spynotes

It is cold in New York. Not Chicago cold, but cold enough that it requires the big parka with the furry hood. Cold and sunny. Every Saturday I head to my old neighborhood to go to the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market with my college friend Cranky. Now that Cranky’s daughter J is old enough, she stays home on our Saturday mornings when the weather doesn’t suit her. And so today Cranky and I took the long way home through the park, past fat corgis and wiener dogs in parkas and ducks skating flat-footed on the pond, around the hill and up the other side where we spotted a hawk in a tree and a nearly brave and stupid squirrel who briefly considered running at the hawk and then, once peering at his beak from inches away, swiftly spun and scurried away.

* * * * *

Let me catch you up.

Spy headquarters is still in Brooklyn. We’ve been here more than six years now, in this apartment for nearly two, and I’m coming up on my eighth anniversary at The Toy Factory this summer. My job has changed over the years, but not all of it. Mostly every so often they pile on some more responsibilities and, if I’m lucky, give me a raise. I still love the job, but I’m getting a little restless. I’ve never worked anywhere this long before. I’m not unhappy, but I’m starting to wonder if I should want to move on. I’m feeling lately more like the squirrel, alternately confidently striding forwards and hesitating, mistrusting my abilities. some days I’m staring at the cloudless sky, others at the hawk’s beak.

Part of this restlessness is driven, I think, by looking forward to all the changes ahead for AJ and for us. He was accepted and has committed to his first choice college. I think it’s a perfect fit and I’m excited for him. His new campus is stunning and a beautiful drive from here, close enough to go up and back in a day, far enough to not want to do that all the time. It’s reassuring.

AJ had a bit of a tough time in high school. After having his pick of schools for high school, he chose a school known for math and science. This wasn’t surprising. Math and science were always his strongest subjects, until suddenly they weren’t. And while he loved the people he met at school, the test-driven curriculum felt like a grind. His grades tanked. But he got himself out of the hole he dug in a fairly spectacular way. He’s turned out to be a very talented writer, musician and entrepreneur. Go figure. He’s composing and producing albums where he plays all the instruments, producing art and music events, and engineering others’ recordings. I learned most of this from reading his college essays. He plays his cards close to the vest. It’s a pleasure to continue to get to know him. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Mr. Spy is still writing and also coaching baseball. His book is now almost a year old and is just out in paperback and he’s doing another round of book events.

* * * * *

Here are some of the things I worry about as a parent in New York City: drugs, muggers, crazy people, school bureaucracy, irresponsible sex, dumb decisions, budget cuts, subway breakdowns, dirty tattoo needles. Here is what I don’t worry about: drinking while driving, drugs while driving, texting while driving, driving. Here is what I feel bad about: we haven’t made AJ learn to drive. There was always something better to do.

* * * * *

I have a word document of things I want to make sure AJ knows before he goes to school. I add to it whenever something springs to mind. Here is what it currently says:

How to do your laundry
How to make your bed
What to do when you are sick
What to do when you are sad
How to keep track of your work
How to cook one simple but impressive meal
How to survive when broke
How to open a bank account
How to keep track of your money
How to drive
How to get help in any situation
How to sew a button
How to iron a shirt
How to tie a tie
How much I love you

It is a year of lists and more lists. The preparation for AJ’s next act is half running forward to see the future, half running away and holding tight to these last months together. It will take me that long to get my head around it and then a month or two longer. Exciting times ahead.

It has been nearly two years since I’ve written here. After 7+ years of writing nearly daily across a couple of different platforms, I fizzled, succumbed to an ever-expanding day job, family life, my guitar, a million distractions of the big city. The blog community was breaking up anyhow. The demise of google reader with no viable replacement was the last straw, I think, but Facebook and twitter had already drawn us away.

But for a million reasons, I’m feeling dissatisfied. I’ve Konmaried my drawers. Now I need to spark some joy in my own head. I miss writing longer strings of sentences. I’m sticking my toe back in the water. I make no promises.

I started my first blog back when AJ was 2 and just starting preschool. So there’s some poetic balance in considering beginning again, now that he’s about to graduate from high school and head to college. I’m starting to feel some space in my head again, but — or maybe because — the ground is shifting. More unrest. I have been just over seven years at the Toy Factory and am starting to understand why the concept of sabbatical exists. A major project is almost complete. I am trying to relearn my job as I used to do it and am finding I am a little burnt out, a little dissatisfied, unreasonably irked by petty things. I am trying to get my groove back, trying to figure out my next act. The blog has helped me navigate uncharted waters before. Perhaps it will again. Still, I make no promises, neither to myself (yet), nor to anyone else.

