Archives for July 2017

When some people find out that I am a lover of literature and music, they tend to ask, “What is your favorite song? What is your favorite book? What is your favorite poem?” I am always at a loss to answer these questions about favorites. How does one decide between Ode to a Nightingale and Annabel Lee? Why would a person limit their choices to these two? Why does there need to be a choice? What is this thing about favorites?
My tendency is to think that it is an idle question. It seems impossible to shine a light with its answer. Choosing one seems to relegate others. I don’t have a favorite and this seems to dull my appearance at parties where such things are asked with regularity. Is it one more iteration of the American chant of “We’re number one?”
Who was my favorite person? Who was my favorite student? Who was my favorite teacher? There is a similarity among all questions that begin “who was your favorite?” Is it not unlike asking a parent of multiple children “Who is your favorite?” I am always at a loss to answer and my wife would say that it is because I overthink it. She was say that it isn’t a pronouncement, just a light, party question.
I’ve never done well with light, party questions. I don’t see the value. If Thomas Mann, or Franz Kafka or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Alice Walker is my answer, does it really say anything about me or them?
What is your favorite food? Well sometimes it is potato chips but I do not wish to be defined by potato chips and I would not like to eat them every day. Again my wife objects and teases that I would like to eat them every day.
Sometimes it is couched differently. “If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have three books, what would they be?” I have no idea. I assume that they would be the books with which I was stranded. Being stranded does not mean that you get to pick and choose. So why ask?
Do people who ask that question really wish an answer or are they just waiting to tell you what their favorites are? Why do they want you to know?
Maybe if the question were phrased, “Whose books or songs or poems do you really love?” I would find that question more palatable. Maybe it is why I am not the first choice for a party guest.
This question lingers with me though. What does it mean to have favorites? I had a favorite towel. I would use it every time I showered. My wife would warn me when she was about to wash it. I preferred it to the exclusion of all other towels. I have a favorite pair of jeans. I wear them every chance I get. I put off having them washed.
Expressing a favorite can be an act of vulnerability. My friend Howard once expressed that owls were his favorite images. He was inundated by them. The owls kept coming long after he wished that they would stop. It was an easy choice for people to get Howard an owl. After a point, each owl only furthered his regret at having mentioned a favorite. One becomes too easy a target with mention of a favorite.
In competition I always longed to play against someone better. Table tennis is my best example. I was quite good but what I longed to do was play with someone better. Losing did not matter. What mattered was playing better. It was a love of the experience, rather than a love of winning.
Favorites imply a winner, and then everyone else. I’m hard pressed to do that in some areas, not in others. The New York Yankees and the New York Giants are my favorite teams, Yes, I choose them in exclusion to others. They are sports teams, but they are not people. We do not have a personal relationship. My interest in them is a one way street. I do not care if this offends any other team in any other sport.
People are a different matter. Music is a different matter. Art is different. Teaching is both different and the same as having a sports team. You root for your students. You hurt for their defeats and revel in their victories. I may not have known it then but I know it now.
One definition of the word is that it describes someone who enjoys special favor or regard. Another is that it is someone expected to win a specific contest, the favorite. Another is that it is a person treated with “undo favor” by a king or an official. Five definitions down and still all about people. There is one slight mention as an adjective, a special thing held in high regard.
It does not mean that other things cannot be held in high regard, but it has become to mean a form of summit of high regard in a given area: song, film, novel, poem, and painting. Why has our language done this? Is it a form of monotheism? Is that the Genesis of favorite?
Favorites has survived transition to the digital age. One is constantly asked to express Favorites. They are listed and catalogued. A person is sent tempting advertising based on an expression of Favorites.
It seems to have been dressed in new clothing, but does that mean that it has been redefined?
Emily Dickenson wrote: The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —

Is that not the natural expression of favorites? It always seemed to me like the happy sperm fulfilled its mission, penetration followed by closure. Selection. I only know that the carriers of those happy sperm have been changed forever. Maybe that is the key to having been a favorite.
The favorite is changed forever. My favorites are rarely human. That says more about me than the nature of favorites, doesn’t it? I really do try to avoid doing that. Maybe it is not as instinctual in me as it is in others. Maybe that is why I feel as I do about favorites.
What does it say about me if the truth is that I have very few? Does a lack of favorites equate to a lack of interest in this world? I do not think so, but you may disagree. That would make you one of my favorites.

