some things just happen despite it all. for us, it’s lettuce.
despite the global pandemic, despite the absolute necessity of social change from deep roots of racism, despite political chaos, despite the economic impact we have felt, despite the isolation, despite the loneliness of missing, despite the challenge of seeing others maskless and cavalier, despite the sheer lack of responsible federal leadership in this country, despite our country’s inability to respond appropriately to a health crisis, despite questionable ally stances, despite ignoring the human-caused-destruction of mother earth, despite a pitiful inequity of economics, healthcare, opportunity in america, despite the mixed messages, despite the glib words of those ignoring the upward trend of a deadly virus, despite untruths, despite actions-that-speak-louder-than-words, despite mean-spirited messages and agendas, despite people and leaders screaming across aisles over constitutional rights, despite children killed by gun violence, despite extremism, despite empty words of piety, despite rage-filled brutality, despite an incapacity to live peacefully in community, despite unanswered questions and confusion, despite a lack of reassurance, despite the worry, despite the fear, despite the challenges, despite not-knowing, despite the grief, despite the yearning for normal, some things happen.
in the middle of my meltdown yesterday, i’m sure i uttered, “i just want normal.”
but normal is subjective now.
there is a deep schism between the normal of the of-course-i’ll-wear-a-mask-maskers and the it’s-against-my-constitutional-rights-to-make-me-wear-a-mask-non-maskers. a deep schism between the sides of the aisle. a deep schism over this global pandemic, the economy, healthcare, equality, blatant racism. a deep schism over confederate monuments. a deep schism over basic respect. a deep schism over truth.
a chasm of difference. it makes me wonder what, if anything, can bridge it, what can create a common story, what can make us a populace that cares about each other?
scrolling through facebook is depressing. there are people ‘out there’ in our pandemic-riddled country doing normal stuff: eating at restaurants, having drinks at bars, gathering with friends, going on trips, boating, fishing, at the beach or the pool, all without masks and without social distancing and without, seemingly, a care in the world.
driving downtown is depressing. there are people ‘out there’ in our pandemic-riddled country just-down-the-road doing normal stuff: eating inside and outside at captain mike’s, gathering at eichelmann beach, hanging out at the lakefront, all without masks and without social distancing and without, seemingly, a care in the world.
trying to plan anything is depressing. we need to go to see david’s parents. i desperately need to see My Girl and My Boy. there are so many details to keep each other safe. there’s nothing normal. it’s freaking confusing. we plot the trip west, a roadtrip, thinking about 19 hours across the middle of the country, thinking about arriving at my at-risk-in-laws’ house, having not picked up any additional possibility of passing covid-19 to them. where do we stop safely? where do we get gas? where do we use restrooms? how can we be sure they will not be recipients of anything we bring along? we care.
and yet, there is the rest of the country – the ones screaming at city hall meetings, the ones seeking judgement against requiring masks-for-safety, the ones who throw pointed word-daggers arguing against the danger of this pandemic, the ones arguing for other causes of death, the ones voting out all precautions for the state of wisconsin, the ones who stand in front of the entire country and arrogantly (and without a grain of truth) state, “we’ve flattened the curve!” how is it that the leadership of this country gets away with this? no wonder half of the country wears no mask, states and does whatever they damn well please. WHAT pandemic?
it’s depressing. missing the moments that make up life – chances to easily be with family, friends. chances to have a bite out without worrying about aerosols. chances to sing with others, to sing for others. chances to go to concerts and plays. chances to gather around a kitchen table or the island at your best friends’. chances to stop and hug your decades-long neighbor. chances to hold your grown-up children and kiss them and make them roll their eyes. happy hour with friends crowded onto a deck. parties in the backyard. normal stuff.
it was on a marquee outside a store, “a little normal would be nice.”
i couldn’t agree more.
i told tom i had a really hard day yesterday. he said, “you have to grieve.”
the old file cabinets are in the closet in the studio. at some point i organized all – well, most of – my music, lugged a couple metal cabinets up from the basement and spent a few days filing. there’s overfill in a few cardboard bank boxes on the floor. maybe someday i’ll get to those.
