Midsummer Hailstorm (Danny Schmidt)

Nothing fancy tonight, but I haven't posted in a while and felt the need to honor the last day of August.  Goodbye, Birth Month... 😃💖🌅

SONG:  Midsummer Hailstorm by Danny Schmidt

BOOK:  Earth Prayers: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations from Around the World by Elizabeth Roberts, Elias Amidon

POEM(S):  Crickets by Sue Owen

Some summer nights you

can hear them getting all

worked up over this idea

of cheerfulness and song.

Deep in the grasses where

they hide, there is a need

to be heard in the darkness,

even if their voices are

so small they sound

like a door creaking on

its hinge, or the squeak

a drawer makes when

it opens up at last.

It seems as if the damp

air and dew are trying

to hold their song down

out of sheer gravity,

but neither dampness nor

darkness makes them stop.

In fact, the crickets like

to show off their song,

to let it lift up off

the earth the way that

all notes rise to the stars,

and float up through the

thick night, as if their

joy itself were the only light

we needed to follow.

before August goes by Maya Stein

Let me remember the vivid hue of the baseball green and the Little Leaguers

timid but determined at the plate. The thin film of pollen

dusting the pond late afternoon. The knocking of two woodpeckers

on the porch roof. The crunch of moviehouse popcorn. Leaves, fallen

after a thundershower, and the carpet they made of the driveway.

The view from Mt. Ida and Sugarloaf and Holyoke. Rainbow Chicklets.

Slices of tomato flecked with sea salt and ground pepper. The smells of hay

and mint and barbecue. How the light changes, incremental, until the crickets

come out. The loose threads of cutoff shorts. Lemonade stands. An ice cream drip.

And time trickling out, not a threat or cautionary tale but permission slip.

QUOTE:  “When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Summerday (Dar Williams)

Can't believe it's taken me over a week to get around to posting my review of Dar's show at Eddie's Attic in Atlanta Saturday, August 15 - then again, it's not like I've been sitting around eating bon-bons. In the last nine days, I've driven a 16 ft. Budget rental truck across state lines (686 miles/15 hours from Georgia to Florida), transitioned my youngest child back to college and reclaimed my home from three-months-of-bachelorhood status - then there's my concert series planning, of which I'm woefully behind!

Dar was with the same keyboard player (Bryn, a young man) as last time, as well as a multi-instrumentalist (Jordan, a young woman), and both added lovely embellishment in the form of harmony and musicianship - her setlist spanned her career, and she played a few we don't get to hear that often (Calling the Moon, If I Wrote You, The Hudson). She was funny, she was bright, she was *on* - her husband Michael and son Stephen were there... and Dar announced that Michael is heading out this week to Ethiopia to pick up their newly-adopted daughter (she had told me last November but, since it was said in confidence, as opposed to from the stage this time, I kept quiet...... :-)

Stephen Kellogg (minus the Sixers, who many of us remember from Falcon Ridge a few years ago) was adorable as the opening act and I loved hearing his well-crafted songs in stripped-down singer-songwriter mode - he was only alloted 4 tunes, but he absolutely won over the crowd and appeared to sell a good many CDs at the break between shows!

The Dar show was all I hoped for and more - I had e-mailed through her management earlier that week, requesting Blue Light of the Flame for mom. Dar did a most lovely job, prefacing it with some really sweet words about mom having been there last November "with her smile and her oxygen" - she then dedicated the song to Connie, Susan and her family. She also said some nice things about me and my concert series, but seriously, as soon as she starts talking, my heart begins pounding, the blood rushes to my ears and I can't hear a thing - however, somewhere in there she did say "I love Susan Moss"... I swear!

I adore the fact that Dar's stories are never the same, no matter how many times I've seen her - so entertaining... and it was fun to experience it through Kevin, my sister's boyfriend (as it was his first time seeing her) and Julia, my sister's 12-year-old daughter, who is indeed now The Babysitter...

So... Dar came out for an encore and said, "this is a request from someone who's not here to someone who is here, who I will not name"... and started telling the story of how she sang Over the Rainbow with the New York Gay Men's Chorus a few years ago (telling a funny story about Dorothy's braids vs. pigtails), and did the most gorgeous rendition of the song, adding a "Pete Seeger community inclusive spin" (her words) of "if happy little bluebirds fly, why can't you and I?" - when she finished, she looked right at me and said, "that was from sharon goldberg" (thanks, sharong)...

As we were leaving, I was approached by Carolyn, Dar's tour manager who said, "are you Susan? - Dar wants to see you"... and led us behind a curtain where we could hug and chat - really, it was amazing. I had brought her a book Mari and I had given mom for her 70th birthday... and we both signed it again for Dar - amazing night (and much love and thanks to my sister for reserving the table and allowing me to be their fourth!)...

SONG: Summerday by Dar Williams

BOOK: Winter Grief, Summer Grace: Returning to Life After a Loved One Dies by James E. Miller

POEM: Photograph of My Mother as a Young Girl by Dana Gioia

She wasn't looking

when they took this picture:

sitting on the grass

in her bare feet

wearing a cotton dress,

she stares off to the side

watching something on the lawn

the camera didn't catch.

What was it?

A ladybug? A flower?

Judging from her expression,

possibly nothing at all,

or else

the lawn was like a mirror,

and she sat watching herself,

wondering who she was

and how she came to be there

sitting in this backyard,

wearing a cheap, white dress,

imagining that tomorrow

would be like all her yesterdays,

while her parents chatted

and watched, as I do

years later,

too distantly to interfere.

QUOTE: "Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." ~ Henry James

One Summer Dream (Electric Light Orchestra)

From today's Writer's Almanac: "Today is the summer solstice and the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere. For those of us in the north, today will be the longest day of the year and tonight will be the shortest night. The entire earth is about 3 million miles farther from the sun at this time of the year. The difference in the temperature is due to the fact that our planet is tilted on its axis, and at this time of year, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, receiving more direct radiation for longer periods of time each day. It is that slight tilt, only 23 1/2 degrees, that makes the difference between winter and summer. The rise in temperature allows most of the plants we eat to germinate. Wheat and many other plants require an average temperature of at least 40º F to grow. Corn needs a temperature of 50º F, and rice needs a temperature of 68º F. "

Let there be light indeed - what an amazing metaphor, eh?

SONG: One Summer Dream by Electric Light Orchestra

BOOK: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

POEM: Light, at Thirty-Two by Michael Blumenthal

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
This morning when we woke—God,
It was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
Then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
Waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As the first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

QUOTE: "Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world." ~ Ada Louise Huxtable