I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I traded dreamscape for a bedroom ceiling speckled with hues of pre-dawn blue my left hand was curled as if his right were still clasped around it, once-distant memories made painfully present and quietly but persistently ensuring I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.

River walking as I am today, it seemed appropriate to share words from water previously forded, images remembered and collected and poured into a submission-of-sorts this past November.

———–

Sometimes I swear I would have saved him.

Swear I could have rescued his breath from the icy depths into which he so foolishly and voluntarily dove, if only he had provided me the opportunity to play fearless, to play savior. I was twelve at the time, almost thirteen. I knew how to act older. I was a good swimmer.

Rationale tells me we both would have drowned that day.

Some days I can feel my blood crying out for his, and an overwhelming sense of loyalty, of family, succeeds in convincing me I wouldn’t have cared. That it would have somehow been right, noble even, for me to sink to the bottom of that river with him.

Sometimes when I’m sitting next to her on a particularly pleasant spring day, her voice loud, myself mere feet from where her shape-shifting body brazenly cuts itself over rock and bank–her rushing waters background music to those thoughts of mine strong enough to overcome such a deafening roar–I feel her icy pulse rushing through me, liquid electricity, and for a the briefest of moments my loss sits still, lapping lazily in sixteen years’ time.

The rest of the time I sit and stare.

I stare at the way she moves-unforgivingly fast, cruel and cool in her perpetual serenity-and I’m amazed at how after everything she’s taken from me I still find her absolutely breathtaking. Strong and stunning, proudly drenched in apathy toward everything but her own power, I could watch her lunging past me for hours.

I wonder and write stories in my head about the lives she still holds captive underneath her fluid visage. I battle quietly with the naïve, impulsive, wannabe hero in me: the hero who assures me I could jump headfirst into her ice-cold heart and live to the see the opposite bank.

The hero who lies.

Today, if not for icicles draped across branches of a small fir tree growing boldly between crevices of a rock cluster on which I sit, her waters look inviting, maybe even warm. But it’s still early April, and she doesn’t fool anyone easily this time of year. Proof of her malice manifests itself in a world frozen all around her, layers of splashing river water quickly becoming incriminating fingerprints of solid ice.

In my dreams I see a woman with brambles for hair and tendrils for fingers. Her voice spirals along the riverbank, years of practice yielding her song a pitch-perfect match to the foamy water churning feverishly below where she sits, pointedly perched on an uneven slab of granite, her skin sun-baked and clutching her bones hungrily. She whispers his name, four syllables splashing off her tongue onto nearby reeds. She waits for the current to give back what it took.

———–

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked on napkins from memory during a particularly quiet night behind the bar. It makes sense I would find her again now, as I always do when I’m feeling quiet with so much to say. Her poems never cease to pour themselves into me, make me want to tell taller, stronger, better stories.

And stories for you I certainly have. As soon as I can find them all.

In the meantime, I’ll let Clifton do the talking, especially because “further note to clark” is perhaps my favorite of all her poems. One of them, anyway.

———-

further note to clark

do you now how hard it is for me?
do you know what you’re asking?

what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?

I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.

I’m collecting the surprisingly sweet scent of roses that shouldn’t still be blooming. Their light pink petals and aroma daily chilled but unmistakably fragrant.

I’m collecting hill-infested streets, cataloging them to keep them close always, to remember the way they push and pull at the breath in my chest, the way they make my legs shake in anticipation of reaching one of their playing-hard-to-get crests.

I’m collecting looks you give me when you think my attention is busy being corralled elsewhere. I pretend I can’t see, climb slowly, stay rock steady. (Don’t worry; your secret’s safe with me.)

I’m collecting trees, so many trees imbibed with intoxicating fall hues. Reds and yellows and oranges so vibrant they make rowdy noises when you catch them in the light just right. They cheer and scream and sing of renewal and growth and death-bringing-life.

I’m collecting hopelessness, so I can set it on fire. Doubt, so I can devour it.

I’m collecting quiet moments, to save for noisy laters. So much change on the horizon, and all of it welcome, sweetly peppered with seeds of mysterious possibility to be watered; I’m going to help it grow.

