Uncategorized » Roger Wright - Chicago

Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro

Aug 162015

“Listen hard,” I asked all ten of them sitting around the table. “What’s the first thing you hear?”

“Guy playing the piano.” several of them said at once.

“What else? Listen again.”

This time the woman heard it. “There’s somebody on bass.” She said.

First time there had been a woman in the Wednesday night “Job Talk” group. They were all here for the weekly meal in the basement of the church.
“Job Talk” was something to do while they waited for the food.

The woman was the only one who caught the bass. Layered into the piano. As if the crystal notes came from just one instrument.

“That Bill Evans on piano?” she asked.

I tried not to let the surprise light my face. “Yep. Sure is.”

Four bars into the piece, and she says: “That’s Scott LaFaro on bass. Paul Motian on drums.”

We were in a small room off of Fellowship Hall in the basement of the church where 100 or so come inside from the streets every Wednesday night for their best, warm, good tasting and healthy meal of the week.

The people had started gathering outside in the 5:00 winter darkness. Lining up on the sidewalk in front of what used to be storefronts, but are now condos. There used to be a butcher shop right next door. The German immigrants making a go of it before the last depression in the 30’s and then the war. Building businesses. Raising kids. Now there are hungry people lined up in front of half million-dollar condominiums, waiting to get into the church basement.

The line gets longer each week. The people come in from the streets for that one meal an hour early just to stay warm. Kathy, a quiet angel who, with her husband Erwin and their son Jeff run the place. Trudi, Penny and Inge and some of the other ladies of the church serve the piping hot delicious meal at 6. Kathy makes the announcement of “Job Talk” as the clients file in from the street.

“Okay, if anybody wants to go in and do Job Talk with Roger—you’re welcome to go into the Sunday School room over here!”

“He got jobs in there?”

“No,” she answers, “just some new ways of thinking about how to get some work. Maybe sharing some stories of how you got some work.”

“Sure, why not,” says one guy.

“I did this last week,” says another.

“This dude’s alright,” I see a chin waved in my direction. “He got nothing going on either”

“No shit?”

“Yeah… he ain’t got no job either.”

First guy to sit down at the end of the table is Jobo.

Jobo, as always, is doing everything fast. Permanently bent forward as if there was always a wind blowing hard against his frame. Teeth that had never known a dentist, scraggly beard.

All the guys lived on the street, but Jobo was the one who was really making it on the street and had been for a long, long time. Animal eyes that could spot food, spare change or a warm place to stay from 100 yards away. Quick hands. Fought against everything the street had to offer. He had known the orange neon glow of the 4 a.m. sidewalks when everybody else had found their way home for the night and all the buses and trains ran empty. Known it for decades.

Whenever I asked a question to prompt the group to talk, Jobo was usually the first one who answered.

But not this time. This time it was the woman.

Her eyes like a memory of a long ago smile: “Yeah, that’s Scott LaFaro.” They played here once. Him and Bill Evans. Paul Motian. Motian was on drums.

“You all know Mary?” Jobo nodded at the woman. “She used to sing.”

That’s when I remembered her. It had been four years since she’d been around. She’d come to see a small production of Amahl and the Night Visitors put on by a bunch of folks from the church.

It was Mary; sitting there recognizing Scott La Faro’s bass on a cold winter night, which had once provided us all with a moment of true mysterious grace at that production of Amahl.

One of those moments you’ll miss if you if you blink your eyes. Here’s what happened:

A collection plate had been passed. The plate was full. It was being carried up the center aisle of the church and just as the plate – held high above the usher’s head – reached the first pew where Mary sat scrunched down on the aisle, she reached up high and gently tossed one more coin into the plate. Leaving every single soul in the room to wonder if that coin was her last.

The performers – stunned by this simplest of moves, took one more bow. I looked to the side and saw the Pastor’s jaw drop. Later he said to me, “Those are the moments that keep you going.” Then we all we all filed out into that cold winter night.

Later I learned a little more, from one of the ladies of the church, about Mary’s life as a singer. Playing the small clubs on Lincoln Avenue back in the day. She was a local favorite. Had a following. Then, when that ended, came the years sleeping in the park on Fullerton near Children’s Memorial Hospital, taking meals at the church in that part of town.

But this was over 30 years ago. A lifetime.

Now she sat here in a group of men, being the first to hear the sound of the bass.

“So why the bass? I asked the group. What could that possibly have to do with getting jobs?

Silence.

“Well, what does the bass do for the music?”

Silence.

“Let’s listen again.”

“Anyone,” I ask, “know the name of the song?”

This time Jobo spoke up: “Sure, that’s ‘My Foolish Heart.’”

Then from the corner, Tim – an ancient, plodding African American man, as deliberate and thoughtful as Jobo was quick – looked up. Tim never spoke. But Tim had made it on the streets for just as long as Jobo. He didn’t need to talk to get that across.

“One time I heard Oscar Peterson play that song. Him and Ray Brown.”

Mary just nodded and said, “Ray Brown.” Her eyes floating back to some smoky club, glasses clinking, as far away from the church basement as she could possibly be. “Ray Brown. Like Scott LaFaro. ‘Cept Ray Brown lived.”

Then I asked again: “Now, listen to the bass. What does it do for the music?”

“It’s like some sort of story it’s telling,” Jobo said.

“But it’s a story where nobody really know the words.” said Lab Tech Guy. Lab Tech Guy never wanted to tell anyone his name. Only that he had worked as a lab tech in the old Vienna sausage factory, doing quality control. So he never talked much either. But this time he said. “A story where nobody knows the words.”

“Sure,” now Jobo was on a roll. “It can help you remember the words.”

“What do you mean?” I asked the group, “How can the bass help you remember the words?”

That’s when Mary brought grace to the room one more time.

