Money for Nothin'

I was sitting along the wall, had one of the few available chairs at a benefit to honor a gone drummer I never met. Musicians from all over Carolina were playing, one band after the next, to raise money for music education and to honor a friend they couldn’t help but love as he couldn’t help but drink.

Chris Clifton pointed to a man standing with his back to us, leaned over and said, “Wait till you hear him sing.”

Last December, I was in my own living room with Jonathan Birchfield when he was talking about Chris. He said, “Wait till you hear him play.”

More years ago than I care to count, at a literary festival in Fairhope, Alabama, the wife of a writer friend of mine motioned toward a small, quiet woman sitting alone in the back row. She pulled at her sleeves and fussed with the hem of her jacket and squirmed and fidgeted like a three year old in a church pew. “That’s Suzanne Hudson.”, I was told, “Wait until you read her.”

What are they worth, these people who bring us words and music? Joe Formichella tells a great story about his artist brother who grunted and shouted as he painted. The creations that came from him were so powerful that a canvas wasn’t enough. They required sound. Joe’s family wanted to get the boy “some help”.  Joe asked why. “Why change him? The world doesn’t need more of YOU. The world needs more of HIM.”

And, there it is.

Sitting in a vineyard in Napa Valley, I listened to the rental car radio, a lousy excuse for a sound system, play Jackson Browne singing ‘Fountain of Sorrow’. The bass half worked and the reception would come and go but I wept. I was watching my old friend, a dog trainer named Dean, a man so pretty I’ve seen woman stop in their tracks when he smiled. Jackson sang, “and at that moment when my camera happened to find you there was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes” as I watched Dean put the moves on yet another lovely woman he would probably take to bed before the day was over only to be lonely in the time it took him to forget her name which he was bound to do. What should Jackson be paid for that? I don’t mean writing the song, recording it. What should I pay Jackson for a moment in my life I will never forget, a split second of complete clarity defined by words he strung together and gave to the world, to me. What do I owe Jackson Browne?

What do I owe Jonathan for singing Bright Baby Blues in my kitchen and taking me, even in a room full of people, back, over years, to that vineyard and that day with Dean where we dug through my cassette tapes and played every album Jackson recorded? What do I owe Chris when he plays Little Wing and his notes, much more than the lyrics, tell the story of my own circus mind that runs wild and rides with the wind? Was the price of my two beers and four Diet Cokes enough to pay Chris the first time I heard him play Little Wing, the first time I stared in wonder and the world around me ceased to exist? Should I have ordered a plate of salmon or is a BLT enough to cover the cost of his band that night as my vision narrowed from the bricks walls and leather booths that lined them to nothing but a man and his guitar, pulling enough thought from me to allow me the freedom to write a piece that would be read by over twelve thousand people. How do I pay him for that?

What about Hudson? We are more family than friends, now. What do I owe her for two books I can never quite forget though I have read thousands? Was the price of the book enough? Taking out the cut of the bookstore and the publisher, Hudson gets about a buck- sixteen. I named a bunch of goddamn rabbits after characters in one of her novels. Is that enough payback for a story that brought a deep and forever understanding of things too mystical to talk about out loud for fear of losing my place at the Back Table of the Claremont Café.  

Them boys can’t have that kind ‘a talk, now.

We pay doctors to heal our bodies and expect artists to take care of our souls for the price of a CD. We’ll make a special trip back to the house to stick flip flops in our purses so we don’t mess up our pretty painted toes and tip the pedicure lady an extra ten if she dries them real good and talk about our jobs, our hair, our periods while the band plays Into the Mystic as if it is nothing more than background noise.

Don’t talk to me about your job, your hair, or your period while the band plays Into the Mystic, especially if Ryan Harris is singing it. It pisses me off. I want my gypsy soul rocked, thank you very much.

I told Michael Reno Harrell I was going to single handedly change the way musicians and writers are viewed but that was lie. I am going to ask for some help with that task. Instead of seeing them as our entertainment, how ‘bout if we remember that they are the voice of change. Let’s cherish them for being the record keepers of how we felt while the historians record what we did. There is a world of difference between those two things and if we cannot remember how we felt, if we are not reminded of how we felt, we are without souls.

Nobody with good sense wants that.

Chris was gone, off smoking when that singer took the stage. I had almost forgotten what Chris had said. That singer boy stepped up to the microphone as I was fishing in my purse for something. I stopped fishing and looked at the stage. “God damn.” I said and heard Jaret Carter laugh. He had taken a chair next to a new friend named Sharon and was watching me to see my reaction when Kurt Benfield began to sing. “Can he sing, Shari?”, Jaret grinned, “Can the boy flat sing?”

