Andrew Bird's Finest Work Yet

The release of a new album by Andrew Bird is something I have no doubt will always bring me mixed emotions.

Andrew Bird was Cara's favorite musician. Although I was listening to his music before she was, he became, of all the musicians we both loved, the one who was hers. Pretty much all the others we either liked about equally well, or I was more into than Cara was. Andrew Bird, to me, was an artist I really appreciated, especially his live performances, but he wasn't in my very top tier of favorites. Cara, on the other hand, developed something of an obsession. (I just loved the passion she had for his music, and how excited she would get about it! On a related note, I always enjoy revisiting her review of his April 2009 Cleveland show.)

So whenever Andrew Bird releases new music, I feel a deep sense of sadness that Cara is not here to experience that music. I want to listen to it with her, and talk about it with her, and most of all, to take in another of his unforgettable live performances with her. And it's not even just about wanting to do those things with her. I also just want Cara herself to be able to listen to Bird's new music because I know how much joy it would bring her. (But maybe, somewhere, she can hear it?) I think, honestly, that there are very few things in life that make me miss Cara more than listening to a new Andrew Bird album or attending one of his shows.

At the same time I feel that sadness, I also feel happy that I'm here to experience his music and that it is and always will be something that helps tie me to Cara.

Last month Bird released the cheekily titled My Finest Work Yet.

(A couple of months before the album release, a YouTube video with the audio of opening track "Sisyphus" was put online, and the first part of the video featured a series of laudatory quotes flashing onto the screen:

"MESMERIZING" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"SEARING" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"DESERVING OF ITS OWN STREAMING PLATFORM" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"ICONIC" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"BIRD AT HIS BEST" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"YES" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"JUST WOW" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"A SWASH-BUCKLING ROMP" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

"I THINK 'MY FINEST WORK YET' IS MY FINEST WORK YET" - Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter

I enjoyed this far too much. Also, the video proper for "Sisyphus" includes Bird on a bicycle. Cara would have loved it!)

After giving the album a good number of listens, remarkably, I think there may be merit to the claim that it (Bird's twelfth solo studio album) is his finest work yet.

When you listen to a new Andrew Bird album, to some extent you have a good idea of what you're getting into. The exceptionally talented singer-songwriter has developed a sound that is very much his own, a brand of indie folk/rock that is highlighted by his violin playing, his remarkable talent for whistling, and his distinctive vocals and lyrics. Each album tends to have its own sound, but the sounds of most of the albums occupy the same general musical space. My Finest Work Yet is no different, but there's something about this one that feels like Bird has just taken all the elements that made his previous music so good and melded them together in a really sublime way. Also, I felt that some of Bird's previous albums could have used a little editing; they perhaps ran a little long (2012's Break It Yourself in particular). His most recent full-length before MFWY, 2016's Are You Serious, on the other hand, I felt suffered from too many of the songs being relatively short in length; the music didn't have enough space to breathe. His latest threads the needle perfectly with ten songs that all feel essential to the album, and each song is given the space it needs - the contemplative, six-and-a-half minute "Bloodless" is an especial highlight.

There is one way that MFWY actually is a significant departure in sound from all of Bird's previous albums, and that's in the prominent role of a piano in most of the songs on the album. But here's the thing - until I read the interview with Bird that is included in the liner notes, it didn't even occur to me that it was unusual for his music to have much piano. That's how naturally it's integrated into his style. The piano helps give a jazzy feel to a number of the tracks and it really suits Bird so well.

Putting an interview with the artist in the liner notes of an album is unusual, but I think it was a really good idea. The interview gave me a lot of interesting insight into Bird's mindset and process of making the album. I learned, for example, that the album was recorded live: "live vocals, no headphones, no separation. We were trying to get all the instruments to bleed into each other's mics in a pleasing way as opposed to a messy way." Like the interviewer (author Dave Eggers, who went to high school with Bird), I would never have guessed it was all recorded live, but now that I know that, I can picture it while listening to the album and I can see how it could have helped give the album the very pleasing sound it has.

I also liked Bird's discussion of writing a song and picturing playing that song live, including potentially playing it live many years in the future: "There's one song I've been doing for 16 or 17 years now, almost every show. It's called "Why," and it's a conversation between two people - an argument, if you will - and in it, I'm mostly playing the role of the other person in the relationship that I find myself in, a person that's frustrated with my passiveness. So, in the whole song, I'm getting mad at myself, and I'm playing myself as well. It's mostly the voice of the pissed off person that's like, "Why don't you show more passion? Why don't you get mad?" And I get really mad, every night, and it never fails. I don't think I've ever written a song where I get so much satisfaction over berating myself, or my former self."

Cara loved "Why." It was one of her favorite songs. I remember the first time we saw him together, twelve years ago, and how mesmerized she was at that song, a song that I'm pretty sure she at the time had never previously heard. I'm also amused by Bird's description because I remember that Cara would sometimes get frustrated with my passiveness.

My Finest Work Yet is a very political album, a description that applies to no previous Andrew Bird album. Bird's lyrics still have his usual whimsical style, but unmistakable references to current events populate the album. "Bloodless" laments that "The best have lost their convictions/While the worst keep sharpening their claws/Peddling in their dark fictions/While what's left of us we just hem and we haw." "Fallorun" much more directly references Donald Trump (although not by name): "You think it's just an aberration/That it could not happen here/Such an abomination/Could be the man of the year."

The message of "Archipelago," I think, is especially worth pondering: "We're locked in a death grip and it's taking its toll/When our enemies are what make us whole." More and more in today's society it seems like people are becoming defined by who and what they hate. Trumpism and to a certain extent the modern conservative movement as a whole are a grievance movement - its main reason for existence seems to be exacting punishment and revenge on those (people of color, feminists, LGBT people, immigrants, Muslims, etc.) who members of the movement see as enemies. Their enemies are what make them whole. And while I can't stand both-sides-ism and would never suggest that people who vigorously and vehemently oppose Trump are equivalent to people who support Trump, I think many liberals are also allowing themselves to become defined by their enemies in an unhealthy way. Someone who watches MSNBC all day won't be divorced from reality in the way that someone who watches Fox News all day will, but both people will be spending a huge amount of time having their minds filled with things to be angry about, and I don't think that's healthy.

These topics are touched on in the interview as well. "I'm interested in the idea that our enemies are what make us whole," Bird remarks. "That's what I'm trying to look at. And how we've gotten to this point and how we could, through awareness of it, maybe pull ourselves out of it." That's something we should all consider, I'd say.

I think about sharing this album with Cara and I think about the fact that to explain the album to her I'd have to explain to her the fact that Donald Trump is the president and a burgeoning neo-fascist movement is threatening our democracy and it's all still so surreal. Cara passed away almost two months before Trump announced his candidacy, so the idea of Trump as president was something she never had to hold as one of her concerns or worries. Sometimes a part of me thinks sardonically that she was lucky to escape this bizarre and distressing reality we now inhabit.

It is a very sad thing that we live in a time that causes someone like Andrew Bird to feel compelled to directly address politics in his music. But it's also a very good thing that we have that music to help us reckon with and get through this time.

I really like the the last exchange in the Eggers/Bird conversation so I'll close by sharing it:

DE: Do you find that your audiences are hungrier for some sort of communal feeling during times like this? I can't imagine anything more cathartic or healing than to play music to hundreds of people - that energy in a room, I would think, is rebalancing.

AB: Playing live and meeting folks after the shows does more to set my mind right and reinforce my faith in humanity than anything else I could possibly do. Get off your news feed and gather in a dark room with strangers for something that doesn't involve acrimony. It's that simple.

Love of seasons

On Thursday at work, as I went to get my lunch out of the fridge, I realized with excitement that the weather was nice enough that I'd be able to enjoy sitting outside to eat lunch for the first time this year. After work, I went for a nice little walk in Roxboro Ravine and took advantage of the warm weather and lengthening daylight hours to sit and read for a while at my favorite spot by the waterfall.

As I get older, I realize I'm appreciating more and more these little things that I can reliably look forward to with the passing of the seasons each year.

