R.I.P., John Prine

John Prine's songs told the story of my life (really all of our lives, I bet) armed with a crystal ball and a magical rearview mirror with perfect vision. He was the troubadour through every romance I've had--the soundtrack to so many moments-- the sad and the jubilant, the sorry and the unforgiven, the transcendent and the earthly.

"How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, and come home in the evening and have nothing to say?" The Someone and I shook our heads over that line a million times, stunned by it, thanking our lucky stars we weren't like that. Until we were. The last few years of the marriage there could not have been a more perfect  description of our lives.

I saw John Prine for the first time in Knoxville in 1974. Life was messy that year. Back from a year backpacking through Europe, too broke to go back to college, feeling unwelcome in my mom's house since she'd remarried, I went down to Knoxville to stay with a friend and got a job as an art model at the university there. For the Freshman drawing classes, it was required that I wear a leotard and chalk a mark to show where my navel was. For the older students, I modeled nude, as is the normal procedure for figure drawing classes. I sold my blood plasma for extra cash in Knoxville. It was a great scheme. Until it wasn't. With two sources of income, I could afford to buy a ticket to John Prine. I didn't even know who he was. My friend said he was good. He sat alone on stage on a wooden stool with a six pack of beer at his feet, every now and then prying the top off a fresh one. As I recall it in my mind's eye, he was in the center of a pool of light. The theater was silent, transfixed, that golden light spreading, enveloping every heart in the room.

I last saw John Prine in June of 2011 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A. for Dan's birthday. The night was a marvel. How the hell could a person write so damn many great songs? Two days later I got on a plane to Minneapolis to do stuff at my condo in St. Paul. Closets, shelves for the pantry. I imagined living in Minnesota someday. The next week I went out to Baltimore to see my mom who was living with my brother and his girlfriend. My mother was still recovering after almost dying after her lung cancer surgery. My brother was having a hip replacement. Every night I listened to music before I went to sleep. I know Prine was on that soundtrack.

For the past few years a friend and I have regularly checked John Prine's schedule, hoping to catch him somewhere. It never worked out. Somehow he released an album in 2018 that I missed. I bought it today. I'm gonna take it one song at a time. I've started with the last song. It's called "When I Get to Heaven."

The Kitchen Sink's Best Time of Day

I walked into the house an hour ago and found the kitchen sink ready for its glamour shot.

It made me think of the pictures my friend Elizabeth has posted of her bathroom on her blog.

http://elizabethaquino.blogspot.com/2015/03/three-pictures.html.

I guess we all have our moments.

My window ledge is full of beach treasures, fortunes from fortune cookies, and plastic musical instruments. If you zoom in you can see a metal tag that I picked up off the sand. It says "Joy Equipment Protection." Joy definitely needs to be protected. So protect yours, okay?

Welcome to Margaritaville

Holiday weekend population at my place is 3. Apparently other households are having guests over too. Yesterday at the beach, I must have seen a dozen people. And with fallout from the demoic acid continuing, there were a dozen dead birds, two dead sea lions, and one sea lion cordoned off waiting for rescue.

It's still paradise.
But for the dead, not so much.

And we have bars in paradise. I love bars.

I especially love bars with music. The night before last we went to see one of my favorite musicians at a beach neighborhood bar so tiny it appears to have been built in someone's garage. A guy we  dubbed "the tornado" blew in about half-way through our evening. He entered as if he was wearing those shoes with retractable wheels you see adolescents gliding around in. He danced his way to the dance floor after a quick word with the bartender. The next thing you know, everyone in the bar had a fresh drink. The Tornado danced. The Tornado knuckle-bumped quite a few of us. And then he blew out again.

This morning he was at the farmer's market looking fresh as a daisy.

So I'm back, enjoying life in Margaritaville.

But not that long ago I was here:

Always aware of the canyons in my heart.
How are you?

Merry Christmas

Christmas at my house used to look like this.

Today, for the second year in a row, I spent Christmas Day at a bar with friends, listening to fabulous local musicians.

Booze and boats. What a lovely view.

