Category: da blues

Did you get healed?

Recently, driving around in the Jeep looking for something good to listen to on the radio, I began to think about a CD I own.

By thinking, I mean, wondering where it is. When The Good Man and I moved in together several years ago, I boxed up a lot of stuff and stored it away.

Over the years, occasionally I’ll remember something that I want or need and it’s a hell of a rodeo to find it.

So I put the thought out of mind. Whatever. It’s just a CD. I can probably find it on iTunes or at the library or something.

I tried to dismiss it.

But this thought came with a long strip of Velcro, and wouldn’t let go.

A voice in my mind kept asking, “Where is that CD? You need to listen to it.”

When you get a voice that adamant, it’s kind of hard to ignore.

But I tried.

And tried.

And failed.

Resigned to satisfying that damn voice so it would shut up, I suited up. Our storage is under the place we rent, and that happened to be a very cold and very rainy day.

Determined, under the house I went, poking around in boxes and bags, knocking stuff over and getting lost on that long winding lane called Memory.

Finally, I did find a very heavy box that had a bunch of CD’s, and also most of my VHS movies, that I’d packed away.

I heaved, grunted and lurched the box upstairs and started picking through it.

A lot of heavy memory stuff burbled to the top, clamoring for my attention, which I gave.

But nothing quieted the voice. I kept digging and finally, yes, I found the CD I was looking for.

Best of the Blues, Vol. 1

Yeah. A “best of” compilation. Forgive me ye Gods of the Blues.

I bought this CD back in 1997. I’d just moved to the Bay Area and some good friends (also New Mexico transplants) had introduced me to the thriving blues scene in San Francisco.

I only tangentially knew the music. I’d listened to some B.B. King, some Muddy Waters and some John Lee Hooker in my time. The popular stuff. The stuff everyone knows.

But back then, San Francisco was steeped in the old ways.

During the course of the next decade, I received what can only be called a Blues Education.

I watched some of the not only best blues musicians, but best musicians period, play in craptastic bars like the old Grant & Green (the remodel took the soul out of it) and of course The Saloon, the oldest continually operating bar in the beautiful City of San Francisco. It dates back to the 1861, which means it survived both the ‘quake of 1906 and Prohibition.

There were nights it was too cramped and too hot (and back then, too smoky) in The Saloon for my tastes, so I would step outside the front door. I was dating a musician at the time, so the dyspeptic doorman had to be nice to me. He would let me sit on his stool by the front door where he collected the cover charge.

I’d take his chivalrous gesture and lean back against the battered wood door. I could feel the driving beat in my spine, and I’d watch the fog roll over the tops of the buildings in North Beach.

I learned about the three Kings (B.B., Freddy and Albert).

I learned about Chicago blues, Delta blues and the just plain blues blues.

I heard a thousand different versions of “Matchbox” and “Shotgun” and I watched guys try to be both Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King. I began to understand why some songs grab you by the gut and sometimes a song that should grab your gut doesn’t (hint: it has a lot to do with the drummer).

Today, I’m a suburban girl with a quiet, happy life. No regrets here. But sometimes I miss the family I made back then who took me in, protected me and helped me learn the old ways.

You know, they call it stormy Monday…but Tuesday’s just as bad.

This one musician, a hell of guitar player, used to tear it up for four hours, and at the end of the night, he’d ask the frenzied crowd, “Did you get healed?”

And he’d get crazy, drunken, full-throated hollers in return. The music mattered. It got us on a cellular level. We got healed.

I may need to see about a Saturday in North Beach soon, because something feels amiss. It may be time to go back and find if it’s possible to get healed.

Until then, I’ll take the ministrations from that ol’ CD found at the bottom of a moving box.

Image of Ron Hacker, arguably the best slide guitar man in SF and maybe even the world, onstage at The Saloon. (No, he’s not the guy I dated, I’m just a massive fan.)

Photo by Scott Palmer

As the world keeps tilting and turning

And there is nothing you or I can do about it.

Today heralds the incoming month of September.

Labor Day, the “official” end of summer, is nigh.

And, if you are perceptive, over the next days, you can sense a change in the atmosphere. The earth has moved in her orbit a tiny bit, and the angle of the rays from the sun are a little less direct, a bit less overhead, more muted.

The days get moment by moment shorter.

When the breeze blows by on a warm day, you catch the faintest bit of chill in the air. Almost imperceptible, but it is there.

And Fall starts to move in, unpack its red and gold and yellow hued bags, and set up residence.

