To Middle Tennessee

Today I'm traveling with a group of honors students to Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, where we will attend annual conference of the Tennessee Collegiate Honors Council. It'll be a short trip, so even though I'll be just a few miles southeast of Nashville, I won't get to do any of the usual stuff I do when I travel to that area—no visit with Mark, Becky and jb, no trip to a restaurant or microbrewery.

Yet even without the usual company and experiences, I still feel that well of nostalgia and memory rising up inside me. For nearly 10 years—through most of the 1980s and most of my 20s and into my 30s—I lived in Nashville and worked on being a songwriter and a star. Those were both difficult and halcyon days, and they have done a great deal to color the character that I have now. I wonder about them—and at them—often.

I've told the story of the White Water Band here, but the story of the Nashville days remains, for the most part, untold. For now, let's just say that "Nashville Days" are coming soon.

Listening Generously

This is a passage from Rachel Naomi Remen's book Kitchen Table Wisdom, read as part of a Speaking of Faith program entitled "Listening Generously: The Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen." While this passage is particularly about doctors and patients, it could just as easily be about any number of professions.

For some time now Dieter had suspected that the chemotherapy was no longer helping him. Convinced at last of this, he spoke to his doctor and suggested that the treatments be stopped. He asked, if he could come every week just to talk. His doctor responded abruptly, 'If you refuse chemotherapy, there's nothing more I can do for you.' And so Dieter had continued to take the weekly injection in order to have those few moments of connection and understanding with his doctor. The group of people with cancer listened intently. There was another silence. Then Dieter said softly, 'My doctor's love is as important to me as his chemotherapy, but he doesn't know.'

Dieter's statement meant a great deal to me. I had not known either. Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.

But I had yet another connection to Dieter's story. His oncologist was one of my patients. Week after week, from the depths of chronic depression, this physician would tell me that no one cared about him. He didn't matter to anyone. He was just another white coat in the hospital, a mortgage payment to his wife, a tuition check to his son. No one would notice if he vanished, as long as someone was there to make rounds or take out the garbage.

So here is Dieter bringing the same validation, the same healing to his doctor that he brought to me. But his doctor, caught up in a sense of failure because he cannot cure cancer, cannot receive it.

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/listeninggenerously/index.shtml

Grammy Night

The Grammy Awards took place last night. Back in the 1980s, I would never have missed such an event. I would've read Billboard and other trade magazines to know who was nominated for all the major awards. Many of the nominees would've been in my LP or CD collection. I would've had favorites, and I would've cared if my favorites won or lost.

But that was back in the 1980s.

This morning I awoke to NPR (sorry, Mark) to find that Amy Winehouse had won five Grammy awards on Sunday night. Amy Winehouse? Less surprising than the fact that I've never heard Amy Winehouse was the fact that I'd never heard of Amy Winehouse. To my knowledge, the name never entered my ear before this morning, and yet she won five awards. And yet when the radio folks played a little of Winehouse's "Rehab," I found it surprising and interesting.

(By the way, in addition to winning most of the delegates in Saturday's primaries and caucuses, Barack Obama topped off the weekend with a Grammy win for best spoken word album—his reading of his book The Audacity of Hope.)

So where was I during the awards? I was in Asheville, North Carolina, where my wife and I joined a couple of good Cherokee friends to enjoy Dougie MacLean's solo concert at the Diana Wortham Theatre.

At 3:40, I slipped out of a Cherokee Leadership Council meeting and went outside to meet my wife in the parking lot. We drove to Erwin and met our friends and then headed over the mountain.

In Asheville, we took a chance on Kubo's, a downtown Japanese restaurant featuring sushi and hibachi menus. We did both! We started with Dynamite Rolls, Philadelphia Rolls, Eel Cucumber Rolls and California Rolls. I had Kirin, a decent Japanese beer to go with the sushi and my steak and scallops. Directly across the street from Kubo's, between us and the Diana Wortham, a Marble Slab called to us like a mythological siren. We couldn't resist. There I had some double dark chocolate ice cream mixed with peanut butter ice cream and covered it with hot fudge. (Today I'm eating Lean Cuisine and anticipating a trip to the gym!)

Dougie MacLean is a wonderful songwriter and performer. His songs are melodically beautiful and lyrically strong, and he's a fine guitar player as well. In addition to these pleasures, he's terrifically funny and engaging. If you ever get a chance to see him perform live, do it.

My favorite song of his is "Ready for the Storm," a song I first heard covered by Christian recording artist Rich Mullins. Dougie opened his second set with it last night. I'm going to try to work it up with our band at Cherokee.


Check Dougie out at http://www.dougiemaclean.com/. The photo of him is the work of Roger Liptrot and can be found at www.folkimages.com/dougiemaclean.html.