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.

The Meet Cute

It’s Oscar weekend and I’m attending Jerry Bruckheimer’s aunt’s Oscar party. I met her four years ago at the Chapel Hill Whole Foods. It was a meet cute.

My parents had a meet cute; they met at the soda fountain at F.W. Woolworth’s in Louisville. My mom, the working girl, waited on my dad, the grandson of the owner of the Broadway Department Store.

Back to my meet cute, one sunny day at the window counter in Whole Foods, Dorothy Moore turned and complimented me on my wide-brim hat. Five minutes later we agreed that cell phones bring out the worst in people and that Louisville is a great city. Ten minutes later we were laughing because I met my first husband and she met her ex-husband in Danville, Kentucky (at the Pioneer Playhouse, no less). Next, she was recounting her days of riding down Brownsboro Road in Warren Oates’ roadster in my hometown of Louisville.

Dorothy is passionate, spunky, and charming. She pulled me right in. Dorothy became my connection to the English Department at UNC (she was the former secretary) and the person that brought me back to my love of theater. One of my more memorable Dorothy dates was a lunch with the director Davis McCallum at Playmakers Repertory Theater in Chapel Hill.

Meet cute's sometimes turn into long-term relationships. Hollywood tells us that. Witness the contemporary movie The Holiday.

As much as I’m a sucker for a meet cute, I’m actually more into remeet cute's. Think Richard Linklater’s film (my favorite) Before Sunset.

My novel manuscript gives a couple a second chance in a remeet cute.

A few years into the writing, I set off for my biannual trip to Austin, Texas. One night in Austin I asked my mother-in-law (I’ll call her my MIL, herein) to drive us to Marble Falls to hear John Greenberg play guitar. “Who’s that?” she asked in her West Texas drawl, drawing out the word that to two syllables (at least).

“You know, you sent me his CD.”

“Oh,” she said in a resigned fashion, “I thought I sent you John Michael Murphy’s CD.”

So already you see the hand of fate at play.

My MIL drove me fifty minutes west of Austin, past Dripping Springs, to the River City Grille in Marble Falls, Texas.

Have you ever happened upon a splendid acoustic guitar show by sheer happenstance? Not much can compare.

At the break, I approached John Greenberg at the bar. I believe he was drinking tequila. I introduced myself as one of North Carolina’s demoiselles and rather humbly implored him to play his song, “Amy Walker.”

I told him I was writing a novel and that the song “Amy Walker” was really at the heart of the matter for me: Guitarist meets woman; he hides his attraction; she walks away; he writes song that says the next time I see you I’ll do better.

John was rather impressed that a Carolina girl had followed him down to the River City Grille. He said he'd play “Amy Walker” for me, but after the show. Then he explained that he would have to work up to that fine acoustic picking since he had just gotten back from Italy that day.

So my MIL and I enjoyed the second set, and as requested, stayed past the end of the show. John and his sidekick, the then president of the Western Writers of America, Mike Blakely, a man with a handlebar mustache (or should I say a handlebar mustache with a man), wowed us with their stage presence and then, after the show, cozied up to us at a coffee table just a foot beneath the stage. A few pleasantries were exchanged. How could she be my MIL? She looked so young.

They played a few songs. It was almost 1:00 a.m.--Central Time, folks. My MIL, in her best Ms. Runnels County 1965 Miss Congeniality voice, turns to John and says, “Now are you gonna play that Amy Walker song?”

First he played a bit of an intro that I recognized, and then he played his heart out. I was sitting directly to his right, and his right knee rested on my left knee while he played the song that completely captures the mood of my novel, the one with all the damn conflict and the remeet cute.

So I was gonna stop blogging here and did for a while because my cell phone rang. I recognized the caller immediately--an acoustic memory. It was the man I had the meet cute with at A Southern Season in Chapel Hill a few weeks back. He’s writing a story about GI’s in Paris that don’t want to go directly home after Vietnam. Tonight he spoke of meeting Jason Robards, Jr. in New York.

As for my cute meet with John Carden: I think it’s charming when a man orders a Campari at noon and tells me that it’s my fault. That’s what John Carden did the day we met. He began drinking early and blamed it on me. He also regaled me with a story of being in a café in Paris and having his female companion point out that Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at the table next to theirs. “Say something to him,” his companion implored.