I’m collecting words, so many stories I want to tell you, when the time is right. When you’re ready. When I am. Soon.

A Marine Biologist and a Professor of English Literature. I tried to be both until a university system said it was too much work, what I wanted too different, made me choose. Beautiful decisions unfolding tenderly like fiddlehead ferns before me, showcasing a forest of promise. But the ferns don’t tell the whole story. That’s not their job. Their job is to mirror resilience. A verdant metaphor of life and longevity and YES.

The whole story is both simple and complicated, as most stories are. As choice is. Exalting one opportunity to a favorite mountaintop so often means another is relegated to the ice-cold trenches of a deep sea, destined to drift quietly in a current swirling with various nouns and half-hearted starts, ideas for zany inventions and thoughts too bold and brazen and untraditionally you to speak, sweet everythings whispered once, when you were sure he wasn’t listening, a promise you nearly shouted with your eyes when she wasn’t in the room.

Sitting in a room packed to the brim with awkwardly brilliant biologists, entomologists, analytical chemists, forestry and genetic specialists, I listen with wide eyes and a broad smile. I hear passion wafting fragrantly underneath every sentence uttered. I watch collaboration and critical thinking and problem solving with endlessly broad applications for a brighter world, and for a brief moment I find myself wondering if I made the wrong decision. I wanted to study whales and ocean currents and the mating habits of starfish as much as I wanted Yeats, Keats, Heaney, and O’Connor. And now anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows why I adore it so. Melville’s seafaring heart is something I inherently understand. He was fascinated by the sea and everything living within it we can’t and won’t ever really see. He wanted to paint the mysterious leviathan, tell its story by simply describing it. A scientist lived in his heart, but the writer was always bigger, bolder, more verbose.

I traded labs and microscopes for books splashed with the souls of kindred spirits, true. I’ve always been drawn to those who can’t be quieted, whose words have to find blank pages daily, even if said pages are never to be read, never to be heralded while they’re still breathing. The heralding matters least, I think. The truth has always been in the trying.

Words are sticky like velcro, will always find their place eventually.

I want overflowing summer, refreshing water, to dive deeper and deeper into nouns not me. I want pine trees, fir trees, big bright green leaves covering us with a canopy of neon possibility and late afternoon cool. I want more ferns, never enough ferns. I want to be able to articulate how much the forest reminds me of you, and will always, while simultaneously reminding me of nothing but peace, stunning design, a promise of a time when I’m not back-diving, not looking to find you coming around some bend in a long-forgotten trail, looking for me all these years, greeting me with a hug that would last a lifetime.

I want to be able to access my darkness, to float alongside the loss I was given–to write in and around and underneath and through it–and not live there.

I want to live near the ocean, on a lake, in a tree house with a mossy staircase.

I want activity, my body always reminding me how much harder I can push it, how much more it can take, promising me steadfast feet, strong limbs, graceful poise on the muddiest roads. I want sheer exertion, my arms and legs pumping pumping, pushing myself up the tallest hill I’ve ever run, again and again and one more time, just to see if I can do it without losing my grin. I want to keep falling deeper in love with the feeling of my feet flying faster, pulsing and praising their God-given ability to traipse over wild and unruly rock, singing hymns to poetry in motion, to devotedly circling a soft track hardened with determination, with fierce competition, with memories of baton passes and 300-meter leads and the dumbest bet I ever took. I want to jump into a pool ten months after the last time I swam (last August, next to my parent’s pontoon boat for hours while they cruised Deer Lake lazily, my mom feeding me carrots and pretzels over the side of the bow) and do a flawless freestyle kick-turn, the way I did Friday without even thinking about it, blushing and diving underwater again after surfacing to unexpected, roaring applause. I want to swim for months without stopping. “My little fish” my mom will always call me, and I’ll always smile before diving in again, deeper this time.

I want music. New music, old music, live music, improvised music, melancholy music, music that side-steps me back to hours of your face close to mine, to one perfect night in a periwinkle dress I borrowed from one of my best friends, to two years of walking away from you. Music that giggles me back to ’90′s movies with ’90′s soundtracks and now-vintage dreams. I want to dance. I want to dance by myself and I want to dance with you, both of us laughing hysterically at how neither of us knows what we’re doing, but it doesn’t matter because I can play the tambourine and you can play something equally silly, maybe the kazoo, and we’ll both lose ourselves in drum beats and sax solos and make myriad references to dabbling in Jazz flute while everything else fades to back-up singers.

