Serious blustery day out there... driving home from my bus run this morning I had to brave a couple of wide lakes in the street. Now it just pounds down... Brooks run to either side of our property, draining -- or trying to drain -- the swampy ground just up the hill from us. It's an aquifer protection zone -- there must be water rising up here somewhere. And when the sky adds all of this to the mix we get a heavy rushing of streams for days.
I'm pulling together a course for this winter -- I'll be teaching at the University of Maine at Augusta: Songwriting. Thinking of all the great material that has helped me so much over the past few years. Pat Pattison, Rikky Rooksby, Mary Oliver. Coming up with a textbook list... There's such great material out there!
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
New Year's Resolution
Couldn't sleep last night, so I dug around the bedroom looking for a book that might help slow down my head. I got a Mary Oliver for Christmas -- "The Truro Bear and Other Adventures" which is a selection of old poems and prose with some new material. There was very little left to finish, and I moved from that to Seamus Heaney. It's been a long time since I've read him. Wonderful to read the two of them back to back.
They both write poetry grounded very much in experience. Something like Frost. Full of detail. Hyper-real. Mary Oliver always makes me want to go to the ocean. Seamus Heaney makes me think of history and home. Mary Oliver is all epiphany and wonder and gratitude. Heaney is weatherbeaten, dirt-under-the-fingernails, blue-collar. Oliver is goldenrod and owls and clear brooks. Heaney is potatoes and cast iron stoves and callused hands.
They both take me back to my childhood. Watching my father slowly fill the dooryard up with chopped wood. The impossible lightness of a swinging stall door. The warmth of hay. The cold of a dog's nose. Rusting pails and mossy stone walls and cinnamon spicey flowers. The angry bite of a wood stove on a lazy hand. The mysteries of insects, the unpredictability of cats, the strangeness of a goat's eyes, the mute dullness of a sheep.
It makes me sad for my own kids, that they don't have that kind of a playground, that forty-acre chemistry set and clubhouse. I wonder all the time what they'll remember of their own childhood. I know that some of my own strongest memories are of single vanishing moments. It's not the average of the experience that is burned into the mind, but the extremes. Not the rules, but the exceptions.
Here's to a year of exceptional exceptions.
They both write poetry grounded very much in experience. Something like Frost. Full of detail. Hyper-real. Mary Oliver always makes me want to go to the ocean. Seamus Heaney makes me think of history and home. Mary Oliver is all epiphany and wonder and gratitude. Heaney is weatherbeaten, dirt-under-the-fingernails, blue-collar. Oliver is goldenrod and owls and clear brooks. Heaney is potatoes and cast iron stoves and callused hands.
They both take me back to my childhood. Watching my father slowly fill the dooryard up with chopped wood. The impossible lightness of a swinging stall door. The warmth of hay. The cold of a dog's nose. Rusting pails and mossy stone walls and cinnamon spicey flowers. The angry bite of a wood stove on a lazy hand. The mysteries of insects, the unpredictability of cats, the strangeness of a goat's eyes, the mute dullness of a sheep.
It makes me sad for my own kids, that they don't have that kind of a playground, that forty-acre chemistry set and clubhouse. I wonder all the time what they'll remember of their own childhood. I know that some of my own strongest memories are of single vanishing moments. It's not the average of the experience that is burned into the mind, but the extremes. Not the rules, but the exceptions.
Here's to a year of exceptional exceptions.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Two tramps in snow time
The snow lays itself gently on branches like a Bob Ross painting, dabbed on with the gentlest knife-edge. My cheeks are hot and cold from walking down to the bus with Eleanor. We timed it perfectly again, just a hundred feet past the corner and in view of the stop sign as Ted pulled up in bus 43 to pick her up where Durham and Moody Road meet.
They've replaced the street sign again – a month or two back it disappeared. Gemma was the first to notice: “Where Moody Road?” And it was indeed gone as a loose tooth, with no money under the pillow next morning. They brought the stop sign back first, and a few weeks later, the street sign atop it “Moody Rd.” I suppose someone decided it would make a nice wall hanging: I'd say for a temperamental spouse, but there are enough Moodys around these parts that it may just be a vanity plate for someone's driveway.