The party ended at 4:30. Santa can party til he melts, but I'm snug at home.
Wherever you are this Christmas, I hope you are safe. I hope you are loved. I hope you've given and received, and that some delicious and festive concoction has passed your lips. I hope you've uttered kind words and heard that kindness echo back. Merry Christmas.

The Ways We Miss the Dead

I had a dream last night too muddled to recount. In it was a young man--the friend of one of my daughters. He was shot and killed at a party when they were in high school. In my dream he was playing the guitar and I was trying to explain to a friend that he was dead and had come back only for this one special evening. No matter how I tried, I could not make her understand.

Friday night I went to the mall to buy a purse and to have three dead watches checked out to see if batteries might revive them. One of the watches was my mother's. I had a snappy red leather band put on it along with the new battery, wondering if some day I might wear this watch, its pulse beating on my wrist now instead of my mother's and somehow this might make me feel her presence in my life in a physical way. While I waited for the work to be done on the watches, I walked through the mall and found myself in Sears, walking in the very same aisle I once walked regularly with my mother to get to Miracle Ear.

The other day I told a friend how my father often spoke in tired and true old sayings and how he didn't even have to deliver the whole saying because he'd said them so often that we kids knew what came next.  Up too late? "The early bird," he'd say. A friend got in trouble for running with the wild kids? "Birds of a feather," he'd say.

On Thursday night, my regular night out to hear music at a local bar with friends, the musicians played a song we'd never heard them play, Sweet and Shiny Eyes. Bonnie Rait recorded it and I think Willie Nelson put out a version too.

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
Drinking salted Margaritas with Fernando

Young and wild, we drove five hundred miles of Texas highway
To the Mexican border as the day was coming on
We crossed the Rio Grande river and we swore we'd have things our way
When we happened to walk into Nuevo Leon

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

The version I know best was sung to me live. The way I remember it, it was usually after dinner at my place. Dan would pull his guitar out of its case and carry it back to the table. We'd push our chairs far enough from each other so he'd have room to play.

In my sweet dreams I'm in a bar, there are people playing the guitar, and the dead are back for a visit, their eyes sweet and shiny. We know, just by being in their presence how lucky we are, and they know that they were lucky, in a way, to leave this life first because we were here to hold them, to mourn them, to keep them alive in our dreams, to tell their stories--and they can never do that for us.

Here's an essay about that by Donald Hall from the New Yorker.

Without Love, Where Would We Be Now?

Party lights in the bar at Cold Spring Tavern in the mountains above Santa Barbara

I wish I were a regular person. Like all those drivers speeding north on the 101 last night, seemingly without a care in the world, while I'm telling myself, you've got this just follow the taillights you can see the road you're just doing that thing where you feel like you're driving off into space but you're not. Really. And it was fine. Nothing scary happened. No close calls. No drama. I don't even know where the driving anxiety comes from and I'm not going to let it run my life. But it's there.

And the flying anxiety.

And the fear of heights. And confined spaces like middle airplane seats.

Driving in the mountains is a trifecta of anxieties. But sometimes I go there anyway--like today. And then if I stay overnight at high elevations, I sometimes have murder nightmares.

I think I had my first hypnagogic hallucination years ago in the mountains by Lake Tahoe when I was acting and traveling with a show that played school assembly programs. Every decade or so I have another one. It's that place between waking and sleeping when you're lying there in that crevice between worlds and you're not sure if what/who you're seeing is real life or a dream. Except you think it's real and find out later that it wasn't.

I had my first anxiety attack the day my mom and I went to talk to the social worker at the adoption agency about giving up my son for adoption. I couldn't stop shaking and panting and I was rendered cat got your tongue speechless. The next might have been a couple years later when I woke up from my second back surgery sobbing and shaking and terrified for no real reason.

The adrenaline level in my body is like the tides. In and out. High or not so high. And then oops, we're flooded. It doesn't bother me so much any more. Really, it's a million times better. Yoga. T'ai Chi Chih. A better diet. Enough sleep. It's okay, but I still envy the seemingly carefree.

