I realized that in all my years of writing and journal keeping, I seldom, if ever, write about “The Inn,” which is and has been, the biggest and most enduring constant in my life for the past thirty plus years. Every Thursday night I load up my car, truck, bus or whatever I happen to be driving at the time with my guitar, amps and broken-down paraphernalia of a small-potato folksinger, and I head to The Colonial Inn in Concord MA and take up my stool in the corner of the Village Forge Pub, and I start to sing–sometimes non-stop for several hours and sometimes with long and friendly breaks thrown in to meet up with old friends or let someone else on stage–almost always some musician with better chops than mine. I can honestly say that have never had a bad night. I’ve had tough nights with indifferent crowds, no crowds or loud crowds, but something always happens to “redeem the night,” and I never drive home feeling eternity has in any sense been wounded by the night.
It is that redemption that gives me the energy, no matter what my energy really is. Music does not soothe the soul–it energizes life and gives a deeper substance that is as real as any seed planted in a welcome soil.
That soil is you, whoever “you” are.
You might be an old high school buddy who laughs and wonders when the hell I ever started playing guitar. You might be some snowbound or life-bound traveler spending a night at the inn. You might be a business- man or woman pouring over spreadsheets in the corner. You might be a friend or group of friends celebrating life or mourning a death or just reconnecting. You might be a lonely drunk or a bitter drunk or just a drunk searching for a better elixir to get you through the life you have or have created. You might be a family out for a burger and chicken fingers and a round of sodas. You might be my wife Denise who sees and senses and knows everything that is me. You might be one of my kids getting on stage to give the old man a break, or one of my students finally getting the courage to sing to a crowd. You might be the bartender: Joe, Subhas, Leslie, Garret, Nick or Patti and my only crowd.
In every case “you” make “me” possible. And, for the most part, I have stopped arguing with myself, and maybe that is why people keep coming by.
Some years ago a reporter from The Boston Globe asked me what I like to sing, and in a moment of profundity, I responded, “Anything that I know that someone wants to hear.” I have butchered many a song on stage, not because I do not know the song, but because I want to know the song; I want to give it a try, and I learned long ago that if I only sing what I know well, I would have a very short set-list. I’ve learned in the magical process of learning, butchering and relearning that my sets are a constantly evolving paradigm–a flow that emerges in a new way in each moment. Each night is a new night and a new way of seeing the world in front of me. I am blessed by the solipsism of a small bar in my hometown of Concord. It is, for those few hours, my universe, and I am pulled by the gravity of tradition to just keep singing.
Everything simply falls in place.
When I started back in the winter of 1983, I had dreams that this was only a beginning–a way to lay a foundation beneath a singer/songwriter destined for some broader fame. Now I am happy to settle for a larger fame, one that my youth could never dream. Tonight my stage will be as large as it ever was or needs to be. Seth and Hatrack might show–two of my oldest and best friends–and we will settle in with me in a crowded corner. Tom Sheppard might come by with his big bass. Keith might lug in his drum kit. You might even be there.
We will meet new people. We’ll sing and laugh and play and experiment and never imagine defaming the night with a list of songs. The true and palpable magic just happens.
It is a damn fine universe, and all I really need.
I woke up today with chores on my mind. My buddy Josh LoPresti lent me his woodsplitter, and I had dreams of a mindless day splitting wood and heaving it into a pile for my kids to stack along the fence. But the dryer was broken, and it needed to be fixed. Margret’s brakes were completely shot and needed to be replaced–something EJ is good at tackling with his inimitable genius. Still, I kept my woodsplitting dream alive. I went out and realized I should move the dry wood to the porch and so loaded two truckloads and heaved them in a pile on the back deck and finally got cracking with the splitter.
About five logs into my joy EJ walked out back and said the bolts on the rotor were nigh about impossible to loosen, so I drove to Tom Cumming’s house for some advice and a bigger wrench–one that would give us some better leverage on the bolt. Tom does not know the word “no” or the phrase “it can’t be done.”
Still, it wouldn’t budge. But then Rex stopped by and convinced me not to try and put a cord on the dryer Billy Cooper donated to me yesterday–as good as that dryer was. “We can fix the one you have–but first, let’s get those bolts off.”