There isn’t enough money in the world. But, we ought to try and if we never get them the money they deserve, let's agree to do a lot better in that old department of respect. Let's show some respect and let's all say "thank you".

I'll go first.

Little Margaret

When I need an ego boost I hang around with the Connor kids. They fight over me.

Charles Franklin, Catie, and Margaret will argue to the death over which one is my favorite, all sure “it’s me. She loves me the most.”  Charles will be married, soon, Catie is a momma, and this is the year Margaret graduates high school and goes to college.

Our Little Margaret.

She was named for The Great Margaret Garrison, her daddy’s aunt and the woman I want to be when I grow up. She was the baby and the toughest, suffering skinned knees without BandAids or kisses that would take too much time from riding bicycles off poorly balanced make shift ramps or tree climbing or any one of a thousand dangerous, life threatening activities that occupied her childhood. I remember seeing her at the Y, her hair long and wild with curls, playing basketball at five years old, throwing an elbow, grabbing the ball from the opponent who doubled over as Margaret ran to the other end of the court without bothering to dribble and throwing the ball at the lowered goal with such force it went over the backboard and bounced off the wall and into the game on the other side of the dividing curtain.

She understood survival.

Last fall, the start of her senior year, she rifled through my closet, playing dress up with my hats and scarves while I packed for a trip. At Christmas, Margaret came over in her jammies and crawled onto my bed so we could watch Baryshinov dance The Nutcracker.  She did my hair and makeup for a photo shoot I had to tolerate for the business end of being a writer and a couple of weeks ago, Little Margaret sat on my living room floor, coloring in the lettering on posters for Claremont’s Gallery Walk. Dress up and the ballet, cosmetics and coloring, that blurry line between girl and woman we never reach cross.

Margaret talked from the minute she hit the door until she hugged me goodbye. I enjoyed every word. As I listened, I knew I would write about it and I knew I was meant to and when she left I had been reminded how lucky I am to call her momma my friend.

Margaret started the conversation by announcing she has something to tell me and not to dismiss her opinion as unimportant, as the whim of a teenager. She said she had spent a lot of time thinking about it, had good reasons for it, and then announced the man she was sure I should be dating.

She used that word. Dating.

Among her list of character traits that she was certain would bond us for eternity was independence and being “all, you know, arty”. But, her big finish was that we were both hot. Margaret said the last guy she knew me to date was not hot at all and since I was hot and this guy was hot we would be perfectly hot together. Everyone would think so, she reasoned.  She called me hot.

 I’m fifty-one years old.

She told me that having me as a friend was important to her momma. I said me, too. For reasons I can’t remember, Margaret launched into a monolog about relationships. She must have listed everyone in Claremont before she was through. Each story would start with a transgression, a misdeed, some far worse than others but they all ended with redemption. Without exception, Margaret would, at some point, say “But, you have to understand, (he)/(she)/(they) a. “had been really, really hurt”, b. “never were taught any other way”, c. “grew up without a mother”.

Margaret grew up with a mother bear.

Edie Connor mothers with the conviction that it is her life’s work and no harm is going to come to her brood and live to tell about it. As I listened to Margaret that day, one thing became clear, Margaret is her mother’s child. I have heard Edie excuse bad behavior in the same way Margaret did. This should not be confused with a silent tolerance. Edie can yell with the rest of the Connors and that bunch has some lungs. Edie can enter the land of fury and point a finger and disapprove as much as anybody unless she loves you and then, somehow, she can forgive anything. She says she can’t, that she has her limits. If she does, I have never seen them. I only know her ultimate acceptance…if you’re one of her’s. That is how Margaret grew up, as one of Edie’s.

And mine.

I think of Margaret’s take no prisoner’s basketball days and believe she will be just fine out there in the big ol’ world. I think of her coloring on my livingroom floor and I worry.

The world will not be the safety of Edie Connor’s house. It will not forgive anything. I believe this already comes as a shock to Margaret, that everyone doesn’t understand the difference between a bad act and a bad soul, that some folks will hold on to something you did and turn it into someone you are and there are those who will never see you any other way.

No matter what.

My son is struggling with the position he takes on the rights of others and his hatred of racism. He wonders where to draw the line with his friends less inclined to abhor judgment based on skin color or sexual orientation. It infuriates him. He worries that instead of being seen as tolerant of their opinions he will be cast as one of “them”, that someone will wrongly believe he thinks the same way, and it tortures him, the question of why it seems fine for them to say offensive things in his presence yet recognizes that not doing so would make them hypocrites.  I have the same questions.

I’m fifty one years old.

I behaved badly this week. Some say I had good reason but I don’t much care. I think you get that way if you keep trying, less concerned with what the other guy did and more focused on what you could have done differently. I want to keep trying.

