Writings from the Dirt Road

A couple of weekends ago my daughters were flower girls in a wedding. They were beautiful in their dresses. They were also perfectly behaved in the wedding. I sat in the front row of the church and silently whispered “don’tmakeascenedon’tmakeascenedon’tmakeascene” I was terrified one of their tempers would pop when something went wrong as they walked down the aisle putting flowers down and they would embarrass us and the bride and groom. (The bride apparently did not mind, she wanted them in wedding precisely hoping they would do something funny during the ceremony.) They were perfect. They did a perfect job and they were beautiful. We then went to the reception and they danced like fools the entire night having the time of their lives. It was the perfect weekend, except that my father was in the hospital.

Walking out of the wedding rehearsal, I got a call that my father was in the emergency room. He was having complications from a relatively simple outpatient surgery. I spent the weekend driving back and forth from the hospital to the wedding. It’s a terrifying thing to see your father in a weakened state the first time, but gradually, gradually his strength returned and he went home a couple days after the weekend. I was very conflicted during the weekend. I felt guilty having a good time at the reception, but there wasn’t much I could do and the doctors were doing their job.

One thing I’ve learned this past year is how many guys don’t have good relationships with their fathers. I guess I’ve always taken our easy-going interactions for granted. Dad and I have totally different likes. He’s a master of wood-working and I couldn’t carve something to save my life. I’m a big sports fan and he cares a little bit about Georgia Tech (also his Alma Mater) but is generally indifferent to sports. Nonetheless, I’m fascinated when he shows me around the garage displaying every amazing figurine, plaque, and other carvings and he humors me by sometimes going to games with me and listening to me carry on about players and strategies. When I visited him in the hospital he was pretty lucid each time, but we didn’t talk about anything too deep. On Friday night he told me to make sure my father-in-law ate plenty of cake and drank plenty of beer at the wedding (done and done.) On Sunday, when he starting to feel more himself, we talked a lot about the girls. He told me he thought I was doing a great job of raising the girls and that meant the world to me. Guys never stop seeking affirmation from their fathers.

During the past year, my father, sister, and wife have all spent time in the emergency room. Thankfully none of the visits have been serious and I’m very thankful for medical staff who work so hard in a difficult job, but I’d be just fine with not seeing the inside of a hospital for a while. This weekend was been pretty representative of life lately, high highs and low lows.

The Choir is a band that I wish I had been more into when I was in high school and college. I was definitely aware of the band, I had the At The Foot of The Cross cassette and I can remember hearing “About Love” on the radio, but for whatever reason I never paid much attention to them. I even remember being invited to see them in concert on the “farewell” tour in 1996 and I passed because of some lame reason (almost certainly, “to study”.) So I’m a little thankful that since they have “stopped touring” I’ve seen the band five times in concert and bought three new CD’s from the band. At Cornerstone Festival in 2001 they released a boxed set with all of their albums up to that point and I snapped it up. Boom. I had caught up just like that and voraciously listened to them in the months afterwards. Indeed, their latest release at the time, Flap Your Wings was a comfort in the post-September 11 days with songs like “Sunny” and “Flowing Over Me”

One of the things I love most about The Choir is the delightfully odd combination of band members. There’s Steve Hindalong, the quirkly lyricist who slips in mouthfuls like “Saskatoon Lnyx” and “Chase The Kangaroo” into songs while he alternates between metronome-like precision and off-kilter swing on the drums. There’s Derri Daughtery, the demurring front-man who sings effortlessly all of Hindalong’s complex words. There’s Tim Chandler, the massive man that was so in-demand as a bass guitar player in the 80′s and 90′s that he often was in two or three bands. There’s Dan Micheals, a combination of an anachronism from the 80′s on saxophone and also part of the source of the band’s signature sound with eerie electronic woodwind sounds from the lyricon.

Touring for the first time since 2005 (long after they said they were finished touring back in 1996.), the band came to the small venue in Dallas, Georgia where I saw the 77′s just a couple weeks ago. The band is celebrating the 25th anniversary of their album Chase The Kangaroo, an album that in my opinion was where the found their signature sound. The concert was billed as an “acoustic show” reinterpreting the album, but it turned out it was not that all. With Tim Chandler and Dan Michaels as suprise additions, they played the album straight through with only small variations from the album. Some of the songs like “Consider”, “Sad Face”, and “Chase The Kangaroo” have long been concert staples and they ripped through those songs with ease. The deeper cuts hadn’t been played in decades, or at all (Daugherty quipped that he couldn’t wait to read someone on Facebook post “and it shows”) but I really liked hearing “The Rifleman” in particular. After running through the album, they played a cut from their new album The Loudest Sound Ever Heard which is about to release. I was hoping they would play more from the new album, but that was the only song for the night. That was my only disappointment for the show, but they played it a little safe by sticking to some of their classics to wrap up the show. The upside though, was that the band sounded really tight and rehearsed and I really enjoyed seeing the band play with such confidence. For a band that everyone assumed ended almost 15 years ago, the band is enjoying a nice little revival with three albums now in the last two years and an actual tour.

More photos of the show on Flickr

Weeks late, I know. It’s not like I’ve been doing anything

77′s frontman Michael Roe teamed up with former bandmate David Leonhardt for a little tour on the road that reminded me a little bit of the “It’s For You” tour they did 15 years ago. Whereas that tour was mostly unscripted, taking requests from the audience for most of the show, this tour had a much more fixed agenda. Supporting a double-album (or triple-album, depending on how much you wanted to pay) re-release of the 77′s classic album Sticks and Stones, Roe stuck mostly to reinterpreting this album that had been out-of-print for many years.