Hunched in the corner, still dressed in the heavy down parka that was her home against the wind, even though the room off the dining hall was very, very, warm…Mary, almost whispering said:

“When I can feel the bass, I remember the words to the song. Like in ‘My Foolish Heart,’ and she sang:

There’s a line between love and fascination, that is hard to miss on an evening such as this . . . .

The memory of her voice as a trained clear instrument prompted the thought, just for a moment, the winter had ended and the birds had returned. The room glowed in a deep blue holy kind of quiet for just a beat.

I then asked: “Anybody ever do something to try and get a job . . . . . . and feel like you just forgot the words? You just didn’t know what to do? What to say? Who to say it too? Feel like you were lost before you even started?”

Every single person around that table nodded their head. All eyes wide. Energy just buzzing across the room as the stories started to flow like they were all part of one giant electric grid.

“This one time? When I was standing in line for 6 hours. . . . .”

“And then she asked me how many babies I had. . . . .”

“And he told me he knew I was carrying a knife!’

Then I asked:

“So what about the bass? What can the bass do? What can listening to a bass player – dead now at the age of 25 in 1963 I think it was – how can the bass player help you with this?”

Jobo, as was usually the case, gave the room the answer.

“It’s like the street,” he said. “You can be walking down the street. Not just now when it’s cold, but summertime too. And you stop and you listen, and you just know there’s gonna be trouble on the next block. You can hear it. You don’t have to see nothing. You can hear it!”

“It’s like that bass is beating out what will happen in your head. You don’t need no words. Sometimes I can even hear a drum inside me. Beating along. Saying, ‘Watch out!’ The bass, the rhythm, helps you remember where you’re going. The rhythm, the bass, that’s the street. The floor. The part where your feet hit the street! You hear that. You keep walking.”

“That ever happen to you with a job you were trying to get, Jobo?” I asked.

“Well, you know the CITGO over on Addison and Ashland? I know those guys. Two brothers, they own that place. They own lotsa places. So I’m talking to the one guy, he’s talking about his brother and he keeps telling me how I gotta make sure to do what his brother tells me to do. He keeps saying that. He keeps telling me about his brother will be watching me real close. So the bass line I’m hearing—”

“Yeah?”

“The bass line I’m hearing is: these two brothers. They talk a good game. But they really don’t like each other very much. Now they never told me that. I just heard it in the way this one brother told the story.”

“So the bass line was…” I asked.

“The bass line was the REAL story. The truth. Didn’t matter what somebody was saying. I could hear the real story. I know it sounds like crazy talk. But when I heard the real story, I got…well…”

“Confident?” I asked.

“”I’m thinking you can’t get no more confident, Jobo!” drawled Tim, smiling for the first time. The whole table chuckled.

Jobo smiled, and then went on. “Yeah the bass line is what made it so I knew what to do.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, so just then his brother walks in and I say—for both of them: I say, so okay, every time, I finish one of the jobs I let both of you guys know?”

“So how did that help?”

“Well, then they both said, okay, we gonna pay you.”

“So you got them on the same page? Where they both wanted to pay you?”

“Yeah, the stuff the one brother was saying, it sounded alright. It was all the right words. ‘Tell this. Tell that.’ But neither of these guys trusted each other. I could hear the bass line running below all that. I could hear the real story. That’s like what you’re talking about, right?”

“”Say it one more time Jobo,” I asked.

“Following the bass line means you can follow the real story.”

With that—Kathy rang the dinner bell and they all went in to eat.

Excerpted from FINDING WORK WHEN THERE ARE NO JOBS. Think Different Press. 2013

Image: minkara.cavview.co.jp

Ronnie Gilbert’s Smiling Power

Jun 072015

A cleansing, windy warm summer rain, washed down Chicago on the morning after Ronnie Gilbert died, at 88, out in California. The smiling power in her voice still resonating. A voice from the past? A folk singer? Right?

Hardly. She was so much more.

There were three men in the Weavers, one of them was Pete Seeger. But they only needed one woman. That was Ronnie Gilbert.

Seeing her name on my screen I could hear that voice like it was wired into my very soul like some musical sign pointing straight towards justice. Straight toward hope. And I wanted Ronnie Gilbert to start singing to some of our contemporary bullies and scoundrels. People like our own Illinois Governor Hedgefund so frothing at the mouth eager to prey on the vulnerable. I wanted to tell her about the new plan that’s being floated to dismantle tenure and thereby curtail what can be taught. Bought and paid for by oil barons of evil, snickering in their self-righteousness with a wink, a nod and shrug of the shoulders as they say, “All we’re doing is balancing the budget” and then breaking out a giant guffaw as they slap their knees in greedy joy.

But then I remembered Ronnie Gilbert’s voice. And thought about how our evil doers of today, those that work to take away the right to vote, the right to organize, the right to live healthy, how none of them were really all that different from the McCarthy’s and such. The evil Ronnie Gilbert fought with the power and smile in her voice.

I remembered Ronnie Gilbert’s voice. How she used it for Good.

How she powered the struggle.

And how that voice of power seemed to always have a smile flowing strong as she sang us along.

Listen to her sing today. You’ll feel that smiling power too. The music goes on.

A Life of Caring

May 102015

A Life of Caring
Sometimes in the comforting grey late summer light that holds the Chicago Loop in a subdued humid hum of pure power; I can feel the presence of my grandfather, Frank J. Dowd. Gone since I was just a kid. A red faced, weary knowing smile, wisps of white hair, round and good to his grandson, suspender-popping Irishman.

Strolling down Randolph or LaSalle Street; his spirit sings in the summer grey shadows cast by the criss crossing of the massive steel and concrete pillars that hold firm and strong the el trains rumbling above as they endlessly circle downtown Chicago.

Feeling his presence; I wonder if heaven is anything like Chicago. And I imagine him leading quite the large and motley crew of a welcoming party for his youngest Mavis —who died several seasons ago, in the absolute frigid, bitter and barren cold of a January day—but before that: helped raise me and very much make me who I am.