Edie Connor said to me that everyone has baggage and she tries to remember that. Some of it is Louis Viton and some is all shabby and worn but what is inside is often the same, pain and scars. I know she’s right. I wonder if we have done our children a service in teaching them to look for the baggage before making sweeping judgments or if we have sent them into a world that has made it sport to watch someone fail, to remember only the fall from grace and not the baggage that tripped them up in the first place.

I worked pretty hard, the last few weeks. I was trying to do good things. I was. I have spent a lot of time thinking about my motives and examining my agenda. I still believe my intentions were good. Today, I had my integrity questioned and my honesty challenged by a few who didn’t do jack shit to help even when I asked for it. Makes it tough to keep working.

Makes it tough to want to keep trying.

Still, I wish that I had behaved differently. I wish I had done better. Not doing so is on me. Not being better is on me.

And, there she is, Little Margaret. She is going to be coming home from time to time, having said something that will be held against her or done something that will go unforgiven and she won’t understand it because all she has heard, growing up, is her mother reminding her that everyone has baggage and she is to look for it what’s inside before she jumps to conclusions. Little Margaret will wonder why she is being judged so harshly when all she has known is that family forgives and family is who you decide is family. Little Margaret will never quite understand why the world is not like her mother’s kitchen.

At least, I hope so. I hope that despite the hurt, she always believes that it will get better. I hope she believes that looking for what another is totin' is the right thing to do even if they never bother to see the burdens she might be carrying.

And, I hope, she remains sure that she is my favorite.

Room for Waiting

It's me and forty nine old people.

They're waiting on their husbands or wives. I am waiting on a kid not yet twenty.

Nobody can hear so everybody yells. The woman across from me is concerned that she forgot her husband's blood pressure medicine. Her sister is with her but not listening which means she has the most profound loss of hearing.  She is reading Southern Living Magazine and occasionally commenting on a recipe or picture. She doesn't much care for a sofa or a caramel sauce nor does she think the camellias are going to be as pretty in her yard as they are in the magazine. The man two chairs down just sits with his hands in his lap, repositioning a wadded up Kleenex, unfolding it and folding it, crunching it and smoothing it out. I smiled at him and it made him cry.

For those who need introducing, this is Amy. The four of you are the ones I chose to write to. Amy takes pictures. She calls them images so I try to, too. Amy and I met when we were trapped with a one woman freak show at a literary conference, a woman who fancies herself a fine Christian woman who, later, stole of story of mine and tried to make Amy sound flighty and shallow in a piece she wrote that never saw the light of day.

She thought we were loose women which we are but that is beside the point.

I introduce all y'all because you have to be family, now. I require it

Say hey to Amy, y'all. Amy, say hey to your new family

>The four of you are the folks I am thinking of on this fucked up day. You are the ones I miss. You are the ones who make me smile when I think of something you said or did. You're the ones.
>
>There's a woman with a brocade jacket, enough gold to pay down the national debt, and an expensive bag but she's wearing pristine white tennis shoes and ankle socks. Her hair would not move in a Texas tornado. She is fond of making faces that indicate her displeasure with the cheating woman being taken down a notch or two by Dr. Phil on the television y'all can probably hear from where you are. I thought about calling one of y’all and talking dirty just to piss her off but it would upset the man with the wadded up Kleenex. I thought about saying I liked her shoes because she wouldn't know I was making fun of her but I decided I needed Karma to be a bit more on my side today so I just smiled at that man, again. He didn't cry, this time.

He asked me if I wanted a butterscotch.
>
>There is another woman. She guarantees everything she says. "He'll be mad when he finds out they ain't gonna let him wear his own pajamas. I can guarantee that." So far, she has guaranteed that President Obama will not be reelected, that they won't have decent soup in the cafeteria, no way, that her little dog will tear something up if she doesn't get home by two o'clock, and that the hem her daughter put in her granddaughter's prom dress ain't gonna hold.
>
>A man closer to my age came in and sat down with his momma. He tried not to smile at the guarantee of a new president but saw me and grinned, anyway. He can't stay, he says. He has a case in twenty five minutes. Lawyer, I reckon. His momma said it was alright but we all can tell it ain't.

The helmet haired woman with the brocade jacket and ankle socks gave him the same disapproving look she did the Dr. Phil slut. She puts me in mind of the time when Amy and I laughed so hard we had to lean hard against Joe Formichella to keep from fallin' in the floor when, at a literary conference, a writer said that if women were offended by what she wrote they were "badly in need of a 'feet to Jesus' orgasm."

Remember that Amy?