I love how each spring brings with it the blossoming of trees and flowers and other plants. How everything starts to get green again after a gray winter. How the days get longer and longer (the first time that I come home from work and it's still light out is something I always take note of and enjoy). And of course, the welcome return of warm weather. Since I've gotten into mountain biking, the first warm day that I'm able to get out on my mountain bike and feel the warm breeze on my face and work up a good sweat is a special source of excitement.

I love spring, but honestly? Spring is probably my least favorite season - here in Cleveland it just has more chilly, windy, and rainy weather (see: yesterday and today) than I'd prefer. It's also the season during which mountain bike trails are most likely to have unrideable conditions.

The truth is I love all the seasons and I'm glad to live in a place where I can experience all four.

Perhaps the best thing about spring is the way it turns into summer. Sometimes it takes frustratingly long to get to reliably warm weather, but it always gets there. I love summer because I love getting out in the warm weather and hiking or riding my bike or swimming or just sitting outside on my balcony or by the waterfall and reading a good book. I love summer because I love being able to come home from work and go out for a 90 minute bike ride and still have it be light out when I get home. I love summer because I love cookouts and camping and going to the beach and my family vacation in the Adirondacks and eating ice cream on a warm day.

And I love going to the ravine and escaping from the city into a world where everything is so green.

Fall was for many years my most favorite season of all, although now it's hard to say if I have one favorite. Fall was my favorite mainly because fall is cross country season and for many years running cross country was the most important thing in my life. Since I'm now unable to do any distance running, there's a certain bittersweet element to the fall. Occasionally while driving home I see the cross country team practicing and it hits me just how much I still miss it. But I still love fall. I love the beautiful colors of the trees and the crunch of the leaves beneath my feet on a walk through the woods.

Fall is also a great season for bike rides. And I love sitting by a campfire at night, wearing a hoodie and jeans, enjoying the refreshing crispness of the fall air and the warmth of the flames.

And winter? It's a less popular opinion, but I love winter. I love winter for basically just one reason but it's a really big reason: I adore snow. I always have.

(The summer after eighth grade I went on a three week trip to the British Isles with a student ambassador group. In the report I wrote about the trip, I drew many contrasts between the countries I visited and my home. One was this: "I prefer the climate here in Ohio. It is hot in the summer, which is good for going swimming. It is cold and usually fairly snowy in winter, which is good because I like snow. And it doesn't rain too much. In the British Isles, it doesn't get too hot or cold, and also I wouldn't like all that rain." Growing up in Columbus, though, I was often frustrated by how it didn't snow as much as I wanted in the winter, so it's fitting that I ended up living somewhere with a much snowier climate.)

I think most kids love snow. Unlike a lot of people, I just never "grew out of it." Actually, I was thinking about why snow, for most people as they age, goes from a source of excitement to a source of annoyance. I think it's largely (not entirely, but largely) because for most adults, snow more than anything else is a source of major delays to their commutes. So they forget the exhilaration that snow brought when they were kids. I'd say this is another way that America's car culture saps the joy from people's lives. (What does that mean? you might ask. People have to commute to work and snow will slow those commutes no matter what. What does that have to do with "car culture"? And I would then point out that if we didn't have so much sprawl - which was enabled by our obsession with freeway building - and if we had better public transit, then the aggregate delays caused by snow to people's commutes would be vastly smaller.)

Just as the first warm day of spring when I can go for a nice bike ride is incredibly exciting to me, the first major snowfall of the winter is also incredibly exciting. And the funny thing? Even as the cold of winter drags on into March and I find myself yearning for warmer weather, all it takes is a nice heavy snowfall and that giddy, childlike feeling of excitement comes back. I love sledding. I love going for walks in the snow. I love the peace and tranquility that envelop the city on a snowy winter night. This past winter I started going for mountain bike rides in the snow and I love that too.

Due to various events in my life, over the past, honestly, more than ten years, it's been rare that I've been able to fully appreciate a good winter. This past winter was a good one and I really savored it. There is just something so beautiful about a landscape covered in a fresh blanket of snow. There were several times in the last few months when I went for a walk in the ravine and found myself just full of awe at how much beauty there is in the world and full of gratitude for being alive to experience and appreciate all that beauty. Just being alive really is such a gift.

So yes, I love all the seasons. If I had to live in a place with only one type of weather, I'd probably pick in the 70s and sunny. And if I lived in a place like that, I'd enjoy the weather, but I'd never get excited about it. Whereas in a place with four distinct seasons, I find great excitement in all four. Life is all about change. I guess there's just something reassuring and comforting about those predictable, cyclical changes that the seasons bring. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for a lot of things.

In praise of the iPod

There have been a number of really remarkable technological advances in my lifetime. Perhaps the most obvious example, both in how futuristic it would have seemed to childhood me and in how ubiquitous it's become, is the smartphone. Being able to quickly access most of the collected knowledge of humanity on a device you can carry in your pocket and with which you can also do all sorts of other things from taking high definition pictures and video to talking face to face with someone on the other side of the world truly is amazing, especially if you think about the level of technology just two or three decades ago. But although smartphones are very useful and convenient, does having a smartphone really make me any happier in my day-to-day life than I would be if I didn't have one? I suspect the answer to that question is no. In fact, the opposite might be true, because there are a lot of things about carrying and using a smartphone that are probably not good for mental health.

There is another amazing piece of technology I carry with me that I think does do a lot for my day-to-day happiness. It's something that is already, to most people, a relic of the past. It's an MP3 player.

(Obviously, a lot of people now mainly listen to music by streaming it on their phones and therefore have no use for an MP3 player. I don't do this. I like having a collection of music that I own. I think streaming has its uses, especially for sampling music before you buy it, but I abhor the way that streaming has replaced buying for most of the music consuming public. The compensation musicians receive from streaming services is minuscule. I strongly encourage anyone who finds value in listening to music to help make it possible for musicians to continue creating that music by buying music.)

I enjoy collecting physical items and being able to look at artwork and liner notes, so I continue to buy albums on both CD and vinyl, but the vast majority of my music listening is done using an iPod. And the ability to carry around my entire music collection with me and pull up and listen to any of the hundreds of albums I own depending on how I'm feeling at that moment is such a wonderful thing for someone who loves music as much as I do. Music is such an important part of my life. It's so beneficial to my mood to be able to listen to my music throughout the day. I've realized recently that in some ways, a lot of the things I do in my day-to-day life are sort of things I do to pass the time while I listen to music. Listening to music is the thing that's really important to me, in the sense of my mental and emotional well-being. Cooking dinner? Something to do to pass the time while I listen to music. Household chores? Something to do to pass the time while I listen to music. (Karyn has marveled at the fact that I don't mind doing dishes. I really don't, because it's a good opportunity to listen to music.) My job? Something to do to pass the time while I listen to music. Okay, there is much more that I enjoy and find fulfilling in my job as a research scientist, but I truly do think that one of the most important qualities of any job I could have would be having the ability to listen to music of my choosing for at least a decent chunk of each day. I had a job delivering a weekly local newspaper when I was in high school and I liked the job mainly because I could listen to music (on a portable CD player back then) while doing it.

My most favorite possession, at least when considering items that I use rather than items of mainly sentimental value, is undoubtedly my mountain bike, but I think second place would probably go to the 160 GB iPod Classic that I got for Christmas something like ten years ago now.

I've spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours listening to music on this wonderful little piece of technology over the years. Two years ago, though, something unfortunate happened. Something in the headphone jack broke so that sound only came out of one of the two channels when headphones were plugged in. I have a 16 GB iPod Nano as well, so I switched to using that until I could get my main iPod fixed. And to do that I waited. And waited. And waited. I'm sure a lot of people recognize the phenomenon that when you have a lot going on in your life, or when you're going through difficult times, or both, you put off doing things that would be very easy to do but that you don't have a pressing need to accomplish. And that's what happened with me getting my iPod fixed, until finally, a few weeks ago, almost two years after the malfunction occurred, I got around to taking it to a repair place.

If I had known how happy getting it fixed would make me, I wouldn't have waited so long!

