Virtual Vinyl

Times like these when there’s nothing to do because the weather outside is frightful, I really wish I could snuggle up with some cold, hard vinyl. No idea what became of my collection. Back in the eighties were my parents throwing it all away, taking it to the streets in black plastic bags or did they sell the collection to put me through college?

Okay, I promise no more hidden song titles if you’ll tell me your favorite records (and let’s keep it vinyl) of all time, based on two criteria: album cover art and actual music.

Without the visual cues from the missing vinyl collection, I’ll pull from the acoustic memory archives to make my lists.

Best Album Cover

1.)Bob Welch, French Kiss: I gave this album to my high school boyfriend, and my parents considered making me go to confession for the licentious cover art.

2.) (a tie) The Who By Numbers: I was so young that I still liked the chance to connect the dots.

Some Girls, Rolling Stones: Sure we could always picture Mick as a girl, but this cover gives you the opportunity to see rest of the boys in lipstick.

3.)Red Octopus, Jefferson Starship: That octopus/heart graphic is slick, pun intended.

Best Album Music

1.)Night Moves, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band: 7/9 aint’ bad.

2.)Stand!, Sly and the Family Stone: Here I’m tapping into my older sister’s collection.

3.)Heart Like a Wheel, Linda Ronstadt: just enough cowbell.

Memories will remind you/

That our love was meant to be.

-Collins, Banks, Rutherford, "Throwing It All Away"

Christmas Music

I’m just a sentimental fool come Christmas time. This year I sent a few cards, homemade, of course, and couldn’t help but enclose lyrics from a couple of my favorite holiday classics.

It’s that time of year when the world falls in love/Every song you hear seems to say/ “Merry Christmas, may all your New Year dreams come true.”

That’s “The Christmas Waltz.”

Course the version of that song I like is the one that Bruce Robison sings on the Kelly Willis and Bruce Robison record Happy Holidays. His Texas rendition is so sincere. Bruce warmed my heart some ten years ago at a Cactus Records in-store when he told my daughter she was the prettiest little girl in Houston.

I also quoted from “Santa Baby” for some of the holiday cards; surprisingly, Senator Javits' niece wrote that song.

I don’t own many Christmas records, at least not that I’ll admit, but I also have one by Willie Nelson. He sings “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” almost as well as my grandfather did.

Yesterday my son asked what my favorite Christmas song is, and I told him my grandfather’s version of “Up on the Housetop” was my favorite when I was his age. Anything Pawpaw George sang with his Waitsian voice and his ukulele was special.

Turns out I also have a John Prine Christmas record. He sounds down-and-out enough on that record to be from Texas, but he hails from Illinois.

Gosh, all this talk about music makes me homesick for Texas, but this Christmas I’ll be in northern Carolina, bracing for snow. My inbox is filling with Austin gig announcements from folks like John Greenberg, Dave Grissom and Troy Campbell. I’ll miss them all.

Think I’ll leave you with this song to give you a little taste of Christmas at the ranch. Brings back lots of acoustic memories of Bruce and Kelly from the Mucky Duck in Houston to Gruene Hall in Hill Country. And if this doesn’t put you in the mood for a Texas dance hall, check out John Spong’s article in Texas Monthly. God bless.

Before the Cock Crows

Everywhere a sign. Many people heed signs; others don’t.

If your personality profile says that you are intuitive, you probably look for signs and ponder a deeper meaning. But if you perceive only with your senses, you might not be so inclined to interpret signs.

In the oral tradition there are many signs. My family passed down a few to me. Pawpaw George said, “Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors’ warning.” His wife had a favorite saying that conveys an itchy nose is a predictor someone with a hole in their underwear is about to knock on your door.

In medical school I learned of signs, not to be confused with symptoms, the patient’s complaints. Signs are those things a doctor can observe, like yellow eyes, flushed cheeks, or labored breathing. There’s Battle’s sign, the sign of Leser-Trelat, and even Sister Mary Joseph’s sign, which should delight those of you who would like to know more about Mayo Clinic history.

Songwriters like to talk about signs. Everywhere a sign. I saw the sign. I am waiting for a sign.

We all, at times, look for signs: a sign that it’s over, a sign that it’s love, a sign that you’ve gone too far.

It occurs to me that some signs foretell and others just loudly announce what has already happened.

If you’re reading, send up a smoke signal and let me know you’re here. What signs do you heed? Are there any signs that were taught to you in the oral tradition that you intend to pass along to the next generation?

I’ve gotta tell you in my loudest tones/That I started looking for a warning sign.
-“Warning Sign” Coldplay


Who's Singing on Your Radio?

If my mother didn’t make the Beatles magically appear in the studio at WKLO by turning a knob in her light green Impala sedan, then maybe I would not have grown up thinking music is magic. Disclaimer: This was not a case of a mom duping kid. My mom never said, “When we turn on the radio a band plays live in the studio on Broadway.” She didn’t have to. I just knew they did. And it made me happy to know they were there with me in my town.

Since no one in my home played an instrument, music first cast its spell on me via radio towers.

Important radio stations—let’s start with WLRS in Louisville. Album rock appealed to me because I had a fairly large collection of albums from the RCA club, and as I sat on my four-poster bed, doing my high school homework at night, I could look out my window at the skyline of downtown Louisville, all aglow with light, and ponder songs like “Dark Side of the Moon.”

More than a decade later, toward the end of my first year in Houston, I discovered KPFT. The owner of the Mucky Duck sat me at a table for a Toni Price show next to a KPFT DJ, Phil Edwards. He talked up the channel to me that night, and paid for my drink, saying, “If you have any extra money laying around the house, just send it into the station.” Of course, the funniest thing is that my drink magically disappeared because Phil forgot it was mine and drank it himself! I tuned into KPFT for the rest of my years in Houston, and discovered the likes of Dan Zanes and Darden Smith, thanks to DJ’s who knew what they were spinning.

After I met my husband I noticed he tuned to a certain radio station as soon as the radio towers became visible on the 290 drive into Austin from Houston. It was KGSR.

KGSR streams daily on the computer in my office. Part of the fun of it is just seeing what will be playing, like now, Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up.” Earlier when I started the blog, Talking Heads were in the studio (not really, but you know KGSR is the place it’s most likely to happen) playing “Life in Wartime.” More importantly though, I may just hear a song by someone I’ve seen live in a small venue, like Alejandro Escovedo.

Radio magic continues tonight when an acquaintance of mine, Ian McLagan, chats with the host of a show on WCOM in Carrboro, NC.

Feel free to share your magic radio stations on the blog.

"But I heard you singing on the radio/your chariot was swinging way down low."
-Walter Tragert, “Singing on the Radio”

Writing for the Senate

My parents let me play hooky for two reasons: to write or to go to the racetrack.

One of those pastimes makes you a bit more employable than the other although it’s a toss-up as to which one will make you more money.

I’ve written over the years for school, for promotion and for hire. I’m happiest when I’m just writing for the fun of it.

I participated in a career development seminar in medical school. The verdict after six weeks was that I should be a writer. Oh well, I thought, I will write in patients’ charts.

There are two places that I currently write--the Chapel Hill Public Library and my home office.

I have to write near a window with birds in plain sight. I have a wall of framed Audubon prints in my office. My novel manuscript is about looking for a songbird, the rufous-sided towhee. Course I don’t have to look for them today; there’s almost always one singing somewhere around the house or the library. People sometimes look for what they already have, anyway.

