Th e Wishing Well

For a lifetime now it seems we have been running around like chickens with our heads cut off, always trying to find something, catch up and be at ease. When this recession hit our town and our country Gary and I did not really feel it because, well, we had always struggled financially, so it was no different now. We have always bought second hand, cut coupons and gone without. One of the things that I have always loved best about our jobs is this possibility in both of them. For example, right now I am on call and I will be until midnight. Possibly I could make some extra money tonight. Then again, I could possibly only make a tiny little bit but being the ever optimistic person that I am I always can see it for what it may turn out to be like and usually it does work that I go out and we make some money. In Gary's job and world it has always been this way. He could drum up some extra lessons any old time and we could get those new curtians or pay the credit card bill or whatever. The difference between his possibilities and mine is the slight, ever so small possibility that he could hit some huge possibility. A possibility that could change our whole world and turn us upside down.
A few years ago Gary made a friend, a fan friend. A lot of Gary's friends are "fan friends". They come to a show, see how great Gary is and then because Gary is who he is, when they come up to introduce themselves they are immediate friends. Gary is an amazingly warm and tender person and people are instinctlively warm back to him.
This new friend had all sorts of connections and over the course of the last few years we have rode a roller coaster of possibilities. In a couple of days Gary will travel to NYC for the second time this year to play his guitar with some other musicians in what looks like could be a very interesting turn of events.
So how do I feel?
Part of me is elated. It would be nice to feel freed up from my job for awhile. I would love the chance to travel with the kids and show them our world. I would love to feel more free.
Part of me is terrified. When my dad started to make a lot of money, that was the end of my dad, spiritually and emotionally.
When I went to Target today to buy some gifts for Gary who will turn 42 in a few days it was easy. The kids picked him out little things and I got him some needed stuff like a new bag and a bike helmet. We spent more time hemming and hawing over the cards. The kids wanted to get him just the right one. Jonah picked him out the card with the charging elephants and Nora chose a really sweet one with flowers and Sadie picked him out a card that played "Somewhere over the Rainbow" when you open it. She said it would make him cry and we all agreed it would.
At times like this I wonder if I wished too hard for this break for Gary and what it will mean to us all. He is already being asked to sacrifice some of our vacation time to travel to NYC and to practice.
It makes me feel possessive of him, wanting his overall attention.
Although I am a person that does not ever regret things I would like to be able to look in a crystal ball once in awhile, maybe know what I am getting myself in to before I go around throwing coins in to the well.

Grae

Gary and I waited up until 11pm on Wednesday night. Grae was home visiting and he called and told us he was in the area. It was no imposition, it was a joy to wait around on the couch for him. I have often thought about writing a little story about Grae, such an interesting path he follows and it is worth telling about the days he comes home and tells us of his adventures. For some reason during his first few visits he reminded me of Dill from To Kill A Mockingbird. Scout would go about her life all through the year and almost forget about Dill and then the summer days would shine upon her and Dill would be at her door, ready to play again. That is how it is for us and Grae.
Grae used to be Greg and Gary has known him for many more years than I. From the stories I have listened in on throughout the years Grae somehow met Gary out in Western Mass or maybe at a show somewhere and they immediately made a connection. They have been friends ever since. The first time that I met Grae was driving to a Max Creek show in the middle of nowhere with Gary on New Years Eve, I think 1996, yeah that is it. I was going to give up smoking and he was trying to talk me out of it. I was not drinking and he was lecturing me on the necessities of living an independent free life away from the constraints of not drinking. To be honest, he was not my favorite friend of Gary's but we sat up until the wee hours in our shared hotel room talking and laughing, the three of us. And then he was gone.
For all of the time that I have known him he has lived in Northern California and he has come to visit his home of Massachusetts once every couple of years so this has amounted to about 8 or 9 visits in our life together from Grae.
It marks time for me.
All the visits occurring in our 20s were marked with drinking and partying and philosophizing and laughing.
When Gary and I started to have children our relationship with him took on a whole other flavor.
There is this thing that happens when friends have children and other friends don't but Grae was around so infrequently that really it was not a big deal. We always cleared time for him. Gary loved him and before I knew it so did I.
In our most recent visits all of the confusion and angst that I had in my eyes throughout my 2os and early 30s are in his eyes in his 40s and now this visit was all about changes and moving on. He has moved all of his belongings in to a storage facility and is going on a great adventure to live in South America on the Amazon River indefinitely. Cool.
We stayed up and waited for him. He looked older, much thinner and much kinder than he ever had. We picked up right where we had left it two or three years ago and then the next day he was gone.
Gary and I are two creatures of habit and constancy. We stay in our flow and we have become foundations for some of our most wandering friends. I love to hear their stories. I love it when they sleep on my couch. I hope that my children travel to wonderful places and have great adventures and find our home waiting for them just where they had left it, a light on and the two of us standing in the doorway....... waiting.

