Wondering If We're Ever Gonna Get Home Tonight...

Some days just call for listening to the blues, and my go-to blues singer is Ruthie Foster.  For those who don't know her music, here's a little bio blurb from her website.

   In the tight-knit musical community of Austin, Texas, it’s tough to get away with posturing. You either bring it, or you don’t.
   If you do, word gets around. And one day, you find yourself duetting with Bonnie Raitt, or standing onstage with the Allman Brothers at New York’s Beacon Theater and trading verses with Susan Tedeschi. You might even wind up getting nominated for a Best Blues Album Grammy — three times in a row. And those nominations would be in addition to your seven Blues Music Awards, three Austin Music Awards, the Grand Prix du Disque award from the Académie Charles-Cros in France, a Living Blues Critics’ Award for Female Blues Artist of the Year, and the title of an “inspiring American Artist” as a United States Artists 2018 Fellow.
   There’s only one Austinite with that résumé: Ruthie Foster. And with the release of her latest album, Joy Comes Back, the Recording Academy might want to put its engraver on notice. Because every note on it confirms this truth: It’s Ruthie’s time.  The small rural town of Gause, TX, had no chance of keeping the vocal powerhouse known as Ruthie Foster to itself. Described by Rolling Stone as “pure magic to watch and hear,” her vocal talent was elevated in worship services at her community church. Drawing influence from legendary acts like Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin, Foster developed a unique sound unable to be contained within a single genre. That uniqueness echoes a common theme in Ruthie’s life and career--marching to the beat of her own drum.

Having introduced Ruthie to any novices, let me get back to thinking about some of her songs.

Lots of times, when I've got some emotions to sort out, I will turn to some of my favorite singers to search for a lyrical line and a musical phrase that will help me dig deeper into what I am feeling.  In this case, the song just kept popping into my consciousness, so I knew I would have to dig into my Ruthie Foster collection and play "When It Don't Come Easy."  It's a song written by Patty Griffin, sung and recorded by Ruthie Foster on The Truth According to Ruthie Foster.  I linked the album version, and here below is a live version that lets you see her onstage performance.  (And here is  another live version with Patty Griffin and Melissa Etheridge, including a very touching story about music and healing when going through chemotherapy.)


It seems like I'm doing a lot more driving on the highway lately.  More meetings at work mean I'm driving back and forth to Raleigh more often.  Working on building better friendships means getting out on the road to go around the Triangle or around NC to meet up with folks.  I'm also spending more time with a specific friend who, as we have gotten to know one another better, has shown me how we've been able to bring goodness into one another's lives.  Living a couple of counties apart gives me another reason for driving.

The other side of those trips is that I have to drive back home.  And it is that moment the other night when this song kept pressing itself on my mind.  "Red lights flashing down the highway...wondering if we're ever gonna get home tonight."  There is a kind of feeling that comes when I have to leave, kind of like the feeling that comes at the end of visits with my kids or my dad.  All the joy of the shared presence seems like it starts draining out, opening up a little space of emptiness, a kind of heavy emptiness. 

I don't mean to be overly dramatic, and I don't think I'm describing something unique.  It's something that many people feel when they have to leave what has been a time of blessing with loved ones.  A version of it can come after a moving time of worship, a great discussion in class that has to end, and a deep conversation with a friend over dinner.  But I felt it as I got in my car to drive home that night, and this song kept asking for my attention.  I put it off and listened to the baseball game on the drive home; then, at home I fell asleep early.  But the next morning, it was waiting for me when I woke up, so I got out the Ruthie Foster music to listen.

There's a part in the middle of the song that seems to articulate images of what is stirring my own thoughts and feelings these days.

I don't know nothing 'cept change will come.
Year after year what we do is undone.
Time gets moving from a crawl to a run.
Wondering if we're ever gonna get home...

 

You're out here walking down the highway,
And all of the signs got blown away.
Sometimes you wonder if you're
Walking in the wrong direction.