That's the news from the waiting room of the Sanger Heart Institute of Carolina Medical Center. They called. Chris remembers those calls from the last time. They call and say nothing. They think it helps, I suppose. It doesn't. They say stupid shit like, "we're still in the heart" as if I need to be reminded that they are sticking wires in and out of my child. I know that it has taken too long for it to have been as successful as they hoped. Until they let me have him back, I'm here, with the hearing impaired and the judgmental and the sad man who only wants to know that his wife will come home and fix him a grilled cheese while he watches Wheel of Fortune.

I love you. All of you, Each of you.

Y'all be nice to one another.

Flight

I took the barstool at the corner, well away from the small gathering of men at the other end.

I came to listen to the woman and her guitar. I ordered a beer and pulled the phone from my pocket to send the word. I wanted him to know where I was.

Just in case.

She sang a song I knew better than she did, about a Captured Angel, waiting to make a break. I've known that song since an old friend brought the vinyl album named for it to my house in a place I would fly away from as soon as I could kick the cage door open and I have been living  the lyrics ever since.

I've done some damage. I've hurt men who did not deserve it because they failed to see the tattered edges and missing feathers in my wings, wings that drag the ground collecting the dust of a road I hear call me all too often, a call I tend to answer, sooner or later. They either believed they could quiet the call or it did go silent long enough for me to believe it, too, that this one would stick. I would make a list of all the reasons I should stay when wind howled through pines and whispered to a gypsy soul I have come to accept, as those frayed wings began to gather around me, keeping pleas of love or logic from ever reaching any place that could feel it.

It wasn't always my fault. A few of scars in the soft downy layer, the lining designed to keep out bitter cold and drowning rain, were not of my making. I found rocks to throw myself against either in blindness to their ability to wound me or the belief that I deserved it. But, leaving is what I know. No shackles yet have kept me from it once I've made up my mind to take flight. It has saved me, more than once.

It's been awhile, now, that I've thought, maybe, this was the one. I keep waiting to hear the highway, to feel the feathers pick up a breeze. It doesn't come.

I paid for my beer telling the bartender I would only be having one. No need to run a tab. He came, waiving another bottle at me, anyway, said a gentlemen wanted to buy it for me, wondered would I take it. Five stools down, there was a nod when I thanked him. He moved in, three closer. He asked if I was from around there and laughed when I said, "Claremont", not knowing that's about as quick a way to piss me off as any there is. He asked me what I did for a living before he ran out of questions and said he liked Tom Clancy but just the movies, not the books. I started to feel sorry for him when he told me he didn't like this bar, this town, or sports because "they're mindless." I told them, in fact, they were not.

I checked my phone, again.

A few more questions occurred to him. He asked if I knew a really old song called 'Pretty Woman' and I laughed though I really did try not to. He said I was pretty and I thanked him for that. He asked if my writing was "like, a thing?" and I said it was exactly like a thing. He shook his head and said he worked in a factory that made furniture. He hated that, too. He asked me if I knew Thomas Hunter. It took him describing a movie before I realized he was referring to Hunter S. Thompson and told him that, no, I did not know him and even if I did, he was dead by his own hand and I was beginning to understand why. He didn't get that joke.

I checked my phone and smiled thinking of a man who would.

He spoke of his brother which was my chance. I didn't let it pass. "How old is he?", I asked him. He said he was his age, thirty one, then corrected himself and said he was close to his age. I sent a text. Couldn't help it. The bartender gave me a look and raised his chin, a silent offer to intervene but I shook it off. He didn't know. He couldn't see those wings from where he was standing.

Before he would give up he would asked if I wanted to friend him on Facebook and confess that he had lied about his age, that he was, in truth, twenty-nine, but he guessed I might be in my thirties so he thought he should be, too. There might have been a time when that flattered me. I reckon most women would have been but I wasn't blessed with that kind of mind. I checked my phone, again, sent a message and reached for my coat.

I learned a long time ago what I don't want. I'm learning what it is I do. I still believe that there is a higher love and I am capable of it, of having it, of earning it. I like taking care of a man. I like the work of it. I tried, for a time, to not like it but with enough road passing under you, you learn to accept things about yourself even as your children or your best friends beg you to change them. I like to cook and watch a man enjoying eating. I like to fold shirts the way he likes to find them in his drawer. I will press a crease in jeans if that is the way he wears them. I will give him a thousand smiles and it will cost him nothing.

And, I will wait for him to notice that there is no crying baby I can not rock to sleep, no song I have heard more than twice without being able to recite the lyrics. I will wait for him to read the words I write and find the reason I chose them. I will wait for him to believe that music and magic lives in me, that I can see things others miss because of the best thing about me which is that I pay attention.