September is the month of still summer warm days but cooler nights. Of State Fairs and rodeos and roasting chiles. In the Bay Area, the crab fishermen start patching nets and negotiating rates, getting ready for the Fall harvest.

An extra blanket may find its way onto my bed. The Feline will sleep a little closer to her humans.

There is talk of Halloween in the air. “What are you going to be” and bags of miniature chocolate bars for sale.

Soon pumpkins will be lit with candles and ghouls will rule the night.

But today, oh today. Today is still baseball and flip flops and cinnamon flavored churros. In small towns, talk of “will that steer take the blue ribbon this year” and kids are back in school and the public pools grow quieter.

The day is still warm and I still grip, and grip *hard*, to the last, butter slippery straws of summer.

When reality reaches up and grabs you by the throat

I have a milestone birthday coming up in May. It is an age I’m not sure I’m happy about being.

Ok, fine, I have to get old. Everyone does it (barring the alternative, of course). I’m ok with it.

Until I’m reminded clearly and plainly how old and out of it I am.

It began, this past weekend, with the shopping excursion to procure new jeans (see previous post for my thoughts on that). While out and about, I wandered into a store called Anchor Blue.

I’d seen an article in a trashy gossip magazine last week while at the dentist’s office about “the best jeans.” There was a pair of Anchor Blue jeans featured that looked like I’d be happy with them.

So. Anchor Blue. I’d seen the store but had never actually been inside before.

Well. If you go to the webpage (linked above) you’ll see several fresh, dewey-faced CHILDREN on the splash page, showing you just how cool and beautiful YOU can be if you wear their clothing.

Walking into the store, I practically coughed dust and picked cryptkeeper tendrils from my person as I looked around and the clerks looked at me.

I did, actually, pick out a few pairs of jeans to try on, none of them the fabulous pair I’d seen in the magazine, of course.

So, yes, happily, the jeans I’d picked fit me. Well. Sort of. I mean, I could get them on and button them.

But to look in the mirror, you could see clearly where the jeans ended (below my hipbones) and my (evidently) granny panties continued on.

Now, I don’t wear old lady briefs (yet)…what I wear are respectable cotton bikini chones. But in the spotlight of Logan’s Run (In case you missed that film, everyone is executed at age 30), my respectable bikini yonderwear appear to be practically up to my ribcage (just below what they must believe to be my sagging boobs).

I may as well give over to the white belt and Velcro shoes ferchrissakes!

So I gave up on those jeans, but continued to look around the store. I checked out accessories.

They had quite the assortment of Che Guevara-style caps for the ladies. I want to look like an Argentinean communist revolutionary why again?

I looked at skirts. I have this little cloth that I use to clean my glasses. That cloth is larger than these “skirts.” Even if I could get a lens cloth skirt to fit me…no, it’s too terrible, I can’t even go there.

Fine. Thus ended my shopping trip.

Sunday rolled around and The Good Man and I traveled up to Muir Beach to meet with some friends. “Take a walk,” they said. Oh, sure, yes! A walk on a sunny day would be nice. Maybe even help me work off some calories in hopes of wearing that lens cloth to dinner!

These folks are all about my same age…well, TGM and his best friend are a year younger. And the best friend’s wife is a couple years younger still. Ok, so I’m the matron of the bunch, what of it?

So we walk on the beach a bit and then decide to hike a trail. Fun!

An uphill trail.

What?

So evidently that one-year age difference between TGM’s and me is a huge gap, because all of my friends scampered up the hill while I was in the back gasping for air and feeling my thighs wobbling.

Now, the other lady in our group is in knockout shape, I forgive her. But TGM and his buddy have no excuse. They billy-goated they way up the hill with ease, leaving me with hands on knees feeling like I was going to puke.

I was further insulted when a tiny fourteen year-old dog named Chester paced me, turned and ran halfway back down the hill to greet his people, then turned around and paced me again.

His legs are three inches long!

Damn you Chester!

Now it is Monday and my legs hurt. My lungs still burn a little and I’m faced with my group of fifteen employees, not a ONE of them over the age of 30.

I remember 30. That was a good year. My thirties…yes, a fine decade. *sigh*

One of ours finds her way back home

After moving to the Bay Area back in 1997, I settled into my new apartment, without any friends or family to speak of. I was completely alone in a big town. It was at once both terrifying and exhilarating.

I knew very few places I could drive to without getting lost, but I made myself the solemn promise that I would not just stay holed up in my apartment. I would leave the house and explore, even if it tested my bounds of comfort. And it did.

