red line

When I was in D.C. for the Inauguration, I took the Metro Red Line every day to the Capitol area. I was staying with a former editor in Maryland, and he and his wife live near the last Red Line stop. It was total chaos during the Inauguration, but I appreciated the convenience of having mass transit nearby.
I was worried when I heard about the crash. He said in an email response that, of course, he was nowhere ready to come home from his editing job at McClatchy around rush hour, but a neighbor two doors down was in the crash and was interviewed on television, and that his wife had checked on her. She's okay.
I thought the Metro seemed very modern and safe compared to the New York subways when I lived there. Obviously, there is something to be said for human hands at the controls.
Here in the Columbia Gorge, we have no mass transit. If we crash, it's our fault, a deer crossing the road, or someone crossing the centerline. Which is worse --- a computer failure or a damn deer? Encounters with deer have happened to me twice, totaling my pickup once. I sat in a lot of stopped underground trains while I was in New York, but most of the time I never knew what had happened. Once, coming home from a gig in the middle of the night, we serenaded the other passengers stuck in the dark in a tunnel. We could because we had acoustic instruments. They applauded in the dark.
Thank you very much.

Places I visit in my dreams

There was a dirty cop in my latest dream, a charmingly cynical Latina with long eyelashes who casually stole because she could. She palmed twenties laid on the bar by men buying her a drink. Some of the bartenders were onto her, but they were also smitten, or bemused.
Her hands were hummingbirds, hovering momentarily in flight.
While in uniform, she sometimes took money or other tokens from slobbering drunks late at night, but only the mean ones. They reminded her of the men in the Bronx where she grew up, the ones always hitting on her, or the ones who hit her, like her father. That's why she was a cop.

A dream or an Inuit folk tale? Coming upon an unknown presence, something moving under filthy blankets piled next to a doorway, the people of the tiny village can't figure out what it is, but they know it is evil, not quite human. They glimpse red eyes.
It will not leave, and will not reveal itself.
To take upon themselves the collective guilt, they rush in with knives, stabbing, stabbing.
It escapes by rising into the air, suspended there like a really high blanket toss. Their monster has been transformed into an unharmed laughing baby boy.
They feel intense shame. It is a test they have failed.

frustration

Replying curtly to ordinary questions. Guilty.
Wishing I could skip out, not attend this meeting, the one that starts in 53 minutes.
Also guilty.

There's such a thing as carrying an obligation to be punctual and responsible too far.
I can't extend it to courteous, so curt it is.

In my world, poetry and prose aren't done the same day.
I write prose for a living, the kind that lacks poetry.
And I pay for it.

Today I had an angry voice at the other end of the phone line, yelling,
threatening to sic an attorney on me.
According to her, I was guilty of one word in a heading over a letter to the editor.
I would admit no guilt, because there is none.
"Alleged" is alleged, after all.

This person is guilty of so much more. It is a classic case of smoke/flame.
This person would not be so upset if the shoe had not fit.
There are other analogies I could use, but I am too nice.

I have one question for this person:
Who died and made you queen?

It was 5:01 when I woke from the dream with a sense of profound loss.
As usual, I was hurrying at the end, worried about getting back in time to get out the newspaper.
But this time, I knew I wouldn't make it.
I was in a fishing village in B.C., one with steep hills and a sharp salt smell in the air redolent of fish and tar.
I could barely climb the winding narrow stair while carrying my bag, all the while thinking, "They have enough to get out the paper without me," also thinking, "But I have to get back in time." Getting back involved train schedules, and finding the station in the first place.
I had wandered the streets, stopping by a ramshackle pub where a 400-pound black bear had lumbered into the lap of the man sitting across from me for a cuddle.
Walking the irregular streets, I had happened on a woman in her 70s, with coiffed hair and an ankle-length fur coat, tapping her sensibly-heeled foot to the time as she blew the shit out of a harmonica solo that I'd heard around the corner, drawing me in.
The town had the quaintness of a New England fishing village, Oysterville Victorians that weren't quite restored and had a dark underbelly, fishermen's bars where everyone accepted everyone else's eccentricities, while muttering under their breaths.
I didn't want to leave this place. It filled me with a wild longing to wander all over it as the sun set and the sea glimmered murkily.
I wanted to live there until I died in some cheap attic room in a boarding house, where drunken men passed me silently on the stairs. One of them would have been my lover, but we weren't speaking, and it didn't matter.
But then I woke, having to pee at 5:01, too early the morning after getting the paper out. And no, I wouldn't have had enough on the page yesterday to miss the deadline. I never do.

