I have been revisiting earlier blog posts back a decade, wanting to glean something that would give me a better feel for who I am and what I’ve become. After 4 years of Trumpublican overreach and a year of pandemic, I meet myself coming and going. Whatever it is that I’m doing, I don’t know what it means and that is disturbing. In my backstory, important (earthshaking) events have slipped past me without registering on my Richter scale. Correspondingly, grand scale human suffering can rivet attention on global tragedy only to drop out of the headlines the next day, making space for a quotable despot’s outrageous tweet.
What would Mark Twain do? His humor, his wit and uncompromising integrity allowed him to roast his critics with scalding effect and a gentleman’s chuckle. Feeling good while feeling bad is no easy trick. Still if I could, I would emulate Mr. Clemens. If I could manage a Mark Twain makeover, it would make me feel better.
But life is long (in my case) and good times have been many. So I can take some comfort in those better days, I just have to suck it up and do it. I have some absolutely great memories, awesome stories but storytellers need to keep updating our material. It’s a task, digging in old holes, remembering simple little stories that are just as rich, maybe more subtle, not so polished. In August of ’03 my daughter got married. We rented a big house on the beach near Muskegon, Michigan, the whole family was there for a long weekend. I was the wedding planner: I know! All of the women thought I would screw it up but I spent a lot of telephone time with my daughter and we managed.
For about a year, I had been fooling around with a guitar. No lessons, just a friend who showed me a few things and a book. I wanted the guitar for a prop and just a few melody lines to go with my storytelling. About a week before, daughter Sarah dropped a bomb. She wanted me to sing in the wedding. “I know you’re not very good but I’ve heard you fool around and that’s good enough. I want my dad to sing at my wedding.”
At the time, I had a drama queen, daughter in law, self designated smartest person in the family. From a small, rural, 4-way-stop town, she was the best musician-singer in her school, in the church choir and very proud of it. The idea that I was the choice to pluck guitar and croak like a shore bird was received as a blunder of great proportion and a personal insult against her. In a subdued voice just loud enough to be heard, back turned but near enough, she repeatedly expressed her disbelief and embarrassment that Sarah would do such a thing and that I would go along.
My son and his wife were both deceitful, selfish, unforgiving and convinced they could control the other. I never bought into her cunning, coy-ploy and she wrote me off as an enemy from the start. At she and my son’s wedding rehearsal her grandmother asked us, “Does he know what he’s getting into?” My wife and I shrugged, compared them to happy drunks who would wake up with a long suffering hangover; a train wreck looking for a place to happen. Her father, a pillar in the Pentecostal Church, had sung at her wedding and that, in a convoluted way, figured into the politic. I never cared for him either but that’s another story.
It was a steep drop-down to the beach with a cold wind coming in off the water. I tuned the guitar at the house, not thinking about how cold weather upsets the instrument. My Taylor Big Baby was way-way out of tune and I never got a chance to warm up. The first chord was a ‘D’ but it sounded like metal being punished. My voice failed as well. Without a good note to follow, the words were lost to begin with but it ended and that was a good thing. The difference between my daughter in law and my family, we knew it was about family, not the primadonna. The song was, “The Wedding Song” (The union of your spirits here has caused Him to remain. For whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name,There is love,There is love) What I understood was; we all loved my daughter. She wanted me to sing at her wedding and I did.
Thinking back on that day I smile, even laugh. It was a great day in so many ways. The primadonna’s union with my son self destructed two years later. As much his fault as hers, he is my son and I love him in spite of his mistakes but she doesn’t get that consideration. I would think every family has its lumps and bumps, and we’ve had ours. But none of us have ever not cared. Nobody has to fake it. So I remember a day in August, 2003, in front of God and everybody, I sent my fractious daughter-in-law a message and she got it.