But, I won't wait forever. I will fly. It's what I know. I can not be captured even though it is often what I wish for. A smart and sexy man, once said to me that I was waiting for someone to tell me it's all going to be alright. I told him that it wasn't hard to get someone to tell me that. It was impossible for me to believe it.

If my wings are smaller these days, they are stronger. I do find that I use them less and less for flight but, still, sometimes for cover. I think less like a captured angel and more like a fallen one, still believing that there is a coming a moment when I can say, and mean, take anything you want from me, anything...

and I will hear it said back to me.

And, the highway will be dark and the winds will be still and the only sound will be breathing with no separation in rhythm or depth and the wings, though there, will be remembered for having brought me to that place where I know it's alright.

It's alright.

By the Grace of God

It is flat amazing what will happen if you put words on a page.

A big man with a big name and the biggest Prize there is was the first one to tell me to do it, to sit down, dammit, and write. I didn't listen to him. A buddy of his was the second and because he knows two things, good writers and how to collect them, I met the man who would get me to finally take it seriously by being sincere and making sense.

Since then, it has brought me truckloads of good things and a fair number of paychecks though those are often late and fifty dollars short on account of editors who don't remember what they promised you and accountants who think you won't bother arguing over fifty dollars.

I went to the Cafe to meet Jonathan Birchfield, to write a story about his music. Two months later he was sitting with me in a hospital waiting room while they stuck wires in my son's heart. Jonathan's friendship has given to me other good men who have shared lunches, a fascination with drummer Omar Hakim, writer's angst, their constant search for sound, and the accident scene in The Horse Whisperer. You just never know what writing is going to bring your way.

Putting words on a page gave to me, Joe Galloway.

I wrote something. He read it and sent me an email. It was love at first 'reply'. We sent letters of family quilts and dead grandfathers and love lost. He would show up at my house and half of Alabama, most of Johnson County and a couple from the lesser Carolina would pile in the guest rooms and on couches just to be near him,to hear him tell stories. Claremont has become so used to seeing Joe they almost forget about his hero status or his movie and one sweet girl I have known since she was five years old took to referring to him as her uncle, even wrote a college paper about the time she sang for him.

He is my Joe.

He lived through the hell that is war, several close calls, a parasite and an ugly divorce that caused one of his buddies to suggest that the next time he found a woman who hated him, he rush right out and buy her a house so he wouldn't have to pay lawyers. He carried the wounded to waiting helicopters and wrote truth after truth about our government while they spied on him. He put down his camera and his pen and picked up a gun and fought along side the soldiers he was supposed to be writing about and he wrote a letter to a man who claimed to have taken a shine to me, ending it with, "and if you hurt her I'll be obliged to shoot you." Joe Galloway is, in many ways, the toughest man I know, and when he would get in that sexy little car and drive out onto Depot Street, toward the highway, I would start worrying and not stop until he was back, safely tucked under a down comforter in my upstairs, east guest room where nobody and nothing could hurt him without getting past me.

I don't worry anymore. He is in a state of Grace.

Women are hard on one another. We tend to think the others of our gender are getting it wrong. At the precise moment I learned that Keith Whitley had done gone and drank himself to death, I went to sobbing but managed to choke out the words, "Lorie Morgan killed him. She's a whore and she killed Keith Whitley.", and I know that just ain't true.

Well, part of it ain't true.

Hillary Clinton can rise to the position of the most powerful woman in international affairs and somebody will post on Facebook that her hair looks bad. We gossip about the pregnant cheerleader but let the babydaddy start at right tackle, cheering when he flattens the skinny kid from the opposing team. I know a woman, a good woman, a fantastic wife and mother who has said to me, on more than one occasion, "can you believe (fill in the blank)is pregnant?" forgetting that her own child was born well under the socially acceptable nine month waiting period after ink went on her own marriage license. It's shameful and uncalled for and I am no better. Not one bit.

Joe seemed to have found a nice friend. He spoke of her a couple of times. I hated her. I never laid eyes on the woman, never shook her hand or handed her a glass of tea yet I wanted her to stay far away from my Joe Galloway. I found pictures of her irritating. I disliked anything he said she said and I didn't fake it all that well.

If he said she was nice, I said, "fine". If he said she was smart, I said, "okay". If Joe said she wanted him to stop smoking which, clearly, is in his best interest, I said, "Well, maybe she should find a man who doesn't smoke in the first place instead of trying to change you." When he seemed to believe she was going to be sticking around and wrote to tell me, I wrote back, "Congratulations."

and that's all I wrote.

I stopped just short of a temper tantrum, a bit shy of a hissy fit, and made sure no one thought I was, in any way, approving of this relationship since most everyone agrees that Joe can only live his life basking in the glow of my full approval and blessing.