I want adventure, barefoot banter, aimlessly purposed wandering, lake discovering, trail blazing with Chacos and sheer optimism, laughing as I walk through another spider web because I excel at always finding them first. I want bluntness and camaraderie, unexpected hours of non-stop conversation peppered with sore calves and sweaty foreheads and copious amounts of jokes and stopping to look each other in the face when conversations get a little treacherous because what we’re saying is hard to say but we’re saying it anyway, for no reason and every reason, because we’re happy and comfortable and quite surprisingly so, but happy and comfortable nonetheless. I want to be touched gently, and spoken to sweetly, and made to laugh raucously until my spleen hurts. I want to be urged on ruthlessly, to never leave your side even when I’m hundreds of miles away. I want my own space. A lot of space. To run and roam and grow independent of you and everything I thought I once knew.

I want to take blurry self-portraits in sunglasses with a pro-hipster premise and send them to people I care about so they can laugh, yes always, but mostly so they can see how happy this girl is. How happy she will always be. Flying solo or equally matched I want you to know she’ll soar, higher than she’s ever climbed on her own before, no more stopping on any dimes, incapable of losing her forward momentum this time. This girl, this Kerri Anne who was once so lost and is now so found, about to be run underground by a freight train of joyful premise, propositioning purpose, unplanned terrain beckoning, guaranteeing her a life-changing reckoning, and she: running out of her woods to meet it.

I want all of this, and more. I want hope I’ve never smelled before.

Some of this I surely already have, already own, already heartily condone and carry with me, a fleece blanket of green sentiment, sediments stitched together from collected ferns and words I might have whispered, once, if you were listening closely.

The rest of it? Careening, screaming, rocket ship beaming toward me. Or maybe lapping sleepily in a sparkling stream, avoiding the meaning, floating soundlessly on a billowy breeze. Some of it surely lost in translation, waiting patiently for further concentration. But on its way, regardless.

Does it take a nine-year-old girl being murdered in a Safeway during a shooting at a political rally for me to stand up and take notice? Does it take that sort of senseless cruelty and hatred to hurtle me into righteous indignation, into action? Does it take the earth trembling, rocking, careening into itself for me to give to charity? For me to think outside of myself, outside of my wants and needs and petty complaints about work schedules and people who can’t seem to use their blinkers?

Injustice and poverty, famine and marginalization comprise an undeniably large forefront of our global landscape and yet, because these harsh realities rest on the edges of my own personal worldview, it’s easy to pretend I don’t see them. Because these people–broken, hurting, and in need of aid as they might be–are not at the forefront of my daily life. They aren’t always forcing me to notice them like a news story on every channel seeping through my social media, through my Twitter friends’ and acquaintances’ reactions to a horrible day in Arizona, or a devastating day in Japan, or enter-your-natural-or-man-made-disaster here.

Pain, suffering, starvation, child abuse, a sexual slave trade that is alive and disturbingly well: None of it is often real to me. Mostly because I won’t let it be.

And why not?

Because to fully acknowledge the state of our world–the overwhelming need in our world–would mean I would have to do something about it.

It would mean I would have an obligation. Just like you would. Just like we all do. No exceptions, no excuses, though I could list ten seemingly valid ones right now.

This isn’t the dark ages. It isn’t one-hundred, seventy-five, or even fifty years ago. I know what’s going on in our world. I can see it. If I can’t, if I don’t know, I can seek it out with a single mouse-click. I can be informed on an issue faster than it takes me to watch an episode of my favorite fictitious crime series. I can read book after book after book about what is happening on our watch while I’m taking deep satisfying breaths, or eating second helpings of dinner. I can watch documentaries about social and political injustice. About the stripping of basic human rights. About rape and torture and enslavement and darkness, so much darkness.

I know what’s going on in our world. Or I would, if I would only open my eyes for a few minutes. Change my perspective for a few seconds, long enough to see there are people who need my help. People I can help. People we can help.

