Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

The other night, I journeyed to DC to attend my cousin's concert.  Will Clark Green  takes his band on a big black bus all around the country and if you get a chance to go, it's a fun show.  I recommend listening to his songs ahead of time, so you can sing along with the crowd favorites: Ringling Road, Rose Queen, and his most requested song and the grand finale, She Likes the Beatles.  If you don't know the other songs, it doesn't really matter, because he's having such a good time playing with the band, you will too. 

I've never been a big Country Western fan despite my Texas roots, but maybe because it's family, Will's songs pluck my heart harder than others.  I know the land he's singing about, and people who fit the stories. His songs bring me to Beaumont, to the swampy parts of life, of childhood that I don't often stop to recollect because there's so much life today that needs tending. 

My kids don't know that beach the way I knew it, because it isn't the same beach and won't be.  The beach house of my childhood lacked even one television, and no phone until 1984, and that made it a place to discover how not to be bored when you're bored. It meant you visited with cousins and brothers and fished and read and reread comics and played cards even when you'd played cards for hours.  It meant you asked what you could do to help, and took naps. It meant you found yourself staring at a fire until it wasn't, and found somewhere in that process, something warmer than the flames.   

Every place on Port Bolivar now has air condition and wi-fi, so the capacity to relate will have to compete with the temptation to distract. The beach I knew may be gone but Will's songs pull me back to a place I can't get elsewhere and to people I can only meet in prayer or memory this side of the veil. 

What sounds, smells, tastes and places will pierce my own children's hearts with a sense of belonging and longing that pulls them into the past to be with certain experiences and people if only for a moment? I worry it will be when they're trapped inside a mini-van in the back seat while someone else has control of the radio and thermostat while eating fast food. Except there's today, and today is an opportunity to imprint yet again on their hearts, something of the salt, sweet, warm and wonderful of life outside of what all the world offers.  I go back to my list. There's laundry, dishes, paperwork, IXL, summer reading.  So much that needs tending.  I put on the timer and scratch two off the list and add two more.  We're making BBQ and I'm taking them to the pool. 

To me, that's the purpose of music, of summer, to burn into hearts, memories of the more. 

Bragging about My Cousin

My cousin Will Clark Green had his song chosen as the best of Texas Country songs in 2013.   Give a listen.

Summer Taste

To everything there is a season, and for some reason, despite having despised country music all my childhood and bemoaned the lack of a top 40 station when I'd go to camp for 5 weeks in the Texas Hill Country, the roots were set to create a sense of place through it in me.  It gestated 45 years before it emerged.

Today I was introducing my father-in-law who loves country music to  Will Clark Green, my cousin.  Within the first strains, I discovered a hidden homesickness.

Maybe it was the magic and beauty of music that can hit you at the right moment, but I could feel Texas.  I hadn't expected to but though the songs had nothing to do with it, they evoked the sticky heat at the beach house when you've got grill duty for the hamburgers and as much as they smell great, all you want to do is go inside or to the front because it's so darn hot.   I could imagine sipping/chugging a real coca-cola and watching the sun slugglishly turn the sky fuschia and orange as it dropped into the horizon.  I could hear the medly of cars and trucks occassionally interrupting the soft roar of the ocean and chirps of various bugs with their buzzing by on the two lane road. 

I flooded with feelings, I wanted my cousins, Aunts, Uncles, all of them. I wanted the beach, my brothers, sister, Mom and Dad, the sand, the mosquitoes, the beach house, all those things and people, some tangible, some out of reach in this life, some gone, all of it. I wanted that mass like moment of my life that had been in ordinary time when we'd all come together at the now lost place to eat, to play, to swim, to sing. 

 My father-in-law liked the music and I mentally made a note to order him a CD, maybe see if Will would sign it for him, but I sat there savoring all those memories of years of summers collapsed into the chords and tonal quality of my cousin's voice.   It made me happy and homesick at the same time. 

I'll still not fully converted, but I suddenly got it.  For the first time, I'd tasted the nature of this music, the long slow development that created emotional touch points; it was like eating true barbecue that someone had sweated over for hours. 

Thanks Cousin.