the hallmarks of his administration beyond what is enacted by the next United States Congress.

This Presidential election is only the 56th consecutive such election in United States history. What a young nation we really are. In the case of victory on either side, it will be the first time that either a woman or an African-American will hold the highest or second-highest office in the nation. In addition to the Presidential election, there are senate races in 33 states.

But I'll still be glad when it's all over. On Wednesday I'll wake up ready to go to work the way I have been most every day for almost six out of the last eight years (I've been working longer but just took a little break after the first eleven). It might feel a little different at first but in the end I still fold my own laundry and pay my own bills. And that's what I plan to do no matter who gets elected, and so should you.

Good luck, America!

Big Wall of Time

2008-11-01T19:44:00.004-05:00

Tonight's the big night when we get an extra hour back. Unfortunately I'm a bit under the weather so I'll probably spend my extra hour sleeping, but how often to we get an extra hour to do that, let alone anything else? It's also coming on a number of anniversaries. My mother June Anne will have been dead six years ago tomorrow. She would have been 80 years old at the end of the month. My dad will have been dead 31 years at the end of the month. I'll ring in my 43rd birthday in a couple weeks. November is a busy month in our family.

It's amazing how we view time. If anything should teach us impermanence, it's time. Yet we hold onto things and make plans as though we have some control over what happens next. Of course we have to have some kind of framework to hang our lives on, and in the day to day and moment to moment of living we want to engage and feel like we're alive and doing some good. We have friends and families and partners whom we love and big milestones in our lives and work that we do and big changes along the way. But at any time it could all change and we'd be in completely unknown territory.

One thing I do plan to do with my time this coming week is to get out and enjoy the offerings at the 2008 Kent State Folk Festival. On Thursday Darrell Scott and Richard Shindell will be gracing the Kent Stage, and on Friday, a duo I try very hard never to miss, Tony Rice and Pete Rowan. The week is full of goodies, culminating with a performance of another favorite of mine, Ms. Nanci Griffith on November 15.

I always look forward to Rice and Rowan. They are a magical pair, I don't know how else to describe it. When they are performing and the audience is quite honestly rather transfixed, it's a completely different kind of concert experience. These are two guys who bring decades of performing experience and such a spectrum of experience -- Rowan played with Monroe as a Bluegrass Boy, and Tony Rice created a unique smooth sound with his brothers Wyatt and the late Larry. He's also widely regarded as sort of a dean of 'grass guitar, although his playing is much more mellifluous a lot of the time (case in point is his famous rendition of Shenandoah, which you can view here) and he's just one of the all-time best guitarists of popular music, period. Pete's voice is just as smooth and soothing and almost purifying. It's really an incredible time and if you're around I hope you can come, 8 p.m. next Friday night (Nov. 7) at the Stage.

Walls of Time is one of my very favorite tunes. It's built on a sweet lonesome mournful mando part. I'll send it out tonight to anyone who's lost a loved one, who's missing someone gone away or a relationship that has gone wrong, to readers who have children or partners in Iraq or Afghanistan, to readers who have lost furry four-legged members of their family, to anyone who is missing a past or present piece of themselves tonight. This is a nice clip that includes Pete's story of how he and Bill Monroe wrote this tune. This particular rendition is a little "flip" for my tastes, but I hope you'll enjoy it nonetheless. I'm ready anytime to do this number and sing the harmony when any of y'all are up for it.

Have a good night and make every one of those extra 60 minutes count for somethin'.

Walls of Time
Pete Rowan, Tony Rice; that's Mike Bub on the bass. The guy in the pink shirt was another Bluegrass Boy brother but I'm faint on the other mando player.

(Not Quite Ready For) First Snow

2008-10-29T07:17:00.005-05:00

I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked out the front door this morning and saw Son of Mando's handily carved Jack-O-Lantern wearing a white hat.

All I'm gonna say is, it is WAY too early for this tune, but, it's a FTLOB tradition.

First Snow
(Tim O'Brien and friends from the Grammy-winning album, Fiddlers Green)

Through the Window of a Train

2008-10-24T15:21:00.002-05:00

A couple of months ago I posted a piece about the conflict I had with my son over being asked to give my permission for him to ride to school with another boy. I remember asking for time to think about it, which didn’t go over well with him or the other parents. It turns out that almost two months later, the young driver still does not have his license. Obviously, I feel set up. It's really a testament of how far things have unraveled and I must have contributed something to it, because people don't just wake up one day and decide to do things like this for fun.

I’ve been thinking again about my attachment to figuring out this stuff that's been happening in the last year either to me or others, and am realizing that, maybe it's not worth trying to figure out, because some of these things may not be about me after all. I’m learning that there are times when you have to accept being a spectator, being removed or without responsibility no matter what the temptation is, and just let it stop there. Just stop. Stop the train of destruction or it will run over you and the people you care about.

As I mentioned I've had the iPod on Shuffle and one of the things on there that I don't frankly listen to often enough is a workshop by one of my favorite writers, a Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron. Her writing has always brought me around when I've been struggling with difficult things because rather than set forth these lofty goals of enlightenment, she breaks it down into little bits of advice. The recording that popped up is a gift from Shameless, titled "Don't Bite the Hook." Eerily timed, the segment that came up yesterday during my drive home was one about knee-jerk reactions.

I think we are all trained to have knee-jerk reactions -- in school, on the playground, later in board rooms and at family gatherings. I have had my share when feel I have to defend myself or see an injustice. I had one a couple of weeks ago and I regret it because it came back around to bite someone I care about right in the tookus, which was of course not my intention but once we have taken an action and can't take it back, no matter how "justified" we feel it is, we have no control over what happens next or how it will be used to further the destructive behavior we think we have the power to stop.

More and more, in different areas, I am starting to see how pulling back, even when a situation involves the people you love most, is the only way to truly be able to bring about more peace in the world. As Pema Chodron says, the buck has to stop somewhere, and it might as well stop with you, as hard as that might be. Maybe it won't make a huge difference, but it will make a difference in how we feel about ourselves. It's a sort of "detox" program from our own knee-jerk tendencies that ultimately destroy not just our own health and happiness and progress as people but it is a real downer for the rest of the folks in your world.

My daughter last night retold a story that her father told her about an injury she got when she was a very little person, not quite two. I remember the incident because I was there, discovered she was bleeding, knew that she was not consolable even with breastfeeding, so we took her to the ER and she had a stitch put in. She was never told to go to her room as it was described to her; she was too little to have been sent to her room, and too upset. But apparently I was not even in the story; who knows how I was repainted by the storyteller. This is the kind of thing that people do to each other when they want the bad feelings to continue and engender some kind of negative action or reaction. Even writing about it is a rather negative reaction on my part but it's part of what I am processing and it validates why I have to get off that train and get on a new one.

In these situations, you have to extract yourself from the intimacy of the experience and look in on it as though you know nobody involved. It doesn't mean I love my children less or worry for them less, or that the things my friends and family might go through are not serious or important. But when we are so entwined in the circumstance, are we really able to help the person we care about? We can step out of it and watch things unfold as though we were a passenger on a train and this is one of the things witnessed on the journey. Now, certainly if there were any real danger, most of us would probably decide to step in. But how often is that really, truly necessary? Not as often as our knee-jerk instinct might lead us to believe.

This Blue Highway song, the title track from their latest release, also has been on my mind for a couple of days. I believe it received a Song of the Year nomination from IBMA. The more I think about my experience in discovering music like this and meeting the people involved, the more I believe and feel I am on the right track. I've never felt as comfortable and "right" as when I am around these folks. Music just has a way of evening things out, of giving us an important outlet for our feelings and allowing us to express strong emotions without hurting other people. Earlier this week I put my earphones in and played through this tune and a bunch of others and it felt wonderful and sounded not too bad! I hope you find the time this weekend to enjoy the things that help you express yourself and bring you some peace, too.

Through the Window of a Train

Everybody drives the same old roads these days
Don't see a thing, but they know the way
Every mile's a marker, every town's the same
Another place to stop but not to stay

Daddy was a brakeman on the L&N
Sometimes he'd let me ride along with him
No matter where we'd stop along the way
Everybody knew his name

A different story down every line
People workin' hard just to live and die
I saw it all once upon a time
Through the window of a train

Then we started back the way we came
Like people moving through a picture frame
Seems the whole world's further down the track
But I'm always looking back

I don't expect you all to understand
Or see the country like a railroad man
So many things you'd never realize
Unless you saw 'em with these eyes

Birmingham to Jackson, hear the whistle call
And the sun goes down like a big red ball
In my memory I still see it all
Through the window of a train

Oh the Mendacity!

2008-10-21T21:02:00.005-05:00

Sunday afternoon I took a little time to myself and went to a screening of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at The Kent Stage. It was truly fun to watch a young Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor doing what made them so famous. And it was, like most Tennessee Williams plays, another family drama where you never quite know what the motivation is until it all comes out in the wash at the end. Or, not.

I was a fan of Williams. I enjoy his writing and in college very nearly decided I would take on his work for my senior thesis. In the end I was swayed to a different dramatist from a far off country. But, as with my affection for Faulker and his long, loose dramatically painted lines, Williams' writing breathes and oozes the brutal honesty of the South.

I've learned that brutal honesty is just not always all that popular with northerners, or city folk. My own boss, who himself grew up in rural Louisiana, has always had to struggle with "speaking truth to power." But once you've done it, it doesn't matter if it falls on death Northern cityfolk ears. When you don't apologize for the truth, or for being a person who tells it, that's just how it is.

I don't know if this is part of what makes me uncomfortable about Cleveland. It's always seemed that there is an overarching long and drawn-out passive aggressive nature to everything. My friends all joke that my mother was very good at it, but not quite to the degree that I witness it around here; there's a difference between suggesting that someone might want to put on a sweater, and not answering an email for four weeks despite reminders. I'm trying to be more discreet, well mannered. But I'm not a faker, I suck at veiled anything, I'm not a shallow person, and not much of a game player. I don't find the challenge of manipulating other people all that interesting, at least I haven't for a very, very long time. It's not worth risking their trust, and I have no reason to. As a recruiter, people are my bread and butter. It's because of my interest in people and my ability to relate with people that allows me the privilege of making my living the way I do.

I've been through a lot of weird things and tough times with my own family, which is fairly spread out across Ohio, down on into Tennessee and then again as far east as Baltimore. We all have our moments, all our families do. As much as I worry for my own children being torn apart while caught in the barbed wire of unpleasant family business, I'm sure I learned a few tricks growing up myself from situations that weren't all that perfect. A sad compromise: if I can't stop what's happening to them, can I teach them how to use the lesson? If I could, what exactly is the lesson?

I've had the iPod on Shuffle for about two weeks. Just as I was driving into work this morning I thought, "I bet Donna Hughes has a song for this post." And just almost at that moment -- no kidding, now -- this tune popped up in the rotation. I've posted it here before but it's a song most of my friends recall from days gone by when we were all kind of fond of Cyndi Lauper. She kind of got out in front with her own thing and had this sort of honesty about her, a way of being herself at a time when music was just busting open with the video age. "Time After Time" is one of those songs everyone kind of knows, I think. It always makes me think of my kids; lines like "If you fall, I will catch you, I'll be waiting...time after time" are sentiments that are always on my mind. It's also a good standard tune for unconditional friendship and love, something that is surprisingly rare when it should be the standard, time after time.

Time After Time

No Consensus

2008-10-19T08:31:00.003-05:00

It finally got cold enough this morning for me to turn the heat on, to just take the chill out. I was sold on holding off on the heat as long as I could, if possible until the new furnace comes in about a month from now, but I figured it would just ease the house into fall.

Not too bad, actually, that it's past the October midpoint. We've been kind of spoiled, I guess, with the warm weather last weekend and then the week before I was in Nashville where it was around 85 degrees when I left. Even most of this past week it was nice.

The hard part about turning on the heat, as it will be for many folks, is, how will this affect my bottom line? I was quite surprised to open my gas bill and find it had been lowered almost $20, which I don't quite buy. I've heard gas and delivery charges are both going up, so how can they lower my bill another $20 a month? Hm.

As fall comes on, we are in the worst economic condition in history. I'm girding myself for all kinds of swings in expenses, from utilities to groceries. Fuel prices are down at the moment, but after the election there's no telling what will happen. Nobody can agree on how all this happened, nobody can agree on what to do to move forward, nobody can seem to come to any consensus. Until it stops being a blame game nothing will change.

I was hoping to find a recording to share with you of a song I heard at IBMA by a band I had not had a chance to hear before, Special Consensus. This band started out in 1975 in another favorite town of mine, Chicago, under the leadership of banjo player Greg Cahill, the current volunteer president of IBMA. The song is called "Our Little Town" and I hope you'll go out and check it out; it's all about the uncertainty of these times and what will happen not just to individual families, but entire communities like the one where I grew up. And it will happen while Washington is trying to execute its big bailout strategy, just the same old "trickle down" economics in a different suit. It will take months before people and businesses in places like Smithfield Ohio see any help from that.

But finding this video of "Special C" at this year's Nashcamp event at least took the chill off for my morning and reminded me that there will be a time when this is behind us, one way or another. If there is a heaven, for me, it would be like this: folks gathered on a warm June night to play and hear live music on the porch -- complete with birdsong. It's how I hope to spend my summer evenings someday when we get through this and other train wrecks. Hope this warms you up and brings you a smile wherever you are.

Ten Mile Tennessee

Wild, Wonderful and Just Fine with Me

2008-10-15T20:55:00.029-05:00

The pace of things has been pretty high since I got back from Nashville and so I’m still unpacking a few of my IBMA experiences on top of still kind of settling back into my “normal” life in Northeast Ohio. Getting past what Pie referred to as that “WTF” feeling – she helped me realize that I go through that feeling every time I pull off the turnpike or pull out of the airport parking lot -- has been a little more challenging this year perhaps because the visit home did hit the sweet spot in so many ways.

I think my trip home, though, actually started while I was in Nashville, not only because I got to enjoy so much time with my sister and her family but also because the last show I saw on Saturday night took me entirely by surprise. The lineup for the weekend featured two performers who really are known as country stars – Vince Gill, and Kathy Mattea. I was kind of lukewarm about catching either show but felt I needed to just see what they were about. Gill was pretty terrific and a good showman, although his voice is not as bell-like as I remember. Ms. Mattea, on the other hand, absolutely shut it down for me. There was one more set on the lineup Saturday night, but there was no point because I had become totally enraptured in Mattea’s performance of songs from her new album, “Coal”.

Mattea is a Mountaineer, and although she has had sort of a pretty successful country career, she handed out each of the songs from “Coal” like little drops of chocolate-covered gold. From start to finish, the crowd thoroughly enjoyed not just the songs but her self-effacing delivery. She admitted that these songs really changed the way she thought about singing, not to mention her life, and I think for the audience they changed they way some folks, myself included, see her. Maybe they changed the way she sees herself.

