Paul McCartney, Part 2 — The Show

"Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, tomorrow I'll miss you..."

A Beatle. Living legend. The cute one.

Yep, Paul is still all of that...although I think they were ALL cute as hell, and he wasn't my favorite. Still, it was fun to see him in concert and hear a lot of songs I have loved for so many years. And "All My Loving" is one of my old faves, so when that came shortly into the first set, I was a happy girl.

Jim thought the concert in Denver was truly and totally fantastic, and the greatest show he's ever seen. So I'm sure he'll have an extensive, well-written, more informative, kinder and gentler review than this short, lukewarm thing I'm writing. Just go to to MessinWithTheKid.blogspot.com. If it's not there yet, it will be.

I'm a huge Beatles fan. You have to love the group who changed your life as a teenager! But only John and George had what I consider great solo careers afterward. Mainly John. I'm a die-hard Lennon loyalist. A staunch Lennonist.

So Paul's songs from his Wings days were sorta lost on me, although I recognized many of them from radio airplay. He did a slew of Beatles tunes, though, which was a treat. He also had a streaming video of clips from the Beatles days, his time with Linda, and his kids. Very nice.

He sang a song for Linda and one for John, which made me cry. But a highlight was a long, gorgeous tribute to George Harrison while singing "Something"...terrific stuff. Very generous of him. Although I don't think he mentioned Ringo, and he only said "Beatles" once, commenting that kids in Russia tell him they learned to speak English by listening to Beatles records. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He played well to the crowd and the ubiquitous camera. Shook his mop top in gentle Beatles fashion a couple of times -- not hard enough or blatantly enough to make the girls scream, though heh heh. His band was remarkable; the show well staged.

He tore it up with a searing rendition of "Helter Skelter," a surprising delight. The big show-stopper was a thunder-boomer fireworks-type display during "Live and Let Die." The sounds scared the shit out of me -- twice. The boy can still rock out, that's for sure.

Two long encores, one headed by "Day Tripper" -- which I found ironically appropriate, considering my "day trip" on the way there. He was onstage the entire time, except when he left briefly before the encore sets. Lots of stamina, and you can tell he just loves the crowd.

And he's a charming, energetic performer and masterful musician, still with a great voice. I love him, admire him, respect him, and salute him. After all, he was a Beatle.

But he's no John Lennon.

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Paul McCartney, Part 1 — Day Tripper

We went to see the Walrus
(The Walrus was Paul).
But on our way there
I took a bad fall.

Paul who?

Jim and I were walking to the Pepsi Center from our hotel...less than a mile. There was a nice, wide sidewalk all the way there, smooth and flat. Not. Instead of looking where I was going, I assumed the ground would stay beneath my feet, not rush up and smack me in the head. Wrong again.

I tripped on an asphalt patch in the sidewalk and skidded head first into the concrete. It happened so fast I could only watch it coming. I must have tried to break the fall with my left hand, because it bore a big brunt of the crash. My glasses went flying. My lip swelled up immediately; I could feel it and Jim yanked out his hankie to stem some bleeding.

And that seemed like the extent of it. I put my glasses back on -- they hadn't cracked or anything -- and I got up, and we went on our way to stand in line. (The Walrus was late.)

The line was a mile long, we were a mile high, it was at least 100 degrees, and I was hurt more than I had thought. There was but one thing to do.

I fainted.

Jim said it was a good thing there was a split-rail fence in front of me, or I would have pitched face first -- again -- onto parking lot pavement. This time, unconscious and unable to break my fall. As it was, I crumpled a bit backward, and he was able to sorta ease me down.

So he says. I knew nothing until I came to on the ground, looking up at a circle of concerned faces, one with a walkie-talkie calling for the medics. Just like in a movie. And I said, "Did I faint?" Duh.

So I checked out okay; they asked for my name and other info; I told them I had tripped on the sidealk and joked that I wasn't going to sue them. They insisted I get in a wheelchair and go to a first-aid station. I resisted at first, saying it wasn't fair, but they won. If they hadn't, I probably wouldn't have made it to the concert at all.

As it was, we were the first ones in! They took us to the station closest to our seats, and I sat with ice and water and recovered in about half an hour. During that time, my left eye began to swell up. Jim noticed a piece of plastic stuck under my eye and removed it. The swelling stopped, and he could see a tiny slice in my skin and could also tell that my lip hadn't split, just been scraped. Still fat as a sausage, and my eye was turning black.

Got to our seats and decided to clean my glasses. Then I saw the chunk out of the bottom of the left lens and realized the plastic was from my glasses. The stem on the right side had popped loose. Still, I was able to wear them to see everything.

During the concert, my left hand and shoulder, which had saved me from more horrible things, both began to swell and bruise. The hand eventually grew to twice its normal size and was immovable without serious pain.

