Like Bees

We had kind of a shitty show.  It happens.  Not a lot of people, the establishment didn’t go nuts over us, the pay wasn’t great, we fucked up the songs, and I was tired and my throat hurt, and there was no sweat but there was PMS, and I was acting when I smiled.  It was mostly in my mind, but it’s where I was.  In the middle of a song when nothing was right, I thought of Leyla.  Like a mantra, like a reminder, like a gift I get to cash in on every single time I lose touch with my own gratitude and become, for even one second and if only in my mind, a whiner.  It’s real, this thing we keep repeating—this thing that has earned an abbreviation and that so many people have inked deep into their skin to last forever: Live Life Like Leyla.  L4. 

Even before she got sick, there was a palpable radiance.  I met her late, as one of the bridesmaids in her aunt’s wedding, the bride even a new friend of mine but an obvious one—an easy one that would soon, without a gram of force, stroll her way into the center of my heart to stay.  Suave and I sang a song during the ceremony, and Leyla, along with the other bridesmaids, wore a brown dress and cowgirl boots.  She was stunning and a little shy with a quiet kind of magnetism.  I didn’t know her, but I recognized it in her.  

Fast forward to now, as she’s resting peacefully at Hospicare, drawing in a steady stream of friends and family, surrounded by photos, cards, flowers, decorations from her bedroom at home, so much snow piling up outside the windows, the diagnosis itself still a sharp and ruthless series of shocks, softened only by good company and these reinforced expressions—we will Live Life Like Leyla and feel less defeated than we do madly and wildly in love with each other and the fact of our existence, here together, with arms that hold and eyes that reflect.  Last night on stage I let muscle knowledge move my lips to sing, and I thought of Leyla.  That made it all okay.  I remembered myself—the best parts—and I dug in with the hooks of my heart.

This village is growing exponentially, evolving into a different animal altogether—a tight bud blooming into a blushing peony so ripe and so full of silky petals that you can’t cup it in both hands anymore or capture a fraction of its perfume in your nose, because it’s filling the room, it’s spilling out the cracks of the door, it’s running down the hallways and into other rooms, it’s bursting through the double doors—it’s on the loose.  It forgets, passes over, and excludes no one; everyone willing to lift the senses is welcome, and everyone who does will be changed (or reminded).  This is what happens when humans grow up with love; we respond to horror by surrounding it with the enzyme that is more love, and even if it won’t dissolve that calcified node, we begin to radiate together around it, making heat, red and real, and like bees, we keep each other alive.  More of this!  Keep it coming, keep it spreading, keep it.  It belongs to you, and to me, and to us.  We are reminded of this us-ness by way of pain, and we each choose how to tune in.  

I feel an enormous amount of gratitude and a chest-filling satisfaction belonging to this self-perpetuating, self-governing, ever-expanding, ever-evolving village—what beautiful animal could it become next?

A couple days ago Suave and I jogged beneath blue skies in the stripy shadows from palm tree fronds along a canal dotted with sun-bleached beer cans, searching for alligators—we spotted five algae-covered turtles, a bunch of minnows, and a gar but no gators yet.  Dave’s mom stuffed us with gulf shrimp, crab cakes, fresh fruit, and wine, and I met a big-bellied, blond-bearded roadie for Roger McGuinn while I was reading my book by her pool.  I collected shells for my goddaughter on Sanibel Island and jammed that David Byrne and St. Vincent album for some yoga in a sunny spot of a screened-in porch yesterday, and today, Valentine’s Day, the band is driving from Daytona Beach to Tampa to play a place called the Pegasus Lounge.  We stopped to fill the tank, and Suave came out of the gas station with single red rose and some corn nuts.  (Who says there’s no romance on the road?)  We’re critically listening to a recording of a show from a few nights ago on the way, trying to map out fixes, crossing yet another bridge, passing orange groves, taxidermy shops, produce stands, more spanish moss, churches and small cows inside rickety fences, watching the sun drop.  We are here now.  It’s good because it’s real and because it’s ours.  Leyla, you’re the reminder—my eyes are open.  Thank you for that. 

a postcard with palm trees

In St. Augustine we played a motley dark bar that smelled like hamsters with an oversized, over-played Jenga game on the table and bizarre art on the walls and total characters in every corner, like the shirtless old man with the eye patch and swim trunks pulled up over his belly button, a cowboy hat and boots, and the giggly hipster chicks wearing late nineties sweatshirts and big glasses frames, and a trench coat with greasy hair and gaps in his teeth and crazy rambling stories and a line of snarky greeting cards for every occasion, and there was a friendly pit bull named Emily making the rounds whose dad busted out a violin at the end of the show and filled the barroom with gypsy fiddle before pouring me shots of well and top shelf tequila to see if I could tell the difference with my scarf tied over my eyes (I could).  And we laughed from our bellies the whole way back to Daytona and when we got there, walked out onto the dock into the the wind whipping off the Halifax River, far away and making a home in each weird moment.  