What drove me here today, though, was not nostalgia for this space per se, but by an assignment I had 35 years ago in my HS sophomore year English class.

I think about this assignment surprisingly often. I probably think about this class once a week how it changed my life in many ways, opening my world in a way that has not happened on that scale before or since. We’d been reading short stories. Richard Brautigan. Robert Coover. John Cheever. Donald Barthelme. I don’t remember which story it was that led us to this assignment exactly, maybe Barthelme’s “The Glass Mountain,” maybe something I can’t recall. But the assignment was to write a short story where the narrative was told with a mix of encyclopedic facts and narrative. My kind of story. There was research involved. I still have the result, a story of a girl choosing artistic ambition over love. It was terrible. Well, maybe not terrible — I got an A+ — but, well, sophomoric. It’s painful to read in much the same way that my 7th grade journal, the blue one with the silver unicorn on the cover, is painful to read. It will always have a metastory about a nerdy suburban high school sophomore who wants to be a sophisticated writer-musician in the city.

This time, I was thinking about this assignment because I am reading Susan Orlean’s The Library Book (which is wonderful and you should all read it too). Mr. Spy gave it to me for Christmas. It is the kind of writing I wanted to do when I was that sophomore in high school and that I find I still want to do today. It tells the story of the 1986 fire that gutted the Los Angeles Central Library and in so telling reveals what matters to us about libraries. It is impeccably researched with archival work and secondary sources but also first person accounts from a million different perspectives. It is full of small details that another writer might not think to mention but which are like bolts to the reader’s heart, drawing you in to find out about that handbag left behind, the temperature of the ceiling, the way the glossy pages of art books dissolve in a flood, the Dewey decimal numbers for any number of books. I am only a third of the way through and I am already reading slower and slower, not wanting it to end.

There were many assignments I loved in that English class. I wrote better papers that year, but this is the one I come back to again and again and I realized while reading The Library Book (I take pleasure in the fact that it is not, in fact A library book), it’s because that’s the moment where the pleasure of research and the pleasure of telling a story could come together. It was the beginning of the work that’s followed me ever since that I’ve never quite managed to put together.

Still no promises, but food for thought. It’s time to start writing again. This book is maybe showing me a way forward.

Just before Christmas, I encountered my sophomore English teacher in the comments on a high school friend’s Facebook post. The friend was the inspiration for the main character in my story. She is an actress now and was writing about seaweed. We met in that English class. I took the opportunity to tell my teacher how much that class meant to me. I don’t know if he remembers me. But I will always remember him. He was clearly pleased. “That course was where I first understood how amazing kids were, and how interestingly they could think.”

This year, finally, in his last year of high school, AJ seems to have found a teacher like this. He can definitely think interestingly and seems to be turning into a writer himself. I make no promises about him either, though. His world should be wide open right now. Wide open with a spark.

As for my friend, she did choose ambition over love, but in the end she found both. Sometimes there are happy endings. And sometimes there are conflagrations and new things built from the ashes, a mosaic of tiny facts reassembled, stitched together. But still no promises of what next.

On February 28th, our landlord informed us that she wanted to sell our apartment and wanted us out in 30 days. While this adheres to the letter of New York law for this type of apartment, it is just not done. Finding housing in New York City is hard. The last time we tried, there was exactly one apartment available in our price range that came close to meeting our needs and we were living in it.

18 days later, we were moved into a new place that is twice as big in a neighborhood we love and has the same rent. We’re not quite sure how we did it. The place is gorgeous, with spectacular 1920s inlaid wood floors, a stained glass window in the entry way, a huge front porch overlooking a street of painted Victorian houses and a shorter commute to work. We can’t believe our luck.

The thing that has been most interesting to me, though, is how fast our habits have changed. A little more space has meant we all seem happier, sniping at each other less, all eating dinner together because there’s more room to coexist. We miss being right next to the park but very little else. I thought I was going to miss the sound of ships on the bay but the other evening when we sat on our front porch with a glass of wine, we heard one, a low, comforting foghorn that reminds you the ocean is not far away.

