Work Song

“What are we made of?” The best i can figure out as one whose dreams are sometimes bracing in their cinematic depiction of actions which i had longed for, outcomes more usually abandoned to the subliminal waking hours where murmurs to the self define, carve out like a stream etches through rock over the scope and boundary of our desires, certainly our natures, is that we are all pilgrims of a sort. Maybe seeking the validation and connection which has eluded.

I had such a dream and in it i found something true lingering over decades in myself even as the script allowed for no mis-steps and i found myself pulling a blanket over us without the usual doubt and wariness and hearing her say “there is so much i want to tell you.” Maybe the pilgriming is not all about valuing what we have done for work or freedom from shame and doubt and fear but the acceptance that someone, some creature can love us.

Which brings us to now. I watch or listen to the tennis from New York on lap-top at night when not drawn into the political drama which for me is like a sporting event as well. Curious as to why “love” is used in the scoring and for the first time and i’m 67 and was captain of my high school team i search with fingers on google and find several explanations the best being that in the Middle Ages the word “love” was synonymous with “nothing”. Later the popular phrase “not for love or money” was added to a Dutch word for “honor” that may have yielded an explanation as tennis was much gambled on back in the day. Regardless these days the sun arcs lower and the precious northern lushness of summer’s idle warmth now rolled up neatly forlorn like the browning bales dotting fields, the harvest of the seasons’ inevitable change combed with harsher light, unexpected chill rains, images of hummingbirds frozen in place feeding greedily seared into brain as richly stored memory against the shorter days, the darkness and cold.

September that practical month like cold well water dashed in face upon waking calls for a sound-track, one that can reconcile what we are made of with what we do to survive, have always done and remarkably given the competing seductions of the world at large, its triumphs, sadnesses, how to apportion enough empathy, care towards strangers beset with hardship in lands far away with memory of those now absent once so integral to our lives, who labored alongside us or loved us or both just negotiating as we did this confusion of being human, this is never a simple thing. So here is an ice-breaker from the past recently recalled by a great documentary i happened on a few weeks ago on the verge of an amping up of tasks that had lingered due to a nursing of a shoulder which had prevented even plugging in the electric guitar for the months here since May (heresy) and tiptoeing around other insecurities. In that it came to me as the Democrats prepared to gather there it seemed an omen somehow, about not just the evolution of the blues tradition, the passing of a certain inter-cultural baton “Born in Chicago”, but an allegory to the striving of the human spirit to be better. Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Hayes are both soloing i assume on this track from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s epic ‘East-West” album. Needless to say and besot with this genre of music the guitar somehow mimics the waywardness of the tasks undertaken here lately, the animals having been pulled along for the ride and as usual their enduring curiosity, trust, the desire for their freedom compromised by the need to keep them safe. A tumbling for sure, headlong and while i have not been consistent with some things, the writing, the parsing but the propulsive emotions have been. Music as a way of life rather than a career.

Duchess the feisty pit-mix asserts her dominance with the nipping and biting at his heels of my gentle-natured Huron. He is goofy like i unaware of his own heft and strength and nobility even. I have loved him and we chose each other from the first and he was no runt, just the only one who emitted a high-pitched and contradictory gleeful whine of his 7 siblings and just a year ago now; his existential pain seemed to mirror my own as a child as when i grew older emerging from the dreamy insecurity of ingrained childhood nature my Mom would say “Apple, the world seems harder for you somehow.” I assign the same birthday for Duchess now as Huron but its just a guess suggested by info from the young couple who found her and asked me to take her away, the congestion the traffic and other threats of the Florida Panhandle town and now forsaken of its allures and dangers even as it held my heart once and in various iterations. A year ago i would have not have imagined any of this yet somehow it feels fated and that acceptance helps counter-balance the burdens of love which are really gifts, workouts for the soul if viewed apart from the ingrained selfishness of one who knows how to exist in solitude and perhaps gratefully but embraces the other too.

I have been a willing captive to the motion of the sun, the slivers of moon even aware that next year there will be different grasshoppers in the field but the same stars in the neutral sky and all repositioning in their arcs as the seasons shift. The animals tolerate my chores readjusting themselves around the work of installing the sink and painting the bathroom, finally clearing out the bump-out entry to the roofed over trailer and readying it for a fresh paint-job, a couch gathered around the cook-stove.

The sink i had found a few weeks ago for $5 in the basement of Calumet restore. A local woman had guided me to a cluttered shelf nearly obscured by mattresses and we conversed briefly and it turned out her sister lived in the small North Florida town where the home i now rented out and had lived in for 20 years had weathered 100 years of storms. It was just an easy conversation where we both established our embrace of an area which grows on you, the history and stark seasonal changes and always in background the presence of the vast lake.

I used the tile remaining from the shower i built last summer when the dogs weren’t even on the radar nor was renting out the house but the ideas were forming. Of course once installed the handle needed to be removed and a washers and a few springs procured, a filter after i had blown out the cold water line which was also clogged. I was determined to use what was already committed to and patience was required and in fact this is my job now so there were no outside pressures other than ones i put on myself. Like the wood storage made with 4x4’s i recalibrated the plan to involve sakrete to hold them in their shallow holes and roofed it with metal roofing lingering in woods behind the outbuilding. Called Mike almost my age who had delivered a half cord last summer and we talked while the young guys unloaded it in a heap heedless of sore shoulders in their own future. He doesn’t make a living doing it he said but mostly now just to be in the silent deep woods foraging the leftovers from logging sites which they transport via battered pick-up in cut up logs then split hydraulically later. They are short enough chunks which i required for the small supplementary stove which will warm the new living room. I can see into the future, the drooping faded field grass now to be covered in a thick white carpet, hummingbirds long gone, the dogs revelling in the newness and necessity of towels, rugs to dry them off when they track in the wildness, the messiness, the scent of joy trailing behind them.

There are warm days left. Many rivers to cross. I imagine the shoulder reacting as i crawl under trailer and staple in insulation between the floor joists, wrap heat-tape around the water line where it comes in from the well, the whirring of the fan motor on the furnace as it greedily feeds on propane and pumps warmed air up from floor grates i have already tested. There are some more motorcycle jaunts remaining past farmland which recalls Vermont, Ireland and in that moment i am free, like a song meandering, unrestrained, guile-less of intent. But intent lies in circumnavigating the lake thru Canada for a week dogs in tow perhaps before the casting for steelhead, salmon in late fall.

The Marshall amp has a switch problem and the spray for it is on order but for a week i lost myself in the Les Paul letting its growl remind me this is a passion i cannot live without. The shoulder be damned i reverted to the strat and coaxed from it the double-stops of a melody both Pearl Jam and Kenny Wayne Shepherd used to honor Jimi. I expand it here recklessly to make more obvious the comparison. It soothes me demands perfecting sure but isn’t that work…. love?