yesterday i was looking for a piece of music i thought i had. i went to the drawer it should be in and starting rifling through the books and sheet music. every title i looked at brought back memories: “moon river” made me think of my uncle allen, who took voice lessons and sang that song beautifully. “all i need” made me think of days at moton school center, comparing ‘general hospital’ notes with lois over lunches of peanuts and diet cokes. “the rose” made me think of earlier years of promise and love.
i forgot about what i was searching for and dragged out a pile of music, sheets spilling out onto the floor as i struggled to pull them from their tightly filled drawer. books – collections of artists or full transcribed albums – called my name, begging to see the light of day. i whispered to them i would be back for them. it has probably been decades since they were opened.
standing at the piano, not another thought in my head, i started shuffling through sheet music and playing. it was no longer 2020, transported instantly back to the 70s, the 60s, the 80s.
had i opened a different drawer i would have found all my old piano books, my old organ music – tools of a student learning her eventual trade. in those drawers are the books my children used for their music lessons, for band and orchestra. in those drawers are the books i used as i attempted junior high oboe and college trumpet lessons. in those drawers are the pieces that kept me on the bench for hours as a child and then as a teenager, practicing, playing, dreaming.
other drawers yield a plethora of more advanced piano and organ music, years of accumulated resources. there are drawers of choir music, both sacred and secular, from years and years of directing and conducting work. and still others house the scores of music i have written, staff paper and pencil, finished in calligraphy pen.
it made me want to just clear a day off. liberate my mind from every worry, every task, every watching-the-time responsibility. brush off the dust of the dark drawers from the lead sheets and scores and play.
i’d love to gather a whole group of friends around the piano and sing through john denver and billy joel songs, through england dan and john ford coley’s “we’ll never have to say goodbye again” and paul mccartney’s “maybe i’m amazed” and david soul’s “don’t give up on us” and the carpenters’ “bless the beasts and the children” and led zeppelin’s “stairway to heaven”, through carole king and james taylor and pablo cruise. through the ‘great songs of the sixties’ book and the ‘sensational 70 for the 70s’ book and fake books from all time. just take a day – a whole day – and sing. and remember together.
in light of the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic, this would have to be virtual, i suppose. so that might not be such a good idea. but maybe d and i could just take that day. think of nothing else but music and where it has brought us, where it brings us. our long stories.
a few things can instantly place you back in a moment. songs, scents, pictures. a whiff of my sweet momma’s favorite perfume has me immediately missing her. john denver singing anything off any number of albums of his that i owned places me in my room hanging out on my beanbag chairs with my slick 3-in-1 turntable/8-track/cassette stereo or driving my little bug around the island. wings’ “silly love songs” or elton’s “don’t go breaking my heart” and i can feel the hot sand under my beach towel at crab meadow.
an empty canvas. a roadtrip with no predetermined destination. where do you go from here, davidrobinson?
an empty staff. a roadtrip with no predetermined destination. where do you go from here, kerrisherwood?
artists’ journeys, rife with intersections, foist decision-making upon us in our quest to create. simply starting is sometimes an uphill challenge. the questions are never easily answered. the value of what we are doing is never really clear. or is it – the value assigned to what we are doing is never really clear?
we have a daily decision, a choice to “begin anywhere” (john cage) and speak to the world around us and what we see through artists’ eyes. we write, we paint, we compose. we either create or we step away from the canvas, the staff paper, the qwerty keyboard. we know that nothing we do will change the world. we know that everything we do, like you, will change the world.
where do we go from here?
last night anderson cooper’s chyron read, “meanwhile, back in the real world.” the real world. a world fraught with chaos, trembling with the fever of a pandemic and the disease of racism. we, as people, turn to the sages of old for words of wisdom. we turn to art for honest displays of emotion. we turn to music for expressions of pain and hope, grief, despair, love, action, change, fear, questions.
questions like – where do we go from here?
Every day just gets a little shorter, don’t you think? Take a look around you and you’ll see just what I mean People got to come together, not just out of fear
Where do we go Where do we go Where do we go from here?
Try to find a better place but soon it’s all the same What once you thought was a paradise is not just what it seemed The more I look around, I find, the more I have to fear
Where do we go Where do we go Where do we go from here?
