Band Groupie

Tonight, I am thinking about life as a series of band gigs.

Fourteen years ago, in the fall, I was learning how to twirl a flag and march with the band in my high school marching band. There was this funny but really sort of strange boy named Paul who played a large horn (mellophone, yes?) and would often times make me giggle, or sometimes roll my eyes in response to an obnoxious noise or joke, when we happened to cross paths within the show set. I loved that he always could make me laugh. But I thought he was definitely pretty weird.

Twelve years ago, just around this time of year, my dear, oldest friend Liz was in Lincoln for her sister's college graduation. While she was visiting, I took her to a dimly lit church basement so we could listen to my friend Paul's "really cool" band play a show. We listened, appropriately mildly starstruck, good Christian high school girlies in the church fellowship hall with all of the other youth group kids on a Saturday night. We bought a CD and sticker for Liz from Paul's parents. (Seven and half years later, I was married in that same church...)

Seven years ago, once again just around this time of year, I was finishing up my senior year of college in Minnesota. Meanwhile, I was lovestruck with a boy from back home by the name of Paul. I'd get home from dance rehearsal each night to spend hours on the phone, and I mourn the band gigs I was missing back in Nebraska, too many hundreds of miles away for a weekend trip. Paul would call me at all hours of the night, after the show, after the trailer had been packed, once he was ready to fall asleep but not before he filled me in on all of the details - good and bad - of that night's music. I ached to not be there in person. One night, after a particularly hard band evening, Paul and I got into our first real argument. It was about how hard it was not being able to support each other in person at things like band gigs and dance shows, and about how this whole crazy high school friends turned romance thing might not be anything more than a pipe dream.

Six years ago, once again late spring, I had been living back in Lincoln for nearly a year. I had been to each and every band gig since my return, and become a pro "merch" seller, roadie and groupie in the process. I was back in Nebraska for this Paul boy, and for my family - trying to help fight that terrible demon of cancer attacking my father's body.

The day after we buried my father, my mother, siblings and I went back for some time alone at the quiet, prairie, farm town cemetery where my Dad had wanted to be buried. I was wearing the same favorite hoodie that I am at this very moment, only today there are small holes worn in around the elbows and wrists. I can still feel the wind whipping up on that peaceful, quiet hill, whispering all of the things that my broken heart couldn't and still can't say. My sister, always prepared, had brought along copies of the song Home on the Range, commenting how apt they seemed and suggesting that we read the lyrics there, for Dad. Whatever we could muster through tears, we did.

Where the air is so pure and the zephyrs so free
The breezes so balmy and light
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright

 When it come my time to leave this world behind
To fly off to regions unkown
Please lay my remains out on the great plains
Out in my sweet prairie home

Home, home on the plains
Here in the grass we will lie
When our days work is done
By the light of the sun
As it sets in the blue prairie sky

The very next week, in spite of life swirling around me in sea of mass chaos and grief, Paul and I kept our plans to travel to Chicago for a U2 concert. It was there, in the total cathartic experience of being immersed in music that speaks to your soul, that I felt for the first time in a long time that things might be alright again someday. Where I felt like life could possibly go on.

Just a few weeks later, Paul and the band, growing up and moving on to bigger and better things, played a farewell concert in Nebraska. Paul sang Home on the Range, and I can still remember those stinging fresh tears in my eyes. For the obvious, and for so much more - the close of a chapter in a myriad of senses. Not even a week after the show, we packed up a u-haul and moved Paul to Madison. One month later, it was me to Chicago. For our young, eager lives, the end of an era and the beginning of life as we know it.

Two years ago at this time, we were weeks away from the CD release concert for Paul's solo album - and all abuzz with preparation. We were nearly three years into life as a married couple, really starting to feel like Madison was home, and revisiting former selves caught up in the music of it all. Paul had been working tirelessly to record, mix and do all things album on his own. I filled in the details wherever I could. I felt like I'd found the old band groupie in me - hanging posters and proofing emails and deciding how to set up the merch table. It felt the same, but oh so different - this time, invested in a deeper, more tangible, more vulnerable way. Being a wife carries a bit more investment than a band groupie girlfriend, I suppose.

Tonight I sat in a sweet little coffeehouse and listened to Paul play a show. With the dreary spring (?) day and the cold rain pelting down outside, it was impossible to not become at least a little bit caught up in my thoughts. I considered the back story to each of his songs - songs that now I can say I've helped live out. And I tried my best to focus, but had to split my attention between Paul and a wee little person, darling little Adah delighted to be watching her dada make music while staying up past her normal bedtime. We left as soon as Paul was finished playing, and I thought about how I haven't stayed for a whole show since Miss Adah's arrival - how now I have to get home to the babysitter or get her home for bed - and how I hope I don't ever let these things get in the way of still going to see Paul sing. Of making sure Adah gets to do the same.

Paul sang Home on the Range tonight as a tag to his song Coming Home, and the timing of it pierced me unexpectedly, prodding at emotions that are already running high between 6 year anniversaries of loss and 1 year anniversaries of life and everyday anniversaries of being in the present moment of this time and place. My mind began spinning thinking about the through lines to my story, to our story, to the legacy we're trying to build for a family. Of prairie roots and a history peppered with band gigs and passion for those things which help the world make sense to us each. It made me hope that band gigs are always a part of this story, a constant thread that might help pull me back to center and remind me of who I am and where I came from, of the many parts that are me. And of the stories that are still waiting to be told.