That's part of what's been happening over the course of the last five or six years with me. My parents never talked about the Jamboree and we never went, even though the biggest stars in country and bluegrass music stopped through there. My guess is that one or both -- probably one, probably my Dad -- felt the music was beneath them and so it never made it to the Friday or Saturday night rotation on the stereo. But no matter, years later I found it anyway and really in the nick of time as I began to unpack myself after years of trying to please other people and pretend I was someone else. Part of that was realizing that just because I grew up in the country doesn't somehow make me "less" in any regard. On the contrary, if anything, it makes me "more." More of who I am. A classically trained singer and a bluegrass fan can indeed inhabit the same skin. Someone who enjoys a well-executed chamber piece and a good barnburner don't have to be different people. Someone who can have a chat with the general manager of a Group 1 orchestra and enjoy a 1 a.m. conversation with a bluegrass fest organizer would be the anxious to introduce them to each other. I no longer try to hide that teensy little bit of "twang" when it comes out in conversation with someone from Philadelphia or New York or LA. They don't seem to mind, so, why should I?

This tune kind of sums it up. Someday I hope I can get a crowd of down-home, closet Ohio Valleyans to join me in a few rounds. In the meantime, I sure get where Mattea is coming from when she sings this one called "Green Rolling Hills." Enjoy.

Green Rolling Hills

Oh, the green rolling hills of West Virginia
Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know
Though the times are sad and drear and I cannot linger here
They'll keep me and never let me go.

My daddy said, don't ever be a miner
For a miner's grave is all you'll ever own
'Cause the hard times everywhere, I can't find a dime to spare
These are the worst times I've ever known.

But the green rolling hills of West Virginia
Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know
Though the times are sad and drear and I cannot linger here
They'll keep me and never let me go.

--- Instrumental ---

So I'll move away into some crowded city
In some northern factory town you'll find me there
Though I'll leave the past behind I'll never change my mind
These troubled times are more than I can bear.

But the green rolling hills of West Virginia
Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know
Though the times are sad and drear and I cannot linger here
They'll keep me and never let me go.

But someday I'll go back to West Virginia
To the green rolling hills I love so well
Yes, someday I'll go home and I know I'll right the wrong
These troubled times will follow me no more.

Yes, someday I'll go home and I know I'll right the wrong
These troubled times will follow me no more.

A Jamboree Journey in Time

2008-10-12T20:25:00.015-05:00

This weekend the kids and I took a badly needed escape to visit the part of the state where I grew up. They hadn't been down there with me for a long time, too long. The motivation behind the trip was to enjoy a concert featuring Tim O'Brien and the Steep Canyon Rangers, but at every turn, even at the concert, we got more fun than we bargained for.

There has been a lot of curiosity about family since we started doing this family tree stuff so part of our planned visit involved cemetery stops. It was actually kind of nice, in a way, to stop at Mom's grave -- we really were kind of fumbling around for it in this giant cemetery in Wheeling, and lo, my daughter spotted the family name as we had almost given up. We also climbed to the top of Riverview Cemetery in Martins Ferry -- an experience of driving up some steep inclines with impressive views that my daughter, the skier and fearless one, did NOT like in the car.

The centerpiece of the visit was live music -- live and on the air. That part kind of eluded me in the planning. I figured we were just heading out to Brush Run Park to hang out with my brother and sister in law and catch some live tunes real cheap -- $15 for the three of us since the kids were FREE. But it turned out to be a real barn burner of an evening with four bands all broadcast live from our little Ohio hilltop around the globe at http://www.wheelingjamboree.org/. Pretty cool. The show was great fun, very old-fashioned Jamboree USA. (Once upon a time, WWVA was right behind the Opry's WSM in reaching audiences with live bluegrass and early country music.) We had a chance to hear the Wheeling Park High School Bluegrass Band which has put bluegrass music education on the map with a recent trip to Japan. Tim O'Brien had a nice long solo acoustic set; his 95 year old dad was in the crowd along with a few other friends and family. The headliner band, Steep Canyon Rangers, were an exceptional delight. Out of Asheville, they were much more high-steppin' than most of the Asheville musicians I've become acquainted with. They did a couple of my favorite Monroe tunes, Tennessee Blues and, with Tim joining in for a double fiddle fest, Wheel Hoss. An incredibly talented lineup and a heck of a night of music making.

One of the best parts of the trip was the drive back to my brother's log home that sits on the lower part of what was once our family home. It was so peaceful to drive along the river and then up into the hills at night, so my son could take in the Valley's twinkling lights and the quiet struggling beauty of it all. Once back at my brothers, we sat up into the wee hours around a cozy fire under the stars. We talked about the family business, about picking, about everything. It was truly good in every way.

Other highlights of the trip included an impromptu trip to my high school (it graduated it's last senior class in May, having been unable to catch up financially), and lunch at "grandmas"--we parked our car in a spot in the parking lot just about where her wonderful kitchen used to be and then picnicked in the shade near the Betty Zane cemetery, where my son and all my nieces and nephews spent lots of time as little kids.

After wrapping ourselves in this wonderful blanket of welcoming familiarity and a longing to be back in the company of people and places that meant so much to us, it was not easy to head home. We are exhausted, but feeling a little girded up by this rich state of re-connectedness, a bit more grounded having reclaimed a little piece of home planet. Sure, it's all about the journey, but sometimes we need the destination, too.

Take a look at this YouTube of the Steep Canyon Rangers doing a tune we enjoyed called Lovin' Pretty Women.

Here's hoping you have a chance to reconnect with your roots soon.

Workin? Great! Me Too!

2008-10-09T08:03:00.008-05:00

This economic crisis really is terrifying but overall, I was doing fine -- until I opened up my kids’ mutual fund reports. The hits in the economy have gutted my kids already fairly thin savings, and I really don’t know how I’m going to pay for college. At least they have their whole lives ahead of them and haven't lost their retirement savings like so many have. Just have to keep plugging away and hope they can get loans (although I have higher hopes for my daughter) or that I can sell my house -- which thankfully is still worth more than I owe on it.

I have not been a saver like I should be as a single mother. Then again, as a single mother, I’m lucky, I guess, to save anything at all. I’m operating on a two-mortgage-payments-on-standby principle, and it probably should be more. I put a little something away every month for the kids but I know it isn’t nearly enough, especially with one kid queueing up for college in about 3.5 years. I focus on jettisoning debt, which other than my primary and secondary mortgages – the closest I came to buying into the subprime market was a second mortgage my lender sold me to increase my downpayment, probably not a wise move but hey, at least I can deduct it – is now thankfully relatively small, and I really hope I can keep it that way. I save nothing for myself or my retirement; at this point I’ve decided I probably will work until I die and this is fine with me as long as I can keep doing something I love. Fortunately, that has always been the case and I don’t expect it will ever be different. I love to work at something worth doing.

When I look at the horror stories of other ordinary Americans and what they are going through, how much they’ve lost, it’s devastating – and somewhat motivating. Other than my kids’ child support -- which I would love to do without for any number of reasons -- what comes in is what goes out. I’m finally sending out less than I bring in. And sure, it means I still have that nasty carpet and I have to wash my dishes, but isn’t it grand that I have a home, and can buy gasoline and pay for water and electricity? I should be busting my ass even more, however, if for no other reason than that the recruiting industry, while it may be doing well elsewhere, is not a booming business in Cleveland. Our next assignment is in Connecticut.

So here’s a tune for all the folks who are busting their butts – Blueberry comes to mind, as well as just a whole bunch of other hardworking friends and family. It goes out too to my friend L, too, who took a new post with her company and got a whole lot more than she bargained for, and I worry about her some. She and my sis and Shannon are hopefully going to get some fun in this weekend in that wonderful city of Beer and Brats.

Let me just say a few words about this young man, Jamie Dailey. I am really pleased that his band, Dailey and Vincent – that would be Darrin Vincent, young brother of Bluegrass diva Rhonda, on the upright there in my photo from last weekend – scooped up SEVEN IBMA awards last week. Jamie is one of the finest singers out there, and to me his voice is just clarion. It’s instantly recognizable, and full of passion and life. His deep faith, which as with other bluegrass artists is evident in so much of his music, does not interfere with the fact that he’s also a terribly smart and perceptive person who knows how to have fun. He’s one of the people I appreciate most, and do my best not to miss an opportunity to see him live, because not only is he a thoroughly committed performer who gives you everything he’s got, but in the middle of his shows he’ll tell you something that kind of sticks with you in a meaningful way even if you don’t necessarily agree with where it comes from 100%. He is very special, and his band is phenomenal. Hold on to your hats while you enjoy one now from Jamie and Darrin’s inaugural self-titled release, called “Poor Boy Workin Blues”.

To Your Health

2008-10-07T06:58:00.013-05:00

Well I had intended with all my heart to post a little something last night, having gotten home pretty late Sunday night and still sorting out all that I saw and heard for four days. It's always a little hard to adjust but overall good to be home.

Last night was kind of an irritating exercise in my technological shortcomings. Not me personally, but, the stuff I have, the technology I have, is kind of cobbled together. For some reason nothing, nothing was working right. On the way home from trying to work out a little, I was listening to this terrific Dan Tyminski song from Del McCoury's new Moneyland compilation, and I really wanted to get home so I could learn it and play it. This set off a chain of technical difficulties that should just not be possible in the home of a music lover like me. But, I have what I have. I found the cd and put it in my 5 year old cheap little RCA disc player/tuner/tape deck thingy, where it is still stuck because the CD component cannot skip past the first disc. It may be lodged there permanently; I decided that rather than take it out side and bust it open I would first allow my son to take the thing apart to see if he could get the disc stack out and retrieve whatever is in there before we set it out for the garbage pickers. And then, that's it, I won't have a stereo.

But I guess it's not that big a deal. There are lots of things I'd like to have -- a new dishwasher (the one I have has holes in the door that are getting bigger and now the thing is really not washing the dishes properly), new carpet (the stuff I have is very worn and stained and is depressing to look at), something to play music on that works (I knew this day was coming that the thing would finally poop out). But these aren't needs, something that Americans get all too confused with wants, which is one of the reasons why we have this unbelievable downspiraling of the economy. Now that I have to pay $40 or more every week to ten days to fill up my tank, a new mode of music broadcasting isn't all that crucial, nor is a dishwasher when I have two good hands, dish soap, and running water. I am getting a new furnace, which is more of a precaution; I just didn't want to tempt fate with a 27 year old furnace on a night when I have the kids and its 20 below zero. And it could well happen based on the last assessment I had done. So that's a need.

Yesterday at the office I turned on a little of the Congressional hearings on the economic debacle and the guy who ran Lehman Brothers was yapping. We stood around listening and determined that there really is no way to get back at these jerks for what they did. Worse, they are never going to feel it, never going to feel what it's like to not be able to just cover a mere 600 square feet with new carpet. I mean, it might be good for them if they did, and maybe next time, if they had a next time, they'd be more careful with other people's money (and spill things less, too).

Now, I spent the last three or so days with Joe Sixpack, maybe Joe Banjer, and I don't think McCain Palin has any damn idea what the hell they're talking about. I still don't have the hang of Palinese, that odd language in which a few nouns and participles and the occasional verb are kind of strung together anchored with words like "maverick!" and "Main Street!" and "You betcha!" And then there's batshit crazy, delusional War Hero McCain, the bad seed in an otherwise impressive lineage of military heroes, graduating 894 out of 899 in his Annapolis class. Neither one of them has really ever hung out with people like me, or people poorer than I am, because if they did and it mattered to them, they wouldn't say two thirds of the shit they do. And they continue to insult my intelligence and that of millions of Americans. I'm not a snob, but I'm sure not stupid and I won't pretend to be. And I will not go out with men who think it's cute to do so.

This weekend I heard some really terrific songs about what it's like to be poor or struggling with things and I decided I would put some of those tunes out there for you. I’m going to start things off with the number I so desperately wanted to hear last night, a tune called “Carry Me Across the Mountain” featuring Tyminski. It’s the story of a mountain family with a sick child, and what they do to ensure that child receives care to survive. I was so fortunate to hear Dan Tyminski in a workshop and then performing with his band (shown here; Tyminski on guitar and that's Adam Steffey to the far left on mando). He's such a talent and has a pretty handsome lineage himself in the bluegrass world, having most recently been a pretty big part of Alison Krauss's Union Station. And he has to be good if that crazy Adam Steffey plays mando for him.

This is the soundtrack for some background info I dug up on John McCain’s health plan. At the moment I am generally healthy and so thankfully are my children, and we are also insured. But about 47 million Americans are uninsured, and a lot of other Americans who are insured have crappy coverage. If the McCain Palin ticket is elected and McCain’s health care strategy goes through, employers will almost certainly throw scores of people off of group plans and into the open “free market” of choice with only $5,000 taxable dollars in their pockets to buy health coverage. The only people who will benefit from this are the folks behind the desks at the insurance companies. Here is a snippet from the Web on the subject:
Comments from Wall Street Journal onlin readers on the McCain plan:
“As a chronically ill patient, I am uninsurable on the private market. McCain wants people like me to use our state’s high-risk pool. I have priced the best high-risk pool plan for me in my state. It would require we spend over $29.000 out of pocket each year, not including prescriptions. This is not feasible, since it is over half our family’s gross income before deductions. Since I require ongoing health care to stay alive, i would choose to go on hospice and die rather than bankrupt our family. Losing all that we have, especially our home, for a few extra months of life is not worth it.”

“How does McCain’s plan address the needs of sole proprietors with no employees? Think of your mechanic, your bookkeeper, your landscaper, your freelancer. Insurers already work hard to keep individual subscribers blocked from enrollment–an issue that the government completely overlooks. (The dominant insurer in my region does not permit individual enrollment at all! Groups only.) I’m concerned that McCain’s plan will further restrain the start-up and growth of small business.”

From this article in the Wall Street Journal online:
“Overall, the Tax Policy Center predicts that the Obama plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 18 million people in the first year and by 34 million in 10 years.”

And this, from the Campaign for America’s Future:
“Fortune Magazine quotes one of their experts on the impact of McCain's plan: “I predict that most companies would stop paying for health care in three to four years,” says Robert Laszewski, a consultant who works with corporate benefits managers.
Now keep this in mind: McCain and his corporate advisers don’t dispute this. The massive upheaval that would result – millions of families losing their health coverage on the job and then having to try to find an insurance company that would sell them a new policy that would cover their families—that’s not an unintended consequence of his proposal. That chaotic loss of health security is exactly what McCain intends to happen. He wants us all to buy insurance not as part of a group—like an employee group or a co-op—that can negotiate for better coverage at lower premiums, but as individuals, at the mercy of the private insurance companies.”

Obama’s plan mandates coverage for children. That’s what I care about. I’m not worried about my children, but for God’s sakes, America, what kind of country chooses not to take care of its kids? KIDS. What are they supposed to do, set up a lemonade stand to help their parents buy health insurance? There is no way that I will ever support anyone who isn’t willing to put a plan on the table that ensures that every child in America will have their health needs met, no matter how big or how small. Because a person who cannot put children and families first, all children and all families, is just not worthy of my vote.

So if you’re thinking of voting for McCain-Palin, think about whether you can make it between 50 and 65 on private insurance. Think about whether your son or daughter or grandchildren with chronic health problems as simple and treatable as asthma will be able to get coverage at all, or what it will cost them. Think about why, when a more standardized government subsidized form of health care exists in every other industrialized nation in the world, countries where people don’t have to worry about losing their homes if someone winds up with a brain tumor, we don’t have that here, in what at least used to be the richest country in the world.