My Grandfather steps back, with a wink and a smile, to let Mavis on through. She has just a few questions for both Jesus and The Buddha. She’d like to get this afterlife thing settled once and for all. That, and then get on to the next set of questions. She will have many. And she will include everyone in the conversation.

While she asks questions and keeps the party going; I look back. Searching for the scattered drops of water that splash from the river her life always full and flowing forward.

I’m seventeen again. On the coffee table in the living room of Mavis’s rented townhouse at north of Chicago, where I lived in the basement for awhile, there is a paperback she’d been reading laying open. Lurid, splashy dime novel colors on the front. Titled: “The Last Picture Show.” An author named Larry McMurtry. “Hmm,” I remember thinking. Larry McMurtry. I wonder who he is? I wonder if I’d like him?

A lifetime later I do. And what he wrote—opened up reading for me as an adult.

If my Mom taught me to play the “A, E, C, D, and F” chords on the guitar to get me started. Mavis would have taught me the seventh chords. The chords that sounded cool. Mavis taught me a song by Phil Ochs called “Changes”—
“Green leaves of summer, turn red in the fall, to brown and to yellow they fade. But then they have to die. They’re trapped between the circle time parade of Changes”

First cool folk song that I could ever play myself. More would come.

Thinking of how Mavis cared, the giant smiling voice of the great Chicago folk singer Bob Gibson and his big 12-string guitar rings out, I can hear him singing right now:

“Well, well, well, who’s that a coming?
Well, well, well, hold my hand!”

Steve Goodman listened to Bob Gibson and became Steve Goodman. Roger McGuinn listened and became The Byrds. Jeff Tweedy listened and is still listening today . . .so the music is alive right now. I started listening because Mavis did.

Stories heard in bits and pieces from other rooms, filtered through the lens of a kid who didn’t know that much yet: sure Mavis met Tommy Makem, she knew the Clancy Brothers, she loved to ride horses, there was some connection to actually riding in the Olympics.

Mavis lived first in Libertyville, which was then a distant outpost in the wilderness. With Uncle John—who was a real live Indian! And a great big and bounding German Sheppard named Little Bear.

Then there was a small house somewhere off the an expressway. Then Mavis—now with Cousin John and Mike—divorced from Uncle John—moved into a small apartment in a not so nice part of town. But in that apartment—which was up a long flight of stairs: there were hand painted designs on the bright and cheery kitchen walls and an honest to God very cool Mexican guy named Hector who always seemed to be there. Mavis had a blue Chevy Impala—a car much cooler than our practical and reliable VW bus. And when Mavis took care of us: she always went nuts cooking us all the bacon we could ever want for breakfast in the morning. Imagine endless strips of bacon!

Apartments in blue Mexican glass; guitars and bright Mexican throw rugs and wall coverings; Mavis worked in politics. For the Democratic Party. And Mavis was and always would be a teacher. She started a conversation is Spanish that never stopped —and I could always see the amazement at her pitch perfect accent and fluency on peoples faces.

I never understood the language—but what I always did understand was that whatever mistake I made in my life: chances are that Mavis had already made it.

And what that did for me was beyond any kind of measure, and sat squarely in the realm of poems, stories and song.

Marriage came to an end for me and Mavis understood. She had been there before.

I can remember standing in the street outside the red brick stately house with my dad and Uncle John as we came to help Mavis move out of the house where she spent the brief months of her second marriage. I can remember my Dad and Uncle John smiling the knowing smiles of men who knew things. Things of life, and marriage and men and women. And though I didn’t know way back then what all that meant—I knew that standing in that circle of men outside Mavis’s house—I would be following the meanings of my Dad and my Uncle’s smiles till the day when their meanings would come clear. And I did.

Then another red brick, just west of the big Northwestern Football Stadium where Mavis lived with her third husband Dick—who gave me, as a very young guy stepping from teaching into business the single best piece of advice for getting along in business that I have ever heard. Frustrated by circles of power that I didn’t understand in a big corporation; Dick said to me, “Roger, it’s not that you’re wrong. It’s that you aren’t the Vice President in charge!”

I can remember a winter night in the big house Mavis shared with Dick. John and Mike were gone somewhere and I was spending the night in the very warm and comfortable basement. A soft show blanketed the streets and a local park where there was a slight bump of a hill. So we went skiing. Remember: this is the suburbs of Chicago. Not a lot of hills.

My first time on skis. Mavis and Dick laughingly on either side of me, pulling me up Mount Evanston—a gradual bump maybe six to ten feet high, and then me whooping down the 3 second slope doing commentary on the danger of it all.

That scene in the snow flashes to a summer day when Mavis, John Mike and I were at one of the first glass recycling sites where it was actually possible to throw and let shatter against the side of the giant bin any and all glass jars and bottles.

So John, Mike and I started screaming things like: “And THIS is for all you DID to me!” Then whipping the bottle at the wall to watch it burst and shatter. “You even TOOK THE DOG WHEN YOU LEFT!” Lines and taunts and outbursts that would have been great lyrics to a bad country song.” While Mavis just laughed uproariously thinking all three of us to be very, very, funny.

I can remember walking through the old Wieboldts in Evanston, the soft hum of the old department store in sway, and I started improvising a commentary on the clothes that I would pick up and display for my audience of Mavis and Dick who again simply could not stop laughing.

Through Mavis—I learned I could be funny.

Growing up a funny, fashion commentator, throwing glass bottles at a recycling bin skier of tiny bumps in the road.

And then one day when I finally did find the love of my life: I told Mavis.

And she believed me.

I saw Mavis last in December of 2006. Another upstairs apartment. She had assembled those of us who came after her: Michael, Kirsten, Anne Louise, Sean, Nick, Colleen, Maria and I. Somewhere there are pictures. She made sure there
was a camera. The time that night was short—because she didn’t have much time left. Mom had been here to take care of her and had done everything humanely possible. But time was running out.

