I should start by saying, I feel very lucky.
That the most frequent buzzing on my phone (especially during election season) is a group text of 10 of us... not just high school friends, or middle school friends... but some of us in this group go as far back as first grade. A motley, classic-rock-loving crew referenced here in Song 109, Tiny Dancer, it just doesn’t get much better than the people I grew up with.
Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band
Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man
And of that group... Miss Jessica is my music wo-man.
She’s much more than that, but the constant and loudest chord between us has always been music. A through-line which extends as far back as middle school when we were in, yes, band together... continuing through high school... which truly speaks to our shared tenacity because committing to a plume on your head for four years requires a real -- I genuinely do not care what other people think -- kind of flair.
(And we made it through high school.)
The summer after graduation -- a Dave Matthews concert. Where the sky soaked our hair in the open lawn and where we had a big, deep, stretching parking lot conversation about what would become of us all when we went off to college. What would become of us at all? Never expecting the dreaded “c” -- the curveball no one expects -- would become a reality for Jessica by our sophomore year.
As not only a cancer survivor, but simply as a person in the world, she just gets it. Whatever IT is. Whatever it is we’re all doing here. She gets it. Supremely. Deeply. Unequivocally.
She is my music friend, but she is also my intrepid, spontaneous, WILL TRAVEL for music friend...
New York 2009 -- Phoenix played a summer concert in Central Park. She decided that morning she’d make an impromptu drive from Boston to visit. We went without tickets. We winged it. It worked out. Famously. As it always does.
Atlanta, May 2014 -- Shaky Knees music festival. Just weeks prior, on Marathon Monday, Jess had resolved to book a flight and come visit. One week later she bought the ticket. Two weeks later she was in Atlanta.
And it rained. Again. As it always does. (It absolutely poured this time.)
But nonetheless, Jess and I had a very Almost Famous weekend at Shaky Knees.
We drank in Spoon and The National side stage.
Found the best concert-goer.
And of course, we “won the party” in true Eileen fashion.
(And scored Waffle House hats for her daughters. Everybody won.)
Not only is Jessica my intrepid, spontaneous, will travel for music friend -- she’s the friend who writes emails like this one -- an ever so subtle nudge to keep going with the blog, after my one-a-day posts began to sputter. “SO, long story long, I wanted to share this clip with you because it just reminded me of a really beautiful way to think of Eileen.”
The takeaway from Thich was...
“It’s like a cloud in the sky. When the cloud is no longer in the sky, it doesn’t mean the cloud has died. Your beloved cloud might have become the rain, calling on you, “Darling! Darling! Don’t you see me in my new form?”
On the second day of Shaky Knees, in between the rain, we stood atop a balcony under a mess of clouds and got to talking about the lives you don’t choose, or that you choose to walk away from, and the lives that choose you instead. Jess is an oncology nurse now at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and felt it was a calling. But if she’d never gotten sick, she lamented, she would have pursued a career in music. Standing atop that balcony... looking out at the life she didn’t choose.
But don’t you see? You did go into music, my dear.
“Darling! Darling! Don’t you see me in my new form?”
People choose their professions for all sorts of reasons, but I believe the subtext in the job description of an oncology nurse is to teach people how to sing in the rain.
We never once played my mom’s iPod while at Mass General, where there was already so much music in that room. Nurse Jane, Rosebud, Sharon... every nurse who waltzed in singing her own song echoes through our memories still. “Puuuhhrrrrfect! Puuuhhhhrrrrrrrrfect!” my dad, my brother and I would sing in unison, miming Nurse Sharon’s upbeat refrain each time she arranged my mom’s pillows just so.
Oncology nurses are a special breed of magic. And you, my dear, are a walking, breathing case study in how to see the silver lining. In, yes... The Art of Singing in the Rain.
Because at the end of the day -- as we well know from our life experiences and concert experiences -- there is always music in the rain.
We ended Shaky Knees weekend sipping mimosas under the sun in Sprice’s yard on Sunday. Mother’s Day. All three of us touched by cancer. Sprice and I who have lost our moms, and Jessica who has survived it. Two un-mothered women and a mother of two children. (And I am witnessing Jessica becoming the kind of mother my mother was.) Maybe that’s why she’s such a conduit to all things Eileen now.
After a good rain, Sprice’s yard comes alive in a wash of bright, bursting, brilliant greens. Tangled vines creep up drainpipes and crawl through fences. The big willow tree seems to grow in size. Rose bushes come out of hiding, the butterfly bush attracts its old visitors and bees dance from flower to flower while the horses graze in an emerald pasture.
Everything operates on a higher frequency here -- buzzing, palpable energy -- the yard breathes through every open door and window into the house where ladybugs have made a home in every room. It is Great Expectations. Sprice’s home is one of the most healing environments I have ever known. It’s where I got my water after my mom passed away.
Jess came back down to Atlanta this May and we stopped over Sprice’s for a visit. After we left, Sprice texted me to say: Isn’t it always magical when Jessica is here?
I love this sentiment... because Jess has only been to Sprice’s twice.
It’s easy to witness the magic and observe life after the rain at Sprice’s, where everything is alive and green and Oz-like and signs of my mom are everywhere. The “moments of glittering mica” are less easy to observe in less dramatic settings... like sitting in traffic on an endlessly grey stretch of highway in Massachusetts. Unless you have someone tapping you on the shoulder to point out the signs.
Of all the concerts we’ve seen, of all the rain we’ve endured, by far our best concert experience came July 30th of this year, back home in MA, the granddaddy of all concerts: COLDPLAY. Church. My first Coldplay concert, a religious experience and portal to my mom. Coldplay was the last concert my mom saw (in person) on July 29, 2012. But boy was she ever present at this one. And she just couldn’t wait...
On the way there, sitting in traffic... Jess’s husband tapped me on the shoulder from the back seat without saying a word, and pointed straight ahead:
(A vehicle as her vehicle.) Of all the cars in Massachusetts...
And well before the concert, in the midst of writing this post and trying to arrive at my point -- I had come to the realization that every time Jessica and I see a concert together, it rains. Without a drop of rain in the forecast I thought surely if it rains on Coldplay this would be a clear sign of Eileen.
So there we sat. Another concert under another very expectant-looking sky. Another big, deep, stretching parking lot conversation. My dad was off chatting with Jess’s husband while she and I sat in flimsy folding chairs drinking beers, discussing serendipity and looking out at the sun peeking through clouds when all of a sudden, out of the blue...
She’d be damned if she missed a Coldplay concert.
And she wasn’t done there. She has to win the party, after all.
So at the end of the concert, in sync with the brilliant fireworks display and the rousing finale and the now signature wristbands lighting the crowd up like fireflies, came the pitter patter of rain falling on us once more.
I smiled and looked up at the cloudless sky as raindrops and tears streamed down my face.
“Darling! Darling! Don’t you see me in my new form?”
How do you get your water?
Coldplay. Good friends. This blog. My mom’s music and the music that is my mom’s spirit in the perfectly-timed, out-of-the-blue rain. Tenacious. Steadfast. Resolute. A reminder of the mantra she kept in her heart, and on a magnet... found among the things my dad collected from her classroom in 2014:
She is alive and well in all the little serendipities of my life; she is the well from which I grew; and it turns out, sometimes roses do grow from the cracks in the parking lot too.
Her art was her attitude.
The Art of Singing in the Rain.
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