I know it’s hard for you to Change your way of life I know it’s hard for you to do The world is full of people Dying to be free So if you don’t, my friend There’s no life for you No world for me
Let’s all get together soon, before it is too late Forget about the past and let your feelings fade away If you do I’m sure you’ll see, the end is not yet near
Where do we go Where do we go Where do we go from here?
clearly there are a lot of people who own registered cars in wisconsin who do not read.
how do i know this, you ask?
drive behind anyone with a wisconsin plate and notice where they have put the year sticker. people place these stickers all over the license plate. when you start looking you will see a variety of methods – in the middle of the plate, stickered all around the edges, smack over the raised lettering. however, these stickers are delivered to you in the envelope pictured above. this envelope leaves little doubt as to where to place the stickers – any and all of them. they are not meant to fill in the white space on the plate, nor to cover the numbers and letters metal-stamped on the plate.
so do they not read? that, in itself, i see as a bit of a problem. somehow it seems necessary to be able to read and follow directions in order to be safely out on the road, driving around.
now, i would understand if the state of wisconsin department of motor vehicles just sent you a sticker in a plain envelope, without specific directions attached. you might wonder, “golly gee, where does this sticker go?” but to receive such clear and concise and labeled instructions, how is it that a vast number of drivers, supposedly responsible drivers, have scratched their heads and tore off the backing and stuck ’em anywhere they wanted? what are they possibly thinking? what is the point of this stuck-anywhere-sticker-thing? is it a display of rebellion? is it a display of apathy? do they think it’s artistic? i wonder.
because it just looks like they over-and-over-again don’t read the directions. it’s not like you need cliff notes for the eleven words, “place year sticker here first time and at time of renewal.” plus there’s the arrow. pointing. to the place the sticker goes. what’s so hard about this?
it makes me wonder what else they don’t read or pay attention to. in a world with a global pandemic, we surely need people to read, stay apprised, follow safety instructions and directions for flattening the curve. we need people to be responsible and care about guidelines put into place, specifications to fairly regulate, to simply be in accord.
now, i can’t help but wonder: are the people with stickers all over their license plates the same people – the customers at the corner store – who sneered at us because we were wearing masks during this pandemic?
everyone else baked artisan breads in march or april. we baked it in june. well, specifically, david baked bread in june. i merely had to watch the process, savor the wafting of baking-bread through the house, tear off a chunk and devour it.
he’d been talking about it for a while, that he wanted to bake bread. this loaf is gluten free – he adapted it from a rustic bread recipe of bill’s. bill baked bread in april and then moved on to homemade gnocchi. a bit trend-resistant, we picked up the dangling carrot at the tail end of bread baking so posting this picture feels somewhat passe.
we aren’t so much everyone-else-is-doing-it-so-we-have-to-do-it people. we are artists so that’s our first excuse. our second excuse is that we are often not pop-culture-informed. that was much easier for me when my children were right here, keeping me in the loop. if cnn or aarp aren’t talking about it, if it’s not in our itunes or the stacks of cds and records we own, we are swimming upstream. third, we tend to make do. as a child of the infamous soap-sock beaky-beaky, who had a mantra of saving new things “for good” and turned bottles of shampoo upside down for weeks draining the last vestiges out, making do is an inbred way of life.
baking bread was no exception. until june. when we wholeheartedly jumped on the well-vetted train, rice-flour-research in hand. voila. heaven-in-a-loaf-of-bread, we wondered why we hadn’t done it sooner.
everyone else had an iphone. i was one of the last dedicated razor-phone fans. i could text with my eyes closed, even using the phone keypad without an a-z keyboard. and then my children bought me an iphone. a convert, i wondered why i didn’t get one sooner.
everyone else has granite countertops. ok, or marble. our kitchen is old but i’ve made over 11,300 breakfasts and 11,300 dinners in it and this sweet old kitchen has had over 33,000 days nurturing its families. we chop and saute and mix and fry and bake and roast and pour – all successfully – in this old kitchen every day. maybe someday we’ll have different counters. and we’ll wonder why we didn’t change them sooner.
we cleaned the garage this weekend. our garage is old-old-old. it has a little bow in the front and there is a bit of an issue with the walls no longer in alignment with the foundation. the decades-old automatic garage door opener no longer opens it. que sera, sera.