We moved last Saturday and early Wednesday morning, I left for Montreal to attend a conference. It was the first time I’d been there since my honeymoon. I spent most of my time working, but some of that work involved dining out and one night was spent stomping through the driving snowstorm to a bar with 400 kinds of beer, hockey on a giant screen, and poutine, which was much more delicious than you might expect from looking at it.

Among the useful things that happened was I found a writing partner. We had our first meeting over Skype today and I think this is going to be good. We’ll be able to help each other through our projects. We’re in similar places in our lives with too many things to do and our own research always ending up on the back burner. It is good to have allies.

When I came back, I had to clean out the old apartment. Going back, it looked so tiny and dingy. We are wondering how we lasted so long. Climbing the stairs to the roof one last time, I knew I’d miss the view of Manhattan, the planes lining up for Laguardia, the music drifting up from the bandshell in the summer time, the smell of lighter fluid coming from the grills in the park.

But we are looking forward to planting the window boxes on the porch railing, finally hanging up the hammock we’ve been carrying around with us, drinking mojito’s on the porch, playing guitar in the book-lined living room. We are thinking of buying bikes so we can ride to the park or to Coney Island in the summer. The new apartment is for making plans. I like plans.

I led the music at tonight’s Mass with my guitar, so our organist could attend an organ recital in Manhattan. Sunday night Mass is what we call the “jazz Mass.” As far as I can tell, the only thing that connotes jazz is that one of the parishioners plays snare drum behind every song. But in general, there’s a little more leeway to what we can do musicwise. I did a bunch of Irish and Welsh hymn tunes and sang Jean Ritchie’s lovely “Now is the Cool of the Day” for the Communion anthem, which is about as political as I can get in church. The other thing that distinguishes the jazz Mass is audience participation. At the offertory, the congregation brings their gifts forward to a basket in front of the altar, instead of people going to them to collect. And for the prayers of the people, after the prescribed text for the week, the officiant takes a mike out into the congregation and people stand up and state their prayers to which we all respond, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

Tonight the snare drummer’s wife stood up and prayed for refugees and immigrants affected by the ban, that they might receive comfort and safety and care. “Lord, hear our prayer,” we all said. Note that our parish is very liberal, more liberal than any Catholic church with which I’ve ever been involved (and being a church musician, that’s been quite a few). At the very first Mass we attended there, the rector explicitly welcomed gay couples and got about as close to stating a pro-choice position that a priest can do. But across the aisle of the church, a tall man crossed his arms across his chest and frowned. When the mic came toward him, he raised his hand. “I pray that we don’t let everyone in, that we don’t let terrorists in.” There was a pause and then some mumbled obediently, “Lord hear our prayer.”

It was a little shocking but it probably shouldn’t have been. We are a church, not the Democratic National Committee. We are open to all. And we are in this place in this country for a reason. But in the moment it felt raw. We felt raw. And the prayers petered out because no one knew what to say. When the priest and his mic passed by me, I said nothing. On the way home, I realized what it was I wanted to say. I pray that we never feel so afraid that we can’t act with compassion, generosity, and love. I pray that we realize that when our actions come from a place of fear that it is we who are the terrorists. And also the victims. And just to be clear, that includes both my wishes for this man and his fear-driven prayer but also to me and my fear of the man and of his prayers.

I was thinking about this when I sang the last verse of Jean Ritchie’s beautiful song.

My Lord, he said unto me,
“Do you like my garden so free?
You may live in my garden
If you keep the people free.”
And he walks in his garden,
In the cool of the day.
And we walk in his garden,
In the cool of the day.

In case you don’t know this song, here is Kathy Mattea’s rendition:

And I’m going to be writing more about this song over at song, so check back there in a day or so.

Hello to anyone still reading here. Over the years, I’ve written a lot about music and done a number of memes about songs (including a couple linked at the top of this page). I’ve really enjoyed writing about songs and my attempts to play them. Over the past two years as I’ve fallen more deeply in love with guitar playing, songs have become an increasing obsession. As I’m learning more about improvising and gigging with a couple of bands, I find myself wanting to learn how to write a song, one that I don’t hate.

As you may have noticed, with my posts here getting fewer and farther between, this process has taken me away from writing somewhat, as practice and rehearsal cuts into my writing time. So I’ve started a separate blog where I can chronicle the process I’m going through. I plan to keep at it until I write the song I want to write, hopefully by the end of the year. As with much of my writing about song here, it’s likely to be (and already is) a mix of memoir and musicology. I’m aiming to write twice a week, but the political distractions being what they are at the moment, I’m not quite reaching that goal as yet, and I’m plundering some of my older posts from this space to fill in the gaps.

