Last night, I did something I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d do: I shared the stage with world-class musicians at the Linda.

I am not a world-class musician. I am a humble late-comer to the music of Django Reinhardt and its community of practitioners and fanatics spanning the globe. But at the age of 55 I find myself playing in a gypsy-jazz band, and we found ourselves invited to take part in a benefit for WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio with a slate of fabulous swing acts: Zack Cohen, the Hot Club of Saratoga, the global superstar Stephane Wrembel.

My band, Hot Tuesday, played a brief opening set and then joined the gods onstage for a closing jam. I couldn’t believe it. This is not something I ever anticipated. But then again, nothing about my life in the last seven years is anything I ever anticipated, as I am well past the point of anticipating anything.

After my husband’s death, I stopped trying to predict a single damn thing about life. I take nothing for granted. Each and every triumph, no matter how small, is a cause for celebration.

Example 1: The Linda.

Example 2: The toilet seat in my upstairs bathroom.

I installed a new one last weekend, letting out a whoop of victory upon completion. YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!, I yelled, pumping my fist in the air. Then I threw back my head and laughed. Then I did backflips across the bathroom floor. Then I flexed my biceps so hard that my shirt ripped.

This is where I reside: at a place of EXTREMELY small ambitions. At least when it comes to things like:

A) My house, in particular my plumbing, in particular anything involving sewage;
B) My car, in particular anything involving expensive repairs;
C) My quest for world domination; and
D) My knees.

In all regards, I count my blessings and take what comes. If I harbor any ambitions at this point, it’s to get through the day without catastrophe. To be as happy as I can be, fumbling along with gratitude. To love. To not hurt. To savor the present.

It’s a funny thing about life. We start it without harboring any ambitions whatsoever, just content to cry and pee and poop and gurgle and and suck and then cry and pee and poop some more and spit up projectile milky vomitus onto our parents’ shoulders (YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!).

As we mature, our goals evolve. We stop puking on adults and instead start sitting in their classrooms and conforming to their rules. We begin to form and pursue dreams. As the disappointments rack up, we revisit and reconsider those dreams. Maybe we won’t actually scale Everest by 30, cure cancer by 35 and retire a billionaire at 40. Maybe we’ll just go for a few day hikes in the Catskills and find our bliss selling crafts on Etsy. Who knows?

To me, this is life — the Who knows? Forget about the stuff we envision in our youth; it’s the stuff that we don’t envision, the sudden twists, gradual turns and bombshell revelations that boot us into a chapter of living we never saw coming and couldn’t have. I couldn’t have foreseen Chris’s suicide in 2011. I couldn’t have known I’d be facing these years without him, fixing the crap that breaks at home and filling the void with music.

If you’d told 30-year-old me that I’d be playing in a gypsy-jazz band in my fifties, I’d have replied WHAT THE HELL IS GYPSY JAZZ and then said you were totally bonkers. If you’d told 45-year-old me the same thing, I’d have understood the musical term but said you were totally bonkers. If you’d told 50-year-old me, at which point I’d taken maybe a year of jazz lessons, I’d have muttered Ohhhhkayyyyyyyyy righhhhhht and then said you were totally bonkers.

But here I am. There I was last night, squinting into the lights, scratching away with my band mates and wrapped up in the crazy ecstasy of swing. How did I get there? How did this happen? Who knows?

Totally bonkers.

Look at this photo. Now look again. Do you see it? DO YOU SEE IT?  I hesitate to read too much into total happenstance, particularly happenstance involving a bowl of water, and particularly when there are so many more pressing and substantive things to write about, including the decimation of life on earth and the air-sucking collapse of normalcy in all facets of American political life, but OH WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT IT’S A MIRACLE! IT’S A MIRACLE! THE PAW OF DOG HAS TOUCHED US ALL!! It’s like seeing Jesus in a piece of toast! Mary in a radish! Kanye in a a Cheetoh! No. Wait. Not Kanye. That was Jesus, too.