Eleanor didn't want to wear her snowsuit again. It bunches up her pants too much, I think. It's uncomfortable. Damn is it heartbreakingly cute to see a five-year old all gussied up like that, though. Fruit-loop blue and red polar fleece scarf and her mom's green hat. Day-glo paisley backpack and pink boots with the white fur around the tops. That's gotta be how Santa's elves look on their way to school.
The delay in getting the suit on got us out the door five minutes late, eating up the five minute safety buffer I set aside. And we had to stop and talk to Ken for a minute. He pulled up in his buckskin-brown pickup, wished Eleanor well at school, said he wasn't sure if he ought to maybe put his plow on. That truck looks naked without the plow. He said the weatherman was asking for this to turn to rain later today – said it'd be in the 50's tomorrow. Ken plows our drive. We actually live in Ken's old house – he and Diane live just down the street. Ken was wearing his “Maine State Lottery” ball cap. They took an awful nice haul in the lottery last year. Sometimes good things do happen to the right people.
He slowed us down just a tad too much, though, and left us hurrying down that last dip and up around the corner. But there was Ted, and El could walk almost straight onto the bus. She waved. We blew kisses and the bus left me alone with the snow.
Not quite alone: two weaving trails, one big and dragging, one smaller and lighter. Here they cross the road to the outside of the curve and the little ones are on the edge. Back again, and the little ones dance for a minute near the middle. They're joined and shepherded back to side again. They meet and scuffle each other up for awhile. Maybe an Indian tracker could tell who led and who followed. Where one passed the other, where one stopped to scoop up a ready-made snowball to throw. Where they stopped to listen to the stream, and see the delicate glass latticework of a higher water frozen in place and hanging from naked brambles.
I replay this as I rewind the walk, retracing our sinusoidal loops and arcs with a dogged vector pointing home. To the top of the rise and the field where skulls of yellow apples still cling to calloused branches. Past the three mailboxes crooked as old fenceposts, wearing little white yarmulkes of snow. The power lines cut the sky with a long swooping slash, a drop-shadowed, black-and-white exclamation point, their clarity increasing as the snow piles, sharpening the black.
And as the snow piles, the two trails go soft. The edges rounding, blurring, fading. At the porch the footsteps are almost anonymous. Circumstantial evidence that, yes, someone passed this way, but nothing more. The symmetry itches. I know it's the kind that you can only make worse by scratching. Inside is a fire to tend. Maybe Marsey will have the kettle on.
They've replaced the street sign again – a month or two back it disappeared. Gemma was the first to notice: “Where Moody Road?” And it was indeed gone as a loose tooth, with no money under the pillow next morning. They brought the stop sign back first, and a few weeks later, the street sign atop it “Moody Rd.” I suppose someone decided it would make a nice wall hanging: I'd say for a temperamental spouse, but there are enough Moodys around these parts that it may just be a vanity plate for someone's driveway.
Eleanor didn't want to wear her snowsuit again. It bunches up her pants too much, I think. It's uncomfortable. Damn is it heartbreakingly cute to see a five-year old all gussied up like that, though. Fruit-loop blue and red polar fleece scarf and her mom's green hat. Day-glo paisley backpack and pink boots with the white fur around the tops. That's gotta be how Santa's elves look on their way to school.
The delay in getting the suit on got us out the door five minutes late, eating up the five minute safety buffer I set aside. And we had to stop and talk to Ken for a minute. He pulled up in his buckskin-brown pickup, wished Eleanor well at school, said he wasn't sure if he ought to maybe put his plow on. That truck looks naked without the plow. He said the weatherman was asking for this to turn to rain later today – said it'd be in the 50's tomorrow. Ken plows our drive. We actually live in Ken's old house – he and Diane live just down the street. Ken was wearing his “Maine State Lottery” ball cap. They took an awful nice haul in the lottery last year. Sometimes good things do happen to the right people.
He slowed us down just a tad too much, though, and left us hurrying down that last dip and up around the corner. But there was Ted, and El could walk almost straight onto the bus. She waved. We blew kisses and the bus left me alone with the snow.