Billed as an “unplugged concert”, Roe ended up playing mostly electric guitar for the songs. Many of the songs had not been played in years, decades even, leaving some room for reinterpretation. The show was the first of the tour and it was clear that Roe and Leonhardt were still learning the songs as they tentatively played out some unfamiliar work. Playing without a drummer they supplied all of the drum tracks via an iPod that Roe jokingly named “Britney.” The drum tracks provided a necessary backbeat to the electric guitar, but were a pale substitution for a live drummer. The material from Sticks and Stones is some of the strongest of the 77′s library and that came through a little bit in the show, even if the show felt a little like a live rehearsal. To their credit, Mike and David handled the show with humor and kept the crowd involved so that it felt like a very intimate, personal affair. Roe told many personal stories from the era of the album. The era was a trying time in his life where he had lost his job, saw his band disintegrate, and go through a divorce. His candor shed some light on some of the songs and added to the personal nature of the show. It would interesting to hear this show again after they have played a couple nights on the road and gotten comfortable with the songs.

The show was hosted by the Area 251/Reallife church in Dallas, Georgia in an old furniture store in the middle of town. I thought I recognized the MC who introduced Roe and Leonhardt, and indeed later discover that it was Mark Blackburn, one of the creative minds behind the 90′s band Jacob’s Trouble. Now I understood the connections as Jacob’s Trouble toured with the 77′s. I really liked the coffee shop venue and it was nice to drive only 20 minutes to nearby Dallas instead of across Atlanta to go to a concert. They have The Choir on their schedule for April and I hope they host some more shows in the future. The show was very well attended for an obscure band (my friend David and I estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 people.) that I’m sure was encouraging to the venue and the artists.

I came away with some thoughts from the concert. The first was that it took a lot of healing and acceptance for Roe to spend such time unpacking a very creative, but also very painful part of his life. 20 years helps put a lot of perspective on sad events and helps a person look at struggle with a little more objective view that allows a person to see the good things that came out of that era. I’ve thought about that a lot with past events in my life and even in struggles that I’m going through now. How will I view things 20 years from now? I’m glad these wandering musicians came through our little backwoods suburb to share a little bit of their lives with us on a Saturday night.

This year’s winter has been, as a pleasant surprise, pretty mild. After last year’s bitterly cold season, I could get used to weather like this. Nonetheless, short days and (still somewhat) cold weather has me in my typical winter funk. I’ve been making conscious effort to improve some of my bad habits and attitudes and I have found, unfortunately, that it only takes a day, nay hours, to totally undo what I have been working on for months. So, here I am no further along at complimenting people more, exercising more, eating better, or handling bad situations with good responses than when I started the year out.

I am thankful for Lent because it forces me to do some more self-examination when I try to decide what I want to give up for the term. Coming from the Presbyterian church, we didn’t really put much of an emphasis on Lent. I didn’t ever really give up anything until I started dating Adriene, from the Methodist church. I don’t even know if there is anything “sacred” about Lent like there is for Easter. I’m sure there are strong opinions on both sides of the argument. However, I do think it’s a good thing to figure out why we do some things and give them up for a while, if nothing else to prove they don’t hold power over us.

I don’t usually like to talk about what I give up for Lent. It’s a personal matter for me and I don’t like to parade my self-control (which is actually really poor) and self-righteousness. What I give up may be perfectly fine for someone else and it may not even be sinful at all. I do usually find out quickly just how much I miss it when it give it up for a while and that tells me a lot about myself, good and bad.

So, as I’m pondering my vices and bad habits, I’m making conscious choices to let go of some parts of my life in search of both growing deeper as a disciple and improving myself as a husband, father, and person. This year is still young yet and there is still time to achieve my goals. More than just forty days, I want to go further up and further in and throw aside the things that will slow me down.

Holy cow, what is this? I had planned to do a post about the new year and here we are already more than halfway through January. Somebody lit the fuse when I wasn’t looking and here 2012 is already burning down. I don’t really do “resolutions”, but I do have some goals for 2012 that I wanted to document and review at the end of the year to see how well I did:

• Eat better and exercise more. Of course. Like everyone. But I don’t want to start some crash diet in January and give up in a couple of weeks or kill myself in some grueling workout only to give up by the end of the month. I want to plan to run in events like Pi Mile at Georgia Tech and The Peachtree Road Race and train for them. I want to cut out bad eating habits and while I don’t need to lose a ton of weight, I wouldn’t mind shedding some pounds so I’ve got some milestones in place for the year.
• Spend less time trying to prevent negative events and enjoy positive events more often. Part of my job is trying to prevent disasters and planning contingency plans in the event of a disaster with applications. While that’s fine for work, it doesn’t translate as well at home. When I spend all my time trying to figure out how to prevent a tantrum, I don’t enjoy the time that my children are actually happy. When things go wrong, I want to see that as an opportunity to step up and achieve something unexpected instead of being disappointed that my plans didn’t go like I wanted.
• Compliment people more. Especially parents. I know how much it means to me when I’m struggling with the girls when someone says, “you are doing a great job. They are good girls.” We spend so much time comparing our children with others and touting our parenting techniques or whining about how hard it is to be a parent that we forget to tell each other, “you are working really hard and you should be proud of your children.”
• Spend more time outside. Take the girls to the playground. Go for walks alone in the woods. Run. Don’t let summer heat be an excuse to not sweat a little bit.

Some of these goals have tangible results and others are a little less concrete. At the end of the year, I’ll look back and see how I did.