When I start to look at the collection of experiences, the piling up of them, like some kind of trick door prize multiplying in my hands until my arms are full and I'm dropping pieces and laughing and dropping more, the heft of them becoming this beautiful, rolling thing, a bulky ship barreling forward with no chance of turning around, I barely have time to jot down even the highlights because the whole damn thing is a passionfruit; a riot of glitter bombs; a hysterical game changer; a lucky button; the cost, the quest, the antidote; the stampede of wild beasts I’ve been asked to run with—and I can’t not join them.  I can’t!  Still I am dripping with joy—still.  So maybe this is what dreams feel like when you've given everything else up and willed them into being…

I can't say it's all pretty.  That would be a lie.  There are empty rooms where we’re more of a nuisance than a draw.  And if people show, oh man, the cast of characters who stumble up to the merch table at the end, beer-and-cigarette breath slurring five inches from my face, needing desperately to tell me who I sound like and exactly what I need to do to get my career off the ground.  The sloppy advice.  So much of it.  (But there are really kind people too, who ask what we’re doing here—“There are tv shows and contests and grants and commercials and radio stations…! Why are you HERE?”)  And we get tired and hungry and sore and annoyed and snippy and lost and carsick and dirty.  I'm getting used to gas stations everywhere — restroom paper towels, shitty hand dryers, the decision to hover or sit, the ones that have coolers of fresh salads and hard boiled eggs versus glass cases of taquitos and hot dogs, stretching limbs and doing a little yoga if there’s grass, filling the gas tank (spending more and more and more money to keep afloat)… I’d also be lying if I said it wasn’t all worth it and that even the discomfort can be really fruitful in the right light.  It is. 

Last night we rocked the piss out of a room of bikers in Daytona Beach, and they invited us back—to play two mornings in a row during Bike Week, and they’re paying us a little money and lots of free drinks…in the morning.  HA!  And today Suave and I are pretending we’re on a romantic vacation, sitting on the beach in the sun—he was playing guitar and distracting me with all of the crazy, wonderful stuff he wonders about as I tried to write, and just then, feeling all warm and lazy, a biker went down right in front of us on the beach and started shouting in pain.  Suave ran over with a bunch of other people to help, and I called 911.  The ambulance came fast, but the dude was already standing up.  He and his biker friend laughed it off and got back on their bikes and rode off down the beach.  So it goes.  So much in an instant,     

And the same night of that show in St Augustine, the song we wrote for our darling Leyla girl was released and shared around, making for a lot of tearful expressions of love up there in our home in the north that from our the van before our set I watched swirl around online.  I listened to it again, thinking about her village hearing it that night for the first time, and I cried all over again.  It’s been happening to me a lot lately, silently, as I stare out the window of this crazy circus caravan with the red bolts down the side, passing spanish moss and palm trees, crossing bridges into new cities, thrilled and happy right in the core of my heart.  And she comes to mind again and again—her strength and her spirit, the day we made that video with her and how she came back after lunch wearing a gold bohemian headpiece, how charmed our neighbors were when we borrowed their daughter’s room to film—the questions they asked about her school, her thoughtful answers and bright face, always excited about something, always seeing the best, and I think of her mom and sister and the babies, and her aunt, my sweet friend, and I think about how completely unfair it is that she didn’t get to take her trip to Sanibel Island with her papa this year—she would be here now—and how she’s losing more motor functions and her ability to form sentences and complete thoughts…and I lose it.  The news about her gets more real.  This is horrifying.  It’s impossible.  But it’s happening.  And all we can do about it, from here, is to continue living in this huge, full way—to Live Life Like Leyla. 

We'll return home a little different, like a friend's kid you haven't seen in a while that suddenly has a couple grownup teeth and is learning her multiplication tables.  The songs will have evolved, and us with them.  There will be jokes only we understand, and memories we’ll only have with each other.  I will not take this time for granted.  I will grow and continue to see and expend the best parts.  So for Leyla and for everything I’ve learned about work and payoff, I choose to do it all with love, every time.  It is an act of will.  It's a promise.