A few weeks later she called on a cold winter day to say goodbye. She said to me: “It’s been a long road for us, Rog. Over 50 years. A long, long, road.”

She told me about the day she was taking care of my brother and sisters when my parents were at the hospital and I was being operated on in a potentially life ending procedure. She remembered how my parents looked when they walked in the door that night at home. “I had never in my life,” she told me “seen your Mom or Dad look that bad. I thought for sure you were gone. You were the first. You were here before John and Mike were here. You were the first. And if you were gone, I don’t know what I would have done.”
And in her words, in her saying goodbye, in looking back now and I think to myself: how loved I was.

Mavis died on January 12, 2007. A bitter cold, sunshine bright winter day in Chicago. A Friday morning, I had walked up to Lincoln Avenue to get the papers. Coming back and thinking through going to visit her in the hospice.

My wife met me at the door of our house saying, “Michael called.” I said, “She’s gone.” And my wife nodded yes.

The last weeks, Mike told me, were very, very hard. Colleen was there at the end. Receiving the very private knowing of how loved she was by her grandmother.

Mavis was very clear about not wanting a funeral.

Mike, Colleen and Kirsten scatted her ashes up into the Pacific off the coast of San Diego—where they can float on down to Mexico and Costa Rica; soar on off to the far east to lands of Buddhist Temples and maybe even drift back here to Chicago.

A few weeks after she died, the cold still blasting its icy grip on to the city; my wife and I and I ventured out at night to a ballet. The wind was overwhelming. The cold all-encompassing. And I realized, walking down the street, that we were walking past the hospice where Mavis died.

Just then, at that moment, the wind got even colder. Cold beyond belief. And through my teary frozen eyes, I looked to my right and saw we were walking past a place called Newberry Library.

An historical library where they keep lots of old maps.

And with thought of those maps, I could see Mavis’s spirit soar up and out and over that hospice and into the Newberry Library. Just to look at maps. She would love it! Out front of that library a park once known as “Bughouse Square” where socialists once stood to make speeches she would stop for a moment.

Then in the golden, orange autumn leaves of October, the park benches full of people eating lunch and reading the great works of time—feeling the warm breezes of autumn, basking in the shimmering promises of the flowing October light, she’d always come back. Every year in October, she’d come back.

So, it’s in those warm autumn breezes of golden October; that I am expecting Mavis will stop for a moment. Back from a travel. Mavis will come back, sit down next to me on one of those benches. Tell me what she’s learned from talking to both Jesus and the Buddha. And once again in that golden autumn light: I will be loved.

I am bathed in the golden warm glowing light of autumn that shimmers off every inch of that park that sits in front of the Newberry Library. Even now. In the last days of summer.

Mavis is traveling. Off on a trip. But she’ll stop back when I need her. She will come back.

Daddy? Did You Fix The Hole In The Ocean Yet?

Apr 212015

Five years ago today. The BP oil spill. And if you had even the most remote connection to the rhythm and rock water soul of the earth, you wept. Because it was as if we, all of us, had taken our promise to take care of the earth during our time, sprinkled that promise with gasoline and then lit the match that sprang forth this oily gooey mess that would smother any kind of hope or joy to come

I remember one of the Obama kids being quoted, “Daddy, did you fix the hole in the ocean yet?”

Then I remembered Teresa,

And as the oil kept killing the birds and the oysters and the shrimp and the souls of the fisherman, as it kept spurting and roaring and the fires kept burning, I wondered if Teresa, a love from so long ago, had somehow gone back to Gulfport.

Perhaps she has set up shop to be a teacher. Spending her time with the children of fishermen who now spent their days glued to the TV cause there were no more fish. Maybe she went down to the gulf and somehow did something to get the oily sludge off the wings of the sea birds that no longer could fly.
Course that would likely be impossible. Even on the TV from far away, when you looked at the eyes of those birds, you knew, something larger than life itself had died.

Had she gone back to help? Perhaps there was a clue in where we started. Decades ago, she walks through the kitchen door of Paul and Betsy’s house in snow swept Champaign Illinois. Then later we all go ice skating. She starts to talk about James Joyce in that Gulfport drawl. Then the night lit up in Paul and Betsy’s living room. Lit in that way that only happens when the dancing is at home, and is music come alive in every color and tone imaginable. A fake argument about who would sleep on the floor and who would take the couch when the hour got late. Then the lights went out and I said to her let’s try. And when Paul and Betsy tip toed through their lving room in the sunny bright morning of the next prairie day, both she and I were snuggled up on the floor.

Back to now. Knowing only those so long ago memories, I wondered if 5 years ago, went home home to Gulfport to help with the hole in the ocean. And if she did, was there a trace of memory of that forgotten Judy Collins song we both liked. It was called “Hard Times For Lovers.”

If we had a song, that was it. Which tells you something. Cause it really wasn’t all that good a song. But it had it’s moments. Had its lines.

And it bought to mind another song. Ian Tyson was the song writer. And if you listen to this, if you listen between the lines, if you listen really hard, you will hear what its like to be young. You will hear hope.
You will hear her singing “he loved his damned old rodeo, as much as he loved me.”

And as that steel guitar soars and then comforts and holds firm, you will see what I see. You will see her go back to Gulfport and simply do the best she can.

Doing what she can to help those bewildered gulf coast birds.

Under Nelson Algren’s Giant Magnet

Apr 152015

Dry mouth. No water after midnight. That’s the rule. But the appointment is early, 7:00 a.m., sun just coming over the morning concrete ribbon of the Kennedy expressway streaming into downtown Chicago over the cement shoulder of what used to be 1528 Wabansia, where Nelson Algren used to love Simone DeBeauvoir.