Carry Me Across the Mountain

IBMA Day 2...Still Awake

2008-10-04T23:21:00.002-05:00

It's going on 11:30 pm local time and all around you can hear in every nook and cranny of the hotel pickers jamming their last. They'll be at it well into the night and on into the early hours of Sunday. All three levels of the lobbies, and traveling all 25 floors of the hotel, you can hear the music.

Just had a wonderful bout of synchronicity. I was planning to bail out for a couple of hours and swing back for the last show of the evening with Lonesome River Band. Unable to find an open computer station to check in for my flight tomorrow night, I wandered down to the Main Stage early. I was intentionally planning to skip Kathy Mattea which would have been the biggest mistake of my evening.

Mattea has a new album out, titled "Coal", and she did a number of songs from that recording in her set. Needless to say I would have missed the full circle of my weekend if I had skipped it. Future posts will explore this material. For now, suffice it to say that my preconceived notions of Mattea as a country star are ill founded.

Earlier in the evening, I sat in on most of Vince Gill's set. Gill, like Mattea one of the biggest names in country music, is now an avowed, out-of-the-closet, back-to-Bluegrass player. He did several of my favorite tunes.

Heading up to drop some stuff in my room I had the unfortunate experience of sharing the elevator with some sports fans. They were whining about Biden making them depressed. When the elevator opened up on a jam session, the guy whined further, "that stuff depresses me too. I'm a country boy." I thought, Mister, why don't you go downstairs and tell that to Vince Gill when he's done picking his mando for a crowd of about 1500 people?" But I just kept my mouth shut and got off at my stop.

It's going to be a long night, for some. As for me, I'm going to go find a beer, and sample the many picking sessions. I tuned up but the D string keeps slipping out and I don't want to make a mess of anyone's session. So I'll listen and make a few new friends (so far the folks I've met are all presenters from Ohio, ironically) and then maybe, get some sleep.

Hope all y'all are having a good weekend.

MM

IBMA Part 1: Who Set My Alarm?!

2008-10-04T08:46:00.002-05:00

Well, I wasn't up all that late, only until about 1 p.m. because I couldn't find a group of beginner-like pickers. But it was a great day anyway.

One of the best things about the way my visit started was that I spent the first three hours at the Roots and Branches stage. April Verch and her band kicked things off, followed by -- believe it or not -- the Freighthoppers, who were terrific. Then, would you believe, Mike Seeger.

From there after I checked into my room and dumped my bag, I headed to the ballroom to catch some late afternoon tunes and then head up to the mandolin workshop. The workshop featured seven players -- seven! I bought a little electronic travel metronome because I do what Dan Tyminski tells me to.

After a quick bite to eat it was time for the Friday lineup, which included the Josh Williams Band, Doyle Lawson, Cherryholmes, Tyminski, The Grascals, and Mountain Heart -- with special guest Tony Rice. Somewhere in my wandering around, however, I got to catch Sierra Hull and some of her similarly young and talented friends just jamming in the lobby. You know, like everybody does.

After the main shows were done for the night I dumped my stuff and headed back downstairs (I'm on the 23rd floor) in an elevator full of pickers who of course played a tune on the way down. Gotta remember to bring my camera with me.

Hope you enjoy your day!

2008-09-30T21:22:00.007-05:00

"What we have HEEyah is a FAILyah to communicate..."

What a freakin' mess. Just a mess.

For the first time in generations, our children will be worse off than we are.

Now that college loans will be harder to get, who do you suppose will be going to the "best" schools?

I suppose if I have to sell my house in four years to send my son to college, it won't be the worst thing that happens. Hell, at least I have something to sell at the moment, which is more than too many folks can say.

I hope Wall Street is happy. Even though intellectually I understand that something has to be done, it seems to me when you have to prop up the finance and auto industries that a little something is lost. Like, oh I don't know, our competitive edge, perhaps? We lost that a long time ago, but this is welfare for rich people. Wefare for people who should know better. Welfare for people who went to the best schools and who sent their kids to the best schools. Not the kind of welfare that statistically supports single mothers for an average of 6 months. We are all going to be paying for this, paying for a very long time, with our hard earned money that should have been spent on our families and in our communities. To quote just this once Senator McCain, "This is horseshit."

Tomorrow I'm going to Nashville. Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm going, because there might not be a next year. I'm going to skip Del McCoury's hosting the IBMA Awards Show and watch the Veep debate instead with my sister and her husband and eat apple pie, and then I'm going to spend three days surrounded by bluegrass people. As Blueberry has reminded me, at least we still have the music.

For now.

Moneyland

And Speaking of Sexy...We Lost the Man Who Wrote the Book

2008-09-28T08:07:00.007-05:00

Paul Newman died yesterday at the age of 83. He had been ill. But like a lot of people, I wasn't ready. It's hard to let go of an icon like that.

Newman was just beautiful. He played good guys, bad guys, sad guys, joyful guys. He worked a really, really long time. I think he still looked good in 2002's "Road to Perdition" opposite Tom Hanks. He was the voice of the Hudson Hornet in last year's Disney hit, Cars. He did anything and everything when it came to movies, but never won an Oscar. From the time I remember first seeing Paul Newman in the movies I think I had a thing for him. Who didn't?

He was kind of a rock solid actor that you could build just about anything around. He apparently was in a lot of stinky movies but didn't get blamed for those. The movies back then could put two people like Paul Newman and Robert Redford (yes, even I have a thing for him) onscreen at the same time and not lose anything.

Paul Newman was a born and bred Northeast Ohioan. He went to Shaker Heights high, just down the street from where I work. He once said that he wasn't running toward acting as much as away from selling sporting goods. He was an Ohio trained actor, at OU and Kenyon (my sister's alma mater). He loved kids. He loved his wife. (He once told Playboy, "I have steak at home. Why go out for hamburger?") His politics got him into trouble with people like Richard Nixon, perhaps one of America's least sexiest people ever. He was a philanthropist. (I am a freak. Someone who has a ton of money and likes to give it away is, to me, sexy. Hell yes, even Bill Gates looks good in this light. You have to admit he has a certain goofball, geek charm...) He did things with his spare time and change to help others. And his salad dressing ain't half-bad.

Paul Newman wasn't just sexy. He was devastatingly handsome in every sense -- mind, body, spirit. There are a few actors, men and women both who are coming up through the ranks who have the potential to take up that heavy mantle, and I hope they can.

Thanks, Paul, for everything you gave.

Very Sneaky, Mr. Senator

2008-09-24T19:59:00.001-05:00

(I'm listening to the President right now. Do you hear the crickets in the background?)

Watching the news and hearing people discuss the events of the last week does have my head spinning a bit. I’m trying to keep my focus on a couple weeks from now, when I’ll get a little breather while being cradled in the arms of the music I’m mad about.

My sister and I also realized that I will be at her house for the Vice Presidential debate. This is perfection. She, her husband, and I watching together in real time as opposed to the cell phone updates that might have ensued. She also makes the best apple pie on the planet, which will make listening to Palin’s grating, nasal voice go down a lot easier. (Again, to you merry men who think she’s sexy. Think of the audio that would go with. WAKE UP.)

But this morning I woke up and realized something very important. I am so distracted by my disapproval of Palin that I’m not paying attention to what is actually being said by our presidential candidates. I’m not thinking about, or working toward an intelligent discussion of where my candidate stands because I’m so goddamn terrified that if McCain is elected and chokes on a chicken bone that Palin will drag us all through her End Times Fantasy and get us all killed.

Now, that ain’t right. And I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t in fact McCain’s true intent in selecting such a miserably unqualified running mate. And by unqualified, I mean, as in the town this woman ran is smaller than the town where I grew up, Martins Ferry, Ohio. And folks, it don’t take much to run Martins Ferry.

So it occurs to me that by throwing so much of the focus ON to Palin, McCain has taken the heat OFF of himself AND Obama. And now he wants to postpone the debate to fix the financial crisis? Weenie. Work on the Hill until 6 p.m., do the debate, and then go back to the Hill to finish your job. That’s how it should be done. There's no reason you can't keep doing your job and interview for the next one at the same time. People do it every day. Have your scheduler call me, I'll explain how it works.

On my way to work I decided, with IBMA looming ahead, I needed to give myself a break from the chatter in my head and the news blasts, and listen to some real old fashioned bluegrass. So I pulled up some Bill Monroe. Early bluegrass is basically old time music on stimulants. And, it reminds me of what happens when you try to do things too fast. Kind of like this bailout package Herr Pretzledent wants us to welcome with open arms. This one is called, appropriately, Fire on the Hill, er, I mean, Mountain. Learning a tune like this might require a "slow downer" program, something Congress might do well to put into service about now, too, before they do something hasty.

And before you do something hasty, make sure you do your homework. Don't get too caught up in the Palin love fest or the attention-grabbing grandstanding McCain is using to buy time and make it look like he cares after 26 years of doing nothing. To both candidates, if you have to be in Mississippi at 8, and then back in DC to finish the job at 1 a.m., well, that's the way it goes. You think being President of the United States is a 40 hour a week job?

There is a fire on the mountain. Run, boys, run.

Fire on the Mountain

Out of Leadership, er, I mean GAS, I mean...What do I mean?

2008-09-21T11:46:00.004-05:00

As I arranged myself for a 30 minute stationary bike ride through another chapter of "End of Faith", I got a call from my sister. She was explaining that Nashville found itself at the epicenter of embarrassing human behavior yet again.

Nashville ran out of gas.

Yes, it's true. Nashville ran out of gas. But what is more telling is not that this rather isolated western Tennessee city ran out of gas, but that it's Mayor has not spoken a single word to the public about it. Not a peep. At least not as of this writing, a good day and a half into the crisis.

Sis proceeded to tell me that she sent the mayor a little note, suggesting that perhaps had he taken the initiative to say a few words about what is really going on, there wouldn't have been two-mile lines from the 15 percent of gas stations in middle Tennessee that had any fuel left. You know, like, maybe if he said a few words of wisdom, like, "Don't drive if you don't have to, we'll have things back on line soon, we're working on it..." or, you know, something.

What we decided is that Americans who support McCain or even those who simply support his VP Nominee have absolutely no idea that this is precisely the situation that would repeat itself over and over if the GOP ticket takes office in January.

Everyone would do well to read this essay, for example, by Sam Harris. Before I saw this, I was pretty down in the dumps this morning, thinking that so many Americans simply have gone batshit crazy to think Sarah Palin would actually make a good Vice President. SHE HASN'T DONE ANYTHING RIGHT. Good LORD, what is the matter with people? And I am damn tired already of hearing about whether she is a good mom, rides a four-wheeler, or is, give me strength, sexy. I'm sorry, but any man who finds that woman "hot" must be the kind of man who would enjoy suddenly finding his balls in a vice.

It's not that this blog is about politics, or anything, but when my sister told me what happened, I thought, "How is this possible?" But it is. My sister, a well-educated woman, mother, professional, organic gardener and all around good gal, is not endowed with any particular influence over public policy any more than the rest of us. So why, on a Sunday morning, is it necessary for an ordinary citizen to point out things like, "You know, Mr. Mayor So and So, it might be a good idea to plan so that Nashville doesn't find itself in a situation where it has to evacuate the city and has no fuel to do so."

This is part of what makes me angry. While 80 percent of America sleeps off the election, the other 20 percent of us who still give a shit are scrambling to figure out whether we should get passports or just hunker down. And we spend a lot of time, an inordinant amount, pointing out basic things like this to people who presumably hold the offices they do because they convinced enough other people that they were endowed with the intellect and common sense to take charge of difficult situations. In other words, Mr. Mayor, YOU ARE MAYOR SO I DON'T HAVE TO BE.

According to everything I've read, every situation Palin has taken charge of, she either has FUBAR or sent mysteriously packing. If she doesn't like something or someone, she turns to her Bible, finds a passage to justify her action, and it is then "handled." Her frightening fundamentalism notwithstanding, she's absolutely and completely unqualified for this job, and is simply a miserable excuse for a nominee. I'm ashamed and embarrassed that someone with McCain's experience has lowered himself, and frankly, his entire party, Lincoln's party, to such a base level. Worst of all, the fact that his choice has been wildly popular reflects just where that party, and a lot of Americans, really are. A lot of Americans evidently enjoy having a mouthful of sand, because that's where their heads are buried.

I mean, this is not brain surgery. As Harris points out, and as just about every thinking person I've talked to about this has been saying over and over, should McCain have an aneurysm in the bathroom or choke on a chicken bone, this woman, whose only public offices were as Mayor of a one-horse town and Governor of a state that has fewer people than Manhattan, who claims that she's qualified to drive foreign policy because she can see Russia from her house, who referred to Obama's defeat of Hillary as "Sambo" beating "that Bitch," will be the Commander in Chief of the United States of America. If we're lucky and McCain does not die from some sudden illness or injury, she'd still be in charge while he's incapacitated. Still plenty enough time to do a whole lot of damage, like, appoint someone to the United States Supreme Court. The next time someone says to me, "I'm not voting because the Office of the President has no effect on me," I may just have to violate my personal commitment to nonviolence.

When I am in Nashville a couple weeks from now, providing it's still there, I know that for the most part, people are there to concentrate on their work as musicians and enjoy the show as fans, but I know too that it will have been more of a hardship this year for people to get there, and I know the election will be discussed on stage and off. I remember my first FanFest in Kentucky and I remember thinking, "Oh boy, this is going to be tough," and then I saw a bunch of Kerry/Edwards stickers on instrument cases. But Kerry and Edwards are both white, and one is from the South; I don't think the same majority will be pulling for an educated black community organizer from Chicago. I hope I'm wrong; I might be. All I know is that I hope Americans step back and start thinking seriously about this election and all that's at stake.

Here's a tune from the late, great John Hartford. It's a live performance from a tribute concert a few years back. It talks about settin' and watchin' the Ohio river just roll on by. And how people can do that and nothing happens, because sometimes that's what people do, whether it's sanctioned by some invisible Supreme Being or one's interpretation of moral law, or not. I miss sitting at night on my mother's porch on a warm night and hearing the boats and the barges go up and down the river, sometimes with only a stitch or two on. Something tells me if we're not real careful, a chance at that kind of simple life for you, for me, for our kids, for anyone who wants it, will be gone.

Watchin' the River Roll By

Life is Cheap...

2008-09-19T20:52:00.004-05:00

It seems we all like little single-engine boats being tossed around on a big angry sea of incalculable stupidity.

It's been a long week, and I'm tired, and I have too much to do, but at least I can stop and take a breath and write a word or two.

Unlike a lot of Americans, I'll sleep ok tonight. Tonight after I got home I worked out, spent about two hours tidying my modest home and pushing a fair amount of laundry I'm lucky to have, got rid of a fair amount of paper, and am now winding down with a glass of wine and the blog. I'll get up early tomorrow, attend to a few obligations, spend a truly fun day with my kids' Auntie D looking at wedding dresses and other fun weddingy things for her nuptials, later do a little work I brought home, enjoy the outdoors and wind down again in relative contentment. I'm not in any real danger of losing my home, not this year, anyway, although I have my small share of debt to service on top of some home and car repairs I'm about to take on to the tune of around $5,000 altogether over the next several months. But I'll manage it. It's what folks do.