Chucklehead chutney

There are times when the best thing on the plate is the condiment.
Here is my own chutney recipe, made when I am blessed with wonderful pears and other fruit from the Hood River Valley or Yakima.

Chucklehead Chutney

8 Bartlett pears, chopped (You can use red ones --- leave the skin on)
2 limes, juice, chopped sections, plus the grated zest
4 green apples, chopped
2 peaches, chopped
1 orange, juice, segment pieces without skin
1 can pineapple (chunks or crushed in its own juice)
1 can Del Monte tropical fruits in juice
2 cups yellow raisins
1-1/2 cups brown sugar
3/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 tsp. lemon juice concentrate
two healthy knobs fresh ginger, grated
2 T. whole cloves
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp. mace
3 large cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 tsp. cayenne (less, if you're chicken)
1/2 cup grated coconut (add last five minutes of simmering)
(4-5 very small whole dried chiles, if desired)
Put all ingredients except coconut and dried chiles in large non-reactive kettle. Bring to boil, lower heat, and simmer 20 minutes. Add coconut; simmer at least five more minutes. Check consistency of syrup—should cling to spoon. If not, cook some more. Add chilis, if desired.
Pour into sterilized pint jars; Cover with sterilized lids; tighten.
Process in simmering hot water bath 15 minutes. Remove jars from canner; cover with large towel and let cool 24 hours before moving jars for storage. Makes 9-10 pints. Good with curry dishes, chicken or pork. Refrigerate after opening.

Music Samples

Music Samples

I am singing at my niece's wedding June 27.

Not knowing she would ask me to sing, I had been working on lyrics for Chopin's Etude 10, No. 3, sometimes known as the "Tristesse."
When I awakened in the middle of the night two weeks ago to write down some lyrics, I didn't know others had also done versions of it.
They include Jo Stafford in 1950, who topped the charts with "No Other Love," leaving out the high crescendos while crooning a simpler version in her husky voice, and Sarah Brightman, who recorded a French version a few years ago.

The lyrics I wrote in the middle of the night are dark, more in line with the "Tristesse" feeling:

When you are gone, sleep will not come
I count the stars and wonder where you are.
And with the dawn,
tired eyes will face another sunrise
knowing life must go on.
I walk alone, among the crowds,
and look away from signs of other loves.
In every face see hope and loss and I must look away
for no one meets my gaze
with recognition in their eyes
I am alone,
time will disappear
days will turn to years
alone.

(piano interlude)

....I walk alone
among the crowds
and look away from signs of other loves.
In every face,
I see hope and loss
and I must look away
for no one meets my gaze with recognition in their eyes...
I am alone
and as time goes one
time will disappear
and how I fear
days turn to years
alone.


I wrote new lyrics just for Jenni, and they are much more romantic and hopeful:


Wandering alone, I felt despair
I thought that there could be no one to care.
You took my hand,
comforting the pain that had consumed me,
when I had felt so alone.
You fill my heart
with hope and love.
You are my sun and moon and stars above,
and by my side,
when those stormclouds darken and the rain begins to fall
it will not matter we'll find shelter from the storm
there is no harm ----
from this moment on
you and I will be
as one.

(Interlude)

You are the one
who takes my pain
and soothes my soul and makes me whole again.
And I am yours,
just as you are mine and we will make each moment count
and live our lives together
and forever love ---
and we are one
from this moment on
you and I will be
eternally
and we will be
as one.

(Both sets of lyrics by Joanna Grammon, (c) 2009)

So which is it? I do fear there is no one out there for me. At age 60, I have been essentially alone since 1982, and it may be too late to break that curse.
I do hope that Jenni will be happy with her Joe, who obviously loves her. He has long hair and rides a motorcycle, two strikes against him, according to some family members. Her self-righteous, vindictive first husband was absolutely the wrong person for her. She has had so many challenges since, including meningitis and partial disability.
Yet in spite of all her troubles, she has maintained the sweetest disposition, forging ahead, taking up the djembe when she could no longer play trap drums, joining SCA and going back to school.
Me? I seem to be stuck in a weekly routine of work and now, taking care of Mom, that precludes having a personal life.
The last few days have been a low point, with depression darkening my attempts to work on music and accomplish something other than work. Tapping into the part of the soul needed to write poetry/sing again is a fearful thing.
The lyrics I wrote for Jenni made her cry, and I do fear I shall do the same while trying to sing them at her wedding.
At my age, my voice is no longer as limber as it was two or three years ago. It has fallen a couple of notches, and while my sister thought I should be able to sing it in the original key of E, I am working on recording an instrumental version in A flat to use as accompaniment.

