Jean Ritchie and Jack Langstaff sing THE PEACE ROUND

Jean is a longtime dulci-mentor of mine who is recovering from health issues. Please encourage people to sing her "Peace Round" at midnight on New Year's Eve!

Australian Woman Guides Me to Mountain View

Yesterday I drove from Lawrence, KS, through southern Kansas City (where, on a whim, I called and dropped in to visit some friends from my Kansas City days) on south through the center of the state, past the flooded rivers that comprise the western edges of Lake of the Ozarks, past Branson with all the billboards for the Best Shows Ever!  (many featuring caricatures of mountain people with goofy hats, big noses, few teeth and always, a banjo.)

My destination is the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, Arkansas, along a route that is green, green, green!  I'm listening to an audiobook entitled, "The Search for Tiger" about the beginning of Tiger Woods' incredible professional career.  

You need to know that golf is not a passion of mine.  But it was one of my father's passions.  

I recall his annual pre-season cleaning and polishing of the irons, the pitching wedge with plastic balls in the side yard, the little putting devices that would spit the ball back at the golfer.  I would look forward to his invitation to attend an early-Thursday morning golf outing, not for the game, but for the time with Dad.  Thursday was his only day off from his doctor's office and it was sacred time to spend together, getting our shoes wet in the morning dew, with the short grass clippings clinging to the sides of our shoes.  Smelling the world awaken at Tanglewood Golf Course in Wood County, Ohio.

As this story unfolds, I find myself sifting through memories of my father as I hear of the discovery and development of Tiger's natural talent into professional skills.  

My resistance to golf is softening as I begin imagining trying it again, just to feel closer to my Dad, who passed on years ago.  

Turn-Around for 2nd Tour

This was a very quick turn-around:  after the first tour of the summer, home for 2 days, then off with my spouse to southern Colorado for one wedding, back home, heading out again for a wedding on Oahu in Hawai’i.  Back for our daughter’s birthday, launder, count product and re-pack for the second tour.  I’m not complaining at all, I’m just saying.

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Friday night dinner in downtown Lawrence at a very loud Free State room, great food and company, just a very loud room very full of very loud people, added to by a nice jazz trio: guitar, sax and bass.  This is a very good way to end a very long, solitary drive!

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Joanne Hickey put together a tremendous weekend:  congregational workshop on music in worship (“Tuning into the Divine Echoes in our Soul”), afternoon Celtic workshop, evening concert and morning worship using a setting for the communion liturgy that I composed (“Christ Is Our Peace”, which I call the “blues, jazz, islands, grunge fiesta” setting.)

Once again, I am surprised by the temperate climate in Kansas in July.  Not at all the sauna-like oven I recall from  a dozen years in Kansas City.  

One More Gig

The driving distances are getting longer as I continue West. Still, my excitement grows as I draw closer to the mountains, home and family.....

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Last night I performed the final show on this first tour at the bookstore, Indigo Bridge, in Lincoln, Nebraska’s famed Haymarket District.  Lincoln is a city with with an interesting character.  The capital city of the state of Nebraska, it is second in population only to Omaha, which is situated an hour to the East.  It has the tall buildings of a larger city, the traffic patterns, congestion, attractions and population mix of a state capital and major university town.  Still, it is accessible to many people who live in the rural areas or smaller towns that surround it.  So the Haymarket is full of people, young and old, urban and rural, who are “in town” for the diversions of the evening.....

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The show draws people, once again, from different eras of my life, and I entice Bill Behmer to join me for a dulcimer-didjeridoo duet, to the delight of the audience.  Unfortunately, my godson, Aaron, is at summer camp and unable to attend this concert, but his older brother and folks—my good friends, Ron and Teri—are.  Ron did a yeoman’s job in setting up and publicizing the concert.  To my surprise, part of my compensation for the evening is the opportunity to choose a book from the shelves of the store!  Wow, so many to choose from—they don’t have my first choice in stock, but I am able to find a reader of articles chosen from the first 150 years of the Atlantic Magazine that I will enjoy….but not until I finish licking the maple-grapenut drips along the side of my ice cream from the next-door shop, Ivanna Cone!....

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Afterward, as we drive the ½ hr south to his house, the cool, moist air carries the rich smells of fertile earth, bringing forth its fruit into the winds, borne on the loud cricket symphony and night songs through the open car windows.  Ron, a radio DJ by avocation, and I reminisce and listen to some new music.  A fitting end to a fulfilling tour.....

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All that remains is the reflection time that the final leg of the journey will provide, accompanied by a novel-on-tape, written by John Grisham.  As, expected, I arrive home an evening before my family, who have been working up in the mountains for the past two weeks.  The usual rhythms of unpacking the car, beginning laundry, cleaning up the trash and re-stowing instruments in the house are conducted in their zen-like move to bring the first tour of the summer to its completion.....

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Heading Home, Herbert Hoover

A nice house concert at Dave Hawkins’ house in College Hill, Ohio (Cincinnati) offered an opportunity to play tunes with the host.  As fellow Local 1000 Board Members we’ve roomed together at the Folk Alliance in Memphis, but had never performed together, so it was fun to play on his tunes and have some back-up for a hammered dulcimer version of Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.”....

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Heading west across Indiana and Illinois, I can feel the excitement that comes with fewer vitamins left in my daily compartments.  I was able to talk on the telephone with a few people who missed the concert (one of whom lived only blocks away but had forgotten the earlier email I’d sent out!)....

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Because I had some time, I decided to stop in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum in eastern Iowa.  For those westerners headed east and vice versa, the brown sign along I-80 offers an oft-over-looked invitation to explore this former president’s boyhood home.  I am glad I finally RVSP-ed with a “yes.”....

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In my undergraduate study of history I did not form a positive opinion of the president between Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt.  This museum helped me move a considerable direction from negative to just past neutral on the positive side!  (There was a survey which asked this question at the end of the tour.)  I’m following up with a book that is tracing Hoover’s development as a “forgotten progressive” --an engineer who graduated in the first Stanford class, who operated successful mines in Australia and China, made tons of money and then decided that he needed to be involved in something larger that making money.....

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That restlessness led to his organization of an amazing relief effort, during World War I, that prevented thousands of refugees in Belgium from starving, even as both German and British militaries suspected him of being a spy for their enemies.  This, in turn, led to his becoming the Secretary of Commerce and seeking to create numerous efficiencies in production and labor relations that have had long-lasting, positive effects that we still experience.....

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He was able to bring disparate groups together and help them recognize their common interests and even set aside resistance to work together to create massive projects like the Hoover Dam, for example.....

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Despite his faith in the importance of persuasion to move public opinion, his inability to clearly communicate his own ideas and his unwillingness to take  enough decisive moves at the beginning of the fiscal crisis at the fall of Wall Street undercut public opinion which turned to view him as a do-nothing goat, rather than a life-saving hero.....

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As I read I find myself growing more sympathetic to his situation and the pressures he faced—another reminder of why I love to study history and see behind the us-or-them polemic that is often presented as truth.....