Not quite alone: two weaving trails, one big and dragging, one smaller and lighter. Here they cross the road to the outside of the curve and the little ones are on the edge. Back again, and the little ones dance for a minute near the middle. They're joined and shepherded back to side again. They meet and scuffle each other up for awhile. Maybe an Indian tracker could tell who led and who followed. Where one passed the other, where one stopped to scoop up a ready-made snowball to throw. Where they stopped to listen to the stream, and see the delicate glass latticework of a higher water frozen in place and hanging from naked brambles.
I replay this as I rewind the walk, retracing our sinusoidal loops and arcs with a dogged vector pointing home. To the top of the rise and the field where skulls of yellow apples still cling to calloused branches. Past the three mailboxes crooked as old fenceposts, wearing little white yarmulkes of snow. The power lines cut the sky with a long swooping slash, a drop-shadowed, black-and-white exclamation point, their clarity increasing as the snow piles, sharpening the black.
And as the snow piles, the two trails go soft. The edges rounding, blurring, fading. At the porch the footsteps are almost anonymous. Circumstantial evidence that, yes, someone passed this way, but nothing more. The symmetry itches. I know it's the kind that you can only make worse by scratching. Inside is a fire to tend. Maybe Marsey will have the kettle on.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Jud's Nov/Dec News
There's great arches of birch out in our woods. Eleanor and I stumbled through them last week, just tromping around. Makes me think of Robert Frost out there swinging on them. It's a funny picture, because I can't imagine him young. There he is, white combover blowing like a thunderhead as he pole-vaults them back and forth, back and forth. The trees grow down toward the ground now, all played out. I asked El if we should call it the Birch Cathedral and she, delighted, agreed, suggesting I could be Quasimodo. I hope the arches last at least a few more years. Birches around here don't seem to. There's a huge one close to the house that died last year. Good for the birds: we see a lot of Pileated Woodpeckers. They look like pterodactyls, bigger than you'd think, with that pointy, origami head.
But that big birch is just too dangerous to keep. It's started to shed widowmakers -- great big branches we find, usually after some wind, shattered on the grass below. Warning shots. So, in spite of the woodpeckers, it's been time to cut it for a while now. I got a chainsaw last week, managed to light it on fire while I was breaking it in. Yes, on fire. Just following instructions. All under warranty, so I guess I wasn't doing anything wrong. It's fixed, but would you feel comfortable pulling that cord again? I wasn't in any rush. Couldn't leave that birch another winter, though. Too easy to imagine great chunks of it coming down in an ice storm. It leans hard and heavy toward the corner of the house, close enough to hit. It's supposed to be harder to cut down trees that lean like that. They can surprise you. They know where they want to go and it's hard to convince them otherwise. This one wanted to go to Gemma's bedroom.
It fell with less terror than it could have, pruning a lilac I would've rather kept. But it missed the rose and, more importantly, the apple and, more importantly still the house and the shed. It felt a little bit like landing the Space Shuttle. But it's down. I went back and cut the stump good and flat a couple feet off the ground as a chair for the girls. They love it. I don't think they're going to let me split the logs I've cut, though -- they're arranged in a faerie ring already, and you know how bitchy faeries get when you mess with their crib.
I heard someone talking about the economy, saying people are turning their attention toward home and hearth now. I guess that's what this is. I look forward to splitting some wood and keeping the fire burning through the night on these cold ones. I look forward to curling up
with a guitar and a pen and letting some new songs come. And I look forward to seeing you, too. I've got some great shows coming up to end 2008, from my home town to Caffe Lena and back. I'll be playing a Holiday/Winter show in Damariscotta, ME, in December, which is a first
for me. And so it goes! As always, I love to hear from you -- feel free to drop me a line and let me know what's new. And please see if you can come out and support some of these venues -- you won't be sorry.
See you soon!
-Jud
But that big birch is just too dangerous to keep. It's started to shed widowmakers -- great big branches we find, usually after some wind, shattered on the grass below. Warning shots. So, in spite of the woodpeckers, it's been time to cut it for a while now. I got a chainsaw last week, managed to light it on fire while I was breaking it in. Yes, on fire. Just following instructions. All under warranty, so I guess I wasn't doing anything wrong. It's fixed, but would you feel comfortable pulling that cord again? I wasn't in any rush. Couldn't leave that birch another winter, though. Too easy to imagine great chunks of it coming down in an ice storm. It leans hard and heavy toward the corner of the house, close enough to hit. It's supposed to be harder to cut down trees that lean like that. They can surprise you. They know where they want to go and it's hard to convince them otherwise. This one wanted to go to Gemma's bedroom.