I remember being twenty years old and not knowing what the future would bring.  But it seems like the not knowing at twenty years old is pretty different from the not knowing at sixty-one years old.  As a young adult, growing up middle class, single-family/nuclear family living, white, college-educated, church-going, called to ministry--there was a script written for me that I had largely accepted and agreed to act out.  I would marry after college, go to seminary, learn about adult life and decisions, find a job, consider further graduate school, have some kids, and follow a ministry or academic career trajectory that looked like the lives of people I had been watching for many years.

The script is never quite as complete as we imagined it would be.  Your companions often have a different version of the script.  You find that there are missing pages, rewrites, conflicting plot lines, and eventually that it fragments more and more into various possible directions without providing an ending.  But at the beginning, those things are not so obvious.  Thus, an uncertain future at twenty seems way more like a clear plan than an uncertain future at sixty-one.  Now one's life may have the look of either mid-career or of the final stage of a career, but which one is not certain.  Many of my students in graduate school come in their late fifties or sixties, starting a new phase in their lives after retiring from another career.  Am I at a point like they have found themselves?  Or am I just getting my stride in the place where I am already?

 

Being this age, according to demographic trends, is far from the end of one's life, even though I've been called a senior citizen for a decade already.  My dad is eighty-nine and thriving.  That's almost three more decades of living if I keep his pace.  On the other hand, Everly and Mom didn't match the years of their husbands.  And the fact that my dad and I live so far apart during this time of his life is another one of those nagging thoughts asking whether I need to make a change.  So life is ahead, and behind, at the same time.  The signs all "got blown away" is an image that makes lots of sense to someone who has lived through at least a dozen hurricanes in his lifetime.  When things get most uncertain, it really can seem that I might be walking in the wrong direction.  "Don't know nothing 'cept change will come."

Ruthie's version of the blues can stare straight ahead into the despair, as in "Ocean of Tears," "Harder than the Fall," or "I Don't Know What to Do with My Heart."  As the bio says, she isn't confined to one genre, and she sings plenty of soul songs that share the wisdom of her community heritage, such as "Mama Said," "Heal Yourself," and "People Grinnin' in Your Face."  Her gospel formation also appears in "Up Above My Head," "Woke Up This Morning," and "Lord, Remember Me."  Actually you can't quite separate these songs into a single or discrete genre, as blues, gospel, soul, jazz, and more intermingle into a mass of healing-struggling-hoping-sad-defiant songs.

However, many of her blues songs intermingle the pain with hope, as is not uncommon in blues tradition.  Foster returns again and again to a kind of hope that has been learned over time because of friendship, family, and community.  She has known and places confidence in friends and loved ones who show virtues of faithfulness in hard times and readiness to reach out, listen, and lift up when one feels lost and alone.

"When It Don't Come Easy" is one of those kinds of blues songs.  It delves into the confusion and pain that arises in our lives.  It expresses the lostness of feeling like one has nowhere to turn, or one who is questioning whether the hard times are ever going to end: "wondering if we're ever gonna get home."  But the self-focused sense of loss gets turned around in the refrain and becomes a message of empathy.  The singer looks away from her own struggle to realize that those she loves also are wondering about getting home.  Sticking with the image of driving down a highway, the song imagines a loved one's car breaking down on some lonesome road.

But if you break down,
I'd drive out and find you.
And if you forget my love,
I'd try to remind you,

Oh, and stay by you
When it don't come easy.

This refrain stands out as the song's hook, the powerful message of connection and care that will not be broken even by the power of disappointment and uncertainty.   The song doesn't depart from the blues genre and get simplistic and goosebumpy.  It doesn't tie up all the loose ends with a closing about living happily ever after.  The final stanza is back to the beginning, driving down a dark road and wondering if home will ever be there.  It keeps things real about life's struggles and our emotional ups and downs.  But sewn into the lining of the blues is a reminder that we can get through things together if we will stand by one another, if we will show mercy to ourselves and those we love, to get through the hard times.

 

A moment of critical self-assessment requires that I not simply hear and believe these words through the normative gaze.  The refrain could easily play into the cultural formation of white men (which I know personally from my own psyche) to imagine ourselves as the heroes of every story.  Conrad framed it through imperialistic and colonialistic eyes as the "white man's burden" to uplift the lesser races (and gender) toward the fullness of humanity.  Hollywood retells the story again and again through white messianic figures who enter into complex issues of socially structured racial and gender politics to fix the problems out of their inherent goodness (and superiority).  

