I’m told the August issue of Outside magazine is now available. I have a fish story in there. About real big fish. Here’s a photo taken on the last day of the story. I caught the fish under the guidance of my neighbor Chuck.
It is not a big fish, but it was a big day.
I sure like my band the Long Beds. They show up for work on time, they mouth the words to my songs when I turn to them live and mid-verse with that slow-puppy look, and they hardly roll their eyes much at all during the first four bars of the opening song of the set when they invariably have to remind me to plug my guitar in so the sound can come out. On the road we cut just the kind of swath you’d expect from roughnecks of our calibre: the first time we got a job where the contract included hotel rooms to trash, we rushed back (to the LaQuinta! Because that is how we ROLL!) to get the party started but then Chuck dozed off, Billy yawned, I got drowsy, and Chris said, “Weellll…I s’pose…,” and twenty minutes later all was quiet at the La Quinta. When you are a Long Bed, you live on the edge…the edge of a nap.
All this to say when you see us these days, the guy generally off to my left and your right playing keyboards and lead guitar is Chris (we had another guitar player once, but he blew his chance to hang at the La Quinta when he left to pursue some silly little side project and wound up stuck at places like, oh, Lollapalooza). Whenever I look over at Chris during one of our shows and see him chicken-pickin’ deep twang or plinking out some sweet keyboard harmony (or even sneaking a Go-Gos riff between songs) I’m always amazed at the range of his talent and influences. Case in point, his longtime band The Jaggernauts.
These guys are a blast live (as the video plays, Chris is in the white shirt and tie over to the right of Noel, doing things you won’t see/hear during yer average Long Beds set), and are about to release a new album. This Saturday Saturday, August, 29, they’ll be playing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at the House of Rock, or “H.O.R.,” known with local affection as the…the…well, just pronounce “H.O.R.” phonetically.
Over there on MySpace, “Don’t Change” will give you a good sense of The Jaggernauts sound, and for what it’s worth, “Wings, Blah, Blah, Blah” is one of my favorites (when I visited their MySpace page, the songs were preceded by a small gap of silence, but then came charging on fine).
The two-year-old Jane wants to go for a walk and Dad needs to go for a walk (ironically, after years of being run over by bulls and haybales and bikes and Little Lakeland Conference running backs, it’s the cumulative sitting and typing that has begun to pinch nerves and fray tendons) so in the pack-pack she goes. We start with the dew and dusk already cooling things. I carry pruners to cut back the neglected trails. Jane provides the play-by-play. The first batch of berries surprises us, and from then on we’re on the lookout for them. Blackberries, mostly. I think. I’m not the expert. I pick a half-dozen, hand them back over my shoulder, grab a few for myself, and walk on. Underripe, they are hard and tart. Overripe, squishy and grape-y. Peak ripeness, they taste of liquid cotton candy. I get a lot of “MORE!” so we work on please, which with her particular emphasis winds up being “PEA-uzz!“ We pause at every patch. Once we find three bright raspberries and these rate a “YAY!” At one point we step into a clearing between Norway pines and a whitetail arcs across the trail, three bounds of red against the green. I whirl and point, and the poor kid gets near-whiplash, but she does see the deer, which quite magically disappears into a bank of mist just then settling into the wooded hollow.
She’s getting cold in her short sleeves then, and we’re deep in the valley so we start back up. There are apples everywhere this year. We sample from tree to tree. She keeps discarding them after one bite. Then we reach a crab apple. Red as the proverbial cheeks of a child. The sour of these apples cramps my face. But there is an addictive underlying sweetness, and Jane chomps straight around the equator, and asks for another. I limit her to two, fearing stomach cramps, but we stand to watch the last red ease from the sky then it’s up the hill past the chicken coop and across the yard to the yellow lights of the house, where bath and bedtime and Mom and blankie await.
This was a tough woman.