At the same time, tourists were interviewed on NPR this week as they watched and took pictures of Lehman Brothers employees leaving the New York office with their belongings after being sacked. We are learning things about the Republican Vice Presidential candidate that have convinced me that Canada is not far enough; I'll have to head to the UK to get away from "Sambo-Beat-The-Bitch!" Palin. We're watching a good swath of coastal Texas recover from one of the worst storms in its history, a storm from which thousands of residents refused to flee. It's now suspected that most of these men, women, and children have been washed out to sea, never to be heard from again. And in rare form, the US government has made us all homeowners by taking on the largest bailout in history and more than likely sticking us with the bill.

But nonetheless I booked my now overpriced flight to Nashville for my escape two weeks from now. I really cannot wait. For starters, I'll get a good chunk of badly-needed time before and after IBMA with my sis and her family, test the new deck and check on Mr. Bill and Mrs. Peck (it's a long Pondfest story). If time allows I'll take my niece for ice cream at the Ben & Jerry's where my sister and her husband got married. Two weeks from this moment I'll be sitting in the Nashville Convention Center ballroom about two-thirds of the way through the evening's lineup, followed by a night of late showcase sessions and jamming. Somehow I managed to book a room at the conference hotel (on a nonjamming floor of course), which means that I can chuck my stuff, kick off my shoes, and sit on the floor in the hall playing or singing with other pickers until I can't take any more (what does IBMA stand for, now?). Then I can crawl back to my room to rest up for Saturday.

I am so very fortunate that I will be able to do this. Who knows how much longer those of us with normal, boring lives and responsible routines will be able to hold on to these tiny expressions of belonging and meaning. Right now, we pay our mortgages and our taxes, make sure the lights and heat stay on, buy or replace things we need, and sometimes take little trips or get on with home repairs. We slide a dollar or two into our kids college savings, hoping they'll keep getting good grades, and put another dollar aside for ourselves, hoping we can still work when we're 70. In short, we're pretty much propping up the economy at our own expense. My boat's getting full and I'd bail myself out except for the fact that my bucket has a hole in it called the United States Treasury.

So much for wishes comin' true. Life is cheap, but it ain't free.

And as Darrell Scott sings, when it's coming down, it call comes down to you.

Life is Cheap. Check it out. It's my new tune.

(And watch this space for the Kent Stage Folk Fest lineup which features Scott along with folks like Tony Rice and Pete Rowan and a bunch of other bluegrass masters.)

I should be...

2008-09-14T20:40:00.002-05:00

...working, or looking over stuff for a shootout we have tomorrow, but I just can't muster the fear. Maybe fear isn't the right word. I think I'm too tired to muster any kind of stage fright. I may feel differently tomorrow when I'm finally sitting across from three board members of one of our local urban universities.

They are looking for a president, and it would be good fun and good work to do that project. Just don't know what the odds are that they'll pick us. I was pretty uninterested in going -- felt like window dressing at first -- but now I'll go if nothing else to support my troops and put in a good word or two about leading the research time assigned to this. Well, if we get it.

And it would be fun to do, really.

But I haven't looked at the information all weekend. Too busy having fun -- went with daughter to The Infamous Stringdusters show Friday night (she picked the best seats in the back with room for her to dance), more Son of Mando birthday fun last night, and just general relaxing and watching the wind blow (and blow, and blow) today and tonight. I don't feel unprepared, just a lot less worried than I thought I would be.

I guess, all things considered, that's ok.

By tomorrow I'm sure I'll feel a bit more worried, edgy, jazzed...more like, this tune, Black Rock, by the Stringdusters, which they played early in the show Friday night. First string break of the evening!

Wish us luck. If the Browns-Steelers game is any indication, if we just play it cool it will turn out ok. (I'm not a Browns fan.)

Panto-Meme

2008-09-11T20:52:00.000-05:00

Oy maria, I've been tagged by Blueberry!

1. Where was I ten years ago?

In Sept. 1998, my son had just turned four. We had just moved to Suburban Hell, and Ohio was in the middle of Welfare Reform Insanity. I had begun to be confused about my marriage but I had a job I really loved as publications director for a human planning agency and I was deeply involved in the issues and having a great time professionally, so I wasn't paying attention. The work was wonderful but the commute sucked, especially once we moved down here. I ultimately quit the following year and consulted from home until my daughter was born in 2000.

2. What was on my ToDo list today?

Usually I don't make to-do lists. I have things that I mean to do for weeks and suddenly in a burst of enthusiasm they get done. I feel good if I go to bed with a clean-ish counter, and leave the office being able to see a little bit of my desk. Yesterday, I did take my car in for a routine oil change that was free, but I paid $112 for a diagnostic on an EVAP problem that eventually will lead to an $800 repair. That would not have been on my to-do list.

3. My favorite number.

Three. It's a magic number. If I meet a wonderful man we can adopt and vice versa, I'll change it to four.

4. Five places I've lived...

Wow, no place as cool as Blueberry -- I don't think I can even come up with five. Let's see:

1) Route 5/150 between Adena and Mt Pleasant, OH
2) Martins Ferry, OH
3) Granville, OH (college days)
4) Cleveland and Cleveland Heights, OH
5) Twinsburg

Wow, ok, technically, that's five!

5. Bad Habits.

Whoa, too many! Thinking for others. Procrastination. Shooting myself in the foot. Disorganization. Falling into internet research like it's a chocolate donut. Not getting enough sleep. Buying stuff because its on sale and I have a coupon, even if I already have three.

And lastly: tag five others -- As Blueberry writes: and if this is a second tag, ignore it unless you can list 5 MORE places (that's the one I can do), and MORE bad habits, and MORE stuff to do today. If you don't want to play, that's OK too. I, like, totally understand. ;-)

Ok, you five, I know, I know, but what the heck...
Shameless
Ipsissimus and her Pandora's Box
Boring Best
Confessions of a Yarn Slut
Shannon

Shakin' That Family Tree

2008-09-08T21:04:00.005-05:00

Last night I did something I never expected I'd do. No, I did not call up John McCain and tell him that if he wins, I'm going to stop paying taxes and give all that money to the family of an Iraq war veteran instead. But, that's tempting, that, and reminding Sarah Palin that the world is not flat, nor did the founding fathers have anything to do with the Pledge of Allegiance....

Ah, but I digress.

Anyway, last night I wrote to a distant living relative I've never met, because he and I are related through one of my great great grandmothers. I'm finding more and more that the further back I go, ironically on my mother's side, there is quite a collection of living folks doing the same type of digging. It's kind of neat.

When I got started with ancestry.com earlier this summer, I guess I never imagined it would lead to meeting actual living people, but of course other people out there are curious about the same things. I have to admit it was a little disconcerting at first to set up a search for one of my ancestors on a random shot and see her pop up on someone else's family tree. Of course, many branches from a few roots, right?

My great great grandmother, Mary Budd, wed Charles Johnson sometime before the War Between the States. Their kids included my great grandmother, Isabel Johnson, and her brothers and sisters (my great aunt Tune's real name was Unity, a popular post-War name for obvious reasons). Mary's ancestors turn out to be stalwart nonconformists -- one of her ancestors took the Quaker oath and died in prison for it. Isabel married Thomas Williams, my great grandfather, a good old-fashioned Republican who ran for public office in Martins Ferry, Ohio. There was a time when I figured that's where the story started. But in fact I've been digging up all kinds of nuggets that take the story wayyyy back and across the pond.

We're just getting started on this little odyssey. It's an interesting task, and one that shouldn't have waited until after my mother was dead. I can count three, possibly four living relatives I know personally on my mother's side; I'm not even sure if they're all still alive.

I'm also not sure what I'll find, on either side. What all else do I have coursing through these veins besides a little hutzpah and a love of baked goods? That's kind of the fun, and the mystery, of family history.

Family History
Tim O'Brien, from Traveler

Out of Time, Out of Place

2008-09-05T22:20:00.008-05:00

Can there be any greater horror for people of a nation than Civil War? Let me be clear that I'm not suggesting by anything in this post that I want to go back to that, but, the fact is that people on two very different sides of an issue were worked up enough to kill each other for it by the tens of thousands in this country. It wasn't even 150 years ago. Really, 150 years is nothing.

Yet, good LORD, think of all that's happened since that time. You can start with the end of the Civil War and the preservation of the Union. Then there's the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment (and all the rest of them since),Lincoln's assassination, the light bulb, cars, refrigeration, Suffrage, World War I, telephones, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear holocaust, penicillin, television, the Cold War, National Parks, satellites, the Red Scare, the Folk Scare, space travel, John Kennedy, MLK, Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam, Watergate, thalidomide, the end of Apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, laser discs, personal computers (thank you, Apple), cds, cell phones, the ERA (still not ratified in all 50 states), electric cars (again), two gulf wars (the second one is still going)...it's just exhausting. Think of all the things I've left off. Mind boggling.

So much progress, but, the last week has me wondering about life in a different time. I don't want to say, simpler, because I'm not sure they really were. A lot of things were harder than they were today -- we take for granted things like indoor plumbing and refrigeration and whole-house wiring. And as the world became smaller, especially during the first War, there was a lot of complexity that people weren't quite ready for. There was a lot of ugly stuff, too, not to be forgotten. Still, some things were different. Or, there was universal denial.

Well, maybe not universal. If everyone had been in denial about the inherent potential in the colonies, we might still be English. If everyone had been in denial about slavery, then there would not have been an underground railroad. If everyone had been in denial about what Hitler was doing to the Jews then Germany might have succeeded. If Kennedy's advisors had been in denial about the final frontier, there wouldn't be an American flag on the moon.

Today is different, though. A lot of people are in denial. Coupled with the fact that there are a lot more people, period, when a lot of them are in denial, it's a lot harder to move the needle. Let's take the GOP's VP candidate. I know, I know, aren't we all sick of hearing about Sarah Palin? Me too, but check it out. The woman has never been out of North America. She doesn't believe in global warming. She says abstinence education is enough but the evidence to the contrary is growing inside her own daughter. And as most readers know, she told ministry students that the war in Iraq is a "task that is from God." If her vice presidential nomination isn't an act of denial by nearly half the country, then I don't know what is. The thinking people of this country are like a collective Sisyphus, pushing democracy like a 20 ton boulder up a steep and craggedy mountain. Truly, it seems almost hopeless at times. And very lonely.

The election isn't going to change much of anything for anyone, either. Even I know that. No matter who takes office in January, he will inherit a mess unseen by any incumbent in our history. Most days, I can't believe anyone is crazy enough to run at all. As most of us have come to believe, I'm not sure the office of the President even means much anymore given the way the office has become an ugly charicature of its former self in the last eight years.

I think what I may be romanticizing is the fact that once upon a time before we were even a country, people did things. People, everyday people, changed things. There have always been such people but we don't see it as often anymore. People hid slaves in their homes, women were beaten in public by straw-hatted gentlemen because they wouldn't back down on the right to vote, doctors performed abortions in safe, sanitary conditions, black and white students lost their lives in order to move equality forward. The decades before may have been a simpler time but there was a lot of daring in it, too. A lot of everyday people died doing not so every day things that moved that boulder another quarter of an inch up the mountain.

I think things are different now. Look at Cindy Sheehan, who took on a bold protest when her son was killed in Iraq. She camped outside Bush's ranch -- how many of us would love to do that for so many reasons and she did it! But she ended up being the only one behind the boulder of apathy and in the end it rolled right back over her. When she gave up, she wrote that more people are interested in who wins American Idol than what's happening with our country. That's the sorry truth.

I don't know that this election coming up is the thing that finally matters to anyone. I don't see scores of people signing up to do community organizing -- a one time fan of it myself, even I don't invest the time or effort anymore; my sleepy denial-driven Stepford community doesn't care and it's a 40 minute drive to anyplace else that might. There are things I believe and things I want to see happen, and I write to my Congressional representatives, and maybe I get a nice little note back. But little changes.

So I guess that's why I'm feeling out of place, and out of time. Even the music I love harkens back to a different way, a different era, some of it from that time and some of it new but in the spirit of those days.

Mac Wiseman, one of the remaining first generation bluegrass players, was recently honored with the National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Mr. Wiseman suffered from polio as a child -- not many people remember pre-vaccine days anymore -- but that didn't stop him from becoming one of the most accomplished bluegrass musicians and recording artists in American musical history. Early on he played with Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt in the Foggy Mountain Boys band. The son of Virginia mountain parents who sang old time ballads and enjoyed early country music, Wiseman has gone on to become an original tradition bearer. You can read more about the honor and his achievements here.

This tune is from the recording, Arkansas Traveler, which I have blogged about previously several times. It is one of two recordings issued a couple years ago by the Pa's Fiddle Project to honor the music that appears throughout the Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. This little ditty is called The Monkey's Wedding -- I figured it would be a nice change of pace from Froggy Went A Courtin' for you and your listeners of all ages. Hope you'll enjoy it right down to the end of a glass of lemonade and some homemade ginger cake. Meanwhile, I've got to crank up the horseless and get into town for some postage stamps.

A Real Labor Day

2008-09-01T20:32:00.004-05:00

Today marks the 14th anniversary of the birth of my son. While we are struggling to keep the house cool tonight, the day we brought our new little 7 lb. bundle of joy home from the hospital it was so cold we had to turn on the heat. New parent jitters, probably.

Now he's taller than I am by a full five or six inches, sports a deeper voice, and has begun "the maturation process" as I'll call it. But inside he's still a fairly magical little guy driven by an incredibly active imagination, always creating, always wondering, asking questions. During a trip over the weekend he acquired another morphing lego-type creature, and even I shared his delight in seeing how many iterations it could take. It was a good prelude to two days in Dearborn, Michigan meandering through The Henry Ford and what amounts to Ford's personal playground, Greenfield Village, where Ford himself assembled a collection of friends and their memorabilia -- like, the original courthouse where Abe Lincoln practiced law, the chair in which he was sitting when he was shot at Ford's Theatre, one of the 30 remaining handwritten copies of the Declaration of Independence, the car in which Kennedy was shot, the home of his favorite childhood teacher, the seat in which Rosa Parks sat and changed the nation's relationship with race forever, the original Fort Myers workshop of his good friend Thomas Edison. (Edison was alive and well. Ford brought the old workshop up to Greenfield, and built Edison a better workshop in its place in Florida. After all, what are friends for?)

At one point over the weekend I looked at my son and said, "You know that game where people ask each other which ten famous people they'd have over for dinner? It's like Ford played the game for real." All of these monuments -- right down to the oldest remaining Windmill in America -- are literally yards from his childhood home.

The museum is also a wonder, a collection of unimaginable breadth and scope in its eclectic-ness. The camper Ford built for Charles Lindberg, the picnic table used by "The Vagabonds" during their not-so-roughing-it camping trips, a model of one of those crazy round metal houses that was sure to be a hit (at 1096 square feet, even my house is bigger, although, we don't refresh the air every six minutes through the handy top-vent or have cool revolving shelves). The collection both in the Village and the Museum just goes on and on -- after two days we still had not seen everything, it would have been impossible.

