Can't predict the future
Can't forget the past
Feels like any moment
Could be the last
All you believers
Standing inside this room
Can't you see it coming
Shooting out across the moon
Robbie Robertson, RIP
In about an hour or so I’m going to the beautiful Lobero Theater to see Patti Smith and her trio. The sky is filled with light clouds and the air feels muggy. I just read the first story in Aleksander Hemon’s collection, Love and Obstacles. Over the past couple of months I’ve read a lot of Hemon’s work, and some reviews written about him. He’s a marvelous writer, inventive, precise, amusing, with depth.
I’m an unknown small town book reviewer. It doesn’t matter as much as it once did. What matters now is that I write reviews of books that interest or move me; moreover, books I choose, and the practice is just an extension of my lifelong reading habit. Until recently, I didn’t give my love of reading much thought, it’s what I’ve always done, but then it occurred to me how few people can confess to a lifelong reading habit. A compulsion to read as much as possible, in almost every spare moment, before bed and upon awakening, while waiting for a bus or a train or a plane. I have this fuzzy memory of the second grade at Hope School, the class outside seated on grass, a young, tawny-haired teacher holding a book aloft and telling the group that I had won some contest, who can read the most pages in 30 days or some such pedagogical gimmick, but it made me proud, though not as proud as when the teacher told my mother that my reading composition was far beyond an average second grader.
I’ve hauled books from every place I’ve ever lived. Japan. Honolulu. Seattle. I remember the year in Hawaii when the roof of the clapboard house my wife and I were living in in the Kaimuki neighborhood of Honolulu, sprung multiple leaks during a drowning rain and soaked my entire library. I still have some of those books on my shelves, stained with mildew. They exude an odor of decay, though that was some 40 years ago now. My first wife would be 70 now. One day I will write about her, the life we shared for eight years. So long ago.
I can say that reading changed the trajectory of my life. It opened my eyes to other possibilities, my ears to unusual sounds, and my head to ideas. In school I always excelled in writing, English and History classes, but was middling in Math and Science, with the distinction of failing an Industrial Arts class in Drafting at La Colina junior high. Industrial Arts exposed me as a mechanical ignoramus. It’s true, and to this day I’m not adept with tools or any home project of more than rudimentary difficulty; I can’t tell the difference between a manifold and a carburetor. I’m good at cleaning and maintenance, but not construction. I have a terrible eye for geometry, angles; I struggled with Math, just as my children have. If it came to pass that I had to build a shelter from the foundation up, I would fail miserably. Perhaps this is why I have such respect for tradespeople, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, roofers, who have a fundamental survival skill I will never have.
My dad wasn’t a mechanical man, either. He played golf, he didn’t tinker with engines or snake the plumbing. He was a gardener, possessed with a skill with plants that rivaled his skill with cards. He had a lathe house built in a section of our narrow patio, which was otherwise all cement, and grew several varieties of orchid. At times this seems so strange to me, my father’s love of growing things, an act of husbandry. It was absent in other areas of his life.
I’ll leave the house in about a half an hour and walk down Canon Perdido to the Lobero. It’s about a 15 minute walk at a steady pace. My ticket is at Will Call. We bought it months ago, when Smith’s show was announced, for $175. The cost is why I’m going alone. Patti Smith is a hero to me more than she is to my wife, though my wife appreciates artists and is aware of Smith’s musical work. We believe in the power of the Arts in our house, of stories, plays, songs, dances, painting and textiles. I suppose it’s the reason we are precariously comfortable.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the performance. Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, and others, now in their 70s or 80s yet still playing gigs, still making art. I think of the absolutely badass actor from “Hadestown” and other Broadway shows, Andre DeShields, a man who will never slow down. I’m talking about people with a powerful life force that isn’t constantly pointed at wealth and power, that seeks something deeper and more significant. Emotion. Beauty. Meaning.
10:15 p.m. Patti Smith was brilliant, a creative force of nature. Her voice is still strong. Her son Jackson played acoustic and electric guitars. I wonder what that’s like, playing guitar next to your mother, a legend. She played for 90 minutes and received several standing ovations. Smith closed the show with “People Have the Power.”
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