The original lyrics I wrote are much closer to the bone.
They are resonant of another set of lyrics I sent off last week to Nancy as part of her 69th birthday present, along with a recording by Fred Hersch and Toots Thieleman of "Lonely Woman," with "Nardis" as a two-fer, as Nancy calls it.
She will be working with Fred in New York soon, and I'm hoping she will be able to do his version of "You Must Believe in Spring," as I was able to find those lyrics for her online.
Here are my lyrics for Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman," which I actually wrote long ago:

She has been alone and waiting,
waiting alone at night.
Where are her youthful dreams?
Nothing is what it seems.
And as the clock ticks slowly,
so slowly time slips by.

Once she had a life before her.
Happiness passed her by.
Love's an elusive thing,
dragonfly in the wing,
hovering once, and skimming
over water at dusk.

She has things to occupy her,
work and a few good friends.
But when they say goodbye,
the mirror doesn't lie.
It says she's getting older,
alone with cats and her pen.

She is only one of many,
sitting in rooms alone.
Beauty is fading fast.
Beauty's not made to last.
She has so much to offer.
But no one sees her at all.


I gave the above to Ornette, while visiting his studio in a former school on the lower East Side, but I've never heard any feedback from him.
Someone else has also done lyrics. Mine fit well with the melody, and I think there is a hint of "Eleanor Rigby" poignancy in there.

I must stop wandering through words. It is time to make Mom's dinner. She is at church, and this is my cherished time of Sunday solitude.
I know I hurt her feelings when I sequester myself in my room with my computer, but I have to do it. This is my chance to do it without guilt, without her opening the door, wondering what I am up to.

Here's to love.