Many of my writer friends keep a talisman near them while they write. My friend Garrison Somers kept a plane on his desk while he wrote his novel manuscript about a WWII pilot.

I have an office angel with butterfly wings; a friend sent it one holiday. A James Michener quote adorns the skirt: “I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotion.”

Turns out Michener is buried in Austin, Texas, my home away from home, and there is a Michener Center for Writers at UT.

When it comes to writing, I remember the advice of one voice. Surprisingly, it was not an English professor. It was the typing teacher at Sacred Heart Academy. She wore a beehive and way too much Tabu. Her name was Mrs. Pike, and she taught us how to type on our Pica typewriters. This is what she said in a deep southern accent about pounding the keyboard: “Girl if you don’t get it right, you’ve got to do it again.”

Now that plays right into my Catholic, repressed psychodrama. No wonder I worked on the novel manuscript for seven years.

I was fortunate to have many teachers and professors who gave me directive advice about writing on the days that I wasn’t at the track or in my basement typing poetry. They are the ones that I want to thank today in celebration of the National Day on Writing.

Off the Beaten Path

Have you ever been offered the perfect job in a new location that is slightly off the beaten path?

In 1995 during my surgical pathology fellowship at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, I considered taking a job in Appalachia. I was going to be paid a salary that nearly competed with the one the UT med school was offering, plus the Kentucky practice was tempting me with every other week off.

With that much time on my hands, I figured I’d finally learn how to play banjo. I’d been playing acoustic guitar and wanted some variety.

Certainly the job would’ve gotten me a little closer to my hometown of Louisville, where my dad and two grandmothers lived. Something worried me though: I figured in Appalachia folks would be knocking on my door to deliver babies night and day, cause, well, in the hollers, a doctor’s a doctor, right? Yeah, but this doctor doesn’t know nothing about no birthing and babies, and so I got scared away from the prospect of moving to the hills of eastern Kentucky.

Subsequently and sadly, I never learned to play the banjo. I stayed in Houston and picked up windsurfing. But happily, at night, when it was too dark to windsurf, I hung out in a place where fiddles, mandolins, and banjos made their rotation. That’s where I met a young musician from Appalachia named Troy Campbell.

His band, Loose Diamonds, covered a song “Stonewalls and Steel Bars.” The song is on their Freedom Records release Fresco Fiasco. “Stonewalls” is my second favorite song on the disc that Neil Strauss of the New York Times called one of “ten records from 1996 that haven't received much attention but are worth the extra time it takes to hunt for them, either through mail order or a local independent record store.” I’d never bothered looking at the liner notes to find out who wrote the song. Then this summer at Antone’s, Troy introduced the song as a Stanley Brothers tune.

I read yesterday in the Times that the only remaining Stanley of the Stanley Brothers, Ralph, has written his autobiography, which was due out today. Now even if he’s embellished history a tad, Appalachia's the kind of place where the truth is always going to be stranger than fiction, so this book is likely to be a hoot.

“Stonewalls and steel bars, a love on my mind/
I'm a three-time loser; I'm long gone this time."

C. Stanley, “Stonewalls and Steel Bars”

Like the Times reviewer said: Go find the Loose Diamonds CD. Better yet, catch Loose Diamonds live for the electric version that Ralph Stanley would consider sacrilege.

My Uncle Sam and McCartney's Uncle Albert

"Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" ("UA/AH") takes its place among those songs with lyrics that confound. I didn't know what the song meant when I was seven, and I probably won't know when I'm sixty-four.

In 1971 while my dad drove us along the Rock Creek Parkway in DC, "UA/AH" was on the radio. I sat in the backseat with my sister and my Mrs. Beasley doll. I was in a dress, on my way back to the hotel from the Smithsonian.

Last Sunday a cabdriver speaking Arabic drove me along the same segment of Rock Creek Parkway, and "UA/AH" was playing in my acoustic memory. I sat in the backseat with a doll, my 17-year-old daughter. She was in a dress, and we were on our way to the hotel from the National Gallery.

In '71 "UA/AH" was one of my favorite songs, but "Bridge Over Troubled Water" won the Grammy. That sad song always makes me think of the deaths of President John F. and Senator Bobby Kennedy. In '71 our troops were in Vietnam; now they're in Afghanistan.

This week the only word my cabdriver said that I understood, as he held a cell phone to his head while he held our lives in his hands, was Afghanistan, and I recall he said that word just as we passed the Watergate. In a Neil Young song "even Richard Nixon has got soul." Nixon certainly had an ego. It kept him from doing the right thing.

I was invited to the Capitol by a college classmate on Monday, and as I toured the building, I felt the same awe to be viewing one of our nation's jewels that I felt as a child at the Smithsonian.

We've suffered as a nation since the 70's. There's the misery of those who returned from war and the misery of those whose kin did not. We're scarred by September 11th and the hurricane.

The misery of "those who have not" hangs in the balance as we makes fools of ourselves over who is entitled to health care. Will the sick have to rely on charity or will access to care be deemed an individual right (not to be confused with an individual mandate)? If our country fails here, the disgrace is all our own. There has been no provocation from foreign soil. We cannot blame the elements.

People who reproduce are said to be genetically fit. Maybe the term should be changed to mean those who can afford the best health care policy their DNA will allow. The insurance companies are becoming genetic watchdogs: "Your body repairs DNA damage, you can have insurance; your body does not repair DNA damage, no insurance for you."

Genetic bullying wasn't okay for Hitler, and it's not okay for us.

Sometimes songs we don't understand still resonate. Even in those songs that lose us, there's usually one line hits the mark. In McCartney's song, "the kettles on the boil, and we're so easily called away." I hope we don't get called away from this topic of national urgency.

I had to turn off The Ed Schultz Show today when the cancer-stricken caller began crying. I didn't want to get that upset while driving, but it was too late because I'd heard enough of the story. The caller's status as a provider had been decimated by his illness. Not only did he lose the business that provided health insurance for his employees, but he also lost his ability to support his family.

Maybe our legislators will get it right. On Monday at the Capitol, my friend pointed out one of Senator Kennedy's sanctuaries. Although the senator's at rest now, we needed him a little bit longer.


"We're so sorry, Uncle Albert/But we haven't done a bloody thing all day."
-Linda and Paul McCartney, "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey"

Drivin' That Train

“How fast is this train going?” I asked my daughter as the skin on my face grew taut from the train’s acceleration.

“One hundred,” she said casually, as if oblivious to the miniature face-lift the subway had provided me.

One of my hundred goals for this weekend was to make my daughter an independent rider of the DC Metro since she may matriculate at a school in our nation’s capital next fall. After reading an article in the Washington Post entitled "Sandwiching Older Metro Cars Was a PR Move," I may not be so keen about the notion of anyone I know riding this system that is an accident that has already happened.

I was all set to write a happy little blog about my greatest lifetime memories of visiting DC when the newspaper article set me back into citizen Cassandra mode.

Let’s file this complaint under public relations trump risk management: The Metro system paid consultants sums of $4000 a day and $275 an hour to smooth over public concern about the safety of the system after a crash this summer killed nine people.

Consequently the old (series 1000) cars that are deemed unsafe were sandwiched between newer shock absorbing cars. End of solution. Cha-ching! Tax dollars save the day. Now hold on a minute. The action was not the result of an engineering analysis according to today’s newspaper. Can anyone say damage control?

