My friend Gina sends an email with the subject line ‘Resident Rogues’, inviting me to see a swing/country/gypsy music band from the US in a little bar called the Merri Creek Tavern. She tells me a story as we wait to see the band.
The lyrics of Rattlin’ Bones were apocalyptic and disorienting but somehow strangely comforting after our deeply personal experiences of the Black Saturday fires.
We mourn the dead, but if they touched us in some way they never really die.
From the first time I heard Five Feet High And Rising I could relate to it, not that where we lived in the lower Blue Mountains was likely to get flooded. It just somehow touched me.
Mostly, Harry sits in a straight back chair by his bed and stares out the window. His mind replays scenes of earlier times: trips to the lake cabin with the children, and square-dances on Saturday to bluegrass tunes by The Dillards and others.
They listened to the radio for hours sprawled out in the meadow under the shade of the Buckeye tree, well out of range of the Amish homestead. An everlasting friendship forged.
Mary Gauthier entered my little world and reinforced the notion that songwriting is a great art form as worthy of any other. To me, she was, until then, an unknown master of songwriting.
My heart hurts as we head towards Port Arthur. So much can depend on one moment; the café we walk into, the car that stops. And as we drive, I tell you about my moment.
As a ten year old I was quite oblivious to the meaning of Galveston – a cry out from an American soldier in Vietnam who is recalling happy memories back home while on the battlefront.
We saw miles and miles of flat plains of farmland from horizon to horizon. A big blue sky above the endless cotton fields, cattle ranches and oil wells pumping up that black gold –Texas tea. We discovered where the saying ‘As big as Texas’ came from that day.