Road Notes Vol. 7
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Four + months after thyroid surgery, here I am on the other side...back to work and flying home to the Cape after a concert at Unity Village near Kansas City. Can you say 'Whew!'? I can. Standard protocol after my type of operation is something called radioactive iodine treatment, involving among other things, two weeks of low-iodine diet (no salt, dairy, chocolate, or flavor for that matter) to prepare the body for the 'radiation cocktail' which would 'ablate' any residual thyroid cells (and who knows what else along with it!)...did the diet, and on the morning of the day I was to go in for the beverage, I knocked a glass fish off the shelf in the shower (don't ask) and caused a huge gushing gash on my right foot just before I was trying to get out the door to drive the 2 hours to Boston/Mass General...Passover at sundown that night...the ORIGIN of Passover: the Jews were seeking freedom from slavery in Egypt, but the King of Egypt refused to release them, whereupon God brought plague after plague upon the Egyptians in an effort to persuade their leader to release his captives. When all else failed (floods, famine, locusts, water into blood, for a complete list see 'The Ten Commandments' with Charlton Heston) God sent the Angel of Death to slay the first-born son in every Egyptian household as punishment for their enslavement OF the Jews. The Angel of Death would "pass over" the home of Jews who had smeared their doors with blood as a signal)! Back to the present...Tricia helped my patch the gash right up, but as I then drove to the hospital I realized that I had merely smeared MY home with blood to keep the Angel of Death from coming in to OUR house through this ordeal...then as they DREW blood at the hospital, what was playing EXACTLY at the time mine was filling the tube? "How does it FEEEEL..." as sung by Bob Dylan. I love folk music. |
...a very satisfying weekend recently completed in my native Midwest with some of my most revered amigos and role models (including Kim and Reggie Harris, Magpie, Pat Humphreys and Sandy Opatow, Greg Greenway, and John Flynn) doing the music of Phil Ochs (and us!) to crowds in Appleton and Madison (WI), Chicago, and Ann Arbor, MI. Since I moved back east from Seattle in 2000, I've joined up with these cool cats (herded by Phil's sister Sonny) and we get together a couple weekends a year or so to sing completely relevant topical songs that happened to have been written 40 years ago by a master of melodies and lyrics. Truly inspiring. And in case you thought it was all roses and lollipops, I did manage to transport a stomach flu to the tour from Cape Cod that hit me on the third day, bringing me down the joyous memory lane of hurling liquid from my body from all conceivable places. Nuff said.
On my flight back home that Tuesday morning I couldn't help but note the irony of the powerful immigration march in Chicago (and elsewhere) the previous day juxtaposed over what happened to me as I checked in at O'Hare Airport...I came early to hopefully go standby and get home sooner and because I fly a lot on one particular airline, I get to use the shorter lines and check my bags at the first class counter...so I randomly got a very friendly agent who looked at my guitars, then my driver's license and said "I know who you are, and I'm a fan"...immediately I'm thinking he's got me confused (yet again) for David Lee Roth, but he rattled off names like Greg Brown and Garnett Rogers and revealed he was from Texas and had first heard of me on one of my many trips down there over the last 20 (gasp!) years...what are the odds? Better at winning the lottery, I imagine.
This fellow named Alan said it looked good for me catching the earlier flight and also offered to buy any CDs I had in my suitcase, but instead I just gave him one and thanked him for the boost to my immune system he'd just given me. He then handed me a boarding pass for the earlier flight in FIRST CLASS. My mind flashed to the 400,000 who had marched the day before in my hometown (without ONE arrest or incident of violence reported by the Chicago Police related to this huge gathering - a miracle and testimony to it's organization and intention) and I asked myself "Can I really sit IN First Class after witnessing such a powerful demonstration? Shouldn't I be back in coach with the rest of "us"? Doesn't First Class embody the insulation of the wealthy and powerful from what's really going on in the world? I looked him in the eye and said...
"Thank you."
So it was home for a day, followed by a luncheon presentation for 200 hospice nurses in Boston on their annual appreciation day (my dad was well served by Hospice when he passed 11 years ago, and my cousin Michele is a pediatric hospice nurse in California - talk about a heart-wrenching job), and up yesterday morning at 3:30 to drive yet again back to the airport for that flight to KC from which I am now returning 24 hours later...alas, no recognition at the airline counter for any of these four flights, so back to coach I go...
-David |