I’m not planning on abandoning this space — the other blog is project focused. I have things I want to achieve and a long list of planned posts to cover the ground I want to cover. This will remain a space for other things (and there are increasingly things demanding to be written about…). But I hope you’ll also join me at the new blog, song.

Has it really been six months since I’ve written here? Things have gotten out of hand. Let’s see, where was I?

* Big project at the Toy Factory that was supposed to launch in November, no January no February is now…scheduleless. I’m placing my bets on May. Which is sad, because my life is very stressful until it’s over. On the plus side, I got promoted.

* Still playing a lot of fiddle and guitar. Not so much with the band, alas, which has been on hiatus for months. But the two other guitarists of my group at work left (one laid off, the other retired) and I’m holding it together on my own now. It was terrifying, but I’m gaining confidence (possibly without any merit). I’m also making my own tabs and arrangements now, which is much more fun than I would have expected.

* I am no longer reading the news. For my sanity. I have, however, joined a local grassroots community action group. It surprises me but it also helps.

There. Now you’re all caught up.

That’s not what I wanted to write about though. What I wanted to write about is this:

Every day, on my way to work, I get off at the Herald Square stop and walk east on 35th St. Right outside the exit to the station is a building perpetually covered in scaffolding under which are the back doors to the clothing stores on 34th Street. Over the last few months, nearly a year maybe, a homeless encampment has set up there. They build shelters out of the discarded clothing boxes every night and almost every morning, someone tears them down or hoses them away. They build their shelters between the poles of the scaffolding. The shelves of the scaffolding hide, but don’t completely block, the large old fashioned projecting lintels over the shop doors and the people who live in the boxes stash their belongings there in shopping bags.

This morning when I came up from the train, it was cold, maybe 20 degrees, the coldest day we’ve had in NY this winter so far. As I walked by, the boxes were piled extra thickly with all access routes covered. And on the front of each box was a bright red Christmas stocking.

Where did the stockings come from? They are empty. I am tempted to fill them. What would you put in them? I thought maybe gift cards to a nearby restaurant, but I wonder how many would welcome the people who live in the boxes. What would you do?

I am on the road, a brief visit to Chicago for a family event. I love traveling alone. I am not so great at traveling with others, but traveling alone lets me unhook for a while. I get on the plane and lose myself in music and books for a while and, a couple of hours later,get off somewhere totally different.

Sometime during my year of traveling prodigiously, when I was moving back and forth to Chicago so often that I no longer had to think about what to put in my suitcase, my plane reading of choice has been memoir. Mostly musician memoirs. I think it started when, on one of my first trips back to Chicago from New York, I ended up sitting next to the editor of Pitchf0rk. He was reading the new collection of Ellen Willis’s Voice columns, Out of the Vinyl Deeps which, coincidentally, I had just picked up for the trip but had accidentally left it on my desk on my way out. I was brand new at editing at the time and somehow that conversation with another music editor made me feel a little bit more like I knew what I was doing. Musician memoirs are a bit of protection, if only because they remind me, while in the middle of change and strangeness, of who I am trying to be while allowing me to disconnect from my innate awkwardness and pretend I’m somebody else for a while. Somebody cooler.

For this trip, I chose to pick up a memoir of someone I used to know. Not well, but enough. And a long time ago. We went to school together, and I knew him through a good friend of mine with whom I’m still in touch. I should have seen this coming when I saw my friend’s name on page 1, not to mention his photo in the back, but I know half the people in this book and it’s weird as hell.

The plane was packed. The guy behind me smelled so badly of whiskey (on a 9 am flight)that I felt like I was getting drunk along with him just by breathing. He pounded bloody Marys all the way to Chicago. In front of me, a small unhappy baby was wailing and wailing, sending up an occasional chorus from all the other babies on the plane, shrieking in solidarity at the injustice of air travel (I feel your pain, babies. All of it.) But somehow I lost myself in this book and while I felt a bit dirty and cheap for reading it, partly because it’s not a great book and suffers from the usual name dropping of this kind of memoir (although not as much as some and in a way that strongly suggests an editor’s hand) but mostly because it feels a little like picking up someone else’s diary without permission — I couldn’t stop reading.

