Michaelmas

Little sweetheart, today is the Feast of St Michael, also known as Michaelmas.

I didn’t even know about it until last year when I read something from The Cloisters - that wonderful medieval art wing of The Met that we like to visit way up in Fort Tryon Park  - in a email. By the time I saw it, it was September 30th, the day after and I’d missed it. But I read up on it and discovered that in more ancient times it used to observed on Oct 11, so I observed it myself, then - ha! Today, having marked it on my calendar beforehand, I had a chance to do so properly.

It’s a feast day, so I made a cake (!) which I’m sharing with the neighbors and later I’ll roast a chicken. In the lightest sense, I’ve jokingly said that I’m celebrating Michaelmas in all my michael-ness. But in the truer, deeper, richer sense, it’s a day of contemplation and thoughtfulness and prayer.

I didn’t get out of the house early enough for my run so I took a long walk up in Riverside Park to listen to the birdsong and watch for butterflies - both things always bring me close to you. I listened to Electric Hymnal this afternoon and again tonight. I told your mom and dad about it and heard back from each of them. Your dad remembered that you and your brother used to observe Michaelmas when you were little kids at The Waldorf School and it made him curious, having remembered that, so he looked up the holiday and sent me a text about what he found online. Your mom loved that I remembered and that had, “quite rightly”, she said baked a cake.

I didn’t grow up Catholic or Episcopal, so I never knew too much about the saints until later in life when the sacred became more intriguing and after your tragic passing desperately necessary to me. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who works at a wonderful church way downtown, I mentioned it before, Trinity Church, not far from the former Trade Center towers, and she suggested I read more of the mystics, if I hadn’t already. So, I’ve bookmarked the works of a few including Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen (who was also a composer) to look into.

Meantime, I’ve another day to look forward to. To quiet down and listen for your celestial, guiding presence. And to do better. With love and gratitude and quiet prayers. With all my love forever.

Forests...

Little sweetheart, the latest iteration of that fascinating UK-based experimental radio project, The Dark Outside, is taking place today, broadcasting for the next 24 hours never before heard music and recordings from Galloway Forest in Scotland. I composed and we recorded a piece for them, as we have for every event since getting to know of them.

We’ve now seven works in total that we’ve assembled and had broadcast for the project. Up til now we’d only released - and quite limitedly - two of them but we’ve decided between records to compile a special album of them, this more experimental side of Bipolar Explorer.

We’re calling the new album Forests, Voices, Coastlines, Dreams: Recordings for The Dark Outside and we hope to release it sometime around your birthday next month. So more news, artwork and links about that all soon.

As ever, it’s all for you! With all my love forever.
 

Summer-FM!

Little sweetheart, we’re almost a year out from the release of Deux Anges but our friends at KFJC, WFMU, London’s Resonance FM, and any number of internet radio stations are still playing tracks from the double album, for which we’re incredibly grateful!

Also, today, Dan - who has a Sunday morning show on the aforementioned KFJC in Nor Cal played a track from Of Love and Loss. “Out”, with your soaring vocals, came in the first hour between a new band that we quite like, Memory Wire, and a longtime favorite of us both, the Cure.

Listen, little sweetheart - you’re on the radio!

A Glimpse of the Divine

Little sweetheart, today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I didn’t think you and I ever really talked about that day. It wasn’t until I was talking to your mom just now that I knew you had actually been home in Davis, not in England at school that morning and had to wait over a week to return to Oxford after.

It was such a strange day, here, little sweetheart, to say the least. I myself was just back from London having been there from Memorial Day through Labor Day. I’d barely readjusted to the time difference and was actually sleeping when the first plane hit. I infamously didn’t have a tv in those days and when a friend called to wake me up, she told me to turn on my radio. I still had a landline, then, which was good because the cell signals were jammed and you couldn’t get through. The subway shut down and eventually so too did the buses but not before the few that made it here uptown were crammed full people seemingly hanging off them like a scene out of Gandhi. All day long people covered in dust made their way on foot up the West Side Highway and 12th Avenue.

No one knew what to do. I walked over to another friend’s apartment - a normal person who actually had a television - and we just stood there watching. We got the idea that maybe we could donate blood, maybe they’d need that, so we walked up to the old St Clare’s Hospital (not there anymore) on 9th but the whole block was cordoned off by police, awaiting injured survivors who never arrived.

The bridges were closed but somehow our friend Paul got in from the outer boroughs to open up McCoy’s because he thought people should have a place to go. It was something you and I knew from our time in England - and later when I finally got to take you to Ireland, too - about how pubs are something different from bars. They’re public houses and especially out in the countryside a community gathering place. “The pub is the hub” Prince Charles famously said.

A score of us trickled in, watching the coverage and speaking in disbelief to one another into the night.

It was a few years before you found me, little sweetheart, although you would move to New York, briefly, for a year, and live just blocks down the street. Later, this place, this place from where I write this, became (and remains) your home, too. Somehow the memory of this day is intertwined with thoughts of you. Certainly great loss is a commonality but I think a larger thing, a spiritual presence, is the true linkage.

When unimaginable things happen, somehow, I think, we’re closer to the divine. We can sense, can feel its presence, almost know it. Today, I feel so close to you, little sweetheart. I know you’re near and encouraging me to carry on - with our work, with striving to be a better person each day, and to hear you calling. I will listen. Always. With all my love forever.

Kindred Spirits

Little sweetheart, today is maternal grandfather’s birthday. I often think about how much you two would like one another. And probably do! I hope you’ve found time in Heaven to get acquainted.

He was a baker. He used to make all of our birthday cakes when we were children. He and my great uncle had a hotel and restaurant in a kind of summer town on one of the Great Lakes. I’d go down there and “work” in the kitchen - over in the salad room far away from the knives or anything potentially dangerous to a seven year old - for two weeks every year and get a crisp twenty dollar bill for my efforts. He ran the whole kitchen and my great grandmother used to main the front desk. College kids would be hired for all the other stuff, mostly.

It was idyllic. I was just telling your mom about the whole thing. I don’t have any plans to write for the theatre anymore but it strikes me as something of a good setting for a play.

Anyway, I feel like you and Louie are such kindred spirits. Both of you so very kind and thoughtful and funny and just love people. Both with such a twinkle, a kind of antic mischievousness. I just think you two would get on so well and again, imagine that you already do! And I only just thought of this now, incredibly - you love baking! - so there’s yet another thing you two have in common.

Thinking of you, as ever, my little sweetheart, as I think of my dear grandpa today, too. With al my love forever.
 

UK Radio Interview

A got a chance to talk about you for some time tonight, little sweetheart, during a radio interview in the UK. 

A station there, Radio SLE, has several programs that have featured us over the last couple of years. The first of them was in collaboration a while back with the Canadian podcast, Limbocast, that did interviews with me after Deux Anges was released, broadcast the double-album in its entirety and then had us back to talk about Til Morning again last December. 

A couple other shows have picked us up, little sweetheart, and a special one, "Music in Mind", that talks with musicians and composers about their work and issues of health and well-being, asked me a couple weeks ago if they could schedule an hour long interview with me for broadcast today. SLE doesn't archive their broadcasts, so I don't have a link to a recording but I had a very wide ranging and thoughtful chat with their host Frankie Rose. 

We spoke a lot about you, of course - the soul and conscience of Bipolar Explorer, the very reason for its existence and continuation - and she opened and closed the show with songs from Sometimes in Dreams: "You Are Loved (Summer's Theme)" at the top of the hour and "Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased" at its end. 

As ever, it's all for you. Listen, little sweetheart - you're on the radio! 

With all my love forever.