On the ride home, coming over I-75 I spotted the Libby Glass Company in Toledo. What crystallized for me in that moment was how the Museum and the Village and their contents were not so much Ford's toybox as his way of bringing together in one place all the best things he could find about America and Americans. The museum was a real tribute to innovation and courage. The Village really memorializes Americans who made a significant contribution to culture, politics, or the development of our economy.

As we traveled further East, I thought how alike these two Great Lake communities continue to be. Cleveland was once a center of industry, like Dearborn and Detroit were the seat of what at one time was a ginormous and overpopulated automotive industry. Today both are near ghostowns. Where did it all go, and why? Are people less inspired? Less innovative? What's taken the place of these iconic leaders? Some of it probably has to do with the fact that once cars and trains started to advance in their technology, everything changed rapidly compared to the first 1800 years AD. So the innovations are so numerous that there is no way to keep up. And so much of industry is automated these days that a revolution in technology is not going to necessarily translate into hundreds of thousands of new skilled-labor jobs.

One of the stops on our journey was the property belonging at one time to the Amos Mattox family of Georgia, a slice of an America to which most of us have never been introduced. The Mattoxes were a black family of little means. Amos Mattox worked several jobs to take care of his wife and family. The little tin-roof porched home had newsprint on the walls and cardboard on the ceiling (which Mr. Mattox innovated because its insulating properties kept things incredibly cool in the summertime). Out back there was a little yard with a chicken coop and a grape arbor, and in front a small garden with not a lot of grass out front so as to keep the mosquito count down. Mrs. Mattox took care of the garden and the animals and canned much of what was grown. Not far from there was a replica of the home of Ford's good friend George Washington Carver, a naturalist and agricultural scientist who transformed the agronomy of the post-Reconstruction South with his discoveries in sustainable agriculture.

My son is at heart a discoverer, a connector, and at times an inventor. The spirit of that place has a good shot at living on as long as kids like mine are supported in their endeavors to continue to examine the past, consider the present, and imagine the impact of ideas -- quite possibly their own ideas -- on the future. We all need to let our own imaginations soar more often, and try not to squelch those we witness unfolding. If you see a kid obsessed with taking apart a new flying toy, let it go. He or she will not only likely put it back together no worse for wear but may already be on to something else.

And don't worry if your kid isn't first in line for everything, head of class, fastest on the track team. If he or she is inquisitive, creative, eager, there will be a way to put smarts to work. Remember, the early bird may catch the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.

The Second Mouse

Remembering Reason

2008-08-26T20:31:00.008-05:00

I think I've paraphrased the title of an old post by either Dr. Don or maybe My Boring Best, so I apologize if that's the case. But I'm hoping that they'll forgive me when they read that finally, finally, I picked up Sam Harris' End of Faith in earnest and finally am getting at Harris' side of the case against religion.

Fresh off the popular Eckart Tolle title, "A New Earth," I wanted something to continue my questing mood. I've had The End of Faith for a while and even started it once or twice but for whatever reason yesterday was the day that picking it up would stick.

The night before, Sunday, I caught -- well, couldn't turn my eyes away from -- the tail end of some terrible, possibly Australian (not that the two are related) movie which I interpreted to be about some act of nuclear warfare resulting essentially in the bitter and painful slow end of the cast of characters I encountered, which included a young couple and their toddler, a Navy captain and his crew, and, as the sister of the young father, that chick who played in the Thornbirds. There was lots of vomiting shown dramatically as the dreaded onset of the radiation sickness that ultimately would kill everybody. (There was also a dramatic high-speed racing-car suicide by another actor that I believe had been in every Australian and most English-made films I've ever seen.) Despite this drama, I was, I'm embarrassed to admit, riveted. The reason is that in the back of my mind, I knew that this was plausible -- except that those lucky folks all had these little blue pills that would put them to sleep permanently so that they didn't have to suffer the inevitable microwaved-from-the-inside-out process of dying from just enough radiation not to kill them instantly. (The couple, cradling their now also has-been vomiting daughter, gave her an injection before they took their pills with a good Cabernet.) I'm not sure how I managed to get to sleep that night, but I did, and the next evening when it was time to go pay homage to my still-working, non-irradiated musculature I grabbed Harris and

headed for the exercise bike.

What I learned was so simple, in just the first few pages.

Nuclear annihilation is possible, even inevitable, because most people believe in God and Heaven and all those nice things that make it appear that the afterlife is even better than this one. By devaluing the present and putting all our eggs in St. Peter's basket, we disengage ourselves from moral responsibility and genuine respect for "life", and proceed to treat each other like crap, from every day bullying right down to strapping ourselves with bombs and getting on crowded buses just to get to heaven.

Ok, I haven't personally done that -- I mean, blown anyone up; I have regrettably treated many people like crap over my lifetime -- but, people, some people with really strong religious convictions, do it every day in other parts of the world. No telling what's stopping them from doing it here more often. It sure isn't the great access to behavioral health services.

I've written a lot about how much I do like a lot of Gospel music even though I have a hard time anymore identifying with most of it. The thing is, I do think a lot of the old time and bluegrass gospel tunes really are lovely, and to a lot of folks they're really meaningful. And at the beginning of my bluegrass journey which overlapped with the end of another era of my life, they were meaningful to me, very comforting. But I never once decided that it was all about getting to Heaven. It was about understanding that everything is temporal and that, one way or another, there would be an end to my pain. I never confused my grinding daily uphill journey with some time in the future when I'd see my mother and father again along with all the relatives I never met and a bunch of dead presidents -- though the idea is tempting. While, unlike Doc and Boring, I have zero interest in spending eternity under the spell of a bunch of virgins, I wouldn't mind a few hours with some notable Virginians.

I finished Tolle right on top of finishing The Amber Spyglass, Phillip Pullman's last in the series about a contemporary young Eve named Lyra who led the effort to kabosh doctrine and restore intuition. It was a frank and intoxicating illustration of the battle against religious authority in an effort to protect our rich, delicious human nature, complete with its beautiful, complex, powerful hidden side, Psyche. Even Sam Harris writes, "There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life." But we're not going to come to terms with anything by delegating our capacity for reason to large, organized institutions, dogma, folklore, the Monroe Doctrine, tarot cards, Emily Post, sudoku, Rachel Ray, the iPhone, Barack Obama, John McCain, seven more highly effective habits of allegedly effective people, or anything or anyone else that has attracted a "following." The only path forward, the only way out of this downward spiral, is to retire some of these illusions and resort to thoughtful action -- or as may be required, inaction.

I'm trying to think of a good bluegrass or Gospel tune that speaks to this. I've just posted this one recently, but I do think that Wondrous Love comes close. (So beautifully performed in this vid by Blue Highway.) It's so basic, bare, but still uplifting, and comes from a very basic time and very bare place in American hymnody. I frankly can't help but sing along (as I had posted earlier, this shape-note tune is a part of my childhood). If people got their act together and started treating each other with humanity, there might come a time where there was sort of a universal "wondrous love" rather than this insufferable divisiveness that abounds in personal, professional, political, and global relationships.

There is something to be said for turning the other cheek, in a way. When we stop defending our beliefs with such ferocity, maybe their importance will diminish to a level more conducive to peace, within families, between foes, among nations.

More than Black and White

2008-08-23T20:30:00.000-05:00

Sometime over the last few days, something shifted, and almost overnight my view has changed again, reverted to the positive. There isn't anything to which I can attribute this, really. Nothing externally has changed -- still have kids, still have same job, still alone, still in the same goofball Stepford town. I am coming on the second day of a real break from parenting, so maybe my brain is just untangling a bit. I feel I've come 'round and am in the middle of a sort of movement, a shift, an opening. It's a good feeling, although I haven't any idea what it portends, and I'm not going to guess.

Over the last week we've been kind of struggling at work to put ourselves forward and sink our teeth into some new business that we feel has been eluding us. We work and work and put out one proposal after another and have meeting after meeting. Suddenly when my new colleague and I got to thinking about the nonprofit community, I felt my energy shift and commitment return. I even overstayed a bit on Friday though I was looking forward to dinner with my sweet ex SIL and her dad and beau (I made it and we had a great time). I have a real passion for certain kinds of work, and I think, I feel, that it's going to be brought to bear again soon and that some of these conflicts at the office -- me wearing too many official hats -- will iron themselves out.

If you step back and let answers come to you, life can really be boiled down to some pretty simple truths. One of them is that I have this obstinately positive perspective about 90 percent of the time, and that when I forget about the other 10 percent, I am able to really give 100% of myself to whatever it is I'm doing, whatever conversation I'm having, whatever it is I'm engaged in, even if it's just feeling myself breathe and my heart thump as I exercise. I have worries like everyone does, and sometimes I worry over things I can do nothing about. But when I'm able to turn my focus outward again the worries and the burdens start to dissipate.

About a month ago, I answered another colleague's cell phone while she was away from her desk. It was a client of hers for whom she is conducting one very special assignment -- he is quite ill, battling a very rare and ferocious form of cancer, and his successor must be found soon. Some how, in our brief conversation, I evoked from him a deep, hearty laugh, a happy laugh. There is probably nothing I did the rest of that week that held more meaning, at least to me.

When we let go and let life work through us, when we begin to see ourselves not as attached to this job or that promotion or that car or house or this future or that project or that client or that or partner or not having a partner, we can just be. Be everything we are, be completely ourselves. That's what we can do for each other, just be ourselves. When I'm myself, when I follow my instincts and meet people where they are, it's a joyous thing. I restrain myself constantly trying to fit in the mold my Managing Director has set forth, but he knows I'm working against my nature. We are all schooled in this, himself included. When we are working on a problem at the office we are at our best when we quit fighting it and allow the answer come to us.

Yeah, I know, in reality it is much harder than all that, it's true. It's really hard to just be right there in the moment. But I'm trying.

My table is piled high with information from IBMA. This has been a meaningful experience for me, and there is more I could give. Every year I say, "I need to organize a beginning picker's jam" and every year suddenly I'm on the plane to Nashville for the same three days and I haven't done it. It's probably already too late for this year, but, maybe not. Going and connecting with a few friends once a year and seeing my sis and her family for a bit is terrific, but going and really engaging people and creating a music-making and life-growing experience is what I should be doing. I should treat it no differently, no less seriously than my passion for connecting people. It is about connecting people and connecting with people. Otherwise I should just write IBMA a check in the amount of my plane and hotel fare and stay home.

That just ain't right, now, is it?

Maybe another reason I need to do this immersion process is that when I received my final IBMA Ballot, there were all of two bands and one or two instrumentalists from my first two ballots who made the cut. So either, I'm not listening to what everyone else is listening to, or, it's time to really figure out how the same five bands, although tremendously accomplished, keep getting nominated. This tune was from my original slate of nominees for Song of the Year. Such a tune need only "be release or show significant chart action" for the period of eligibility. Well, screw chart action, people. This song is just one great piece of work. I believe it was written by Sonya Isaacs (congrats to Sonya for her nomination in the category, Female Vocalist of the Year) and is performed here beautifully by Cia Cherryholmes and the rest of her Cherryholmes clan. It's sort of a lament, but in some ways though the point of view is represented from the chain gang, the more we look ahead and look to better ourselves through acquiring something down the road or over the fence, the more we are sealing our own chain-gang fate, destined to never experience what is right in front of us, destined to overlook our nature, to take a breath and let our being have a chance to contribute to the richness of our own lives.

I'm going to try not to be my own downfall. I recommend the same to all y'all. My few loyal readers are good human beings, gentle at heart if more than a little frustrated on the surface. How I wish there was a place we could all meet in dreams to commiserate, and wake up better for it. Until then, I'll send this out and remind you that you're all on my heart.

Black and White
Written by Sonya Isaacs, performed by Cherryholmes featuring Ricky Skaggs and Sonya Isaacs

The Long and Crooked Road

2008-08-19T21:00:00.005-05:00

I'm fit for a trip, but I'm not going anywhere much. The kids and I have a fun weekend getaway planned in a few weeks, and that will pretty much spell the end of travel for summer. I think part of what has me feeling used up and burned out is that I haven't had much time this summer to get away on my own. Nashville and IBMA loom ahead like an oasis, but deep, deep down I am ready to get away, for good.

I'm not saying I want to be on some permanent, wandering vacation through the hinterlands. That ain't really me -- I love to work although if conditions were right, I bet I could take a year off. But when I get some time and enough of it in a row to slip away, there's a place I want to go to see if I can hear it calling.

The Crooked Road is a 250-mile and counting stretch of Virginia country driving in the state's southwesternmost corner. It leads you into the cradle of bluegrass, old time, and country music, the place where it is not most celebrated, but most begun. All the music I love really leads back to that place.

Earlier in the summer as Son of Mando and I started to dig a little into family history, I learned that ancestors on both my mother's and father's side came up out of Virginia. It is a place I've always loved, and could certainly someday call home. For now it would just be nice to spend a little time wandering this wonderful pathway of American musical history.

And since I can't be there now, until I can I'll wander it vicariously through this sweet and singable tune by The Dixie Bee-Liners honoring The Crooked Road. Jump to the link and scroll up to the top of their MySpace offerings to hear what Brandi Hart described as a "love song" to one of their favorite places, a little bit of backcountry sacred to us trad fans.

I Made A Mistake!!

2008-08-16T12:34:00.003-05:00

Well, now. I've had a conversation with my son. Evidently, he clearly remembers a conversation over dinner in which he asked about the alternative transportation. Curiously, he also remembers getting what he describes as a fairly emphatic "NO" for an answer. In tracing back over the time frame, it is a conversation that very likely took place at a point when I was dealing with that client I wrote about and strongly considering quitting my job. So it is entirely possible that we did have that conversation, and that I forgot all about it, almost immediately. I probably considered it handled.

I apologized to my son, and left an apology on his father's mobile phone. But what I don't understand is this: I had already given the answer. Why it was asked again as if it had not ever been asked? What was the objective? In the follow up conversations he had with the other adults, did this aspect ever come up?

Mistakes are the way we learn. What I'm learning is that evidently, I need eyes in the back of my head. I am capable of being manipulated, and that people will co-opt that quality in a heartbeat before they'll be honest.

Bummer.

Zengrass

2008-08-15T22:25:00.005-05:00

In reading Shameless’ recent gift to me, Tolle’s “A New Earth”, I came across a beautiful story this week. It was about a Zen master who lived in a tiny village. A young girl becomes pregnant and tells her parents that the Zen master is the father. When the baby is born, the parents, believing the daughter, take the baby to the Zen master and angrily tell him that his daughter says he is the father. The Zen master replies, “Is that so?” The parents leave the baby with him. He lovingly looks after the baby for a year, and the parents meanwhile learn from the daughter that it was not in fact the Zen master but the son of the butcher who is the father. The parents go back to the Zen master, all reticent, and tell him he is not the father. Again he says, “Is that so?” and gives the baby back to the girl’s parents.

Sometimes there’s not much else to do but just step back and say, “Is that so?” and let things unfold.

