Unfinished Blues
The new plan was this: a post every week; I was going to call it The Saturday Evening Post, in fact, with appropriately subversive references to Norman Rockwell. Then 10 months went by—how did that happen?
Here’s how (backtrack to June 2018, my last post): super-busy summer managing 100-some beehives, recovering from previous surgeries, getting more surgeries. I got half a lung removed, ran a 5k just to prove I wasn’t dead, kept mending.
In a moment of reflection last November I recorded the song above, meaning to flesh it out before the new year. Then whoosh… a family visit to Ohio for Thanksgiving, a clean scan!, holidaze, more good family time on the coast, ramp up work for the new year, another clean scan!, busy and normal schedule with healthy habits, school daze for Japhy, bees waking up this spring.
In March though I got diagnosed with a recurrence of the cancer, and … suddenly I wrap up two weeks of radiation on my hip tomorrow, and get back on the chemotherapy train soon.
The cancer is not finished with me, which is just as well, because I’m all full of unfinished business myself. Unfinished songs recorded on an iPhone. More a capella stuff I sung in my car. Snippets of cab-driver pomes and other stuff that just drifts off into the ether. The unfiltered, unpolished, rudimentary, roughshod, stutter-step. Marginalia and metaphor. Maybe The Saturday Evening Post will get cooking after all. Even if it’s Thursday.
Song notes: recorded into an iPhone 7, lyrics and melody (such as it is) improvised as this was the first time I’d sung anything with these chords. Half of the chord progression was copped verbatim from Rory Block, “Ain’t No Way to Do” from Blue Horizon, Rounder Records 1983). Song title copped from Louis Armstrong.
UW INFIRMARY BLUES
hold me close
hold me tight
please be kind
because this dream
i've had so many nights
keeps coming back to me
with such a fright
please be nice
please be kind
i need someone to shine
this dream that i had
so many times
comes upon me
makes me cry
it holds me down
it holds me down
i see a day come soon
when all we have
isn’t lost in ruins
and that old sweet song
that plays upon my mind
comes back and lets me go
and looks me in the eye
and it's gonna be alright
it's gonna be alright
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