Before John could think of anything, Sartre said, in perfect English, “Do you have the time?”

John gave him the time of day and then Sartre said, “Time for me to go.”

And now, it is time for me to go.

I’ll leave you with the words of Robert Mitchum (remember, he was in the movie that scared the piss out of us in 1991), as uttered on the Johnny Carson Show, as told to me by John Carden, tonight on the phone, just before he invited me to his house in Ireland this summer: “There’s no one around that knows how to make movies anymore.”

This Is My Brain on Tobacco

When we were kids, we sat around on Saturdays, eating our cinnamon rolls from a tin and watching cartoons like Conjunction Junction. Now there’s an acoustic memory!

But while we were learning how to hook clauses together, some very evil people were plotting to hook us on cigarettes. Some good guys tried to save us with a few songs. I’ll never forget the jingle: “You mind very much if they smoke—yeah, yeah, don’t smoke.”

My generation knew of the carcinogenicity of cigarettes because starting in 1984, four labels were penned to let the Surgeon General warn us about smoking on our packs of cigarettes. This was twenty years after the Surgeon General issued a 387-page report on the health risks that attend smoking.

But how were we supposed to stay off the sticks with the clever ad campaigns and the tobacco companies’ use of nicotine to addict smokers?

We now know that the tobacco fields were the killing fields and that the rugged ad cowboy with the cigarette was more likely to ride a wheelchair than a horse. Much has been done in the fight against the tobacco industry, but have we really come a long way?

How is it possible that the tobacco companies can continue to manipulate the nicotine in cigarettes to addict smokers?

Now, I’m sure you know that the chemicals in cigarettes and smokeless tobacco cause cancer; nicotine addicts you to them.

What if happybabyo’s cereal switched to a sugar that was more addicting but was known to cause childhood leukemia? And what if there were a warning label that even said so on the box? WWFDAD? What would the FDA do? Would it even matter? Who would buy the product?

The FDA has let us down. At least the Supreme Court is getting its act together.

Gather round little children and Aunt Heather will tell you a story. Native Americans smoked. The Jamestown settlers grew tobacco for cash and this increased the need for slave trade. In 1865 a prominent Carolina family named Duke founded the American Tobacco Company. And it was pretty much downhill from there. Of all the dirty deeds done, one of the more heinous is the racial profiling of consumers. They increased levels of tar in cigarette brands marketed to African Americans.

When I pick up my daughter from high school, there’s a group of her classmates just across the property line at the town bus stop, and they are smoking cigarettes. Who is looking out for them? I’m trying. Last year I gave four tobacco ed lectures at that school. I can’t tell you how many “word up”’s those kids gave me. While it was much more fun to visit schools than it was to sit in my office and diagnose lung cancer, it’s disheartening to see those kids still smoking. But look what I’m up against: It takes four cigarettes to addict a teenager’s brain to nicotine.

Imagine there’s no smoking. It’s not easy to do. How are we going to get there?

We can educate our children. Thanks to Troy Campbell for agreeing to work with me on a cartoon infomercial for kids (we need some more brains on tobacco to help us with the project, by the way). We can provide assistance to folks trying to quit. If you live in the Chapel Hill area, Dr. Adam Goldstein says that his clinic at UNC offers help to smokers “regardless of their financial ability.” But until we stop making the products available, in their addictive form, the work has just begun.

When I was a student, I worked as a temp at the corporate headquarters of a tobacco company. I actually typed an in-house document that said, in response to the findings that substances X and Y have been found to be dangerous [did it say carcinogenic--doesn't matter], we will continue to use them in our products. And how could they have been so brazen as to let an outsider have access to such a damning document?

So let me say this again, much has been done in the fight against the tobacco industry, but have we really come a long way?

My friend Jocelyn Godfrey is the editor of Attitude Digest and she interviewed Maya Angelou this morning. The word on Joce’s Facebook page is that Maya says protest, don’t whine. Forgive me Maya, I’m posting a 12-step plan with some undercurrents of whining. But I’m not really whining--I’m fuming!

Before I turn my list over to you, why don’t you get good and mad, too? If you’re down with Obama’s plans for change, check out this website and then scroll to the bottom of the page and see who's funding it.