I don’t know why the places that I have lived have almost always felt sacred to me but they have. After Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, I was taken home to a place on Thomas Street in Newark. The street is no longer there, but have these pictures of it in my mind and these movie like replays of what happened there. Joey and Carol and I were children there and it was there that they told me about my first ghost. I was excited and afraid. The place held the ghost. I think that was when I first considered an entity that inhabited a place, at least for a time, at least in some minds.
The address was 780 Broadway, Newark, New Jersey. This was before the era of zip codes. It was a basement apartment that was considered two and one half rooms because of the kitchenette. I loved it there. There were glass enclosed cabinets standing up on a hardwood floor. I lay curled on that floor and played with baseball cards, marbles, and toy soldiers. I could look out and see the sunlight and the passing traffic. It never occurred to me that I lived beneath the ground. That little apartment held the enclosure of my existence.
I experienced holidays there for the very first time. I remember my very first joys being there. My life flowed with family then. The concept of friendship was fairly new. Joey and I were friends because his mom and my mom were friends. I had not realized that friends were people that you met.
That small basement apartment came with horrors. I contracted asthma there. I had to put my mom back together there and save her from going insane. But the place was good to me. I’ve gone back to visit more than a few times. Inner city economics has not been kind to it and I think that it may well disappear.
I can picture every inch of that small apartment and they soothe me. I learned to read there. I recited scripture to my great grandmother there, in our shared bedroom, where she lay dying for years. I believe the room offered all the comfort that it could.
We moved to a now nonexistent apartment house on 41 Lincoln Avenue in Newark. It was above ground and bright, on the third floor. I mostly remember it sexually, after all I was just 13. But I read the first book that made me cry in that apartment, Animal Farm. I lived there when Pope John the 23rd was elected as pontiff. I was re-baptized as a Catholic there.
I remember French glass doors and a long hallway. I can feel the walls. I can see out of the windows. I can hear the song “I Will Follow Him.” Apartments are like harlots, aren’t they? They are rented out, passed around. They sometimes become hardened. They bear witness at the mercy of business.
There have been so many apartments. Some had no heat. Some had no way to be cool. Some were without toilet. You might think that I lived in an underdeveloped country, but it was all in New Jersey.
John Lennon wrote, “There are places I remember…” Places are not always a silent witness. Sometimes they speak to you. It depends on whether you are able to listen.
The first house where I lived came about because of debt. My stepfather gambled and then gambled again. My mom tired of paying off the endless debts and made the calculated decision that since my stepfather was actually a hard worker that if she put him in more debt that he had ever known that he would curtail the gambling.
It was a two family house on a one block one way street that also housed the police department and the firehouse for an upscale, suburban community called Glen Ridge. We rented out the second floor. I was given the bedroom of a four room apartment. They placed a hide abed into what was supposed to be the dining room we had an eat-in kitchen and what was glorious to me was a backyard that did not feature broken glass. I was a city kid with high rolls and leather, and this was the madras capital of the world. But there was a porch and a basement that we did not have to share. We could have a washing machine that we did not have to rent by the load. There was a garage and a driveway that we only shared with the next door neighbors.
Delight of delights was when my Aunt Dotty and Uncle John became the tenants of the upstairs apartment. It was the place where both of them would spend their last days. We were able to get a dog. My room was mine except for the closet, which they needed. When I looked out my windows, I did not see feet or traffic, I saw green.
I lived on every level of that house, including the fairly uninhabitable attic. I knew every room and every window and every doorway. The first time that I had sex in a place where I lived was this house. The only other experiences had been in motels and car seats. I first took out my bedframe and put a mattress and box spring on the floor and called it my bed there.
On the whole, memories of places are fonder for me than memories of people. Experience attaches to a place differently than it attaches to people. Things become colored by future interactions with people but they tend to stay the same with memories of places. The image of a staircase with a stained glass window brings me a feeling of warmth. An above ground pool in the back yard brings me joy. When I lived in the attic, I would descend the pull down ladder at night and cool off in the pool. I was then able to sleep in the stifling heat of the attic.
Quirky things are now comical. The pantry was unheated and things would freeze out there. The basement would take on water. The house abutted the high school field and the band would blare music into my room. They were all annoying at the time but now they just bring a smile of remembrance.