But I'm fine. Feel like I've been hit hard all over by Maxwell's Silver Hammer, but I'm healing fast. A little puffily lopsided, but it'll resolve. All in all, I was PDL -- pretty damn lucky. Nothing broken to send me to the hospital. No chipped teeth to make me wear dentures. No plastic in my eye to make me blind. Nothing that kept us from the concert. PTL.

But I may have just book-ended my long concert-going career with Beatles. The first in 1964 with the Lads in Kansas City; the last with Paul in Denver. Not a bad run...for an old broad!

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The Bad Blogger

Back to the poetry muse and my music --
The musings amusing my mind...
If you don't use it, you'll certainly lose it
And it keeps getting harder to find.

Regularity, regularity, regularity. It's so important in so many areas of life! heh heh

It's really easy to wake up in the middle of the night (too damn easy!) and let your brain spin in many directions. Harder to get up and write the thoughts down. Of course, some are crap anyway, but at least you can sort through them -- instead of lose them -- in the light of day.

Faded Photographs...and Other Traces

"Memories light the corners of my mind...
Misty, watercolored memories of the way we were."

I don't believe in an afterlife in heaven or hell. I think you only last in the hearts and minds of the people who remember you, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the stuff we loved and touched and cherished contains a part of us that lives on beyond the memory of mortals.

I have kept tons of stuff from my parents and theirs and even of great-grandparents I never knew. Only some of them actually constitute treasured memories, and yet...it's hard to let that stuff go. Why?

I'm wrangling with these questions because of all the stuff. (Yes, I love and believe George Carlin's ramblings about stuff!) I love the stuff because it triggers memories and because it belonged to family and loved ones. But I don't need them to remember the person, and much of it has become a sort of psychic burden. Why is it so hard to let things go?

My friend Chris recently and admirably let stuff go with a vengeance. And she was an only child whose parents both died within six weeks of each other. She knows her extended family well, and still she has let stuff go. I'm in awe.

I'm actually dismayed at what I don't know and will never know about my family history. I didn't ask in time. I didn't care in time. So why does it matter now?

James Hillman, in his book The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, says:

"[Our] uniqueness is reflected in the stuff left on the dresser, the reading glasses on the nightstand, the trivial accumulations in the desk drawer that no one knows what to do with but are handed down as 'valuables.' Useless irrelevancies, yet now imbued with the specialness of art objects. Does the irreplaceable soul of the deceased pass into these ordinary bits of matter?...

"Is our image located only in the memory of those who remember us? Or does character remain in the objects collected, the tools used, the places inhabited. Perhaps history lives in the world's memory beyond human rememberings."

He wonders if we project onto the objects or if the objects reach out to us. Has the departure of these things' living companions transferred to the objects some of the person's former life?

He goes on..."Can a person become an epiphany? Can we entertain the idea that all along, our earthly life has been phenomenal, a showing, a presentation. Can we imagine that at the essence of human being in an insistence upon being witnessed -- by others, by gods, by the cosmos itself -- and that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display? The image will out, and the last years [of life] put the final finish to the image.

"We are left as traces...lasting no longer than a little melody, a unique composition of disharmonious notes, yet echoing long after we are gone. This is the thinness of our aesthetic reality, this old, very dear image that is left and lasts."

Perhaps this idea is reflected in the value of provenance when people sell old stuff.

In which case, no damage is done by letting all that stuff go.

Irrigation — the Stuff of Life

Heat brings desert conflagration
Cool is river irrigation
There's a line of demarcation
'Tween the green and brown.

If you fly into Grand Junction during the summer, you see a verdant valley rimmed crisply and abruptly in brown. This is the line between dry desert and irrigated desert. Life abounds in both areas, but it clusters in the green. Happy Valley. Pleasant Valley. Grand Valley.

The Grand River runs through it. That grand river is now known as the mighty Colorado. Canals off the river carry water to land that without it would be as brown as the surrounding public land, which isn't irrigated.

We moved here from Austin, Texas. Hot. Huge. Humid. Green. We'd never seen swamp coolers, or seemingly infinite amounts of public land, or ditch irrigation.

Irrigation is a miracle. A life saver; a life giver. Nothing new to most people, but to us, with a little ditch running through our property, it was a revelation.

I arrived April 13, 2001, and it was already running. A tiny but enduring moat that cut our main yard off from the front parking lot (it's big) and the pastures. I instantly became a Ditch Bitch. I loved it then; I love it still.

It runs from April to November, every year, all the time, a constant flow of Colorado river in our front yard. A miracle of human engineering as old as the desert itself. You expect a river to flow and flow, but a ditch? In your front yard? Water you can use tor seven months to make your little homestead a productive, living thing of beaury and bounty? For $100??!!!