It shouldn’t be optional: Helping our fellow man, the men and women and defenseless children who share this earth, who live where we live, who dream and hope and fear the same way we do. It shouldn’t be optional to assist people who need our help, even if we don’t pass them on the street every day. Even if they are oceans and cultures and countries away from where I’m sitting right now, feeling sick to my stomach that there is so much I seemingly could be doing, and just am not. These are people just like me. Just like you. Men and women and children who are sisters and brothers, husbands and wives and fathers and mothers, just like us.

The fact I’m not suffering from malnutrition, or dealing with malaria or unsanitary drinking water has nothing to do with me. The only reason I’m not impoverished or marginalized–the only reason I’m free–is because I had the good fortune to be born in Spokane, Washington in 1982. I didn’t earn that. I didn’t earn anything about that. Sure, I work hard. With a few rare exceptions, I have always worked hard. I’m sure you work hard, too. Sometimes, I make sacrifices. Sometimes I face difficult decisions.

But I’ve never had to decide to go hungry to feed my child. I’ve never had to drink unclean water. I’ve never been exposed to a curable disease that could kill me because I don’t have access to sufficient immunizations and/or health care. I’ve never had to go to the bathroom anywhere but a functioning toilet unless it was because Dad wanted to show us what “real camping” looked like. I’ve never been persecuted for my beliefs or made to feel like I couldn’t do something because I was American, or female, or Kerri.

The United States is such a me-centered culture. Our world teaches us that our personal happiness and success (however you choose to define it) is paramount to…pretty much everything else. Too often I’m such a me-centered person. And I hate it.

I know we aren’t the only country or culture that pursues our ever elusive “happiness” while children starve to death. While people with HIV can’t afford medications that could save and prolong their life. While people contract countless diseases and illness from unclean drinking water. While little boys stand on the front lines of battles they are too young to fight, too young to even understand.

I know we’re not the only ones burying our collective heads in the sand while we could be helping countless countries filled with people who need us. I know we’re not the only ones, but this is where I live. This is what I know. So I can’t speak to the ways other countries could and should be aiding nearby or faraway places and faces. I only know I’m not doing enough. That we as a country and a global community seemingly aren’t doing enough. Because if we were doing enough, everyone would have clean drinking water. No one would be dying from treatable and curable diseases. No one would be starving. No one would be enslaved. No one.

I really do believe that if we as a global community (and thus, as individuals) were doing enough, our world would look far different than it does now. It would look happier. We would be happier.

The heart of the matter (for me, and I’m guessing for many) is this (taken from a video you can watch at the end of this post):

“We see this imbalance and we go, ‘Man, that’s not right; that’s not fair.’ But all too often that’s all we do. Because for us to do any more is actually going to cost us something.”

So the question remains: Where does giving my time/my knowledge/my gifts and talents/my monetary resources-to help the tired old man on the corner begging for quarters to buy a cup of coffee; to help fight human trafficking; to stand up for those too sick and weak to stand up for themselves-where does all of that fit into my “life list”?

Right now, I’m really not sure.

But more than just fitting into my life somewhere, I’m feeling more and more, day by day, that my life needs to be turned upside down for the injustice and poverty that shouldn’t have to exist in this world. That simply wouldn’t exist if every single person who lives on more than $2 a day gave some of their excess to those who are struggling to survive while the world spins on, seemingly unaware and apathetic to their plight.

I know we are so often inundated with links and videos, but the one I’m embedding below is worth watching. Four minutes of your day that just might hit your heart in all the right places. Even if you can’t watch it right now, please watch it later. Please watch it whenever you can. Because I promise the message is worth hearing. It’s something I need to hear every single day.

I can’t stop watching it. I can’t stop thinking and praying about where I should be going. What I should be doing. How I can best stop doing nothing, and start doing something.

And here’s the part where we can hopefully encourage and inspire one another.

Are you helping your community, either locally or globally? If you are, I’d love for you to leave a comment sharing what you’re doing.

Is there a cause you’re particularly passionate about? Please share that, too.

Maybe you, like me, don’t really know how yet to answer the first two questions.

