Full of Joy

I will do my best to condense the last few weeks of experiences: 2 weddings, 3 trips, numerous impromptu jam sessions, the reemergence of 2 long, lost friends and a box full of old LPs.

I didn't take any notes during my sister's pre-week, pre-wedding celebration when many future in-laws and friends of her future groom came from England to help them celebrate. This photo was taken on the last day in Missouri and before they all went off to their respective destinations: New York, England and Disneyworld. I was able to make a connection with my sister's, husband's brother and convince him to take my card and CD to Goldie in Bovingdon and try to get an autograph for me. (For those who don't know, Goldie is a graffiti-artist turned jungle DJ who started a record label called Metalheadz and was featured in the movie "Snatch".) He is also half Scottish, half Jamaican = a great mix of Celtic madness and pure Caribbean soul.

I accompanied my wife to a dance workshop in St. Louis on the weekend after the wedding and spent most of the day in Forest Park. The following is dated 6/9/07 Forest Park, 2:45 pm:

I dropped my wife off for her dance workshop this morning then asked for directions to "Music Folk" from a friendly woman who struck me as a local. In the course of the drive to the music store, I went thru Webster Groves and had a kind of an eerie flashback to the time when there might have actually been significant groves in this very pleasant - and very suburban - community near St. Louis.

As I passed thru busy intersections, I visualized the trees and imagined a place where people had once identified the space by the presence of trees, their full foliage character changing with the seasons and associated with a very unique and special location: none other like it and instantly recognizable by the trees. How had the presence and the character of those trees, those groves, helped people to cope with life and love and death since time immemorial? I thought back to the recent ice-storm devastation of our trees in Springfield, some of which simply perished but all will never be the same again.

Stopping by a local cafe and opening a local paper to the real estate section and eating my oriental egg wrap, I couldn't help but wonder about all the agony and ecstasy that had gone on in each of those spaces: births, deaths, marriages, divorces, affairs, promotions, firings, ill-timed breakdance sessions - every single range of experiences conceivable.

So, being back in Webster Groves reminds me of the summer that I came up to stay with the Bowers, who were friends of my parents with children all about the same age as my family. I was such a square, country boy in the tubular suburbs and I thought that I had just died and gone to pre-pubescent suburban heaven. Before I came to the city, I had a breakdance class at the YMCA, so I felt that I could travel anywhere in the big city unimpeded by spending my new currency of waves and worms and breaks. When I visited Dan's friend's house in Webster Groves and watched Prince's "When Doves Cry" on MTV for the first time, I was possessed by the spirit of breakdance, which beckoned me to break, wave, worm and moonwalk. (I might have even tried a windmill, but I had to miss that last class since I came to the city to try my new moves.) They were not impressed.

Later at the art museum, I was in awe of the spaces that had been animated by the artwork of centuries ago. However, some of the most impressive objects in terms of sheer magic were the items from Africa and Oceania: a West African anti-sorcerer's cape with the beak of a bird and numerous other totems woven into the dark burlap cloth, a primitive mask from Paupa New Guinea that turned out to be an actual human skull covered with clay and shells and real human hair. The whole Oceania display seemed rather dark and sinister, but that was possibly due to the fact that all the artifacts were housed in a dimly-lit basement....

Hmmm. One wedding and one trip thus chronicled. The other facets of my extended absence from my beloved, literary homeland include a last minute decision to travel to Overland Park, Kansas for a barbeque held by the Executive board of the Midwest Highland Arts Fund where we were joined by none-other than the legendary Fred Morrison, crown prince of Celtic kitchen piping; a wedding in Eureka Springs at the famous glass-and-wood chapel in the boondocks that i can't remember the name of except the fact that it's a Fay Jones original; a cruise by Harrison where a fellow piper-dancer couple fed us with good food and good advice then sent me off with a box full of old Celtic music LPs including the Chieftains in China and the title track of this post "Full of Joy."

Two weddings, three trips and a box full of LPs down. 2 long lost friends to go. Well, one of my friends contacted me out of the blue and said that he was going to be in town to visit some friends and could he stop by. Later that week, we had a beer together on the back porch, and he told me of the work that he has been doing as a firefighter and a GIS mapper on an indian reservation. He laughed, "Indians don't even refer to themselves as native Americans but as indians!"

Contact with the other friend happened in a much less straightforward way: at the bbq in Overland Park, myself and several other pipers were playing music with Fred Morrison and in walks a guy who looks so familiar, someone who I thought that I should know, but my conscious brain would just not allowed me to perceive him in the new context.

I just shrugged it off and thought, "Ehhh, that guy just looks Scottish, that's all. Could be anyone." Furthermore, I had gotten burned by that whole, "Are you so-and-so?" line and it turns out that the new person has nothing to do with the old person. (Actually, I found out that even when I lived in Asia and was surrounded by thousands of complete strangers a week - Koreans - I could still pick out someone who would inevitably remind me of someone else - an American - at home.)

Needless to say, I played the whole "I wonder if that guy IS who I think he is" game way too cool and didn't approach him. After the fellow in question had left and speaking with a fellow piper outside, I found out that the fellow in question had, indeed, relocated to Kansas and was taking on new students. This guy was the guy! After a 2-hour call last night to catch up on life between here and Scotland, it was decided that I am going to Kansas next week for a bagpipe lesson. Awesome!