How about we dance the 12-step?

1. Quit treating corporate America like God. From the Enrons to the Peanut Corporation of America to the tobacco industry—how many times have we seen it play out—corporate America doesn’t always take the consumer’s best interest into account. Let’s not put their best interest first when we use our brains on the tobacco issue.

2. All US production of cigarette, dip, etc. etc, must cease by the year 2012.

3. Because I don’t think we have the chutzpah to carry out #2, how about, smokers, after the year 2020, pay a higher income tax. This gives smokers eight years of incentive to quit.

4. Cigarette corporations will fund all nicotine-containing smoking cessation products and the advertising for them.

5. Homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages will sue the tobacco companies for their money back. A 40-year-old woman who smoked a pack a day would get back enough to pay off a house.

6. Executive pay for cigarette companies will be limited to three colonoscopies a year.

7. State medical boards will set up task forces to assess their states' tobacco problem and to make recommendations more serious than the ones proposed in this list. Look at the impact of the North Carolina medical board on capital punishment.

8. Increase the cigarette tax. In North Carolina I pay 48.6 cents per gallon for gasoline; the tax on a pack of cigarettes in my state is 35 cents.

9. School systems that do not mandate tobacco-free campuses will receive fewer federal dollars for education.

10. The Motion Picture Association of America will rate all movies with smoking "X."

11. Jim Lehrer will take a moment of silence at the end of the Newshour each night for the cigarette smokers that died from cigarette-induced illness that day. Wait, that will take more than an hour.

12. We shall work tirelessly until we overcome. If we couldn’t do it for ourselves, let’s do it for our kids.

Yes, I know I’m fuming, but this is the “toned down” version of today’s blog.

Twenty-eight Things I'm Not

Been thinking about stuff I wanted to do and why I didn't do it.

I thought about becoming:

1.) A cloistered nun. Since the Carmelite “factory” was across the street from Kaelin’s on Newburg Road, where my parents took me for fried chicken, I originally wanted to become a nun. I would have made passionate love to the grocery delivery man and gotten kicked out of the order.

2.) An actress. My dad said I would get hooked on drugs. Besides, I didn’t want a director telling me what to do. I’d so be having Nancy Braun do my hair in LA, though.

3.) A stripper. I confess to this vocational interest in the novel. I would have liked the applause. The tips. Getting paid to dance, now that works. I’m not much of a night owl though and don’t like drugs. Or prostitution—too much quid pro quo. Note: I do not have a pole in my house. Raven does some amateur stripping in the manuscript for a special audience.

4.) A geriatrician. Said this is what I wanted to be when I interviewed for med school. Always dug old folks. But when pathology came along, I just got too into the visual, the patterns, and the colors at the microscope.

5.) An art historian. Like I said, I’m into visuals. Took two semesters of art history in college and still enjoy a day at the museum almost more than anything else. I never looked into it enough. Pardon the pun. Bought some art in Houston.

6.) A jingle writer at an ad agency. I used to write jingles for products when I was a kid. “Lite Beer, is the right beer, drink the right beer, to be light.” Advertising would have played to my creative talents and I’m sorry I didn’t explore it. Most of my friends in Chapel Hill are either old or in advertising.

7.) A rock guitarist. I’m probably never gonna forgive myself for not living this dream. I like to perform, and it would have been fun to make music and money at the same time. Not great for a family-oriented chick though. And I like to sleep at night.

8.) Pro cheerleader. I would have choreographed the routines and would have liked to have gotten to know Paula Abdul, but I had a fear of going under the knife for the enhancements.

9.) A newspaper editor. I had my own newspaper and typewriter in my basement when I was a kid. Mom let me cut school to meet my deadlines. And there I was, so close to the Binghams in Louisville. This may be a dying industry though.

10.) A forensic pathologist. I loved the show Quincy and I saw Jack Klugman at the track once. I guess I came pretty close to this job. As a pathology resident I really enjoyed working at the state medical examiner's office with Dr. George Nichols and Dr. Tracy Corey. After I had kids though, I didn’t like thinking about what a crime-laden world we live in. And unless there are other fun people in the morgue, I hate awfultopsies.

11.) Anything in a big city. I like the hustle and bustle of a big city. When I lived in Boston for a month in ‘93, it was hard to return to slowdown Kentucky.