The memoirist writes about people I know, about concerts I went to, about events I was a part of, but his perspective is totally different from mine. He has photos similar to those I have in a box somewhere under my bed. I can’t argue with the accuracy — it’s all incredibly familiar but also different and odd. And I can’t put it down.

A long time ago, I read an interview with the memoirist in some zine or another. The interviewer asked him about his musical inspiration, about how he came to do what he did and he told the story of a favorite teacher who had given him a Bowie record so he could tape it when he was too poor to buy his own copy. His favorite teacher was mine too. He didn’t give me Bowie. He gave me Philip Glass and introduced me to John Cage and French New Wave film. The teacher doesn’t make the book but while I’m reading I’m thinking about how he may have saved the intellectual well-being of dozens of disaffected suburban teens. He changed my life in ways I wouldn’t understand for years.

At 30,000 feet, when I’m seeking to lose myself in the beautiful anonymity of a plane, I am reading a page that is forcing me to look back at my childhood, at the things I didn’t notice and the things I didn’t fully understand. I find I’m reconsidering my own perspective on the things that happened. When he quotes my friend on a topic I have actually discussed with him, I am there in that minute, even though I wasn’t actually. And suddenly I’m not sure sure if I’m losing or finding myself.

Somewhere under the bed, with the photos, are copies of the school paper I used to work on. The memoirist and I both wrote poems for it. His were cliched angst, full of things that I thought I wanted to experience. Mine were empty pretty words. Nothing special. But there they are, sharing a space, a couple of pages after a review of a concert he played in that I attended. I remember the agonizing embarrassment of that page. It looks different to me now and I wonder what it means.

As I sit on the plane reading, one of the memoirist’s songs comes through my headphones. The babies are gone. The whiskey man is gone. I am drawing a map in my head between where I am now and where I used to be, the dots spinning out from a place I lived long ago but am wondering if I ever knew.

A long time ago, I was on my way to a required school assembly with the other law-abiding citizens when suddenly I stepped out of line. The idea of a pep rally in the school gym horrified me. My feet gave out in the music department and I ducked into a practice room where I found myself face to face with the memoirist. We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. “Hi,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was in here. I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Neither am I.”

“I hate pep rallies.”

“Don’t go.”

“I have to go.”

“Do you want to go?”

“No.”

“So don’t.”

While that idea may have occurred to the feet that walked me out of line, it hadn’t occurred to the rest of me. I was too embarrassed to stay. I backed out of the room. But I didn’t go to the rally. I found another practice room and started banging out riffs on the piano,repetitive arpeggios, feeling a little exhilarated for breaking a rule that probably no one cared if I observed.

I’m not sure I ever spoke to the memoirist again. I moved away a few months later. But the moment stuck with me, maybe inspired me to pick up a book years later to see where he ended up. I’m not sure the book is going to really tell me that, but it may have told me a little something about the person I used to be.

Back on the plane, I turn the page. We’re landing in ten minutes and I want to finish the chapter. I wonder what happens next.

My orthopedist has a new office.  The old one was inside a large urban hospital, dusty and cramped and full of cardboard boxes and dead plants.  The new one is in a swanky office building near St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Radio City Music Hall, much closer to my office.  It is gleaming white, like a scene from a space movie – white concrete floors, a white marble desk, bright white lights and rows and rows of identical blue chairs.  I am sitting in one of those chairs, waiting for an appointment with my hand surgeon, who is checking the progress of my formerly broken fingers.  I am dressed for work, where I will be walking afterwards, because it is a nice day and only 13 blocks.  Two rows over is the only other person in the waiting room.  She is also dressed for work. If you look carefully, you can see signs of wear, particularly in her polished shoes, but she is carefully presented, professional. She is African American. I am not. Is that part of this story?  I think it is part of this story.

