August 26, 2022

HS16: JR - Times Like These

If you’re from the midwest or have ever looked out the window of a plane while crossing this awe-inspiring country of ours, then you’ve seen the vast expanse of flatness, broken up by rivers, lakes, and mesas, that shapes the “heartland” of the U.S.A.   

The flatness lends itself to a singular advantage once you’re back on the ground: the clouds are in charge and they stretch on for infinity, casting shadows onto an ever-hanging tableau across the prairie.

My family—both my mom and my dad’s kin—are from Kansas, and I spent more than a few summers (though now I wish it’d been more) trekking there from the east coast. When we were lucky enough to fly, I’d try to set up my yellow Sony Sports Walkman so the song would hit at precisely the moment the plane took off. It was a rush. U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” was my go-to. Stop, start, stop, start, stop, start…until I matched the exact time the plane’s wheels left the ground to the exact time when Larry and Adam jump in and the song goes stratospheric. The moment is 1:06-1:10, if you ever want to try.

The opening of that song still gives me chills and always reminds me of heading west.

Last week, I flew west again, this time to Wichita, KS, thinking it would be my last trip there for a very long time. I’d been summoned by finitude—a message from my closest cousin that our 97-year-old grandmother was hovering near the Light.

97 and fucking amazing!

Our grandmother, the bootlegger’s daughter, was the funniest, feistiest, iron-clad, hardest-working, sharp-as-a-tack-until-the-moment-she-passed woman you’ve ever met, and she saw everything—from the tail of the Great Depression to all the wars to space travel to cell phones to the near-demise of the republic (she was a dyed-in-the-wool Kansas Catholic Dem). Ever read The Grapes of Wrath? Old Tom Joad could’ve been her Pa. Did I already say she was funny as all get out?

Holding vigil at the assisted living center gave me plenty of time to think. I thought about my family in the west. I thought about how much I love my people at home in North Carolina. I thought about trees and roots and disappearing. And I thought an awful lot about what life is and what it’s not, about what counts in the end and what doesn’t (at least to me).

And today, digging for what to write you, I landed on this thought: my grandmother’s life, my connection to this place of hers, the things she witnessed and shared with those she loved, and everything she represents vibrate throughout my work. Hers is a pioneer’s tale. It’s all in the songs, and it’s still present in my struggle (some days) to write them.

Any mention of a sheriff or a get-a-away, of vastness, plains, or bending wheat, of hands working, any hint of family trees, or of stars that seem to collapse into the ground—it’s all from tiny towns like Hays, Atchison, and Great Bend. Whiskey mouths and bottlenecks. Good luck charms. Masks. Punching in and punching out. I can make it if you can.

Kansas is in the songs. She is in the songs. 

I’ve come to think this won’t be my last trip to, as the t-shirt I wore home read, WichitAwesome, after all. I know I’m not done writing songs yet, and now I’m reminded more than ever that I know to look out west if I need a place to start the next one. 

I’ll start the next one tonight. Because I know finitude. I know vastness and clouds that dance. And I know the pale horseman is coming for me, too, someday.

Rest in peace, Mimi.

Yours,

JR