 

I have had to learn through marriage and parenting the hard lesson of interrupting this narrative in my own imagination, to stop trying to fix the problems of my wife or children, and to learn to listen and "stand by" them as they make their way toward using their own strengths, their own power.  I'm not the guy in every story who has a monopoly on power.  I'm not the hero of every struggle that touches the people I care for.  Caring for someone and needing to be the fixer of all problems are not the same things.  But the steady caring, the readiness to give of myself for others, the walking alongside in the struggle--those are the real things toward which the song can encourage my aspirations to be human and to be good.

Ruthie doesn't write all of the songs she sings and records, although she has written some great ones.  But she fills each of them with a soulfulness and power that doesn't leave me asking whether this is "her song" or someone else's.  Thanks, Ruthie, for trying "to remind" me that even when by myself and feeling a little empty, the music can fill up that space with memories and commitments made to "stay by" one another "when it don't come easy."

Palpable Absence

These are challenging days for the Broadways and Esteses.  We are still tender from the losses of our beloved Everly and Herbie, and we will be for the foreseeable future.  Today what stands out to me is a palpable absence.

It is the absence that is filling all available space.  It is not so much that I am thinking about specific things that Everly said or did, nor that I am seeing her in my imagination. All of that is true, but what seems to press most on me is the lack of the one who for so long was always in the midst of my life.

It struck me last weekend when I was attending a professional conference in Pennsylvania.  I have attended these meetings at this time for almost two decades.  On a few occasions, Everly and children have joined me for the early summer getaway.  Usually, I have gone on my own to be with friends.  We would call our wives or husbands during the evenings to catch up.  If I were giving a paper, I would report on how it went and whether I believed I was making significant scholarly progress.  I would tell her about various friends at the meeting, and she would fill me in on job, home, and the kids.

Thus my attendance at the CTS/NABPR meeting in late May and early June was a regular rhythm of our lives.  Though usually not together during those days, it was a time for mutual investment in my career progress, for thinking ahead into the summer plans for our kids, and for a period of years, a season of planning and sharing family time around our kids' high school graduations.  It was a time, even though apart, that we were in the work together.

That must be why on Saturday afternoon I began to be overwhelmed by waves of grief.  As I thought about how Everly would have enjoyed the weather and the beautiful scenery of Latrobe, PA, and the Lincoln Highway that took me there, her absence overwhelmed me.  I had driven alone from Durham to Latrobe, and it was a pleasant trip.  But car travel was often some of our most important conversation time.  Everly enjoyed sleeping in the car, but she also enjoyed working things out, figuring out problems, making plans, and generally talking through whatever was on our agenda.  I was feeling the absence in the car and at the many sights and stops we would have shared.

That night I turned on the iTunes playlist that I had made on our anniversary, May 24, 2013.  Everly never actually heard too much of it.  She was not much for listening to other people's music, or for much variety of music at all.  But I had put together the songs believing she would like them tolerably, and in the last weeks of her life I played this music often for my own help and comfort.  One of my friends came by my room to find me lying in the bed, listening to music, and sobbing.  He was at a loss, wanting to provide support if appropriate, but not sure how to respond.  I told him I was doing what Kate Campbell says in a song, "fading to blue."  I made as much sense of my mood as I could for him, and let him off the hook of needing to help me get through it.

Again, it was a palpable absence.  She and I would not share a traveler's room again.  We would not take scenic drives.  We would not enjoy the beauty of a new place.  The next day, I would drive home alone, and she would not be there when I got there.  It's the absence, above all, that weighed on me.

Today was another day of absence.  I have been looking at houses in Durham for the past few weeks.  I am relocating back to North Carolina, and I want to make this move a good match for my convictions about where to live in relation to my church and ministry.  It is my effort to respond to the first "R" of John Perkins's "Three Rs:"  relocation.  Perkins came to believe that the only way that church people can play a role in transforming their communities is to relocate to the neighborhoods where they feel called to minister.  In one way, it is a reaction against the dominant pattern of "commuter churches" which functions within a consumer model of "church shopping."  It elevates the neighborliness of being in walking distance of one another, of making friends of those around us.  In another way, it is the response to Jesus' incarnation, to go to the people where they are and live among them.  There are many implications for class and race that you should be able to imagine.