The dancing man at Cold Spring Tavern today looked carefree. He was the only one, at first, on the dance floor, waiting to pounce into his routine as soon as the music started. His t-shirt said Fireproof and there was some biblical quote too. Hair and beard reminicient of Charles Manson, he had a fervent gleam in his eyes and danced as if it meant salvation. Maybe it did. Maybe he was up there saving all of us, letting anyone who was watching channel their anxieties through him. Later in the afternoon, he danced outside on the gravel patio. In the sunlight, I could see he had no front teeth and that the skin on his arms looked as though it hadn't seen the indoors in years. Still a half-dozen pretty women danced with him un-ironically. And who knows, maybe they were all regulars--the dancing man and the women and the bikers and the families.

Without love, where would we be now? were the song lyrics that followed me to the car while behind me, the man kept dancing. That song stayed in my head all the way down the mountain.

Back to Pillville

It's really pretty awesome here.

Post respite, my mom and I are back in our routine. Morning beach walk for me, snoozy day for her. Martini at 5. Dinner was a piece of diced up sausage, a sweet potato with a ton of butter, and half an avocado. There will be vanilla ice cream later.

Both my mom and I had a wonderful time. Wonderful, marvelous, such beautiful scenery, were some of her descriptors. She especially loved that her room had French doors that opened onto a private patio where she had her breakfast. When I got there, the white tablecloth was still on the table. Just a like a resort, she said. The hospice nurse and the hospice facilities coordinator said the staff thought she was the life of the party. I'm not making this up. 

And me? I had a wonderful time with my friend Pete.  Fun with his family and friends and a visit to Chicago.

Buckingham Fountain under a remarkably gorgeous sky.

Skyline reflected in "The Bean"--one of the most delightful public sculptures ever!

We caught one of the World Music Festival's concerts--Aziz Sahmaoui and The University of Gnawa.

Amazing. Look and listen.

And we paid a visit to Obama. Well...just his house. And right down the street, THIS was going on.

Seriously. Both my mom and I came home happy. 

Report from Pillville: Have I mentioned the harpist?

art by Sulamith Wölfing

THIS  was in today's New York Times.

And since my head has been rising higher and higher into the clouds these past several weeks, I honestly can't remember if I've blogged about the music therapy hospice has provided for my mom  Forgive me when I tell you I was skeptical at first, but when the nurse told me a harpist would be coming to play for my mom, I envisioned something hokey. Please don't let her be wearing an angel costume was the wish that kept circling through my head. I was more than a little bit relieved when a woman wearing ordinary clothes showed up at the door.

The harpist has visited us four times now. Sometimes she brings a large harp and sometimes a smaller one with a set of bells and gongs. My mom sits in her chair at the dining room table since it's usually around lunch time. I lie across the room on the couch and the harpist sits between us, a bit closer to my mom than to me. She talks to my mom between songs and my mom talks to her. I remain silent unless my mom gets confused about something she wants me to straighten out--like whether he twin sister has been dead for one year or two, or if I was already living in California when my father died. These brief conversations are far more lovely than they sound. While there is talk about the dead, there's also talk about love, and about the different places my mom has lived in her 90 plus years on this planet.

I didn't know that harp and vocal music woven into end-of-life care was actually a formal discipline called thanatology until I read the article in this morning's Times. My awe and respect for our harpist's talents is now even deeper. At some level, I think I understood the depth of the experience from the beginning because I chose to do nothing but listen from the moment that very first note was plucked. I'm not quite sure why. It would have been more like me to hover near by, quietly folding laundry or to use the presence of another person in the house as an excuse to slip upstairs to my room. But after introductions were made that first day, I fluffed up the pillows on the couch, stretched out facing the water, and closed my eyes.

The music is mostly instrumental. But twice now the harpist has played and sung that old song by the New Christy Minstrels. The first few lines are pretty good instructions for living.

Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine
I'll taste your strawberries, I'll drink your sweet wine
A million tomorrows shall all pass away
'Ere I forget all the joy that is mine...today

Thursday Afternoon Beach Report

How about some song lyrics to go with that?

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me.
I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

--from Every Grain of Sand (Wrecking Ball, Emmylou Harris)  I think Dylan wrote it.

I realized tonight that I seldom listen to music these days. My mom can't really hear it...so it seems weird and selfish to do so. And I can't hear her if she needs me if I have music on.

