Far away & a wish

Wow, I checked flights to see if I could make the services Thursday.  With pre and post flight travel and processing it would be a minimum of 12 to 14 hours each way, and last minute flights aren't inexpensive. 

The last time I was in Woodstock was in 2008 for two days during July in the middle of the week, with my now ex-wife. We were on our way to Denmark and then Greenland.   I'd asked the folks where we stayed at the Millstream Hotel about the Rambles but of course they didn't match our travel schedule. 

Home.  Woodstock didn't really feel like home when I was there last, which makes sense when you figure I'd lived away for more than 30 years.  It was familiar and it felt good, but it was no longer home.  A lot of NYC accents too!  And people who consistently pronounce vowels.  Here in the NW, folks pronounce merry, marry, and Mary the same... with the vowel pronounced between the merry and Mary, but much closer to merry.  Context usually works well enough to differentiate them, but placenames can be a problem. 

And food, even cheap restaurants offer gourmet meals back in NY compared to what I've grown accustomed to eating here.  But still not home.  The rest of my family moved out here.  My dad died here in the late 90s of cancer -- he was 71 when he passed.   Now my mom, my sister and I are all. 

One association with home that I have been grieving has been part fantasy and part idealized reality.  A "down home" kind of home that I always longed for and heard about in songs and saw in Norman Rockwell kind of paintings.  And my dad was a square dance caller originally from NYC who took me to the mountains of West Virginia and called an impromptu dance there after the locals challenged him to show he could do what he told them he could.  He could, and they were impressed.  He sounded like the real deal.  He sounded a lot like Levon. 

I don't expect to make it back Thursday, if any of Levon's friends or family happen across this, please know how sorry I am for your loss, I can only hope that you ride through this with the love and support of one another, and that you share the power of each other's strength, and the compassion borne of sharing each other's weakness.  My little prayer for you all. 

Elaine's dance

I'm getting closer to understanding why it seemed so important to find a tangible connection.  It has to do with the idea of home.  I realize Woodstock is not my home, even when I was living in the immediate area I would always say I lived 3 miles away.  Others I grew up with, just a few houses away, say they grew up in Woodstock.

As a young teenager I worked in Woodstock.  At the Joyous Lake, in fact.  I've loved music, for as long as I remember.  My parents played us Woody Guthrie's Songs for Children -- I still remember some of those songs.  But another element hitting me now, is how superficial my understanding of music has been and is. 

Reading anything I can find on Levon Helm, I've come across a number of pieces written by musicians.  I've learned the meaning of expressions like "in the pocket" and "behind the beat."  But while I can understand the description (after going to other sources to find the definitions) I really have no ear for it.  And I mean, really don't.

Jack Hamilton's piece in the Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/04/levon-helm-was-perfect/256184/ gave me proof.  I've played Van Morrison's Caravan performance from the Last Waltz with special attention to what happens around 0:17 -- repeatedly.  When I can watch the numbers I think I can almost hear it.  When my attention lapses in a certain way I almost hear it.  When I think I've heard it, it sounds like the record slowing down just the slightest bit.  A friend tried to describe it to me by saying, "It's like someone about to take a breath but didn't."

My sense of rythym may best be visualized by finding a clip of Seinfeld's Elaine dancing.  I just played one for myself and confirmed it -- my fragile hope at this moment is -- if even I can see how bad her sense of rythym is in her dance, then maybe I'm not a totally lost cause. 

On the other hand, here I've been describing perception and thought.  When it comes to physically demonstrating a sense of rythym through dance or even clapping along -- maybe I am Elaine after all.  I see all too clearly why I was kicked out of band in junior high.  I'm sure it didn't help that being close enough to the right pitch was good enough for me. 

photoshopping history

A few more comments before getting too far into this:  To all my English teachers and others who tried to teach me to write well, I am sorry.  I will actively try not to use all the skills I've learned because I do not wish to spend an hour trying to wordsmith a couple of sentences because I've mixed metaphors or used overused expressions time and again, etc. etc.

Writing can force me look at things more attentively.  Part of why I started with my email to work was because there were some things I wrote that have stuck in my craw ever since I hit send.  The main one I want to explore right now is "at least that I remember." It was an honest statement, written fairly casually with the idea that I spent so much of early and mid 1970s wasted that I could have seen him but not remembered.  

Then I slowly started to entertain the possibility that I may have seen him with other artists and just hadn't regarded it as important enough to remember.  I found my scenario while perusing various websites, and it seems remarkably plausible.  But before that, I'm still not sure why it became so important to me to find something that would work like this. Perhaps the mention of him as a fixture... it is true that is how I saw him, but the word bothers me at the same time. I guess I took him for granted, and realize now the cost. I expect that observation alone will prove to be an abundant source of material.

So once I found my "I've seen him after all" scenario, I began to fill in details... I have no idea how true thay are or could be... but they have been showing up.  I don't know if hypnosis would work or whether the memory has already been contaminated or photoshopped too much already, to separate fact from fiction.  It is almost as if the old Soviet propagandists have been hard at work going through files and images in my mind that the history I enjoy now bears little resemblance to that which would have been recorded by a dispassionate observer.  

So here it is:  I saw him at the Joyous Lake in Woodstock at a Muddy Waters show in either 1975 or 1976.  This came to me after finding out about Muddy Waters' Woodstock album.  I think I still have the poster for that show somewhere (whichever one it was). i even spent an hour or so looking in old boxes to see if I could find it.  I think I'll try some more over the next few days.  In the meantime, for whatever reason, this has been given me some comfort -- though it is not without its own issues.

emailed "late to work" on Friday

Starting a blog because I'm not sure what else to do.  I'll begin with the email I sent in to my closest colleagues and supervisor.  It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out where I came up with the name for the blog.  Sunday now, I'm still sorting through everything that has come up in the last few days -- perhaps some of it will be worth sharing.  The email::

I'm sending this in advance with the hope it will help keep me from being hit by it too hard at work today...  I'm having a hard time really explaining why I've been so caught up in grief about Levon Helm's death -- even to myself.  The closest I can come is that it hit a sense of "home" on a number of levels... and much of it I haven't been conscious or aware of until now. 

I found one paragraph in a Poughkeepsie newspaper that gives a flash of insight and it feels real to me, sometimes an "outside" observer can describe things better than those in the middle of something: 

"As someone who is not from this area, it is particularly unbelievable the way this guy has touched the lives of Hudson Valley residents," said Will Baylies, afternoon host on WKZE (98.1 FM) in Red Hook and a Bard College graduate who is originally from California. "That's the thing that is really sticking with me now, how personal my co-workers and KZE listeners are taking this. It sort of seems like, that's the power of music, or the power of the soul."

So for the time being I feel very much like the folks he is describing, having grown up less than a 15 minute bicycle ride from Woodstock, and it does feel very personal.  I actually never saw him live, at least that I remember... but I guess he was such a fixture there that I always thought I would. 

Guess that's all for now,  I should be in by about 10.