We have been sitting here for a while. She is waiting for her orthopedist.  The desk clerk comes out from behind the counter and tells her quietly that they no longer take her insurance.  The woman is not quiet.  She is angry. The office had called her to check her insurance and then gone ahead and made the appointment. She names her insurance, which I know to be a budget plan designed for healthcare workers. She has taken off work because she lives far away from this place.  She works in the hospital where the office used to be. “We never took that insurance, really. We only accepted it as a courtesy for the people who worked in the hospital.  But we aren’t there anymore,” the desk clerk explains. The clerk’s demeanor is entirely neutral, as if she’s repeating a message she’s communicated many times.  The woman is seething but polite in pointing out the office’s lack of respect for her and her time. She asks to speak with the office manager and a beefy man in a custom suit comes out and says he’ll see what he can do and disappears down a white hallway and out of sight.  The woman sits down. A few minutes later, I hear a soft sound. She is crying. Her façade is falling apart and you can see that this is someone who has to fight for everything. She carefully arranges the layers around her, but when life is hard, it tends to get harder and there is no extra fabric to cover the holes. I have never been more moved to give a stranger a hug, but she was clearly embarrassed and I didn’t want to interfere.

A few minutes later the man in the suit returns and mumbles a few words to the desk clerk before disappearing down another white hallway.  The Desk clerk comes out and says to the woman, still crying softly, that the doctor has agreed to see her and will be out soon.  And then my name is called.  When I come back to the waiting room after my appointment, the woman is gone.

But I’ve been thinking about her all morning and thinking about how grateful I am for my health insurance that costs me relatively little because I have a job that helps me pay for it.  I am grateful that it lets me visit my doctor for an affordable amount. Let’s me visit almost any doctor. That I have a job that lets me come in late when I have an appointment and I get paid anyway.  Because when you’re sick or hurt, you need all of those things.  You need doctors who will see you when they say they will. You need doctors near where you live and work. You need child care and you need your paycheck, whether or not you are able to be at your job.  You do not need gleaming white marble rooms. You need warm and soft and gentle. You need someone to bear you up. You need someone to not only tell you it’s going to be okay, but to make it so. Otherwise for those the worst off, things can only get worse.  There has to be a better way to do this.

My hand is healing.  My heart is not.

Scene: A Brooklyn street at night.  AJ and Harriet are walking home after AJ’s basketball practice.

AJ:  I’d like to go to Sweden for vacation sometime.

Harriet:  Why?  I mean, I’d like to go there too, but why are you interested in it.

AJ:  They have hockey and pretty girls.

Harriet:  True.  Now that’s a way to plan a vacation.

—

The Spy family is not (alas!) going to Sweden, but we are taking an impromptu vacation in the not too distant future.  I’m not sure why we didn’t think of it sooner.  But Mr. Spy had spent a few days in Florida while working on his book and he came back feeling like he hadn’t had enough We are not going to Florida either.  I am okay with that one.) We had briefly toyed with the idea of going to an inn on a small Caribbean island, but it proved to be complex.  Also, when Mr. Spy called them to find out if it would be a suitable place for AJ, they replied “Oh, yes, it’s not just honeymooners.  We get all kinds of people.  Calvin Trillin is spending the month with us.”  It is very hard to get away from New York.  It  has a tendency to come with you.  (We are not going to a small Caribbean island).  We are, however, going to a small island, one with which we are intimately familar.  We plan to do very little.  I am very much looking forward to it.

When you’re a musical kid, people give you music tchotchkes at every possible opportunity, and it can make you feel like a cliché. I’ve had music mugs and pads of paper with “NOTES written on them (the 8th notes are usually written backwards). I had a bag covered in a Bach score that said “Music is My Bag” (at the time I didn’t even know what that sentence meant). I had violin bracelets and earrings that mostly stayed in their boxes, posters of small sad children toting giant violins. These things and others like them were markers of music nerds everywhere. They propped up my burgeoning identity as a musician, even as I wasn’t sure that I’d earned it or that I wanted to be limited by it. After a while you start to think they belong to you and that they are inevitable.

I don’t have any of these things anymore, save the chipped mug with an 8th note for a handle that I bought with my own money on a field trip to Boston when I was in middle school. The glaze is completely worn off, but it still holds my morning coffee. I knew by high school that as much as I loved music and relied on it as a way of understanding and commenting on the world around me, that it was not the only thing I wanted to do. But I kept doing it, sometimes out of habit, sometimes out of compulsion, sometimes out of a sense of retreat, a need to pull back from new things and remember who I was by going back to the last place that I knew for sure. Sometimes out of love.