With my smaller iPod, I could only load a fraction of my music collection. This would generally be all of my recently added music and a sparse selection of the older entries in my library, which I would rotate from time to time. But this meant at any given moment during the day I would be shut off from listening to most of my music. Recently I was finding more and more that the selection of music I had with me at work was getting stale, and that helped push me to finally put forth the minimal effort needed to get the repair done. And wow, once more being able to browse through and select from my whole 10,000+ song library is so great!

(Again, I realize that people using Spotify on their phones can browse through and select from a vastly larger library. To me, there is just something meaningful about having this collection that I put together over the years and that I chose and paid for and own.)

There are some really good albums in there that, due to the circumstances of my broken iPod, I hadn't listened to in years, and pulling up one of those again and letting those familiar sounds once more fill my ears can be an unexpectedly emotional experience. This week I've been listening to a lot of Woodpigeon, one of my favorite bands and a band I was completely obsessed with for much of 2008, 2009, and 2010, but hadn't listened to a whole lot in recent years. I'd forgotten just how much I love their music! And it's cool how hearing a song or an album that you listened to a lot in a certain time period and then took a break from can transport you back to that time in your life.

So that's the story of why I love my iPod. Hopefully it will keep working for many more years to come!

In conclusion:

The wisdom of age and the wisdom of youth

We are often told that we should listen to the wisdom of our elders. Generally speaking, it's not bad advice. What is heard less often is that elders should listen to the wisdom of the young. That's something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

I have a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides of my family. On my dad's side, people are scattered all over the country and there is a family email list mainly used by my aunts and uncles to keep in touch. Some of my cousins and I are also on the list and generally participate less often but occasionally contribute. And there's an interesting dynamic some of my cousins and I have noticed which is that even though we are now all over 30 years old, to some of our aunts and uncles it seems we will always be "the kids." This has been most evident when political issues come up on the email list. It's been a recurring theme over the years, but was most striking last fall, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, which is what in large part led me to write this post.

Discussion of the Kavanaugh hearings led to a huge eruption of drama and in fact ever since then political topics have hardly been touched at all on the email list. Which is a little disappointing to me because the email list was one of the only forums I had in which I could discuss political issues with people I know personally but who also fall all along the spectrum of different political views. (It's interesting to me that I never made any effort to choose friends based on their political views but it just kind of happened that basically all of my good friends hold generally progressive views.) But then, I have also started to question the point of those discussions, which is partly because of how people in general have just become very polarized and set in their ways, but also because of the aforementioned dynamic of the cousins being viewed as "the kids."

During the Kavanaugh hearings, it was abundantly clear that some of my cousins and I were vastly more knowledgeable and better informed on the relevant issues around sexual assault than were any of the aunts and uncles. Several of us wrote lengthy, thoughtful, and impassioned emails only to have most of our points ignored or dismissed by some of the elders of the family. This sort of thing has happened many times over the years but it was especially infuriating in this case because we all know people who have been personally affected by the horrors of sexual assault. Some of us even directly said so, but this didn't seem to help. One elder family member in particular has a tendency to occasionally reply in very condescending and dismissive ways to messages with which he disagrees, mainly but not exclusively toward those of the younger generation, and the irony is that the same elder family member (based on past experience) would basically throw a temper tantrum upon receiving replies containing a fraction of that level of condescension or dismissiveness.

There were a lot of hurt feelings all around from these emails. But what I think most struck me was that it really seemed like some of my aunts and uncles (definitely not all, but some) had hurt feelings due to the mere fact of their nieces and nephews trying to passionately engage and disagree with them on an adult-to-adult level. Like they thought that we didn't know our places and were being disrespectful. And when I look at society at large I think that's a common problem.

As we age, we continue to accumulate more and more knowledge about the world. Everyone knows this. Based on this fact by itself, one might assume that older people, in general, possess more wisdom than younger people, and younger people have more to learn from older people than vice versa. I think some people do think this way. I also think it's a very simplistic view.

As we age, we do continue to accumulate more and more knowledge about the world. But there are other effects of aging. Our minds also become less adaptive. We become more set in our ways. It becomes more difficult to incorporate new information into our internal models of how the world works. There are also, of course, issues like dementia that can emerge with age, but even in someone who possesses a healthy aging brain, it is very clearly the case that there are ways in which that brain does not work as well as it did when it was younger. Recent studies have shown, for example, that the 65 and over demographic is the worst at distinguishing opinion statements from fact statements, and that the 65 and over demographic is the most likely to share fake news on social media.

Of course, there are very smart old people and not so smart old people just as there are very smart young people and not so smart young people. My general point is that age does not necessarily correlate with wisdom. There are two forces working in opposition to each other - roughly speaking, they could be described as the increasing accumulation of knowledge with age, and the decreasing ability to successfully utilize that knowledge. Perhaps peak wisdom occurs at an age that strikes the best balance between the two opposing forces - perhaps about age 35?

Nah, I'm kidding. I couldn't say what that age is. It's undoubtedly very different for different people. It's also undoubtedly different within an individual person when looking at different categories of knowledge and wisdom. So there are certain topics a young person might have more to learn from an old person about, and other topics for which the reverse would be true.

It's struck me that in the last few years the way I view my parents has changed a lot. When you are a little kid, your parents are the ultimate authority figures. You think they know everything. As you grow through childhood and young adulthood, you realize that they of course don't know everything. You start to form your own world view that can diverge from that of your parents, at times dramatically. But you still tend to look at them as authority figures to whom you look up. At some point, though, the parent-child relationship switches to a relationship between an adult and another adult, and while the parent never stops being a source of knowledge and wisdom to impart to the child, eventually the now fully grown child becomes just as much of a source of knowledge and wisdom to impart to the parent, just in different ways. At least that's the way it should be. I think some parents have a hard time with that transition. Perhaps this is even more true for aunt/uncle to niece/nephew relationships in which the aunts and uncles might have somewhat crystallized views in their minds of their nieces and nephews as children.

I think this also applies to the society-level relationship between an older generation as a whole and a younger generation as a whole.

Recent events in society have dramatically illustrated some of the concepts I've touched on here. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, student activists have fundamentally shifted the national debate on gun control. Sure, those students don't have the same level of accumulated knowledge about the world as the generally much older people who hold positions of power and authority in society, but those students are much more able to think about things in new ways. Older political figures, set in their ways after having spent many more years on this Earth, assumed standing up to the gun lobby's stranglehold on our legislatures just couldn't be done. The young students realized that taking the fight directly to an organization that opposes something like universal background checks that a supermajority of the citizenry favors can be very effective, and while we still have so far to go, those students have accomplished so much in the last year that older people never could have done. Wisdom doesn't only come from age.

Similar things can be said about the young climate activists who have been taking to the streets in cities across the world.

And many in the older generation automatically dismiss those young voices. It's sad but it's not surprising. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken the country by storm since being elected the youngest congresswoman in history. And along with her dramatic rise, there are of course loud voices dismissing her as crazy or not smart. There are comparisons to infamously dimwitted political figures like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin. These comparisons are utter garbage. AOC won a prize in an international science fair as a high school student and went on to graduate cum laude from Boston University with majors in both economics and international relations.

Not only is she not unintelligent, she is almost certainly one of the most intelligent members of Congress. (Let's face it, there are a lot of congresspeople who don't have particularly notable intellects.) Of course, racism and sexism and political tribalism are all major contributing factors to the attacks on her, but I really do think a significant component for the attacks on her intelligence is the assumption by many old people that someone that young just couldn't understand how the world works as well as they do.

Young people do have a lot to learn from old people, but old people have just as much to learn from young people. When it comes to certain topics, the older generation has more to learn from the younger generation than the other way around. There are many older people who already get this, but there are many who don't, and a lot of the problems in society could be better addressed if we would all listen a little more to the wisdom of youth. I'm making a vow that I won't forget this myself when I reach my later years.