A few hundred yards south of the long gone, paved over 1528 Wabansia, a car dealership with no people, so you pull over to wait for the MRI joint to open. And you wonder if there was an old dive bar here where Algren and deBeauvoir might have stumbled out into a cold wind beyond belief just as it started to snow as they began walking on back to 1528 Wabansia. A warmth beyond any breathing soul’s belief.

And then just a few steps north, it’s time. So you slide on away from the new car showroom on to North Avenue, turn right on Ashland and just a few steps north of 1528 Wabansia, where you pull into the storefront MRI joint and begin about an hour of having someone tell you to take deep breaths and lie still, Just lie still. Without breathing. While the giant, million dollar magnet works the magic of seeing inside you. Sights you would likely prefer not to see.

But as a pal said today, “there is a reason they call it practicing medicine.”

When the joint first opened, the technician guy, who could not have been nicer, said that the company that makes the big machine had to come and install all sorts of magnet stuff because they wanted to make sure that the rhythm and dull roar of all those cars didn’t screw up the magnetic resonance imaging, make sure they don’t f—up the magnets that saw inside your skin.

And you wonder, when he tells you that, if Algren and deBeauvoir, could somehow see inside each other’s skin like the giant magnet did.

Or if they’d just laugh. Think that was ridiculous. And just wander back home in the snow to 1528 Wabansia.

And toast the giant magnet. Across time and brand new days. Looking out at that cold snowy night outside. Pulled by a giant magnet.

But, looking at the unknown straight in the eyes.

https://youtu.be/W9LGfXeoYII

Where You There?

Apr 032015

And the blood burbled out

Dribbled down

Stained his shirt.

He dropped down hard head

Smacked the soot stained sidewalk

Shook loose slammed beneath the city street throng.

I did not see the moment

But I heard the sound of bone on concrete

Sprawling arms convulse then still.

Under brutal baked and cruel city sun

That said

There might not be tomorrow.

And the blood burbled out

While the circles of cell phones rose to attention

Then a slow motion time staccato crowd moan

And the yips and yaps of blind and impotent orders being given

“Be careful!”

“Don’t move him!”

“Give him room!”

“Just be careful!”

Then finally the siren.

Coming in an instant that felt like forever.

Then came the siren

Ripping through the heat

Life a razor honed knife through melted butter.

Here they come

The social safety net.

And with a lumbering certainty

Lights flashing parting seas

They disembark

Take positions

Checking vitals

Street science saviors seeing more

than the rest of us

Making the decision

He was alive enough to move.

Faded Hawaiian shirt, blood stained knees and a missing shoe

He looked like a worn out wandering beach boy

Gone too long from a sad distant ocean

Swallowed by the city

Dirty blond hair, and shocked grey eyes

Dreams of summer waves and a smiling surfer girl.

While those resolute plodding street science saviors

Secured their new charge

Lifted up the sleeping beach boy

That man and that woman who are the social safety net

Lifted him high

Above the glass cracked baked and tired Chicago sidewalk.

Slid him in their wailing flashing chariot

And I wondered if there’d be someone worrying

When the cracked head bloody beach boy

Did not make it back on time

Tonight.

https://youtu.be/PeJkbSi0vMA

My Mom’s Music

Mar 302015

It’s in history books now. And my Mom was there.

A young preacher from South Carolina named Jesse Jackson arriving in Chicago, to see blocks and blocks of brutally burned out buildings on the west and south sides of the city. You could still smell the smoke. It was the aftermath of the killings that ripped hope from the heart of the nation, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s kids lost their fathers.

Long before there was any kind of Rainbow Coalition, or Operation PUSH, there was “Operation Breadbasket.” Formed by Reverend Jackson to get food to starving people; not people starving in a far off place, but right here.

There weren’t a whole lot of volunteers – much less women – from the northern suburbs of Chicago who raised their hands to offer their help. And by help, I don’t mean donations; I mean being there. Filling those boxes. Loading those trucks. Handing out the canned goods. Stocking the shelves of the grocery stores where the Black owned businesses had previously found their products hidden in the back.

My Mom was one of those volunteers. The kind of volunteer that treated the work like a job, not a hobby.

Child of the last depression, as soon as she was old enough to talk, she asked her Mother “what are heaven and hell?”

Her Mother answered, “Heaven is where we go when we die.”
“But what about hell?” she asked her Mother.
“We don’t believe in hell.”

Mom was not too many generations removed from the red-faced Irish on her Dad’s side and the stand up straight and tall Germans on her Mother’s side. Those who made the long, gut-wrenching trip from the old country; those who enjoyed the drink that came most times at the end of a long working day.

Her father was a lawyer, in years of both feast and famine. I can remember sitting on his lap, white hair, red face grin and I was snapping his suspenders. His rollicking laughter. His dream of being the guy who repealed Prohibition. Lawyer for the Bowman Dairy Company.

The Cheryl Wheeler lyric floats in here:

“Child of changing times 
Growing up between the wars 
The Fords rolled off the lines 
And bars all closed their doors”

I can remember another kind of drink. From a silver thermos with a plastic red top for a cup. A golden dawn breaking over Lake Michigan. I’m sitting in the front passenger seat of our family’s VW bus. Mom’s driving. My brother and two sisters are in the back and we’ll be meeting my Dad down south in Virginia for a family vacation. Mom unscrews the top of the thermos, pours some of its contents into the cup and says, “Have some of this.” Coffee with sugar and cream stirred in, that to this day – some 40 years later – still tastes like wonder, like possibility, like…now that you are just about grown up and healthy, you can do anything you want to do.

It wasn’t always like that cup of coffee. My parents tried for five years to have children of their own; they had adoption papers signed at one point.
Then I came along, but from my first breath I was always tired. Low blood cell count. Couldn’t do a sit-up in gym class to save my life.

My Mom was there for that, too.