Why are people constantly finding visions of Christ in single servings of food? I ask as one who believes in both God *and* snacks. Wouldn’t it make more sense if people encountered images of the divine in larger, more godly quantities? Say, an entire 18-wheeler shipment of Cheetohs. Why just one? Have theologians ever addressed this discrepancy? Shouldn’t they? Don’t answer.

And here again, it’s just one helping: a humble bowl of water. Within lies a clear and aqueous sign telling us to . . . ummm, I’m not sure what, exactly. To feed and water our pets? To keep the faith as the End Times loom (see “decimation of life on earth,” above)? To make terrible puns, remaining dogged (sorry) in the pursuit? To pen craptacular doggerel (sorry)?

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? It must mean something, and don’t tell me it doesn’t. You’re not allowed to say “It means nothing, Ames, it’s just a damn bowl in a damn sink, so stop reading too deeply into bubbles,” because that is not why we’re here. Not to be dogmatic (sorry) about it, but we’re here to decode the messages before us, and THIS ONE MAKES A PROFOUND STATEMENT. I just have no idea what it is. Do you? (Don’t answer that, either.)

True confessions: I do tend to see miracles in the everyday, though the closest I ever came with a dog was that time I got chomped in the thigh by a batshit Cujo in Ecudor and DIDN’T ACTUALLY DIE OF RABIES, AMEN AMEN HALLELUJAH, nor am I normally one to go scoping for the divine in Pyrex receptacles. I wasn’t this time, either; this isn’t my photo. It was snapped and sent to me by an ardent punster, attentive pet-owner and keen-eyed washer of dishes who reads my blog but inexplicably prefers to remain anonymous.

Dog knows why (sorry).

It’s Christmas Eve again. In a week it’ll be New Year’s Eve. How did this happen? How did twelve months slip past so quickly?

Darned if I know. Each year I’m caught off guard, greeting the dusk of December with a flappety-wappety shake of the head and a startled WAIT, WHAT? TOMORROW IS CHRISTMAS? I’M NOT READY! I STILL HAVE TO WRAP GIFTS! MY ATTIC IS COVERED IN DOLLAR STORE TCHOTCHKES! MY FINGERS ARE RAVELED IN TAPE!

This is my usual M.O. I’m never ready for Christmas, but it always comes. And when it does, I cry.

On Saturday morning, writing a few end-of-year checks, I shed a few tears. Not buckets. Not cups. Not even thimbles. Just little saline markers of sentiment and reflection as I dwelt on gifts dispatched and received, on Christmases present and past, on people I love both here and departed.

On Saturday afternoon, running last-minute Christmas errands, I cried again. Again, not buckets. Again, just tiny hat-tips to my emotional state as I ticked through all who aren’t here, ruminating on the impermanence of life and the permanence of love.

Christmas does this to me. It loops around with joy and wistfulness, a tinsel-strewn reminder of love and the miracles it births – and not just the baby Jesus. It reminds me of everyone I’ve ever held dear, everyone who ever shared a piece of themselves with me, everyone who brought beauty and warmth into my orbit before leaving a little too soon. My husband’s laugh, my mother’s pluck, my father’s puns, my sister’s giant violet eyes: They’re gone now, and so are our Christmases together. Except they aren’t. The pea coat Mama gave me in December 1980 might be a tumbleweed of gnarled wool thread, but the gifts that matter endure.

Lives are linear; they begin and they end. But love is not. Love cycles back, coiling its way through moments as the years pile up behind me. And what is Christmas, after all, but an annual feast of love? The love of parents for their newborn? The love of God for us? The love of us for each other?

So the ghosts of Christmases past don’t haunt me, really. My tears, when they sneak up on me, speak less of grief and more of gratitude. They remind me to look up and out at the world. They remind me to love those around me — everyone who walks beside me in this world, hearts thundering, bellies laughing, taking my hand as I stumble.

They’re here with me now in this season of wonder, and I clutch them hard. I regard them with wonder, treasuring the gifts that they bring.

But now you’ll have to excuse me for a moment while I head up to the attic and finish wrapping presents, BECAUSE I’M NOT READY FOR CHRISTMAS.