Somewhere along the way

About six months ago now I went to a Dawes concert at Stage AE in Pittsburgh. It was a really great show, one of the best I saw last year. This post isn't really, for the most part, about that show. But ever since that show I've had parts of this post intermittently jumping around in my head. And in bits and pieces I've been making progress on writing it out. That it's been half a year since the show and I still haven't finished the post (when I first started writing it I think it began "about two months ago," which has been revised several times) is partly a reflection of how busy my life has been and how quickly the time has flown by. But it's also because this is kind of an awkward thing to write about and a part of me questions whether I really want to share this. At the same time, there's a sense of something being unfinished and I know it's going to keep on occupying space in my mind if I don't get this out into words.

Last summer Karyn stumbled upon a book called Love is a Mix Tape, an autobiographical work by a music journalist named Rob Sheffield. She was startled when she read the description, and how much it sounded like a story she knew well: the story of Cara and me.

He was tall. She was short. He was shy. She was a social butterfly. She was the only one who laughed at his jokes when they were so bad, and they were always bad. They had nothing in common [okay, that part doesn't fit, because Cara and I had a lot in common] except that they both loved music. Music brought them together and kept them together. And it was music that would help Rob through a sudden, unfathomable loss.

I read the book and liked it a lot. I liked the way Sheffield tied music to the memories associated with that music, something I (obviously) do a lot of myself. It was interesting to me how there were aspects of Sheffield's widow experience that were very familiar and other aspects that were very different from my own experience. One part that was very different was that for him, after being widowed, there were songs he felt he could never listen to again. It was never that way for me. There are countless songs and albums that are indelibly linked in my mind to Cara. I never stopped wanting to listen to those songs. Some I even had a renewed desire to hear.

On the other hand...

Going to the Dawes concert was a really big deal to me. Because I had been to one previous Dawes concert, and it was my first date with EB. I actually hadn't known much about the band before that date. Knowing I really liked going to concerts, EB had suggested going to one at Nashville's famous Ryman Auditorium, and I thought Dawes sounded interesting. That show was also really good. I didn't know at the time how much I would come to love Dawes. I listened to a whole lot of their music over the next few months. Then EB broke up with me. And I completely stopped listening to Dawes for almost half a year.

That was a very difficult time in my life. I think it was hard for most people to really grasp how difficult it was. Your wife dies? Of course that's going to be devastating and take a long while to move past. But a breakup? That happens to everyone, right? I remember on more than one occasion in the early part of last year when friends asked how I was doing and seemed surprised when I said that I had been having a pretty rough time for the last few months.

I wrote in the aftermath of the breakup about why it was so incredibly painful. I did so while also trying to keep truly detailed descriptions of the events to a minimum, partly out of a desire to protect EB. At this point, because neither of us has been in any way a part of each other's lives for quite some time, I no longer feel a need to try to protect EB. That doesn't mean I want to drag her name through the mud or go out of my way to make her look bad. I certainly don't think she's a bad person. But I also want to continue to regain control of my life and part of that means being able to tell the story of my life if I so desire. And I think it's worth sharing, because I like sharing my writing, and I do think it's a pretty compelling story, and there might even be lessons others could take from it. Lessons that could be helpful if they ever see someone they know in a similar situation.

What happened that caused me so much pain really was a perfect storm of awful. It's said that the first time someone breaks up with you is always especially hard. Check. It's also said, among those of us who have been widowed, that the first time after you're widowed that you get into a serious relationship but then it ends is especially hard. Check. And then there was the worst part of all, which was that this wasn't just the end of a relationship for me, it was my family being taken away.

Note: because I was asked to censor EB's daughter's name from my blog, I'm going to refer to EB's daughter as EBD.

As Karyn (who is probably the only other person who really knows what this has been like for me) said to me many months ago: "You were supposed to have a family with Cara. And that didn't happen. And then you thought you had found that family with EB and EBD."

And then, very suddenly and inexplicably, I hadn't.

I didn't go into that relationship looking to become a father to someone else's kid. I actually thought before meeting EB that I probably wouldn't want to date someone with a kid because the presence of a kid might get in the way of my building a relationship with the kid's mother. The first time I visited Nashville, EBD was staying elsewhere for the weekend and I only briefly met her. The first time EB visited Cleveland, EBD did not come with her. The second time I visited Nashville, EB declared that she wanted the three of us to start doing things together, kind of like beginning a test run of us being a family.

Perhaps, in retrospect, that should have been a red flag that she decided to do that so early.

I don't want to portray myself as an entirely innocent victim. EB and I are both adults. We're both responsible for our own actions. I could have proceeded with more caution than I did. At the same time, I don't think it's unfair to say that she bears more responsibility for what happened, because she was the one who very quickly and rashly put her own child into that situation.

I remember something EB told me when we were just beginning to get to know each other, that she felt like we widows were like another species. I thought that was a weird thing to say, although I didn't tell her. Sure, widowhood fundamentally changes you, but so do a lot of other experiences. I don't think that widows are so different from everyone else that we're like a whole separate species from "normal" people.

At some point later on, EB told me that she felt becoming a parent changes a person just as much as becoming a widow, just in different ways.

So she felt that becoming a widow changes a person so much that that person is like a member of a different species, and that becoming a parent changes a person just as much as becoming a widow.

She was already both a parent and a widow. I was the latter, but not the former. I knew from personal experience how becoming a widow changes a person. I had no idea what becoming a parent was like. Cara and I had tried, unsuccessfully, to have children, but back then the idea of becoming a parent was only a hypothetical to me. The bond between a parent and a child, from the parent's side, was something I had never felt in the slightest.

EBD and I quickly bonded in a remarkable way. The first weekend that the three of us spent together, one of our activities was going on a hike at a state park. During the hike, EBD decided to take off running on the trail ahead of EB and me. I decided to join her, and the two of us ran giddily together through the woods. "It was about the most amazing feeling in the world," I wrote a few days later.

EB clearly approved of and encouraged the bond between EBD and me. She did this in a number of ways, both implicit and explicit. The one that still stands out to me most of all happened on Father's Day, when EB and EBD were in Cleveland with my whole family (that year's Breathe Deep Cleveland charity event that Cara had helped found took place the day before Father's Day). The two of us were in the kitchen of my apartment while everyone else was in another room and she looked at me and said, "Happy becoming a father day."

Perhaps to her that was just an offhand comment that popped into her mind in that moment. I'll never really know. To me it was an incredibly significant statement. From that moment on, being a father to EBD was one of the most important things in my life. Perhaps even eventually the most important.

And yes, I never took on the full day-to-day responsibilities of fatherhood. It was an odd thing, I remember commenting to EB once, going back and forth between being for all intents and purposes a father to EBD (when I was in Nashville or when they were here in Cleveland) for just a few days at a time and my life by myself in Cleveland the rest of the time. I didn't feel like EB and I had a "part-time" relationship because we talked every day, but I did feel kind of like a "part-time father." Yet I embraced that father role wholeheartedly. And although in retrospect there were a few times when EB was trying to hint at the fact that she had not-insignificant doubts about our future together, she never stopped treating the three of us as a family, so I never felt any reason to doubt that the three of us would continue to be a family. And so naturally, after having in my heart and mind made that fundamental transformation into being a parent, it was utterly devastating when the magical experience of me-as-father abruptly ended.

I have no idea how EBD handled the events, but I can't imagine it was easy on her. It was clear that she was drawn to me much as I was drawn to her. I remember when, after EB returned home from her first weekend in Cleveland, EB told her daughter that the two of us had decided to become boyfriend and girlfriend, and EBD's initial reaction was to become very upset and say we shouldn't do that. EB was eventually able to draw out the reason for this reaction, and it was that EBD remembered her mommy's previous boyfriend, and the fact that they had broken up, and she therefore believed that a breakup was an inevitable consequence of two people becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. EBD and I hardly knew each other at that point in time but she already liked me a lot (the feeling, obviously, was mutual).

One of the sweetest things was how much she loved running with me. "Come on, Jeffy," she'd exclaim, looking up at me while on a walk, and the two of us would take off together. I remember well how, on the way home from a park in my hometown of Grandview Heights, a seemingly tired EBD was being pushed in a stroller, until my mom mentioned to her that the long hill we were walking up was one I had often run up when I was younger, and EBD immediately hopped out of the stroller to race up the hill with me.