Eighteen years later: I have a much better guitar. Not trying to be something I’m not, a musician, I don’t play it, more like play with it. I don’t sing, rather I talk my songs and somehow it works, through a decade of professional storytelling. I still take comfort in making the strings ring, in framing lyrics to a forgiving rhythm. You can’t fool an audience and they have been kind to me. But that woman I don’t care to remember, something has to remind me or I don’t remember: and I do feel better than when I sat down here.
What would Mark Twain do? His humor, his wit and uncompromising integrity allowed him to roast his critics with scalding effect and a gentleman’s chuckle. Feeling good while feeling bad is no easy trick. Still if I could, I would emulate Mr. Clemens. If I could manage a Mark Twain makeover, it would make me feel better.
But life is long (in my case) and good times have been many. So I can take some comfort in those better days, I just have to suck it up and do it. I have some absolutely great memories, awesome stories but storytellers need to keep updating our material. It’s a task, digging in old holes, remembering simple little stories that are just as rich, maybe more subtle, not so polished. In August of ’03 my daughter got married. We rented a big house on the beach near Muskegon, Michigan, the whole family was there for a long weekend. I was the wedding planner: I know! All of the women thought I would screw it up but I spent a lot of telephone time with my daughter and we managed.
For about a year, I had been fooling around with a guitar. No lessons, just a friend who showed me a few things and a book. I wanted the guitar for a prop and just a few melody lines to go with my storytelling. About a week before, daughter Sarah dropped a bomb. She wanted me to sing in the wedding. “I know you’re not very good but I’ve heard you fool around and that’s good enough. I want my dad to sing at my wedding.”
At the time, I had a drama queen, daughter in law, self designated smartest person in the family. From a small, rural, 4-way-stop town, she was the best musician-singer in her school, in the church choir and very proud of it. The idea that I was the choice to pluck guitar and croak like a shore bird was received as a blunder of great proportion and a personal insult against her. In a subdued voice just loud enough to be heard, back turned but near enough, she repeatedly expressed her disbelief and embarrassment that Sarah would do such a thing and that I would go along.
My son and his wife were both deceitful, selfish, unforgiving and convinced they could control the other. I never bought into her cunning, coy-ploy and she wrote me off as an enemy from the start. At she and my son’s wedding rehearsal her grandmother asked us, “Does he know what he’s getting into?” My wife and I shrugged, compared them to happy drunks who would wake up with a long suffering hangover; a train wreck looking for a place to happen. Her father, a pillar in the Pentecostal Church, had sung at her wedding and that, in a convoluted way, figured into the politic. I never cared for him either but that’s another story.
It was a steep drop-down to the beach with a cold wind coming in off the water. I tuned the guitar at the house, not thinking about how cold weather upsets the instrument. My Taylor Big Baby was way-way out of tune and I never got a chance to warm up. The first chord was a ‘D’ but it sounded like metal being punished. My voice failed as well. Without a good note to follow, the words were lost to begin with but it ended and that was a good thing. The difference between my daughter in law and my family, we knew it was about family, not the primadonna. The song was, “The Wedding Song” (The union of your spirits here has caused Him to remain. For whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name,There is love,There is love) What I understood was; we all loved my daughter. She wanted me to sing at her wedding and I did.
Thinking back on that day I smile, even laugh. It was a great day in so many ways. The primadonna’s union with my son self destructed two years later. As much his fault as hers, he is my son and I love him in spite of his mistakes but she doesn’t get that consideration. I would think every family has its lumps and bumps, and we’ve had ours. But none of us have ever not cared. Nobody has to fake it. So I remember a day in August, 2003, in front of God and everybody, I sent my fractious daughter-in-law a message and she got it.
Eighteen years later: I have a much better guitar. Not trying to be something I’m not, a musician, I don’t play it, more like play with it. I don’t sing, rather I talk my songs and somehow it works, through a decade of professional storytelling. I still take comfort in making the strings ring, in framing lyrics to a forgiving rhythm. You can’t fool an audience and they have been kind to me. But that woman I don’t care to remember, something has to remind me or I don’t remember: and I do feel better than when I sat down here.
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