Then tell me, what’s been on your heart lately? Maybe I can help. I really really want to.

Since September I’ve been running often. During lunches and after work, and anytime I can. I’m down two sizes, feeling stronger, and happy, and there is still a lot more work left to do, but running feels amazing again for the first time in a long time, and I need to take a moment to celebrate my return to it.

I started writing this after a particularly mind-altering run in Forest Park on September 27, 2010, to remind myself why I run on the days I feel tired, or discouraged, or otherwise might not remember. Upon revisiting this post prior to publishing it I was reminded of how I can rarely view or ponder or walk into any woods without simultaneously thinking of these four lines from Frost, from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening:

The woods are lovely dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

——————–

I was sitting at work just like every other day. Sitting, sitting, so much sitting still.

On this day I could physically feel the way my body ached to move. The way it needed to sprint, to physically exert itself until every ounce of energy was spent. To erase the anxiety, and the fear, and the doubt, and the tiny stresses of the day compounded into heaps of worry etched across furrowed brows. The way my legs needed to stretch, to reach out for soft dirt and moss and tread quickly, steadily, moving with the rest of me, one unit in forward motion, with a combined goal: To move forward, ever forward.

This time, I listened. I knew what my body needed, what it wanted, and I listened. Simple really. And yet the simplest of occasions are so easily complicated.

I concentrated on my breathing and heard the soft sound of my feet padding cautiously against the soft dirt. Later: The more solid sound of my feet finding traction and moving quicker when bends in the trail were harder. Ferns everywhere, and I could smell recent rain still resting on them, and my heart traveled back to weekends spent hiking with my sister and my dad, the three of us seeking solace underneath a seemingly endless platoon of pine trees, tall and stoic. Happily heavily breathing, I sought to memorize leaves on low-hanging branches perfectly obscuring a bustling city only a few miles below where I catapulted myself down, down, downhill and around a bend in between two solid trunks–trees older than I can ever hope to be–around a small creek barely trickling with water, and up, up, uphill to another bend in the trail where I could again look out onto a trove of trees peppered with bright gold and green hues, a forested blanket hiding everything but this moment, this exact place.

I had to force myself to make it to the trail. I had to fight to hold on to the feeling that my body NEEDED this time, needed this space to stretch and groan and grow. It’s so easy to drive home and sit. To get complacent. To make excuses, however valid. “I’m too tired, too sore, too busy; it’s too dark, too cold, too hot.”

I know them all by heart. I heard every single one of them in my head the moment I decided to run that day.

Too busy listening to my legs telling me they needed to run until they couldn’t carry my weight anymore, I ignored every negative thought seeking to derail my new-found motivation, and the sheer exhilaration I felt when my feet starting propelling me down that trail–as my entire body instantly remembered how to work seamlessly in unison–was one of the most euphoric sensations I’ve ever felt. I was almost laughing as I sprinted as fast as I could, years of muscle memory from countless basketball and track practices once again pulsing through my arms and legs, reminding me my body knows how to do this. It’s always known how to do this.

The simplest of occasions are so easily complicated, when all my body wants to do is something perfectly simple. Something perfectly part of its original design. It wants to move.

——————–

*Post title inspired by Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. If you haven’t read it, and you run, or bike, or want to do either, I highly recommend it.

Don’t you try and tell me that you never loved me
I know that you did
‘Cause you said it and you wrote it down

-from Kate Nash’s Merry Happy

I’m learning and re-learning. Learning and re-learning so many lessons I thought I already knew.

As much as we pretend it does–until the fists stop clenching, and the cramping stomach and the dull ache in our chests subside–betrayal doesn’t make love less real, less tangible. It doesn’t mean someone didn’t love you. That they don’t love you still. It doesn’t mean they always lie. It might mean that. But most of the time it simply means they are human. Frustratingly, cruelly, overwhelmingly human.

We all are. We are all imperfect. We strive to be the best versions of ourselves and then suddenly we’re straddling gray areas both old and new and we don’t know what to do, don’t know what to say. We falter. We fall. We are perfect in our imperfection.

I will always let someone down. I won’t anticipate a need. I’ll miss something. I’ll be a jerk. So will you. You won’t even know you’re doing it, or maybe, you will. I might not do it consciously, but it will still happen; I’ll still hurt someone. So will you.

