Sound Bites

This is not the first time I’ve turned off cable TV.
As a first year law student living alone, I knew I could not be trusted with unlimited access to TV. Thank heaven I had dial up internet as opposed to something faster or I would never have graduated. I lived alone in an antebellum house in Georgia that had been split into three apartments. Unfortunately, shortly after I moved in, I watched The Sixth Sense and every place in the knotted pine floors started to look more ominous after dark. I became good friends with NPR almost instantly. It filled the quiet and covered the creaking floors. It was a nightlight to study by, like one of those green glass reading lamps you find in libraries.

Though I’ve kept up with NPR over the years on road trips for work, since turning off cable again, it feels like my old roommate has moved back in with me. It lingers in the kitchen as my husband leans over the counter reading or chopping. It echoes in the bathroom when the shower is running. {My parents got us a shower radio that has been a lifesaver.} This time though, I only get to hear 5 minute snippets of what my roomie has to say before I am pulled away and have to return to the online version later to find out what happened. I don’t know about you, but since becoming a parent, I’ve noticed that {on a good day} I have at maximum 15 minutes to complete any given task. Each of these posts I’ve been writing here since 2007 has been written in multiple sittings. But for the “save draft” button, I would never post anything. This post, for instance, was written in 28 separate sittings. I kept count. The shower radio is essential.

This morning I heard bits and pieces of two different stories that I hope to return to online later tonight. The first one was Michael Chabon talking about being a father and husband. He has written a new book of personal essays called, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son. The featured excerpt essay, The Hand on My Shoulder about his relationship with his ex father-in-law is so well written. I’m eager to read the rest. He says that though writing nonfiction can sometimes be uncomfortable, “the ultimate sign to me that I am on to something is if I’m squirming a little bit as I’m writing about it.”
SO true.

I’m also interested in Ayelet Waldman’s memoir Bad Mother {Waldman is married to Chabon}. You may remember her from the controversial article she wrote that ran in the New York Times a few years ago where she said she loved her husband more than her children. Oprah interviewed her about it at the time and I remember feeling like I missed the point of it all, so I’d like to give her the benefit of the doubt and try to get where she’s coming from. I love my husband and my daughter completely and in different ways and I can’t quantify one love as being anything other than a different kind of unfathomable love than the other. My daughter has begun saying, “I love you all the way to outer space,” the longest distance she can conceptualize and I feel that way too. For both of them. Still, I’m interested in reading what Waldman to say.

The second NPR piece I heard this morning was an interview with Rosanne Cash performing songs from her new album The List.
Here’s the story behind the album:

CASH: When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and he mentioned a song. We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don’t know that one. And he mentioned another. I said I don’t know that one either, Dad, and he became very alarmed that I didn’t know what he considered my own musical genealogy.

And I was very steeped in pop and rock music, and I grew up in Southern California. So he spent the rest of the afternoon making a list for me, and at the end of the day, he said this is your education. And across the top of the page, he wrote 100 essential country songs. The list might have been better titled 100 essential American songs because it was very comprehensive. He covered every critical point in Southern and American music: early folk songs, protest songs, Delta blues, Southern gospel, early country music, Appalachian. Everything that fed into modern country music was on that list. So his overview was really of a musicologist but formed by his instincts, you know, and just the rhythm in his own blood.

So I realized when he gave me the list at the age of 18 that this was an important document, and I set about learning these songs. But it took me I think until know to realize that he was really giving me himself, a part of his heart and soul.

How powerful. She is so thoughtful and articulate. She mentions a few of my favorite writers in passing {like Joan Didion and Malcolm Gladwell} and I kept thinking that I wish I could sit on a creaking porch with her with rocking chairs and quilts and have hot tea and talk about stuff that moves us. She would be, I imagine at least, that kind of friend.

On religion she says:

“I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. CASH: The pronouncements of small children. You know, I’m not the type to turn to religion in that way. I’m not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music – and children. And those three things, as well as the love of my husband, who is an amazing partner and, you know, if you ever have brain surgery, you want to call him up to do all of the vetting of the neurosurgeons and all of that business because he makes a great patient advocate.

On advising her 27 year-old daughter who just made an album and asked, “how do I have a successful career as a musician without having a public life?” she said, “And it kind of broke my heart because that was the exact question I asked at her age. And I said, I don’t know because, you know, songs are not complete until they’re heard, you know, you can’t just do this for your living room.”

I love that sentiment. I feel that way about all kinds of art. It’s not really complete until it’s shared. I always feel that contradicting tug of living very privately on one end but feeling disconnected if I keep everything to myself.

So, I have to ask, what would top your 100 list?