For the next twelve years she took me to every kind of doctor imaginable, trying to somehow figure out what the heck was wrong with her first kid – and having three more kids in the meantime. All that, and working at jobs that women of that time simply didn’t have. Not many women, especially women with four children, started their own businesses then.

But my Mom did.

My Mom picked up a guitar, partnered up with a woman originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and started performing an historical retrospective of Civil War songs at local gatherings. After her “Women of the Civil War” show came the aptly named “Chicago, Your Bustle Is Showing,” songs from the city’s really early days.

She became the musical director for the local Reform Jewish Temple. The fact that we were not Jewish might have given many women pause.

Not my Mom.

What religion we actually were, was always a pretty interesting question. Because the answer was always “all of them.”

My Mom, raised a Catholic, enrolled us in pretty much every mainstream denomination as well as Christian Science. Then when all of us grew up and left home, she got her Doctorate in Religion from Drew University.

Oh…and the career as a therapist? That came before the doctorate. Her Masters degree in Social Work. The doctorate, she said, “was for fun.”

As was her book Jewish Renewal in America Then the second book, An Awakening Heart. An historical novel on Moravian women.

Today, on her birthday, she’s working on a third book.

Like her beloved JS Bach, she was born in March. Most mothers don’t offer advice to their sons like “never listen to anything written after 1800 in the mornings.”

But my Mom did.

So again, I’m twelve years old. Breakfast time. And a Brandenburg Concerto fills the house. There is a time shift and that Brandenburg segues into another piece of my musical memory.

It’s New Year’s Eve. Everyone’s asleep except my Mom and me. Staying up to listen to the Midnight Special on radio station WFMT. Pete Seeger sings:
My land is a good land
It’s a good land so they say.

On her Birthday today, I hear all that musical memory and recall that I know lots of songs like the Bach, the Pete Seeger or even just the other day when she told me how much she was liking Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain.”

And did I mention how she now likes Stevie Ray Vaughn?

Mom’s music. Still in tune.

Last Day In Paris

Mar 212015

A tired grey morning rain, boarding the elevated train in Chicago, reaching up to grab the strap, standing shoulder to shoulder. She shoots a fast glance as the train lurches forward and our shoulders touch. Decides I’m safe. Leans down to keep scrolling her phone, shakes the red hair from her face. The train slows, a seat opens, I invite her to sit down with my eyes and a nod. She does. And from the packed aisle of the train, no one moves to sit next to her. She looks up at me and with a tiny smile of amusement and with a shake of the head asks the world, “Was it something I said?”

So I sit down next to her. Shoulder to shoulder. Lightly grazing thighs with the rumble and clank of the train on down to the center of the city. She looks up from the phone. I am remembering your smile. Perhaps, she sees me and wonders about a grandfather she never knew as we touch shoulders. What’s the old man smiling about?

Then the train doors swish open and I hear the rain, I’m back in Paris with the water washing down the gutters of the ancient stone streets that flow, like time, down the hill from the gleaming white Basilica Sacre Coeur. I smell coffee that lights up the morning and like Holly Near once sang, “frees my soul and I ain’t ready to grow that old.”

Once again, I am six hours or so from sitting down next to you on the steps of the Basilica, gazing out together over Paris in the mid day sunlight and saying the absolute most profound thing I could come up with at the time, which was, “Didn’t I see you in the Monet museum this morning?”

At which point, you looked over with only enough interest to smirk, “That was deep.”

A few seconds passed, you got up, paused to look at the rippling city in the sunlight below, stretched, and I almost believed, like McMurtry once said, that it really was possible to fall in love with someone while they were stretching.

Being pretty good with the more primal of life’s needs, I remember saying something about being hungry. Probably something dumb like, “Know where you can get any good French food around here?” Then, and this is a mystery I still never have and never will, till my very last breath, figure out, somehow we were in a café, there was wine that amazed, and cheese and fruit and sausage and the afternoon shadows were falling in a way that marked our Paris as the one of centuries past.

We never stopped talking.

My new book had just come out. I remember reading you stories out loud. I remember telling you instantly the truth in the story about how the Blonde had come back with coffee and croissants one spring morning and announced, “Roger? I’m a Princess. I just thought you should know.”

The Princess was soon gone. Vanished except for the way she hovered over so many stories. And now you’re gone too.

Which is why it’s so strange that you keep coming back and filling in what’s between the lines of all these new stories.

But back then? I thought that loving someone enough meant that eventually they’d change.

And of course that doesn’t happen.

So the city lights dimmed. And you stayed, until it was time, for both of us to go.

And as much as I sang and wrote and wrote about all those mysteries you never believed in, I never imagined you’d come back. I never imagined a sequel.

Till right this very second.

The Chicago train swishes into the Grand Station, the red haired woman gets up and wonder of wonders, leaves a smile for her imagined Grandfather, me. She smiles at me and there you are. That smile like a sequel. That smile brings you back.

From the smoky mists that rise from the fires you lit, in a story called “Pale Grey For Guilt” John McDonald’s timeless hero Travis McGee writes a letter to his future,

“ . . . and now and again, when she is asleep and you are awake, and your arms are around her and you are sleeping like spoons, with her head tucked under your ugly chin, pretend it is ‘me’, who loved you.”

Even right here in this story today, the young girl leaves the train. And you come back as she tosses me a smile.

And that will have to do.

Like an Ending

Feb 252015

“How did it end? Make your own damn ending. I don’t remember. And if this picture fades to black, does the ending even matter?”

Inside a no name neighborhood tavern of smoke and memories. An empty Chicago Street in a February wind. The old man whispers to last years calendar hung crooked behind the bar. The bartender hovers in the background quiet because it’s not the first time he’s heard this story. The old man’s whispers are like muted thunder that had forgotten how to roar.

The old man whispers to the calendar, “Course it was winter back then. Winter, all those years ago when we woke up in that Montana cabin surrounded by the snow.”