It fell with less terror than it could have, pruning a lilac I would've rather kept. But it missed the rose and, more importantly, the apple and, more importantly still the house and the shed. It felt a little bit like landing the Space Shuttle. But it's down. I went back and cut the stump good and flat a couple feet off the ground as a chair for the girls. They love it. I don't think they're going to let me split the logs I've cut, though -- they're arranged in a faerie ring already, and you know how bitchy faeries get when you mess with their crib.
I heard someone talking about the economy, saying people are turning their attention toward home and hearth now. I guess that's what this is. I look forward to splitting some wood and keeping the fire burning through the night on these cold ones. I look forward to curling up
with a guitar and a pen and letting some new songs come. And I look forward to seeing you, too. I've got some great shows coming up to end 2008, from my home town to Caffe Lena and back. I'll be playing a Holiday/Winter show in Damariscotta, ME, in December, which is a first
for me. And so it goes! As always, I love to hear from you -- feel free to drop me a line and let me know what's new. And please see if you can come out and support some of these venues -- you won't be sorry.
See you soon!
-Jud
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Discipline
I decided that most of what's wrong with my life is due to lack of discipline. And the word comes up all the time related to writing: all the experts say you need to write every day. Either first thing in the morning, or you make an appointment with yourself and commit to it. I've seen that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, my writing gets better when I write more often. I can write every day for two weeks, and at the end of the time, the material is always better. And yet, I've always resisted making the habit permanent. Maybe it's just my inherent lack of discipline. So what better way to jump-start on the path to a more disciplined life than by taking on this very simple, well-defined, highly-touted approach to writing? Okay. So yesterday I said I'd do it, and yesterday I did it. Great. That was easy. Today I'm home with the kids, and it's just that tiny bit harder to pick a time and make it happen, but still: pretty easy. 1pm was the time.
I decided that today I'll write for 15 minutes on some random topic, and I've got a nice little book ("The Writer's Block") in which every page is a writing assignment. Open it to a random page, take your assignment and go. So by 12:57 I've got Gemma in bed, and I'm running downstairs to the studio to get the book. Open the book to a random page, and there's a little photo and a "starter" word -- one word. The picture was ballerina feet, up on tiptoe, and the one word?
"Discipline."
Somebody trying to tell me something here?
I decided that today I'll write for 15 minutes on some random topic, and I've got a nice little book ("The Writer's Block") in which every page is a writing assignment. Open it to a random page, take your assignment and go. So by 12:57 I've got Gemma in bed, and I'm running downstairs to the studio to get the book. Open the book to a random page, and there's a little photo and a "starter" word -- one word. The picture was ballerina feet, up on tiptoe, and the one word?
"Discipline."
Somebody trying to tell me something here?
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Oh Shenandoah
I wandered down to the Shenandoah to say goodbye. Stupid to have not gotten down there sooner, but there was a lot going on up the hill. Smoked venison, Kentucky Bourbon, blues and folk and more blues and some hot pickin'. Chuck E Costa's haunting voice and heart-rending storytelling. The Biscuit Rollers: blues with smiles that are somehow bigger than their bellies. I had never been to Virginia before. I was driving through those wide open hills with rolls of hay out in the fields, thinking, "this is a little like where my Pappy is from." Rusted out water tanks abandoned in cow pastures, vans by the side of the road that look a little more permanent than just parked. A grandmother pushing her lawnmower around in the heat of noon with a tube-top and short shorts, leisurely two-handed grip on the handle and a cigarette balanced on the corner of her mouth. "McCain Country" billboarded on every other lawn. Really not so different from Maine. Parts of Maine, anyway. The "real" Maine. Like Jonathan Byrd said: "Maine is so far north it's south."
I couldn't help but think that the Shendandoah looked a little like a pond, though: reeds and maybe lillies, some kind of water plants just growing right out to the middle. Sleepy. Good fishing, I hear. Great, actually, if you believe the stories, and I do. The 20 hour stopover wasn't enough. Not enough to do any fishing, not enough to even learn everyone's names. I hate that. The nicest people you'd ever meet, and you get introduced all at once at the precise time that all you're thinking about is finding the portajohn and seeing if the "all lanes closed" on 95 Southbound has got you bumped out of your first set. It didn't.