This past week when I was chaperoning a field trip to the Haw River, the teacher made a public service announcement before we boarded the bus about her husband being attacked by a copperhead at the river last week. Although the teacher intended to keep her class safe, one of the 9-year-olds became so distraught by the warning that I took her aside and tried to comfort her.

“There is risk in all that we do,” I said to the worried student, “but as long as we are cautious and aware of our surroundings, we’ll be fine.”

Sometime after the Metro wreck this summer, a Facebook friend commented, “That’s why I don’t ride the front or the back car.”

Yesterday I rode the middle cars, unaware that they are likely the 30-year-old series 1000 cars.

Should Casey Jones and her daughter just stay off that train? Let’s face it: The drivers are all a-Twitter, the old cars are not safe and there are terrorist threats in the news. One reason not to buy a fare card is likely enough.

Trouble ahead.
Trouble behind.
And you know that notion just crossed my mind.

-R. Hunter, "Casey Jones"

Death on the Highway

Call it suicide or call it homicide, he was just a nice kid.

One of the last things that he did on Earth was call 911 and ask for help.

People in Chapel Hill are talking about the unexpected death of Courtland Smith, a premed biology major and fraternity president at UNC.

I would start with the story but since we still don’t know the rest of the story, I will stick with the facts as I know them from police reports that aren’t sealed and from the rivoting 15-minute 911 call Courtland made the morning of his death.

• Courtland was the DKE president at UNC.
• There was a party at his fraternity house Saturday night.
• His best friend saw him at 2:00 a.m. after the party. He reports that Courtland was “fine” at that time.
• About two hours later, Courtland placed the now famous 911 call.
• A female operator handled his call.
• Approximately 15 minutes later, Courtland was shot to death by a police officer on 1-85 southbound in Randolph County.

The questions outnumber the facts at this time. A video remains with sealed evidence. The medical examiner’s report has not been made public, nor has an e-mail Courtland wrote to his parents “that explains everything anyone would need to know” as Courtland told the 911 operator.

Because so much is unknown, the 911 call seems all the more important to our initial attempt to grieve this loss. The audio for the call can be accessed in the box with the story in the newspaper article.

Would I have listened to this call if I hadn’t watched Phone Booth last week? Maybe not. But Courtland's death would still have weighed on my mind as I worked with my premeds this week, talking with those students who are disappointed and feeling dejected about their low MCAT scores.

So many of my friends have sent their children to college for the first time this month. It’s every parent’s fear that their child will encounter danger or become severely ill while away at school.

The UNC campus has seen it’s share of tragedy recently. A few years ago, the student body president, Eve Carson, was shot to death at close range after being kidnapped and driven to an ATM machine to make her last withdrawal.

When Eve’s death was initially reported, there were holes of information big enough to drive a truck through. With Courtland’s death, the holes are even larger.

But what strikes me is the human interest. Sure, this is a human interest story, but that’s not what I mean. Somewhere in those last 15 minutes of his life, Courtland developed an interest in the female operator. He even asks her where she is from. And whether, as in Phone Booth, there was someone with a gun on Courtland’s “back pocket” or whether Courtland intended to fatally harm himself, he still cared about the operator and took an interest in her.

Call it homicide or call it suicide, he was just a nice kid.

One of the last things he did on Earth was call 911 . Our acoustic memory of Courtland is that of a young man who grew increasingly frustrated during his last cry for help.

Zombie Highways

Time was we worried about Chief Falling Rock when we took to the highways in my dad’s sedan. It was politically incorrect family slang for falling rock. On our family excursions along highways en route to the Smoky Mountains, the roadside signage warned of falling rock in the area. Chain link fence along the interstate heightened the sensation that a boulder could come sailing into the passenger window at any moment.

"Chief Falling Rock is after us," my dad would warn. A few years ago I took this acoustic memory and used it as the opener for a short story about a family portrait.

Times have changed a bit. Today there’s new terror on the roads. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer warned tonight of Zombie Highways. The story was about the Appalachian Development System gone too far in building a road to nowhere in north Birmingham. I saw some zombies on the interstate this summer, but the kind of zombies I saw were a little different than Jim’s.

If I had a quarter for every person talking on a cell phone while driving on the interstate, I could have made it to Austin and back without using my credit card once. Throw in a dollar for every mom (with kids in car seats) merging onto the highway while texting and I’ll make a contribution to your favorite charity.

We need laws to get people to quit taking undue risk.

How does that legislation get enacted? It seems soon after airbags began showing up in automobiles, I was witness to an autopsy at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Kentucky where a woman, under the height of 5’4’’, did not walk away from her accident because she suffered injuries when her airbag deployed on I-64. I don’t remember the exact role the ME’s office took in bringing about legislation to warn consumers that people under a certain height were at risk of airbag deployment injury, but I know there was some communication between Louisville and Frankfort on the issue.

There are plenty of people who argue government is too big, government does not need to take our freedoms away. If people made judicious use of capitalistic pleasures like phones with keyboards, maybe we wouldn’t need so many laws. Trouble is most people never want to think of safety until someone has hurt them.

While we’re in Mexico at the summit, we need to remember that we don’t want eighteen wheelers from Mexico on the interstate with the yellow HISD buses. Yes, let’s quit sending guns into Mexico for the drug cartels but no, we are not ready to allow Mexican trucks without brake inspections on US highways while my family is on the road.

Too much free trade and texting is bad for our safety on the roads. Darwin awards are for suicide, not homicide.

(This post was written last week and deemed too negative for the blog. Nonetheless, so many people have talked about dangerous road texting in the past four days that I felt compelled to post today.)

Taking the Time to Lay Down Some Tracks

I had a very pleasant morning with my son. I made chocolate chip pancakes. We watched a British show about training dogs. We walked our Lab and listened to the sounds of birds and cicadas along the way. We talked about mockingbirds. We paused to admire our favorite tree alongside the stream that flows into the one where James Taylor played as a boy.

Walking with a dog along a path takes me back to my grandfather’s retirement haven in Meade County on the Ohio River. He and I would start the day around five-thirty, sitting on stumps and drinking coffee under a large oak. Then we’d take his dog, a big ole slobbery shepherd mix, for a walk along trails with enough rabbits to keep Cesar showing off for hours. My grandfather pointed out the finer nuances of berry and tree identification along the way. By eight o’clock we’d be back at the house where my grandfather would scramble eggs and fry bacon. My Italian grandmother would still be sleeping when we spread her elderberry jam on our biscuits.

Now I can’t walk in the woods without remembering that mystical place where decades of river travel floated up from the steep banks to the house, on the notes from the Belle’s calliope.

The Pitch-Perfect Acoustic Legacy of a Parent

After a week of playing catch-up from an Austin pilgramage, I finally made it to the Muse Scripts box at the Carrboro post office. Nothing makes me happier than reaching into that box and pulling out a big ole glossy Texas Monthly. I dig that senior editor John Spong used to babysit my husband at the Westlake Oaks compound.

Ever play the game where you plop the magazine open and read only the article on that page? Nothing maintains the allure of an issue like taking it one randomly selected piece at a time. Maybe you can tell I was one of the kids that saved some candy for later.

This afternoon I dug into the magazine and up popped a photo of Roland Martin in a pinstripe suit and a lilac tie. It had been less than twenty-four hours since I returned from the Triangle Area Freelancers meeting so falling upon an article on being a multimedia journalist seemed fateful.

In the interview with Pamela Colloff, Roland Martin talks about Tiger Wood's father's remark, "'Even when I'm gone, Tiger will always hear my voice in his head at any moment in his life.'"

