Yesterday was an interesting day.
It started off with Star Trek. Heather and I have been getting up later and later, and now grip consciousness at just about the time that Spike TV starts showing its daily regimen of Star Trek. Two episodes of Deep Space 9, three episodes of the Next Generation. I agonize at their inattention to TOS.
I find it important to stress that Heather usually flips the switch here.
In any case, we tune in to find Major Kira (?) describing a death scene, lamenting that she hadn’t been there for her father. She is very detailed, describing how the breathing slowed,, was more agonized every moment, how every time he exhaled they were SURE it was the last breath, and then he fought for another ragged inhalation. It was nasty to wake up to someone practically describing my own father’s death. Family, gathered on the bed and waiting.
I tried not to let it get to me, and indeed, after five OTHER hours of Star Trek and work on the computer and chatting with friends and fiddling with chords, it was pretty well forgotten.
Heather spent time in the kitchen being strangely domestic. She created mushrooms and potatoes and lemon flavoured lunch. Out of character, but I wasn’t complaining.
Somehow time always creeps up on you, though – and before we knew it, it was time to pack up and get our Lovely little tushes out to Caffe Driade to play a gig in the warm North Carolina night. Fiddly set up, moving iron chairs and finding cables, avoiding spiders and giant millipedes. I finally got my amplifier reset they way it’s SUPPOSED to be (after the beating it took during the Firedean gig) and was ready to play a show through it. We got through a song before it started to sprinkle. We got to the first chorus of “Old Love” before it started to out and out rain. At first I tried to keep the solo going while strolling out to the merch table and flipping the mailing list closed with my guitar’s headstock… but soon it became obvious that we needed to get stuff under cover.
People came out of the woodwork to help us move shit, and but there was still an agonizing slowness as all the wired-together fragments of our cobbled together sound system had to be detached before they could move. The whole time I was just waiting for the shock or the sudden lock of muscle that would tell me that water had gotten into the amplifier or connected me to a power strip.
Of course, at this point, mere wall current isn’t something that I really fear, but it would’ve
been a sign of probable damage to the equipment that was our Life’s blood. But we had to sort cables before I could get the amp moved, and we couldn’t just unplug everything, cause it would’ve all taken a LOT longer in the dark…
We sat on their porch under the overhang for a while, sorting chords and practicing some songs, but eventually we just cleaned up and moved out and came back to Jamie’s apartment in Cary.
We settled down to music and Scrabble with Jamie – Heather hastily scrounged together a mix of music that led me through all sorts of moods and made everything okay. It made me feel inspired and good and ready to take on the world again. Music has that power, still, somedays. It might have helped that I did a lot of name-taking and ass-reaming in the Scrabble games (Jamie won the first one, but only by a couple of points).
I’m not going to say it to her face (in our tradition of not giving too many compliments and keeping one another balanced on a fine knife-edge of agony about one another’s musical tastes) but she’ll read the Journal eventually and discover that I think that… THAT MIX at least, if not her overall taste in music, was exquisite. Moments of sweet agony wracked me in conjunction with Richard Shindell’s Dar Williams cover of “Calling the Moon”, “Architect” by the Decemberists, “Speed of Trees” by Ellis Paul and that train song by Elliot Bronson. We know so many amazing people, and they make amazing noise.
It wasn’t till we ended the games at 2am that I realized how my day had come full circle. My father raised my brother and I on Scrabble, using it to expand our vocabulary. My Dad’s mastery of two letter words was complete, and when I play Scrabble, I run my memories through a flipcard of past games with him, looking for words that I can use. My brother’s speciality was throwing down letters and letting my Dad challenge them, and together they’d discover such unlikely words as “eft”, but my Dad always won, for years. It was a big deal when I surpassed him.
In any case, my father’s two last Scrabble games marked his decline. One, I think against Del and George and I (?) he reamed us. He couldn’t sit up for very long, but he did some substantial Scrabble ass-kicking. The last game though, I remember coming home and finding my Dad sleeping on the couch, and my Uncle and my brother talking quietly. Scrabble has a spread to it, and you can see the words scattering over time in the game – and I could see my father’s words getting less and less coherent. He’d taken the lead in the game, but only because my brother hadn’t been pointing out that he’d been confidently laying down nonsense. I’d like to think that it was my Dad’s private little joke, that he was purposefully doing it and knowing he could get away with it, but it made me cry a LOT.
Last night, after we turned out the lights, that flipcard memory of Scrabble games turned into other remembrances. How my father used to “paint on my face” with his fingertips (my mom would scratch my back to put me to sleep when I was young). I remembered being small. I always had trouble sleeping and I’d pester him with questions about planets and stars… and death, I remembered that I’d never ask my mom questions about death, but I would always ask my Dad questions about how things died – my grandfather (who I can’t remember anymore), my hamster, stars and galaxies. The stories of how things ended kept me up for hours, lying awake in the darkness, staring at glow in the dark stars on the ceiling slowly losing their radiance.
Sigh. It was a long night. I fell asleep around when Jamie went to work in the morning.
I wish I could just shut myself off.