there was the usual assortment of garden tools and clay pots, chairs-in-bags and chairs-without-bags, the wrought iron table and umbrella we hadn’t put out yet, random bags of potting soil, milorganite, sand, a plethora of spiders and their webby homes. there are old doors in the rafters, the tricycle My Girl and My Boy rode, a red wagon, the hammock. there are jacks, a snowblower-that-doesn’t-work-but-we-should-have-repaired, a wheelbarrow that has seen many trips down third avenue. our bikes hang on hooks; we wonder if i will be able to ride this summer – the whole two-broken-wrists-thing has put a damper on things. there is a woodpile rack waiting for us to re-stock, have a few bonfires in the firepit or the chiminea. and there is my old vw bug. smack-dab in the middle of this tiny one-car garage is my well-loved 1971 super beetle.
it was father’s day yesterday when we moved it out of the garage, me behind the wheel, clutch in, gear in neutral, hand ready on the emergency brake as david pushed. it hasn’t been started in years and i could hear my sweet poppo groan with me from another plane of existence as i looked it over. dirty from a few years of garage-sitting, it sure-enough wouldn’t start and i ticked off a list of things that likely now need fixing. these are things i can’t do anything about right now, so i did what i could do something about.
i got a bucket of warm carwash-soapy-water and a good sponge and my dad and i washed our bug together.
i could hear him telling me about when he and my mom picked it up brand-new in germany for their roadtrip around europe, about how it was shipped back home to a port in new york. i reminded him about how he ‘sold’ it to me in the mid-70s and how i drove that little car everywhere – rain, sleet, snow or ice – and it always kept me safe. i reminded him about how my little miniature-collie-mixbreed-dog missi used to ride in the well (i could hear him laughing when i retold how she one day actually pooped in the well.) we talked about its color iterations – it was born baby blue (marina blue, they called it). somewhere along the way we had earl scheib’s paint it navy and later on down the road it was painted white, its current color. i drove it with my best friend sue back and forth to florida, a trip where she learned how to drive a stick shift. it lived in new york and then florida and then wisconsin. it’s been dragged behind tow trucks and up on flatbeds. it bowed out of the drive moving up to wisconsin, so we pulled it behind us with a tow bar. it’s had a couple engine overhauls and lots of tires. i know how to adjust the timing and the carburetor myself. i’ve played countless john denver and loggins and messina cassettes at full volume in this little car. the heat was either stuck on or stuck off. my poppo reminded me that it had 455 air conditioning – four windows open at 55mph. i drove it to get both my degrees in florida. i drove it through a drive-through to get a milkshake the day i went into labor with My Girl. it’s been around the block.
i gently washed the dirt off of my little-white-vw-bug yesterday and realized how time had flown by. i was struck by how – right now- in the middle of a pandemic and unrest – time seems to drag. both are true.
yet i know that one day, as i ponder this time – in all its dragging chaos and emotional upheaval – i will look back and realize time, precious time, was actually flying by.
i sat down on the rusty metal bumper and missed my dad.
the chaos of irato. a passage of angry, passionate. a symphony of irate engaging us, challenging us, buckling us under in its fervor.
“take a break,” earth-the-breathless-conductor would admonish. “hold and rest,” earth-the-counselor would encourage. “slow down. be deliberate,” earth-the-sage would advise. caesura. fermata. lento.
acknowledging the rage. listening. resting in the questions. conscious mindful steps. measured decisive action. slowly leading the way with goodness.
i suspect mother earth, in its mother-earth-wisdom, would hear the symphony as transition. the space between before and after. a time of growth and change and every possible note, every possible emotion.
we listen, as earthlings, imperfect-in-every-way, and we get lost. to live in irato is uncomfortable. a cliffhanger.
but mother earth smiles. after all, she knows all about suspense and the big bang and butterflies.
at a time when i couldn’t afford paint and knew nothing about painting, i painted. i was drawn to big canvasses and the household cans of black and white paint in the basement workroom. there were housepaint brushes on the workbench, many with twisted brushhairs and dried wall paint from previous projects on the handles. they felt good in my hand. i didn’t know what i was doing, but i was compelled to do it.
and so, my paintings are black and white. layers of white on black and black on white and white on black on white and black on white on black. i brushed on paint; i stood back and spattered paint. i kept going until i felt “stop”. when i ran out of canvas i taped off a rectangle, ventured out with the leftover from a can of khaki interior paint, and painted on the wall, later framing the box with a clearance frame, broken but not obviously so.
