Winter 1993

Sometimes, dearest, I just stop. Because I don't understand.

Sometimes I look at my life and say...yes. All of these things.

Sometimes I turn and look at you.

Sometimes I remember that trailer on the edge of town. Sometimes I remember a white bench seat in an old two door, the engine humming in the chilly Winter wind. The awkward windows. The scene on the screened-in porch. Weren't they all scenes. Weren't they all waiting. Why didn't they say one thing. I was in the midst of a Midwestern Austen adaptation. Longing. Silence. Longing. Silence. Whispers. Anticipation. Silence. All in the middle of a god-damned cornfield.

You were there, corn silk hair and gray eyes. You were there, all form and no function. You were there, hands in pockets and digging at the gravel road with the toes and heels of your shoes. I was there and I walked away, cold air burning red into my tear-stained cheeks.



Sharon Van Etten - For You from the album Because I Was In Love

Never Gonna Dance

"Though, I'm left without a penny,
The wolf was discreet.
He left me my feet....
And so, I put them down on anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.
Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love.
Never gonna dance."


I've fallen in love with the sound of Fred Astaire's voice. I sit here in the office at the Cancer Center, legs crossed under the desk, feet tapping, 5th cup of Joe of the day grasped in my 2pm tired hand, fan blowing in my face reminding me that tomorrow I'll be sitting in cool car air all day instead of the broken air conditioning here in my department, and suddenly, over my left shoulder, I hear someone sing to me...


"Have I a heart that acts like a heart,
Or is it a crazy drum,
Beating the weird tattoos
Of the St. Louis Blues?"

We recieved "Swing Time" in the mail a couple of weeks ago....
Jim said that he could tell when a dance number was coming up....not because of the splendid opening banter or a bowing big band intro, but because I would pull the covers up over half of my face and start convulsing...(I'd like to say right now that I have no memory of said seizure but do know that in my mind, at the moment such things may or may not have occured, I was taking Ginger's place as Fred's very capable dance partner...)

"Have I two eyes to see your two eyes
Or see myself on my toes
Dancing to radios
Or Major Edward Bowes?"

Tomorrow, we're driving up to Illinois for Jaime's wedding. Our first big trip together. As I'm typing this, Jim is at his house, checking the list of things to pack.

(Light dress shirt for Saturday afternoon outside wedding featuring hayride) (CHECK)
(Casino Clothes for eve of wedding on a riverboat outside of ST. Louis) (CROSSED OUT)
(Walking shoes for back pasture of Miller Family Farm and Streets of Chicago) (CHECK)

"Though, I'm left without a penny,
The wolf was discreet.
He left me my feet.
And so, I put them down on anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.

Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love.
Never gonna dance".

I've driven this trek up to Browstown so many times that it should be a blur, a tunnel of travel...but I find that as I slip over the state line into Tennessee, burn through Nashville, up to Clarksville, over through Bowling Breen, Kentucky, to Paducah and then to the Land of Lincoln, I still take in the scenery bit by bit, dreamily eyeing lakes and fields and rolling hills, captivated. I'm sure I'll tug Jim's sleeve and point ten thousand times tomorrow. He'll smile and take my hand and nod. I wish that he could see these things through my eyes, with my heart... and maybe he will.


"I'll put my shoes on beautiful trees.
I'll give my rhythm back to the breeze.
My dinner clothes may dine where they please,
For all I really want is you.

And to Groucho Marx I give my cravat.
To Harpo goes my shiny silk hat.
And to heaven, I give a vow
To adore you. I'm starting now
To be much more positive.
That's....

Though, I'm left without my Penny,
The wolf was not smart.
He left me my heart.
And so, I cannot go for anything
But the la belle,
La perfectly swell romance.

Never gonna dance.
Never gonna dance.
Only gonna love you.
Never gonna dance."

"Never Gonna Dance"
music by Jerome Kerns and words by Dorothy Fields

Window.

The picture I painted, a window with a girl sitting in the sill, bland face staring out into the black, was not meant to be a statement of my teenage loneliness and sadness as my therapist mother analyzed so quickly with such a short and sure declaration.