There was a highly visible, highly transparent example of this at the high school orientation we attended with my son last night. X was there with his brand new bride, a good initial effort at solidarity except for the not-speaking-to-me part. (This is a regular thing at public gatherings, private parties, basically anywhere we’re all together at the same time and in front of one or both children and other people.) After sitting through a routine orientation presentation, I figured we would take a walk to the lockers and classrooms. I stood up all excited to explore this new world but my son was suddenly engaged in a private conversation with X, then turns to me and says, “So, can I ride to school with Step?” He asked this as if he had asked it weeks ago and I’ve been pondering nothing else ever since. What ensued was a very uncomfortable debate in which he genuinely believed he had asked me previously. He had not. Meanwhile the other two adults begin to advocate on his behalf. Having been in this position on a few occasions now, it was clear to me that I was dealing with a group of people who already had made their decision and that my acknowledgement or agreement was just short of perfunctory. I asked for a little time to think about it and that simply drove things even further in the wrong direction. So finally, I looked at my son, and said, “Do what you want.” And then, I left.

I needed a time out from this untenable and dead-end conversation with my son and two adults who, perhaps quite unconsciously, were co-opting his weaker qualities in order to get at something that appeared desireable for the three of them, without regard for the potential consequences for my daughter and I should something go awry. Luckily the problem was solved by the folks at the transportation department, who probably spend most of their days this time of year saying, “Is that so?”

People will do what they will do, say and believe whatever suits them at the time before they think and act responsibly or respectfully. Ego always gets the better of most of us, myself included. Children will grow up and imitate the behaviors they most frequently encounter. My son’s display of disrespect was vibrant and very painful. I understand he really believes he told me something he did not and that is probably equally painful for him. He is a beautiful, very special person going through a new and difficult learning process. I am also certain that he felt an uncommon and very uncomfortable division of loyalties. As much as I love him, walking away was in fact the right thing. I wonder whether I even should have attended the event at all, but not being there for him didn’t seem quite right, either. It might have been good to fade into the background instead, a compromise of sorts, rather than be drawn into what was a lifeless and pointless debate.

The thing about being the natural parent is that children don’t require proof of your love. As my pediatrician pointed out, step parents often feel they have to compensate lost time with their own children to cultivate the affection and trust of the nonbiological children. This is a concept that even I can grasp without a lot of thought. Some of the behavior that others have observed and that leaves me feeling what I’d describe as sidelined is really nothing more than that. In the end my job is to choose a path that has the least impact on and fullest support for my son and gives him the broadest range of experiencing the full impact of his own decisions. In other words, he has to own the choices he makes, and I have to let him own them.

The impermanency of life, relationships, things, being -- all these are really at the fore in these situations. As humans we are imperfect and to feel better about ourselves we try to manipulate, control, cajole each other into action or nonaction, come out "the winner" and show how much we know, how we are "the better parent" but with the next breeze it's all meaningless. It's hard to watch people struggle with this and harder yet to refuse to play along. But some folks build their whole lives around it. That's a choice they make and have to live with, but not one I have to make.

I've been enjoying this Blue Highway tune all week, ironically enough. It was a subtle validation that maybe it's time to move on from some parts of my life and let other fully expand. It's also just a beautiful song with an open-ended cadence that adds to the theme of transience. Thank you, Shawn Lane, for your incredible playing and for the spot-on vocal delivery. And Wayne, this song makes me want to learn to play the bass.

Message from the Wind
(Written by Shawn Lane, from the release, Marbletown;)

I got a message from the wind today
When it blew a tear across my face
Said it's time to turn and go its way
I guess it's time I'm movin' on

Saw a bird sail a breeze that blows
Across the ridge the way I need to go
It took this much of my life to know
I'll probably never find a home

Wandr'ing life is what I have
Comin' in and headin' out
The urge to go is in my blood to stay
The wind is startin' to pick up today

Might’ve had what I left to find
in the place that I left behind
but a different breeze was blowin’ in my mind
and it just would not let me see

Now I’m standin’ here but it’s just not the same
I guess the only thing I know is change
The winds a-startin’ to blow again
Guess it’s time for me to leave

The Trouble with Twitter

2008-08-13T20:43:00.003-05:00

I first heard about Twitter a couple of weeks ago at a meeting I was attending for a client. The presenter described this latest craze in the context of online community building and social networking. According to an article in the latest issue of Fortune magazine, Twitter has roots in some pretty large-scale initiatives, helping to keep the public and firefighters current with developments in the battle against the 2007 California wildfires. That makes sense; it’s like emergency broadcast texting, kind of, I guess…but, chances are there aren’t 3 million “twitterers” tuned in just for that. But that’s about how many users there are of this “micro-blogging” service—whatever the hell that is. For as little as I contribute to this blog on a regular basis, this could be considered microblogging.

What’s fascinating is that as I write this, these terms aren’t even yet recognized by Microsoft Word. I have to add them to the dictionary. I refuse.

I can’t decide whether is the latest symptom or just another cause of our nation’s growing collective attention deficit disorder coupled with our unmitigated fear of being alone. How people can tolerate, and in fact perpetuate, this maddening continuous stimulation is a mystery to me. How they can function under its spell is frightening, because to function, you have to be conscious. I’m sorry, but, you can’t be doing anything with intention if you’re sending a Tweet and texting your roommate or your business partner while ordering your Orange Mango Banana Vivanno at the Starbucks drive thru. The more I witness of this perpetual explosion of nanotechnology, the more I believe it’s a miracle we’re not already extinct given our attention span.

Fortunately it hasn’t affected everyone. I also just read a neat article about a group of scientists at CWRU who are working on a tiny new cancer drug delivery device that looks basically like a nano-hairball. It’s genius, really. Where would that idea be if those docs stopped to Twitter all the time? Maybe they do, to update each other, but my guess is that their “tweets” would be along those lines and not on who they just saw with who else sipping a Banana Vivanno at Starbucks.

It’s no surprise that some of the world’s best doctors and scientists also played a musical instrument as a child. Their parents had the vision to make sure they had other means of developing dexterity, hand-eye coordination, concentration, imagination, and in the best cases, an artistic instinct to go along with the technical execution. There are I’m sure some kids who aren’t swept up in this insanity, but I don’t think I’ve seen a teenager all summer who didn’t have at least one electronic device glued to some part of his or her body.

I’m not sure where all these new developments spring from, or why. They just appear, get suddenly terribly popular, and then there is some new thing right behind it to displace it from its Throne of Cool.

The more I witness this, the sillier it seems. What could all these devices possibly contribute to my enjoyment of walk in the woods, a cup of coffee at my table in the morning, a conversation with my son or daughter, the thrill of watching an athlete’s defining moment on the Olympics, an understanding of myself, learning a new tune or playing an old one, or just living and breathing? Not a single thing.

As much great music as there is in the world, I think the longer I live and listen the richer and more beautiful traditional music becomes to me. That’s not to say I wasn’t sorry not to take my kids to hear Dvorak last Friday night at Blossom. And it’s not to say I don’t love a barn-burning bluegrass tune about 80 percent of the time. But nothing to me cuts through the din of techno-insanity like the sound of a single line drawn by a human voice or some other instrument.

I’m destined to be ever behind the times. I can rarely keep up with the WordTwist demands of my FaceBook pals, I haven’t updated my MySpace in weeks, and you know the ups and downs of this blog. I still can’t stand texting but tolerate it as a form of communication acceptable to my teenage son. To Twitter is not to be for me. But to you true Twitterers I wish you sweet tweets and hope that you’ll make the most of it rather than make it the next thing that takes over your life.

I keep pimping this new album by those Infamous Stringdusters but the whole thing is just flat-out superb so I can’t help myself. Here’s a young bunch of guys doing a good old-fashioned steamy little tune about the very simplest pleasures in life. From what I can tell by listening, none of them involve an iPhone, Nintendo game, BlueTooth, or even a Frappucino. I love the downright Delta bluesy flavor updated with the Dusters’ contemporary idiom. I hope you enjoy one called “Get It While You Can” – and whatever that means for you, I hope you do.

Out of Time

2008-08-10T18:52:00.002-05:00

The kids and I spent the last few days time traveling. Thursday we went to see an exhibit of art objects and artifacts from the Vatican -- right down to St. Peter's bones and a few other relics, not including myself. From there we wandered over to see the renovated galleries at the Cleveland Museum of Art and also took in a little of the future as we were led through galleries that will open again next year. On Saturday we hung out in Avaloch, the imaginary village of the Great Lakes Medieval Faire. My daughter absolutely adores Johnny Phoenix -- I don't know if that guy can play the banjo and walk on fire at the same time, but he was genuinely funny and if I may say not too hard on the eyes for a man in tights in the woods. Today we wandered into a Civil War encampment circa 1863 at Hale Farm and Village. I have to say, it seemed to me the Union soldiers must have known how it all turned out because there didn't seem to be much of a sense of urgency in the way they sauntered across the field in their lineup. But the music and the conversation was good fun, although my daughter was not convinced that the man in the tall hat and dark coat really was Abe Lincoln.

It has been really fun exploring all these different things to do and especially just relishing the time together. Summer is still not over, even though the kids start school again a week from Tuesday. I can't get over how fast time flies, even though I try to slow it down by focusing on what is right in front of me.

The one thing that bothers me is that I haven't picked up an instrument in weeks. There just is preciously little time left after everything else to really sink my teeth into playing. I'm pretty sure I'd do it or be more motivated if I had a group of musicians I could work with on a regular basis, and I've been thinking that the way that will happen will be for me to hold it at my home. I think it could work. There are some picking/bluegrass jams around the region too, and I should probably start there. Sad to say, I need the pressure of playing with folks to get me to give up time on the other things that in the end are just not that important.

I have been enjoying this tune by one of my fave bands, The Infamous Stringdusters. Like the narrator in this song, I can feel the clouds beginning to break up a little. I do feel like I'm on to something, although I can't say for sure what it is. But every now and then when I've stepped off the hamster wheel I get a sense of my capacity to just go off and do what I need to do.

"Well, Well" reminds me of my pal Blueberry, who really doesn't ever get a break, either. I'm pretty sure she's crazy about these guys too. This one's for Blueberry -- better days are coming, I'm sure, just not sure when!

Eight Fast Years

2008-08-06T20:36:00.004-05:00

Today as I rolled through town pre-dawn on my way to work out, I thought back to where I was eight years ago at that time. Eight years and one hour ago from that moment I was holding my perfect newborn daughter. It was the best morning ever. Her coming into the world was as easy as pie, and the kind of experience that all mothers should have. I had never felt stronger or happier, and at the same time, never felt more humble and unimportant.

We were also surrounded by people who would always love her and be part of her life. Her big brother was on hand for the whole thing, her father, her aunt, and two of our best friends. Everyone who was there laughs at the way just before the last push, I asked my doctor if she’d had a chance to meet everyone. But I was that comfortable. To me, it was a party, a joyous collective moment in which we all welcomed her into our world. Eight years ago tonight, her uncle drove in to spend some time with her. It was special; everyone else had gone home and it was just she and I in the hospital. Now the father of his own beautiful baby girl, he remembered A's birthday and called her tonight so they could "catch up."

That first night we spent together, I was holding her and I sang a little something, and as tiny and new as she was, she held up her tiny head and looked at me with those amazed baby eyes. We have our moments, but we are connected in ways deeper than we may never understand.

I threw together a party cd for her birthday fete, and she asked if I had included this song. I felt bad that I hadn't but it didn't seem to be a fit for musical chairs. It's her favorite Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver tune, Four Walls, and really shows off their signature harmony singing. She's a little sad that her cute friend Jamie Daley isn't around to sing it anymore, but she still loves it nonetheless and we can't help but sing it, too. Hope you enjoy.

Four Walls

Eight Months....Two Days

2008-08-04T21:14:00.002-05:00

I had a stunning realization today.

In the last eight months, excluding Memorial Day and the Fourth of July (we didn't do bank holidays), I've had two -- 2 -- days off.

Aha.

Suppose I'd do well to Go With The Flow*.

What a great song...it's perfect going along with the reading from Shameless on ego...we're all guilty of trying to "...stand like a rock on the sands of time."

Live, love and let live.

(by Sam Bush, from *Howlin' At The Moon)

The Carnies are Coming

2008-07-31T21:02:00.005-05:00

I dread this weekend.

It's Twins Days.

Not that I don't love Twins. I know several pair and adore them all. But once a year, the rest of them come to my little town and take over parking lots, swimming pools, ball parks, picnic tables, streets, grocery stores. And that weekend has come.

It started on Tuesday. After working late, I headed for the park to walk off my frustration. At the other end of the trail the trucks were already setting up. No parking signs popped up like dandelions all along the street. And tonight, after getting home from work and heading directly for the grocery store there they all were, in the back of the parking lot, settin' up and partying.

Our little town is of course called Twinsburg because it was founded by twins of course, Moses and Aaron Wilcox, identical twins from Connecticut. This region actually was all part of the Connecticut Land Company, and our community was distinguished as Township five in the tenth land range of the Western Reserve. The Wilcox brothers purchased land in the area in 1819. However, the first person technically to survey and settle the area was a young boy from Millsville named Ethan Alling. I do not likely need to point out that young Master Alling was a singleton.

Nonetheless my kids always get a kick out of seeing multiples everywhere. My daughters two best little friends are twins, and they'll be sharing a birthday bash with my daughter at the end of the weekend. We may walk down to the parade this year. It's an odd little claim to fame but people all over the country seem to know where we are because they know someone who hangs out at the festival.

Ethan Alling is not to be confused with Ethan Allen, a hero of the Revolution who claimed Vermont as home but who also was born in Connecticut. I've always thought this tune, The Land That I Call Home, was really lovely. It's performed by Front Range and is featured on the Sugar Hill Retrospective album. I love the bands sweet, smooth harmonies and the song's lilting folk style. Hope you enjoy it as it takes you back to a time before there were Hummers and highways and parking lots and utility bills. Then again, they didn't have indoor plumbing either, which I'll be grateful for when I get home tomorrow morning from my 5:45 a.m. workout, squeezing it in before everyone starts seeing double.

Where Do W-Ego? Up to the House!

2008-07-29T20:28:00.004-05:00

Things continue apace on the Hamster Wheel. Never do I miss, wish for, or envision a new life in the world of music as when I feel so cut off from it, much like the way the Golden Compass series describes the battle to prevent us from being viciously severed from our souls. I left the office Friday at 6:30 and again tonight about the same time. I’m beginning to realize that the people involved in one of our searches, one person ultimately, is going to doom it to failure. There’s not a lot I can do about that, as long as his fellow committee members allow him to continue.

About two weeks ago, though, I felt quite differently, differently enough that I spent a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon right here at this computer, banging out candidate summaries and yelling at my kids because I was trying to work. I felt horrible, and it was a horrible experience, for them and for me. I felt behind and as though I had to get them done, but it wasn’t worth the time we lost, the stress, the unhappy feelings or my bad behavior. Wasn’t worth it at all. What I have learned is that the Shadow of this single, charismatic leader who founded this organization, did nothing to train or develop a successor (and in fact freely states that none of the internal candidates should even be interviewed when they are without question, perfectly positioned to take on the responsibilities) and who is now controlling the process by his constant, overriding vocal objections as a member of the Search Committee (mistake number one) is killing the search process, along with any joy I or my boss got out of conducting the assignment.

