There are two ways to learn from a wish;

the first - and most common - is when the wish does not come true. If the wish was for something that really mattered, like for a badly-needed job or for a loved one recovering from a serious illness, the failed wish will hurt you deeply, sometimes to the point where you can't see how you'll ever get back to who you were before.

But you do. Most of the time. You find a way to recall whatever is still good in your life, in yourself, and you put one foot in front of the other and you walk back down from the ledge. You breathe, you feel your heart beat, someone says something kind to you that touches you deeply, you have a sandwich. Something.

The second way, when the wish DOES come true, is actually a longer, more subtle lesson. Subtle enough that I can only give you an example, and hope that in the telling, I'll get closer to knowing what I've learned:

Teri and I had our firstborn, John Francis McKenna, in January of 1985. We were living at the time in the bottom-front apartment of a concrete shoebox four-plex in the Berkeley flatlands; not a great neighborhood, and the landlord was a bitter man whose own wish was that either Berkeley rent control laws would all get repealed or that the place would burn to the ground so he could collect the insurance. Sorry, Arthur; try a different wish.

We had no money to speak of, but we had each other and we had our boy, and he just grew bigger and smarter and more handsome year by year. (If you believe in sin, we most definitely fell into the sin of pride, because we both felt certain that our son's beauty and intelligence and temperment were the result of our gifted parenting. But more on that later).

We both knew we eventually wanted one more child, since neither of us had been only children, and we both felt strongly that a child needs to have at least one other person with the same parents so that they can compare notes and reassure each other that "yes, our parents are flat-out nuts sometimes".

We started to try for Child #2 right before John began kindergarten, and we expected fast results because we'd conceived John in about seven or eight weeks. And in fact, Teri got pregnant in about a seven weeks again. It was a golden warm Bay Area autumn, our OB/GYN had a charming, homey office in Lafayette about twelve minutes from our house; all was good.

Until, out of the blue - no, out of the black - trouble with the pregnancy. Spotting, cramping, long periods of horrible silence while Dr. Klein peered at the sonograms. Lots of terrified waiting and feverish denial on our part. Then it was over, in the ER of Alta Bates Hospital, in the middle of the night. We cried so hard I thought we'd die.

But we tried again, and along the way we took every test the specialists could think of. Even changed OB/GYNs two times, not because of any fault of theirs but just to try to outrun whatever nightmare mojo was dogging us.

And we lost another baby. And another. Six in all. I don't know how we kept going. I don't know how Teri kept going. But we had each other, and our little boy to love and take care of, and we had friends who helped us, probably in ways I may not have even been aware of.

Sometime in the Spring of 1992, around Lost Baby 4, I think, I was working in downtown SF, on California Street, a few blocks down the hill from Chinatown. Work was not going wonderfully and money was a constant grinding worry. But as I sat on a bench in a little park at lunchtime, in the warm afternoon light, with my sleeves rolled up and my tie loosened, just trying to get my blood pressure down before I had to walk back into the office, all I could think of with all my heart was, "All I want is one more little baby to be with us and feel this beautiful sunshine on their face."

And I carried that wish with me all the way past Lost Baby 6. Then, when Teri was pregnant with not-yet-Lost Baby 7, something happened. This baby decided to stick around. At first we were numb; it took a long time for us to open our hearts to the risk of hope. But we did open up, because we still, still really wanted a new baby, and we began to allow ourselves to believe that this little one was going to make it.

And she grew stronger and stronger inside my wife, till one morning in March of '95, Teri's water broke and the contractions began - three weeks early, just like with John. We drove to Alta Bates, got checked in, then waited for the doctor. Considering all we'd been through, we were pretty relaxed. The doctor came and examined Teri, and, also just as with John, Teri was barely dilated. He says, look, I know you wanted to try for a vaginal delivery and not a C-section, but from what you've told me, this is playing out just like your first delivery - you could go through thirty hours of tough labor then wind up having a Caesarean anyway. So, you need to decide which it's going to be - go for the vaginal, or just schedule the C-section now.