In truth, I had sat there so many moments, resting in the white uncomfortable brim to the night, watching the stars through the limbs of the tallest tallest trees, watching the warm summer air lift leaves and set them down again, as if shaking hands. I sat there with my weathered paisley journal, feet tucked into the corner, the top of my head pressed upon by the frame. I was too tall. In time, I turned and stretched my legs down to the floor of the balcony, a balcony not meant for men, not meant for a girl of 14 to walk upon. The covering, the barrier against nature, felt chalky underneath my feet, and I gingerly approached the railing. I leaned out, resting my elbows upon the white-washed wood, knees against the hard, safe boards. How could anything be so quiet? How could the world be so still? I heard nothing but the slight sketching of leaves, a car rumbliing, miles in the distance. I saw a streetlamp below, the gleam of our tarred summer gravel street, the grass, sidewalk, lawn. I inhaled the smell of oil, the sweet of cut grass, the dream of this moment. My loneliness here was not a prison. Here, upon this porch of sorts, it was the moment of freedom I'd awaited every moment of the day. The real pang of loneliness and despair was felt while roaming the halls of my school, or sitting quietly in sunday church. I went back again and again, no matter where I was to this, this moment, this quiet air. I turned back to my window, the golden light reflecting off of the crumbling green pastoral wall paper, the creamy ivory of my french provincial chest of drawers, the faint whisper of Natalie Merchant and her 10,000 Maniacs floating across the room. In I climbed, sorrowfully leaving the night behind, one leg, one head and shoulder, then the other leg. I closed the window, crawled under the covers...lights out. So, would start another day and another, but no matter the headache and heartache of events and conversation... I would always have this place. This quiet place of my own.

Right Here. (updated)

I pulled up into the driveway and stopped the car. A man in his mid-forties stood peering at me, waterhose in hand. I opened my door and stepped out and smiled. "I'm Sara Leah Miller. Dave Miller's daughter." His questioning stare turned into a half grin as he put down the hose and walked over to where I stood. I stood next to a green tinted mound of earth. A sad strange heap of ground where a white two story house once stood. The house of my Grandfather and his father. The simple small house that I often run through in my day dreams, thinking of it's stale quiet air. Dusty corners and dead silence. My sad homestead, my heritage, now a mound of dirt and a lonesome gate.

We chatted for a while. We walked to the backyard of the gentleman's small white prefab house nestled where the drive once ran into the garage and the milkhouse. A tree stood in the distance, familiar, but bare...the tree which once held my treehouse. The treehouse had been a grand affair, two platforms of lumber and an underbelly of sturdy limbs to climb in and swing from. It had once seemed so grand....so big and strong...like my father, like my family, roots so deep in the soil, so tall and healthy and eternal. Now it stood, branches outstretched and unburdened, wading through the mid-day breeze coming across the plains. I felt it. I understood it's lonliness and it's freedom in one long glance.

His wife leaned on the deck. Her faded t-shirt and easy smile made me feel at home, even while I felt this small constant yearning, this comparison of old and new, memories to reality tearing at my head. "I think I may come back through this summer. Would it be okay if I came out here and took a walk through the pasture? I don't have time today but..."

She nodded her head, "Of course, you are always welcome."
He scratched his head and put his hand on his hip, "Now mind you the cows aren't out. We've got a new bull, so check with me first."

I turned and looked across the slight roll of hills, the trees in the distance cloaking the turn in Camp Creek, the turn at the base of a big tree. Blue bells always bloomed there at it's feet. It's branches were so high that Davey and his friends would take a running-flying leap, running their shoes and knees and gangly arms up the side to reach one big solid knob about 7 feet up. They rarely got very far, there was really nothing to hold on to. They would look up longingly to the upmost branches and see the remains of my father's boyhood treehouse...a few grey tattered boards, but to them it was like some fabled land, some dream in distant past that someday would come true.

I turned the corner of the house back to my car and slid into the seat. My shoulders bent and searching, my heart a little weary. I drove up the lane, speeding and speeding, my thoughts bursting, my memories flowing down my body and into my car seat and out into the road behind me. At the stop sign, the abrupt screeching halt, a young boy on a riding mower looked up, smiled and lifted his hat. I looked out over the farmland, down the road to my family's resting place and to the land they loved so much. The stereo was turned off, but in my head...I heard these familiar measures of song in John Wozniak's low and somber voice...