“Not to worry, Rex,” I told him. “I can always call Sal Angelone and Andy Bloch just sent me a novel-length description of what to do, and if I looked perplexed enough, my neighbor Tom will mosey over and probably do it for me…and if worse comes to worse, I’ll call Sal–the master of all things mechanical.”
Rex’s solution, arrived at after a slew of colorful language that had EJ and I smiling, was to simply turn the steering wheel so that the wrench handle would be outside the wheel well, and damn him, the extra purchase gave us the leverage we needed.
Then Rex tackled the dryer–a dryer that cost way too much and was only a year and a half old–six months past its warranty from Home Depot. More colorful language mixed in with “It is the f…ing motor, something is stuck in there!” Sure enough, after taking the whole dryer apart (held together by a myriad slew of screws, there was a pencil stuck in the fan.” We put it all back together, tested it and it worked like a charm.
But…when I went to reattach the cord, I dropped a screw that sets the wire to a terminal–a very small screw that simply “disappeared” on us. We combed the ground everywhere for close to an hour…nothing, nowhere. We could not find the screw for the life of us, and so the pile of laundry would keep piling as no store in town or out of town had that stupid little terminal screw.
Rex went home. Denise was bummed as laundry was her project of the day, and with her indefatigable energy and resolve was all set for a longer trip to Home Depot for a final last ditch attempt at screw-buying. Right as she was leaving I offered a $5.00 reward to any of my children who could find the screw.
Money is a wonderful motivator. There was a scramble of kids headed to the basement.
Margaret found it within two minutes, more or less hiding in plain sight. The dryer was fixed. EJ replaced the brakes. The other kids stacked all the wood on the porch, and now I am out back on the oh so neat back deck smoking a cigar, sipping tea while sitting between neatly stacked wood–enough I promised them to get us through to March, when we can tackle the other pile if needed.
The unsplit wood is still unsplit. I have no doubt that Josh will grant me a few more days. The splitter is covered for the night. The kids are sprawled on couches. There are hot dogs still to be grilled.
I woke up feeling blessed that I had the time and place and wherewithal to do the daily chores of life, but more so feeling blessed to live in this tiny town of Maynard where people seem to find the time to help each other in small and magnanimous ways–where philanthropy is an action of everyday life, not a pillar or plaque set in some museum or school hallway.
Not many more nights like this, warm enough to sit outside on the back porch. The kids and Denise long asleep. Usually, during the school year, this is my “time” to catch up on schoolwork–grading, posting the assignments for the week and playing the general catchup game that is the reality for most teachers. I think…
I consider myself a good teacher. I certainly love what I do and what I teach. My school is extremely supportive of “most” everything I do, and it has the resources to help me do what I want to do in class. If I ever feel any angst, it is in the fact that I teach at a wealthy private school that strives to be in touch, but we are not in so many ways. We are working on increasing our diversity; we recognise the various traditions of a myriad of cultures; we teach good moral values; we demand decency and respect in all circumstances, and our pedagogy and curriculum is enlightening, empowering and prepares kids well for…
And that is where my questioning of myself begins. As much as I want to think that I prepare my students for “life,” I fear that in most cases their very access to a privileged lifestyle is all they really need to succeed. I look at my own kids–all doing very well at what they do. I have four in public high school, one in a public college and another who graduated from a public college, and one, Tommy, a 7th grader at my school, but it has always nagged on me that I could not give them what is common practice with my own students who take private music lessons, who hire tutors at any turn or bump in the road, who travel the world and give presentations on safaris they have been on, or service projects to remote villages, or who simply and unaffectedly talk about second homes on the Vineyard, or Nantucket, or St. John–or ski houses in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. They are good kids and not bratty, self important of in any way unkind.
We honor diversity in a staggering way, yet our hands are never dirtied by true diversity. There are no girls. No children with severe handicaps or special needs. We struggle to find the right fit for black and Latino students to bus out of Boston to our wealthy suburban town.
They are simply wealthy and their options in life are blessed and informed by a quiet acceptance of this blessing. Most of us wish we were more wealthy than we are, so perhaps we are in no way better–just unlucky that the fate of our lineage began some mill town or any hard-scrabble homestead around the world.
