Triple Angel

Oh, my little sweetheart! How badly I have needed you these last many days, so how very comforting to know you have tried your best to find me. I’ve had 11:11 three times in the last 36 hours. Thank you, my angel. I know you are doing your best to guide and comfort me in these difficult days. Please help me to do better. And please take me to you just as soon as heaven will allow, won’t? With all my love forever.

Sharing

Little sweetheart, it’s awfully hard to choose but I think this is maybe one of my favorite pictures of you. It was on a tour boat on the River Rouge when we were on that vacation on the Oregon Coast with your family. I had posted it on Facebook at some point and it came up as a “memory” there, so I shared it. A couple of people immediately wrote me and it gave me a chance to talk about you. That is maybe my favorite thing to do - tell others about you. You are my angel, the dearest, most special and lovely girl in the whole world. I adore you. I’m proud of you. I admire you. And love, absolutely love, telling other people about you. It keeps you near me. Thank you my love. For everything. For forever.

Ominous

Little sweetheart, I just came back from a run and I have the strangest feeling of foreboding. There’s something very strange in the air. A dark energy that is ominous and even feels a little sinister. Like violence is imminent or something horrible. You’ve taught me to pay attention to these signs and so I am, my love. I hope everything will be alright. Saying quiet prayers and calling on you. With all my love forever.

Thousand Thousand

Little sweetheart, as I continue work on the live OF LOVE AND LOSS, writing and recording the short guitar pieces that I call “incidentals” - that both link the existing songs from the album in transition and underscore the spoken word narration I’ve written - I’ve just composed something rather new. I have a new guitar pedal - a loop station - and it’s pretty neat. I remember that you just gotten one yourself our last Christmas together and were looking forward to trying it out. I was going to help you. You wanted to use yours specifically for vocals, layering harmonies, singing with yourself, and I thought that a great idea. Mine is more of a guitar based one, but I am certain we can figure out how to use it with a mic, too. I think it takes the kind of mic you use with a harmonica. And there’s also a USB port, so I can pre-load vocal loops - of your isolated vocal tracks, for instance - and play them back. That’d be neat, right, little sweetheart?! I'm just starting to use the guitar one and that’s what I wanted to tell you about. I started out making two different guitar loops. One layers both a guitar chord with tremolo under a clean arpeggio and the other is a big power chord leading into feedback. They’re based on coming out of the song “No Answer”, so the next thing I did recording-wise was to fly in your isolated vocals from the end of the song - both the parts where you laugh at the end, the spoken/softly sung beginning when you’re getting ready for your entrance and a little snippet of you singing the descant. Those are on tracks 3, 4 and 5. Then I added me way off mic saying the first words of the Choral Text Passage - “I have a thousand things to say…” and a second close up on the mic whispering the same thing. I put an ambient vocal effect on that so it’s low and sort of pans between speakers on tracks 6 and 7. All together it’s a kind of soundscape. It’s really neat. I think you’ll like it. I call it “Thousand Thousand Summer”. It's a whole new idea about composing, using these loops. I bet the next album is going to have a lot of them. And I love working with your voice, It makes me feel so close to you. And I know you are. Closer than I can imagine. Thank you, my angel. I love you with all of heart and soul forever and ever.

Need To Remember

Oh, little sweetheart if there’s one thing I need most to remember, one thing that helps me stay near and sense you closer than I can imagine, it is to quiet myself and be gentle with all the souls that surround me. To act in love and kindness, even when others are rude or indifferent. You yourself are such a sensitive, kind, lovely soul and you taught me this many times through your selfless acts of love and thoughtfulness.  Help me to remember to do as you have. It keeps me close to you and when I feel that closeness, even separated as we are by this terrible wall of mortality, my heart lightens, my soul lifts, and I can breath a bit easier, knowing that I am doing your will. And that you are near. Thank you, my angel. Please take to you the second heaven will allow, won’t you? With all my love forever.

Help Me To Do Better

Little sweetheart, I’m feeling odd and disconnected from you. And that’s when I know things are going wrong. It not only makes me sad, it worries me. It makes me believe that I’m losing my way. Please help me return to your guidance and care. You know me better than anyone and want the best for me always. I feel safe and loved in your presence. Even when we were apart, just waking and knowing I might already have an overnight text from you or would hear from you in an hour, gave me the greatest sense of well-being, of belonging, I have ever known in my life. Now that I must wait to cross the divide between life and The Forever, it’s so much harder, but when I have a sense of your celestial presence - and I know you try to best to assure and come to me - it’s such a great relief. Please help me, my darling, to do better, won’t you? I need you. And I love you with all my heart and soul forever.

For the Better. Forever.

Little sweetheart, we're working on the live Of Love and Loss and at its center is something we call the "Choral Text Passage". It's largely based on my memorial speech for you but delivered by both Jason & I (and later, Kim) in turn and unison. There's a part of it - where I was talking about your acting - that I've wanted to rewrite, so this morning I had a go at this. It's below. I'm not sure how I'm going to break it up but this is the new section. Thinking of you, always... 

...This isn’t the main thing, so I don’t want to linger, but I have to say this: she was the truest artist I’ve ever known. Breathtakingly gifted. When we met, she was playing - inhabiting - the central role in "Tir na nOg" - a play about a young girl in the West of Ireland who grows to adulthood and further adventures in Dublin. She burned that stage to cinders every night. For six weeks. With three broken toes. She’d careened barefoot into some stair unit backstage during a quick change in the middle of the Final Dress and half her left foot swelled up and went purple. Her doctor told her she’d have to quit the run. Not a chance. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. Neither did the audience. Not unless they happened by the stage door after and saw her striding away in her short air fracture boot.

When she joined this band, everything changed. For the better. Forever. I loved writing for her and she was the best musician I’ve ever known. Her vocals, like every part of her, were connected directly to her soul. And she had total telepathy. I’d play something on guitar and she’d meet me there the moment I arrived.

One more thing about her acting. A year after we first met and became inseparable, she got a job, down the coast in Carmel, doing “The Blue Room”, David Hare’s reworking of “La Ronde” where two actors, one male, one female, play all ten parts. Good actors, great ones, are supposed to be adept at one of two things - transformative character work, disappearing into a role; or the deepest kind of emotional connection, shocking us with their naked honesty. Summer could do both. Simultaneously. She did that night. In the round. A foot from the audience where you can’t hide anything or fake it. I sat there between Linda - her mom - and Coy - her friend - and I think they literally had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I couldn’t move after. She was that good. She is like the Supermoon - once in a generation...

The Seventh Word

Little sweetheart, with some film loops and the audio from the Good Friday remarks I wrote for you, I made a little video. It's here. Love you forever...

Keep The Faith

Little sweetheart, I think I told you that I was asked to write and deliver remarks on Good Friday at that little church I go to sometimes. They asked me each of the last three years. This year, apparently, they also recorded them. So, they can heard and/or downloaded here. Love you forever.