Coming Home Curly

To take a walk is a lovely thing. Especially in Spring. Try not to think of the places you can’t be. Long only briefly for the people you can’t see.

Today the kids weren’t screaming and chasing each other down the street with fists swinging. No one complained about how far we went. We talked a little, but mostly looked around. We passed a family from our school and Abel said hi to his friends, but I didn’t feel more than a tiny pang of sorrow for that former life when we’d see these kids every day; when rather than shouting hello from across the street, the kids could lean their heads together over a book or a spinning beyblade.

There’s really nothing I can complain about now. That’s what I thought as I walked down the peaceful street of modest houses with little yards and basketball hoops or little backyard playsets. We’re living in a dream now - a good dream. We’re not sick, and we can either work from home or take a break from working to take care of the kids. And the gift this horrible virus has given us is time to spend with these kids we made. Ordinarily I’m pretty glad when they go to school and I get to do my job, teach a music class, write songs for an album, shop, cook, do the every day things which I enjoy doing without my kids around. I didn’t want all this time together. And it took some getting used to, mentally, not to be worried about it. Suddenly today I realized - this is nice. We couldn’t ask for this or know how good it could be for us, but for our family, at the ages our kids are right now (4, 7 and 9), this is perfect. We get to frustrate and challenge each other, hug and comfort each other, and maybe even play together and accomplish some projects (like painting the fence and making a garden). Anyway, we are lucky, and I’m going to focus on how cool this opportunity to have so much time together is.

I’ve got a lot of things on my list of THINGS TO DO. And they are not getting done, at all. I’m avoiding things that I was proud of myself for making daily habits after years of neglect (mostly playing music!). I don’t know why. There are some “issues”. I walked into my music room/office just now and felt a cringing in my heart - guilt at something or other, I guess it’s that I haven’t played a song for awhile.

But my kids seem to need my help or attention almost all the time. It’s been a struggle for me in the past not to resent this… and not to resent my husband for not taking care of more of their needs and requests. Now I am really aware that resentment is my own guilt, it’s a harmful and unhelpful reaction against myself for expecting things to be a certain way, or people to behave a certain way. Now every expectation of the world following any kind of reasonable order has been torn to pieces, thrown in the air - blown away in the wind.

So, I’ve been just being the teacher, helping the kids, doing puzzles, playing games and reading books with them, making them practice their instruments (which i dread sometimes!), keeping them sort of on a schedule. It takes the whole day, but that’s what I need to do now. I need to not feel guilty that i’m not playing music (or working - I actually should be putting in some hours for my job for the Coalition for Healthy School Food, but I can’t figure out how to do that yet!). This is the hardest thing for me… not feeling guilty about what I’m not doing. I want to write more about this idea of how we decide what to do with our time another day.

And the most important thing today, is that John Prine died. I can’t believe it. Now we’re going to just keep repeating it until it becomes a fact, but yesterday morning it wasn’t. He’s been suffering in the hospital for many days and like all the thousands and thousands of others who this horrible virus has stolen from the world, it is impossible to comprehend. It’s so awful and painful.

But I have to cry over and think about John Prine. His songs moved me as much or more than any other songwriter. He was unique - wry and funny and straight-forward. His lyrics focused on the oddest seemingly “every-day” observations - distilled through the filter of melody and rhyme into some universal human feeling so that if you listened to or sang one of his songs, you could make yourself cry. Just raw, plain truth, or raw, plain poetry, or raw, plain heart. I don’t know how to express it.

I wrote to John’s good friend Jim Rooney, a skilled producer who made albums with many of my favorite musicians, and I was lucky enough to have him produce my album in Nashville awhile ago. I told Jim how sorry I am for his loss and how much I appreciate John’s songs and their collaboration. Jim wrote back right away and thanked me for the letter and told me that he and John had worked together for over 40 years, and were just this December in the studio recording a track (a song I love) “Love at the Five and Dime” for a Nanci Griffith tribute album, and that they were planning to record an album with John’s two brothers as soon as the lockdown was over.

Be well, dear family and friends whom I miss visiting with!

Love,

Naomi