in that time of a compelling need to paint, to preserve emotion-in-black-and-white-on-a-canvas, i wonder what my paintings would have looked like had i access to all the colors in between? where would i have gone with mountain meadow green or razzle dazzle rose or canary or cornflower or atomic tangerine or fuzzy wuzzy brown?
anyone who has merely stood outside and looked up at the sky knows that the colors of life are as transient as breath. they morph and change in the moments that go by. capturing color is like capturing the wind. one cannot see color without light reflections, refractions, wavelengths, shadow, absorption. they work together so we might see the twilight sky, rainbows and unicorn horns.
is black black without white? is white white without black? is cerulean blue without scarlet? is any spectrum complete without all others in the band of light, without all the wavelengths? any spectrum at all?
do we actually realize that none can exist without the other?
“all colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.” (marc chagall)
“music moves our world.” bmi’s tagline: “we celebrate your talent. we value your music. we champion your rights.”
i don’t blame bmi. as an royalty organization, it is trying to keep up with an industry imploding on itself. the very same opportunity to ‘get music out there’ using online platforms is what is destroying opportunity to make a living ‘getting music out there.’
as you might guess, i just received a bmi royalty statement. the check, which will come later in the mail and stamped with a 55 cent first class stamp, will cost them more per penny paid for the stamp than i will receive per performance play of my music.
because i am a specific-detail kind of person, here are the details of that: if you take my check of $71.57 and divide it by the (just shy of 100,000) performance plays this particular quarter, it amounts to an average of .00074 of a cent per performance play (you read that 7/ten-thousandths of a cent). it you take a 55 cent stamp and divide it by the check, it is .00768 of a cent per penny of the cost of the stamp (you read that 7/thousandths). that’s 10 times as much as i receive per play.
to cite some examples: there were 7530 youtube views of my piece ‘last i saw you’. the royalties i earned for that are 66 cents. CENTS. the piece ‘i didn’t know’ yielded 49,085 plays counted on a few digital music services, which averaged $.00025 of a cent. that is 2/10-thousandths of a cent. way to make a living.
i’m not really sure anymore why i’m telling you this, except for the big word “awareness”. i think most people are not aware of the explosively-good-explosively-bad impact that all these music services have had on independent musicians. headlining musicians and independent musicians – a schism of differences. yet, i’m not a person with one or two albums, new to the industry, eager to do anything to ‘spread the word’. i am an artist with fifteen albums, multiple singles, in the industry for decades and who did all the eager-stuff for many, many, many years. and like you, i want to believe that all the time and energy and writing and practicing and recording and sacrifice and thought and perseverance and education and experience and drive and hard work i put in might yield something in return now – dividends – kind of like how a retirement works.
in these times of chaos – a pandemic, an uprising of protests striving for equity in race, in gender identification, in sexual orientation, in all manners of humanity – it seems that one of the most unifying calls is that of music. music does move our world.
why, then, is this so inequitable for us? because i don’t know about you, but there isn’t one bill in my bill folder that totals $71.57 over the course of a quarter. dog food alone costs $73.16 for a quarter. there isn’t a bill that is merely for $71.57 for a month. not the phone bill, not the mortgage, not home insurance, not health insurance (don’tgetmestarted!), not the gas/electric bill, not student loans (again, don’tgetmestarted!), not car insurance, not groceries, not wifi-cable. too much information, i suppose.
with thousands of cds in boxes in storage in the cds-have-gone-poof world, i wonder, as i have written and you have read before, where to go from here. most professional careers keep building, arcing in some positive direction. i try to remind myself that this music is played hundreds of thousands of times, millions of times a year. i try to remind myself of all the times i have heard that some piece, some song, some album, some concert, some performance has resonated with someone, that it has given them a moment of reflection, of peace, that it has buoyed them. i try not to be jaded by people who burn copies of cds for their friends or who change their email every three months to access apple music streaming for free.
but as i write checks or click ‘pay’ online for the accountant, the doctor, the mortgage, the water, the gas and electric, the health insurance, the phone bill, the wifi and cable, the car and home insurances, the student loans, the groceries, i wonder what would happen if somehow each of those things went poof and there were free ways to access all of them.
reverse threading 