12.) A writer. Dr. Hazelrigg tried to talk me into a graduate degree in English at Yale. I often think about that path not taken.

13.) A teacher. Well, I was a teacher at the med school, and because I like to perform, lecturing to one hundred people in an auditorium is pretty darn fun. I still lecture to students on rare occasion for the day job so this interest is fulfilled. At UT I got voted best lecturer and was asked out by students who brought “questions” to my office.

14.) A book agent. Not a bookie, that was my grandfather. Yes, if anyone wants to start agenting books to publishers, then give me a call and we can make a go at it. Let’s move to Manhattan, too.

15.) A detective/international espionage. With my pathology background I could have been Dana Scully. Nonetheless, I’m twisted enough without getting messed up by intel. My writing critique group in Raleigh included a former CIA agent and a retired FBI’er.

16.) A ballerina. This is another one that I wish I had done. Dancing. Music. Love. Applause. One day when I was five, my dance teacher in Buechel told me to sit Indian style and she pressed my knees down to the floor. Told mom I didn’t want to go back and no questions were asked. My torso to leg ratio is a bit off for this job, seriously.

17.) Music scout for Sony Records. Yeah, I could have done this. I think I have a knack for picking/predicting music talent. But the times, they are a changing, right?

18.) A writer for a TV show like Fringe or 24. I’m so there. Make the connection for me and it’s a done deal. When I was five, a writer for The Guiding Light visited a lady in our neighborhood, and I met her.

19.) Any bloody blokette living in the Huntingdon in Houston who has the doorman walk the dog.

20.) A Houston socialite. I like parties, Neiman's and museums. My dad wasn’t an oilman and I didn’t marry for money so I’ve been disqualified by fate and my actions. But oh, I could so hang with JoAnne Herring. I’d have a private jet for the Keeneland meets.

21.) Wind surfer. Buff bods in the water, here I come! I navigated the wind for a while my first year on faculty at UT. I joined the Galveston Bay Windsurfing Association. My instructor, Joe the Engineer, wanted “this for that” though. The president called me and said he had a thing for me. I became uncomfortable, but it was awesome while it lasted. Now that my Purkinje cells have decreased in number, it's challenging enough just to stand on one leg to shave the other in the shower.

22.) An opera singer. I like nice watches and the book Bel Canto. Do I qualify?

23.) A vintner in Cali. Yeah. I loved Falcon Crest.

24.) An importer of antiques from the south of France. My dear friend Eric Yvon is from Avignon, and we actually talked about doing this before he became a rocket scientist and before Americans wanted to change the words for French fries.

25.) An olive farmer in Italy. My Italian is getting rusty but my Mediterranean blood needs sun. Bab Corneo, are you in?

26.) Music writer for No Depression. Move over David Menconi—I want to cover the Triangle. I met Peter Blackstock in The Regulator and gave my signed copy to Walter Tragert when he played a party at the house in Austin.

27.) A member of LBJ’s cabinet. I just would have liked to have hung with Jack Valenti. Props to Troy Campbell for enlightening me in Austin Java one day about this one.

28.) A 60s groupie. Here I’m thinking Anita Pallenberg would have been my mentor. I was born in the wrong decade. Did you know the OED breaks groupies down into two types? My knowledge of the etiology of cervical dysplasia precludes me from becoming that type.

A Bird Named Rufus

Two days ago I stood in my driveway in North Carolina and heard a familiar lilt —“tee hee hee hee hee.” Now that’s a sign of spring.

It’s a sunny day and I’ll just let the rays warm my keyboard while I tell you a story about a bird. Pull up a chair and make yourself at home.

Two days ago I heard the familiar lilt of my favorite bird—“tee hee hee hee hee.”

Time was when I wandered around on my grandfather’s retirement farm in Meade County, Kentucky, looking for the bird that made that sound. Before I became a stuck-up city girl, my main pastime was running loose, face slathered with clay, like nature girl. I’d check the size of the tadpoles in the pond. I’d look for arrowheads. I’d beg my grandfather to dig up the Indian burial ground. When he said no, I’d sulk off on my lone mission to find a bird that didn’t want to be seen.

Every day it was the same drill. Wait for the bird’s trill and then try to spot it.