I had identified three neighborhoods in which to search.  Rather than go into detail about them and raise all kinds of questions about why I did or did not end up in a specific place, let me simply characterize them generally.  One neighborhood already has in it a number of friends who share similar views about relocation.  That would be a place to become part of existing structures and practices of community life, a very attractive possibility.  Another neighborhood has some churches involved in community organizing, as well as several which would likely be willing and even eager to join the broad based organizing efforts with the right kind of relationships and leadership to pull them into the fray.  Another neighborhood is near the church I have been attending, as a "commuter member," for almost twenty years.  It would mean putting my body and energy into sharing life with the neighbors who are in close proximity to the place our church meets.

All of these neighborhoods are outside of the main popular areas of town.  That means housing prices are somewhat or even significantly lower than the "aspirational" neighborhoods.  That is a good thing, since my income is much lower now than when Everly was our major breadwinner.  Combining the money from selling our Demerius Street house in 2012, savings, and insurance money, I am hoping to keep a purchased house as affordable as possible.  Yet, having lived in a very small house for 25 years, I do wish for a bit more space to spread out.  I also want plenty of room for my kids to come and stay a while as needed over the next few years.  Finally, I want to be able to be hospitable to neighbors and other folks God will send my way.

So today I was taking a third look at what seems to be the most promising house to come along.  No house has been perfect.  These are not perfect house neighborhoods.  Most houses are old.  The ones that are renovated to match the trends of the times start to be priced out of my range.  The ones that have not been renovated much at all often look like nightmares of slow, even interminable repairs.  Many are too small, too deteriorated, or too oddly arranged.  Buried oil tanks, water leaks, poor drainage, and shifting foundations crop up everywhere.  This house I was looking at had big promise:  priced low for its size, all new inside renovations which are done well, new HVAC, all new bathrooms, a big yard, nice porches, including an upstairs porch.  I know I could be pretty comfortable in the house.  Another small one not very far away lacks any "extra" room for me to spread out, and it also is not within the walking distance criterion that I want to stick by.

So on the third look, I can't help but see the things that undermine the house's promise.  There are some old structural concrete items that need to go, a dead tree in the yard, and branches from another tree too close to the house.  There are questions that will require an inspector to search around in the crawl space, which I have not yet tried to do.  A few details of the renovations are consistently left undone.  I'm uncertain about many things.  I need to talk it through.  My good friends Nancy Bumgardner and Joanne Jennings have been kind enough to go with me on separate occasions to look at this house.  They each have different and good insights into how to look at and evaluate it.  My realtor thinks it will be possible to have certain work done as part of the purchase contract.

But the absence is palpable.  There is one that I trust, one whom I want to please.  She understands the strengths in how I think and also recognizes my blind spots.  She is not here to talk this through.  So I go on trying to think on my own.  I can see multiple points of view, strengths and weaknesses, promises and potential dangers.  The yard is so big, and I'm not a lover of yard work.  The house has idiosyncrasies.  Will I get sick of them, or will they just become normal to me?  Can I make the space work as a place of hospitality for neighbors and for my family when they come to visit?

I would love above all to be able to sit and dream together about this or some other house and what we think about the life we could live in it.  We did that in Austin about a year ago, and we were actually in the midst of buying a house just twelve months ago.  It would have been the home for our last years.  We were trying to be near a certain church and in a certain neighborhood.  We felt pretty good about our options.  We were making room for all our kids to be comfortable visiting with us.  But the change in her cancer led us to back out of that contract.

Here I am a year later about to start the same process.  I wish I could sit and chat, share a drive, and ease into the comfort of knowing that the two of us are ready to face the challenges of a new home together.  I won't get that this time around.  And wherever I end up, there will be an empty side of the bed, empty closet space, and a big room with an even bigger palpable absence.  Yes, there is a constant and abiding presence of Everly in and with me all the time.  But that presence exists in and alongside her absence.