24 Hours

This is the So Cal talk of the town this evening. But not for me.

I slipped out the door yesterday morning, simply telling my mother that I was off to an evening of theatre with old friends. (M is here.)

It was a much bigger day than that. It was a drive through the past, recent and not-so-recent, in a grid-lock through L.A. way where you have time to inhabit years of your life, taking it all in, remembering this and wondering if you'll ever forget that.

I had lunch with my dear friend Elizabeth, a friend I know "in the memoir way." You want to get to know someone? Take a memoir writing class. Write down your story. Read it. Listen while they read some pages from their story. Repeat, repeat. Thereafter those words will always hover between you. They are the basis for how you know them. How you trusted them with your story. How they will always be able to trust you with theirs. Sprinkle some of that over your Greek salad.

She and I went to the memorial service for the husband of the beautiful and fabulous women who taught that first class we took something close to a decade ago. This must be hard for you, Elizabeth and other friends said, acknowledging my own recent loss of the man who loved me. A dark place I chose not to step into. One cannot go to the service for another's beloved and wail. T'ai Chi Chih has taught me to place my feet flat on the floor, to feel the earth beneath the floor, and connect with the energy there. To breathe. To recognize my t'an tien. Your friend's grief is not your grief. All grief is all grief, said the voices in my head. Both are true. So I let those voices just talk it out while my feet stayed flat.

There were prayers, and poems, and remembrances. One learns so much at a memorial. Memorial. Memoir. Both peel open the story. The music, performed by the church choir and a soloist from the Los Angeles Opera was probably the most stunning I have ever heard at a church service. The soloist, a beautiful young soprano, was from South Korea. Dan's face seemed to materialize from her face in the moments I felt most transported. There he was in front of me, my beloved.

Then came the driving. I drove through one old neighborhood after another on surface streets, crawling along in traffic that seemed just one car short of gridlock, contemplating the three decades of my life with a man who discarded me like I was nothing. How incredibly lucky that was in the bad luck good luck sort of way. I shuffled my plans around to this and that as if all the time travel was unhinging my brain and after, a stop at a favorite museum, ended up in the new incarnation of the very restaurant where, for years, I ate dinner nearly every Sunday night with The Someone, Finally, I went to the theatre with friends and saw a play that I performed in myself forty years ago. I slept at the house of those dear old friends who gave me oranges and almonds this morning that I ate in my car with a perfect latté I bought at an old-haunt coffee shop.

It was a lot to think about.

And 24 hours later, an empty cup in my cup-holder, I was back. Not singed from the re-entry, but warmed.

This is the Light that Shines

Tonight's Sunset

When you arrive at LAX and ride the steep escalator down to baggage claim, it's the feet of the person awaiting you that you see first. As you descend past the overhang from the upper floor, the rest of the body gradually comes into view. You see a pair of jeans, a torso in a jacket so familiar you know the feel of it even before the hug. Finally you see that face you can't wait to kiss.

Dan picked me up at LAX dozens of times during the five years we knew each other. Grad school. Fellowships at writer's residencies, visits to see my mom, or friends, or M who was away at college. Almost every month, I went somewhere. Only once was he running late and picked me up at the curb. Every other return, I rode down, watching for the first glimpse of his black and white Nike's.

I flew back to L.A., landing about 7:00 this morning, and let that vision materialize even though he wasn't there. I'd been away all but a couple of days this month, having a wonderful time with three different sets of friends on three different Hawaiian Islands. It was a perfect trip. But there was a surreal comfort in coming home to that image of Dan waiting at the bottom of the escalator. He was here in my house, too. On the beach. In my car. More and more as the weeks and months pass, he's everywhere, and I'm beginning to finagle a sort of peace with that--well, at least some of the time.

I've packed and re-packed for two other trips this September, and that's left no time for house cleaning so today I scrubbed, thoroughly wiped down the kitchen surfaces, opened a laundry basket full of mail, dealt with some of the general clutter all while listening to music. I stopped listening to music when my mom moved in with me two years ago. It seems rude since she can't really hear it, and I worry that if I have the volume too loud I won't be able to hear her if she needs me. This month while she continues to stay with my brother and his girlfriend, I plan to work my way through the almost 7000 songs on Dan's iPod.