Rahway, what more can I possibly say about that place? I loved it so but it was never mine.The feelings that I found there have been seminal in what much of my writing tries to express. I found the seeds of hope for a new way of looking at life in Rahway. Now it is gone. I’ve visited and revisited that place so very many times. I know every crevice and every corner, but is there a use for those memories? Are they baggage or propellers?
I once lived in a garage. It was in Paterson, New Jersey. My oldest friend had lived there since I met him and now he was getting married and moving to a larger space. That converted garage had been magic for me. It was there that I first heard the music of Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. It was there that I first listened to Hal Holbrook perform Mark Twain tonight. It was there that I first heard Lightnin Hopkins and Lenny Bruce. I am so grateful to Lanny. He taught me so much and then gave me this garage.
I almost died there. I had no money, no food, no income, and no car. The sink was irreparably clogged. I shivered listening to the street traffic at night. My door was right there and there were only factories around. It was very dark at night and the door was flimsy. I wondered how he could have lived there for so long.
That garage and Rahway were places of learning for me. In the garage were stacks of magazines and a fish tank on the kitchen table. Empty bottles of wine and tequila- It was a place that I loved to be, until I had to leave. Rahway was much different and somehow the same. Love of a place is only a rental agreement. You may love it forever but it moves on.
I think that it may be the same with all places. You embrace but then move along. The embrace of a home is something different. More strange than inter-species, it is an embrace between creatures of fast time and creatures of space.
There was this kid that came to the garage, at first he was looking for Lanny. But he found me and brought pot. At the time I was listening to Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky. The kid was enraptured by it. He thought it was the best thing that he’d ever heard. I smiled and felt old. I wondered how many people had sat in this garage and heard the best music that they had ever heard before. I think that it must have been dozens.
I remember being hungry and sick and without money. My car was broken and I was walking up a steep hill for two miles a day to get to school. I knew that I couldn’t maintain, but I didn’t see alternatives. I had to finally have a degree. I’d needed to do it on my own but my sense of stubborn pride was failing.
One night my friend Howard came over and said, “I’m taking you home to stay with my family for a while.” I felt touched by the magic of the world. One of those times when the world is not just about physics-
Howard and Karen’s home had been Howard’s parents’ home. There was his beautiful wife, and three wondrous children. I had a room in the attic. There was a high up, stained- glass window. I had my own radio, a mattress and box spring, and my first ever down quilt. I graduated from college in this room and did my first preparations for teaching as a graduate assistant here. I can feel the temperature of it in my mind like an emotional thermometer.
It was an old house and Howard employed me to earn my keep. I ripped the front of the house away with a crowbar. I dug a trench from the street to the house. It was four feet deep and I dug it by hand. He was most at home in the garage. He taught me how he cared for his motorcycles there. He tried to teach me mechanics but I was hopeless. Instead I offered Shakespeare.
I gave back the only thing that I had to give then, an opportunity to learn from someone who had taught me. It wasn’t a gift that had financial obligations, but it was a gift given in gratitude for being able to share a space in time.
The gift of a place is not easily given, it can’t be. A person has to see the place and embrace it and be embraced by it. Others must join in. It is very difficult to give the gift of the experience of a place. It may be sought after but not possible.
Places that you remember cascade with aging. I can see each and every classroom where I ever taught. Every window out of which I looked while reciting Anabel Lee. Time in still life, like a gif with some animation.
I left Howard and Karen’s home for relocation. I was moving to Minneapolis, I was all in on love that I did not realize was gone. It was a three room apartment on University Avenue. There was a kitchen, a middle room and a bedroom. The bathroom was shared with others.
I remember the thunderstorms and rain that washed down the street in torrents. I remember walking everywhere. I remember the Mississippi, way up north. I recall the yoga in that apartment. I can feel the air there. Images flood from a place that was never ever mine, but I can see out the windows. I think that I was only there for 6 weeks, but so many years later, so vivid. That is the character of a place that you remember, whatever the reasons for and duration of stay.
I came back to Rahway and found that my home was no longer a home and now a battleground, because of the people. Everyone feels like they own a place, but places are not owned. One can be a caretaker.
