We head off once again into the grey. I-95 south for a quick 48 hours down to North Carolina and back. Less, really. Probably closer to 37 hours. House concert. Murder ballad program. Rush, rush, rush. Rain, rain, rain. What should be a six hour drive 2016. It’s definitely the future. dances back and forth with patches of red and yellow on google maps and slowly balloons. Hopefully things get cleared before we reach them. They could get worse.
Horrible nightmares last night. I was jarred awake by imagined shattering sounds, breaking sounds, break-in sounds. I dreamt that it was snowing outside and my car was half-covered under drifts but every time I looked at it SOMEONE had opened another door, the back door, the trunk – clearing out all the gear that had nestled there. I dreamt of stabbing them of tracking them of seeing their footprints in the snow but the Catonsville drifts were slushy and filthy and I couldn’t see where they’d come from or gone to. I jar awake with icy water splashed over me from a passing truck and lie awake wondering if I should go check on my car. I slowly fall asleep and then wake up to someone shuffling around in my room suddenly smashing my computer, keyboard, monitor. Some sort of metal baseball bat rises and falls and rises and falls again and the smashing sound jars me awake once again. I turn on the light to see that nothing’s awry. Lie awake. Eventually I’m jarred awake by my tablet falling over and shattering. I turn on the light and look. Another dream. Suddenly I’m performing and my strings rise further and further off the fretboard bowing my neck further and further until suddenly my guitar snaps in half with a horrible crunching, snapping sound… waking me up.
Well, by 7am it was time to just go ahead and get up.
Today’s drive is long and rainy, quickly dark and rainy and we lose time to patches of traffic and my body’s belly arguments. Still, we roll into 215 on Main in Laurinsburg, NC with time to spare. We set up and sit down to a delicious meal – foolish me asked for a hot sauce to go in my gumbo and the chef herself came out with a peppery paste saying that “no-one was going to put some hot sauce in MY gumbo” and that was what SHE made to go in it. It was hot and stupendous. We played the show to a small but attentive audience before going home with our host – I rode back with her in her AWESOME convertible a little bit enamoured with the gestalt of the night – scent of pine and the crisping of the air, low-hanging under-lit clouds whipping around over head and I just wish that drive had been longer.
Just something amazing about a woman driving you around in her stick-shift Mustang with the top down and leaves falling all around. I don’t remember the last time I was in a convertible – it may well have been my father’s Austin Healy! Our host’s dad had also had English sports cars while she was growing up and we chatted about the romance of Love-driven barely-running Jaguars on the short drive home.
A lot of driving today. But I’m American enough to be just fine with that.