I also know that the view of the three of us as a family that EB instilled in me was picked up on and embraced by her daughter as well. Later in that same weekend that we visited my family, EB, EBD, and I were at the swimming pool with my mom. At one point as we played in the pool, EB, EBD, and I all went underwater together, and upon surfacing EBD declared, "We're the best family!"

I'm sure that eventually EBD will forget most, if not all, of what happened, but I know it must have been hard for her, a little girl whose life was already so affected by loss. And I do wonder if there will be any lasting effects.

I also know it was hard on my parents.

I myself was profoundly affected by the whole experience. In the immediate aftermath I became deeply depressed, and I continued to experience bouts of depression for many months afterward. The feeling of being depressed was not novel to me, but the anxiety that I came to feel about being in a relationship, that was something I had never before experienced to any notable extent. And the anxiety has stuck around much longer than the depression. I've gotten help, and my mental health now is dramatically better than it was a year ago, but those feelings of anxiety haven't entirely stopped. One thing (among many) that has helped, trivial as it might seem, is just being able to recognize what I'm feeling. When I first started spending serious time with Karyn, that uncomfortable, tense but not really a headache feeling that would pop up in the sides and back of my head was a new and strange thing that I didn't understand.

The anxiety isn't the only long-term effect on me of my relationship with EB and its dissolution. I think it's almost undoubtedly harder now for me to feel really deeply connected and attached to another person. But then maybe those feelings came too easily before. Another effect, and hopefully a more positive one in the long run, is that, as Karyn put it, usually it's women our age who have "baby fever," but I seem to have it. And I won't deny that she's right.

Every time that I see a young girl in the approximate age range of EBD, it's impossible for me not to think of her. Perhaps right now my life would be at least a little happier if that whole painful experience could be erased from my mind, but obviously it can't be. Those memories will never entirely disappear. And so I choose to cherish the memories and look back on them as fondly as I can. When I think of special moments shared between me and the girl who was briefly my daughter, I smile. It's a wistful smile, and it's not without pain, but then I already had a great deal of experience with those sorts of memories. Memories I shared with someone I loved very much, and who loved me very much, and who was taken away from me with neither of us having any say in the matter. I'm absolutely not saying that EBD was as significant in my life as Cara was, or that I miss her as much as I miss Cara, but at the same time, that girl will always be an important person in the history of my life. And so just as I'm eternally grateful for all the wonderful time I got to spend with Cara, I've also developed a feeling of gratitude for the time I got to spend with EBD.

In the aftermath of Cara's death, it was very important to me and helpful to my healing process to share my memories of Cara with other people whenever the opportunity arose. And it still is important for me to share memories of Cara, although it's no longer something I feel the need to do all the time. This experience has been different because whereas people are generally very receptive to hearing stories about my late wife, I have a sense that it would be looked at as strange for me to want to share stories about my ex-girlfriend's daughter. Like I would be doing something wrong. Obviously the situations are very different. But those memories are not going to disappear from my mind and sometimes I do feel a desire to share some of them. They really are amazing memories.

A little more than two weeks before EB broke up with me, during my second-to-last visit to Nashville, I took EBD on a shopping trip on what was the first, and as it turned out the only, outing the two of us took together without EB. We went to Target to shop for birthday presents for EB. (As it happened, we celebrated both Cara's and EB's birthdays that weekend, as they fall just five days apart.) It was a really big deal for me to go on that shopping trip. Looking back, I wonder if having her four-year-old daughter go on an outing with a man who wasn't the girl's late father caused EB to secretly experience severe anxiety of the sort I was experiencing at times last year. From my perspective, the trip went well. I knew that becoming a parent was a big responsibility and that I had not yet nearly taken on the full measure of that responsibility and it was important to me to continue to take concrete steps in that direction. My favorite moment of the shopping trip, during which the two of us collaborated to select several presents, was when we were standing in front of a display of body washes and EBD pointed to one labeled "age-defying" on the bottle and suggested we buy it. I immediately started laughing,  so she asked what was funny. Getting a four-year-old to grasp why it was funny that she had suggested an "age-defying" product as a present for her mom's 37th birthday would likely be rather difficult, but I told her that her mom would understand.

Two weeks later my parents and my brother joined me for another visit to Nashville. The last thing we all did together was visit the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center. As we walked back to our separate cars after eating dinner (I was catching a ride to the airport with my family), EBD, holding my hand, started skipping, and the two of us skipped hand-in-hand ahead of the rest of the group. At the time the plan was that on the very next weekend I would be meeting up with EB and EBD in North Carolina to attend a wedding with EB. I told EBD that I would be seeing her again in just five days. EB, hugging my mom, said, "We'll see you in December" (we'd discussed making plans for the holidays). The following evening, in a video chat with me, EB ended the relationship.

So yeah, that sure was a thing that happened.

I won't rehash the details of how incredibly painful it was, but now that a good amount of time has passed, I am able to safely conclude this: the breakup, although not the worst thing that ever happened to me, was undoubtedly the most emotionally damaging thing that ever happened to me.

I want to mention here what I think is the main lesson of this experience that I want to impart to others: in a dating situation in which one of the adults has a child, the adults and the child shouldn't start "being a family" together until the adults are sure they want to be together for a long time. And you can't really be sure after just one month of dating, even if it feels like you are.

Returning now to the topic that originally prompted this post... over the course of the relationship, the music of Dawes had become very meaningful to me. They had become, it's fair to say, one of my favorite bands. The morning after the breakup, when I began backing out of my driveway to go to work and their song "All Your Favorite Bands" came on the radio, is a moment that will stick in my mind forever. A song, about life after a breakup, by the band I had seen on my first date with my now ex-girlfriend, coming on the radio first thing in the morning the day after that ex-girlfriend broke up with me? Of all the strange coincidences that I've noticed and catalogued in my life, that just might be the strangest of all. It was certainly the most cinematic moment of my life. One of those moments that make you think this can't be real, it's all some crazy story that someone is writing and I'm just one of the characters. I recall laughing hysterically through tears at the absurdity.

I didn't turn off the radio or change the station. I let the whole song play. It was just too fitting. After that, though, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I stopped listening to Dawes. I just had no desire at all to hear their music. That was the case for almost half a year, and that was one of the most difficult half years of my life, only surpassed by times when I was experiencing truly horrendous physical pain. But eventually, a thought began to form in my mind. A thought that I had really liked the music of Dawes not just because of its connection to my relationship with EB, but because it was just plain good music, and by depriving myself of enjoying music that I really liked, I was letting EB have power over my life that I didn't need to let her have. The first time I pulled up one of their albums on my iPod, in late March, it was with a tentative feeling that I pushed the play button. But as the familiar music filled my ears I found that yes, I did still enjoy listening to it. Listening to it was very different than listening to it had been before. There was a pain associated with it that hadn't previously existed. But I still enjoyed it. And that made me feel happy. It was a small but significant personal victory. And it was around then that I really started to make progress on feeling better about my life, although there were still some further bumps in the road.

As the year progressed, the music of Dawes once more became very important to me. In fact (I know this from my last.fm charts), despite that lengthy period in which I did not listen to them at all, they ended up being not only my most listened to band of 2017, but also my most listened to band of 2018. It struck me as I began listening to them more that they have a number of good breakup songs, so that probably helped.

When I saw the band's fall tour dates, I quickly decided that it was very important for me to go to one of the shows, and with the closest one being in Pittsburgh, I had no hesitation about making the two-hour drive. Just as listening to Dawes' music again and enjoying it had been a small personal victory, I knew that going to another Dawes concert and enjoying it would be another personal victory. Perhaps a more significant one, because to me there is just something about a really good concert - so many of my most favorite memories are from really good concerts - and I knew from that evening in Nashville that Dawes would put on a really good concert. By the time the date of the show, September 12, rolled around, I was very excited to go. And I was not let down in the slightest.