But, one day, she was gone and Gracie was there and I just knew.

I haven't met her but we write nearly every day. She encourages me not to pay attention to cold feet but to put on extra socks, get over myself and "go for it". She says she loves me " 'cause Joe does" and I believe her. She goes to where he is. She takes no shit. She rocks his world while keeping it steady and that is the power of a good woman.

She wrote me a quick email today. We were trying to confirm a dinner date and Gracie needed to work it around a hair appointment. If you can't bond with a woman over that priority you're pretty sorry. She said she knew I meant March though I wrote May, that they were going to look at property in the mountains so coming here would be great. "Hair-property-Shari...sounds like a plan to me."

and I cried.

I did. I sat at this computer and cried. I could picture it; Gracie in charge. I could see them, Joe waiting while she got her hair done, driving, together, in my beautiful mountains, checking their watches to come to my farmhouse and sit at my table and tell stories. I knew that I am right not to worry over him, anymore. His health will be tended to, his days will be filled with laughter, he will not be alone but, more importantly, he will not be lonely, and his heart is safe. Joe Galloway, the toughest man I know, is also, by far, the most tender hearted, and a man made of that combination, limitless courage and bone china fragility, is one you need to worry about every minute of every day.

But, now he has Gracie and Gracie has Joe. They are worrying about me. They are giving me advice and encouragement and threatening the lives of potential suitors and they are coming for dinner after she gets her hair done and deciding where to build a cabin.

But, he is still my Joe and because a good woman knows who she is and Gracie is a damn good woman, that is just fine with her.

Home By Now

I've never been in love with my house.

It was a marriage of convenience. I needed a place to live and it needed someone to pay the heat bill. It lacked anything that would stir passion in me but I believed I could fake it for what it did have. I've never seen stars or heard violins while walking through it.

Walker loved it from the beginning. He always felt our other home lacked privacy, sitting on a corner, both doors visible from two streets. He heard wild turkeys in the woods on the first night in this house and was home. He fell hard. He's always seen the good. Nate and Abbie walked through it before the closing and thought it was great. Abbie was right when she said, "It has a perfect layout, Mom." She's always been one to see the practical. She and Nate thought of building one just like it.

I went through the motions.

I spent enough paper money to burn a wet mule on renovating the barn. It was a love at first sight that only grew stronger. I am at peace within its' walls, made whole by every minute spent caring for it. While hiding from a tornado in the hallway bathroom of the house with a retriever I love and a dachshund I don't even like all that much, my consuming fear was not for the roof above me or the old oaks and pecan trees. I whispered to wind that skipped us all together,

"Don't take my barn."

I finally, after two years, painted my room. It helped. But, you can talk a man into putting on a pair of cowboy boots. Unless he was born to wear them, it won't make you want him to leave them beside your bed. I tore out a wall in the kitchen. Now, that did make things more interesting but not for long. The best thing about that decision was it gave me a wider view of the barn while chopping onions or scrambling eggs. It was still, just a house.

It's nearly been three years. If I could multiply, hell, if I could add, I'd know how many days that is of now and then loving moments in a loveless union. I've thought of leaving it a hundred times, of walking out the back door without bothering to lock it, of finding the true love I believe is out there, somewhere, even if it's plaster is long past smooth and it's paint is peeling. I never do.

I stay. I keep working on it.

I stopped mourning the house that died a while back, stopped feeling the loss. Now, it is a story I tell, not a pain I feel. What I continued to want were my neighbors. I wanted P.J. and Brenda, Nick and Jan and Donna. Mostly, I wanted Miss Jean.

What I got was Tim Yount.

Tim wasn't really even my neighbor, at first. Until he got free of a woman who did not deserve him, Tim used that great, old house only as an office defying a city zoning ordinance nobody much cared about anyway. I used to see him in the Cafe, reading the morning paper, sometimes two. I didn't think I cared much for him. I was wrong about that.

Tim has the quickest wit of anybody ever. I play host to writers, Pulitzer Prize winners, Bronze Star recipients, folks with big brains and big words. Tim is quicker on the draw than any one of them. He once told me about a car breaking down in California and the mechanic who came to get it running. He heard Tim talk and said, "Where are you from?", Tim being heavy on Southern and light on Malibu. I couldn't help but think, that guy heard an accent and mistakenly assumed all kinds of wrongs. He was talking to a man who could verbally spar with kings and presidents..

and kick their ass.

Tim has a musician friend, Jonathan Birchfield. Tim said I should hear him play, sometime. I didn't. Roxanne Moser bought me his CD. Jonathan brought it by while I had a house full of writers. One of them said, "Who was that?"

