Gift # 7 - Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Cover)

Hey.

Here's the last gift I want to talk about this week.

Not doing well.  Can't sleep much. Just hours and hours in my own head. Nothing seems to help.

I'm either blunted and fatigued beyond sensation, or I'm just a ball of panic.  And I don't know what to do.

My father had a lovely singing voice. It was gentle and rich, not tinny and high-strung like mine.  He was self-conscious about pitch, though, and would only sing on car rides to the kids or at night, as we slept.

While not a religious man, he had a deep affinity for spiritual songs. I remember the first song he ever sang me, "Michael Rowed The Boat Ashore".  It's the only time I'd get chills hearing the word "Hallelujah" sung so simply, with such love and power.

At the funeral, my mother requested I play Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, one of his favorite songs.

So I learned it.

And it's so goddamned heart wrenching, you know? 

It's a song people without hope sing.

When your mortal life is spent and each moment is a unblinking terror, it's a song for people who fervently wish that the next page is a pain-free, comfortable respite.

It took me a month to get it down without shaking and weeping each time I tried to play it.  Did it okay at the funeral. I held the guitar on my knee and took deep breaths, watching the vapor strike the foggy air.

Here it is.

lyrics

chorus
swing low
sweet chariot
comin for to carry me home
swing low
sweet chariot
comin for to carry me home

first verse
you know i looked over jordan
and what did i see
comin for to carry me home
a band of angels
comin after me
coming for to carry me home

chorus

second verse
you know im sometimes up
and sometimes down
comin for to carry me home
but still my soul feels heavenly bound
comin for to carry me home

chorus

third verse
i say
if you go on and get there before i do
comin for to carry me home
tell all my friends that im coming too
comin for to carry me home

chorus

home
home
i really hope youre home

Gift #6 - Scarf and Mittens

Hey.

I've always been fiercely jealous of people who can make arts and crafts.

Never been able to pull it off, myself.

Today's gifts come from my good friend Jennifer Moraca. She's a fabulous actor/singer who makes some delightful work with yarn as well.

You must read her work .  She's a bright, passionate sort on all things creative, political, and personal.

Over the holidays, I got to see her briefly and swap gifts.

She made me these exquisite mittens with snaps so you can open them if needed. And in my favorite color, too.

For comparison, on the right is the one of the first knitting projects she ever made, and her first scarf.

I love that scarf.  Once, I made someone drive over an hour back to a restaurant just so I could recover it (having lost it in a diner after a funeral)  The first creative stirrings we make can can often embarrass us, or
dishearten us as we try to improve and grow in our artistic lives. But they're so vital.  They're touchstones to raw, vibrant expression. Without this fire, art's technical and passionless.

Gift #5 - Bicycles

Hey.

Here's another gift I gave out as a child, and another story about my father.

During high school, my father owned several bicycle stores called SPOKES AND SPORTS.  The shops were located near run down bars and 99 cent stores. They never made much of a profit, but they gave my father several years of peace, working on his own terms.  We kids would work there when we weren't busy with school or other extra-curricular activities. 

I remember the grease and dirt. Carpets were matted and sticky with it. The smooth-talking meth addicts who smiled too easily and always hung around my father. The quiet, mumbling, lanky teen who was the only other employee who wasn't a family member.  He killed himself by sticking his head in the oven.

One Christmas, my father woke up the kids.  We headed to the store, and loaded up a dozen or so refurbished bikes.  Then, he revealed that he had been working with a local charity, finding families even worse off than us who wanted bicycles for Christmas.

We spent that morning traveling around the Central Valley, saw a lot of overwhelmed and teary kids.
My father never smiled as bright as he did that day.

He did well.

Gift # 4 - A Calendar

Hey.

I'm reposting this from a prior essay about my father.  Still one of my favorite gifts ever.

1995. I was about to start my senior year of high school, and we were broke. My grades in school were commendable, I was part of a wide variety of volunteer groups and extra-curricular activities, but that wasn't going to be enough to get me out of my hometown and into college.  My dad knew this.  Because I was aware of how bad things were, money-wise, I asked my parents not to get me any gifts for my 17th birthday, which occurred during the first week of school.

The morning of my birthday, I get a knock on the door, and my dad comes into my room.  I made you something, he drawled.

And then he pulled out a large office calendar and laid it softly on the bed. The calendar was covered with two kinds of ink:  Red for one month prior, and Black for the final due date.  In the back of the calendar, he had included application after application for scholarships.  In the pre-internet world, my own father had spent months researching scholarships, printing out applications, and charting exactly when submissions were due.  For me. 62 scholarships in all.  I still tremble when I think about it.

That year, I completed all but five, and I won five scholarships from that batch.  That, combined with serendipity allowed me to go to college.

Gift #3 - Handmade chess set

Hey.