It was still summer when I left, but the light shines in at a different angle now. The patio gets very little sun, and the house seems almost chilly. I plan to make this a fall and winter in which I stop complaining about the dark and seek out the light.

Here's one of the songs from the As in the iPod. Dan liked it a lot. Go ahead. Close your eyes. Dance.

June 6/Afternoon

Blood pressure dropping. Blood pressure drops some more. The nurse delivers her tidings every hour. We murmur. We watch. We wait. Lunch. Snacks. Coffee. Conversation. Silent sitting. Phone calls.

Dan's friend Will drives down from Berkeley for the second visit in 4 (or is it 3?) days. Dan's friend Russ arrives, and Will and Russ begin to make music, sitting next to Dan's bed.

Do you want to climb in with him? the nurse asks, nodding toward the bed. Of course, I do, I say, but I can't figure out how I'm going to fit myself in with the five pillows propping him up. And there's the oxygen line, the tube from the catheter. It looks impossible. Instead, I help the nurse with the cool washcloths we are placing on Dan to relieve his fever. Let me know when you think I should crawl in with him, I say. How about now? she asks. I'm still doubtful. I'll help you, she says, lowering the bedrail and then pulling it back up again to support my back.

The songs Russ and Will are playing are Dan's favorites. Wow, I tell them, I never thought I'd find myself in bed with my boyfriend with live music in the room. Best girlfriend ever, Dusty says.

I begin whispering my "litany of bests" in Dan's ear. I've told him some of these things already, but I begin again, telling him everything I can think of. Best first date, best kisser, best friend, best guy in the kitchen, best massager.... Dan's breaths are shallow, as they have been for days. I watch the rise and fall of his chest. And then there is no rise. I call out for Dusty who is just a few feet away on the couch, and she sets her fingers against his neck where there is still a pulse. The rest of the family is at  the bedside now and everyone lays their hands on him. The pulse stops too. He sighs a final sigh, and he's gone.

The nurse pronounces him dead. It's 4:04 p.m.

This Morning (again)

Calm and gray. The mirror of water outside the window just beginning to ripple. We sit on the couch (Dan's daughter, his sister and I) asking ourselves why he is hanging on. There has been no change in Dan's condition in the last 24 hours. The nurse asks us if we have had "the talk" with him. We have. Go, we've said. Separately, we've said it. And together. His daughter and I stood on either side of him  yesterday afternoon and told him we love loved each other. I will take care of Dusty, I said. I will take care of Denise, she said.We've delivered messages from others. Held the phone to his ear for a number of one-sided conversations. Read him the emails that keep filtering in from long-ago school friends. Filled the room with music from his own iPod.

In my experience, the nurse says, it's the women who hang on. Men, when they can't use power tools, are done, she says. The women want those grand babies.

We don't know what Dan wants. To say something, Dusty says. He would say the most perfect wonderful thing, we are certain, if he could talk.

I am done with questioning. Instead, I sit at the foot of his bed. I'm watching. I'm waiting. With every email, phone call, Facebook message, every old photo, every family story, the heart of this man I love grows larger even as the shell of his body grows smaller. My house hums with the fan that blows across his fevered body, the sound of his oxygen machine merging with the sound of my mother's oxygen machine, the rustle of newspaper pages being turned, the click of laptop keys. My house hums with life.

The trick is in knowing when to let it all go
hanging on til you're sick to your soul
saying yes and forever and never and no 
They're just spots on the dice as they roll

---lyrics from the chorus of a song Dan wrote long before I knew him.

Better than This

Right now, right here the man who loves me is playing music in my living room with a friend. The thump of his bass is pulsing upstairs into my bedroom where I sit at my desk letting it come through my feet and into my body like a heartbeat.
My life has never been better than this.

My mom is sitting at the dining room table with her bowl of Rice Chex and her strawberries that were probably grown a mile from here. Maybe she hears the music; maybe she only feels the pulse of it. She tells them they're very good and that they should start a band. They are a band, I tell her when I come down to warm up my tea.

The water outside my back door is barely moving, it seems. But the tide flows in and out in the marina, too, and right now, right here that water is imperceptibly higher or lower than when I started this post.