Of course, there were a number of times during the two plus hour performance that my thoughts turned to my previous relationship and its dissolution. So many of the lyrics seemed fitting as a soundtrack to those events.

From "Somewhere Along the Way":

But somewhere along the way
The dots didn’t all connect
The promise became regrets

From "Things Happen":

Let’s make a list of all the things the world has put you through
Let’s raise a glass to all the people you’re not speaking to
I don’t know what else you wanted me to say to you
Things happen
That’s all they ever do

From "Roll With the Punches":

You just roll with the punches
Until you can't feel a thing
You just roll with the punches
Aww yeah

("Roll with the punches - that's what we do," I recall EB saying to me, referring to our experiences with loss. Yep.)

"Somewhere Along the Way" closes on a more hopeful note:

But somewhere along the way
I started to smile again
I don’t remember when
Somewhere along the way
Things will turn out just fine
I know it’s true this time

In the summer of 2017, when I was dating EB, these lyrics already had a lot of meaning to me. It's now become a recurring theme in my life - horrible, painful things happen (that's all, it sometimes seems, they ever do), and then I claw my way back, and somewhere along the way I start to smile again. I'd like to think that things in my life will turn out just fine. I don't know it's true. But I'd like to think it's true.

My starting to listen to Dawes last spring happened to come around the time when I once more started to genuinely smile again. And my going to the concert last fall happened to come around the time when that smile finally began to more regularly and consistently come to my face. Since then, things in my life have continued to be pretty good. Being able to say that for more than a half year running is something to be grateful for.

Of course, Dawes also played "All Your Favorite Bands" at the concert. And as I sang along with the rest of the crowd, I of course thought back to that morning in my car. Hearing that song at that moment, as surreal and painful as it was, is now something I'm grateful for too. How many people have the ability to truthfully tell a story like that? When life throws something that crazy at you, sometimes you just have to laugh and appreciate the craziness.

Among the lyrics to the song are these lines:

When I think of you, you've still got on that hat that says "Let’s Party"
I hope that thing is never thrown away

Naturally the Dawes merch table sells a hat that says "Let's Party" on it, so after the show ended, on a giddy concert high, and in the spirit of embracing and owning the events of my past and taking as much control as I can over my present and future, I bought the hat.

Maybe it was a weird thing to do. Probably most people wouldn't buy a piece of merchandise so strikingly symbolic of a past relationship that ended in a painful breakup. For me, just like starting to listen to Dawes again and just like going to the concert, buying and wearing that hat was a small declaration of victory, of being able to move on and have a happy life after another traumatic experience, while acknowledging that that experience is something I'll always carry with me and will forever help shape the course of my life. And so I look forward to wearing the hat to more Dawes concerts in the future.

There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust

A couple of weeks ago I learned, in short succession, of the deaths of two people. Neither person was someone I knew personally, but both were people who had played some small part in my life, and both deaths moved me deeply.

The morning of November 12, 2018 started like any other Monday, and then everything changed when I saw a friend's Facebook post reporting the shocking news that Nikki Delamotte had been murdered.

As I said, Nikki was not someone I knew personally, but her name was very familiar to me. A local journalist, I'd seen her name many times on wonderfully written articles about Cleveland's music and arts and culture scenes. As time progressed on that Monday I saw more and more posts popping up on my Facebook feed from friends expressing their grief and horror at the event. Many of the posts contained a picture of a face that was familiar to me despite my never having known her. I went to her Facebook profile and saw that I had 34 mutual friends with Nikki. She'd probably shown up in my "suggested friends" at some point. She'd undoubtedly been to a number of concerts and other events I'd attended. The more I read about her, the more I wished I had gotten to know her.

I felt a deep sense of grief for Nikki, for her family, for all my friends who had known her, and for our community for losing such a special figure. As details came out of her tragic death, I felt sickened at what had happened - at 30 years old and with such a bright future ahead of her, Nikki had reconnected with an uncle of hers she had not seen in years, and had made plans to go hang out with him, and then, after entering her uncle's trailer, had been shot to death by that uncle before he turned the gun on himself. It's one of the saddest things I think I've ever heard.

This isn't a political post, but I have to mention it. I hate guns.

It's rare for me to be moved so deeply by the death of a single person who I did not know, but Nikki's death deeply moved me, especially because of all the tributes and remembrances I saw my friends post.

One of those posts helped lead me to the line of thought that made me want to write this blog entry.

I have a friend named Annie who I met in a rather unusual way. I met her because when Cara died Annie, then an undergraduate student at Case, reached out to me to ask if I'd be willing to be interviewed for an article in Cara's memory in the Case student newspaper. I gladly granted the request, and the article turned out to be quite a beautiful tribute. Since then, our paths have occasionally crossed. Annie is now a reporter for cleveland.com writing primarily about music, and in the past year especially we've run into each other at a number of concerts. The most recent of those was the Case radio station WRUW's Studio-A-Rama music festival held in October, at which we were both excited to see headliner Lucy Dacus.

Annie was a coworker of Nikki's and was very close to her. On November 13, Annie shared the Lucy Dacus song "Pillar of Truth" and wrote this on Facebook:

I just remembered and wanted to share.

This song brought Nikki some comfort when her grandma passed away. She even got to see Lucy perform it live, the same day as her grandma's memorial. I remember that she was excited that she made it to Cleveland in time for Lucy's performance, after spending the evening driving back from Toledo.

I don't know but maybe now it can bring us a little bit of comfort too.

"Pillar of Truth" is a heartrendingly beautiful song that Lucy had described as being written about her own grandmother, and I was taken back to that night in October when I had stood there mesmerized by Lucy Dacus's performance of that song (the final song of the night), and there in the crowd not far from me had been Annie, and Nikki, as well. And I thought of the feelings that Nikki must have had that night, and that Annie must now have, for the story reminded me so much of things I myself had experienced in 2015. Things that in some way simultaneously feel like they could have been just the other week or could have been a lifetime ago.

I thought of seeing Lady Lamb perform at the Grog Shop on July 28, 2015, the day after Cara's grandmother Margie passed away, and little over three months from Cara herself's passing. And how the day after the show I had shared the song "Ten" (the final song of the night) on Facebook, tagging both Cara and Gram in the post, and quoted the line, "There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust on our eyes when our eyes finally close." That live performance of that song gave me some comfort after Cara's grandmother, who had become to me like my own grandmother, passed away, and I thought that perhaps what Nikki had felt at that Lucy Dacus concert was a little something like what I had felt at that Lady Lamb concert.

And I thought of seeing Sufjan Stevens perform at the Masonic Auditorium on April 16, 2015. Cara was supposed to go to that concert with me but ended up not going because she didn't feel well. Our good friend Troy ended up going with me instead. Troy, as it happens, was also a good friend of Nikki's and posted beautiful tributes to her as well. Cara and I had a tradition running back to very early in our friendship where when I was at a concert of an artist Cara liked and Cara wasn't at the concert with me, I would call her on the phone during the concert so she could listen to a song. There's one Sufjan Stevens song that was especially meaningful to us, because it was our wedding recessional. So when Sufjan played "Chicago" (the final song of the night), I called Cara.

It was the last time I would ever do that, because she passed away barely more than a week later.

So I thought that perhaps what Annie felt, thinking back on sharing a special concert experience with her friend who it turned out was unexpectedly short for the world, was a little something like what I had felt thinking back on that Sufjan Stevens concert after Cara's death.

The next day, November 14, was when I learned of the other death. There's a radio show on WJCU, the John Carroll University station, called Beautiful Mess (for the Diamond Rio song of the same name), that airs every Wednesday from 6-8 pm, and because I'm usually driving home during that time frame I often have it on in the car. It's a country music show, playing a wide variety of country and related genres from a wide range of years. I've been a listener of the show, albeit a casual one, for probably five years now. Which is kind of funny because as a kid and into my early adult years I couldn't stand country music. But I've become much more open-minded about music in general, and although I don't love all country music (especially the sort you'd most tend to hear on modern country radio), there's a lot I do enjoy. And the show Beautiful Mess has been one of the things that has helped broaden my tastes in that direction.