So I teach, and I sing, and I give lessons and tutor, build things, dig gardens and write and somehow I help create a pretty good life for my family. The irony is that I am always leaving them to give to other kids what I wish they could have.
And I help create a better life for my students. I hope. But it is just strange to me that my life is so far removed from the lives of those I teach. Maybe that is why I demand my students find the enduring universal themes in literature, if only to help them see that they are not special–that no one is special, and we are all inextricably linked by a common DNA of humanity. I entice them with stories of my academic failures, my reckless odyssey through life. I share my poetry and my songs as if it is the only gift I can “really” give them.
Perhaps they will only remember me for teaching them comma rules or how to whittle a bird out of a scrap of pine.
It is a sad day for humanity. Another sad day on top of many others happening every day–many in places we hear about only obliquley and sometimes not at all. Paris is that much closer to home for most of us here and in Europe, but freedom and tolerance has to survive. Moral values have to be practiced and lived and embraced even more fully–quietly and humbly, not only in outrage.
Our greatest revenge is to constantly move forward, to grieve openly. A flurry of bombs wrought on ISIS will feel justified, but it is, as Thoreau wrote, “A thousand striking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.” I admit that I don’t know exactly what the root is, but I know that the evil of collective thought springs from a selfish and righteous ignorance.
We are–or should be–the collective billions of humanity who give a damn about each other and who live in common with each other, but it seems like we react more than we act. We do not sense the power of our commanality. My day has been spent raking leaves, cutting wood and fixing a hot water heater. I will sing tonight at the inn the same as I have for thousands of nights before.
I have to feel that how I live is sustainable and real and imbued with purpose.
I wrote this song back in the winter of 1989 in the dining car of a steam driven train, somewhere along the Trans-Siberian railway, after meeting a group of Russian soldiers fresh from battle in Afghanistan—that poor country that has been a battleground for way too long–and, sadly, still is…
We stare together hours
at the snow whipped Russian plain—
rolling in the ghetto of your eye.
We share a quart of vodka
and some cold meat on the train—
you know too much to even wonder why;
I see it in the ghetto of your eye.
He turns to me and asks
if I’ll play a song about our war.
I know the war,
no need to tell me more—
asking with the ghetto of your eye.
So I play the most of Sam Stone,
in words he cannot understand;
still the tears fall as from a man—
falling from the ghetto of your eye.
I pass to him my guitar:‘Man, I know you’ll play a song;
something where nobody plays along—
no, nobody play along.’
His friends they gather ‘round
and put their arms around
the shoulders of the soldiers of the war,
their cold and crazy mountain war.
His song is barely spoken;
it’s more a whisper in the night:
whistles blow, trains pass each other by—
riding in the ghetto of your eye.
And Pasha, the young soldier,
whose strange and childish smile,
breaks down wailing like a child:
He tears his shirt; the shrapnel is all gone:
“Pasha, boy, the shrapnel it’s all gone—
Pasha boy, the shrapnel is all gone.”
Drunk to hell I leave,
and then I lay awake all night
waiting for the sunrise on the plain—
cold and snow-whipped Russian plain.
Songs of love and brotherhood
blow like rags of empty wind—
blowing through the ghetto of my eye;
building the ghetto of my eye;
staring from the ghetto.
I realized that in all my years of writing and journal keeping, I seldom, if ever, write about “The Inn,” which is and has been, the biggest and most enduring constant in my life for the past thirty plus years. Every Thursday night I load up my car, truck, bus or whatever I happen to be driving at the time with my guitar, amps and broken-down paraphernalia of a small-potato folksinger, and I head to The Colonial Inn in Concord MA and take up my stool in the corner of the Village Forge Pub, and I start to sing–sometimes non-stop for several hours and sometimes with long and friendly breaks thrown in to meet up with old friends or let someone else on stage–almost always some musician with better chops than mine. I can honestly say that have never had a bad night. I’ve had tough nights with indifferent crowds, no crowds or loud crowds, but something always happens to “redeem the night,” and I never drive home feeling eternity has in any sense been wounded by the night.