All of us in this house are breathing in and breathing out. A breath older. A heartbeat farther. The musicians breathe in and out comes song. I breathe in and out come words. My mom breathes in, and sometimes the out breaths are moans--but right now she's quiet. Maybe she's back in her room breathing out snowflakes.

How to Heal

First this happened.

And yesterday, after nine days in the hospital, this. Welcome home committee included Piper, the ancient cat.

Tonight there was even a little music.

The daughter of the man who loves me is staying here, too--and that has been the silver lining--getting to know her a bit. Today she slept and rested most of the day. The relief crash. I'm feeling it, too. The sweet slowdown. The knowing (as much as we can know) that this will all be okay.

We are all burrowed in. Heads full of song. Bellies full of meatloaf. Present full of wellness.

How the Eavesdropping Failed but instead A Brief Soundtrack of My Past

I really did go out.

First, the moon. A photographic failure. I can't make you gasp the way I did when I saw it--a golden crescent cradling the full shadow of its past and future selves. So picture it. Then picture this:

Couple 1: They're wearing black leather jackets--not matching. She has on tight white jeans and black high-heeled boots. They're in their 30s or 40s. He has an English accent. They're drinking cosmos. The glasses glowing like rubies. His arm rests on the back of her barstool all through three rounds of drinks. Occasionally, his hand hovers closer to her back, but he doesn't touch her.

#howtocommitforeplayinabar.

Couple 2:  Another set of 40-somethings. She's wearing a dress and hose. He has on black jeans and a black tee-shirt--and has a neatly trimmed  goatee. They're stylish, but there's something a bit weary about them. He scrutinizes the check a moment too long. She sighs and raises her eyebrows. Over the music, I hear only two words of their conversation. Pregnant and love. I'd bet a million bucks they were talking about someone else.

#IthinkI'llturninearly.Seeyouinthemorning.

Couple 3: They're in their 80s, sitting side by side in a booth. Maybe so they can hear one another. But maybe because they like it. He savors his red wine. She lingers over the menu. They lean toward each other. When they leave, he aims toward the floor to ceiling windows as if there's a door there; she takes his arm and steers.

#IblessthedayIfoundyou.Whatdidyousay?

The Soundtrack of My Past (performed by a lone musician): 

I'll Get You in the End by The Beatles

I'm in my room with the liner notes to The Beatles Second Album, listening over and over again while reading the words and looking at the pictures on the album cover. I will memorize all the lyrics, who wrote what, who's singing the lead vocals on each song.

She's Not There by The Zombies

I'm probably not supposed to be there either. "There" is the new frowned upon teen club called The Web. It's a regular after school stop on my walk home. No drugs. No alcohol. Pizza. Soda. A juke box. And it's run by a cool 20-something guy. Was his nick name Spider? Parents didn't approve.

Brown-Eyed Girl by Van Morrison

Was it our song? Had we formalized it in some way or was it just in my head, the significance so dizzying because of the way he looked into my eyes as we danced to it? We are caught up in the ecstasy of a summer dance at the park pavillion. I am wearing a dress my mother sewed for me by ripping apart a hand-me-down and re-using the fabric. A couple of summers later, this will be the dress I wear home from the hospital after our son is born.

Me, wearing the dress.

Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones

A song that takes on new significance after the adoption papers are signed.

Cherry Cherry by Neil Diamond

Neil Diamond live onstage at my first college concert. Is this a dream?

High on a Mountain of Love by Johnny Rivers 

I'm wearing a red mini-skirt and a white blouse, driving to my waitress job at a supper club on the Sauk River in rural Minnesota, the job that will get me to California despite the fact that I'm a terrible waitress and my best tips are motivated by pity.

What's on the soundtrack to your past? 
Is it possible to imagine the sound track to our futures?

My mother will remain in the hospital tonight. Maybe I'll go out again. Maybe I'll have popcorn for dinner and sit on the couch with the cat.

Get Wet. Get In. Ride the Wave. Get Frosting on Your Clothes.