The bird became my Holy Grail.

No matter how fast I ran, no matter how secret my perch, it eluded me. There were very tall deciduous trees on the farm, and the bird seemed to like the interface between the trees and the field. I just knew I wasn’t big enough to spot the bird. But even with a pair of hand-me-down binoculars from my dad, who was no doubt at the track on the days that I was at the farm, the “tee hee hee hee hee” became a taunt: You’ll never find me—tee hee.

My grandfather had a book on his shelf called American Birds, but even that resource didn't help. In hindsight, my method was flawed. I was trying to match an acoustic memory to a set of photographs. It was no use.

Years passed. My grandfather passed. While my life was flying past, I flew over his farm on a flight to Houston for my interview at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. As the plane followed the western course of the Ohio and then the southern course of the Mississippi, I thought about the bird, but briefly. The bird, it seemed, had won.

While I was spending all my time learning the histologic patterns that tumors make, my daughter, the lone child of two doctors, was spending lots of time in her room with her books.

I didn’t have much time to read to her my year at Anderson. I was a pathologist in a rigorous fellowship program and the wife of a surgeon. Put those two things together and it comes up just short of single parenting. So, I limited our reading to one book a night at bedtime. She was starved for attention and had figured out that the more pages in the book, the longer mom would have to read. Of course, I compensated by skipping tracts of paragraphs, which didn’t work for long because she had a sharp memory and would pipe up when I left something out.

I still recall the night that I asked her what book we should read, and she handed me the book on backyard birds. All fifty-nine pages. Her smile said, “Gotcha.”

While I read to her I noticed a couple things. As a testament to her loneliness and her budding obsessive-compulsive disorder, she had circled the illustration of every bird in the book. Some she circled in purple crayon, some in orange crayon, and some in black ink. By the time I got to the last page, I was mentally drained and didn’t think much about the description of a brush bird that says “drink your tea.”

After a divorce, a second marriage, a second child, the death of a second parent, and a move from Texas to North Carolina, I turned to the two things I felt passionate about: writing and parenting. To fill the void when my son left the nest for preschool, I worked on a novel, creating characters to keep me company. I did my best writing at a window that faced my front yard and its bird feeders.

The day I heard the tee hee hee in North Carolina I felt like a miracle had come to pass. I got up from my Mac and stood at the window. There, under a bush, was a rather ordinary looking black bird, with orange markings below his wing. I ran to the bookshelf and pulled down my grandfather’s book. On page 149 I found Pipilo erythrophthalmus, the rufous-sided towhee. The text described a brush bird.

I couldn’t believe it: All those years of looking up in the tops of trees when I should have been looking down in the brush.

Have you ever looked in the wrong place for something? It’s like forcing an agenda.

The rufous-sided towhee came to be written into the novel, where the quest to spot him is a metaphor for looking high when you should be looking low.

At my house in Carolina you can hear the rufous-sided towhee from February to September. Each time I hear him I’m transported back to Kentucky and my grandfather’s twenty acres that meant so much to me before I got stuck-up.

A Moment of Silence

A moment of silence on the blog today.

I just learned that Eric Danheim's wife, Betsy, died on January 30, 2009.

I recall the day that I bought my case from Eric that he said he was moving to Seattle with his wife.

For more info, see:
http://www.continentalclub.com/Austin.html

Acoustic History

Sister Karen taught me how to play guitar in the second grade, and I was playing on the altar in church back in the 1970’s when Mass was a little folky. I was a student at St. Athanasius School.

Athanasius was an Egyptian bishop who was exiled by the Byzantine Empire. Some of his views about the Trinity were ahead of their time.

My Greek friend, Elaine Jerome (whose name means “holy memory”), thinks it’s cool that I went to a school named after a Greco-Roman saint.

I had a small guitar back then. No telling where it is today.

I grew up in a string family if you’ll indulge me by allowing my extension to the Farmer family. My mom’s dad, George Farmer, played the ukulele. I wish I could remember all the songs he sang, but he covered “Up on the Housetop” like it was nobody’s business. My uncle, Jim, who served in Vietnam, played guitar. Seems like he and his friend Paul played Beatles.

I was pretty into the Beatles at age five. I remember being disappointed the day my mom told me that each time we heard them on WHAS radio, they weren’t downtown in the station at that moment.