He swore he could see the beauty there
And he said " ooo ooo oh I never wanna leave
Ooo ooo this place
Ooo ooo yes I always wanna be
Right here"

Find a place
To call home
Any place
To call home

Right here

And so I came in the dead of night
Climbed up into the satellite and
Looked out over America
I swear I could see the buffalo
Ooo ooo oh and I never wanna leave
Ooo ooo this place
Ooo ooo yes I always wanna be
Right here, right here

-America, Marcy Playground, Shapeshifter

I don't know if you know that song at all. But know this, for those first two years after I moved here, after my family had sold our land and had left our home behind...I would listen to this song so often and it's like it took the place of my heart on the matter. My night dreams were tied so tightly with the loss of all of this. My sad head would swim within the shadowed guitars and resurface in his hollow vocals. I imagined myself standing on the tip top of my treehouse, looking out over the land on a bright and windy day. Then I saw myself in the darkness climbing higher and higher and peering at the neighbors' lights so far down the road and at the barn yard and summer kitchen and every single structure glowing from the one light above the barn. At that moment, in that vision, it was all I ever knew and everything I ever wanted. I never understood it until then, I let the rest of myself, everything that I ever thought I was, crumble away and I stood there, clutching to limbs in the thick whipping air of the plains watching the night fade back into sleep. (j)

Land o' Lincoln

Today we will be embarking on a great adventure. My mother and I will be driving across the great state of Tennessee, through Kentucky, to my hometown in Illinois. She will spend the weekend with her close circle of friends from our home church. I will spend the weekend running around with two of my closest Friends in all of the world. I've not been home in over a year and a half. It's funny when I think about it. My mother grew up in Hawaii across from Turtle beach on Oahu and finds that every few years she must go home, go back to the place she spent the days of her childhood, replenish her soul in the surf and sand. I feel the same way. Although not as an exotic location, to look across the flat plains of Illinois, to drive those winding dark back roads with the windows open taking in the farm-filled air, to walk through the woods and around the lake on Jaime's farm, to peer at the ghost town that is the downtown of Vandalia, my own heart is renewed.

I can never really go home again. The house of my heart, the homestead of my childhood was sold long ago, as was our family farm. The farmhouse was eventually torn down by the new owners and replaced by a double-wide. But in my mind's eye, I often see it, in fresh spring greens and blues, the white of the two story house that had been my family's legacy, the red of the barn, the stone in the barnyard taken from the creek bed, the buffalo trail, a quiet straight line across the property worn by the hooves of beasts long disappeared from our land. The rusted metal frame of a model t out in the pasture. A ghost of a machine, I turned it's tired steering wheel in my imagination so many times, standing on it's sideboards while my grandfather and brother carried firewood from the mountain of timber lying at it's side.

I miss the simple things, the pieces and foldings of our little county that made it so unique. Everyone took such pride in it's rich history. My father's Law Office was across the street from the Old State Capital Building in Vandalia. Lincoln served there from 1834 as a freshman legislator to 1839. One of my favorite annual events was the Grand Levee. Tradesmen and crafters from all over Illinois would come in period costume selling their wares. They'd set up in canvas tents and pretty wood paneled booths around the capital building. A women would make chicken and dumplings every year and I would fairly run from my father's office building to her booth following the perfume of pepper and chicken and celery. The root beer guy was set up right next to her and the Kettle Corn booth beside him. There were tatters of lace and blacksmiths, a man who made brooms and baskets, a man who made whistles and kitchen ware from tin (the whistles, much to my parents chagrin, were what I was really interested in. Somehow every year my treasure of a tin whistle would seem to disappear a few days after the festival...after I had driven everyone crazy with it). There was a young girl who cut paper into silhouettes and whimsical seasonal shapes. Her father had a big red nose and bushy beard and a crooked smile and he whittled wood into small angels with light paper thin wings. Each angel held a musical instrument. I would wistfully bide my time in that booth, wishing for a intricately cut valentine or an angel for my mother. But most times I'd already spent all of my pocket money on my lunch and tin whistles and bags full of rock candy.

The musicians would be on the back side of the building, accompanying a handful of clog dancers who click-clacked away on wooden squares arranged just-so on the freshly cut lawn. There were an equal amount of onlookers in standard summer fare as there were young ladies in bonnets and mothers in flowing skirts and aprons. The Lincoln Impersonator would take the stage after the Old Timey Medicine Show. The Native American dancers from Cahokia would put on quite a display by the Children's activity area. I would sit on the stairs of the courthouse and listen to the ladies from the historical society play their recorders (They named their merry little troupe "Baroque Folk"). The hollow beautiful harmonies would echo through the building. I was enchanted.

Tonight around midnight, we will arrive in this fair town. My mother will go to her friend Charlotte's house to sleep and Jaime will pick me up. We might go to the local hangout, the Depot, for a drink. We may just go back to her farm and spend the next 13 hours talking and sleeping and eating and watching movies. Darren will drive through (with Tom and Patti in tow) the next afternoon to pick me up and whisk me away to St. Louis for the Son Volt show. It should be an incredible time.

