Just when I think I’m building a new normal, something comes around and knocks it all down.
Do you know what the most beautiful sight from yesterday was? My husband returned from the grocery store, the sun had already gone down, but the weather was so beautiful and the moon gave off such light that folks were still walking and there were kids on bikes and, when I went out to help unload the groceries, there, on the corner stood a gathering of neighbors so beautiful like I haven’t seen in a long time.
I was already in pajamas and unprepared for such a meeting so I watched from my driveway as my husband went over and said hello. Parents and kids on bikes, the neighbor family quarantining together after Dad had returned from 8 weeks away, the family from across the street and the light from the moon shone down from the sky.
“You’re not a songwriter,” my inner voice tells me, “Look around you and see how you’re runs at an end. You’re just a wife and a mother and another pen with a paper, you’re done, it’s over, you now know when to say, ‘when.’”
“All you are is a songwriter,” my inner voice tells me, “and no one is hiring for musicians these days. You’ve no other skill and work’s hard to come by, now don’t you regret all those years you frittered away?”
“What’s left for the songwriter?,” my inner voice asks me, “when you’re down on your luck and all you have now is time? Ain’t nobody hiring, and you never got there, you never got anywhere close to John Prine.”
I never got anywhere close to John Prine. And there’s no work and I’m busted and I’m fishing for something that might tell me for certain who I am and what to do. And just maybe, just maybe, in the midst of all this nothing, I can take pen to my paper cuz I got nothing to lose.
And they say, “grief is just love that’s got no place for landing” the day after he’s gone and the day after that. And there won’t be a funeral with plates of potato salad, where folks smoke on the back porch and we all dress in black.