snapshots

My father didn't always take good pictures (or slides), and time did its worst to many. Some are out of focus, or pinkish as the color film of that time fades into oblivion. But some of them are good, really crisp and revealing personalities, and all are a window into times past.
As my father sank into Alzheimer's, my brother took a box of slides and photos Dad had taken over the years back to Louisiana with him. He had them turned into a CD, which he has shared with all of us.
Some of the photos date back as far as 1951. In a couple, my sister Deanna and I wear matching outfits, squinting against the sun. In one, I am clasping my hands to my chest in excitement.
Deanna is a toddler in the first ones, and I'm not much older. There are gaps. Boise and Iowa seem to have been skipped, and Yakima was mainly skimmed over. Wapato looms large, mostly birthdays, with candles lit on seven minute icing, in my case adorned with fresh rose blossoms. In one, Lois and Arnie are actually asleep in their seats at the double dinette set. Dad was probably working late, and Mom had held off the birthday party until his arrival. Deanna and I are wearing glasses that tilt up at the corners. In one, I have my hair in two ponytails with those roses tucked into the rubber bands. It looks like my 15th birthday.
Then there is Arizona. I stayed in the Yakima Valley with the minister and his family to finish my junior year. There are quite a few photos without me --- their visits with relatives in California, and their first months in the mobile home in the middle of the desert.
In many of the Arizona family portraits, we are all squinting against the sun. There is a shot of Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona, taken from above the water's swift course downhill.
That's where I took nearly all the skin off the front of my left leg while whooshing down the sandstone waterslide, turning the first weeks of my senior year in a new high school into a limping litmus test.
In one picture, I am shown forking pit-barbecued meat onto my plate at a church picnic, Terry Juarez proudly presiding over the carving knife. My hair is in curlers, and Grandma Juarez can be seen, all four foot three of her, behind my elbow.
In another Arizona shot, I am playing guitar with sheet music held in front of me. This was during the first part of my folk music phase, and I am merely tolerating the gospel tune I am playing to accompany the other church folk. I'm sure I would have rather been playing a traditional Appalachian or English folk song. During that year, Mom smashed my Joan Baez records, as I discovered after coming home one day from school. I had long straight hair much of that year, and wore "granny" dresses I made myself, with long, lace-trimmed sleeves. I was surprised to find in the photos that my hair had been cut short before graduation. I didn't remember that. In the cap and gown shots, I look positively loopy.
By that time, I knew I was bound for Midwestern School of Evangelism in Iowa, largely against my will. There was a year and a half when Dad and I did not communicate at all.
Dad's photos that include me resume in the early '70s, when I was living in Portland with Alan and they were building the house at Skamania.
There's only one existing snapshot of me in San Francisco. I tucked it into a long descriptive letter that Mom kept a lot of years. Reading that letter again was a revelation. I was candid about what was happening then, and about Trent, the drummer I was living with at the time.
Shortly after sending that letter, I became quite ill with hepatitis.
I had to be fetched from San Francisco and hospitalized. After that, I sang in coffeehouses around Vancouver and Portland, and went on the road with a band based in D.C.
I was back in Portland living with Alan when Mom and Dad bought the Skamania property. There are photos of the rocky expanse, and the beginnings of construction. We came up a few times on weekends to help. There are photos of Alan and I, taken by Dad along a rock wall in the Columbia Gorge in some sylvan spot. In them, Alan is beautiful. They are the only photos I have of him now. I cried when I discovered them on the CD of Dad's photos.
Those pictures were taken before I left Alan and went back to San Francisco, where an anonymous customer took an instant snapshot of me, (turn about's fair play), as I was demonstrating Kodak instant cameras. The svelte woman in the photo whom I barely recognize is wearing a snug turquoise knit top and the turquoise heart necklace William brought back from Peru. I no longer have it, and it had developed a crack before it got lost in the detritus.
Not long after that, I went to New York. That's where I later got the news that Alan had hung himself in the woods near OHSU. He had visited me in my apartment at Bretton Hall on the upper West Side. We went out to hear some music, and he slept on the floor. He had a new girlfriend in Boston and had seemed quite positive about recent changes in his life. Then I got the call from Mike Kearsey, the bass-player in Upepo, telling me Alan was dead.
About 1979 or 1980, that same period of time, someone snapped a picture of me sitting at a table between sets at my regular gig at the Red Rooster in Harlem.
I hardly recognize that woman, either. She has a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, and a cold Heineken is next to it. She also has a tape deck and an open fakebook in front of her. She is probably looking up tunes for the next set.
The upholstery on the booths is red velvet, and the mirror behind her is dark. She is wearing a lacy jade-colored sweater, and a sly grin.
No one takes snapshots any more, except with instant cameras or their cell phones. At recent family gatherings, the digital photographers in the bunch take images that are shared, but they show people opening presents or carving turkeys. They don't reveal much personality.
There are a few recent digital photos taken of me, a fat older person I would prefer not to recognize. My youngest sister grabbed a few shots at a 4th of July gig. The guitar player looks downright grim in most of the photos (I hope that is concentration), and I notice that I have a very big mouth when I sing.
Then there are a couple of hilarious blurry shots someone took of me singing in my Madrigal Feast outfit. I do not make a good picture, although I take other people's pictures all the time as part of my job. I don't do a lot of snapping away at family gatherings either, like I used to.

Dad has been gone more than a year now. I am glad that we have Dad's old pictures. Sometimes I buy flowers or a plant, but they don't last long. His pictures have lasted quite a while longer, though quietly languishing in a box in the closet many years.
Now they are a window to the past that I'm grateful to have.

My brain is a sponge --- it gets wrung out every Monday onto the pages of the newspaper, with my photos as flotsam. Since this is Tuesday, I am feeling a bit high and dry. My sponge is in need of a quiet spring in which to rehydrate.
I should be outside pushing a lawnmower over the dandelions. I should also be making pumpernickel bagels to go with the Alaskan smoked salmon I bought, or a loaf of sourdough from the jar in the refrigerator that has been sitting next to the pickles for more than a week unused.
Instead, I am making a blog.
My sister insisted I start one. Hers is quite amazing, when I am able to get a look at it. I had it bookmarked, then it disappeared. She occasionally shares when we are in the same room and she has her laptop on.
Turning 60 last week was cause for a pause to reflect on the ephemeral nature of things. Attending two high school graduations in one day didn't help things. Memories of my own graduation come too easily --- walking across the stage in the Arizona heat in those white shoes that were too big for me.
Sitting in the row as I filed past was one of the contributors to "potpourri," the little poetry magazine I started with Steve, a 14-year-old senior. The boy opened his closed fist to reveal a sugar cube. ("It's LSD," he whispered.) After all, it was 1967.
I thought about that summer this morning. It was Arizona, too hot to work, although I did.
I remember lying on a roof next to Tommy, looking at the stars as a cool breeze washed over us. Infinity isn't scary to an 18-year-old. Now it is.