So every kid in America (at least when I was a kid) wanted to be either an Astronaut or a rock star. There were garage bands everywhere, kids taking guitar lessons, beating on trash cans. I had years of piano lessons and my fingers could just never get out of their "classical" mode; I was very much a mimic, and not at all a creative force on the piano. I finally stopped playing all together at around 20. When my husband and I got our own house I moved my childhood piano into it though, in the hopes that one day I'd sit down at it again. It's still sitting there, but at least these days I'm trying to pick out other people's songs on it.
I've always kind of toyed with singing. I never had any formal training as a kid, and my brother and sister were merciless in their hatred of my voice. "Who's that singing on the radio?" "Journey," I'd say. "Then let them SING IT!" That was the mildest of retorts, but it really didn't take long for me to utterly believe that I had the worst singing voice on the planet and I should just keep my trap shut. Still, I had a love for all things harmony and whenever I'd hear new stuff back then (Madonna or Taylor Dayne, for instance) I'd sing the background harmonies loudly when I was alone. Sometimes I'd forget where I was and at least once someone listening said to me "how'd you learn that harmony? Can you teach it to me?" Hmmmmm. Interesting.
Flash forward about 20 years. My darling husband played in bands (as a lead vocalist, no less) through most of his teens and twenties. About 10 years into our relationship we both realized we had let our creative sides be totally repressed by our work and business sides. One trip to Burlington, IA where Marion spent his teen years changed things for me. His friends have four children, and for family night they would gather in the basement and perform to karaoke tracks. I was enjoying hanging out in the back of the room listening, when one of them says "Hey, you should sing something." Well of course I refused: I have the world's worst voice according to my siblings. (Wait, did I just quote my then 11-year-old sister? Sheesh!) I didn't want to use the mic, so I sat in the back and belted out something (no idea what) and for a second my husband and friends were stunned. One, that I actually did it, and two, that it didn't break mirrors like I told them it would. Truth be told, noone was more surprised than I was.
Not long after that trip, I started doing theater again for the first time in 18 years, and he started singing in a band again, for the first time in at least 20 years. Just a couple of years later we left the landlocked city we were in and headed to the coast where each of us has learned to balance our lives a lot more. We started making friends with other creative people, and we met this absolutely amazing female lead guitar player. Another year later, and I'm performing in an acoustic duo. Singing, and coordinating the harmonies for us. Holy shit. Another friend, the most amazing keyboard player I've ever met in person, likes what we do so much that he wants to join us and make it a trio. Are you f'ing kidding me? Are you sure you were listening to the right people?
We have a regular gig on Wednesdays through the summer. We're picking up other stuff as we go. The keyboard player may have to jet for a job as a car salesman, but my duo partner and I think we can pull it off by ourselves. And even as I type these words, I still can't believe it's me. At the age of 40, "fronting" my first band. Rock-N-Roll Fantasy: Phase 1? Complete.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Reply-Wind...(A)
I like that previous piece very much. Often with the kids when I find the pressure mounting I think of the future as the past, i.e., the memories I'm making right now. And surely it is enough to stop me from my petty concerns and frustrations and remember to be more loving and let the little things slide.
Your evocation of childhood summers in Maine is beautiful, I wish i had something equally evocative to share but I think as a kid I lived so much inside my own head in fantasies and books. I didn't have a lot of friends and the ones I did have were also kind of nerdy bookish types and we reveled in writing and passing notes making up jokes and stories. There is a certain sort of nostalgia for summer days, but mostly having to do with hanging out with my Dad doing something car related. It's those bonds with the now dead you're talking about too, the physicality of them finite, the memory of them ephemeral. But, if passed on, the bond is unbroken and it is almost as good as the concrete reality. But there are infinite stretches within that "almost" to be sure. Reality wants to teach you that missing someone you love that is dead is a self-indulgent nostalgia, what else can it be? I'm still trying to figure that out.
It's funny when I have memories the kind that pause you in your tracks, the kind that the wind brings to you through an open window on a summer's day, they're often of the trip I took in Europe by myself. Maybe it was reading all those Sherlock Holmes books that made the U.K. feel more like my childhood memories! (Problem is, Europe and its cultures really have nothing to do with me or my background. Paging adult identity crisis...) Anyway, I suppose we're not responsible for what speaks to us, although it's our choice whether to respond.
I don't find myself yearning for the past at all. But what I know I need to stop doing is this amorphous waiting although it's not done consciously. Living in the present sounds so simple, and I guess it is. But it feels like a struggle most times.
Alessandra-- I just found this bit of writing. I guess the time for writing comments is passed and it will only let me tag on. I think it makes sense that your Europe trip is what you pause for. I think that was your childhood. The time you let yourself be. The time when life that was swirling around you was just a backdrop to whatever you were doing in that moment. If you were a bit bound in books as a child, this was your "doing" childhood--your physical one. I'd love to read some accounts of that time. As I suggested before, you could copy old journal in or just write a recollection.
Your evocation of childhood summers in Maine is beautiful, I wish i had something equally evocative to share but I think as a kid I lived so much inside my own head in fantasies and books. I didn't have a lot of friends and the ones I did have were also kind of nerdy bookish types and we reveled in writing and passing notes making up jokes and stories. There is a certain sort of nostalgia for summer days, but mostly having to do with hanging out with my Dad doing something car related. It's those bonds with the now dead you're talking about too, the physicality of them finite, the memory of them ephemeral. But, if passed on, the bond is unbroken and it is almost as good as the concrete reality. But there are infinite stretches within that "almost" to be sure. Reality wants to teach you that missing someone you love that is dead is a self-indulgent nostalgia, what else can it be? I'm still trying to figure that out.