(NOTE: Last year, I started writing an amateur musical memoir. Then I stopped. But in the eternal spirit of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, I’ve decided to take what I’ve written, break it up into tidy, digestible chunks, toss in a few new chunks and then spew it out into the world via this shit-figurin’ blog. And so, with no further ado. . . )

I GOT MUSIC: CONFESSIONS OF AN AMATEUR
PART VI: JAZZ IS LIFE

I’ve dug through the past until my fingernails bleed, but I can’t remember when and how I first heard the music of Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt. It was probably in some movie soundtrack. It must have been “Minor Swing,” because Amazon tells me I downloaded it in December 2010: there it is, the moment of inception. In January of 2011, I bought a fat collection of Reinhardt/Grappelli tracks, and I was gobsmacked. I didn’t know the violin could do that: the swinging, the sliding, the astonishing flights of virtuosity in the context of popular song. At no point, of course, did I delude myself into thinking I could do that. How could I? I was a crappy classical amateur! My playing unleashed the dying squirrel!

Then, just eight months later — in late September of 2011 — I lost my husband to suicide. In the face of incomprehensible tragedy, I resolved to learn jazz violin. This made no sense, but what did? My beloved Chris was dead. Why not make an utter boob out of myself in the pursuit of some swinging musical dream?

So I started lessons. I found a wonderful teacher. I learned gradually. I sucked happily. But I kept at it, learning and sucking, as I grieved and coped and grieved and coped and grieved some more, saying goodbye to my second mother, Pat, and my best friend, Pam. Life tossed other complications my way, some joyous, some painful, and as it did, I found myself playing jazz out in the world with other people.

Two and a half years ago, I drove to the pretty stone church in Connecticut where I was married in 1991. It was a couple weeks before Easter, and the doors were open. I walked up the aisle, standing for a moment at the altar with the shades of all my departed. Chris, Pat, Pam. My parents and sister, who died in 1992 and 1994. I recalled that drizzly Saturday in July. I pictured Pam, helping me with my makeup that morning — the second and last time I ever wore it. My handsome husband, beaming in his polka-dot bowtie. My dear, sweet, senile father, confused but smiling as my mother squeezed his hand in the pew. My sister Lucy, squeezing mine. All of the love in the church that day. All of the hugs afterward.

The memories pressed hard on me. I sagged, breathless and teary, before a crucifix draped with the purple of Lent.

Somehow, I left. And as I drove away I listened to Grappelli, a cassette tape crammed into my (extremely) old Honda. The music carried me. It bore me along bendy hills and blind curves with a wild, indefatigable, syncopated cheer that hauled me into the present and filled me with hope.

At home the next day, I hugged my son and then bolted to my bedroom, got out my fiddle — Mama’s fiddle — and played gypsy jazz, each successive tune punching me awake. As I told a friend not long ago: It’s impossible to be sad while playing that music. It’s impossible to think about anything else, any people I’ve lost, any errors I’ve made, any scars I’m prone to picking.

Music keeps the brokenness at bay. It’s an act of creation in the face of loss, a patch of daylight in the dark. It expands my shrunken universe, allowing me to meet new people and make new attachments at an age when the meeting and the making are not the easiest thing. It allows me to greet the world as a friend. I am sick as hell of death, that greasy bastard, and I refuse to let it win: Jamming is my triumph over the reaper. BACK THE HELL OFF, I say, armed with a bow in one hand, a violin in the other. I AM GOING TO PLAY JAZZ.

Swinging with friends, I know I’m alive. I  know I have a place in this world — if only for a moment, if only in a sly little pocket of rhythm that seduces and slays me. But isn’t that all of life? Isn’t it just one fleeting but fruitful pocket, thick with meaning? A swing on a pendulum that dips and turns, all sharps and flats and blue notes and bridges from one piece of song to another?

Maybe that’s why everything’s better when I swing. Maybe that’s why everything feels right on the two and the four. Maybe that’s why even a wrong note makes sense as I bend it into the right one, inching it a half-step up or down in a metaphor for living that that I seized upon, some months ago, and now clutch to my chest as the answer to everything.