I’m not bad at husbandry, although that is a matter of judgement. The first place that the law said belonged to me and the bank was a townhouse. It was an end unit. There was magnificent light in some rooms and almost none in others. It suffered from a lack of insulation that caused a couple of rooms to be less than comfortable for a good part of the year. But there was the first fireplace that I ever had that was mine, at least it felt that way then.
There was this floating staircase and a bedroom that had a sort of balcony. There was a Jacuzzi. Many moments of a place are attached to people but some are just between you and the place. It wasn’t like that for me there. Everything got attached to people. The coloration wasn’t great. I was glad to sell it.
My fondness for places seems to be related to how much I was able to write there. Maybe, in the process, my writing is an attachment to place as well as time. A place that my mind sees as a mental laboratory- A place where I can be alone with the natural world-
Where we moved, on Decker Pond Road was just such a place. There were windows looking out over a fine, small lake. This place was the essence of magic for me. The embrace of person and place, is what I felt in Rahway, but that was never mine. I felt it again on Decker Pond Road in Lake Tranquility. We lived there for eighteen years, long enough to plant trees and watch them grow. As long as the life span of creatures who would share this place with you and then move along to somewhere else.
Only some of these creatures were human. People came and stayed and then left. Some creatures spent their entire lives there. Keats and Fitzgerald lived and died there. Howard and Tom called it their home for a time and then moved on. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of that lake and of my gardens there. There is not a day that goes by that I do not look out of those windows. The flowers the trees and the ground are woven into my soul.
It was our glorious home. I tell myself that we left it better than we found it, but I am not sure what that means to a place. I know that it wore me out and would have crushed me with its challenges, at least it seems that way. All logical evidence leads to that conclusion. I wanted my home with its magnificent views and gardens to be a place I never left. I didn’t get my way.
The soul is in part a product of the places that you have lived. I think that place speaks to soul. I’m not sure about the why of that mystery. But I know that it exists for me, mystery or fallacy, it exists for me. The bond between person and place seems to extend beyond death of people, but I am less sure about the death of place.
Rahway burnt down and was condemned. By chance, I visited before it was destroyed. I felt the passion and the depth that a memory of place has. It felt desolate. People and places have this in common, sometimes they feel desolate. Travelling back up the highways to my gardens and views and animals and trees, I felt renewed and if I could pray, one of my prayers would be to have places avoid desolation. I want my places to prosper and my fervent hope is that they will have benefited from my tending.
The history of people and places is intertwined. Each have their highs and lows. If you recall a particular place, does it not usually come with a warmth bath of feelings? I does for me.
There are so many more places and not enough time, for me, but I pray that there is time for them.

Passing Through

One reason that the voices of the dying and the voices of the dead differ is the yearning. Dedication to the dying is temporary but dedication to the dead is more enduring. How many of us have an enduring dedication to the dead? Do they reach back from the grave ensnaring or guide us toward a light? The voices of the dying are different from this.
We age and the legions of those once in our lives but no longer grows. Is being faithful to the dead a trap of time? Is it a world of ghosts? Is it a ladder on which we climb? In this shocked about existence, do we know if we climb up or down?
At heart, I am more of a diver than a flyer. At more than 100 feet below the surface, I am relaxed and at ease. I feel agitated in the air. I dive deep and accept that there are no mistakes for which I will not pay, but aloft I know that mistakes are out of my control.
Funny feeling that way and being a Gemini. I’m supposed to love the air but I long for the sea. The songs of the dying and the dead are different on the sea. I am writing about the dying but not for the first time. The air is my friend but it frightens me with the lie of its endless space. The sea has a bottom and a top and immense power. I am not a child of the sea although sometimes I wish that I were.
I feel like I am one of the living who hears the voices of the dying and the dead. I struggle with feeling that it is merely a redundancy of what has been heard before. It’s difficult to not look for meaning.
My wife knows this far more intimately than I do. For a decade she helped the dying and the dead. She became an acknowledged expert therapist. We had the dying to our table. I so admire what she was able to bring to them, but I got to witness the price of the dying and the cost for her to facilitate it. She has always told me that she did not fear death but feared the dying. I’m afraid it is the opposite for me.
I once had this dream that frightened more than any other that I have ever had. I was eternal and totally alone in a void of blackness for eternity. It sounds like a dream of one’s personal hell, doesn’t it? Most things eternal between heaven and hell feel like hope. Maybe they should feel like dread. I know, at least, that they are wishes.
