Music in the rain...

The emotional position I’m expressing myself from is not good this rainy week as February crawls into March. Sure, I’ve stopped drinking alcohol almost entirely, due to an “incident” last summer (July 2019) involving me falling down some concrete steps while leaving a party, and then slapping and swearing at my husband when he tried to help me up— but finally learning my lesson doesn’t make me a great person at last. But I don’t want to be a great person. I wanted to be a great something-else-specific, such as a writer or musician. No one gets recognition for their achievements in personhood— in fact they’re more likely to get taken for granted. I do realize now that, that night, with five beers in my system, I felt like the same “person” but apparently was not, behavior-wise. Oh, well. Alcohol, no matter the occasion, was no longer making me feel good, just sleepy and mostly silent. My aging animal energy was no longer bubbly enough to bring motivation and excitement to the drunken state (until I was threatened with what I thought was humiliation).

As our house fills up with boxes, papers, and random objects, I scan the domestic landscape and cringe. It is some relief to turn the lights down; even more to focus on the television screen. The best part of the day is the end of it, when I’m getting into bed with a book or something to listen to on my headphones. It’s nice if my husband is there next to me, reading or sleeping, but it’s not required. I’ve always been wary of “pleasure,” especially when deliberately sought, but I do admit to the occasional sensual journey provided by jazz classics. I relate more to piano and guitar, since those are instruments I’ve played, but I don’t object to horns, which surprise me with their aggressive precision sometimes. In this complicated sound world, everyone’s a genius but me.

I used to think of myself as a great appreciator of many things, but now the awareness of being ONLY that fills me with shame, which I manage to hide from myself long enough to enjoy the music. If I eschew the music and listen only to news podcasts, I avoid the shame (except for the slight embarrassment of not actually being a good activist) and embrace the world’s slide into dystopia while slowly realizing that it’s always been that way. These are the gifts of getting old.

My cynicism is not a pose. It’s a treasured inheritance, mostly from my father. Though my mother had faith, it was the kind that posited heaven as the goal and ignored the possibilities of earthly existence, or so it seemed to me. I’m probably wrong, though. She was a lively young woman before marriage and children, and I know she laughed and played and enjoyed exercising her mind, skills and charms. In a few days, if I’m not mistaken, she’ll have been gone six years. I suspect that she was proud to have passed the 90-year mark, mostly because her sisters did not, though they came close. I cried at her funeral after-party, but only because I was angry with my brother Michael for taking over the living room with his sons into the wee hours. (That was the last time I cried at all, about anything.) My mother-in-law may be on a similar trajectory to my mother’s, but no one is sure about that, because who can be? My mother had a stroke during or just after her hip operation. My mother-in-law did not, so my mother-in-law is better off, but she’s not happy about her situation. My mother had religion; my father had his intellect; my mother-in-law is bored and miserable. How can I not be aware of this constantly? How can I not be wondering what will happen to me eventually? My thinking tends toward, “Well, I have maybe five more years to keep going to these open mic events and playing a song or two, but even if I do become more proficient at it, what difference will it make? Because I’ll have to stop at some point, probably for some health reason. I wonder what that reason will be?” (I already have numb feet, to which I pay little attention unless I suddenly do pay attention.)

These open mics and jazz jams, though. They’re fun. I become a bit manic and strangely elated. I usually get to sing at least one song at the jazz jams, although I sometimes mangle it. Watching a video of myself from last week, I realized that for the first go-round of “All of Me,” I was singing in a key that wasn’t exactly the key that the musicians were playing in. How did that happen? If I don’t have the right starting note in mind I apparently can’t intuit the key in the chords played, at least not right away. (This was never a problem with my ol’ good-time band because the chords and keys were very simple.) During the second go-round of “All of Me” I was right on, but too late; I’d probably already established myself once again as a wacko wanna-be. I heard Marcia (who filmed it with her phone) in the background saying to another singer, “She’s got her own style.” Marcia is very kind, one of the people I feel I’ve bonded with at these events, although she isn’t a musician. She’s an appreciator par excellence and proud of it. It’s enough for her.

The open mics are a different story. I’m struggling and learning how to accompany myself on ukulele, and now on my tiny new tenor guitar, so I have some control, but it’s not easy. Every other week at Mad Malts, a local brewery, I try to do three songs I haven’t done before. I use the music stand and have stuff written down that I can refer to—I’m not proud. Lately, at our infrequent and pointless Lonesome Lovers band practices, I’ve been appreciating Huey’s guitar-playing and, most important, his prodigious memory. He may never have been the most subtle of players, but he knows hundreds of songs by heart, including the lyrics. I used to get so irritated and frustrated with him for his lapses and lacks, but now I realize I was probably lucky to be backed up by him when we were going strong in the early 1990s. I’m also realizing that, just very possibly, my loud, forceful, pseudo-Ethel-Merman-style singing and random harmonica playing were suitable only for my band, and almost nothing else.
 
So, now music is back in my life in a big way, but who knows how long it will last? It’s a great world to get lost in when the “real” world seems not to satisfy. But my longing to “achieve” something with music will not ever be fulfilled, and is pretty mockable. I need to chill. Perhaps simply learning a few new things is enough?