It sounds strange to say I’ve gotten too fragile for music, but that really might be it.
It’s been several years now like that, the surface tension holding, iridescent and moving along, sometimes floating effortlessly, sometimes bouncing in wonky directions, strong and pliable, but avoiding the pointy things that threaten to blow the bubble to smithereens, or at best deflate and leave me flattened.
My history with music is deep and long privately, not so much so publicly. I was 8 years old when I learned of my grandfather’s death. He’d been my only champion, the reliable adult in a family better suited for raising the Artful Dodger than a willful, questioning kid too in need of approval and fearful of repercussions to do the pickpocketing necessary to buy her way out of the mess. I sat in my room on the day of his funeral, the drama in the household bowing the closed door like a hallway tornado, and I wrote a song.
My guitar playing stayed at a 3rd grader’s level, 4 or 5 chords poorly played with ham hands, but I kept thinking in lyrics that needed those chords to find suitable homes, so I kept writing and playing. Singing had always been my salvation, but I was horrified at the thought of singing in public. Growing up surrounded by mean-girl schoolmates and turbulent relatives, you’d have to be an idiot to stick your head out of that foxhole.
In college a friend pulled me out and got me singing publicly – a relationship that would offer me promise, nurture me for decades, and then abandon me when the lyrics that we both valued couldn’t be translated to real talk when the going got tough. Maybe she was too selfish to bother, or maybe I just wasn’t worth the freight. Probably a little of both. A musician had moved in – that’s what they do – and suddenly the guitar player changed from a fan, a realizer of my melodies and tender to my vocals, to a dependent no longer interested in joint projects, but more in what was left over from the dinner he’d missed, and what he could claim as his own in the world I was no longer invited to be a part of. “When you start writing again, maybe we can do something.” When you can give us more, maybe you’ll be worth it again. A theme with both of them. Can’t be a coincidence, and only one common denominator.
I’d gotten used to out-loud music as a daily part of life, and for a few years I tried in fits and starts to stay in it, but the company was gone, and I’d gotten used to checking in for harmony, for inspiration, for encouragement and approval. I just stopped.
I got myself busy with all sorts of other things, computers and business and the organizing of things that do good. I barely even listen to music now. I write a little bit, but without the melodies, and so written pieces sound more like confessionals than the observations and experiences that I could put into song – something that relates to everyone, and not just me. That’s the part I loved the most.
I pick up a guitar a couple of times a year, playing someone else’s song and putting it down after a half an hour when my pulpy fingers ask me what the hell I think I’m doing.
But I’ve never stopped thinking in lyrics, mine and other people’s, and when I land on something pointy, because you can never avoid the crags and cliffs no matter how hard you try, it’s always a song that rises up and pierces through the skin.
It was like that yesterday, when a friend called to tell me she’s done fighting, and won’t be pursuing her awful cancer treatments any more. She was calling to say goodbye, though she lives across the street. “One more cup of tea,” I asked? “I love you, I support you, I understand. But we have a little time left. How about some tea?” There was no answer.
Christ Stapelton’s Fire Away was in my head when I woke up this morning. It’ll be here all day I suspect- nothing to do with the mega-drama statement video that does nothing but distract, but more to do with the withstanding it tells. It is worth it to be there for people, to have sung the songs, even to have lost what you love. It is very, very pointy to do so. But that doesn’t mean you stop.
Honey load up your questions
And pick up your sticks and your stones
And pretend I’m a shelter for heartaches
That don’t have a home
Choose the words that cut like a razor
And all that I’ll say
Is fire away
Take your best shot
Show me what you got
Honey, I’m not afraid
Rear back and take aim
And fire away
Well, I wish I could say
That I’ve never been here before
But you know and I know
That I’ll always come back for more
Your love might be my damnation
But I’ll cry to my grave
Fire away
Take your best shot
Show me what you got
Honey, I’m not afraid
Rear back and take aim
And fire away
Without the song I would have kept going today. I’d be cooking, maybe, to load up that fridge across the street. I’d be sad but I’d be working, probably, distracted by the annoyances and accomplishments of some greater good project. Answering email. Doing. But the song is here, sliced through and exposing the core.
A friend once told me that when the pain of her lost son gets too bad, she goes to the woods and stacks pine cones, and then screams as she throws them.
“Why do you stack the pine cones?” I asked.
“Without them, I’m afraid I won’t stop. When I throw the last one I know it’s time to go back home and get back to living. ”
The song will end. Even on loop, I’ll eventually get tired of it or stop hearing it. The places I visit will be visited enough. The bubble will reinflate, but it’s always in danger of the searing, exquisite blade that is both the wounder and the healer, the only cure for the ache it gives rise to.
My own song is also visiting today, a singer-songwriter special played on an old Sears Silvertone from the 60s, untunable even with fancy replacement pegs I’d added. There’s dust on the shoulder of it, like there is on all of the guitars that hang behind me in my office, old friends waiting for a call.
I guess it’s time to see what these fingers can take today.