The legacy of what we tell our kids and what our parents told us is Texas size.

This week I traveled to the North Carolina Administrative Offices of the Courts and talked to parents about what they should tell their children about tobacco.

I told them about how tricky the topic of mortality can be for the younger set (9-11). By the way, that's the age of initiation for smoking, so if your youngin falls into that group, it's time to get your game on.

A friend recently shared the story with me about how her son, who is in the aforementioned age group, cut through a parental admonition about dying young with the eager anticipation of a premature death for a chance at early admission to heaven.

The day my mom told me she knew I had been smoking cigarettes, we were driving home in her light green clunker and my favorite song "Blinded by the Light" was on WKLO. (That keyboard intro still gives me chills.) My calliope came crashing down, alright. She gave me the usual, "Wait until your father comes home."

My father let me agonize in dreadful anticipation through most of the meal. His words were simple: "In our house we value our health first." Because I had a headache from the five or six cigarettes I'd smoked that afternoon, round one ended rather quickly.

What are you telling your children about tobacco? What are they saying? I'd love to hear.

I also want to hear what you remember your parents saying when you hear their voices in your head, on any topic.

Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun.
But Mama, that's where the fun is...
Bruce Springsteen, "Blinded by the Light"

Songs I Heard on the Way Home

Got a good station on I-10 outside of Nawlens. How could I have forgotten these songs?

1.) My Baby Blue

2.)Hot Fun in the Summertime

3.) Devil with the Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly

4.) Band of Gold

5.) My Maria--the 1973 B.W. Stevenson version

I must add that BW (Buckwheat) Stevenson's song "Shambala" was covered by my fourth grade crush on his brother's electric guitar at our 4th grade talent show at St. Athanasius.

Sly & the Family Stone recorded "Hot Fun in the Summertime" in 1969. My sister had the Family Stone album with "Sing a Simple Song."

"Time is passing, I grow older, things are happening fast. All I have to hold onto is a simple song at last."- Stewart, Sylvester

Stupidly/Stupid

Oh, I just can't bite back my tongue (that's how Richard Thompson says it) any longer.
Yes, I like Obama. Full disclosure: I voted for him.
Today I watched with glee as he called a spade a spade. No matter how you slice it, the police in Cambridge acted stupidly. I've even blogged about racial profiling on this, my mostly apolitical blog.
And yet, when Obama starts to talk about folks going to a primary care doc with a sore throat and alluding to the public that they could fall prey to doctors who will yank the tonsils to make a buck, he's stupid. Primary care doctors don't even remove tonsils. That's done by an Ear Nose and Throat specialist. Was Obama winging it or did his adviser take the day off? Please, when you are trying to triumph yourself as the answer to our health care crisis, don't let that tongue get so loosey-goosey in areas where you have absolutely no content knowledge.
There, and now I feel better. And it was free--the insurance company ain't getting a penny off this.
But I'm not finished yet, while we're talking adverbs. If the police acted stupidly, how is it that the students in the audience today in Ohio were dressed "good." He said, "I didn't dress that good when I was your age." Wince.
Can we get the prompter back?

Magical Thinking

It’s seven o’clock Central Daylight Time on a Sunday night; I really would prefer to be at the Saxon Pub, but I’m headed East toward New Orleans on I-10 instead. Last Sunday a promise was thrown out to cover Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” tonight at the Saxon, but I’m missing that.

Even at 75 miles per hour, there are more songs than grasshoppers bombarding my windshield.

I just passed Opelousas and thought of the song “Sweet Relief” that mentions it. I recalled the young friend of mine that used to play guitar with me in Houston who was so fond of Maria McKee that he followed her all over Europe one year. Check out Maria’s cover of “Sweet Relief” on the tribute CD for Victoria Williams. Back when Victoria was diagnosed with MS, other musicians covered her songs on a benefit CD. My Cajun friends Barrow and Gregg used to play that CD at their apartment back in Houston.

And how could anyone drive through Louisiana and not think of the other Williams, Lucinda, headed back to the Crescent City?

Egrets dot the rice fields, and I hear Adam Carroll's song "Rice Birds." Scrappy just covered it last Sunday at the Saxon. You can hear Adam's version on YouTube.

Roadside billboards advertise boudins and cracklins. I remember being seven and believing Neil Diamond was singing about my grandmother Rose in "Cracklin Rosie."

When we are children we pass through a phase called magical thinking--Troy was just talking about this with Dano and me Saturday at lunch at Hyde Park. It’s about three parts ideas of reference (they teach you this is pathologic in med school) and ten parts hope. In Human Development classes, they say it’s just a stage, something you move beyond as you age.

As I age I realize what I cherish about music is that it tells me magical thinking is not a stage of development but a state of being that we can all check into when we want. I still believe. And hope, it’s still in my diet. Troy sang about finding it in so many places during his show at Antone’s Friday, and he mentioned at lunch how many people in Austin still have it. Check out an early version of his song on YouTube.

I’m preparing to cross the Mississippi—getting my camera ready to capture twilight on the surface of the water. I’m back at my grandfather’s farm on the river. I hear the calliope on the Belle of Louisville. I remember the song "Riverside." I think of all the wonder still to come.

And oh, the wonder…

Felt the lightening

and waited on the thunder.

Bob Seger, “Night Moves”

Under the Influence of the Druid Bard

It seems that as much as I might neglect my novel manuscript, she pursues me. Take my recent trip to Arizona for example.

I networked day and night at the National Conference for Tobacco or Health and had little time for relaxation and no time for writing, except for editing my clients’ work. I met a woman from Erie who invited me to rent a car for a day trip to Scottsdale to see Taliesin West.

I’m a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, but I’d never set foot in one until last Friday. During the guided tour we learned a little about Frank’s personal life and how the house evolved from year to year. Of greatest interest to me was that the home did not have glass windows, originally. Canvas was stretched across the openings. Mrs. Wright the Third convinced Frank, over the course of 10 years, to use glass because he would then be able to work, inspired by the scenery around the house. Then, when he blasted to excavate for his cabaret, all the glass in the house shattered.

The guide told us, before we even set foot in the house, that taliesin means "shining brow." Then she talked about how the house was purposefully situated not on the top of the hill, but under the top, like a brow, so as to blend with the landscape.

This morning I got around to an Internet search for the word. I came up with some of Frank’s own words:

"Taliesin was the name of a Welsh poet, a druid-bard who sang to Wales the glories of fine art. Many legends cling to that beloved reverend name in Wales.

"Richard Hovey's charming masque, 'Taliesin,' had just made me acquainted with his image of the historic bard. Since all my relatives had Welsh names for their places, why not Taliesin for mine? . . . Literally the Welsh word means 'shining brow.'

"This hill on which Taliesin now stands as 'brow' was one of my favorite places when as a boy looking for pasque flowers I went in March sun while snow still streaked the hillsides. When you are on the low hill-crown you are out in mid-air as though swinging in a plane, the Valley and two others dropping away from you leaving the tree-tops standing below all about you."

- Frank Lloyd Wright

My Facebook friends wrote to me and suggested that I read Loving Frank. After checking the synopsis, I understand that this story of taboo love is meant to inspire me to finish "Acoustic Memory." And so I must return to the influence of the bard.

Why Not Phoenix?