It's funny when I have memories the kind that pause you in your tracks, the kind that the wind brings to you through an open window on a summer's day, they're often of the trip I took in Europe by myself. Maybe it was reading all those Sherlock Holmes books that made the U.K. feel more like my childhood memories! (Problem is, Europe and its cultures really have nothing to do with me or my background. Paging adult identity crisis...) Anyway, I suppose we're not responsible for what speaks to us, although it's our choice whether to respond.
I don't find myself yearning for the past at all. But what I know I need to stop doing is this amorphous waiting although it's not done consciously. Living in the present sounds so simple, and I guess it is. But it feels like a struggle most times.
Alessandra-- I just found this bit of writing. I guess the time for writing comments is passed and it will only let me tag on. I think it makes sense that your Europe trip is what you pause for. I think that was your childhood. The time you let yourself be. The time when life that was swirling around you was just a backdrop to whatever you were doing in that moment. If you were a bit bound in books as a child, this was your "doing" childhood--your physical one. I'd love to read some accounts of that time. As I suggested before, you could copy old journal in or just write a recollection.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
What the wind blew in (L)
I'm sitting on my bed in an empty house. The wind has suddenly quieted, building up again for another roll across the tall grass out my window, laying it down in ripples like moving water. The sky is blue, the sun bright, the birds and insects of summer have crawled out to sound their approval. I am following through on my intent to write without editing without regard, to keep our blog alive, and to keep part of me alive, too.
Days like this bring back childhood memories of Maine. They call up ghosts of my grandmother, my aunt, and now my mother. Drawing them back to the sun, back to the wild blueberry fields, freshly mowed lawns by grills, the sloping grass of Walker Park, the dirt road that dusted my grandmother's green grass as we ran paths through it. When C and I first moved back to Maine, I was nearly suffocated by the ache of my yearning for those days. I'd drive to my mother's and aunt's for fresh fuel to keep the fires of my burning nostalgia for those days, for my grandmother. Somehow it seemed if the bittersweet was acute enough, I could somehow conjure up a portal in time to step back to those days of my long brown legs running free beneath a bathing suit, eyes squinting up into a camera.
When I had my children, I'd whisper the stories in their ears, hoping they could continue to chant my spell for resurrection after me. I'm sure I lost some of the moments of their sunny young days as they seemed to pale in comparison to the memories of mine. After all, there is no go greater power of summer memories than summers not spent at home. You can't recreate the magic of parents not being at the table they write bills at all year, next to the phone that can break the spell of a perfect summer moment to jar you back to reality.
There was no sound that could compete with the laughter of my mother and grandmother mingling together over a deck of cards. Though I think some of the power of our summertime happiness was created by the dark lonely shade of the rest of our lives.
In Maine, we had cousins and family and, somehow, money for ice cream. My mother never resisted buying my father as much beer as he could drink. My mother didn't yell, my father didn't snap, I wasn't hit by flying objects meant for one of them. They went fishing together instead. There was peace.
Now, I don't hunger for those days as much. I watch the wind rolling the grass as it used to in the fields out back of my grandmother's house. I feel a twinge, the wisps of an old spell settle in me to write. But nothing like the pining I had before my mother died. Maybe it's because that old pining brought me to my mother for more memories, for salve on my wounded yearning heart. Now it can only bring me to graves. The kids have tired of the drives past all my heart landmarks. They will either remember my songs, or they won't. I feel a lot less yearning these days. I don't know if I'm jaded or wise. But I'm leaving this writing now, posting it without re-reading, so I can go join my kids at our cottage on a sunny day. I feel a renewed charge to give them something more than whispers of memories, to try and give them some of their own days of shining peace.
Days like this bring back childhood memories of Maine. They call up ghosts of my grandmother, my aunt, and now my mother. Drawing them back to the sun, back to the wild blueberry fields, freshly mowed lawns by grills, the sloping grass of Walker Park, the dirt road that dusted my grandmother's green grass as we ran paths through it. When C and I first moved back to Maine, I was nearly suffocated by the ache of my yearning for those days. I'd drive to my mother's and aunt's for fresh fuel to keep the fires of my burning nostalgia for those days, for my grandmother. Somehow it seemed if the bittersweet was acute enough, I could somehow conjure up a portal in time to step back to those days of my long brown legs running free beneath a bathing suit, eyes squinting up into a camera.
When I had my children, I'd whisper the stories in their ears, hoping they could continue to chant my spell for resurrection after me. I'm sure I lost some of the moments of their sunny young days as they seemed to pale in comparison to the memories of mine. After all, there is no go greater power of summer memories than summers not spent at home. You can't recreate the magic of parents not being at the table they write bills at all year, next to the phone that can break the spell of a perfect summer moment to jar you back to reality.
There was no sound that could compete with the laughter of my mother and grandmother mingling together over a deck of cards. Though I think some of the power of our summertime happiness was created by the dark lonely shade of the rest of our lives.
In Maine, we had cousins and family and, somehow, money for ice cream. My mother never resisted buying my father as much beer as he could drink. My mother didn't yell, my father didn't snap, I wasn't hit by flying objects meant for one of them. They went fishing together instead. There was peace.
Now, I don't hunger for those days as much. I watch the wind rolling the grass as it used to in the fields out back of my grandmother's house. I feel a twinge, the wisps of an old spell settle in me to write. But nothing like the pining I had before my mother died. Maybe it's because that old pining brought me to my mother for more memories, for salve on my wounded yearning heart. Now it can only bring me to graves. The kids have tired of the drives past all my heart landmarks. They will either remember my songs, or they won't. I feel a lot less yearning these days. I don't know if I'm jaded or wise. But I'm leaving this writing now, posting it without re-reading, so I can go join my kids at our cottage on a sunny day. I feel a renewed charge to give them something more than whispers of memories, to try and give them some of their own days of shining peace.
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