In jazz, at least, mistakes don’t kill the music. They simply change it. And ain’t that life, or it should be.

Click here to read PART I: MY DJANGO OBSESSION
Click here to read PART II: GYPSY JAZZ AND HOLY TERRORS
Click here to read PART III: I LIKE MY HANDS (AND WILL NOT CUT THEM OFF)
Click here to read PART IV: IN PRAISE OF SECOND FIDDLE
Click here to read PART V: MUSIC = SEX

Dear People:

I am not your Enemy. I’m not.

Am I human? Of course I am. Sometimes I make mistakes. I strive not to. I double-check, I triple-check, I report and report and fact-check and fact-check and proof and proof and proof — but still, sometimes I make them. Sometimes I misunderstand something or misreport something or misspell something, and when I hear about it afterward, believe me, I beat myself up. I tell my editor, write up a correction, and then I go home fretting over it. I go to bed fretting over it. I wake up at 3 a.m. fretting over it. I spend the next workday fretting over it, and the next workday, and the next, vowing never to make a mistake again.

I am imperfect. But I am not your Enemy.

Do I have biases, preferences, beliefs? Of course I do. Am I subjective? Of course I am. As I admitted above: I’m human. This doesn’t make my work Fake. It doesn’t delegitimize everything I write. It means that I’m aware of my biases and beliefs and strive always to counter them with with balanced reporting. It means that I’m aware of my subjectivity and strive always to counter it with objectivity. It means that I ask questions from every angle, listen hard to every answer, then do my best to piece the answers together in a fair and full and accurate story.

This is what journalists do: ask, then listen, then tell.

This is what journalists believe: that the telling matters.

What we do isn’t easy, and maybe it doesn’t pay so well, either. But we do it because we’re curious, and we do it because we we care, and we do it because we like being in newsrooms filled with curious people who care.

If you’ve worked in journalism long enough, you’ve gotten a threatening letter, email or phone call. I have. Everyone has. Reporters periodically piss people off; that’s just a fact. Sometimes it happens when we get things wrong. Sometimes it happens when we get things right.

But Trump’s every reference to the “Enemy of the People” scares me. It scares me because the phrase reduces an entire population of well-meaning, hard-working, admittedly somewhat frumpy professionals to a class of depraved and cynical scumbags scheming to undercut the American way of life.

And we’re not. I mean it: We’re not. You want to know the truth? We love this country. We revere its founding principles, and I don’t just mean the First Amendment; I mean all of it. Widespread and longstanding stereotypes to the contrary, journalists aren’t actually cynics. Journalists are skeptical idealists, people who’ve seen it all and question everything but still want to believe in something greater. Why would any of us be in this business if we didn’t? Why would we care enough to stay?

We are not your enemy.

You know what? I haven’t written a holy-moly, super-Catholic, spirituality-on-steroids blog post in quite a while. So watch out! Incoming! Run for your life!

Something hit me in church two months ago. Then it kept hitting me, and hitting me, and hitting me. The revelation clocked me so hard only because it was so blazingly obvious, and I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me before — kind of like when someone pointed out that the “L” in “Staples” is actually a staple and I howled OMIGOD OMIGOD HOW COME I NEVER NOTICED IT BEFORE OMIGOD THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING. And ever since then, every time I drive past the Staples on Central Avenue I shake my head with silent little omigod, marveling at its genius and my stupidity.

So this is what hit me at Mass: the Word. If you’re Catholic, you know that moment just before the Eucharist when the congregation says: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.” (That’s the new translation; until late 2011, we said: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”)

Or, to quote my own internal monologue: “Lord, I am broken and bleeding. I am soooo not worthy of the body of Christ. But THANK GOD, and I mean that literally, you already know this about me. You already know I’m a piece of. . . ummm, work. You know all my flaws, even the ones I don’t yet realize I have, because I’m a clueless nincompoop in addition to being unworthy. Yet here I am! At the table! Unworthy little me! Just say the word, and. . .  wait — what’s that? You mean, you’ve said it already? The word that makes everything right? The word that heals? The word that resolves my broken state, my error-prone nincompoopedness, just as it resolves every cracked piece of everyone who approaches the altar to receive? REALLY? ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS, GOD? You are? You’ve said the magic word? Whoooooa, so I’m healed? You’re kidding! Thanks, dude, I mean God!”