On earlier visits to the area for work, some people I knew in the East Bay had taken me to a restaurant in San Francisco. They had given me directions to get there, and I still remembered the route. I recalled the food was good and the people who worked there were nice.

So it became a steady destination. The restaurant is named Sodini’s, and I’ve spoken about it here before. If you’ve been out to visit me, I’ve likely taken you there.

Anyhow, as I went out every weekend, a little New Mexico girl picking hayseeds out of her hair, the people at Sodini’s began to know me. They looked after me. They gave me advice on how to live in the Bay Area, and they protected me.

Usually, I’d eat at Sodini’s then go across the street to a bar called The Grant and Green to listen to live music. Once in there, a part time cocktail waitress, part time stripper took over looking out for me. She was beautiful but also one tough lady. She would scare off guys she knew were bad news who had come sidling up to me, or would shout down anyone trying to run a scam on me (there were plenty who tried. What did I know? They didn’t have people like this in Albuquerque).

Then, several months later, I began idly dating a blues musician. So now I really had reason to be in North Beach. The blues scene is thriving. Over plenty of nights in various North Beach bars, I became a regular. I became part of the North Beach family. A loose band of a variety of strange and not so strange. Some talented. Some educated. Some rich. Some homeless. We are a little bit of everything. I’ve both been read to from Plato and offered the chance to buy crack in the same evening.

As motley as these folks are, truly, they became my family. I was often alone considering my boyfriend was a working musician. The more I fretted, the more they looked out for me. And I began looking out for them, too.

With all of the people I knew who lived on the streets, I began to worry about them. My big heart would be crushed if I didn’t see Willie on his regular street corner, playing harmonica to cheer passerby. Or if Lorne wasn’t standing outside Café Trieste, looking for some money or maybe to fix someone’s car for a couple bucks. And then there was Millie.

She’s about four feet nothing and would bop from bar to restaurant to bar with a huge gap toothed grin and a Polaroid camera. For $5, she’d take your photo and then give you the biggest hug you’ve ever received from someone so little. Her smile would brighten the entire room.

As the years passed, things turned rather sour with the musician. Then I went through an odyssey of my own psyche. And to add to all of that, then my father passed away. All life changing events.

I stopped going to North Beach so much. When I did go, my family would hug me, ask after my health, worry over me and welcome me home. Then they’d chide me for being gone so long.

Finally, as more years passed, I was alone again and unable to get up the courage to explore like I had before. Things were changing. I was changing. I was profoundly alone and considerably lost.

Then on a sunny day in November, my gray skies parted when I met The Good Man. For a while when we first dated, he lived in North Beach, which meant I visited my old haunts with a new set of eyes and a new man in tow. My North Beach family eyed him warily at first, but were soon as charmed as I over The Good Man.

But, to be honest, that’s not the point of my story. The point is this…recently our friend Millie, the cheery, adorable Polaroid taking woman had gone missing. I’d heard this through the grapevine and was sick to my heart. She isn’t a young lady, and I feared she’d ended up like a lot of my family and succumbed on a cold San Francisco night.

I cried this morning when read this article in the SFGate.

Millie was found in a Reno hospital after taking a bus up there and getting turned around. Some kind folks went up and brought her home.

She’s back in North Beach with her Polaroid and her amazing smile.

I don’t get back to North Beach all that much anymore. The Good Man and I moved into our place on the peninsula and now we’re all married and domesticated and living our new lives together. That’s ok too. It does my heart good to know that even though I’m not still running around North Beach, that my people are there and they are okay.

I’m a strange kid, I’m the first to admit it. I can manage to be homesick over two places at the same time. Both New Mexico and the Bay Area beat inside my heart. I’m not sure how to ever resolve that.

I’m not sure I even want to try.

Photo from the SFGate.

Rumor has it

So. Word on the street is that today is December.

But I’m not buyin’ it.

Because I’m fairly certain I did NOT authorize 2008 to dissipate so quickly.

Nope. No way. No how. I don’t care that people are Christmas shopping. I don’t care that decorations are cropping up. Nope.

Nuh uh.

Not gonna do it.

Oh, and *someone* must have told the Bay Area that it’s December today because it went and got all overcast and foggy and crappy and, well, wintry.

I’m telling you, if we all band together against this thing, it doesn’t HAVE to be December. Roll back the calendar, get the sun out of storage and let’s go on about our lives circa, I don’t know, June?

How does June work for you? Do I hear a July? Going once, going twice…

Please stand by…I’m going to go see about fixing this.