A perfectly timed gift arrived quite unexpectedly on my doorstep yesterday. It was a book from Shameless that she said she turns to when her head is spinning. After calling to thank her, I took it to the fitness center and got lost in it while churning away on the bike. Slowly I came back to the conscious realization that I had allowed my ego to resurface during this search project, trying to counter the arguments and prove our point. I would get an email, and I would not hesitate to respond immediately. In most cases, that’s a good thing, unless the person on the other end is a megalomaniac trying to get his way and control everything from behind the curtain. I mistook my action for trying to please the client, when in reality, I fell prey to being controlled and risked the authenticity of the work I was doing by letting my desire to please out of fear or competition get in the way of seeing the truth.

There have been a lot of changes going on this summer and my friends are all equally frenzied. My kids’ dad is getting remarried and I haven’t really explored the full impact of that on my son and daughter, although I get glimpses. I have a new work situation that is almost entirely hampered by this albatross project and one or two other obligations. And frankly, working without any down time, not having a live-in cabana boy to help with chores or pay my rent so that I could actually enjoy my kids is another layer adding to the burnout. But all these feelings of exhaustion and frustration are part of the Ego world – feeling resentful that I have these invasions of work on my private time (I take calls at all hours of the day and night but that’s next on my STOP list), feeling like I have to do it all myself, blah blah blah. That’s Ego talking.

Shameless’s thoughtful gift reminds me that I have to be careful not to accept other folks’ shadow or Ego games. I have to be careful not to let my own Ego be stirred by the countless stupid things people say and do. When I called X a couple weeks ago simply to set up a time to talk about some to-do items on the Parenting list, he somehow leapt to the conclusion I was asking for a meeting (can some of you even imagine?!) and dragged us down the path of the list while I was frankly just trying to enjoy my walk and get myself on the waiting list for a few minutes of his time. What a mistake! It happened again a few days later when he threw himself in front of the moving train of his own assumptions about something my son had said. Unbelievable, yet regular as clockwork. There is an Ego and a Shadow there that I am lucky did not completely destroy me before I escaped. He is no different from the client who seeks to control every decision, every move, pretends to be democratic among his peers but is quite the opposite.

We all have these Egos in our lives. On top of that, we all have our own Egos to contend with. It is a wonder any of us can get through any day. The book Shameless sent has good wisdom and healthy reminders about these things. Like the story of letting go of fear so I could swing literally over the treetops with my daughter, the story of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth offers a way of thinking about our collective human dysfunction as an opportunity. We cannot change others but we can each be responsible for our own awakening if we are prepared to bear it and the marvelous consequences it can have in our lives.

I just found this great vid of the young Sarah Jarosz performing Tom Waits' classic, "Come on Up to the House." It's a great tune, so true. It says "Aw, quitcherbellyachin and shut the hell up!" in the nicest bluesy way. I'm sending it to Blueberry who gets to say hello to that amazing, talented, wise-beyond-her-16-years Jarosz now and then in that Oasis of a town they share, Austin, Texas. Evidently, some of the folks ain't never heard this tune because there was a good laugh from the line, "Come down off your cross/We can use the wood." Give it a listen. And don't let nobody drag you up on their pile of woe. Just tell 'em to come on up to the house.

Bird's Eye View

2008-07-27T11:13:00.006-05:00

It's been a pretty heavy couple of weeks and I'm pretty sure I was getting a little close to burnout. So I thought I'd share a funny story about something that happened a few weeks ago and that provided a little perspective.

Readers likely know the kids and I spent the Fourth in Milwaukee visiting a friend who moved there earlier in the year. I mentioned Summerfest, which probably a fair number of music-following folks have been to. It's staged right on Lake Michigan in a big park designed just for the occasion and which also hosts a number of festivals throughout the summer. I was impressed with the investment and energy that Milwaukee puts into running this huge event and the evident commitment it makes to its Lakefront. The kids and I did not see the new Art Museum (complete with the whale's tail solar powered...thingy) but spent almost an entire afternoon at the science center (ours kind of pales out in comparison).

Anyway, the day before we had hit Summerfest. There were probably anywhere from 20 to 30 thousand people milling around all the stages and activities and food. From one end of the park to just about the other there was this skyway express ride -- you know, like a ski lift that goes over the event. Once we were inside the park, getting a ride on that thing was pretty much my daughter's main concern, mitigated just barely by the blue ice cream cone that matched her outfit and the fresh-squeezed lemonade that followed. So I assured her that we'd catch a ride when we were getting closer to the time we'd leave the park.

We strolled around a bit and enjoyed some of the live music by bands whose names I cannot remember. We made it to the far end of the park where the British 60s hitsters The Zombies were fixing to play to a very large crowd of folks just about ten years down the road from me. We hung around for a few moments before turning back.

Finally we decided that my daughter and son and I would take the sky car thing back toward the front of the fest and our friend L would meet us on the other side. So I purchase the tickets for the ride and Little A and I hop into a car with Son of Mando right behind us.

Now, first, let me tell you a little something about my daughter. She is smarter than just about any other person on either side of her family (with the exception of her cousin in Tennessee--together, they are quite a force to be reckoned with), quite small, for the most part fearless, and generally quite a good companion if you enjoy distraction because she is always sharing her observations or asking clever questions. So the entire time leading up to the ride was simply looking forward to yet another memorable mother-daughter moment, something we'd hopefully always both remember.

Well I'll never forget it, that's for sure. The reason is that most of the people who know me well know I have an excruciating fear of heights. Now, if I'm climbing a mountain or going up the side of a building in a glass elevator or at the top of a sand dune, that's cool. But when I'm standing on a lookout platform or, say, hanging 100 or more feet in midair in a swinging school bus seat, I'm a little less comfortable.

But I'm not really thinking of these things because I'm just looking forward to hanging out with my baby girl and taking in the wonders of the view.

We grab our car, the attendant slams down the little latch gate, and away we go.

And about 45 seconds in the ride, I realize what I've gotten myself into, and that because I'm sitting next to my seven year old daughter, there ain't a damn thing I can do about it. I just gotta act cool.

My daughter meanwhile is of course delighted beyond measure at being able to take in the entire scope of Summerfest, because we are flying high above everything, including the stages. I pry my own hand off the bar in front of me to pull out her camera and snap one photo before shoving it speedily back in the bag for fear of dropping the whole thing. The alarms going off in my head force me to shut my eyes for a moment with one arm around my daughter and the other leaving a permanent mark in the bar in front of me.

Finally I open them and force myself to focus -- on my daughter and her myriad observations, on the fact that, yes we really are somwhere between 100 and 300 feet above ground and moving, then stopping, then moving, that there are full cars going in both directions with adults and children even younger than Little A and none of whom are acting the least bit terrified. We took in how many people flocked to each band. We mused as we were stopped over a makeshift beer garden that, what if someone had on flip flops and dropped them into the crowd below and it landed in someone's food? She reminded me that hey, if I am going to take up skiing, I better get used to riding htese things. I agreed but also reminded her that between the extra padding of the snow suit and the slow itself below, a fall from a ski lift might under the best conditions (we're talking Ohio, not Colorado) result in a slightly softer landing than one might experience from where we were.

Then suddenly, we were ever so slowly on our way back down. We stopped a final time near the children's area, where we could watch the kids playing in a makeshift fountain/sprinkler set up, and enjoy the first acoustic band I'd seen. Then it was on the way to the end of the line, where she and I hopped out and raced to the gate to meet our friend, where I confessed privately that I didn't know what the hell I was thinking.

But in the end, I love the memory of my tiny girl next to me in her smiley face hat, high above it all, taking it in stride and assuring her mother that this was what fun was all about. She's right. Why can't I be more like her, a little less fearful, a little more ready for life's great adventures, taking it all in stride? She has her moments like everyone else but she's always ready to catch a big wave and go. She doesn't worry about things, and granted, while that's to some degree because she has a fair number of people to worry about them for her, she seems to have a certain kind of inner balance, at her age a wisdom of what's important and what's just part of everyday stuff.

It was a good lesson for me, and I really will never forget it. I just hope I can get my arms around all that's going on and find a way to not let it take over the all too rare time I have with my children or for my own recouperation. At the end of the day, much of this is self-inflicted, as it is with all of us. I have to remember that most things offer a choice, right down to whether I work, play, sing, train, sleep, stay up, parent, defer, move, stay. And I can either stay on the ground where its safe, and miss stuff, or climb in the car and get high above it all just long enough to see a few things I didn't see before.

Please check out this favorite tune of mine by a true first lady of Bluegrass, Claire Lynch. The words really ring true about being open to the changes and challenges that can make us better people, bring us closer to purpose, and find more meaning in our crazy lives if we just stop and pay attention for a moment. It's called "Be Ready To Sail" and you can enjoy Claire and her band performing it at Bluegrass in the Smokies by clicking here.

ZzzzzzzzzOOOOOM!

2008-07-24T21:12:00.002-05:00

Oh look! It's Thursday night, 10:15! What a surprise!

Damn, time moves fast. One minute I'm watching a movie Friday night with my kids, the next suddenly I'm eeking every last second out of bat watching while the clock ticks and I know I'll never get my daughter up in the morning for camp.

Where does the time go? What happened to the life I had, when I had time to spend with friends, and my kids, talk to people on the phone, sit and write, sit and tour the blogosphere, sit and do nothing? It's kind of, well, gone. And I don't know why. I really don't.

It's 10:15 on a Thursday night but I'm going to go for a walk around the block before I turn in. Turn into what, I'm not sure.

Just turn in, I guess. Meanwhile here's a slick Blue Highway instrumental that kind of goes at the speed I feel my head spinning.

Three-Finger Jack

How're Things in Moneyland?

2008-07-20T21:07:00.003-05:00

This weekend was filled with luxuries for my kids and I. On Friday night, we went to see the new Disney flick, Wall-e, which was quite frankly a brave little film considering the way it thumbs its nose at conspicuous, unconscious consumption. We loved it. On Saturday, we hit the ground running early to spend a couple of hours at the dentist (beats making three separate trips from Twinsburg to Richmond Heights). We grabbed lunch, my daughter and I took a quick dip in the pool, and then we all headed to the Cleveland Irish Cultural Fest to see friends and family and enjoy a roaring set with Liz Carroll and John Doyle (with a surprise pub-burning number when the duo was joined by fiddler Eileen Eivers and Cherish the Ladies' flutist Joan Madden). Since we forgot to turn the a/c on when we left -- it's been above 90 and extremely muggy the last few days -- the three of us "camped out" on the floor and went to sleep reminiscing about our fun couple of days.

In the middle of it all arrived this gem from Del McCoury, the well-timed Moneyland. My copy arrived Saturday just in time for us to head out. It's got a fabulous lineup and of course a spot-on message. Funny how we're all getting poorer and the handful of folks at the top don't even notice? The other day I spoke with a colleague at our community's major food bank. The enormity of the demand they are experiencing compared to years past is pretty staggering. And frontline agencies like theirs are getting hit from three sides: donations are down, expenses and demand are up.

Meanwhile, as Dr. Don noted in his recent post, the last bastions of American manufacturing, like the automakers, literally spin their wheels, ignoring the alarms while scheduling shutdowns and layoffs and, rather than redirect research and development to come up with more fuel efficient cars that Americans will buy, they are keeping an eye on their hefty severance packages. None of them will feel any pain.

I kind of like what the Continental Airlines exec decided to do. Since his airline isn't making as much money as it needs to stay in the air, he's forfeited his salary for the rest of the year. What a novel idea. Unfortunately it looks like he's a lone wolf out out in CEO wilderness.

A portion of the proceeds will be used to support homeless programs in the US, so if you were of a mind to buy something this week, think about making it this terrific effort featuring Del and his Boys, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Patty Loveless, Bruce Hornsby (with the Fairfield Four), and even the late President Franklin Roosevelt. For a limited time you might be able to pick up a signed copy. This tune, Breadline Blues 2008, features Tim O'Brien, Del, Mac Wiseman, Gillian Welch, and David Rawlings. Some folks will notice that the tune smacks awfully like another blues tune you might be able to catch here.

Whatever you have to push uphill this week just to put bread on your table, I hope the load is a little bit lighter, and the bread's a little bit sweeter, and if you're lucky that you'll have real butter to spread on top.

Lighting the Darkest Hour

2008-07-15T21:13:00.003-05:00

Last night I did something I've never done. I've not ever been one for crowds, but at the last minute -- in fact, late -- I decided to go to the second community vigil for Josh Miktarian, the officer who was killed in my tiny quiet town Saturday night.

I went for selfish reasons, initially. I wanted to see who was there--in other words, I wanted to confirm my suspicion that this poor officer's death was the first stumbling block in a trip down the steps into the basement of race relations. I wanted to see what my community was really like. I was stunned and moved to see a sea of humanity of every race, paying rapt attention to the words spoken by those who had known Officer Josh Miktarian.

It was a beautiful night, too. As I gazed up and over the hillside covered with people, I looked up at the stars and took a little comfort that maybe, when we die, we get this feeling of relief for a brief moment before the flame goes out. I think it might be kind of cool to fly around with just enough of a shred of consciousness left to take in a scene like that last night, a swath of land covered in flickering bits of light from the vigil candles.

As sad as it all has been, everyone knows that at some point, you hit the bottom and then come back up. And we all know someday we'll draw our last breath. We don't look forward to that, necessarily, and it's never easy on the ones we leave behind. I can't imagine what this officer's family must be going through. Somehow I stumbled into this music during a time of my own deep darkness, and so some of the old gospel tunes brought real comfort, and still have meaning even though my perspectives have changed. I hope someday that this community finds peace, that the officer's family will be able to find a little light, a new dawn for them so that they'll take a satisfying breath again.

This beautiful old Stanley tune is even more beautiful delivered by Emmylou Harris in the video here. Enjoy one for a moment called The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Dawn.

Whither a Wondrous Love

2008-07-13T18:56:00.002-05:00

I just got back from a blissful afternoon under the trees at Hale Farm and Village playing music for close to 5 hours with total strangers. I wasn't going to go as it had rained all morning but at around 12:30 the sun came out, I called a buddy of mine, and we met out in the old Western Reserve for a day of music.

While there he told me he'd heard about a shooting in Twinsburg. A police officer had been killed. I thought that was mighty strange. Nothing much ever happens here and if it does it's a big deal and yet somehow I missed it.

When I got home, I fixed myself a beautiful late supper of salmon with spinach salad with a glass of fume blanc wine. Then I opened the news. The officer, Josh Miktarian, 33 years old, was shot and killed right by the grocery store where I bought the food I'd eaten, a few hours after I left the store. He had pulled over a driver and his K-9 was in the car with him. Nearby residents heard yelling and then a shot rang out. And that was the end of Officer Miktarian, dad, husband, owner of a pizza joint, guitarist in a local rock band.

It's sad, certainly, and unnerving, and I'm pissed off, too. What the hell is going on in this world? The other day a guy in Cleveland was shot and killed while standing in his bedroom just as he was about to lay down and go to sleep. Well, the fella, a postal worker, is sleeping now for good.

Wondrous Love, performed in perfection the other night at The Kent Stage by the amazing Blue Highway, has kind of grabbed me over the last couple of days because it was a hymn from my childhood. It also is eerily appropriate now.

