There are feel good videos circulating on the internet of people in Italy making music, playing cards and singing happy birthday to each other from their patios. I live in affordable housing in Boise, Idaho and most of my neighbors are older women with small dogs. Besides the House Finches and Warblers that visit a few of our feeders, there isn’t much action out on the patio side of the building. I did, however, have one recent conversation with my neighbor Tracy about her flea problem, she seemed blissfully unaware of the pandemic. Sometimes I can smell cigarettes, but not the fresh sharp smell of someone smoking, more like someone who smokes inside and then opens their slider.
I don’t play an instrument but I do own a Ukulele (and a Tamborine) and so yesterday I sat out on my patio and crooned along to an old favorite album while I picked at and patted my out-of-tune toy. I remember hanging with some musicians last year around a backyard fire and I asked their advice in learning to play the tambourine. They all said that playing along to songs they know and love is how they learned. I think I’d have to either get really drunk or have a big occasion to celebrate to feel like playing the tambourine from my porch is the appropriate thing to do, maybe when this thing is all over or when Tracy gets rid of her fleas. For now maybe it is best that I believe no one is listening but pretend like they are because that is when I do the best at everything
Its still edging on cold here in the mornings and evenings but they are both long and slanted with light. Some albums can really take you back to time and a place; Jackie Greene’s Sweet Somewhere Bound takes me back to another patio, in another dry valley town during a different time of self-isolation. Its the kind of bluesy, baratone, lengthy riffs and harmonica harmonies that make you want to smoke and drink and brood. In the picking through the muck, or the junk or the reminenets of disaster you find a little something that shines and gently lifts your heart. I could see someone else on their porch a couple of blocks away. They were too far away to really see, just a silhouette of a person but I imagined they could just hear me and I sang deeper and louder and with more passion, less one of the songs struck a cord.
In keeping with practicing imagination I pretended I WAS Jackie Greene, just off a bender and playing to a crowd remembering that this is why I live this lonely life and singing like I know better.