I was just a stone's throw away from the river in the Winnebago where I bunked down (this is another story entirely, but very comfortable) but I didn't get down to it until just before I left. Foggy morning, everybody kicking around, not wanting to leave. A row of cars with open trunks, waiting for the packing to finish. A huge maple tree with four elephantine trunks. Ashes in the fire pit and styrofoam cups of weak black coffee. That drawl I always forget I'm missing until I hear it again. Good friends, all. Can't wait to get back.
I couldn't help but think that the Shendandoah looked a little like a pond, though: reeds and maybe lillies, some kind of water plants just growing right out to the middle. Sleepy. Good fishing, I hear. Great, actually, if you believe the stories, and I do. The 20 hour stopover wasn't enough. Not enough to do any fishing, not enough to even learn everyone's names. I hate that. The nicest people you'd ever meet, and you get introduced all at once at the precise time that all you're thinking about is finding the portajohn and seeing if the "all lanes closed" on 95 Southbound has got you bumped out of your first set. It didn't.
I was just a stone's throw away from the river in the Winnebago where I bunked down (this is another story entirely, but very comfortable) but I didn't get down to it until just before I left. Foggy morning, everybody kicking around, not wanting to leave. A row of cars with open trunks, waiting for the packing to finish. A huge maple tree with four elephantine trunks. Ashes in the fire pit and styrofoam cups of weak black coffee. That drawl I always forget I'm missing until I hear it again. Good friends, all. Can't wait to get back.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Einstein and the Woodpile
Just finished "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman. Haunting book. Short chapters, each exploring different theories of time. In one, we follow an old woman growing younger as time flows backwards. In another, a man pursues a lover while simultaneously (and divergently) choosing not to pursue her. Time fractures into infinite possibilities. In others time stops sporadically, or literally flits about as nightingales: catch them and time stops, but the moment goes stale. The birds die. In one, time is perceived faster or slower by different people, in another time varies with location, so that one city runs faster or slower than a neighbor. But the book is all about the human implications. People grow isolated by their perceptions of the past. People grow listless with their sense of inevitability of the future. Parents long for their grown children to come home, grandparents want to seize some inconsequential moment with their grandchild and make it last.
Myself, I tried to freeze time today by stacking wood. Didn't work. My head has been a snake eating its tail ever since I got home from the Boston Folk Festival two weeks ago. That was the end of a long run, a weekend in PA followed by a week in OR and a brief time at home followed by a long, treacherously stupid weekend of driving back to PA, bouncing off the Boston Folk Festival like a rock off a windshield on my way back to Maine.
I've repeated this bit of Robert Frost to myself on and off since high school. It's the last stanza from "Two Tramps in Mud Time:"
"But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes."
I always took this to mean that I should try to make music (my avocation) into my job (vocation.) But in the last two years, when my job has been more closely tied to my own original music than it ever has been in the past, my life has started to feel more fragmented that ever. My good friends on the road are strangers to my family. I drop out of my life in Maine on a Friday morning like the White Rabbit down the hole. And when I get back on Sunday, I'm the same anxious, hurried bunny. Always late for a very important date. I wonder how Einstein would explain that flow of time?
Myself, I tried to freeze time today by stacking wood. Didn't work. My head has been a snake eating its tail ever since I got home from the Boston Folk Festival two weeks ago. That was the end of a long run, a weekend in PA followed by a week in OR and a brief time at home followed by a long, treacherously stupid weekend of driving back to PA, bouncing off the Boston Folk Festival like a rock off a windshield on my way back to Maine.
I've repeated this bit of Robert Frost to myself on and off since high school. It's the last stanza from "Two Tramps in Mud Time:"
"But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes."
I always took this to mean that I should try to make music (my avocation) into my job (vocation.) But in the last two years, when my job has been more closely tied to my own original music than it ever has been in the past, my life has started to feel more fragmented that ever. My good friends on the road are strangers to my family. I drop out of my life in Maine on a Friday morning like the White Rabbit down the hole. And when I get back on Sunday, I'm the same anxious, hurried bunny. Always late for a very important date. I wonder how Einstein would explain that flow of time?
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