I’m in Phoenix. There’s a pigeon at my feet at the Starbucks table, a waning moon has paused between twin towers across the street, and my US News and World Report hasn’t told me anything my teenager did not presciently discuss with me on the day before I left. Panhandling and mandated health insurance have one thing in common: They’re both controversial. One of them is very pressing right now—I keep getting harassed for money by panhandlers—feels much like Chapel Hill.

Phoenix was a fork in the road for me in 1997. The song that was on the radio in my rental car was the Gin Blossoms “Follow You Down.” I was offered a job at Good Samaritan Hospital and belabored the decision. I recall that they did a fairly good job of courting me. The very friendly Mass General trained female in the group took me in her Land Rover on a tour of expensive digs that looked like adobes. We cruised past the Scottsdale Neimans (I was in a blue pinstripe suit from the Houston Galleria Neimans). She gave me the word on the guys in the group and told me that being single was no problem: She met her surgeon husband in the doctor’s lounge at Good Sam. (I bit back the “been there, done that.”) They could have enticed me with a hike on Camelback (well, I hiked it anyway by myself) or pictures of the head partner’s cabin in the mountains that was only discussed in the context of his car when we went to dinner. “He drives an economy car because he sinks his money into his weekend retreat.”

In the end there was my darling Ella, a daycare child, who would be in a very hot climate (as if Houston wasn’t hot enough) and there was a grad student at Baylor, who struck me as a fun guy. Now there is a son, Samuel; a husband; Beckley, the Baylor grad; and Ella with a recently diagnosed proclivity for making preneoplastic moles. Forget the Arizona sun; the moon across the street tells me I made the right decision. Now the only phoenix in my life is the one on my husband's tattoo.

Takin' It to the Streets

It's funny just how jam-packed a life can become when you are living fearlessly. I'm approaching the 6-month mark of a resolution to take it to the streets.

I'm putting more miles on the car, spending more time with real world people, meeting one on one with exceptional folks with stellar track records, and finding myself moving forward on many fronts. I'm filming a video that has teenagers enthusiastically asking to participate. I'm following a big idea dream that has talented people jumping on board. I'm aiming for backing from the WHO and the CDC. I'm watching legislative committee meetings. I'm reading political blogs.

Just in the past thirty days I've interviewed a pilot home from Charlie Wilson's war, spent two hours in the office of the executive director of the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, bent the ear of a National Urban Fellows graduate, and made plans to work on a storyboard with a filmmaker in Austin. I've attended a freelance writers' seminar, registered for the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, and listened to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Chair of the Cullen Trust for Health Care speak on tobacco and health disparities.

New words in my vocabulary include ecological momentary assessment, MPOWER and F-scanning.

The people around me inspire me: I learned that my next-door neighbor is on the board of Africa Rising, that James Protzman's political blog rocks, and that altruism is alive and well at the Splinter Group.

My community is asking me for more. I've been asked to speak at two state employee functions, to write a letter to the editor of the local papers and to consider how I would like to contribute to leadership in the American Lung Association.

All of this for a girl that used to be chained to a microscope. Now I'm holding on to whatever I can find.

When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Lives

My generation did not "kick the habit" because for every "We Mind Very Much If You Smoke" jingle, we had another one about coming a long way. Those acoustic memories intermingle with memories of friends and loved ones whose lives were extinguished by the tobacco industry.

There is a global movement underway toward graphic warnings about disease on tobacco packaging. What follows is my letter to the editor of a North Carolina newspaper.

Sunday, May 31st is the World Health Organization’s annual World No Tobacco Day. This year’s theme is the implementation of pictorial warning labels on tobacco products. Other countries, including India, Canada, the United Kingdom and Brazil, already place pictures of diseased patients on tobacco packages, making the health risks of tobacco use hard for the consumer to overlook. The United States lags behind. Currently textual warnings are all that are in place on tobacco products.

Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the world. I witnessed this firsthand at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, where I diagnosed thousands of cases of disease caused by tobacco.

World No Tobacco Day is an ideal time for all individuals to consider their own possible contributions to the WHO’s MPOWER initiatives to “Monitor tobacco use and the policies to prevent it; Protect people from tobacco smoke; Offer people help to quit tobacco use; Warn about the dangers of tobacco; Enforce bans on tobacco, advertising, promotion and sponsorship; Raise taxes on tobacco.”

Let us act responsibly and proactively for the benefit of our country’s children by advocating for picture warnings on tobacco products.

Dolley Madison and Maureen Dowd

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and I was enjoying the company of a bright 5-year-old who sat to my right at the dinner table and held forth with me on the topics of his selection, namely, the war that won’t end, Dolley Madison, and Hotel for Dogs. When he mentioned Madagascar 2, I said I thought the plot was a little too similar to The Lion King. I told him I felt like I was back with Scar and the hyenas all over again. Because the boy is an accomplished writer, who had shown me several books before dinner that he had written on first grade paper, I introduced him to the word plagiarism.

Plagiarism. Well first, he wanted to spell it. You know the schools are really creating brave spellers these days because now there is a theory called something like experimental spelling in usage in the Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools whereby students are not penalized for using a word that they cannot spell correctly in their writing. Thinking back to my days of typing term papers at Sacred Heart Academy on a typewriter, I wish this educational coup would have occurred decades earlier.

So the experimental speller gave it a crack: P-L-A-Y-G-E-R and so on. This spelling makes plagiarism seem like child’s play. A quick check on Webster’s online says that the word is from the Latin word for kidnapper.

And the taking of the idea must be willful. I made that point very clear at the table.

Did Maureen Dowd willfully take from another and fail to credit him in her NYT column? I personally find it doubtful. According to an AP article I read this morning, she told the Huffington Post that the material she wrote was an acoustic memory. She did not use my term acoustic memory. That might have gotten my goat. She did say it was something she heard and then wrote. The AP article does not go on to say if she intended to credit the speaker or if she didn’t feel it was necessary.

I am such the idea purist that I do fault people who steal others' ideas. But what under the sun is new today? Still I think there is a line that does get crossed too often. Having been around many writers in the past five years or so, I once witnessed a writer discussing a topic at a coffee and then saw a very near exact quote of his concept in another writer’s work, uncredited, the very next day by a writer who was at our table.

But what of aging brains and acoustic memories during the creative process? For example, have I heard someone posit this question and failed to credit him? Does Maureen Dowd sometimes forget she did not create an idea and then fail to credit it? At my age it would be plausible. My son constantly tells me that I forget because I am OLD. His caps. His emphasis. There, I gave credit.

The Dalai Lama and My Mama

I've been reading Barbara Walters' memoirs, Audition. An elderly friend of mine bought the book for two dollars from the Chapel Hill Public Library and passed it on to me.

Every time I think of Barbara Walters, I think of my dad. My father was on his deathbed in Baptist East Hospital in the fall of 2003. I had flown to Louisville to visit him. I had plans to meet two friends, Susan Ward and Kim Maddox, for lunch. My dad was short of breath because he was dying from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It was my second day in his room, and we'd been over the important stuff. It didn't seem appropriate to waste breath on small talk, so my dad asked me what I would like to watch on his television in his hospital room. I said The View.

"That damn Baba Wawa," my dad said, in an exasperated tone of nearly benign disgruntlement, "I never did like her."

After reading Barbara's memoirs, I realize one thing: Men hate her or they try to seduce her. Harry Reasoner--hated her. Fidel Castro--tried to seduce her.