I've wanted to live by the ocean, I said, probably ever since I first saw the ocean in a movie.
And you just got here, she said. After all those years. Well, a person just can't do everything.
But you, I said, managed to live in Baltimore during the 40s. There are people who'd pay a million dollars to hear the music you heard.
Oh, yeah, she said.
Ever see Cab Calloway? I asked.
Sure, she said.
Louis Armstrong?
Oh, yeah.
And on we went. From the Inkspots to Glen Miller. The Dorsey Brothers. Bennie Goodman.
I heard about the clubs where she and her sister worked. The Club Charles. The Band Box and the Chanticleer.
And she told me about a crazy Martha Raye act. After she sang her set, she threw a cake at the audience.
People loved it, she said. They didn't care if they got frosting on their clothes.

I love you, radio.

I don't know why exactly, but I choose to spend much of my day in silence. No TV chattering in the background. No music unless I'm really listening. In fact, I detest having music on if I'm reading. I savor my errand running when I drive off alone in my car because that's a chance to tune the radio to a favorite station. Yesterday this is what I heard:

Thou Shalt Always Kill

I laughed out loud when I heard, Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls' pants. 

Use it to get into their heads. 

By the time I heard, Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave before it's done just because you've finished your shitty little poem or song you self-righteous prick, I was a fan.

Complete lyrics are below.

Thou shalt not steal if there is direct victim.

Thou shalt not worship pop idols or follow lost prophets.

Thou shalt not take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hartman, Desmond Decker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barret in vain.

Thou shalt not think that any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a peadophile... Some people are just nice.

Thou shalt not read NME.

Thou shalt not stop liking a band just because they've become popular.

Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry.

Thou shalt not judge a book by it's cover.

Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover.

Thou shalt not buy Coca-Cola products. 

Thou shalt not buy Nestle products.

Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriend's best friend, take drugs and cheat on him.

Thou shalt not fall in love so easily.

Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls' pants. 

Use it to get into their heads.

Thou shalt not watch Hollyokes.

Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave before it's done just because you've finished your shitty little poem or song you self-righteous prick.

Thou shalt not return to the same club or bar week in, week out just 'cause you once saw a girl there that you fancied but you're never gonna fucking talk to.

Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were.

The Beatles... Were just a band.

Led Zepplin... Just a band.

The Beach Boys... Just a band.

The Sex Pistols... Just a band.

The Clash... Just a band.

Crass... Just a band.

Minor Threat... Just a band.

The Cure... Just a band.

The Smiths... Just a band.

Nirvana... Just a band.

The Pixies... Just a band.

Oasis... Just a band.

Radiohead... Just a band.

Bloc Party... Just a band.

The Arctic Monkeys... Just a band.

The Next Big Thing.. JUST A BAND.

Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-english speaking countries as to those that occur in english speaking countries. Thou shalt remember that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be. Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music, thou shalt not make repetitive generic music, thou shalt not make repetitive generic music, thou shalt not make repetitive generic music. Thou shalt not pimp my ride.Thou shalt not scream if you wanna go faster.Thou shalt not move to the sound of the wickedness. Thou shalt not make some noise for Detroit.When I say "Hey" thou shalt not say "Ho".When I say "Hip" thou shalt not say "Hop".When I say, he say, she say, we say, make some noise... kill me. Thou shalt not quote me happy.Thou shalt not shake it like a polaroid picture.Thou shalt not wish you girlfriend was a freak like me. Thou shalt spell the word "Pheonix" P-H-E-O-N-I-X not P-H-O-E-N-I-X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you. Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that Sharon got off with Bradley at the club last night by saying "Is it".Thou shalt think for yourselves.And thou shalt always... Thou shalt always kill! Dan Le Sac lyrics 

As things turned out, my errand running took a little twist. I went to some thrift stores looking for a nice wooden cane for my mom. I was really excited when I found a nice one sitting on a shelf next to a pile of suitcases and duffle bags. I snapped it up and hustled  to the cashier. A weird feeling descended on me as I handed it over and noticed it had no price tag.The cashier called over the intercom for a price check, and moments later a little old lady limped up to the counter. Yep, it was her cane. I had nearly stolen it. Not exactly a victimless crime. 

The Weekend of

 the sweet 

the golden

 the exotically

delicious

and satisfying.