The dead and the dying, what am I doing? Why am I here? What drives me in these directions these days? What gives me pause abut looking towards a future? There’s the rub. Right there. Pause about looking towards a future-
Voices of the dying often sing of their pain and longing. Voices of the dead are more settled with the accepted tinges of regret. It did not work out the way it might have, but now it is done. Do I have acceptable tinges of regret? What would make them acceptable?
I traded a gift for a paycheck. I traded it for financial security, not all gifts come with this benefit, but mine did. If you know what good teaching is and how to organize it, you will be paid twice as much, but you will no longer have time to teach. I tried to go back to teaching, but it was a voice of the dying. I’d left. I let it go for the sake of my family and the need to do more for them. I saw myself as the necessary provider.
I feel as if I have wandered into some existential cemetery. The voices of the dead seem like roots. It feels like the voices of the dying will be swept away. I am almost afraid to know how I fit into this dichotomy. Maybe I am just here as a witness, Leonard Cohen wrote “passing though.”
“Passing through, passing through- Glad that I ran into you.”
But what does that say about the voices that I hear? Maybe I am better off not listening to these voices of the dying and the dead. Maybe I have written too many eulogies and have grown an affinity for the form. Maybe I need a dose of something else. Do I need to deny what I hear to have that portion? Gift for a paycheck- Trading senses for understanding-
As far as I know, I am the last of my maternal line, all genetic evidence to the contrary. I should say that I am the last of my known maternal line, but is there a difference? Perhaps Ancestry.com or some other service for hire could help me with this, but they would just be names with whom I really have no history. I think that is why I seem to listen to the voices of the dying and the dead.
While writing this essay I get the news that my next door neighbor has died. She is no longer a voice of the dying. She was a ninety-five year old retired school teacher who bought her home in 1947. She met my wife and my grand-daughter and we will attend the funeral. I have mixed feelings about not ever having met her.
The voices of the dead are more muted when they have not been the voices of the dying in your life. She was one of my people, a teacher who lived and taught and loved that she did, or so I am told. My wife calls it a missed opportunity, but I feel somehow spared. I do not have her image in my mind, I don’t have her voice in my head.
What does it say when I value this more than having had the experience to share with her? There were only a few days when she was not back and forth to the hospital. I remember Valerie coming home and saying that Miss B, as she was called, was off to the beauty parlor. I did want to meet her. She expressed a desire to meet me. I can imagine a cup of tea and talk of the classroom and a pride in students who we taught.
The timing just wasn’t right. I think feeling this relief says more about me and really nothing about her except for her achievement of endurance. Something seems to be pressing down on me. I’m not sure what it is but it feels like me pressing down on me.
Perhaps the voices of the dying and dead need to be heard. Maybe the remembrance does them a service. Perhaps, unheard it is they who are in that dark void.

What are the measurements of your life? Are they measured by progeny? Are they a measurement of style? Is the measurement the result of an intellectual contribution? Is happiness an indicator of your measurements? Is life to be measured at all? Where does one find the correct measuring stick?
Many turn to religion and philosophy when seeking feedback on their lives. Measuring is after all a form of feedback that is based on a widely accepted graph. The old workman’s saw is “measure twice and cut once.” I am searching for a method of measurement. I have little idea of what it will be.
I can eliminate some obvious candidates. Having never biologically fathered a child, I can remove that aspect of things. I have made attempts at being remembered, but if someone asked me why, I would be hard pressed to come up with an answer. I tell myself that art lives forever, but I think that is because I know that I will not. I am increasingly aware of my mortality and so I look for a way to measure my life.
How does one go about this task? Why is it undertaken? What satisfaction exists in the answers that you find? Does it change anything outside of your own perception of who you have been and who you are?
Perhaps your own perception is enough but it does not feel as if it will be enough for me. My writing is an exploration and I am looking for more. Jackson Browne wrote and sang, “I’m holding out my only candle but it’s so little light to find my way.”
I want to take measurement of my life and I don’t know how to do it. My wife says that this is because I am dense and I do not disagree, but even the dense need answers. When these answers are memories, one knows that you are close to living in a past tense.