It’s a great exercise in being an adult to begin to recognize, to really understand and believe, that when someone you love, someone you trusted, is lost, it doesn’t erase the happiness you once felt, the sheer joy you held so tightly you might have smothered it, but you just couldn’t let go. It was impossible. Just like it’s impossible to separate the past from the present sometimes. You lose yourself. You lose those you love. You lose actual love. For yourself and for someone you thought you could love for an infinite amount of time.

Life is about losing. True.

By certain standards I’ve certainly lost enough. An aunt I looked up to and who I physically resemble when I was 11. My father when I was 13. Best friends to moving trucks and far-away cities. The sound of my maternal grandfather’s voice, of both arms wrapped around me, when I was 17. A first love. My paternal grandfather, to a rare form of stomach cancer when I was 22. A child just weeks alive inside of me, and someone I thought loved enough to maybe consider being a wife when I was 23. A friend I had laughed and cried (and laughed until I cried) with since I was in the seventh grade when I was 24. A marriage at 27.

I will lose more. I know it. It’s inevitable.

I also know I’ve gained so much. An undeniable faith in hope, in optimism. A family who loves and supports me when I make great decisions, and when I make ridiculous ones. An ability to stop counting by twos, to stop seeing pairs everywhere I look and just live. Confidence. Freedom. Peace. Strength. Friendships I cherish more and more each day. The ability to laugh on a daily basis, because I really am happy. The tangible realization that there is love bigger than any of us, bigger than anyone who might love you one day, and betray you the next. The promise of a life lead with purpose.

I will gain more. I know it. It’s inevitable.

Life can never be one-sided. It’s never a glass half empty without simultaneously being a glass half full. Maybe not to you, but somewhere. As much as life is about loss, about suffering, about loneliness, life is also about gain, about healing, about community.

Life is about hope. Life is about love.

In my experience, never will you be better able to list the many things for which you are thankful than when you’re standing face-to-face with your ability to be wrecked.

————-

It’s a long story I’m not really going to talk about here just yet, but recently I’ve felt (happy and excited, yes, and) vulnerable and anxious and angsty for the first time in years. So many years. And I’m so scared I don’t even know what to do. I don’t know what to say. So I’m breathing deeply, and remembering who I am, and who I want to be, and talking honestly, about what I need and what I don’t.

And I’m listening. I’m doing so much listening, and it feels incredible. It also feels hard. The way bones and joints ache when they’re growing: that’s how my heart feels right now. I’m so thankful my life is filled with people who can and will and want to speak truth into my life, who love me enough to say words I need to hear even when those words might sting at first.

Life is about hope. It’s about love. So I won’t stop hoping. I won’t stop loving with everything I am. No matter how much I’ve lost and might lose. Not ever. Not because I’m not ever going to hurt someone or be hurt again. I’m sure I will hurt someone; I’m sure I will be hurt. I am hurting as I type this.

I won’t stop loving with everything I am because life is just too short to love any other way.

————–

(Post title also from Kate Nash’s Merry Happy.)

Fleece pretense
thrown over my shoulders
much too heavy, much too

warm.

A flashlight,
blindfold,
a shell I found in Korea, nowhere
near the sea.

A hatred

of all things solid,
sturdy like wood.

A Mason jar of river water
stolen from her belly
April 15th, 1996.

—————-

Inspired by Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

What about you? What do you carry? Feel free to be poetic or literal. I like both.

The individual stories of these three powerful and determined women, and the way their respective stories intersect and bisect and run aground on one another, fascinates me.

Cat Stevens dated Carly Simon who later married James Taylor who collaborated with Carole King and who also previously dated Joni Mitchell, who dated nearly every man she ever met and/or collaborated with.

From the article it would appear Mitchell’s physical presence was nothing short of intoxicating. There were countless stories of her sitting in a room, singing and playing her guitar, and some man, typically another musician, wandering by and being instantly enraptured by her.