As I've mentioned before, I grew up poor. What shaped that experience with pride was watching my parents create highly orchestrated, loving gifts using little more than time and care.

For my 9th birthday, my father finally revealed the secret project he'd been making in his makeshift wood working area in the garage.

He had spent several months making a portable chess set for me. Took a standard metallic board and used his divine crafting skills to make a work of art.  Still takes my breath away when I see it.

The chess set folds in half and locks shut with a latch.  Here's what's underneath:

Soak that in. For a nine year old boy, he made this ornate sliding set of liners with a foam backing for the pieces.  All of them, capped with magnets under a velvet base.

For years, I took it everywhere with me.  Spent lunches at school with the chess set.  Didn't play a whole lot of games with the kids (because it was the fourth grade and chess wasn't very fashionable), but I'd play one or two quirky pals of mine.  Or, just slowly open and close the drawers and marvel and the precision and passion my father gave a creative project.

After loaning it to a friend for a several years, I got it back over the holidays.  It's banged up a little, and over a quarter of a century old. But it's so beautiful.

Gift #2 - The Stinky Toe Sandwich Song - for my nephew, CD

Hey.

Running on an hour of sleep and was tempted to make the second gift this week another somber one.

Thought better of it, today.

Today, I want to push past the sad swimming round my guts.

Despite what I'm dealing with, I got up, did a wonderful production of  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this morning.  Hugged a few kids in the audience afterwards.  Days like these remind me that making things, making theatre, is ardently bigger than me.  Than my ruddy flaws and fears.  That if I just show up and be present, good things can happen.

Last week, when I was back in California, staying at my sister's home, when I wasn't holed up in bed trying to sweat or sneeze or cry out all the sick and grief, I got to play with my nephew CD (Carter David).  He's two, and the first time I brought out my guitar for him, he started dancing. Then, he rushed to his parents room, and handed me a fistful of dollar bills.

So, it's a given that whenever he wakes up from a nap, or is about to take his evening bath, dance parties with Ole Uncle Jara are gonna be rockin' !  Dance parties consist of him worming around my air bed while I sing and play him my songs.

I wrote this one just for him.  He picked up a habit of saying "No way" to my sister, and this silly tune got him to change it to "no, thank you".  If you have kids, or love songs about stinky toe sandwiches, listen and smile.

I know  - in the same month, I write this song, and the saddest song in the world? 

It's all Walt Whitman up in this dome!

Happy New Year, and thanks for reading my odes and nonsense.

LYRICS

stinky toe sandwich
whats that
stinky toe sandwich
ooo weee
stinky toe sandwich
oh boy
out comes the stinky toe sandwich

one bite
no thank you
one bite
chomp chomp
no thank you
one bite
no thank you
one bite
chomp chomp
no thank you

Gift #1 - 21 shell casings

Hey.

Back in the city.  Spent a week in CA to see my family.  Buried my father Friday.

Still not well. Bad head cold. Sleeping no more than an hour or so a night.

This week, I'm gonna write about seven gifts, ones from past and present, that I've been given or that I've given out.  It's a way to keep moving.

And, to really kick my ass, I'm using the first gift as a chance to write my first new poem in over a year and a half.

Before I was an actor, before I was a writer or a singer or a playwright or a songwriter, I wrote poems.  Thousands of terrible poems. I wouldn't even talk to women.  I'd just write them these impromptu poems and leave them at their table.  Or while sleeping on a train. I thought poetry would forgive me. Minored in poetry writing in college.  For five years, earned more money and awards after college for poetry than I did in acting. And the poems slowly became more cohesive - less second-hand e.e cummings and Russell Edson - and more authentic.

But then I self-published a book of poems, RAMSHACKLE  (it's so cheap and so good and it has poems about people eating suitcases and drunk weathermen - go buy it like crazy) ,  and I stopped.  Acting and songwriting took over.

Here's the poem and the description of the first gift.


FIND THE PEA

The flag, folded and snug,
Slouches against my mother's breast.
My brother, with quiet mercy,
Offers her his hand. 
My nephew paws at the lip of his hoodie,
Trips and shuffles along the grass with his father.
My sister warms her brittle fingers.
She does not cry.      She keeps
Tradition.

I ease out of the wobbly plastic chair
when the honor guard captain
taps me on the shoulder.  I turn,
and see him hold up the shells
from the twenty one gun salute.

He grabs my hand,
slides the metal caskets across my palms.

People keep these.

My father in ashes, not three feet away
boxed in a wooden enclosure the size of a newborn.

He has a shell.

My brother, his humor, his love.
My sister, her son, her resolute strength
My mother, her faith , her determined ability to tell the same story seven different ways
to seven different people.

I'm going rotten
And I know it
If I don't grow some enamel quickly