My mom didn’t play guitar, but she was a soprano and used to sing weddings back in the day. My father and his family were not musically inclined.

In church I played songs like “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” but the first song Sr. Karen taught me was “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley.” Sr. Karen had long red hair and blue eyes. She was one of the nice nuns. I suppose she influenced my early desire to become a nun. And a guitarist.

Playing guitar in church might not sound like fun to you, but I had a blast. One day I decided to do my best Charlie Watts impression on the altar. Yes, I know he played drums, but the idea was just to stay “cool” during my performance. Trouble is, my mom was in the church that day. Boy, was she mad when I got home! But I was hooked on performing. In grade school I fully intended to become a rock guitarist, just like Keef!

In high school I didn’t play much. Guess I was too busy shaking the pom-poms. They’re percussion instruments, right? The dream was dying.

Lynnell and I played a bit freshman year at Centre.

It wasn’t until the fellowship days at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center that I bought a Yamaha at Guitar Gallery on Richmond. I bought my case from in Rockin’ Robin on Shepherd from Eric Danheim of the Hollisters.

My best playing was always with my friend, Gregg Barré, who sat next to me in the fellow’s room in surgical pathology. Gregg was straight up from the bayou. We covered Toni Price (who covered Gwil Owen) and Neil Young. I wrote a song called “Alone in My Room, Again,” which Gregg later changed to “A Bone in My Nose, Again.” You had to be there.

Gregg (see photo above) was an altar child at a Catholic church when he was a kid.

Gregg’s got more guitars than I do, but don’t bring that up with his wife, Barrow. I’ve got two guitars now. The Houston Yamaha and a Telecaster I got one year for Mother’s Day. Gotta have that twang. Ted of the band Downtown Senate takes care of my guitars at the Music Loft of Carrboro.

When I plugged in I got a really super cool instructor, Dan Bergstralh. He’s got some UT-Austin School of Music roots in him. Plus some other genetic codes that couldn’t come from his dad. Unless his dad has the blues.

Dan seems to like Louisville boy Dave Grissom as much as I do.

Dan also taught my daughter to play before he moved to Cambridge for a Marshall fellowship.
He visited us for a living room jam session on his last trip to the States.

My guitar playing days aren’t quite the same since I injured my left second finger a few years ago. It hurts to play, but barre chords are a snap. The finger doesn’t want to bend, anyway. The hand surgeon in Chapel Hill says I have reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Dr. Bynum is pretty sympathetic, too, cause he plays guitar.

I don’t even play regular these days. If you pressed me to play something now it would likely be Lucinda Williams’ “Drunken Angel” or Tift Merritt’s “Virginia.”

My daughter rocks though, and it’s good to have the sound of those strings in the house again. It’s all about Foo with Ella. She’s a bit taken with Dave Grohl at the moment. (I found out this New Year's Eve that my friend Jessica once went to a tupperware party with Dave.)

I think guitarists are pretty cool, no? So it’s not hard to see why the protagonist in my novel manuscript would fall for a guitarist.

“I have a friend, she’s fallen for a guitarist.” Right.

So there’s a story behind the story. But I’m not talking about that.

Soul Mate

It was First Night® Austin, and I was sitting on the street corner waiting for the parade to begin when this couple walked past. What a coincidence! Four hours earlier they sat at the table next to mine in Noodle-Ism: the blind man and his soul mate who was wearing a pink tulle skirt.

What if we traded out the word marry and replaced it with the phrase soul mating? Would there be greater happiness in marriage if in addition to not entering hastily into the union, we were also reminded to choose the best soul mate?

Anam cara is the Celtic version of soul friend. I had the pleasure of reading up on the topic while writing the novel manuscript.

I suppose that agreeing to the existence of soul mates first requires a belief in the soul. What is a soul?

Lately I’ve been researching the literature on embryonic stem cell research, and I decided to revisit a futuristic novel. My son overheard me listening to a tape of Brave New World, at the point where there is a tour of the embryo lab. Grasping that babies were being made in test tubes, he asked, “They wouldn’t have a soul, would they?”

This gave me pause to reflect because I’ve never discussed the topic of a soul with my son. Then again, when my father died I may have had that discussion with my son, the memory of which might be frozen in grief.