Teri looked at me and said, what do you think? I said, I think it's your body but if you're going to let me decide, I say C-section. Can't say why, but I didn't feel even a moment of hesitation or second-guessing. She said, OK, Doctor, let's do the Caesarean.

We had to wait for an OR, so we had about an hour to kill. I remember there was a nature show on the TV in the room, about tigers, so we held hands and watched the big cats doing their thing in some deep green jungle for a while. It was really calm and quiet in that room.

Finally, they came with the gurney and wheeled Teri down the corridors to the OR, me following in the one-size-fits-all scrubs they give us civilians. Everything went smoothly, and I did my job - stroking Teri's cheek and holding her hand on and off, behind the screen they put up to shield us from the actual gore of the operation. The nurses and doctor murmured back and forth as they took care of business, till they all got quiet. Then one of the nurses said, in a tone I couldn't read, "Wow. I've never seen that before." Other voices agreed. "What's going on?" I said, perhaps a little frantically. "What have you never seen before??"

They explained that when they pulled our daughter out of my wife, the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck. Three times. With a knot. There was no danger, since they just cut away the cord like so much kudzu, but of course, had we tried for a vaginal delivery, there would have been no real chance my daughter would have survived.

But Jacqueline Jane McKenna not only survived, but thrived, and she was as beautiful and smart as her brother. Not as mellow-tempered, as we've noted many times - when she was little, we used to call her Lightning Bolt, because she could turn from peaceful to furious as fast as lightning, but I thought, then as now, it's not a bad thing for girls to have some sharp edges to them. And I've spent my whole life surrounded by strong-willed women; why should that change now?

So, more than eighteen years have passed since I was granted my heart's deepest wish, and what have I learned? Is my soul perpetually filled with gratitude? Does misfortune pass through my life as quickly and painlessly as sparrows flitting through fog?

No. But I do have some damn fine moments. And I'm working on the rest.

When it's been really important,

or important to me, at least, I've made it happen. I like to think so, anyway.

The most trivial, obvious example: back when I was single (riding dinosaurs across the still-molten Earth), I really loved connecting with young women. As in, the sex.

I was not a bad-looking fellow, and those were more promiscuous times, but it still required some degree of luck (that's why they call it "getting lucky"), as well as persistence and patience. Then as now, most young women had a lot more opportunities in that area, so they were (and are) more selective than most young men, and the most common responses to the unspoken question "How about it?" were "No" and "I don't think so".

But again, it was important to me to make these things happen if at all possible, so, in those instances when I perceived even a glimmer of interest, I would find pretexts to hang around and "chat them up", as no American ever said. Sometimes they would eventually (or quickly) get annoyed enough to tell me to get lost, but other times, we would suddenly find ourselves alone and they would make it seem like it was all their idea. Which, hey, perhaps it was.

But as life unfolded, the most important things in my life became to be a good husband to my wife and a good father to my children. I'm more than thirty years into the first and 28 and 18 years into the second, and - knocking on wood with my fingers and toes crossed while throwing salt over my shoulder - I believe I've done OK so far. Works in progress.

At this point, it's difficult to the point of impossibility for me to imagine a life without my wife and children. But I have occasionally thought, well, everything has its cost; what might I have done if I had no wife or children? Would something else have taken the place of being a husband and father, in terms of what's important, what must be done as well as possible, no matter what?

No.

 

Patience, or the Lack Thereof: Winter, 1973

Aside from some beautiful memories I have from early childhood, when I had no sense of time at all because there was no place I had to be, I've struggled to be more patient, more relaxed in the face of time. "I eat too fast, I drink too fast, I talk too fast - what's my fucking hurry?", I wrote in my journal at age 20, and this is all still true, forty years later.

Time is elastic and erratic; it can race then crawl then race again, and my efforts to master it, and to be more patient with and more accepting of how fast or slow things unfold have been unsuccessful. So far.

Of course, back in the day when we ingested various substances with the express goal of messing with our cognitive processes, this impatience could - and did - take some comical turns:

Winter of 1972/73 I was a sophomore at Utica College; I was sharing a pretty nice old house on Kemble Street with two of my friends, not too far from campus, so I could even walk when a ride was unavailable, and if the weather wasn't too arctic or swampy (the Mohawk Valley's two main climate settings).

