Nellie's Blues

In my sense of Starbuck urgency… (in my previous blog) they, displaying squinting, clandestine eyes, watching me, after two plus hours typing and getting free hot water refills in my tea cup, at that little table by the window, I closed down hurriedly and escaped without looking back.

It is not that I was taking space from waiting customers and I did pay $9 American bucks for tea, a croissant, and a sumptuous piece of banana cake at the outset… an expensive two plus hours for the use of their internet… which they advertise… “Free WiFi”. Of course I know it is not free. I would likely have been shunned out earlier with jabbing dagger eyes had I not purchased, basically my breakfast. But, I figured my strategy was all wrong.

I should have simply purchased a cup of tea and then gone back for a refill after about 20 minutes. Take another 20 minutes, go back for another free refill but, this time purchase a croissant. After about another 20 minutes or more, go back for another hot refill and purchase the banana cake. Then spend the next hour finishing that cup of tea. With this strategy my total purchase amount would be the same… $9 bucks. But I could easily have stretched that up to two to three hours while the staff offered no dagger eyes but, wait with anticipation and shallow, glancing, smiling cheeks for another purchase… Success is all in the perception. I will field test this strategy in my next Starbuck breakfast.

That is devilishly amusing… but, let me finish my last blog by explaining the fruit photo above. Throughout the day or after meals, to balance my diet, I eat fresh fruit… bananas, pears, peaches, apples, oranges, tomatoes, avocados. One might argue that tomatoes and avocados are not fruit but, vegetables… but not so. They have come out, they are swing fruits. So enjoy them with pleasure.

Just a little back tracking. I referred, in a previous blog to a rock formation looking like the pages of ancient books. This is a much better sample… like a recently discovered geological book of time (ancient weathered manuscripts)

Now, let me give you a little tour on the inside of my travelling cargo can.

Down that long hallway (ha) at the back doors is my sleeping bag, which I simply roll out at night time.

Coleman stove, fold up table and ladder/seat, tool box

A pile of show gear…flood lights, tripods, musical cables, music stand, microphone stand, loop pedal, digital head mic, plus regular industry rough and ready mic, camcorder tapes, canvass, art paintings, extension cords, show boots, bicycles gear, ladder for climbing up on roof, broom, etc…every thing one need for an "on the spot" show

Dinner table, fold up work table, with magnetic pencil/push pin/staple boxes, that conveniently stick to the metal sidewall of the van. Under the table are my guitars and banjitar, milk cartons filled with reference material of past project, kitchen posts and pans and utensils and an African drum.

Front of the van with two coolers, one with ice, the other electric (testing it for highway efficiency). Ice in a regular cooler will last comfortably for over two days.

My black hat, which I use in stage shows around which I tell road stories, including of how I met Chief Sitting Bull of Custer's Last Stand

Musically practice day… trying to learn the blues. I am certainly not a musician but, am determined to write a blues song, which I will call “Nellie’s Blues”. I have only ever known about four strumming chords. Have tried music lessons with instructors but, have failed miserably… mostly my rhythm is a disaster in the company of musicians… who can actually play.. The blues is a whole new world of…”finger picking”.

There is something about Nellie… pathos… I see in her face that grips my feelings for her. Can you see it… there is no smile in her face… is it simply me… projecting… about tears I see in her inner world? What do you see in her face... a woman who was buried in an unmarked grave at the age of 38....

Cousins Laura and Nancy and I are “digging up Nellie” and other cousin’s want to join us, fantastic. This has become a focus point for my trip. That tied, integrally, to getting her a headstone, to mark her death bed in this world. Are there any face readers out there who can say, just by looking at that photo, what is inside that dear grandmother of mine. I know this woman suffered, before she died at 38. I would love some feedback here, so that I may write a beautiful song with real passion… you know, like Robert Johnson. Big Bill Brusy or other delta blue greats have written.

There is something else that Laura said… maybe my music needs a different frequency from the standard 440 tuning… to be in harmony with my inner rhythm. My “crossroads“. I have never heard that before but, there could be something to it … worth some research!

Well, I finally got to Galveston in my search for heroines of the Texas Revolution. I was whole heartedly disappointed. The statue was not what I remembered from my visit four years previous. There is no story of heroines. That was simply my projection, my fantasy, my wishful thinking. There certainly are woman all over that sculpture but, they are simply metaphors… Grecian goddesses.

I left the city feeling it was a waste of time, too hot, too crowded with tourists, flooding the streets and side walk cafes, no place to park. I just had to leave. One house caught my eye on the way out, so I stopped, trying to find reason to justify my whimsy for being there in the first place… looking for heroines… so damn silly.

It was the Moody House, meant nothing to me, but it was open to tourists, so I popped in, landed right in the middle of one of those stupid tours and tagged along,,, sheepishly, as there may have been a ticket fee. After 10 minutes of slithering along the side back of the group, I got tired of that silly woman, her pompous, pretentious expressions and slithered out, as I came in, least I was about to vomit and collapse from her and the crowds oohs and ahs about whether the woman house owner, a century earlier slipped her husband a bit of arsenic,  garbage into his cup so she could get the house and his money, (rhetorical, Agatha Christie) before that old bitch died herself… truly, this was the obnoxious chat of that ugly woman guide and the giddy sedated, empty headed group. I could not get out of there and that city fast enough.

Anyway, who really gives a damn about a limestone (“shipped from Europe!!!”) ostentatious, Disneyland house, for monied idiots.

But, look what I came across on my way out of town in a couple towns along, Kemah, Texas, Bay Port Road, Highway 146, leaving that town… leads one to leak incontinently with joy…

Finally, let me tell you the poignant joy of my day:

That is right… cotton. I came across fields and fields of cotton. First time I had actually seen it in real life. I cut two flowering buds and went back in another along the road to cut a whole small bush. This was a profound moment for me as we know the history of suffering, slavery, Lincoln and abolition and recall today, the shooting of a black man, by a white police officer and the ground swell of on-street protest and violence, revealing the ongoing fact of disturbing racial undercurrents, that erupt in an instance. It is disturbing. Will it ever diminish… can it? Is it humanly possible, with the pressures and demands of claustrophobic population forces and cross cultural pollination?

I said “poignant joy” because, it made me feel the pulse of the human struggle. And, in retrospect, the artist of the Revolution sculpture may have felt the same, as he used women as the metaphor for the embracing values and the aspirations of human life... courage, honour, patriotism, devotion.

The day wasn’t bad after all. I remembered Meisha, as she and I stood there together... four years earlier.