Winter when we walked out into the sunlight for the trip back down the mountain to Stapleton Airport. I never really thought I’d see her again. We didn’t talk much. No music played.

The old man takes a breath and dreams up a wavering shadow of a face. A much younger man. When he first told the story. Back when folks would read what he wrote. Sometimes even want to talk to him about the story. That was the best. When someone else, maybe even a stranger, would want to talk to him about the story. But the best of all? When that stranger’s load got even just a little bit lighter because they recognized something in the music of the story that made them nod their head and say “Me too.”

He called the first part of the story. “Like Love.” That was the one about how they met in Chicago. Part Two was “Like Music.” A trip through a musical snowstorm. The storm that lit the way to that cabin in Montana.

Course every now and then he’d get a question that he never really figured out how to answer. Somebody would say something like, “hey wait a minute. Are these stories true? I find it hard to believe those stories really happened. I mean, c’mon. Look at you. Look at her. You see what I’m saying? You just made all this up, right?”

“Hah!” the old man pounded his fist on the bar. “Are these stories true!” he shouted at the old calendar. The bartender glanced over. Went back to polishing the glass. You want to find the truth in a story? Well, how about this. How about finding out the ending of the story first. Let’s see how it ends. Because if you know how a story ends, maybe the part about the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

So what’s the ending of this story? Of course it started with a song, just like everything else between us did.

Why right after we got to Denver, checked in the car, walking to our flights, and it was Muzak we heard. That’s right. Muzak. More like a machine than a song. Piped in drivel that they used to play in airports. But she picked it up. She could hear things like nobody else could. The mere hint of a song was all she needed. So just as this song started, we stepped on an escalator. She was a step above me. The song started, she turned around and she lip-synched it right in my face. Those sparkling eyes telling me it was just the two of us who got the joke. That blonde hair sailing, flying, she sang just for me to hear. She sang the old Dusty Springfield song,

You stopped and smiled at me
Asked if I care to dance.
I stepped into your open arms
And I didn’t stand a chance

Right that second, hearing that song, that’s when I said it. As the escalator steps folded up, I said, “Come to Chicago. Make a new home with me. Let’s try.”

“But it’s only been four days!” She stopped at the top of the escalator. Crowds swirling all around us. “And I’m under contract. I have a job! It’s what I’ve been talking about! The new TV series. Where I can almost be myself!”

“And you can’t . . ..”

“You wouldn’t want me to . . ..”

“Well they have airplanes between Chicago and LA . . .”

“So we’d see each other on weekends?”

“Yeah,” I said. And then in the airport throng walking towards our gates, “But we’d be married.”

Which stopped her cold. Blue eyes wide as the Rocky Mountain skies.

I saw her turn to look out the window at the giant planes on the tarmac framed by the mountains, and I heard Bob Segar sing,

She looked out the window a long, long moment
Then she looked into my eyes
She didn’t have to say a thing
I knew what she was thinking

“What’s the name of the town we’d live in? The one where you grew up?”

“Evanston.”

“Is there a McDonalds or a Carl’s Junior in Evanston?”

“There’s a Burger King”

And as John Hiatt’s song rushed through my head . . . . .

I thought I had a line on something
Maybe no one else could say
And they couldn’t find it in their hearts
To just get out of my way
Then out of nowhere, and from nothing
You came into my life
I’d seen an angel or two before
But I’d never asked one to be my wife

“You know I’ve never lived anywhere but LA?” she said.

“Mmm”

“And you know I’m nutso crazy. Kind of competitive.”

“Do I ever.”

“OK then yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“She said yes!” I shouted out to a group of 6 sailors.” One gave me a thumbs up. Another said “Awesome” and the other four just stared.

The February winds outside the tavern shook the building. The old man drew a breath.

And that calendar behind the bar answered, “Nice. But too cute. I’m not buying. If this had a happy ending, then why are you here? Where is she? At home in the kitchen making brownies?”

“Too sweet?” said the old man, now answering himself, “OK. How about this. How about you pick the ending? Harder than it looks, ain’t it? Want some help?” he asked the calendar. And when there was only silence, he went on. “Here, let me help you with a song. Another John Hiatt lyric. Maybe this will prompt your ending.”

Well now the babies are all sleeping
And the twilight’s givin’ in
She looks like you, he looks like her
And we all look like him
Well maybe it’s just the little thing
The way I feel tonight
A little joy
A little peace
And a whole lot of . . .

That give you an ending? Nice song like that. Or does that make the ending even more cloudy?

Then in amidst the dialogue with himself, The old man stands up, nods to the bartender, pulls the collar up on his coat and heads up and out into the wind.

Is that the ending?

Alone now on the empty street. Calendar gone. He remembers that today was the day was the day he was finally going to throw away that thick, yellowed folder full of medical tests, plastered with his name. The one he had stashed behind the books on the bottom row of the shelf. All those tests. All that money. All that time.

An ending stuffed in that folder. The proof that there would be no babies. Not now. Not ever. Nobody would be looking like anybody. Not if he was to be the Dad

Not if he was to be the Dad.

Oh he had an ending alright. Just like Bob Dylan’s song. She didn’t even like Bob Dylan. But he still heard . . .

He woke up.
The room was bare.
He didn’t see her anywhere.
The neon sign above the bar on the deserted street beat out a rhythm so faint, he had to strain to hear it. A rhythm like an ending.

Stumbling through the darkness. Now the only light is a memory of her sparkling eyes that time he said, “Let’s try.”

And she answered him, “Yes.”

Once he said, “Let’s try.”

And she answered him “Yes.”

Like Music

Feb 082015

It was back when we all had plenty of time.
A late night call. I was up. Scribbling something unmemorable in a spiral notebook under the circular pool of light cast by a metal gooseneck lamp.

The caller ID said Los Angeles. I remembered the number. Even after two years of never seeing it at all. So I picked up the phone. And then as if the conversation had never stopped, you said, “So come to Denver tomorrow.”