One evening, we decided to make a batch of pot brownies. We had come into a nice amount of weed somehow, but it was not especially high-quality - not much pot was, back then - so this baking experiment was our attempt to squeeze as much stoning power out of our stash without wrecking our throats.

None of us had learned how to infuse butter with marijuana back then, either, so - don't laugh - we just pulverized the weed into as flour-like a consistency as we could, then sifted it into the brownie batter. As a result, the end-product tasted as bad as you'd expect - imagine chewing stale chocolate off a dry lawn - and we also had no real clue as to how strong the brownies would be.

While we waited for the brownies to bake and then cool off enough to eat, the sun set, and we grew a little bored and antsy. So, we rolled a joint, smoked it, then another. Perhaps a third. Who can say.
But by then, the brownies were cool enough to cut into squares and eat, and with our appetites sharpened by the smoke, we devoured a couple of squares each with great enjoyment. Despite the taste.

Then we waited for them to kick in. And waited. And waited. "Well, hell, these must be weak; let's down a couple more." Each.

Eventually, we started to feel pretty high, especially in terms of physical sensations; we got out of our chairs feeling like balloons rising to the ceiling. Nice.

We must have walked to campus - we surely couldn't have driven - and since every possible activity now seemed equally random, we just sat in the Student Union listening to our hearts beat and the building hum.

I turned to my roommate. "Brad?"
"Yeah?"
"Does that wall look weird to you?"
He considered this. For some time. "Yeah, it kinda does."
We both pondered this.
"Brad?"
"Yeah?"
"I figured out why the wall looks weird."
"Yeah?"
"It's really the ceiling."

Man Of Virtue (Take One)

Wrote this a while back but decided I needed to record it now, despite constrained (that is, zero) resources. A thin soup that asks you to imagine the stew it may be someday.

I Know You Rider Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone

I've had some of the most intensely pleasureable moments of my life listening to Jerry Garcia sing and play. Like many people, I saw and heard in Garcia an intense intelligence, by turns wry, gleeful, mournful, and cryptic. Some of my impressions were no doubt projections, and some were chemically enhanced, but these feelings were strong enough - and have lasted long enough - that they've taken on a life of their own.

So it may seem strange that at the time of his death, I did not grieve. But please understand: by that point, I hadn't seen him perfom live for more than fifteen years, and I was mostly unengaged with most his more recent recorded work. Plus, his overall deterioration from decades of massive substance abuse and generally hard living was not a secret.

Thus my lack of suprise or intense sorrow when he was found dead, in August of 1995. Like many people, I had seen it coming, and it was just a matter of when. The opposite of a suprise.

With the passing of more time, though, I began to experience some moments of sadness and loss when I thought about him. But still, just moments, and mostly while watching or listening to performances from his last couple of years, when he was obviously ill and often struggling to form the sounds he wanted to make.

Today, though, on the way to work, I tuned into the middle of a performance of I Know You Rider, from around 1977, and it was astonishing, particularly Jerry's guitar playing - uninhibited, loud; leads that were more clusters of rapidly executed chords. The opposite of tentative. Then he began to sing,

"I wish I was a headlight,
on a northbound train,"

and he was bellowing, insanely joyful, like a warrior roaring into battle.

And I started to cry. He had been this force, this beauty in the world, and his time is gone.

 

Cocoa: Surprise.

So get this. As some of you know, we have had - and still have - quite a few cats. Some we got from the pound, but more than a few have just come to us: wandered in, then stuck around. And a couple were ferals that we helped rescue. Anyway, once we acknowledge that a cat is "ours", we take him/her to our vet and get them vaccinated and, when old enough, fixed.

The exception was Cocoa. He got his shots OK, but before he was old enough to get fixed, he just disappeared. We felt awful but eventually moved on. THEN, after about three months, he strolled back in one morning like he had just woken up from a short nap. But during his mysterious travels, he had gotten as husky as a small badger, lost a piece of one ear, and now had a big ol' set of balls on him. Not too domestic anymore, shall we say.

