Jan & Joe

Jan: Why do men have so much trouble with commitment?

Joe: Who has trouble?



Jan: A lot of men do!

Joe: How many is “a lot”?

Jan: Are you trying to irritate me?

Joe: No. I just think it’s an unfair question. You can’t simply lump men together
into this big blob.

Jan: I never said that men are a blob.

Joe: Why can’t women accept their age?

Jan: What!?

Joe: See? It’s annoying to be lumped together with countless others.

Jan: I was just saying that a lot of men find it difficult to commit to one person
and they have the wandering eye.

Joe: You never look at other men?

Jan: Sometimes.

Joe: See!?

Jan: I look at Chanel handbags but I don’t pursue the purchase of one.

Joe: I’m quite faithful my dear.

Jan: I know you are.

MUSIC

I learned guitar from my brother who was four years older than me. I traded a trumpet for my first guitar. I must have been about fourteen. I had been taking piano lessons since I was eleven but this was a truly golden era in the evolution of rock-and-roll and I was all for it.

One time I auditioned at a local bar, in the middle of the world in Middletown, Ohio. It was called Dana’s. I was shy, insecure and had a lousy voice. Other than that I had a lot going for me. I played some Neil Young songs and a rarely played Rolling Stones song called “No Expectations”.

During the second song, I remember seeing the owner, Dana, presumably the one who was supposed to be listening to my audition, walk outside. He remained there for the rest of my short set. I finished, packed up and left and that was that.

I have continued to compose and play music for over forty years now. One discards illusions about where and when and how and why and how much.......as the years pile on. It’s enough to do something that you love. My fifteen-year-old daughter has introduced me to an entirely new generation of musicians who make wonderful recordings, full of life and poetry and love - far from the bland, annoying realm of popular radio and, especially, away from the incessant repetition of once good or even great songs now turned sour from endless playing day after day, decade after decade and mutated into the wretched “Classic Rock”.

Music, like painting, is a search, a dance, a walk uphill, a struggle with better angels. It is art and art slips easily out of the grasp of those who would rigidly define and limit its possibilities.

Infrastructure

Many of us endure and/or complain about the constant roadwork that surrounds us when we endeavor to bridge two separate locations in our motor vehicles. It’s frustrating to us because we have become accustomed to speed and efficiency in all aspects of our lives. We’re impatient. We hate the delays.

The road pictured above was worked on for many, many months. A new bridge was constructed farther down the hill. Yet - like many roads I have noticed lately - it has been revisited by the road crews. The newly paved black top has been dug up, the orange cones set in place again, the heavy equipment hauled back into place. Is this a problem stemming from the age of the pipes underneath? Is it poor workmanship? Who knows? The temperature is now about 50 degrees colder than it was when these guys finished last month. It doesn’t look like too much fun out there.

Way back in the twentieth century I owned a house for a few years, here in Cincinnati. The antiquated sewer system beneath the street my house sat on was dug up and repaired three years in a row. Completely black topped and then torn up again. We in the neighborhood started an annual picnic in August that we named Sewerfest. It seemed better to find humor in the situation rather than defeat and despair.

America’s infrastructure is aging and crumbling and, like the aging and crumbling empire that we seem Hell-bent on becoming, all signs point to increasing numbers of road-blocks, closed lanes, heavy machinery, traffic delays. The car has changed our social reality over the last century and now it lumbers on as a convenient but out-dated mode of transportation and one that increasingly makes
the trade-off much less easy to take.

fall

the first snow fall
it’s no longer fall
i hope she doesn’t fall
when she walks her dog

the flakes fall
and my memories fall
and the wishes fall
like ice crystals

time for lunch
and coffee

it’s really winter

again

Photos Recovered

Some time early in this decade my dad gave me a box of old photos that had belonged to his father. Grandpa Grund was a distant figure to me. We never saw much of him. He was built like an ox and had a big, raspy voice. He had moved his family to Ohio from Des Moines, Iowa, to be part of the scrap business. Armco steel was a mighty venture then, headquartered in Middletown. Grandma Grund died when I was very young.

Armco, like my grandfather, is no more. Similarly the relatives and their friends who populate these magnificent photographs are no longer around. The era of American manufacturing might is mostly gone as is the world made visible in these faded images. I am struck by how well everyone is dressed, even in casual situations. Other than my grandparents I don’t know who anyone is. I have asked my dad to sit with me soon and identify as many of them as he can.

A few years ago I put many of the photos in the box into an album. I took the album to my studio and later it disappeared. For over two years I could not find this album of photos. Just last week I uncovered it at the bottom of a stack, like an archeological find. There is an elegance, a restraint, an innocence, perhaps, that I see in these people that is largely unseen today. We are too used to the camera, too filled with information and experiences to be as uncalculating as these folks. Too much can be made of this I know - people haven’t changed all that much throughout history. But there is something memorable and a touch wistful in looking through this album.

I see my grandparents looking very young and in love. Grandma Grund wears my favorite hair style. In another photo I see two women sitting on a man’s lap and I develop an instant crush on the beautiful young woman at the right. They are all strangers. All passed away. Gone from present time but able to stir emotions through aging images that gather new mystery and meaning by virtue of their survival into the future.

JAN & JOE

Joe: Hey, I’ve got a great title for a country song.

Jan: What is it?

Joe: I Broke Her Heart So She Broke My Arm”.

Jan: That’s so dumb. Truly stupid.

Joe: I think it’s great! I’ve got another one, too.

Jan: Forget it.

Joe: “Love Kills and Yours is Murder”.

Jan: Have you seen the Times?

Joe: Who reads newspapers anymore?

Jan: I do. I thought you still did.

Joe: How’d you like that second one?

Jan: Forget the Times...where’s the wine opener?

JAN & JOE

Jan: Do you ever imagine what we must look like to ants?
Think about a knat that’s perched on your hair and looking down at the ground.

Joe: I have better things to think about.

Jan: Like what?

Joe: Like, what if an asteroid slammed into our planet right as I was about
to be awarded the Nobel Prize. That would be just my luck.

Jan: That’s ridiculous.

Joe: Why? It could happen!

Jan: You could win the friggin’ Nobel Prize? Hah! That’s good!

Joe: Just before the moment when that prestigious prize is about to be turned over to me, everything is swept away in a
gargantuan firestorm.

Jan: Oh, that’s a happy thought. But back to what I started out saying. The relative scale of things in the universe is freaky. And
without gravity none of this could exist. Yet we can't even see it or define it exactly.

Joe: “...the force that attracts a body towards the center of the earth, or toward
any other physical body having mass.”. Defined in the Oxford Dictionary.

Jan: Aren’t you clever... looking that up. Still, they can only call it a force. They don’t know what it is.

Joe: It’s what makes it possible to drink beer.

Jan: I often look down around my feet and imagine that my eyes are hundreds of feet up. It reminds me of when I was little,
playing with tiny toys outside in the grass and dirt. That small little patch of earth became an enormous world to me, so
much larger in my imagination than it was in real life.

Joe: I’m going into the kitchen to play with gravity.