“Peachface?”

Your laugh. Like a bubbling fountain lit with the colors of a soul born wise. “So I’m still just fruit to you, huh?”

“Fruit, famous bimbo, circus clown . . . “ I heard background noise, a piano, cranked up a notch. Somebody was singing something. There was a crowd. “Where are you, Melon?”

“I’m at Warren Zevon’s house.”

“What’s he like?”
“Intense.”

“I’ll bet. So, I gotta tell you. This is a surprise. How’s work going?”

“I got another TV series.”

“That’s wonderful! Congratulations!” She filled me in on the production deal. The premise. The characters. “That is really great.”

And then she said it again. “Come to Denver.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Listen Lemon-Lime, I can’t just go flying off to Denver! I gotta work. Tomorrow there’s a meeting on the IPO and I . .”

“Oh yeah. I forgot. You’re like Mr. Software Executive, can I get you some coffee sir, oh of course I’ll sit down and sir, why are you touching me there . . . . .”

“Yeah that’s a normal day.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s okay. We’re going public soon and I’m cashing out. So there will be a little bit of money if a rainy day ever comes. A rainy month, not so much. But a few good days.”

“Okay, then you really gotta come to Denver.”

“ Kiwi, it’s been two years since that one weekend in Chicago. And you really want me to come to Denver. Why Denver?’

“Cause there’s this cabin. Way north. But we start driving at Denver. Cabin belongs to a friend of a friend. I’m gonna start work on the new series soon. So I thought. . . .okay, I know I didn’t return a call or two, but then I remembered how weirdly normal you are. . . .and if we went out cross country skiing and met a bear? I’d need somebody there who could out-talk the bear.”

Denver was a regular stop in my travels for work. I knew the flights. While we talked, I reached for a book people used to have that listed airline flights.

“So you really want me to come to Denver? You’d risk a whole, TV and movie star seen with a nobody thing?”

“Roger, are you gonna go all ‘star is born’ on my ass? Walk into Lake Michigan and take the big drink” Force me into playing Barbara Streisand? You know I don’t want to be Barbara Streisand.”

“I know. You want to be Lucy. I remember. So you’re sure you want me to come?”

“Why are you asking me that question? You’re still a guy, right? That same batshit crazy cocktail of macho and sensitive I remember? That time in the Four Seasons in Chicago? You remember I was the loud one? And how much more fun showers were when you had company? You are still a guy, right?”

I answered, “6:00 arrival. Denver International. United Flight 545. Tomorrow night.”

And I hung up the phone.

This was back when we all had plenty of time. Everything seemed so easy. And no one knew it wouldn’t always be that way.

Barreling down the runway the next afternoon, strapped in wheels up. A straight shot through the sky to Denver amazed at how easy it was to just go. The one thing I always did was make sure to have people who could be in charge around me at work. So now they were. Back then there was no Black Berry, on or off the grid, 24×7.

So the world faded as the plane climbed, and the songs in my head started up.

The Isely Brothers. “If you leave me a hundred times. A hundred times I’ll take you back.”

Then, landing in the snowstorm, so the music stopped for a moment. She was in the corner of the gate by herself. Not looking like a movie star; just looking bright-eyed happy. One open palm wave. Then a slow motion walk, holding back a magnetic pull. She sticks out her hand as if to shake and then busts loose; jumping up to wrap her legs around my waist and the only word I remember after that was “Hi.”

The car was in her name. I remember the look on the rental car guys face when he handed me the keys. A look that said, “Damn I wish I was you.”

Then out to the starry Rocky Mountain night. “As soon as you got here it stopped snowing,” she said. She put the mix tape she had made into the slot as we began the winding road up to the pine trees, and Bob Dylan sang as we talked. We missed not a beat of the silent two years. Everything was easy when we talked. Dylan sang

“If you go where the snowflakes storm, when the rivers freeze and summer ends”

And the pines sang a private melody all our own.

Her Dad had been a DJ, and she had been making mix tapes since she was five years old. Driving up further into the mountains, it was as if her music let us own the road. Lowell George sang

“All, all that you dream, comes through shining, silver lining”

As we glided up into that starlit night, the song flowed into Frank Sinatra singing

“You are the promised kiss of springtime, that makes the lonely winter seem long.”

Then Bonnie Raitt…

“You made me leave my happy home, you took my love and now you’re gone”

And just for one instant, looking at a giant boulder that had tumbled down the side of the mountain and feeling the rush of the Big Thompson stream cascading in the darkness to the side of the highway, just for one second, I could see a time when it wouldn’t always be this easy. But that faded fast, as Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds bopped along, asking
“Heart, why are you pounding like a hammer?  Heart, why are you beating like a drum?

We talked some more about the premise of her show. How much she was going to able to be herself. A lot more than last time. But not as much as the next time. Back when we all had plenty of time, the conversation always stopped at any talk of future.

On into the mountains and the night. The talk and the music so easy, the rhythm we had together was so warm, that she fell asleep, leaving me with directions to the cabin. We pulled in at the dawn, having been up all night. A private little jewel of luxury nestled in a circle of pine trees. Not a neighbor in site. Five miles from the nearest town. A view past the circle of pines out across the tops of the mountains, the golden light of coming day rising with the sun.

“Wake up little TV girl,” I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “We’re here.”

As her eyes opened to the first light of the sun, the knowing wisdom in the old Kris Kristofferson song ended her mix,

“I have seen the morning
Burning golden on the mountains in the skies.
Aching’ with the feelin’
Of the freedom of an eagle when she flies. . .

I don’t know the answer to the easy way
She opened every door in my mind.
But dreamin’ was as easy as believin’
It was never gonna end.
And lovin her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again.”

Back when we all had plenty of time.

Back when we had time.

*********
Photo Credit: Paws Up Montana

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