My career has taken me many places, almost all of them musical in one way or another and this has never ceased to surprise me, even as everyone around me says it looks like I’m doing what I’m born to do. These other jobs, which I love, are about other things to me. They are about music; they are not music. Playing is something else altogether. Despite the physical evidence to the contrary, music-making has never really been about identity to me. It’s about communication. It’s about making meaning out of chaos. It’s about sitting down with people to do something together. And these things have only become more valuable to me as I get older. I couldn’t quite articulate them earlier in my life. It maybe took a nearly decade-long hiatus while I was living in exurban Chicago to figure it out.

Today’s physical evidence is different. It’s a pocket full of Gibson guitar picks (medium), a T-shirt from my kid’s last band concert, the remnants of frayed strings along the side of my bed where they seem to gather like autumn leaves against a stoop. It’s the grooves worn in my fingers and the mark on my neck. It’s the white stripes of rosin decorating the black shirt I wore last night, currently balled somewhere in the bottom of my closet because I got home too late from my gig to turn on the lights to find the hamper. It’s the small metal plate reading “Gibson” from my guitar’s old case that I will keep forever. These things aren’t props. They are evidence. The real thing.

In the last few months I’ve discovered that I’m in a band. It happened slowly and I’m still a sort of apprentice member, but I can’t tell you how much I love it. It’s entirely different from the symphonic playing I grew up with and even from the Irish seisiun playing I used to do in Chicago. There is no fear. I am not so focused on memorizing and creating perfect paths to accurate performances, on impressing anyone. Accuracy matters on some songs more than others – sometimes it’s about a good improv, which is all about communicating with the other band members on stage, the moment of performance. The people in the band are a huge part of what I love about it. We are all nerds with kids and interesting and creative jobs in other fields. Our music is quirky, a mix of unusual arrangements of well-known songs, covers of more obscure songs, and some gorgeous originals. We repeat our rep a lot, which makes it easy to hop in and out of gigs without a lot of work, but we change things up just enough to keep things interesting. I want to play more, so I’m working on arranging. But I’m also enjoying not being the one in charge. I do what I’m asked. I suggest things occasionally, and I do a lot of sitting and listening. Also laughing really hard. My ribs sometimes hurt when I come home from rehearsal.

Back when I had a stack of music stationery in my desk drawer, given to me by assorted aunts and uncles, when I spent a lot of time running between orchestra rehearsals and violin lessons, I used to imagine being in a rock band, standing in front of the mirror on my closet door, my violin held sideways under my arm. Now I actually get the chance to try it. Our rock credentials are sketchy – we play a lot of acoustic instruments. We’re kind of old for this business – we’re more likely to wear clog boots than stilettos. We play tiny rooms in the backs of bars. But our musicianship skills are solid, our repertoire knowledge is large, and those tiny rooms? We pack them and the audience hangs around after the show. Most of all, though, we have fun. There’s a reason they call what we do “playing.”

After a gig a few months ago, I was taking a very late subway back home after a gig that started at 10 p.m., my mandolin under one arm and my fiddle and tote bag of mics and cables slung over my shoulder. Two people walked by me to wait on the other end of the platform. “You were in the band that just played at Superfine, weren’t you? You guys were great.” I thanked them and we waited a few more minutes on the platform before getting in adjacent cars and disappearing into the night. For a few minutes I felt like a rock star. It was nice, but it pales by comparison to walking into a rehearsal and knowing you’re going to make some good music with great people.

The band’s on hiatus for a few months because we have lives and there are things happening – imminent babies, solo albums to record, apartments to move and theses to write. I’ll be using some of that time to work on some arrangements and maybe a song or two. I haven’t written a song – well, not a rock/folk/pop song anyway — since I was of the age to stand in front of the mirror with a violin-guitar. I’m not sure I know what to do, nor have I done many arrangements. But the kind of playing we do puts ideas in your head and I want to see if I can make them happen.

Part of the process of figuring out how to do this has involved listening – really listening – to lots of songs and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I’ve been thinking about melodies and lyrics and instrumentation, trying to consider what the band does best but also what sounds good to me. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good song in an effort to create some rules for myself to tame the terror of the long minutes at the beginning where you’re moving from noodling on your guitar to staring at a blank page of black lines. I’m hoping that writing about this will help me sort through some of what I’m doing. I think this is likely to be more memoir than how-to, but I’m hoping that maybe a little of the latter will shine through and may possibly be useful to someone. But part of the project is definitely going to be about the role this band has/is playing in my life and the things I’m learning from it. I’m aiming for writing at least once a week – more often doesn’t seem to be too realistic at the present moment, at least not on a regular basis. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.