Okay, so it’s been a season since I last wrote here. Did my legs magically heal and I’ve been busy running amok? Nope. I returned to work. Part-time in May, then full-time in June. Even though my work involves sitting at a desk and writing copy for a few hours a day, the toll of the surgeries has made it difficult to do much else. I was also in physical therapy for a chunk of that time, doing little rudimentary exercises that required every ounce of my energy, of which there is never much.
That said, I am better. A lot has happened since May. The biggest thing that wasn’t that big in actions: my kid graduated from high school. CJ’s always been shy and dislikes Big Celebratory Events. The morning of graduation, when they woke up to thunderstorms and a deadline to get to the school gym by 9 a.m., they promptly had a panic attack and said no. And you know what? I was relieved. Because I don’t like forced, traditional celebrations, either. All their grandparents were in from western Missouri and northern Michigan, and we were all relieved to spend a laid-back, stormy day in an AirBnB with good food and good company from a handful of friends. The lesson in this: make your own damn parties.
I’d planned on being able to cook for the party, with all the local strawberries and asparagus that was growing in time for graduation. A week before the anti-ceremony I spent a day driving around by myself, and I stopped at the farm where I used to source most of my local produce when I was cheffing. The owner looked at me like she was seeing a ghost, probably because I vanished as soon as I became too immobile to cook in early 2020. Around 20 minutes into standing and visiting with her, I shook and sweated with pain. Not from my knees, but from sciatica related to my knees. A few days later, while standing to make pie crust, the panic attack was mine when the pain returned. I haven’t tried to cook since.
If I can’t stand and cook, I surely shouldn’t try to navigate a music festival. And yet, I deluded myself into thinking I could handle the Solid Sound Festival in the mountains of western Massachusetts. A sloppy mix of the exhilaration of tasting a freedom I haven’t known in a long time, coupled with the fury of being at the mercy of a body not capable of much. Long story short: I missed most of the acts I wanted to see between being physically incapable of handling the venue (and, in one case, lack of ability to stay awake) and trying to learn how to advocate for myself and trust others to help me. I heard some resentful grumbling from a people-pleaser about the help required by me and two other people with limited abilities in our group. But that’s hers to handle, right? Right. It was buffered by friends who stayed back away from the stage to be with me, and the one who took charge and made things happen for me. That lesson: have a flight attendant friend because they get shit done.
What I did get from the experience: a reconnection with far-flung friends, being a part of something bigger than myself and my knees, and the first experience of stepping out on my own.
This really is going to be What I Did on My Summer Vacation, even though there has been no vacation, per se. Most days there has been work, sitting with my swollen feet propped up while texting friends and doomscrolling until I go to sleep. The sitting required for work causes my legs to swell, which makes the level of movement I need difficult, and I feel like I’m in a terrible cycle that’s going to lead to all that degenerative pain and surgery pain turning into a third kind of pain.
But the cycle does get broken occasionally, and I surprise myself with what I can do. Like going to Tulsa in the 110-degree middle of summer for Woody Guthrie’s birthday. Since 2018 I’ve been part of a group called Woody Guthrie Poets. Each year a Woody Guthrie song is chosen as the subject and poets can submit works that thematically relate to the song. The poets who are chosen do three days of readings: one-third of them read in Oklahoma City on the Friday nearest Woody’s birthday, another one-third read in Woody’s hometown of Okemah on Saturday as part of Woodyfest, then the last group reads on Sunday at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, where I spent four weeks researching in the archives in 2018. Somehow I always get put in the Tulsa group, and I love that because it feels like home.
The reading, as is always the case, surprised me with how humbled it left me. For some reason when I enter it’s with the idea that it’s a bunch of Woody Guthrie groupies like me, and that they probably accept everyone who submits their work. Then I get to the reading and, with each poem I hear and each poet biography that’s read, I feel more and more out of that comfortable home space I’ve carved in Tulsa.
This year I followed a poet who has a half-dozen Pushcart Prizes. I can’t even get the nerve to submit my work to Pushcart. Why am I even in this room?
While I didn’t feel like my work was nearly on par with most of the poetry I heard that day, I did walk to the stage and back without my cane and stood through my reading without pain on legs that looked like this:
My last trip to Tulsa was in September before I even knew the surgeries were happening so soon. It was right after that trip that I gave up on St. Louis orthopedists and made an appointment with one in Chicago. During that visit to the Woody Guthrie Center, I had to take the small special exhibit on protest music slowly, with breaks to sit down because the pain would start five minutes into standing, leaving my legs shaking and sweat pouring down my face and back.
This time, I started at the new Bob Dylan Center on Saturday. When the security guard offered the elevator, I passed and took the stairs. A half-flight to heaven’s door, perhaps. With my cane in hand, I stood at the counter and checked in, visiting with some of the employees before I entered through the exit as drum cracked and the organ started to wail the opening of “Like a Rolling Stone”:
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People call say 'beware doll, you're bound to fall'
You thought they were all kidding you
How does it feel?
And I sat down and sobbed.
Songs so engrained and beloved often lose their meaning. Or, more specifically, we forget their meaning. On its surface “Like a Rolling Stone” is about loss and starting over from the perspective of someone who’s not exactly sympathetic (rightfully) to the person who’s down. But in his rage he reveals the freedom of being on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown.
And never have I related to those words of Bob’s. Never have I heard them so clearly. In the dark, I sat and watched the film about him, watching people come and go, little kids dancing to his music on their nimble little legs, and felt like there is something brand new in me which I felt by going to the place that feels like my soul’s home: a room, surrounded by the artifacts of my music heroes.
The next day, before the reading, I went to the Woody Guthrie Center early. Both to see my friends Sam and Holly, and to visit the current limited exhibit of Bruce Springsteen concert memorabilia. Unlike the last time I was at the center, I didn’t have to take repeated breaks. Just one, where I slipped into the main museum area and took a seat at one of the listening stations. Beside me, an older man removed his station headphones and wiped his eyes, complaining that something was in the air. Because we still can’t just openly cry in the presence of songs. I mean, I can. I don’t care anymore. And I’ve probably cried more to Bruce Springsteen songs than those by any other artist. He was the one who taught me that the searing ring of a Telecaster coupled with the words “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” can crumple me like nothing else.
This guitar, the one that looks like the hardwood floor at the worst bar in town. The one with the Tele body and the Esquire neck. Bruce’s primary guitar from the year I was born until the year after CJ’s birth. Got a Springsteen song you really like? You’ve heard this guitar.
I stood in front of this guitar until pain got to me. I spent more time with it, glass between us, than I’d spend with Bruce if I ever met him. That would be uncomfortable. I met Joy Harjo the day before. She was walking down the street when I stepped out of the Dylan Center. And my real-life human mouth called her “Ms. Poet Larauette” and then told her I’m proud of her. Can I just sit in a room with one of her notebooks locked in a glass case instead?
But spending time with Bruce’s guitar … This is why people visit the places where their saints have been, seeing what they touched. These tools, conduits to the spirits of our idols. I can get closer to Springsteen when I meditate on his guitar in a museum than I would while panicking through a conversation with him.
I can’t get this sitting in my living room no matter how many times I watch that video of “The Detroit Medley.”
But I’m still healing and will be for a while. I’m so much better than I was, though. At this time in two weeks I’ll be in Los Angeles. In a month? Georgia O’Keefe’s ranch in New Mexico for Ladder to the Moon. My fiftieth birthday in October? New Orleans. Tulsa felt better than Massachusetts. L.A. will feel better than Tulsa. And so on and so forth. Fifty will feel better than 49. I have guitars to see and poems to write.