This is pretty much the narrative that runs through my brain each time I receive communion. I’ve been Catholic for more than 28 years now,  and I’m constantly struck by the beautiful illogic of God’s attitude toward communion: None of you is worthy, but all of you are healed. This is one reason I’m forever infuriated by those who would deny “sinners” the Eucharist, as though A) everyone isn’t already a total sinning mess and B) Jesus himself ever denied anyone anything. For crying out loud, he didn’t boot Judas from the Last Supper, did he? And he knew what was up with that guy.

But what hit me at Mass two months ago: The word. It’s the Word. Meaning Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — so goes the opening of the gospel according to St. John. I never really got it (true confessions). As gospels go, John is a little too wordy and poetical for me in general; I prefer the bluntness of Mark. And the prologue always hit me like: Wot? How is Jesus a word? But I took it to mean that Jesus was part of God’s plan from the beginning — that God, in creating us, knew from the start we were flawed and decided to include a handy-dandy redeemer in on the deal. It’s like going for a drive with a dying battery; you know the car is likely to crap out en route, so you pack a portable charger before you leave.

Jesus is our jumper. God packed him to make things right. And not just for Christians — for everyone.

I think about this, now, whenever I receive communion. I dwell on the greatness of God’s love, the outrageousness of it, as I shuffle up to the table in all my inadequacy. “Lord, I am not worthy. . . but only say the Word,” I repeat, rendering the upper case in my mind. I’m always unworthy, always healed. Makes no sense at all and all the sense in the world.

Holy-moly blog post, over and out.

Where the hell have I been? Not here, that’s for sure. I’ve been an absentee blogger. The last time I posted an entry was five weeks ago (in blogospheric terms: a lifetime). That was two weeks or so before my son’s departure on his gap year and my new life as me, by which I mean me. Me. MEEEEEEEEEEEE. Just me. Little me. Befuddled and bewildered me. Jittery me. At times marginally exhilarated me. Hopeful me. Happy me. Blue me. Questioning me. Somewhat petrified me. Rattled to my core me, staring down an unfathomably empty nest and wondering how on earth I’d ever carry on alone (ALONE) in a house once occupied by five (FIVE).

As the day drew closer, I coped by helping my son plan and pack. I made lists. Then I annotated the lists I made. Then I made more lists! And then I annotated those! Yes! Coping through parental micro-management! Was I trying to control the uncontrollable? Was I trying to take command of ungovernable Fates through the orderly arrangement of stuff sacks? Yes. Yes, I was.

Then, at 6 a.m. one misty Thursday morning, my son flew off on his adventures, and I flew off — metaphorically, at least — into mine. The three and a half weeks since have been busy with work and music and friendship, with gigs and trips and lunches and laughter, with eating when I feel like it, reading when I’m in the mood, sleeping when I’m tired and scratching on my fiddle anywhere in this echoing house that happens to suit my whims. When someone asks, “Hey, Ames, ya wanna do X?” my answer has nothing to do with anyone’s needs and desires but my own. Suddenly I’m in a position to ask: What do I want? From the moment? From this day? From my life? It’s a question I haven’t really entertained in (long pause as she counts on her fingers and toes) a while.

