So after so much of this, for so long, I find myself forced to ask: Is there something about me that simply invites a certain kind of chaos? I went out early tonight to a concert, 18th-century European chamber music on period instruments, at a local gem called The Music House, on 5th Street just …
In the end, this may be my favorite picture ever of my father, dancing here with my mom, my angel, my mother. It says everything you need to know. Everything all of us who knew him should remember. At 9:46 p.m. yesterday, Frank “no middle initial” Rabey, the final child of Slavic immigrants rubbed out …
As I have delved even deeper into the music and writings of Leonard Cohen since his passing, searching for a particle of solace in what has been for me a profound loss, I am struck, again and again, by the thought that we simply did not deserve him, this sage of a man, nor his …
I took my frail old-girl kitty to the vet’s this morning for scheduled dental x-rays I somehow knew in my gut would be ugly in their revelations. And they were, even more than I had bargained for, absolutely crushing: a mass growing fast up near one eye. I thought she would at least be going …
There is nothing, just nothing they can giveyou, not for this. You’ve set the timethey will arrive with needles, somethingliquid clear and final, andsome sorries, surelyso the suffering will go out But for now, you markthe labored rise of ribs, furfloated into every cornerof your life, there will beso much less to clean, feelyour own breaths, halting there is …
Never have given half a rip for country music, as country music is today, all truck-lovin’ light-beer bros in over-styled cowboy hats gulping on the last note or two to get it to twang. But Merle Haggard. Now, Merle Haggard. Deeply grateful I once got to interview this raucous gem of a man, by phone, …
So I’m in my kitchen doing kitcheny stuff, and my son, Luke, from the other room, starts banging out the drum part on the Jimi Hendrix gem “Crosstown Traffic,” on whatever version of Rock Band he’s wrapped up in today. And suddenly, there I am in my last angry years of high school, slumped down …
RIP, great Meadowlark. You inhabit one of my favorite childhood memories. This, from a story I wrote for Mountain Xpress in Asheville, when I was working there back in 2001: An 8-year-old kid gapes from the stands as the great George “Meadowlark” Lemon stomps over courtside to hurl a bucket of water on the ref — …
Few things are as heartbreaking to me as seeing someone at the veterinarian’s office with a much-loved animal for the very last time, with that shattering person struggling to hold it together, and the pet, through all its final suffering, still attentive to its adoring human. That kind of helpless grief and abiding devotion, that throbbing human …
Never risk listening to those aching songs you love on nights when you’re too tired to breathe without hearing your own breath admitting how little breath you have left ahead of you compared to how much exhaling has already come and gone. Nostalgia, yes. To wit: “How many a year has passed and gone / …