"Some Singer-Boy.", I answered.

But, I listened to his music and it was good. His lyrics were good and the boys playing were good. Mostly, to be a good neighbor to Tim, I called him up and asked for an interview, tried to find a story to write about a guy who wrote a song about my Claremont Cafe. We talked of our shared love for Jackson Browne and Larry McMurtry books. He invited me to a benefit concert in Valdese, arranged an All Access Pass. I decided to show up.

This is what I know. All good things come to me by way of Claremont. With the exception of my children, and through one of them, my grandbabies, everything good in my life came to me, or came back to me, because of this town. It's a fact.

Backstage,I found my story in a dobro player from Hudson. Because I am good at one thing, paying attention, I saw the way he picked up his instrument and knew he was a killer musician. I was right. I was wrong about the dobro being the only thing he should play. In the weeks that followed, we would spend hours talking about Lowell George and Miles Davis and the boys in Steely Dan and because I was paying attention to him that night at the concert, I found another story in a songwriter who paints pictures with words the way other artists work in oils. We've had lunch at the Cafe twice since then. Yesterday, Willie Hewitt came through the door and said, "There's Shari and her hippie friend." Raymond wanted to know if I was goin' out with him. Raymond worries over my single status, believes it is high time I took a husband.

You know you are sorry when the town drunk who lives in a storage unit thinks you're ability to attract a man is fast leaving.

I found a story in a cowboy who came through the back door and said, "Hi." Jonathan would tell me he was a guitar god. The dobro player would call him the "best electric guitar player on the East Coast". I would come to appreciate him for a song he sang in my living room when they all came for a bowl of my chicken and sausage gumbo.

They left their guitar cases scattered around my house like the writers leave their laptops and backpacks. They pulled their chairs in a circle while my dog took her place on the rug and went to sleep.

I wanted Miss Jean. I got Tim. Together we have emptied a jar of moonshine he made in his own kitchen while a fifty dollar bottle of Blanton's bourbon sat on a shelf not five feet from us and I have laughed harder than I once thought possible. He's been in several of my stories. An English teacher and a literary agent told me that I am at my best when my writing includes something Tim has said. From Tim, I got Jonathan. From Jonathan, I got music. From music, I got a home.

This morning, I woke and pulled my jeans for the first of many daily trips to my barn, slipping from the one I am supposed to love to the one I do. But, today, it was different the moment I opened my bedroom door.

I heard it.

Ella's nails clicked in time on a laminate floor I've openly cussed to the tones of acoustic guitars. From the walls that soaked it in some weeks ago, I heard a cowboy sing.

"Sun is shining through your window
Pretty curtains of lace.
Though I've never been here before
I don't feel out of place.
All my life I've been alone
but, I'm here somehow.
I was thinkin', if I lived here,
I'd be home by now."

It's not my old street where Nick Colson, still in his boxer shorts, would go get the morning paper. It is where Tim leaves clean casserole dishes on the bench outside my back door when I lie to him about cooking too much and fix supper for him and his good boy. It's not where Kevin Isenhour and I pounded the Yard of the Month sign into the front lawn at Miss Jean's house and surprised her with the award. It is where we raised money for a boy who needed it and I took my first, but not my last, drink of Apple Pie. It's not where Saturday night drunks miss their aim and run into the privet hedge bringing all the neighbors to the corner to speculate as to his blood alcohol level. It is where guitar players show up, now and then, and feed a need I have for music as much as most folks need oxygen.

It's still Claremont.

And, I was thinkin', since I live here, I should be home by now.

What You Need To Know

Things seem to come in waves. For the last couple of weeks, folks have been trying to tell me and others a big long list of what we need to know.

It's never good.

No one has said, 'what you need to know is he was good to his momma.' or 'what you need to know is he always carried his granddaddy's pocket knife.' It's always a transgression that they believe better defines the character of the person in question. "He may have visited the sick and always put money in the collection plate but he was bad to forget his wife's birthday.

It's got to where it's burdensome.

I grew up hearing stories like that. I've written it before but the women in my family could remember every sin anyone ever committed and enjoyed nothing more than mentioning it at the exact moment the sun seemed to be shining particularly if the person in question was a member of a church congregation. If a woman in the community baked a good pie, I'd hear, "Well, you know she was pregnant when they got married."

They landed the same body blows to each other. I heard about the miserable first marriage of my favorite aunt, the lack of financial responsibility of my least favorite aunt, the drinking of one uncle and another's shameful subscription to Playboy magazine before I was ten years old.

That side was not Southern.

