There is a big difference between saying it’s alright to feel bad sometimes, and that it’s fun to be miserable. Rock musicians, yeah, I’m looking at you.
Life is a big serious thing, and it’s not always a party. Sometimes it is a party, but it’s a wake. Sometimes you feel like sharing what’s weighing on your heart with others. You can make something nebulous to carry your feelings, if you know what you’re doing. Any artist knows the give and go. A used car salesman knows only the bait and switch.
Life is not a phone book you read. It’s a fuzzy image projected on a crumbly wall with a guttering candle. People with my name, people with my face, people with my mind call out to me from the heavens and the grave alike. Their images flicker and dance. You play the fills.
I visited my friend Steve last night. A handful of my friends were there.
We talked of business, as we do some together. Steve has grown children, who are at home from college for the summer. They work. Like men, not boys. In addition to daytime work, the oldest and his friends are performing at a nightspot near here tonight. I’ve written about them here before. They’re really good now. They invited me to come.
It seemed like a kind of dreamworld they inhabited. I knew if from the past, but it’s grown indistinct with the passage of time. It was Friday night, and their labors were done, and my friends were going out to a nightspot in a gang. For fun.
I don’t do that. I was a musician, for money, for a long time. I don’t really know how to enjoy myself in a nightclub anymore. I never know how to act “facing the opposite way,” as we used to call it. And besides, I am married with children, one small, and my wife and me rarely do anything without at least one child in tow.
But there’s more. My business is not like most others. I don’t commute. There is no cubicle. No timeclock. There are no stacks of forms outside the HR department. There is no quitting time. I don’t own a watch. What difference does it make what time it is? I’ll be called to meals. That’s it.
If you examine my situation, it’s very much like a traditional wife’s life. There are large exertions necessary from time to time, but also a kind of minimum level on duty at all times. You are never done. My wife never even sleeps, really. If the children murmur down the hall she hears it and goes. It is what it is.
I’ve had more than one regular job. I know what it’s like to be done on Friday and look only for amusements. It’s a dim memory.
But sometimes I’m the lady, toiling out in the landscape, far from the centers of commerce and culture, hungry for a hint of the world at large; not the door to door salesman.
My boy plays the trombone in the school band. He was offered private lessons for the summer, with an eye towards getting him into the junior high bands that require an audition. They cost too much, so we passed. A sort of scholarship appeared, and he was selected to receive it. My wife suspects that they were afraid he’d lose interest over the summer, and they realized their loss if the polite, cooperative trombone player disappeared. If he played the usual instruments, saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, he’d never have had a sniff of it. Trombone players are scarce.
None so scarce as these, though.
Or perhaps you’d like something a little more sedate. Chet Atkins:
While we were out walking on Sunday in Bristol, Rhode Island, this jarring tableaux caught my eye. That is my childhood toy. It is in an antique shop.
It’s unlikely that it’s the actual article, of course; but even that’s not impossible. I grew up a few dozen miles from there. But I hadn’t thought about that thing for forty years, and then there it was in all its glory.
We didn’t have a lot of money. Then again, people with a lot of money didn’t have a lot of stuff forty years ago, either. So any toy like that seemed precious. But its precious nature is different than today’s. Being precious meant that you used it all the time, not that you kept it in the box and displayed it like people do with so many things now. I put baseball cards that would pay the mortgage on my house into the spokes of my bicycle to make that satisfying brrrrrrt sound. I don’t regret it one bit. Since everyone collects everything now, it’s all worthless. There’s next to nothing in 99% of antiques shops I’d call an antique. It’s just stuff old enough to be left on the curb once.
I spent countless hours in the little patch of dirt outside my door, assembling my own cogent universe out of a riot of disparate objects. That thing there, the little enameled mild steel truck, is invested with the anima of a million boisterous pushes and gentle touches.
If I was rich, I’d buy it. If I was really rich, I’d play with it.
Month: July 2007
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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