Anyway, the show is hosted by a woman named Holly, whose age I don't know but who I'd guess is a bit younger than me. Over the years one of the things I've most enjoyed about her show is how she started occasionally having her dad on as a guest DJ, co-hosting the show with her, and eventually it became a regular thing. And between songs you'd get to hear this father and daughter talking about the music and the memories that went with it. It was just one of the sweetest things.

For the previous show or two, there had been a substitute DJ for the show instead of Holly, but I hadn't thought much of it (and I'm usually only listening to the show for ten or fifteen minutes if I'm simply driving straight home). On November 14 I was driving to Target before going home, meaning I'd be spending a longer time with the show. Holly was back, and after a song finished she started talking, and at first I was only half-listening to what she was saying, but then it struck me somehow that she seemed to be talking about her dad in the past tense, and this feeling of dread overtook me, and I gave the words coming out of my car speakers my rapt attention, and soon it was confirmed for me. Her dad was gone.

Already full of sorrow that day because of Nikki's recent death, the sorrow in me grew for the rest of my drive. I remember sitting behind the steering wheel staring at the road and just feeling this immense feeling of loss for this man I had never met. And at the same time there was something beautiful about the way that Holly was using the songs on her show to try to begin to work through that horrible loss.

I don't know the details of Holly's dad's passing, but I do know it was unexpected. In the subsequent weeks, she's continued to use the show as a tribute to her dad. This past Wednesday found me with an unusually large amount of driving to do in the 6-8 pm time slot, and I listened as Holly described how she was carrying on with playing music her dad had picked out for the coming weeks on the show. I smiled at the appearance of "Piazza, New York Catcher" by Belle and Sebastian (a surprising selection for a country-centered show), remembering seeing it live in concert with Cara. I don't know whether that song was one Holly or her dad picked out. Perhaps they had a memory involving it too. My strong sense of sorrow returned as I listened to Holly's show this week, but as I've written before, feeling sad is not necessarily a bad thing.

As you might have picked up on, the theme that's emerging here is that I'm struck by the way music helps connect us to loved ones who have left this world. I think it's a special power that music can have and it's almost hard to describe it.

I have a few other anecdotes that have reinforced this to me.

A few months ago, Karyn and I were watching John McCain's funeral on TV. I remember being struck by how, throughout the lengthy proceedings, McCain's wife Cindy's face betrayed little emotion. There was just one moment when tears were evident. It was during a performance of an especially meaningful song.

Earlier this year, Karyn and I were watching the Tony Awards. (That, incidentally, is something I never would have imagined myself doing before meeting Karyn, but I'm glad we did it.) By far the most moving moment of the night came when students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School drama department, months after the horrific gun massacre at their school, took the stage and performed "Seasons of Love" from the musical Rent. It was so powerful and so beautiful and I remember Karyn and me sitting there side by side on the sofa, both awestruck, with tears forming in our eyes.

There's something really profound about the effect music can have on us and the way it can help us connect to lost loved ones. I'm fascinated by this phenomenon. Why does music have this power? Why, come to think of it, do we even have music? It's actually quite easy to imagine an alternate reality in which humans had never developed music and society was otherwise much the same as it is (in contrast to, for instance, the written word, the lack of which would result in a tremendously different society). And yet music must be something that we've had for a very long time. It existed, in fact, long before there were any humans. We aren't the only species that sings songs - so do many birds, and some whales, to name a couple of diverse examples. I find that music has an almost mystical power, and although I wouldn't presume that it has the same effect on everyone, I know I'm far from alone in feeling this way.

I have countless other examples of songs, particularly during live performances, stirring deep emotion in me because of their connections with Cara. I've written about many such instances in the past and I'm not going to go back over them here, but I did want to share one other personal anecdote. My Aunt Donna, my mom's oldest sister, passed away early last year from multiple system atrophy, a cruel disorder of the nervous system that presents as similar to Parkinson's. The last time I visited her, just days before her passing, while I was there she asked her husband Dave to look up and play a song. The song was "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night. Donna had requested that the song be played at her funeral. While listening to the song, Donna, who by that point had little remaining ability to control her muscles, was lightly moving her hand and head in time to the music. One of the other people in the room asked Donna if she was remembering dancing to the song.

"I was remembering joy," Donna corrected her faintly, for speaking was also becoming a struggle for her. Then she looked at me and continued, "Joy was Cara's middle name, wasn't it?"

I answered in the affirmative. "I'm going to dance with Cara in heaven," Donna said, one of the most touching things anyone has ever said to me. And I'd like to think she was right.

Year of the cats

On the evening of November 17, 2017, when I was walking into (sadly now closed) wine bar La Cave du Vin at the corner of Euclid Heights and Coventry for my first date since the traumatic ending of my previous relationship, I don't think I'd have predicted that one year later I would be celebrating the anniversary of that date.

And yet last weekend found Karyn and me in Chicago, happily commemorating our first anniversary.

The two of us have done a whole lot of traveling together in that year. The list of destinations for our trips includes: Columbus, Detroit, Washington DC, Toronto, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Pymatuning Lake, Sandusky, Steubenville (yes, Steubenville - a day trip for a concert by Typhoon's Kyle Morton, and one of my favorites of the whole bunch), Put-in-Bay, Los Angeles, and now Chicago. Quite a year of traveling, and the year was quite a journey for both of us in other ways too. This last trip was perhaps the best of all, so I decided to write about it.

Karyn likes to come up with hashtags for trips. For this trip she decided on #yearofthecats, which I quite liked. The meaning of the "year" part is obvious; as for the "cats" part, many of you are probably aware that we have a lot of cats. Eight cats, to be precise - my Eponine and Gavroche, plus Karyn's Grady, Hogan, Rupert, Martin, Rusty, and Tortellini. One big happy family!

We said goodbye to our cats and headed out to Chicago on a cold and windy Friday morning. The weather we had for the weekend was not particularly nice, but you don't go to Chicago in November for the weather. At least the high winds of Friday did not stick around for the rest of the weekend.

One of the big themes of the weekend was delicious food. This started with a brief stop at Eataly after we finished getting settled into our posh accommodations at the Loews Downtown Chicago hotel. Eataly is a massive two-story market full of Italian food for eating in, taking out, or grocery shopping. We were both in awe of the place. We didn't have much time to spend there that day so we vowed we'd return before we had to leave town. That we did on Sunday afternoon, our last excursion before departing, and I'm pretty sure that Sunday visit led to the largest grocery bill of my life, but I have no regrets!

After we grabbed a quick bite, we headed to a nearby barber shop where Karyn got a haircut. She was pleased to find a place that did not discriminate by gender on pricing.

I wanted to go eat in Chinatown at some point during the weekend, something I've greatly enjoyed doing on several previous Chicago visits, so we caught a train there early Friday evening. Before dinner, I decided I wanted to stop in at a gift shop I'd previously visited with Cara. I recalled how on that previous visit, we had bought one of Cara's numerous Chococat plushes. Chococat is another character from Sanrio, the company responsible for Hello Kitty, but Chococat is not nearly as well known. Cara adored Chococat, who she nicknamed "Boco." I honestly did not go into that shop last weekend with the intention of purchasing more Chococat merchandise, but once inside I naturally started looking for Chococats as I always had when visiting any sort of Asian gift shop either with Cara or by myself in search of a gift for Cara. And I was saddened to see that there were absolutely no Chococat plushes in the shop.

As I said, Chococat is not as popular as Hello Kitty, and there was never a great abundance of different Chococat products at any given time. But it now appears that Sanrio has almost completely stopped producing Chococat merchandise. And that makes me very sad.

Karyn has also come to like Chococat. We have a gigantic Chococat pillow on the sofa and she has said that it's seemingly impossible to lie on it and not fall asleep. Seeing my desire to find a Chococat in the gift shop, Karyn joined my search, and I have to say I was deeply moved by her great determination to find something, anything, with that familiar wide-eyed feline face on it.

Ultimately we did succeed in finding three Chococat-branded items: a phone case, a pocket-sized notebook, and, best of all (and discovered by Karyn), my new wallet!