--------------------------------------------------------------

John Ciba has been here in the Magic City since Wednesday. We spent yesterday evening with Janie Alfano, the daughter of the Birmingham Sound's Neal Hemphill. We met her at an Applebees and talked for hours. She told stories we'd never heard about her mother and father, about their devotion to each other and their dreams of the future. What an incredible family. What an incredible legacy. If you've not read Bob Mehr's article on the Birmingham Sound, here it is: Bob Mehr's Article on the Birmingham Sound

Derek, the other half of John's label Rabbit Factory, is flying in from New York today and as Mom and I drive north, he and John will be driving south to meet up with J. D. and Jim Lancaster. After last night's late night brew-tasting and Eddie Hinton storytelling at J. Clydes with Moises and Darryl (Documentary filmmakers, in from New Mexico for the Scott Boyer Benefit), and early morning rise (John rode in with me to work at 7 am and is currently working on his computer over at Lucy's), I'm sure their drive will be a tough one. I know it will be for me and the mum, for sure, but it will be worth it.

not a problem

It's super okay, rolling over the days like this. The distortion from the Black Lips kills what quiet thoughts I had left. My head wags back and forth and as the pressure runs from side to side and settles in the back of my skull, I start to remember. I run to their car, jump inside, the tail lights bobbing as we pull away from the curb. We turn onto College Ave, up the street and on into the night.

On nights like this we'd drive through the country side, the flat dark backroads beyond St. Elmo, into the oil fields and pastures and woodlands. Shawn and Josh and little tiny me, laughing stifled teary laughs in the wind that flew through the broken sun roof of the El Dorado. The curves of the night, the gravel and broken pavement, the fresh green field-filled air, the genius of teenage invention. We spent the hours on the edge, the only edge I knew, this dangerous quick turn, my hands extended out the window, my eyes closed taking in every jolt, every rev-v-v-v of the tired engine, the night air whipping the long locks of my hair into my eyes and face. Shawn, from the passenger seat, nodded his head in time, his curly hair just hitting the shoulders of his flannel shirt. He turned up the stereo and Josh peered back at me in the rearview mirror and smiled. I sat in the middle of the back seat, hands steadying as we took another turn. I stared back at him through one eye and then the other, turning my head slightly with each small look. I leaned forward between the front seats, elbows pushing against the sides, my head resting on Josh's right shoulder. Shawn pulled a paper bag from beneath the seat, motioned for me to sit back, pulled out his lighter and lit a bottle rocket, flinging it out of the sun roof and into space, a POP resounding in the dark distance behind us. Josh leaned forward, the drumming hum of the car, the crushing sound of rock'n'roll through broken speakers pulling us out into the night and on into the future.

Revelation Big Sur

"and through the rhythm of the timeless season...."
-Mark Kozelek

My favorite flower is in bloom, the daffodil. Their yellow heads are leaning over the monkeygrass in my front lawn, a tired but bright morning greeting as I head out to my car.

When I was a child, my father would take me to a place, just outside Bluff City, called Sonneman's Cabin. It was a getaway for an attorney from my father's practice, two generations before his time. In my tiny blond head, it was like a dream. The two room structure was set in a field of green and yellow, daffodils as far as the eye could see. I would run off into the woods and come back, small fragile arms overflowing with butter colored blossoms and bluebells. We drove back there every year, to take pictures, just to catch a glimpse of this lovely vision of spring.

When I was old enough to drive, through high school, college, and ever after, I would find myself traveling the winding back road to the cabin, after school, on the weekends, late at night. The clear moonlit sky would cast an eerie glow on those golden heads, wavering in the night air. I'd sit in my car and listen to Mark Kozelek, America, Glen Phillips, weaving together ghost stories through each turn of the guitar, brought from the dark corners of the barn across the way, midnight tales of love and death and eternal longing. I never asked my father of Sonneman. I never was told a truth about this small place. I was afraid of it, that my father's plain sense would knock my sensibilities off of the face of the landscape. "He just had a green thumb," would be his answer. And all of those stories I had written, all of those songs in my head of devoted tribute to a lost love and glorifying the paths that she once walked would wither into such a short sentence.

It's been five years since last I drove down that road. 500 miles away, I can still see it, clear and quiet. Maybe I'll ask a friend from home to search it out, as soon as the Midwest winter thaws. Darren, I know how you love driving those back roads. Are you up for the task?

It's a rainy day here in Birmingham. A dark day. The cars are flying by on the overpass by my window, their headlights a waterfall of light.

Mister Murray Lightburn: I still don't love you. I gave you another chance on the drive in to work this morning. My heart never turned your direction. It stayed curving through traffic, from lane to lane, and then on into the morning.

Maybe someday.