Did you know Carly Simon also dated Kris Kristofferson, and that Kristofferson** was the one dating Janis Joplin when she died? Or that Mick Jagger, who was a friend of Simon’s at the time, is the one singing back-up on her “You’re So Vain” track? Or that “You’re So Vain” originally started as “Ballad of a Vain Man” after Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” and is most likely written about Warren Beatty (who repeatedly tried to date Simon in the early ’70s)?

Did you know sweet baby James (Taylor) is an ex-heroin addict and sort of a jerk? At least, when it comes to his intimate relationships with women he is. He has a documented history of severing all ties to people he once deeply cared for; when he’s done with you, he literally never talks to you again. After Carly Simon watched him behave poorly with ex-girlfriend Joni Mitchell (and others), after eleven years of marriage and two kids, Taylor did the same thing to her. It’s easy to see from the Vanity Fair article, and interviews she’s given before and after, that his coldness and distance from her is something that still hurts Simon to this day.

The article was extensive and well-researched, and I was so enthralled I spent the rest of the evening listening to Joni Mitchell and wishing I could have been alive to see her and Carly Simon, Joan Baez, and Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, and groups like Crosby, Stills and Nash performing in their respective primes. I would loved to have seen them young and vibrant and finding their place in the world through their music, telling stories that still resonate forty years later. Their music had so much soul. Their music still does, to this day, have so much soul. In my opinion, more soul than even the best music being made today will ever have. For whatever reason, it’s hard to find music that moves me the same way ’60s and ’70s folk rock and rock n’ roll does.

——————

I will forever maintain that the single saddest day in music’s dynamic and collective history was the day Cat Stevens stopped playing his guitar, the day he stopped performing and recording albums.

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This is one of my all-time favorite pictures of my dad, found in a box of old family photos I didn’t realize I had during the recent Great Closet Purge of 2010:

(You might have noticed I’ve been on a bit of a scanning kick as of late.) This picture was taken at my grandma’s house (my mom’s mom), and I’m quite excited to be heading toward that same house this Friday for an extended Memorial Day weekend. I have been missing my family to a degree I haven’t really felt in years. My grandma is one of my most favorite people on the planet, and I can’t wait to wrap her wee frame in a huge bear hug, both of us mostly likely crying because we’re (sappy like that, yes, and) just so happy to see each other.

Speaking of awesome grandmothers, I have two! This is my Grandma Ladish (my dad’s mom):

She turned 80 earlier this month and is as lovely (and as English) as ever. I get to see her (and Frances!) Saturday, and I can’t wait. Oh, and that incredible cake? My cousin Lianna totally made it. From scratch. Because she is amazing.

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After watching MacGruber last week with Sarah, Erin, and Daniel, I made an inspired ’80′s soft rock mix for the 6+ hour drive from Portland to Spokane and beyond, featuring Toto, Heart, Eddie Money, and Mr. Mister (to name a few). I then told Hans she was going to be subjected to said mix CD on our drive, and instead of fleeing the state without me, she humored me by acting as excited about it as I am. Come to think of it, I think she actually might be as excited as I am. Which is why she’s my Hans. (You know you wish you were going to be in the car with us. Especially after I tell you I’ve been practicing my rendition of “Take Me Home Tonight.”)

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Nothing is set in proverbial stone yet, but there’s a good chance I’m going to get to see my sister at the end of August. THE END OF AUGUST. For the calendar challenged, that’s not even a full three months away. To say I’m psyched would be to grossly understate. And grossly understating is gross, so I’ll just stop now, and wish you a happy! long weekend.

(Or if you’re Canadian and don’t have a long weekend that starts in t-minus two days (but who’s counting, really?)…you get to be Canadian, so don’t worry, you still win.)

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*What? Birthday notes that look like ransom letters are totally fun!

**Speaking of grandmothers! My grandma (mom’s mom) LOVES Kris Kristofferson. I doubt she’s seen any of the Blade series, but I’ve seen her call him “a fox” on numerous occasions.

***In case you were wondering, I have no logical idea why I titled this post “Bits & Bats.” I just liked it/thought it fit, especially because this might be the single most random entry I’ve ever posted. For the record, there are no bats, have never been any bats, will hopefully never be any bats. Unless maybe we’re talking about Batman. The Christian Bale version, though, none of this Keaton/Clooney/Kilmer nonsense.