I would love to claim, with certainly, that the South is better at sticking together and accepting parts of people that ain't so shiny, and I think, most of the time, we are. Miss Janie is as church goin' a woman as exists anywhere in the Confederate South. When complimented on her singing on Sunday morning, Miss Janie would answer, "Aw, I just sing to the glory of the Lord." One day,she told me about stepping over drunks on her way in the door every morning to begin her shift at the Claremont Cafe. Pool tables and moonshine are a combination that tends to make it near impossible to travel much further than the sidewalk. There she'd find them in the dark hours before dawn, slumped over and snoring. Her only judgement in telling me this story was of the oversensitive nature of folks in this century. She shook her head and said, "Ever'body'd just die if that happened nowdays. Wadn't no harm in it. They got up when they could." Miss Janie is a member of the choir of the First Baptist Church in Claremont. Michael Reno Harrell, a brilliant and funny man, wrote a line in a song that made me laugh out loud in the parking lot of hardware store where I sat in my truck listening to his music instead of going in and buying paint and a closet organizer.

"The Baptists don't own the South. They just use the name."

It's been about a year ago. A good looking man who is as quick witted and funny as he is book and street smart handed me a drink and said, "You're gonna hear stuff about me. People are going to want to tell you things they think you need to know." Better not. Better not be anybody, anywhere who dares to say a word. I don't wear boots with rounded toes and I know how to use them.

It's not in my nature, hanging on to the bad. I reckon that comes from my Tennessee half though if you saw the fire in my cousin's eyes when she talks about her momma bein' done wrong by a preacher man, you'd have a damn good argument against that and I know that, 'up there', they believe that we're still pissed off about losing The War but mostly we're pissed that the facts were changed to make one side, not ours, holy and that Atlanta has never been the same since y'all burned it. It grew back less Southern and that's just wrong.

I guess we can hold on to a grudge pretty tight if we want to.

Still, Southerners tend to think of a man's sin as his behavior, not the true mark of his soul. We see it as what he did, not who he is, and we are the undisputed champs at seeing things the way we want them to be. Erin and Anna Taylor told me that when a Carolina boy was in the running to be the next American Idol, their cousin was swooning,sick-in-love and reasoned that, "He's not gay. He was just raised by his momma."

Pretty sure she was wrong about that. Anyway, he lost.

I'm working on a piece for a magazine. With two exceptions, everyone I have interviewed has believed it was their god-given-duty to tell me what I really need to know about the others. I am to keep in mind the demons that travel in guitar cases and bass drums and escape back stage rather than hear the music. It's wearing me out. It reminds me of being a kid,of Frank Thomas pointing to my t-shirt and saying, "How can you like Elton John? He's a sissy.", of that free spending, least favorite Aunt telling me not to listen to another song by John Denver because, "he smokes marijuana" and gets all Rocky Mountain High.

In my early thirties, I met Elton John. He's a bitch. He sure is. When I hear Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, I never think of of that. When I rocked my babies and my baby's babies and sang "Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose" I never considered James Taylor's heroin addiction. I do when I hear Layla but Eric Clapton meant for me to think about that to better understand why he wanted a woman he thought he wasn't going to get. I don't judge him for it. I am damn glad of it. If not for it, there would be no Layla and that, people, that would be the real sin.

We get it wrong. We get a lot of shit wrong. Whether it's ego or weakness or because our mommas potty trained us poorly, sometimes we're just all to hell. The artists are the ones who use it, twist it, bend it from clay to sculpture, from pain to a sheet of music, from heartache to the page. The great ones are those who free an entire race of people and set the standard for all future outcries for social justice. If along the way, if while they are having rocks thrown at their heads and dogs sicced on them and fire hoses of water blasted to bring them to their knees they find comfort in the bed of someone other than the one they are married to, I think we can find a way to understand that. I think it's a long damn distance between those two points of character and I am certain it is more important to be thankful for one and let the other go as it is none of our business.

I'm going to do better.

I'm determined to do better, staring today, not at getting everything right. Hell, no. I will continue to falter and fuck up and try, again, but if not for that, there would be no words on the page and some people tell me I'm good at choosing the words I put on paper. If not for the drugs, his time would not have been at hand and there would be no fire, no rain. If not for the sin, there'd be no redemption whether by a watery grave or a story in a book or a guitar riff that makes you close your eyes and still see heaven.

I'm going to do better at not listening.

For any of that judgment to be said, there has to be ears to hear it and I am going to try, to really try, to make it known that mine are closed to the business of bashing. Let 'em sin, by damn, let 'em sin. Let them get it wrong and write about it. Let them get it wrong and sing about it. Let them get it wrong and hide it, I do not care. I'll get it wrong, from time to time. I'll listen when I shouldn't.

But,I will do my best to hear only the music.