I'd been reading the memoirs in a fairly linear fashion, which is something that I do on rare occasions when I am entirely fascinated. On Mother's Day weekend, I had asked my husband to read me the chapter on Monica, so I had already skipped ahead a bit. Last night I chose to read the chapter on celebrities. Barbara writes of her visit with the Dalai Lama in that chapter.

Now two friends of mine, Troy Campbell and James Protzman, have recently spoken of the Dalai Lama to me. Troy mentioned the Dalai Lama when he told me about the movie Happiness Is (Troy is an associate producer of the film)and James said that he would most like to interview the Dalai Lama when I interviewed James about his first book, Jesus Swept. So I was clearly at attention while reading this passage from the book, even though it was about thirty minutes past my bedtime of ten o'clock Eastern Time.

I got to the part toward the end of the chapter where Barbara interviewed the Dalai Lama, and he told her that the purpose of life is "'to be happy.'" I had to put the book down. I had an acoustic memory.

It was January of 1987, and my mother was on her deathbed. We were both on her deathbed, actually, because I was lying with her in her bed in her bedroom. I was getting ready to leave Louisville to return to Lexington for the spring semester of my first year of medical school. My mother, realizing that the breast cancer was going to win, turned to me and said, "I want you to always be happy." That was it. The last piece of wisdom my mom ever bestowed.

And yet, it did not seem profound to me. I was climbing, climbing, up and up toward a dream of becoming a physician, and my mom was advising me to be happy. The advice seemed so cliche at the time that I filed it away into my memory archives and never really thought of it too much. To be honest, the advice she gave me one day in the Brown Cancer Center, upon watching a rather plain jane physician walk past us ( "Heather, when you are a doctor, at least put on lipstick in the morning") is advice I have mentioned to my daughter and to my friends because I thought it was clever. It was slightly more directive than, be happy. At that age I really craved substantive advice and lipstick seemed more substantive than happiness.

When I was able to pick the book back up, I mused that Barbara seemed fairly surprised that such an important man gave such simple advice.

Upon reflection, my mother's advice about happiness was much harder to follow than her advice about wearing makeup.

And so on this spring day, when the dog took one look at my inbox and whispered, "There's nothing to edit yet, take me on a walk," I did. We saw a mockingbird chasing a crow away from his turf. I felt amused. When the breeze whispered, "This may be the last spring day," I headed to Southern States for soil and fertilizer and worked on my patio garden past noon without sweating. I found the first tomato on the tomato plant. I felt happy.

The Specter of Disease

Well, it’s comforting to know that amid a growing swine flu outbreak in the United States, Arlen Specter can trump a virus. Maybe this isn’t going to be a pandemic. After all, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer covered Specter’s shift to the left before the swine flu tonight.

Since the weekend, the swine flu has spread to more states in the US, and given the incubation period and the laboratory identification lag phase, we can expect that just in time for the this weekend’s run for the roses in Louisville, Kentucky, some folks will find themselves wondering if they should make that trip to Churchill Downs or not. Three weeks from now there will likely be a spike in cases in Kentucky. Who can stay home sick from the Derby?

You can. It bears repeating that the CDC urges all of those who are ill to stay home one day beyond the day all symptoms subside. Yes, that is one day beyond, and not one day into symptoms, as is the usual practice in our capitalistic, thou must not call in sick society. The CDC is asking business owners to proactively consider the flu.

If you are well enough to go to the Derby though, put some money down on Advice for me.

Beware the Barking Pig, Be He Human or Swine

The Center for Disease Control has confirmed cases of swine flu in San Diego, California, and San Antonio, Texas. They will update their case list at 3:00 p.m. today.

Here are some important facts about swine flu:

This influenza virus is spread from person to person by respiratory droplet, the same way other respiratory viruses spread. People can also spread the infection to pigs and vice versa. You cannot get the virus from eating pork.

The symptoms of swine flu in people include fever, fatigue, cough, runny nose and sometimes vomiting and diarhhea. The CDC reports that pigs with swine flu appear depressed (don’t ask me) and cough (sounds like barking).

There is no human vaccine for swine flu.

If you have swine flu symptoms, it is important to avoid contact with other people and see your doctor. The current strain is responding to two antiviral drugs, so if you see your doctor within the first five days, you can get tested and potentially treated. That window is ten days for children. At this point the virus is striking mainly adults.

Bottom line for North Carolinians this weekend: Make a trip to the store for some hand sanitizer and be wary of close contact with people who say they have “a cold,” especially if they are just back from Texas or California. It’s safe to go to Allen and Sons Barbecue for pork this weekend. As for the Piedmont Farm Tour, it’s probably more likely that a visitor would infect a pig than a pig would infect a visitor. Nonetheless, steer clear of sad, barking pigs.

With Liberty and Genetic Fairness for All

My DNA still scares me. No, I’m not talking about the untimely deaths of my parents.

Last Sunday the New York Times reported that some states and the FBI are now routinely collecting DNA samples (a cheek swab) from people being detained for crimes. The premise is that they need a database to solve future crimes. The rationale is that it is no different than fingerprints.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I understand that the FBI and even local police departments would like to have DNA databases. Two things: Law enforcement officials could solve all crimes more quickly if we all had a government-placed microchip implanted in our shoulders like prized sporting dogs. Let’s not do that. Secondly, if the people that are detained but then released for crimes are the victims of racial profiling, then the people who are having their cheeks swabbed are also the subjects of racial profiling.

If we need a DNA database to solve crimes, then shouldn't all citizens be on file? And illegal immigrants? Good question: I don’t have all the answers today.

I can’t even think of all the questions, and that’s my point. There should be a multidisciplinary presidential task force taking stock of all applications coming out of the burgeoning field of genetics and considering the ethical and legal ramifications of the technologies to protect us.

In December, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Reviews reported that Obama wanted to create “an inter-agency task force on genomics research,” but the article went on to describe research initiatives that would be improved by the Obama presence in the White House. I would like to see some air of caution in the rhetoric of progress.

While Obama says that he introduced the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act (GINA) that President Bush signed into law in 2008, it would appear that this legislation only protects our rights with employers and insurers, not with law enforcement.

Is there any indication that the Coalition for Genetic Fairness might broaden its purpose to investigate this discriminatory collection of DNA by law enforcement? I'm going to see if they will.

As we translate biomedical research into practical application, there should be some public comfort that we are not headed toward a flawed futuristic society.

Professor Chism and the Sacred Heart Weekend

A crescent moon

A lilting tune

A prayer that soars above

Your daughters sing

While vistas ring

To honor the school we love...

Becky and I go way back to Saturday eighth grade Algebra class at that other high school across town.  We were the French version of the foreign language/science geeks at Sacred Heart Academy, class of 1982.  Together we attended French theater of the absurd plays in downtown Louisville, said the Angelus in French every Friday at noon in Madame Danzig's classroom with the view of the campus dogwoods, and endured the biting sarcasm of Father Wagner's A.P. English class.

In driving rain I picked up Becky in my white Toyota Corolla to go to Showcase Cinemas to see a movie the first night I got my license.  Becky drove me to KFC for senior lunch the first Friday she had her Honda Civic.

I gave up French; she gave up science.  Somewhere along the way we lost touch.

Her flight arrives this afternoon.  Rain is in the forecast.  We're seeing Louisvillian Jon Jory's production of Pride and Prejudice  on the UNC campus. We're taking in a comedy show at Dirty South Improv.  And we're catching up.  Where to begin?  Maybe hello.  Or better still, bonjour!

The Keen Stars Were Twinkling

I’m still reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.