I had written earlier in a comment that when the guys got done with this, my jaw literally was hanging open, and it's true, it was. There was a lot of levity and a lot of fast-acting bluegrass up to that point, and usually at a bluegrass show the band will offer up a gospel tune or a quartet, and it's usually some standard off of one of their albums. This hymn tune, the title track of their gospel recording, Wondrous Love, was presented in layers, lead vocalist and bass player Wayne Taylor setting the stage with mando player and vocalist Shawn Lane. Tim Stafford came out next on the next verse, then the band's banjo player Jason Burleson, and finally Rob Ickes. (See the band's profiles here.) But it was so subtle you didn't really know what was happening, you just had this impact all of a sudden. And I've heard a lot of great singing over the years, but this was really exceptional singing. You could have heard a pin drop. I suspect a good many of the folks in the audience were holding their lower jaws. Hear the studio version here, or go back to yesterday's post and click on the link near the end when I mention about Sunday quiet time for a YouTube video.

The last time I heard this hymn, I was a little girl, probably not more than 10 years old. My mother used to take me to church with her in Dillonvale, Ohio, literally almost a one-stoplight town. We were Catholic, but somehow I never took this hymn for being like any of the others. And it's not, it comes from the shape-note tradition, and the words are anything but Anglo-Roman mass fare. But I always liked it, as a kid, because it was haunting and unusual. Now more than 30 years later I appreciate it much differently. But I had certainly forgotten all about it until Blue Highway performed it the other night. Suddenly I felt captured, exposed --oddly graced.

I leave you with this tune and hope that something of it resonates with you. I wish that we could believe in a wondrous love that would explain away the wasteful side of human nature, the power of shadow to take a life, ruin one's own life and so many others in the taking. My loss now is that innocence when I could turn to this song or so many others and just put my trust in it, in a higher love. Now, all I have is the hope that at some point humanity will right itself before self-destructing. How I miss the days of my innocent belief.

The Sound of Unwinding

2008-07-12T20:42:00.003-05:00

Ahhhh. Today was the BOMB. An absolutely butt-kicking, barn-burning night of music last night at The Kent Stage totally and truly DID turn my spirits around -- despite being completely mentally baked I could have gone on with those bee-loved Bee-Liners and that collection of bluegrass deans, Blue Highway, 'til well into the wee hours. Oh! And the bonus of the night was to see Casey Henry step out with the Bee-Liners! She stepped in for banjo player Sam Morrow for the weekend and did him proud. The crowd was terrific and the show was really phenomenal, one of the best in a good while. I am so grateful that both those bands took a chance on Northeast Ohio and turned out for us. And it was refreshing to see a closer-to-full house with lots of happy bluegrass fans! We had a good time all the way around.

Something did happen overnight. Part of it must have been the music and the laughter -- Brandi and Buddy Beeliner and Friends kept it pretty lively with a clever set of their best plus a few rarely heard old standards, and I have to say, Blue Highway's Tim Stafford does a pretty mean Slingblade impression, and a downright spooky imitation of Ralph Stanley -- he also does a few variations on Stanley's well-known (thanks to the flick, "O! Brother, Where Art Thou?") "Conversation wtih Death". I woke up early, at around 7, and just got on with the day. I felt like the person I remember a few weeks ago who had energy and some kind of a game plan. By noon I had paid bills, worked out, changed all the beds, dusted, cleaned the laundry room, pulled weeds, washed the kitchen cabinets, and gotten the bad news about the new furnace likely in my future (not that bad, really, but necessary). The rest of the day was really all mine, and I spent it intermittently playing a little music (hoo boy am I RUSTED), playing out side when it wasn't storming, grocery shopping, making myself a delicious dinner, reading during my brief visit to the pool, and barely catching up on the blogs of my other pals. Somewhere in there I even got a little nap, more than I can say for those artists who were all on the road bright and early today.

I feel I am beginning to unwind a little. So much has been on my mind about work, and we've been constantly on the go. A day like this, when its "Gee, I think I'll sort clothes and then watch it rain for five minutes" is such a pleasure. The phone didn't even ring. It was perfect.

Must say, I loved our visit to Milwaukee last weekend and to Summerfest, and I have a fun story about that I'll share some other time. I'll also have some fun stuff to share about a project my son and I have taken on -- we're officially addicted to ancestry.com. But right now, I'm just hanging out. Time to soak my toes and play a tune. Tomorrow I'll treat myself to my weekly Sunday iTunes acquisition, and I think it's going to be Blue Highway's 2005 release, Marbletown. From that effort, here's one called Nothing But a Whippoorwill. A damn fine tune (which we all enjoyed in an extended jam version) but also reminds me why it's good to be single. ;-)

For those who still perform a little Sunday quiet time, I recommend this. Sometime I'll post about the history of this hymn tune for me personally and about how my jaw was literally hanging open at the end of this number.

Happy tails, happy trails, clip your nails, don't eat snails.

MM

The Best of Buzz

2008-07-08T20:45:00.005-05:00

Following a four-day car trip -- or was it, five? Yeah, I think it was five -- with the kids, only to return to hit the ground running all too early this morning, I am beside myself with longing for this Friday's show at The Kent Stage. I'm counting on those feisty favorites of mine, The Dixie Bee-Liners, to turn my crabgrass back to blue. And if that doesn't do it -- unlikely as that is -- I'll have to hope for the best when Blue Highway takes the stage.

DBL is one of those rare bands that comes along once in a while to smack upside the head those folks who say things like, "I don't like that bluegrass kind of music." There are a lot of semi-conscious listeners out there who really don't know the depth and breadth of bluegrass and how, being a young form, it has its roots and its branches, to borrow an overused term at this hour when I should be asleep.

Blue Highway is a solid, more traditional band but with a message quite contemporary. Several tracks on the new release get at what is going on in this country right now. All I can say is, people who would tell me that I can't both oppose the war and support the troops are a sad case.

My mind has been turning and like my pal Shameless I've been running on fumes, but finding the time to set a spell and write just doesn't come easy, if at all. And there are so many things, despite rising before 6 and going the whole day, there just isn't enough time. Balance. I know there's got to be a way to get a better balance. Before I know it, the week will be gone, and another, and another. It makes it so hard to sink my teeth into anything. I haven't played an instrument in a few weeks. My soul needs a recharge but I'm out of batteries. If I could stay awake, I'd call my friends whom I miss so much. I feel guilty but at a loss.

This pensive tune from Blue Highway's latest release, "Through the Window of a Train," is a bittersweet take on that feeling of time slipping away like water through your fingers.

Where Did the Morning Go?

Three Days in July

2008-07-02T21:25:00.003-05:00

As usual, the night before a trip I'm trying to cram in this chore and that errand and still manage to get to bed at a "decent" hour. How funny that, with the world literally crashing around us, we can get hung up on our insignificant worries, our self-inflicted overdoing. Talk of GM going completely under and the market firmly gone "bear" and I'm concerned over whether I remembered to pack something or if we'll get on the road at a reasonable time (in my Subaru).

There have been worse days. On this night exactly 145 years ago, lots of Americans had a lot worse on their minds. Things like, "Where are my boots?" Or, "Where are my feet?"

The Battle at Gettysburg raged on from July 1 to July 3, 1863, culminating in the fiercest losses of life on American soil, and supposedly turning the tide on the War itself. (I never understand this; the war raged on for another couple of years. If I had been Gen. Lee, I surely would have turned my sword over to Gen. Meade.)

So we are, 145 years later, in the middle of another bloody war, this time far away from home. In some ways the Civil War was a just war. This war we're now in is just wrong. Men and women of the armed forces, not to mention tens of thousands more men, women and children of Iraq and Afghanistan, are losing their lives for no particular reason that anyone has given, really. And at home we wage war every day to get and keep our jobs, to fill our gas tanks, to put bread on our tables, to raise our children and keep them safe and alive through another day.

And I'm worried about getting enough sleep.

This tune is a grabber from the Infamous Stringdusters brand new and fabulous self-titled release. "Three Days In July" tells the story of one night from one young man's point of view. Boys my son's age were part of a youth "brigade" that made up as much as 15% of the soldiers on both sides. I'm sure as the song says, they learned things they never knew, and we surely never will. Maybe we should. Maybe if we really understood some of the things that used to be, we'd treat each other better and take more seriously our roles as citizens. We can only take the next few days and over the holiday think about what about this country matters to us, why we celebrate our "independence," and what we can do to get back some authenticity for our busted-up, beleaguered, midlife-crisis nation.

"Three Days In July"

You're Never Alone, Really, Sort Of

2008-06-29T21:42:00.006-05:00

I really do have the sweetest family.

This morning as I was purchasing all-important underwear with monkeys on it for my daughter, I got a call from one of my cousins, who recently had fairly serious surgery, as did her mother, my aunt. We'd been talking about getting together when they felt better, and she was calling to tell me that my cousins who formerly lived in WV were in town. So I called my sister in law and we threw together a gathering at my brother's place out in the country. Unfortunately I didn't have my kids along but in some ways that made it easier to really visit.

It's almost 11 p.m. and my sister in law called to make sure I made it home (eek, I forgot to call!). As independent as I am, I forget that something could actually happen to me and that I could find myself in trouble, sick, or hurt, or worse, and that not having a partner means that it could be a while before someone found out. My boss will sometimes call in the morning if I'm running a bit behind schedule, to make sure I'm ok. They know I'm typically in the office no later than a few minutes after 8, and if they call at 8:15 and I don't pick up, they worry. I've decided it's not that silly. It's his way of extending the way he takes care of damn near everybody (he's the oldest of 8 kids and the only son) to me and my kids. His wife does the same. I feel very lucky.

I've begun lately to entertain the question of whether I really want a relationship or if I have room for it. I would definitely, at this point, have to make room for it, which means that I'm far pickier than I used to be. That comes at an age when most men and women decide they need to be less picky. But I think that, as much as I love my freedom, there are times when being "it" feels a little old. It's all on me, all the time, and if something happens to me, oh well.

I'm not sure what exactly I should do about this beyond just acknowledge it for now. I've started down the road of online dating, with results I've described here and there on the blog as just this side of tragic. At best, I was introduced to a few nice men who realized they weren't over their last girlfriends/wives/whatever. At worst, either I was being set up to be "corrected" or setting myself up to take on burdens I just don't want to take on at this point in my life. Maybe a few folks have had better results, but, evidently it's no way for me to meet an environmental lawyer who plays the banjo and whose kids, if he has them, are already in college.

Like I said, picky. The Nonexistent Mr. Right has to be smart, treat me with the respect that I deserve because I am also smart, probably plays an instrument, is somewhat driven and enjoys working at SOMETHING at least as much as I do, and hopefully he's passionate about it. And, he doesn't have attached to him some complex co-parenting situation into which I refuse to introduce my own kids (they've been there, are there, done that). The list is actually longer than that, but why even think about it? I'm not, really, just toying.

In the end, I suspect the reason it's even on my mind is that my family and maybe even my kids feel sorry for me that I haven't mated up already. But the longer I stay single, the more I have to do on my own, and chances are I'll still end up alone outside of a sudden illness or freak death that precedes that of any eventual partner. So at least I know I can do it. I just feel a bit guilty for my family worrying about it, even though they are universally pleased for me to be out from under the vapors of a toxic marriage.

One things for sure, I do love the freedom to enjoy, explore, expound on, and expose others to this great music that I've completely fallen in love with. One of my favorite songs from Donna Hughes release, "Gaining Wisdom", is this tune, "Find Me Out On A Mountaintop", because it's so often how I feel. Here it's performed by the fabulous Blue Highway, who will make their way to The Kent Stage on July 11 along with the hottest buzz in bluegrass, the Dixie Bee Liners. Whether I can convince my friends to come along or I go alone, I'll have that night to celebrate the music and savor a little real joy.

Find Me Out on the Mountaintop

To the West, For One Night

2008-06-27T21:57:00.004-05:00

Chances are pretty good that you're about as burned out as I am, and maybe more. Part of my weekend remedy for that will be spending Saturday evening (June 28) at The Kent Stage with the decidedly cowboyish Riders in the Sky. Most folks know them from their various contributions to Disney collections..."Woody's Roundup" is probably one most folks can sing. But they've got quite a little recording history and are the rootin'-ist, tootin'-ist Grammy winners any side of Texas.

If you don't really want to see the Indiana Jones movie a third time, lasso your friends or family and bring 'em out for a night with the Riders. Their job is to make sure you all have a durn good time with their brand of fine music makin' in the tradition of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

Saddle up and come on down to The Kent Stage for the 8 p.m. show! Maybe we can hit the waterin' hole after.

Riders in the Sky

Got Raisins?

2008-06-24T21:19:00.003-05:00

Thanks to my sister and her brood, a pure delight landed in my email box Sunday night. It's a concoction called Snacktime by those loveable Canucks, the Barenaked Ladies. Thanks to my sister, my daughter and I can't stop singing this silly song called "Raisins."

Life has been getting a little loopy, and tonight my colleague and I got some very bad news about one of her favorite people. It's the latest smack upside the head reminding us that we are actually never in charge.

When life hands you sour grapes, leave 'em in the sun a couple days, and whistle.

Raisins

An Exercise in Restraint

2008-06-22T17:11:00.006-05:00

I still can't quite figure out how I got all the way to Sunday night so quickly. But most of last week was a bit of an adventure, from the shrill fire alarm at my hotel outside St. Louis International Airport -- it made my teeth rattle, and convinced me that it would be impossible to sleep through it -- on top of two intensive days of training on a new system, to getting home late and then turning around the next night to retrieve Son of Mando from his exciting week at the Space Academy camp in Huntsville, AL.

A note to those picking up unaccompanied minors: if you take little brother or sister along, be sure to get a pass for them, too. We were all the way through security when they turned us back because my seven-year-old wasn't given a pass by the one Delta ticket agent we could find amidst the tumbleweeds in all of Cleveland Hopkins Airport on a Friday night. Back at security, those two patriots who sent us packing conveniently slipped off for a hard-earned break, having done their part to keep America safe from the likes of me and Daughter of Mando.

What is up with people and their need to satisfy some ridiculous illusion of grandeur? At 8:49 p.m. on a Friday night, there's no emptier place than the Cleveland airport. My daughter and I were literally the ONLY two people anywhere near security. Upon our returning all the way to the Delta baggage office, a far cry from the gate, to get a second pass, he told us that had never happened to him before. This was not a security issue. This was clearly a "let me be a big pain in the ass to this woman and her little girl -- I wanna see 'em jump."

But I don't like to jump. I pulled out my phone, prepared to call X when one of the TSAccidents agreed to walk me through and over the shortcut to baggage. What he should have done is walk me to the gate and waited there while my son deplaned. We raced back up and through and made it with about three minutes to spare.

I don't know what kind of training these people go through but it clearly doesn't include making rational judgements. We've had a fun if exhausting weekend since, during which none of us managed to make life difficult for anyone just because we felt like it.

I have one small consolation. In a little under 30 years, my daughter will be old enough to run for President. In her honor, for putting up with these witless icons of part-time authority, here's a sweet little instrumental off the brand new self-titled Infamous Stringdusters cd. Enjoy this one called Golden Ticket.