The temptation is to list accomplishments. I was a teacher and I helped people. I think that I am quite proud of that. I am a good husband. I look for beauty in the world. I have learned to prefer gentle as opposed to harsh. It doesn’t feel like enough. I have poured my soul into my books and songs. It still does not feel like enough. One might ask if anything would feel like enough and I have no answer. I do not feel as if I have done enough.
I ask myself why I need to measure anything. Is it my sense of competition? I would be humiliated to think that is what it is. I know that what I seek is a deeper understanding. I do not know if it is there or if I have the ability to grasp it. My angels are older. Sometimes a new angel flashes her wings in front of my eyes, not unlike temptation. I know that my needs have changed. I have learned that time changes needs.
This process would have been called in the past “taking stock.” But I am unsure as to how to measure, how to count stock. And so I hold out my only candle.
Answers come in eye dropper portions. Preferring gentle to harsh is one. Maintaining gentle while others are drawn to harsh is an argument with my nature. I am only up to the challenge sometimes. One of my favorite words is sometimes, and now it seems to haunt me. Do the allure of previous passions haunt us with regularity? Does this regularity make them any more surmountable?
In his sermon, The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life, Martin King preached that the words given to a creed were far less important than the deeds that one accomplished in service of this creed. I don’t know how to measure the power of my deeds, if, in fact, they had any power at all.
How is power defined? How is it best used? What are the measuring sticks that I should use to guide me?
I have so many questions and so few answers. I guess that the answers that I do have will have to be sufficient. Still holding out a candle-

Lyrics of Living

Music was always a huge part of my life, but I thought that I would only be an appreciator. My Mom loved good, popular music. We listened to the hi-fi as much as we watched television. I grew up on Billie Holiday, Joe Williams, Tony Bennet, Frank Sinatra, Roberta Sherwood, Count Basie, and the magnificent Judy Garland, always my mom’s emotional favorite. Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald were a soundtrack of life for us. Perry Como and Bing Crosby as well, although then I did not understand that they were all crooners. I thought that word just meant singer. I did not understand that it referred to a particular type of singing.
The first time I heard my generation’s music was the Everly Brothers. My dad worked on juke boxes. When I went to work with him, my job was to slide the inserts inside the jacket that eventually appeared on the box and told you the name of the song and who was playing. I would earn copies and so I always had a prodigious collection of what was then called 45’s.
My Dad taught me about Harry James and Glenn Miller. The night that he married my mom, they went to see Harry James play. My Dad and mom were both credible dancers. My Dad had this fluidity of moving. It was like that in sports and games for him as well. Then he got this little organ. It taught you how to play in a simplified way and was a fad in the late 1950’s. Pretty much like everything else that required eye-hand coordination and rhythm, he was a natural at it.
I, of course, was clumsy. Making my fingers work in conjunction with my ears was a challenge. But I did have this history of passion for music. My Mom offered piano lessons. His name was Frankie Melton and he ran a music shop on Summer Avenue. He was very short. I did not know what the word dwarf meant in real life, only from cartoons and children’s books. But I suppose Mr. Melton was a dwarf.
He taught piano and while learning piano, he taught the student how to read music. I was very enthusiastic, but there was a problem. We could not afford a piano and I did not live with my father.
I tried finding a place to play, but there wasn’t one that I could afford. Once a week Frankie would let me practice on a piano in the back of his shop. I relished those times, but it wasn’t enough repetition for me to learn. Once I rolled out toilet paper and carefully painted in all the keys. My first usage caused irreparable rips. And so it was decided that I would get an accordion. We could afford that rental.
It was not a piano. I was an asthmatic child and the sound of the organ was similar to me to the sound of my wheezing. I hated it. I did learn to admire its durability. No matter how many times I accidentally dropped it or kicked it, the instrument was indestructible.
There followed brief encounters with a coronet, which was not the saxophone I wanted. It was advised that because of the asthma, that would not be a good idea. I played a recorder and then I quit. I was a listener.
There came the day that the music died. My mother married a man who considered all music noise and he liked quiet. The hi-fi was gone. There was no radio. The only music was the radio in the car and the music-hater controlled that as well: the day the music died. I became separated because of my love of music. It was no longer something that I heard around the house. The silence was oppresive.
Music was not noise. To even entertain that thought betrayed my mom and dad. Music was beautiful and inspirational and I felt robbed. The worst part was the feeling that there was nothing to be done about it.
Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and The Four Seasons changed that for me. Then there were The Beach Boys and The Beatles. I listened and because I had a foundation of allowing music into my heart, I felt. The feeling required a rejection of all that I knew about music. Big Band was slick and I wanted something else. Frank Sinatra was singing some “ring a ding” crap and I needed something else.
My dad teased me about Elvis and I felt stung. He told me that it was awful music. I rebelled and listened to it more. My mom would no longer talk about music and just said, “Joe doesn’t like it.” I hated him for not liking it.
The influence of music on my life is profound. It has shaped me in many ways. I wanted my writing to sound like jazz. I needed my prayers to sound like blues. I wanted my insights to sound like folk and, after Dylan, to sound like rock. Once I could drive, music was a constant companion again. It was a place where it was not noise. All those artists of my childhood were pushed away in favor of my youth. That was a mistake that many of us made.
Raw trumped style because of sincerity. Later, I found myself telling students that poetry was about your ability to use the language to express emotion, not about emotion itself. I didn’t feel that way about music then.
In 1966, Frank Sinatra released “It Was a Very Good Year.” The Loving Spoonfuls released “What a Day for a Daydream” and I loved them both. This strained at my sense of taste. How could I love them both? They represented such vastly different things and yet I sang the Sinatra song in my room and listened to John Sabastian in the locker room. It was a conflict of tradition and new experience that I settled decidedly in favor of new experience. I didn’t understand that my tradition would just take a back seat and wait. I did not know that tradition was ingrained in me.
I had two friends: Frank and Lanny. Frank gave me his Martin guitar to play and Lanny taught me about Lighten Hopkins and Phil Ochs, and so many others. I learned that music was message. And then there was Tom and Nancy.
She could play and to borrow from Jackson Browne, “that girl could sing.” Nancy gave me a guitar. It was a little warped but I loved it because she had given it to me. She had moved on to a new guitar and played in coffee houses and still wanted me as her lover. Oh that girl could sing. And she knew picking rhythms. I asked her to teach me “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright.”
The song was far too complex and she listened over and over as I slaughtered it. Finally, she asked that I never play it for her again. Undeterred, I kept on slamming it out without the correct rhythm and off key.
I’m not sure when I began to sing off-key. I don’t think that it happened until after I decided that vocals should include sincere passion. With emotion trumping style, I pressed on. When I was a very little boy, I sang for my school. It was a song that went, “There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy…” I was on kay then, but that was before the music died and before Elvis and before so much.
I had been led to believe that learning guitar came with blisters that would eventually become callouses. This isn’t quite true. It is difficult, at first, to press hard enough on the strings to get a clean note, but you can feel the note. It reverberates though your body and affects your voice. I could feel the notes. That changed everything. I could always listen but now I could feel the music. I had forgotten what it was like to feel a note. Then the memory rushed back in like an epiphany. It was something new that was not really new but that I had forgotten. Hands on keys and a chord that reverberated up, a rhythm that became part of you, joined with you and connected you to something greater. Writing can be like that too, but that came much later.
Right around the same time as Nancy, I met Tom. We sat in his room as he played his Fender Stratocaster acoustically. The soft riffs intoxicated me. He had the ability to become part of the song. I practiced harder on the old guitar that Nancy had given to me. I only knew chords and sometimes I didn’t know their names. I still don’t. I find configurations that feel right. I mostly do it by trial and error. This makes it hard for anyone else to play with me. Because it did not sound good at the start, I shied away from playing in front of other people.
The connective power of music is its language. Its levels of communication range from the intellectual to the basic instinctual rhythms that rarely use words to form meaning. Hearing and feeling are different. Music has little smell but does conjure aromas. It is elusive, here and then gone. Music is an angel with a temperament like angels have, here and then gone. The music can be summoned but not the accompanying angel.
I have been playing guitar on and off ever since. Sometimes I sit at a piano and those old memories come back dimly. I did learn to use the harmonica but not well. I never did master the single note technique. What I did find that I was pretty good at was music lyrics.
I would write them and then compose the music to match, but at that point my “music” did not have a life of its own. I played the guitar so that I would have something to do with my lyrics. About then, I became enamored with the music of Bob Dylan. My love for his music has endured. When I was a DJ at my local college, I once played Desolation Row three times in a row, but then someone came to the station and knocked on the door and asked me to please stop because it was depressing the hell out of everyone. I had difficulty understanding this but I did play another song. I think it was Mr. Tambourine Man.
