Thoughts from the Road, Volume 1
I’m currently sitting in a Hampton Inn in Milledgeville, GA awaiting our visit to Andalusia Farm (home of Flannery O’Connor) in the morning. I feel like I need a vacation from this time on the road and I’m looking forward to the music and literary stops we’re going to make before heading back to Colorado.
The trip started by heading to Arlington Heights, IL for my father-in-law’s funeral. We weren’t super close, but he was the easiest going one in the bunch. I think like all men, he was tempered by time, but by the end, he’d reached a state of contentment. I believe in his faith and I think he was ready for what’s next. As much as I liked him, I was definitely playing more of a support role (as it should be) and I know he would have been happy with the three of us singing “I’ll Fly Away”. Especially his grand-daughter overpowering her mom and me in the chorus.
Families can be tough sometimes and when you add in differences of culture and fundamental beliefs I find it hard to know what to say or do sometimes. After heading down to Indianapolis for two nights and church with my whole family Sunday morning, this is the first peace and quiet I’ve had in over a week. Too much has gone on, I need to think. Thinking, for me, often requires quiet and the time to write - if not music, even a blog post like this helps me spew things out so that they can then be re-organized in my noggin later.
We made a stop in Nashville where I had planned to see my friend Mark who is dealing with throat cancer (the same thing my father-in-law had). Unfortunately, he had a complication earlier in the week and was in the ICU and had surgery yesterday. I haven’t heard from him yet, not surprisingly, but we’re praying for him. I did get to see my friend Clark, who has almost always been my reason for coming to Nashville but they were leaving the next morning for vacation so I was just happy our schedules worked out. I was impressed with his writing room behind his new house and am looking forward to coming back and putting it to use writing with him.
I apologize this is more of a list than it is a coherent thought, but if I go all in with diarrhea of the fingers, it won’t be how I want to say things. Life can be really heavy sometimes, and back home in the midwest and the South, the air is so heavy, it’s like the weight of the past and present both is on my shoulders and I can’t think about adding the future just yet. Every time I come back it stirs things up - the past mixing with the present - and when it settles, it settles in a new way than it did before. New perspectives on old things, sifted through the filters I’ve added since I was here last.
It’s like Flannery wrote in her prayer journal, hell is easier to imagine than heaven because hell is much closer to our day-to-day reality now than anyone would probably care to admit. I struggle with knowing how to properly respond to these hellish situations and often acquiesce to what I feel like is the lesser of two bad decisions - which leaves me feeling guilty no matter which decision I make. Like in Braveheart, sometimes you have to hold for the right time and the right action, but if you hold too long it’s worse than fighting too early. You just have to live with the consequences and hope you live to fight another day. Because if you do, there will be another fight.
Looking forward to revisiting favorite places and seeing one or two new ones.
I highly recommend Kenny Aronoff’s Sex, Drums & Rock n’ Roll as well as Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick. We had to cut off Kenny when the kid got in the car, but it was very enjoyable and only rated R in a few places, but just often enough to pause it while the child is with us.
Until next time.