Sinatra and the Big Stuff
The train, that electrical silver dragon slithering far underground in a sooty lair, paused. I joined the hordes on the platform. It hissed and swayed. Someone up ahead in the warm blackness, the overhead lines sparked.
New York City isn’t a place to take a nap.
But I wanted to.
Guitar bouncing on my back, I stumped up the stairs, and up again, out into the light, past the umbrella hawkers and tornado of souls that is 33rd street, to a quiet corner for a granola bar.
Come on, man. You’re here to play music.
Back down into the dragon’s lair, over to the subway– those little brothers of the great worms that patrol from Washington to Boston.
Someday you’ll go farther than Coney Island, buddy. Stay in school.
Lethargy gripped me in a slimy, suffocating hug, contrasting the high tension boxer of a city, jabbing, jabbing, always jabbing. It’s hard to win a fight when you don’t care.
Three hundred fourteen year-olds crammed the platform for the uptown A Train, suddenly cursing in only the way that students on their first time away from home can, out to impress the cheerleaders, also on their first city trip to take in the sights in matching uniforms and parental waivers.
(Badly.)
There’s a syntax, an ease, a subtle method of proper delivery for profanity in the city. It’s different than four letter words in the country, as delta blues differs from Muddy’s Chicago inventions. They share a common root, but live in different climates. These fresh-faced Eric Claptons missed the point of the original Robert Johnson Crossroad Blues.) (The young English guitar god may have played the notes of the delta, but he didn’t live through 1935 in Mississippi.
Duke Ellington references couldn’t make the modern A Train experience better.
I went back to my hotel, and took a nap. No way I could win that round.
All of this is to say:
I think I have a coffee hangover. The world feels like NYC at the moment.
I blink, bleary-eyed at the cloud on the mountain, and the silver maple with quiet, fuzzy blooms, and take another swig. (That’s one way to fix it.)
The hearse waited in the driveway at the retirement home yesterday. I didn’t know their charge, but everyone else did.
Two white horses in a line is what Blind Lemon Jefferson would sing.
(Or an overpriced SUV with a sign.)
As the cloud stifles Long Mountain this morning, a sadness hung in the air yesterday, a mist in the halls, and nobody escaped with a dry, warm shirt.
I didn’t (and don’t) know what to say, except to say it softer, and less, and listen, and sit with.
Sometimes even a NYC nap won’t yield an answer.
Earlier in the week, I made the trek back to the “old stomping grounds”, and spun records for my hometown place. A little lady there wheeled herself to the front row, show #168. (I think she’s missed exactly two in the last dozen years.)
She had pulled out a cracked photo from her purse years ago, showing it to me quietly after a show.
“That’s you and your husband?”
The handsome couple, attired in tropical vacation wear, beamed. He, twinkling above his mustache. Her, that proud, quiet triumph that beautiful women radiate when they feel they’ve won life with their man at their side (and who am I to disagree).
“Yes. I miss him so much.”
This Tuesday, after Elvis stopped singing, she raised her hand. “Josh!”
“Yeah?”
“It’s my wedding anniversary today. Will you play ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’?”
“Of course.”
(I hope St. Peter notices the supreme giving of spinning Bette Midler, or at least you do.)
After about forty five minutes, the song ended. (ha.)
“Hey, I’ve got something to add” I said. “Never have been married, so never lost a spouse. I can’t imagine.”
“Oh, you can’t. It’s horrible” she shuddered under her silver hat.
“So, this in no way compares, but…I had this German girlfriend once. She went back home, and before she did, I showed her this song...in honor of the occasion, I’d like to play it for you.”
I pressed a button, and Frank’s voice filled the room.
When the last notes faded away, the silver hat nodded.
“Yes, that’s right. They can’t take that away from me.”
Sinatra’s hardly an answer to the big stuff. But I hope you enjoy this, for what it’s worth.