You see, for most of this year I have been saying that I needed a new wallet because my old one (a pretty standard-looking leather wallet) is very worn out. And from time to time we'd be out somewhere and see some wallets and I'd look at them but I hadn't come across one that caught my fancy. So when Karyn presented this wallet to me in that Chinatown gift shop I instantly realized that this was exactly what I had been looking for. I think she was surprised at first at my intent to actually use a Chococat wallet as my everyday wallet. "You're a very confident man," she said. True, I suppose.

It goes without saying that it's because of how much Cara liked Chococat, but it's still hard to exactly put into words just how happy it made me to get this wallet, and I'm very grateful to Karyn for finding it. I told her that it might be one of my favorite things I've ever bought, and I really meant that.

So finding the Chococat wallet was for me one of the highlights of the trip, but it was one of many highlights. The stop at the gift shop was followed by a delicious dinner at MingHin Cuisine, and after dinner, because it was right there I could not resist getting a bubble tea from Joy Yee, as I've done on more than one previous visit to Chicago's Chinatown. We then headed back to the hotel.

Saturday was a very busy day for the two of us and it was a very wonderful day as well. It started with another great meal, breakfast at Cupitol Coffee & Eatery. After a brief stop back at the hotel, we headed out for a day spent wandering the streets of Chicago and enjoying various holiday festivities. It was a dreary day, and a light rain fell for much of the morning and early afternoon, leading us to remark that at least it wasn't windy like the day before.

We began the journey from our hotel by heading south across the river and toward Millennium Park. Now, the one unfortunate thing about our hotel's location was the skyscraper obnoxiously and aggressively emblazoned with the letters TRUMP staring across the river at us. As we crossed the river, Karyn paused to take a photo of the skyscraper, its upper levels disappearing into the misty sky. It would have been quite a pretty sight if not for those letters:

Karyn posted the image to Facebook and called it "The Tower of Kefka in real life." She had to explain to me the Final Fantasy VI reference she was making, because I knew nothing about that video game. As she told me, Kefka was the game's villain and was an evil, clownish, self-obsessed nihilist character who pretty much destroyed the world, and built a massive tower from the wreckage of all that he'd destroyed. And apparently in the early part of the game Kefka seemed like a minor threat worthy more of mockery than anything else, but then in a surprising twist he rose to power and went on to wreak enormous destruction. Good comparison, right? I really enjoyed listening to Karyn describe this as we walked.

At Millennium Park we of course enjoyed seeing "The Bean," although the weather was far less than ideal for taking in the scenery.

Fortunately our main reason for visiting Millennium Park that day, the Millennium Park Art Market, was held inside a giant tent. We went there with the intention of doing some holiday shopping and also buying something for our new apartment. We found plenty of great offerings to choose from! I really was amazed by the tremendous display of creativity and talent and effort from all the art students whose wares were displayed. I was also struck by how much of the artwork, almost all produced by people younger than Karyn and me, clearly reflected the world in which our generation and the generation after ours is growing up. The uncertain future in a society and a planet plagued by climate change and growing inequality and other ills. The technological advances that have so dramatically changed the ways in which we communicate and interface with the world. The never-ending struggle for basic human rights and dignity fought by members of various marginalized groups and the growing sense of solidarity among members of those groups and their allies in a nation where reactionary forces have seized power and are desperately and viciously trying to stem and even reverse that tide of progress.

We ended up making purchases from a number of the artists. When we checked out I remarked that the total bill was actually not bad at all for all the great stuff we were getting. And I always like to support small independent artists like those at the market. One of my favorite items we bought was this poster by a young woman named Meha Ray:

She has a series of robot illustrations and Karyn suggested that she should make a book based on her robot character.

Our next stop after the art market was Macy's, where Karyn suggested we go get our picture taken with Santa Claus. While waiting in line, we were amused by the fact that we were the only ones without children, but it was fun! When Santa asked what we wanted for Christmas, Karyn said a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl win and I said world peace. Santa said world peace might be easier.

We ended up spending quite a while in Macy's, where we both bought (among other things) much-needed new winter gloves. By the time we returned to the street, it had thankfully stopped raining. Our next stop was Christkindlmarket, a German-themed outdoor holiday market with plenty more artwork and plenty more delicious food. The cheese melted directly off the wheel onto a toasted baguette was a revelation.

We couldn't resist making a few more purchases, including these adorable hand-carved wooden animals, a cat and a snail:

(I picked the snail because it was the closest thing to a slug. If anyone ever comes across a wooden sea slug, please let me know.)

The main attraction that weekend in Chicago was the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival and we next made our way to the Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue where we joined the throngs who were waiting for the festive parade and the accompanying lighting of the trees. It really was quite cool to see all the Christmas lights on our block's worth of trees simultaneously spring to life at the command of Mickey Mouse who was passing by on a parade float. I also greatly enjoyed seeing the high school marching bands in the parade (including one from Akron) and, of course, Santa Claus and his reindeer on the final float. It was a chilly night to be standing outside for that long, but we had fun! One of my favorite parts, to be honest, was seeing the excited reactions of all the children near us.

After the parade we returned to our hotel, but our busy day was still not over. The last item on the agenda was a late night anniversary dinner at Gilt Bar, a restaurant Karyn had found. She said that she had picked it because, from the pictures, it seemed to have the most similar vibe to La Cave du Vin's dimly lit interior. It was a good choice! The roasted garlic appetizer was amazing, our salad and our pasta entrees were great, and our meal concluded with an enormous and delicious slice of carrot cake on the house. While dining, our conversation turned to everything we had been through together over the course of that year. It really is remarkable. And the trip to Chicago was a perfect way to celebrate that year.

At some point earlier in the weekend, we had walked by the original Pizzeria Uno on Ohio Street in downtown Chicago and then just up the street its sister restaurant Pizzeria Due. My thoughts instantly turned to my first visit to Chicago, for a cross country meet as a sophomore in college in the fall of 2002, and how the team had dined together at Pizzeria Due (Uno having had a longer wait). I looked up from the street and could see the room where I remembered sitting all those years ago. Karyn wondered what I was looking at and I explained it to her and how it was hard to believe all that time had passed.

In March 2011 Cara and I took a trip to Chicago and I wrote a blog post about it and one thing I wrote, regarding our visit to the park where the aforementioned cross country meet was held, was: "Going to a place that you've visited before and remember well but haven't seen in years is an interesting experience. Memories rush back at you. In a way, I'm a different person now than I was then, yet there's obviously a very strong connection with my past self." That's even more true now. I guess I've always had that keen interest in staying in touch with my own past. But it all has an extra poignancy now after all the things that have happened in my life in between that 2011 visit and today. And reading something you wrote many years ago can be a similarly interesting experience to visiting a place you haven't seen in years, one of the reasons I'm glad I've kept this blog.

My and Karyn's visit to Chicago had to end on Sunday, but the good times and good eating were not quite over when we got up that morning. For brunch we decided to try a restaurant called Beatrix and there we found what was not only perhaps the best meal of the weekend, but also almost undoubtedly the best customer service we've ever experienced. Karyn decided to order the pecan French toast special, while I opted for lemon pancakes and a side of brown sugar bacon. Before ordering, Karyn had told our waitress (named Kelsey) that she was thinking about the cauliflower grits, which Kelsey had recommended as her favorite. When our food came out, the first item was the cauliflower grits. We hadn't ordered that, we said, surprised. The rest of the order was correct, so the server returned to the kitchen with the cauliflower grits. A minute later Kelsey came back to the table with the grits and explained that she had wanted us to be able to try them, so she had added them (the full size plate) to our order, and they were on her!

And that wasn't all. We both expressed our tremendous gratitude, and after we finished eating Karyn told Kelsey how it was our anniversary weekend and this meal had been a perfect conclusion to it, and then Kelsey brought us a slice of pecan pumpkin pie to go, also on her. It really was an extra special way to cap off a very special weekend.

After brunch we made that final excursion to Eataly, and then headed to the car and made the drive back home to Cleveland, where we returned very tired but happy to our new apartment and our eight cats.