One thing I love about certain music: through it, I’m reminded that hope is really the best thing to have. Hope’s not always easy. Hope alone is not enough. But hope—also, love, faith, trust, a voice, and friends—is essential. Lose it and you are nowhere.
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Last week, I was also reminded that going to see live music is a real treat, one that can fill the soul.
I don’t get out to concerts very often. But thanks to my lovely mother-in-law purchasing two tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter in concert at an auction (for Safe Passage, a local agency that supports women around domestic abuse issues, an organization I gather up baby stuff for regularly, and give money to—and especially if you’re local and reading this, you might want to, too) I didn’t have to go through the should-I-get-tickets part of the process. There they were. Off I was going to go. I had to get childcare for the one child home (isn’t that amazing; one was on a train from Philadelphia with his papa and another sleeping over at his friend’s house) that evening. The eldest came along.
At 14, he was one of the youngest people in the Calvin Theatre. The over-forty set, we were very well represented though (go ahead, smile with recognition if this applies to you; I certainly did). Chapin, she’s a few years older than I am, and so our “set” is her audience’s demographic. I can see how the teen felt, surprised to be at a concert surrounded by old people. It was kind of lovely to be in that grand—always amazes me how beautifully restored this Calvin Theatre of dive-y dollar movie nights in my younger adult past—building with these aging folks and this resonant, big band, with its fill-the-house music (oh, let’s add to this: Jim Henry joined her band, Jim Henry of my Hampshire College Folk Festival days, so full circle!). The moment that summed this up: her reminiscing about dancing on the tiny stage at the then-tiny Iron Horse (and how back then, she didn’t have to worry about throwing her back out dancing; although I was dancing in the aisles, I didn’t have much company).
Chapin alluded to her health crisis onstage and I used the Interwebs once home to read more. Three years ago, she survived a pulmonary embolism. During the concert and afterwards—all weekend, really, since my Saturday included an art opening for Susan Mikula’s surprisingly haunting American Vale show at Ferrin Gallery (as well as the very charming Couples show) and a 95th birthday party for friend and longtime activist Arky Markham (no gifts, donations to Mass Care to advocate for single payer health care reform or the Markham-Nathan Fund, please)—I was thinking a lot about this whole middle-of-life phenomenon. It’s not the time or specific age that denotes middle that I was pondering. These two aspects grabbed my attentions: one, having been through fill-in-the-blank and fill-in-another-blank and what happens after that and two, having known people a long time. I was at those early Iron Horse concerts Chapin recalled (every one of them, actually). At Ferrin Gallery, I was in a crowd thick with people I’d known a couple of decades. I mean, yipes! Decades.
The beauty is having been through fill-in-the-blank and fill-in-another-blank, the then what happens is this: you are exceedingly grateful for everything you cherish. One of my two decades friends at the opening had breast cancer (very young) and she said that nothing stresses her out the way it did before her cancer experience. So, we’re older, more grateful and in a way, calmer constitutionally. I mean, on balance, wow, o-kay. The beauty of having friends for a long time is perhaps obvious, but I’ll say it anyway; even with folks you don’t see enough or miss sharing certain experiences with, you have shared markers, shared realities and often have in your back pockets some really important shared experiences that aren’t current yet remain defining. The work I did with the friend just mentioned early in our reproductive rights organizing lives was so profound—not even the product, which was a slim anthology, ‘zine-like, of young women’s voices about reproductive experiences, but the process, working with a group of young women on a national level and giving credence to our own voices—it shaped the work—diverse though it turned out—for many of us from that working coalition.
Okay, and the music on Friday night, it just took me back and put me present and resonated in new and old ways. Part of the reason I decided to hightail it to Pittsfield (I am not a very willing driver much as I adore the Berkshires) was that it gave me a chance to listen to my pretty vast Chapin collection without any disruptions.
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Back to hope: I feel like this moment in time—the BP debacle, the wars without end or it would seem coherent anything, the need to celebrate small gains as if they were bigger say with financial or health care reform, the Phoebe Princes and Carl J. Walker-Hoovers—hope is hard to hold onto. My earliest memories were of times that were both desperate and sad and scary and hopeful, Civil Rights marches, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam war, anti-war movement, and then onto Frank Rizzo and Richard Nixon (forever paired in my psyche), Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein and the very first Earth Day. Hope and fear/sadness/desperation, I think that’s my sweet and salty, that those are my roots. I can’t say I believe that we’re headed in ideal directions. I know, though, not to work for what I believe and not to see the beauty and the victories and the signs of hope, that’s really not an option for me.