It is very difficult to know all that he was attempting to accomplish in this work. Certainly there is meditation on houses as structures, and houses as homes. That I was expecting. There is a chapter on daydreams. There is writing about the process of creating. Bachelard quotes French writers I didn’t read in college.

“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.” Jean Lescure

Interestingly Proust, whom I have read, is also quoted. The reason this is significant to me is that in describing this book briefly to a friend in the gym, he said, “sounds a little like Proust.”

Poetry is the thread that unites the chapters. Though not on every page, Bachelard has sprinkled verse throughout the text, and when he does, he gives the poem in French followed by a translation in English.

Mainly Bachelard attempts to deconstruct poetry.

Bachelard considers the imagery of doors and forests: “On May nights, when so many doors are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges have been well oiled. And our fate becomes visible.”

The forest represents a “limitless world.”

I made use of a forest setting in two chapters of “Acoustic Memory”—one where the lovers are together and one where Raven longs for Gray. The glass walls of the Chapel Hill Public Library allow a view of a forest and facilitate work on pastoral scenes.

But back to Bachelard, in deconstructing poetry, he considers imagery and also sound, but not rhythm (at least not that I have seen yet—I confess I am not reading this book sequentially). He writes pages about Baudelaire’s use of the word vast and the phonation of the word vast. In the middle of this long rant, there is a gem of a metaphor for the human voice. The voice is a “delicate little Aeolian harp that nature has set at the entrance to our breathing” and it “is really a sixth sense, which followed and surpassed the others.”

More about Bachelard another day.

I look out the window of my airplane and see darkness penetrated by a strobe-like, red light that momentarily illuminates the wing—flicker, flicker, flicker. I’ve just flown over Chicago.

And here I will leave you with one of my favorite excerpts from a Shelley poem with a much more romantic take on the voice of a beloved:

"Though the sound overpowers, sing again, with your dear voice revealing a tone of some world far from ours, where music and moonlight and feeling are one."

Silence and Space

Somewhere above Montana and surrounded by the snow.

Somewhere above Montana there's places you oughta go.

Somewhere above Montana the snow mutes all the sound.

Somewhere above Montana with only memories around.

I'm back in a mountain fortress, the place in my manuscript where Raven came to a turning point in the early drafts.  The weakness in your plot, said a trusted friend, is that Raven never decides.  True.  She was weak.  No more.  I'm at this fortress strong and Raven is going to emerge, like the knight down the hall, with armor, ready to fight for her honor.

The stark terrain of the Rockies is the truth, as it was established over a hundred million years ago.  The truth, like the mountains, is all that can emerge with time.  

In the mountains, by herself, Raven looks inward and knows her truth.  Then, fearlessly, she acts. The other ending was too cliche.  This one is going to be true.

Oh, the Noise, Noise, Noise

I’ve been reading how the memories of our first home come to bear on our writing.

My first home was a brick ranch with hardwood floors, a garden, a collie and traditional parents. It strikes me that our house was very quiet. There were places you could go in our house and not hear anyone else. My favorite place was the basement.

We had a finished basement, replete with faux fireplace, a sitting area, a bar with swiveling turquoise pleather barstools, and a large desk with a manual typewriter. Did I say it was quiet?

I have to have quiet to write. It is a curse.

My current home is a smaller ranch with Pergo, a garden, a Labrador and traditional parents. (Well, I didn’t used to be traditional when I worked at the med school, but now that I work less than fifteen hours a week from home I am more or less June Cleaver without the pumps.) Our house is very noisy. There is no place you can go in my house and not hear anyone else. I wish I had a basement.

GRRRRRRRR. Did you say something? Good, I need quiet!

Right now I can hear someone rattling around in the kitchen. I wish they would stop. My son just clomped down the hall. He’s going out to play. Now the dog is tap, tap, tapping as she walks. Her nails need to be trimmed. I could get up and remind someone he said he would trim her nails today, or I can try to keep writing.

There is a clinking of a spoon in a bowl. My teenager is already into the mint chocolate chip ice cream that I bought less than three hours ago.

Someone just walked down the hall and into the garage. Our garage is no destination place, so just as I thought, that person is now trekking back in from the garage.

Now someone is opening the kitchen cabinet to tear paper towels. What is being done with paper towels? Now the water at the kitchen sink is running. Was there a spill? Do I need to see if the cleanup is going to be sufficient or should I stay here and try to write?

Now someone is opening my bedroom door.

GRRRRRRRRRR. I turn around to behold my teenager, who is holding a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. As she swirls the eggs to mix them with the salt that she has no doubt poured in the bowl, she tells me someone at her school got into UT-Austin yesterday.

I put on a motherly face and make a motherly comment.

She closes the door and leaves.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Should I stay here and try to write? Hell no! Now my room smells like hard-boiled eggs.

Yes, I realize the irony of my last post now.

Keeping My Ears Open

My muse and my memory: They both come to me pretty much on demand through my ears.

If you had to choose between your vision and your hearing, which one would you keep?

Paintings in museums would be hard to forego. Wegner’s Christina’s World in the MoMA, Manet’s Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe in the Musee D’Orsay, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills in the Phillips Collection. I used to say I was either going to be an art historian or a pathologist. Where would I personally be today if I had not memorized a bunch of visual patterns and applied them at the microscope in my practice of medicine?

But when I think about my happiest hours, they are spent sitting at live music shows deciding just when to close my eyes and give in to the pull of the sound. As sight is sacrificed, the aural experience is heightened.

The slam of a door, the lilt of a child’s voice, the morning business of the birds, the sounds of a lover, the calliope of the Belle of Louisville. Are these more worthy than the yellow light in the sky of a Turner masterpiece?

As a child I favored sight to sound. I think it was a childish fear of the dark. Now that I’ve seen some of the world’s wonders and have laid eyes on my own babes, I’m inclined to value my hearing more. And while it may be true that eyes are much prettier to behold, what enters my ears stirs my soul.

Could I go on writing “Acoustic Memory” without sight? With difficulty, I could.

Could I go on writing it if I were deaf? Nothing would unmoor me more. My inspiration derives from the bass note that warns, the melody that welcomes and the voice that woos.

In the coming weeks I’ll be taking dictation from Richard Thompson’s guitar and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I’ll be floating on the sound waves like that Wagnerian twig on its way to a distant lover.

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig.”
-Gaston Bachelard

Rodeo Religion

It's that time of year. Time for the Houston Rodeo.

The trail rides leading up to the actual festivities have already begun.  No telling what tales, new and old, will be shared by the "pilgrims."  Once they get to Houston, there will be plenty more oral storytelling at the concerts that have become such a staple of the celebration.

If I were going this year, I'd want to see Gladys Knight.  Did you know that "Midnight Train to Georgia" was originally going to be a song about a plane to Houston?

Rodeo 1995 I was still in Kentucky. I'd sit facing the Southwest on my back porch and listen to this song coming out of the speakers. I fell in love with Lyle and Texas before I ever set foot in the state.

I paid an obscene amount of money to see Lyle sing with Shawn Colvin my first summer in Texas.

Over the next year I developed a taste for sad songs and very intimate venues. That means Townes Van Zandt, of course.

I hung out in my neighborhood bar, and that's where I met Scrappy Jud Newcomb and Troy Campbell. Thought it was cool that Troy spent time in Appalachia, and I told him about Susan's summer work in the hollers.

Before long I was making the drive to Austin to see shows.  A modern day pilgrim of sorts.