Yikes. We have 5 acres, no small amount of land to keep from turning back to brown desert. And keeping it green through a hot and dry summer is no small feat to accomplish without pipe, knowledge, time, and perseverance.

But even if the land around it does go back to desert, the mere fact of two feet of water streaming endlessly through a tiny ditch is incredibly amazing. We can tell when it rains in the mountains above Aspen. The ditch runs red and muddy, colorado in Spanish. Then we have to clear the filter so our sprinkler system works.

No matter. It's all just wonderful. At night during the full moon, you can stand and look at your very own Moon River...and it seems as grand as the river that feeds it. I love it.

To Keep Us Free

Bill's daddy always said he paid an arm and a leg
To buy their piece of heaven.
Bill turned eighteen and never dreamed he'd ever leave their land
But then came 9-11.

And the rest of my song tells the story of how Bill enlists to go fight terror in Iraq, gets hit by an IED, and literally pays and arm and a leg -- to keep us free.

And then he spends the rest of his life learning how to live with missing body parts, psychological trauma, and the realization that war is, indeed, hell.

Not all heroes pay the "ultimate price" that dead soldiers have paid and get honored for on so many holidays. We set at least a couple of days specially for the dead.

What about the still-living soldiers who now must face a lifetime of disability and challenges beyond anything most of us can imagine -- with even greater courage and determination than it took for them to go to war?

They deserve honor and tribute. Not just on a holiday or two, but something lasting. So I wrote a song. As far I can tell, it hasn't been done yet -- at least not that someone has made popular so people actually THINK about these great people.

Heroes -- not in death -- but for the rest of their lives.

Golden Boy

Chow face, with a purple tongue
Part yellow dog (like me!)
He connected with my soul
Now his is running free.
He saw me through a lot of grief
And gave me years of joy.
I loved that dog beyond belief.
I miss my Golden Boy.


What a great dog! His name was Ansel.

My friend and animal advocate extraordinaire, Janet, found him at her school. She'd taken in so many strays that the principal had warned her to stop. So she stuck the little golden blob in her truck and called me with an SOS.

I'd only have to keep the dog until she found a good home for it. Uh-huh.

When I peeked in her truck window, there he was in the passenger seat. Calm as could be at about three months old. Just watching. Very self-possessed. Cute, but nothing real special about him. Or so I thought.

In fact, that was all she wrote. He'd found his home. I have many memories of Ansel and me, which will most likely leak out in later blogs. He only lived 10 years, and he died in 2008 on this date. So did part of my heart.

El Dia de Las Madres — Mother's Day

Mama was my lifeline to a lifetime full of love
From the moment of my first breath, 'til the day she took her last.

Love you, Mom! If you're lucky, nobody in the whole world will ever love you as much as your mother does or did. I was lucky.

Jim and I got married on Mother's Day weekend...on Kentucky Derby Day in 1988. We didn't know all that was happening that weekend when we planned it. Guess we didn't look at a holiday calendar.

It was a total blast, with loads of mothers there to celebrate with us, away from their own families. How great is that? Most of them came because they loved my very special mother.

I wish I'd known her better as a person and a woman, beyond her being my mother.

It's Jazz, Man!

To a musical family was born
A man of whom ladies be warned!
He'll play with a strumpet
As if she's his trumpet
That talented man with a horn.

And then there's what he does with a flugelhorn! But you can hear it all for yourself. Click here:

http://jazzonline.com/mike-metheny/mike-metheny-a-tapestry-of-sonic-delight.html

If you haven't listened to Mike Metheny, do yourself a huge favor and immerse yourself in the magic of melodic (mostly), moody (often), and mesmerizing (always) music that is his special kind of jazz.

Buy his new CD, entitles "60.1" (yes, he's "our" age, and the better for it!). Listen to it all in order. Then and only then -- after about 3 full times through -- pick and choose which cut you'll put where on your self-compiled favorites. You'll also want his other available CDs, so search them out and buy them as a treat to yourself.

I've known Mike since seventh grade, when our family transferred us kids from Lone Jack school to Lee's Summit. I believe it all happened because my mom made a surprise visit to my brother Dan's second grade class and found him teaching spelling while the teacher was taking the curlers out of her hair. That about tore it with Mom. But I digress...

Mike's always been a music man; it runs deeply in the family. He's a consummate musician, a nice guy, and, as you can tell from the limerick, a man with a sense of humor. (I think; he hasn't seen this yet!)

I believe in buying good music and in supporting friends...although NOT in sharing music with friends (or anyone else) who don't pay for it. (I REALLY believe in copyright protection.)

So, dear friends and music lovers, I hope your next CD purchase will be one of Mike's CDs.

Thanks!!! Love you! You're the best!....;-)