It took me a while to like music that I hadn’t listened to often. There were exceptions like Simon and Garfunkel or Jackson Browne. When I first heard Bruce Springsteen, I labeled him a Dylan wanna be and dismissed him. Tom kept encouraging me to go back and listen again. During those years, Tom was responsible for introducing me to more music than anyone. We used to go to the City and hear concerts. The most memorable in retrospect was Elton John’s American debut. He opened for Leon Russell at the Fillmore East.

But I also got to hear John Mayall and Taj Mahal and groups that most people didn’t know about. In those days people openly smoked joints in the audience. Tom arranged to have a concert at our school which was a two year community college. I don’t really know how he did it but he managed to get Carlos Santana and BB King. BB was chosen to fulfill a dream of our friend Mario and his group the Psychotic Blues Band which actually got to open for BB.
That night at the Fillmore, we told Tom and Noreen that I had asked Nancy to marry me and that she had accepted my proposal. In those days, my friend Noreen found Nancy exotic. I found her warm and wonderful without having any idea of what it took to make a marriage work. We parted six months later.
In my mind, whenever I hear the phrase “that girl could sing,” it will always conjure an image of Nancy. Then I got lost and she went into news radio. That was how that song really ended. Even today we are distant friends and that feels so right, so good, so much like feint music.
So for all these years I have played and listened. I feel like a priest of music- a priest a long time in the ordaining. Sometimes I am very alone in my music. I know that I must have faith. I am not sure where my faith will lead.
About ten years ago, my wife gave me a great birthday present: a day in a recording studio. I played and sang and my music was recorded. I split the day into halves in order to get maximum impact. This resulted in the recording of six songs. They were songs that a person could listen to. They were songs that made me proud. Tom came and played on some of them. Then I played at a number of open mics.
The audiences were young but I seemed able to win them over. So, even though I am not playing right now, I view music as a performing and recorded art. I need to hear it on most days. The days when I do not are days not spent especially well.
I worship at the altar of music ever grateful. As Leonard Cohen wrote, “I’ll stand right here before the Lord of Song with nothing on my breath but Hallelujah.” I have nothing but praise for Gary Mielo who taught me about Jazz. I am eternally grateful to all those who have been gatekeepers and allowed me into the gardens of music.
Music is the language of my soul. I think Longfellow wrote something like that. There was a time when I could play, there is nothing more to ask for. I managed to touch music. What else is there to be had?
The Bill Evans recording of “Suicide is Painless” is part of my spirit. “Sketches of Spain” joins it, sometimes. I sometimes hear the songs that I wrote but it never feels right to share them.
The most popular of my songs is called “My New Sneakers” It makes people feel good to hear it. I wrote it with Tom about his daughter KT. She was just a very little girl, four or five. She got this new pair of sneakers and her mom brought her home and deposited her in those sneakers. They were Fire Engine Red. Tom composed the music and I worked the words.
I have been told that children with reading difficulties sing this song with ease, and they smile as they do. I feel humbled by this. I created a combination of words that went with Tom’s music and that brought joy and a fluid sense of things to other people. In my heart I know that this is what makes me an artist, a musician. I feel blessed by the Lord of Song.
Discovering a seminal chord is like finding a world. My first was to slide the A-minor down to the 5th and 6th fret. No one has told me what this chord is but I know that it rings true. It sings of beauty and promise. It can be tinged with hope and sadness. It is a versatile chord.
It occurs to me that I know people very much in the same way that I know music. I consider myself a lunatic who has somehow managed to evade detection. I have been conditioned to believe that anyone who puts up with my lunacy gets carte blanche. We just have these configurations between us. They are like the chords whose names I don’t know.
I love music but sometimes I don’t know how it works. I love people very much in the same way. Some of them become resonant chords that stay with me for a lifetime. Some wander off to the allure of better melodies.
Music is intertwined with people for me. It is that most rare form of communication shared by feelings. It is one of the reasons that I maintain a belief in the eternal possibility.
I enjoy playing for people now. They no longer flee the discordant din. I adore the gifts of music and those who have given them to me. My Martin guitar is in the basement. I’m not playing these days. If I could pray, one prayer would be that playing music would come back to me. But each day I listen.

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