After having a meal or two, he made himself scarce - we'd only see him a couple times a month for a while there.

Then, recently, after a couple of years of now you see me now you don't, Cocoa began spending more time around the backyard, and coming into the pantry more often for meals (which freaked out the other cats big-time, except for Elvis).

Soon he was being very affectionate, mostly to me, even coming all the way into the living room in the evenings, to sit on my lap (or, balance on my lap - again, big cat). We were of mixed feelings about his redomestication, though, because he really does freak most of the others out. We also didn't understand what had prompted his new lovey-doveyness.

Then, this morning, Teri calls me at work; I answer, and ask what's up. Silence. Then, "Cocoa's balls are gone."

My turn to pause. Then, "What do you mean his balls are gone?"

Well, far as we can tell, seems like one of our neighbors did what we thought was impossible - they caught him, took him to be fixed, then released him.

Ain't that the damnedest thing. But the guy himself seems utterly unfazed.

 

How Does It Feel?

Growing up, I heard plenty of music in my home; my parents had, for those days, a really fine stereo system in our living room, and some beautiful LPs - Modern Jazz Quartet, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, The Weavers, original cast recordings from shows like Fiddler On the Roof and West Side Story, the Brandenburg Concertos - I was far from deprived. And on top of all this, my older sister would let me listen to her 45s with her, on the little portable turntable in the den. The Shirelles, The Crystals, The Ronettes, The Chiffons.

But the most exciting music was always on the radio, because it was where I heard the newest music. And the car radio was best, because we could play it loud, especially when my sister took the car out to cruise around. And my parents were more amenable to letting her have the keys if she let me tag along.

Which is all by way of saying that the first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in our family's car. Summer of 1965. We had been out somewhere - a restaurant? - and on the way back, my parents had let me play one of "my" stations. No long before we pulled into our driveway, the song came on.

Six minutes later, it was still playing. My parents had already gone inside, telling me to just turn off the car and bring the keys in when I was finished. So I sat there in the back seat, with my door open to let a little breeze in, as the last crashing, wailing measures faded out.

This morning, almost fifty years later and three thousand miles away, I heard it on the way to work - for what may have been the thousandth time - and once again, I was thrilled to the core. I thought - not for the first time - "this is the song that changed me forever".

Then I thought - for the first time - "So what?"

What have you done, with this "changed" you? Have you made the world a better place? Yeah? How?

Where has all this led you?

How does it feel?

February 1972, Clinton, NY

The only thing harder than being in a band

is not being in one.

Years ago - post-Nixon and pre-Reagan - I was lucky enough to be in some bands with people who were not just inspired performers and songwriters, but who were also fiercely dedicated to making a living at it. And we actually did. But a big part of what made that even possible was because we were young enough to exist on almost nothing. At times, we lived four, five, even ten to a house, splitting rent and utilities and groceries, pitching in for gas and maintenance on cars and vans along the way. Speaking for myself, I walked a lot, and I went for a couple of years without spending more a few bucks a day on food. Ever.

So, under those conditions, being a "professional musician" was feasible, even when we only had a handful of paying gigs a month. Plus we played on the street regularly, and became proficient at getting folks to open their wallets.

But it was still grueling, because what we all really wanted was for something Big to happen. And when nothing did, the bickering began. As I've said elsewhere, being in a working band is like the worst parts of a marriage and a small business.

Fast forward: some of us persisted and found ways to make some kind of living from music. Some eventually said to hell with it and pretty much stopped playing. Me, the most money I ever made from playing music in any given year was around $200, which paid for a red Mexican Telecaster that was my main guitar for a little while.

But I was proud - I AM proud - to have never become an ex-musician.

I've been playing with my current band, The Waterdogs, with pretty much the same personnel, since, oh, 1997? Wait, is that right? Sixteen years? We have never really gigged much, because as middle-aged guys with day jobs, the prospect of competing with 22-year-olds for the privilege of playing to a mostly empty bar on a Tuesday night holds little appeal. So what perfomances we've done have been mostly block parties and school fund-raisers, where the pay is often in hot dogs and beer. But the hours and working conditions are good - generally weekend afternoons, outside.