“Offer it up for the poor souls.” That’s what my devout grandma used to say when I felt sick, and that’s what she said she was doing when her joints ached.

The concept of a soul gets implanted into our mind at an early age. And then what?

Maybe we think about it again when we read Dante. Maybe we hear about it in church. How many of us consider it when we mate? Fewer than the number that consider astrological compatibility, no doubt.

What of those unions begotten of the soul mate? Can those couples maintain that level of intimacy past a disagreement or an infidelity, or even ten arguments over who is going to take out the trash. Or do they eventually go off in search of the next soul mate if they are so keen on that level of intensity in their relationships?

“A room without a rug is like a kiss without a hug.” That’s how I knew that my daughter could read. We were driving toward Westheimer Avenue in Houston and she read the logo on the rug shop window. When people wed, do they have a happier union if it is with a soul mate? Or is the marriage without the soul mate as cold as winter, eventually?

Here’s what singer-songwriter Darden Smith has to say about staying satisfied.

People get all kinds of advice on mating: when to do it and with whom. Some of it is funny. Some of it is welcome, but most of it is not.

In “Acoustic Memory” Raven is at that mating point in her life. Raven has a list of no-cringe rules for dating. Her best friend has some uptight advice about men to avoid. And her great-aunt stands at the ready with an armamentarium of intellectual advice. And then, against the odds, something magic happens!

Itchycoo Park

Do you ever have that down and out longing for a place or person from the past? That’s called hieraeth /he-rye-th/ if we’re keeping it Celtic.

Shortly after deciding that there would be Celtic magic in the novel manuscript, I crossed paths with Jocelyn Godfrey in Chapel Hill. Jocelyn mentioned her interest in creative writing and her love of Wales. I knew we would become friends. In the summer of 2005 I borrowed a book from Jocelyn about hieraeth.

Hieraeth is great material for artists. Stephen Foster's diet must have been high in hieraeth. Every Derby Day "My Old Kentucky Home" brought a tear to my dad’s eye, even before my mother died. Now that I’ve moved from Kentucky, it seems to have the same effect on me.

Songs can be a poultice for hieraeth. I wouldn’t say a cure because songs can make the longing more poignant.

If a song could take you back, where would you go?

If a song could take you back to someone, would you follow that song down?

Songs might just be a portal or at the very least that thin place in our memory where our souls can pass through to our past.

The Jayhawks song “Crowded in the Wings,” has been playing in my head all morning, but that’s not quite the same thing (and it’s not at all random because I read in the paper yesterday that Mark Olson and Gary Louris are coming to town next week). What I really mean is the phenomenon of hearing a song and being transported back to one of the days you would have heard it regularly.

Steam’s version of “Na Na Na Na” takes me back to St. X -Trinity football games the same way the song “We Will Rock You” does. “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground” takes me back to my first and only job choreographing with a set of pom poms. “Tainted Love,” the summer after I graduated high school. John Anderson’s, “Just a Swingin,’” the Phi Delt house at Centre. “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” med school. “Follow You Down,” driving around in rental cars in cities like Phoenix, Nashville, and Birmingham to interview for my first big job. “You’re Still Standin’ There,” the one that wouldn’t go away until he moved three time zones away.

Songs are time machines that have the power to take us to places and people we’ve left behind. The song that takes me back to sitting on my mother’s lap is “Itchycoo Park.” The year was 1968 and I was attending preschool on Bardstown Road, across the street from Assumption High School. Each day before school, I would sit on my mother’s lap and she would scratch my back. That part of our day was called Itchycoo Park.

Fast forward ahead to maybe 2005. I’m talking to a member of the Bump Band in the parking lot of the Saxon Pub, and I ask him why Ian McLagan never plays “Itchycoo Park.” He tells me that Ian doesn’t like to rehash his Small Faces drug days.

Then a year later I’m driving my daughter to her confirmation class at Christ United Methodist Church and hear an NPR interview with Ian. He says the song is so beautiful that he must record it again. That summer he played the song at the Lucky Lounge. I got to thank Ian and tell him what the song means to me now that my mother is gone.

If a song could take you back, where would you go?

If a song could take you back to someone, would you follow that song down?

That’s Raven’s conflict in “Acoustic Memory.”