And it’s been strange. In a home once exploding with the crash and hum of family life, it’s been quiet. Dishes accumulate in the sink at a much slower rate. With no ravenous teenager in the house, I take much longer to consume the food in my fridge; a gallon of milk lasts eons. Despite all this, I have not yet accomplished any of what I set out to do this fall, including my pledges to A) climb all 46 Adirondack High Peaks at least twice; B) write at least 23 best-selling novels; C) perform a stem-to-stern cleaning/clearing-out/Shop-Vac’ing/nuclear-bombing of my entire house; and D) blog more.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the seven years since my husband’s death, it’s this: Life does what it does, especially in the midst of transitions. No matter how impatient I am, how badly I want to ka-zoom into some mysterious but delightful future, none of this can be rushed. I have to figure out who I am. What I need. How I might move forward. And isn’t that everybody’s task at hand? Isn’t that what we do from the moment we’re expelled from the womb, howling in rage at the slap of cold and the shock of hunger? (Where’s the breast? Where’s the breast? OKAY I MEAN IT NOW, WHERE’S THE #$!@ BREAST?)

So my son has launched. I’ve launched, too. Where I’m headed, how long it’ll take and how hard I’ll land on arrival, I can’t tell. But I’m a soul at loose in a body navigating the world, and I’ll get there.

In the meantime, I’ll blog more. I swear I will. I promise.

For the first time in 20 years, a child of mine isn’t enrolled in Albany City Schools. No kiss and hug on the way out the door after Labor Day; no zipping and unzipping of backpacks in the kitchen; no choir and orchestra and track meets and chitchat with parents at same. No emails to teachers. No grades in the mail. No talk about AP classes next semester and next year and next, and next, and next.

For the first time in 25 years, my children are all adults. My youngest graduated high school in June and is now less than two weeks away from rocketing off into life as a mature and autonomous creature: first a gap year, then college. I am tempted to ask HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN, just as I was tempted to ask HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN when his two sisters launched before him, except, of course, I know full well HOW THE HELL THIS HAPPENED: I loved their father. He loved me. Our love made babies, boom boom boom, which subsequently exploded into the world with sweat and blood and violence (and in one case deft scalpel work) and then proceeded to eat and cry and eat more and cry more and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow, although we never noticed the growing, not really, not while it was happening, not until we took them to the top of the basement stairs and put a ruler on their heads and scratched a line in pencil onto the wall while uttering look at thats and oooh good jobs and wow wow wows.

Those lines are still there. My babies are still there, squirming a little in my still-vivid memory, wincing at Mom and Dad and just wanting to be set free from the peculiar and ritualistic parental urge to mark off milestones. Milestones don’t matter to children. Children don’t get sentimental at the first day of kindergarten, or the last kiss and hug on the way to school. They don’t stop to think, “I won’t ever walk home again with Mommy this way,” or “I won’t ever eat a bagged lunch she made for me with a smushed PB&J,” or “She’ll never again hold me on her lap or read me a picture book or give me a terrible bowl cut that I will look back upon with horror for the rest of my living days.”

Children do their job without guilt or misty reflection: They grow up. And as they do, they leave us gasping with pride and wonder, marveling at the beauty and rapidity and unaffected grace of their departures from us. They’re always rocketing away, and we’re always feeling the tug. As I explained in an earlier blog post, my mother always characterized this in umbilical terms: The cord never truly breaks. It only stretches.

And boy, is it stretching now.

As for me, I am not sure what life will entail in this new era I’m facing. I suppose I should begin by unsubscribing to school-district emails — will I need to know about snow days any longer? — but I don’t have the guts. Not yet. Nor do I know what to say when people ask me how I’ll cope with the empty nest, a logical question that I’ve asked myself every second of every minute of every waking hour for the last six months. My usual response is this: I’m framing it as an opportunity. I’m framing it as a chance to figure out who I am — I, a singular pronoun at an existential crossroads, facing an unwritten chapter with a shape and syntax yet to be revealed.

For the first time in 30 years, I’ll be well and truly alone. I tell myself that this is inevitable. That it’s necessary. That it’s good for all of us. That all I’ve wanted, since the death of my husband seven years ago, is to know that my three brave and extraordinary kids (and can someone please coin a decent term for adult children) are living their lives with hope and pluck and independence. That I’ll do my job right, and they’ll leave me.

They’re leaving me. Miracle of miracles, joy beyond joy, they’re leaving me.