And when you're playing just for pleasure, with no realistic prospects of fortune or fame, there is generally less stress. I say generally, since where there are people, there are egos, and where there are egos, there is stress. So, after all these years, The 'Dogs are going through some more changes, and the future is uncertain.

But then, when is the future ever certain?

In any event, I thought this would be a good time to share a lovely song of my long-time musical comrade's, Kurt Regas. Recorded by us nearly fourteen years ago, but still fresh. We use only the finest ingredients.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWM4JQ_ANc

Had To Be

When I grow old and all my bones have turned to glass

Come down and visit me by the sea

I might convince you as the hours slowly pass

All of this is as it had to be

Every little boy thinks he’s a superman

who sees what no one else can see

You’ll see me smiling when I see you understand

These songs and stories were for me

I knew you when you were a shadow on the lake

before you even tasted air

and now you’re trying to decide which road to take

and who to be when you get there

I used to want a Lincoln Continental

and I used to want a watch of solid gold

Time went by and I got sentimental

Give me things that keep me from the cold

I heard some friends of mine had crossed the river

Good or bad their stories are all told

Now they’ll walk along that shore forever

I hope that where they’re walking it’s not cold

Not long ago I was a worried man

All night I’d toss and turn

- Didn’t do the crime - Still I did the time -

I had a lot to learn

Someday all this will be a memory

We’ll all look back on this and smile

Just another molecule of history

---It’ll take a little while....

Ain't So Deep

Ain’t  So Deep

I’m gonna take me a passenger train upstate,

take along a sandwich or two

I’m gonna sleep real deep while the rails run straight

Otherwise I’ll think about you -

And I hope you think about me too

You say that your encyclopedia is much too old –

The information’s all out of date

I tell ya most of the stories have yet to be told –

You oughta read ‘em while you still see straight – 

Later might be too late

I dreamed about an alphabet I could not read

It put me in a thoughtful mood

It did not burn and I did not bleed

When I noticed that I’d been tattooed
my reaction was not subdued

Some days it takes me a miracle to get out of bed –

I feel like I was beaten to sleep

But it’ll be OK ‘cause it’s all in my head,

This hill can’t be that steep

And this water just ain’t that deep

April, 2007

March 7, 1995

The Power of the Press

Fred and I had worked as gardeners in a graveyard in North London over the summer - 1972?-and I took my earnings and bought a sweet little Yamaha six-string. Returned to college - Utica - and by then knew perhaps four chords. My buddy Frank and I were stretching our legs on the lawn in front of one of the dorms after our drive, and at that moment, a reporter from the local rag wanted a "Utica welcomes back its returning students" story, so the guy pulled over two girls and a guy who we'd never seen before, and told me to play a song, and for everyone to sing....this accounts for Frank's deeply amused expression.

Let me melt like a stone in the mouth of the sun,

let me breathe
Like a single clear note I would gleam then be gone
Dressed in white like a summertime saint,
I could step off the edge and be done
The only son of an only son

Let me rise like the smoke from a fire in the night
to the stars
'Cross the deserts of space to the islands of light

I could pick one to circle and turn like a ring

out of mind, out of sight

At rest tonight in the restless night

Crow

Crow

I see the train pull out of town

I see that black smoke blossom rise above the hill

Seems like forever since my feet have touched the ground

If I move close I know I’ll hear

the sounds as mothers try to call their children home

If they were calmer, they would probably shed a tear

They will not cry for me

for I am just a crow

Now I recall when you were young

you thought this brave new world would last ten million years

You should have been a bit more honest all along

I watch them gather down below

I hear them shouting but I can’t make out the words

But pretty soon I know I’ll hear the sirens blow

They will not blow for me

for I am just a crow

________________________

And now the clouds are rolling in

so deep and dark the sun might never shine again

There’ll just be weeds and cockaroaches and the the wind

Now even I must leave

though I am just a crow

I wish I could’ve helped

but I was just a crow