Ms. Wagner was the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire school of nursing during my college years. She was a woman of strength and dignity. Look at her photo, and then imagine her in 1986, having summoned a certain well-mulleted, pickup-truck-driving, roadie-dressing, night-shift-working male nursing student into her office simply to ask how things were going. She had concerns, you see (more implied than stated, but sometimes stated), that perhaps I wasn’t wholly focused on the art of nursing. In some ways she was correct. She wanted me to drop the jobs and focus on my studies, but I needed the money for tuition. Plus I liked alternating between assisting with surgery and wearing a Snoopy suit and roller skates. I always had the sense that we were fencing a bit. But I also remember how she blended firmness with respect. She really did care about me, and as her life demonstrated, she was profoundly dedicated to the art and practice of nursing.
As I type this I have just returned from her memorial service, and I am so glad I went. Thanks to those who eulogized Ms. Wagner (both during the service and in conversation after), my own decades-old memories (I visited with her a handful of times in the interim) have been given richer depth. One of the eulogists shared a powerful image of Ms. Wagner as a young woman of Nebraska, splitting firewood. The image was unexpected, but not at all surprising.
Today in honor of this strong woman, this compassionate educator, this nurse, sign me: Michael Perry, R.N., B.S.N.
It’s so fun to be just plain proud of someone.
From a Wall Street Journal review of Chicago’s recent Lollapalooza shows:
Local music, really. Even when he’s in Belgium.
Two years ago we took our then-seven-year old daughter to see Merchant of Venice at the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin. She drank it in, loved it, and marveled that she could look up from the stage to the sky and see all the stars above.
During our Mineral Point visit this past week we had a chance to attend the theatre again (this time for George Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderer). It was, in short, a dreamlike evening, my wife and I in the company of our now-nine-year old, the weather perfect, dear friends in the audience, the stage brilliant under the lights, our daughter alternately transfixed by the beauty of the costumes and set or giggling at Shaw’s enduring humor. And my favorite part? Somewhere during the third act when she nudged me, pointed upward, and whispered, “They’re here!“ And directly above us were a few stars, gauzily revealed.
You pay your money. You get your show. But this was a night when you wanted to add your heartfelt thanks to the cast and crew and staff and everyone involved with this theater in the woods for providing our little family with a jewel for our memory box. The day is coming when the young one will find her own way, and the old bald guy will become less the center of her world, but last night as we made our way down the footpath to the parking lot – her in the middle, holding our hands – I listened to her happily recounting her favorite moments from the play, and my heart was as light as her step.
Special thanks to Jimmy, and to the keepers of the troll. Good to see you.
By the time you read this we should be back home. Spent the week in the Mineral Point area courtesy of the folks at Shake Rag Alley, who asked me in to help with a writing workshop. A special thank you to “my” writing crew. We came to discuss writing in general and their work in specific, but I left feeling I’d been given new perspectives on my own typing, and why I’m so grateful I am allowed to spend so much time with words. Thanks to everyone who gathered in the little room…may your pens flow freely, and your keyboards never stick.
This was fun, too:
An outdoor stage carved from a backstop of native limestone. Kinda like the cheesehead version of Red Rocks. You will note some longsuffering folks had to stare at my “other side” for the entire evening. Now they know how it feels to be in the band.
Back on chicken butchering day we boiled up a big old tub of gizzards and livers. Dumped’em in the hog trough. Y’really haven’t lived until you ‘ve watched a pig dance while hot-mouthing a steaming gizzard.*
*Yes, I know we can eat them, pickle them, grill’em on a stick…but we had pails of the things. Plus if you put the chicken in the pig you get…pig. So we’ll eat them eventually.
Was sitting in the green chair editing a draft at dawn when this fellow emerged ever so slowly from beneath the desk, headed for a patch of sun. He was dehydrated and covered in carpet lint.
Put him outside in the dew-covered grass. An hour later he was bright green. Another hour later he was gone.
I believe I mentioned these fellows previously, but here’s an update. Had a chance to sit and sing a few with the Cook brothers a few weeks back, lakeside up in the Nobbern area. These are fine fellows and good to their mother. Their music being genre-blending experimental progressive folk music, I do worry about the possibility of an improvisational holler wreck in which everyone locks beards.
I did not know about the horses.
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