Happy Learn Nothing Day!

Crap! I forgot today was Learn Nothing Day! The kids have already gone off to Nature Camp, listened to the radio, opened books and talked with us about all sorts of various things. Learning Nothing is a very hard thing to do...........

In younger days I danced like this. This is how Gary met me. Looking and feeling like this. This was a festival before we got married. Gary had just come home from 6 weeks out on the road and we had driven the old tour bus two hours to this festival. I think Gary may have been playing while I was dancing here but maybe not.
We camped with our good friend LJ. Several years later LJ drove across the United States and left us a message staring at the clouds in Montana chanting about the surreal beauty in the skies. He overdosed two weeks after that call.
We were dancing during this photo. He and I loved to dance together.
I miss being that carefree. I know what they all say, all the old cliches about age and youth and all that but I know that when I go out now even if I may be swaying I will never dance like that again.
I danced in those days with the lightness of a floating petal, carefree and full of the promise of another day and one after that. I danced without the burden of bills and taxes and checklists. I danced in the eternal glow of youth.
I love this picture. I am glad it is here to remind me.

"He took her soul—though, being a secular-minded person, he didn’t think of it that way. He didn’t take the whole thing; that would not have been possible. But he got such a significant piece that it felt as if her entire soul were gone. As soon as he had it, he not only forgot that he’d taken it; he forgot he’d ever known about it. This was not the first time, either.

He was a musician, well regarded in his hometown and little known anywhere else. This fact sometimes gnawed at him and yet was sometimes a secret relief; he had seen musicians get sucked up by fame and it was like watching a frog get stuffed into a bottle, staring out with its face, its splayed legs, its private beating throat distorted and revealed against the glass. Fame, of course, was bigger and more fun than a bottle, but still, once you were behind the glass and blown up huge for all to see, there you were. It would suddenly be harder to sit and drink in the anonymous little haunts where songs were still alive and moving in the murky darkness, where a girl might still look at him and wonder who he was. And he might wonder about her."
Mary Gaitskill Mirrorball, at Pantheon Books

One of Molly's friends took this picture with her new Pentax that I am secretly seething in jealousy about. I don't know, there is something about this picture of Sadie that is amazing to me.

Jonah at age 4

Jonah will turn 4 on July 5th. To me these last four years have been a whirlwind of change, moving, and growing. Out of all of my children Jonah has blessed me with the most plentiful of moments to explore my own experience of parental anger and displeasure. I have had moments with Jonah that I thought only existed for "those parents". And yet, there they were for he and I to explore and learn together. We are closer as a result. I am grateful.
On the dawn of his fourth birthday I have many thoughts in my mind about him and about the thought that my baby days are over. I watch as other friends of ours begin their families and I wonder at that timeless moment and those sleepless elated days where it feels like there could never exist anyone else in the world aside from you and this new being and the man that helped you create this baby.
And then you blink
and it is gone
just like that, things to do, bills to pay and other children to attend to and then you notice that his baby fat is somehow changing and subsiding and that he will no longer let you call him baby anymore anyhow.
He still yearns for me though, needs me in a visceral kind of way, in a way that only he can. That's ok, I'll take it.
Last night we took the kids down to St. Peter's Fiesta which the first year that we lived here made me think that I should always live here and made it impossible to imagine life without the culture of Gloucester. Every year since it has made me wonder what the hell I am doing here and where I belong in this crowd I cannot place and do not know.
Last night we got tickets for Nora, Sadie and Molly to go on rides but it turned out that Nora was absolutely terrified of rides and that Jonah loved them so off he went on the "Crazy Bus" with his big sister without me.
I held back, close to Gary, looking around at the display, watching people walk around in circles in St. Peter's Square, not knowing this culture that I had chosen to live in.
Jonah got a new set of drums for his birthday and has been playing them for days in a row without avail and he actually makes a really good rhythm with the drums, he has a thing for it. He and Gary go off together and speak that language and I can't believe how lucky I am. I can't believe how blessed I am to have this all, the husband and these children and my life.
Now if I could just freeze Jonah at four...............
I sneak in to his room at night just to get a smell of his head.
It terrifies me that that smell may dissipate over time.