Me and my guitar,
Always in the same mood;
I am mostly flesh and bones,
And he is mostly wood.
Never does grow impatient
For the changes I don’t know, no;
If he can’t go to heaven,
Maybe I don’t want to go, no…
— James Taylor
As many of you know, I am a musician. I am an amateur, to be sure, and not as proficient or dedicated as I was in my younger days, but I’m still enthusiastic about my music and deeply attached to my guitars.
What’s the difference between now and my youth? Why was I “more proficient and dedicated” then? Well, in part, back then music was something I did instead of course work. It was a welcome distraction, a great way to procrastinate, and one of my favorite things to do when high. (Hey, you asked….) These days, I have other distractions and I am far more devoted to my writing than I ever was to school work.
More to the point, though, back in the day, I used to perform regularly. Along with my dear, dear friends Alan Goldberg and Amy Halliday, I was in a band called Free Samples. Three voices, two guitars. Acoustic rock — CSN, Beatles, Paul Simon/Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Pousette-Dart, etc. We performed several times a semester, usually at the campus coffee house, but also at special events during which we shared the evening with other acoustic bands.
I loved performing. Even more, I loved rehearsing and preparing for gigs with Alan and Amy. Making music with the two of them defined my years at Brown. I enjoyed my college years (mostly) and made many of my most enduring friendships in those years. I learned a lot, did well academically, grew up (some — I still had plenty of growing up to do post-college). But my fondest memories, my happiest moments, revolved around Free Samples.
After college, we three went in different directions. Alan and Amy were both in the D.C. area for a short while, and while there they continued to perform together on a regular basis. I remained in Providence and performed there a few times before starting graduate school out in California. I performed once or twice in the Bay Area, but my studies consumed most of my time. And then I met Nancy, and life took me in other directions. Amy continues to sing with a church group. And Alan has become a regular performer in the Albany, New York area as the leader of a band called Innocent Bystanders. He has made himself into an incredibly accomplished musician and performer.
Me? I have played regularly over the intervening years, but pretty much only for myself and my family. Aside from a fun and memorable guest appearance with Alan and his band one night some eight or so years ago, I haven’t performed publicly in a long, long time.
Why am I sharing all of this with you now?
Next week, I will be out in Oregon visiting another couple of dear friends from college — mutual friends of Alan and mine. Alan will be there as well, and over the weekend we will be performing music. Alan’s younger son, Dan, a terrific keyboard player and singer, will be joining us. This will be, as I said, my first public performance in years, and only my second since, well, the early 1990s.
Nervous? Why, yes. Yes, I am.
As I made clear earlier, I am not the player or singer I used to be, mostly because I don’t work at it as I once did. And so I’m afraid I’ll sound bad. Alan and Dan have played together a lot over the past several years, including live performances and online concerts they gave during the pandemic. They sound great as a twosome and I don’t want to ruin that. They have terrific on-stage rapport, just as Alan and I did back when we were young. I don’t want to get in the way of that, either. And I have overwhelmingly positive memories of my performing days. I don’t want to sully those recollections with a performance now that is subpar. I don’t want to embarrass myself.
Put another way, I can think of a hundred reasons why this might be a bad idea.
At the same time, though, I’m also excited about the possibilities. Audiences, as Alan has reminded me again and again when I express my doubts to him, tend to be kind, generous, and forgiving. They aren’t there to point and laugh and denigrate. They’re there to have fun, to enjoy good music, to sing along. They don’t care about the occasional botched lyric or missed chord. Neither do Alan and Dan. The insecurities are all in my head, rooted in my own self-doubt. So the moment I get beyond them, I will be free to savor the experience, to bask in the musical camaraderie, to rediscover something that once meant the world to me, something I have missed terribly for all these years.
I’m trying my hardest to build my anticipation around that vision, that outcome. Because if all goes well, this could be a magical event.
Have a great week.
We had lived together for two years before our wedding, and we were both in our late twenties. We had known almost from the day we started dating that we would spend the rest of our lives together, and by the time that weekend rolled around, we felt ready for the responsibilities and challenges of marriage. And we were. And still, we had no idea.
The clichés are true. Of course marriage is about love, about passion, and — even more — about friendship. But it is also about compromise, about joining two lives and finding the balance necessary to make certain that each of those lives feels complete and fulfilling, even as together we build a third life that belongs to both of us. It is a complicated undertaking. And while love and passion are great, there are times when they feel elusive. The kids are sick and you both have work deadlines and the shopping needs to get done. Or one job is more demanding than usual and it’s all you both can do just to get one kid to soccer practice and the other to ballet while also taking care of dinner and arranging the babysitter for the Friday event in town. Work, balance, compromise, sacrifice — sometimes, it feels like that’s all there is. Those early days of the romance, when everything was laughter and love and sex and adventure, seem so very, very distant.
2. Have faith. I’m not talking about religious faith here (though if that’s your thing, great). I mean faith in each other and in what you share. That belief in the fundamental power of our bond has gotten us past some really hard times. The love might not always be palpable, but we KNOW it’s there, and that certainty gets us through.
As I say, if you know me, you probably don’t find this surprising. I have spoken and written about my love of the Grateful Dead, my experiences shivering outside on cold nights, in the dark of Providence, Rhode Island winters, waiting at the Providence Civic Center for Dead tickets to go on sale. People don’t do that unless they have already done damage to their prefrontal cortex. I could tell additional stories. It is possible that I (and select others) was (were) high during at least one musical performance that we gave while in college. I might remember playing Cat Stevens’s hit “Wild World” and literally watching my digital dexterity degrade over the course of the song.
In the last year, I have written two pieces of original short fiction. That’s it. I haven’t written a novel since I finished The Chalice War: Sword, late in 2022. I have recently started work on a tie-in project (I can’t really say more than that, right now), a novel. It is coming slowly, and because I am essentially playing in someone else’s world, the emotions I’ll be mining are somewhat removed from my own. I spent the first half of last year doing a bunch of editing, for myself and for others, figuring that when those projects were through, I would dive into a new book of my own.
At this point, the celebrations of her life are over. Guests from out of town have left. Erin has gone back home. Nancy is starting to work again, and I am gearing up to do the same. We are, I suppose, stepping back into “normal” life. Except there is nothing normal about it, and in ways that truly matter, in ways that will remain with us for the rest of our lives, it will never really be normal at all, ever again.
The numbness, though — that bothers me. I want to feel. I want to weep for my child or laugh at a golden memory. I want to feel pain and love and loss and connection, because those keep my vision of Alex fresh and present. Numbness threatens oblivion. Numbness makes the loss seem complete, irretrievable — and that I don’t want. Not ever. Better to cry every day for the rest of my life than lose my hold on these emotions.
This is the post I never wanted to write. The one I dreaded, the one that was, not so long ago, unthinkable, and, more recently, heartrendingly inevitable.