Not all the songs in Texas are sad. Every once in a while a crazy guy from California comes around and sings a sad song in a happy way. But for rodeo, you need a sad one.

Soft Seduction

In 2000 I moved from 77019 (featured in National Geographic a few years back) to the Museum District in Houston. I knew I was moving to Carolina, eventually, and wanted to garner top dollar for my house, which I sold to a Rice English professor from New York. The professor's real estate agent was Wes Anderson's mom, Texas Anderson.

My new digs were walking distance to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Glassell School, the Italian Cultural Center, and the Jung Center.

A neighbor was a professor at the Glassell, and he used to have garden parties to show off his art.

After moving to Carolina and starting my novel manuscript, I figured out that I was going to have to write some short stories to show off my art. Sigh.

So I set my first story in my museum district neighborhood, and John Pence was nice enough to print this in The Blotter about five years ago.

The Art of Kissin and Stealin

Come inside my air conditioned room and have a whiskey. I've been drinking whiskey for some twenty years. Had my gums rubbed with the amber liquor when I was teething. Whiskey is entwined with the history of my state—the oak barrels near Getsemanee and the mint julep that’s served at Churchill Downs. But personal history has taken me far from that land that DeSoto roamed in the 1500’s to this land that is larger and hotter.

Have a seat. In spite of the heat, it’s a beautiful day to sit at the window and watch the leaves blow from the trees. A noncommittal sun is making intermittent cameos. The gray sky is a blank slate for the ruby, orange and banana yellow leaves that flutter and spin on their way to stillness and decay. In other parts of the country, the air conditioners have long been silenced. In Texas, their noise will have to compete with the blare of the leaf blowers and lawn mowers for a few more months. In the summer, the lawn companies make their rounds early in the day so that the work can be finished before the heat of the afternoon. But in the fall, they come later and later each week.

Pedro wasn’t any different. His men started to interfere with my open-air sessions in mid-October. I had an art class at the Glassell School in the early afternoon. No sooner than I would get home and set up that I would I hear the Latino music that blared from his van. This gave me roughly three minutes to haul my palette and canvas inside, but the easel would stay on the driveway. Later I would dust the flecks of freshly cut grass off of its unstained wood.

Eventually I accepted their late arrival as another source of domestic annoyance. One of the many necessary digressions that an artist faces, like paying bills and cleaning the bathroom. Nonetheless, the new schedule was really starting to get my goat. I’d been feeling out of sorts lately. I was growing sick of the portraiture work that kept food on the table and allowed me to live in the tony museum district of Houston, if only in a garage apartment. What I really wanted to do was get my hands back into clay. I hadn’t actually bought any yet, because of my impulse control problem. I knew that once I bought the clay, there’d be no more heads on the canvas, no more fat checks to cash, and eventually, no electricity for that much-needed air conditioning. Then I’d be hot and grumpy.

I was painting topless one day, something I did when I was feeling uninspired or just couldn’t get the creative juices flowing. I had broken into the bottle a little early too, in fact, two hours before my five o’clock special of whiskey on the rocks.

This time there was no loud Latino music to announce the truck, no sudden cacophony of voices, no cranking of the mower. Just Pedro. “Seniorita,” he called out as he rounded the corner of the house and entered the backyard.

I turned and looked at him just before I realized that my breasts were out of a shirt.

“Santa Maria!” he exclaimed, as he made the sign of the cross.

I dropped the palette. Splat, the green liquid made a stellate pattern on the ground where the board landed near my bare feet, which were speckled with paint. I backed up to get out of the paint, upsetting my Styrofoam cup of whiskey and nearly toppling the easel.

Simultaneously, a river of whiskey and Pedro ran toward me, Pedro with his hand over his eyes as if my breasts would blind him. Sensing that he had somehow played a part in this man-made disaster, he was evidently going to help me restore harmony despite my partial nudity.

“No Pedro, no necessito.” I didn’t know how to speak Spanish, but it worked because he stopped mid-sprint and turned around, and even though he was facing the other way, he kept his hand shield over his eyes.

I grabbed my shirt from the branch of the tree and fumbled with the buttons. When I had covered myself and righted the easel, I turned to find Pedro still as stone. A light brown sculpture in my corner of the yard, draped in worker’s clothes. That’s when I knew what I had to have.

I thought about Pedro and the family that I knew he must have. I could almost be certain of where they lived, the apartments in the part of town near the Fiesta market. The area where gang graffiti had first appeared tentatively on dumpsters, then on the sides of buildings before boldly defacing road signs. The graffiti was not in words. Not ones that I could decipher. It looked more like hieroglyphics. The broadly curving lines conjured thoughts of sinuous calves and orb-like buttocks. I was sure that these were not the images the graffiti artist had intended to confer. To those in the know, the messages probably screamed, “Shitbags, this is our gang’s turf. Stay away, or I’ll smash your face and rape your sister.” Yes, Pedro’s wife probably shopped at this Fiesta, and she could probably use some extra money to buy food for the family.

But no, it was cerveza. That’s what Pedro asked me for the first time that he sat for me. I racked my brain, which was wired to understand English first, French second, and Italian third. “No say,” I improvised.

“Cerveza,” he repeated, and tilted his head back and took a swig from his hand that evidently represented a bottle, his thumb, the neck of the bottle.

Something to drink. Oh. I had whiskey.

When I returned from my apartment, Styrofoam cup of whiskey in hand, he was sitting on a stone bench near the yellow lantana, taking off his T-shirt. That’s when I first saw Santa Maria. I saw her hanging from a gold chain on his hairy, burly chest, just above his Buddha belly. So this is where East meets West. “No Pedro, no necessito.”

He stopped. This line was coming in handy. His black eyes looked at me imploringly, all forty-five years of his pride on the line. Yes, I have noticed your biceps, and yes I have dreamed of your pecs, but I want to sculpt you the way you looked the day that you stood stock still because I was half-naked.

Some sittings and a few whiskeys later, I had a sculpture. I felt bad about my Pedro’s outcome. He ended up under a tree in a man’s front yard, just two blocks north of my street. Sure, the proximity suited me fine. It’s just that this was the home of the man who paid two Hispanic men to hand wash his Hummer and his wife’s H2 in his driveway every Saturday morning. He had help at his house every day. Last Halloween, the help carved pumpkins on the front porch with his children. This ostentation was despicable, and I had to rescue Pedro’s form from its new lawn jockey status.

Before I even masterminded the plot to have Pedro’s brother underbid a job at the house so that he could dismantle the motion sensor lights, wait for a new moon, and bribe Pedro with beer (which I now know is cerveza) to carry out my heist, I considered the bottom line of stealing my Pedro. I would never be able to exhibit the statue. It could never stand in grace next to the other sculptures in the garden across from the Museum of Fine Arts. If I suddenly had the sculpture again, wouldn’t it be proof that I was a thief? Circumstantial evidence, or something like that? My apartment was small. Not only would I have to stow my big Pedro in a small apartment, I would have to hide him under a sheet.

We carried it off, all right. And I was the driver of the black Toyota truck. Pedro and his brother narrowly outran the insomniac au pair who screamed for the police at the top of her lungs. They shared a ride in the bed of the truck with my Pedro as I drove to Fiesta for more cerveza. Just in time to watch the graffiti artist wielding a can of green spray paint.

You’d like to see my Pedro? Come into my bedroom; he’s in the back corner. Oh, no need to turn on the light. Santa Maria, you taste like whiskey.