Clarence Clemons, said both my daughter and Bruce Springsteen this week, passed through his life doing exactly what he wanted to do. Bruce said the rest, which amounted to admitting that you can’t really do that, and the result of trying to is confusion and turbulence and discomfort and illusion. Except when it works. Then Read more...
Home
Walk Free, My Son: Vincent Harding Writes the President
June 13th, 2011
Vincent Harding, scholar and writer, speaks here as perhaps the leading Gandhian activist in our nation. He can say not only that he “marched with King,” but that he wrote with him, planned with him, and learned together with him. He remains one of the truly inspiring figures of the American freedom movement. This open letter Read more...
100 Years of Robert Johnson
May 31st, 2011
[This item appeared in April at the Holler If You Hear Me website: www.hollerif.blogspot.com I added a little here.] Somebody asked if Robert Johnson ever got to Chicago. I looked for the fact in a few places and then realized that what I was going to get was somebody’s version but that it was more Read more...
Uncle Tom’s Cabin Book Reading Marathon
April 10th, 2011
My friend Kevin Gray and others in South Carolina are having a Uncle Tom’s Cabin Book Reading Marathon in Columbia, South Carolina on April 12th. They are telling the enslaved Africans and abolitionists’ side of the story.
Please welcome Weston Kristof Carr–Another Chance to Get It Right
February 4th, 2011
Born about 6:45 PM Tuesday at Norwalk Hospital, to Sasha Carr, a 9 pound 1 ounce baby boy. He has his great-grandfather’s thick black hair. His mother’s nose. All of our hearts.
The nurse who measured him held up the tape and mouthed to me through the nursery window, “Twenty one and a half!” (Inches, she meant.) I thought she did this for all onlookers. When I met her later, she explained she was amazed at how long he was. A few minutes later, a family standing nearby said, “Look at that one. He doesn’t look like a new born. He looks like he’s a month old already.” He does too—none of that Winston Churchill resemblance. He’s built like a point guard or a wideout, maybe. But already, he’s his own man, which is the important thing.
He overwhelmed me, like babies are supposed to do. As did his mother. And her mother, who stood by all night the night before, not a wink of sleep in the hospital’s bed chair, then caressed her daughter through the final round and, finally, cut the cord. I have seen my wife and my daughter look beautiful many times. But this is the best yet. Sasha and Wes live next door, and we get to participate. I await further instructions with an eagerness that suprises me a little. I’d think there comes a point where you’re too old for love at first sight, but I guess you never are.
For those of you who asked or may wonder, Barbara is Nonna, and he can call me Grandpa, Pops, Pop-pop, Duke, Dukie, or a term of his own devise. The one thing that’s clear already is, I don’t own him. He owns me. Remind me of that once in a while, if I slip….
Both this morning’s Live from E Street Nation and this Sunday’s Kick Out the Jams are about what it means to be a grandparent, in their different ways.
Dave
“What children are, more than anything else, is this: another chance for our flawed species. Another chance to get it right.” – Andrew Vachss
A Letter to My Daughter on the Anniversary of Her Death
January 4th, 2011
Every year, on January 3–the anniversary of her death at age 21, from a very rare cancer, retroperitoneal sarcoma– I write my daughter Kristen a letter. This is the 18th. The others are available if you would like to see them.
Thank you for the attention you might give this.
If you would like to know Kristen better or more about the fight to cure and find better treatments for sarcoma, please go to www.sarcoma.com, the website of the Kristen Ann Carr Fund. (There is also KACF info at Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.) Among other things, there is a brief but very fine video by Mark Cerulli that explains the whole situation beautifully and features many of Kristen’s cast of characters.
May you really live.
Dave
P.S. Christine Ohlman’s song is “The Gone of You,” two versions of which are on her beautiful 2009 album, The Deep End.
———————————————————————————
Dear Kristen,
Eighteen years and no, it doesn’t seem like yesterday since you departed from us. It seems like a long time–though not so long that once in a while, I don’t find myself reattached to the emotions and memories of the end of your life.
The better times are easier to remember, or maybe I mean that when those reminiscences come, there’s no resistance, they are not accompanied by fear. Mostly, there’s just the pure pleasure of re-experiencing your growing up, the laughs, the triumphs, and even the failures, the trials of courage and patience and understanding that we shared. These memories are of life, and they are true, therefore some of it is “bad.” Anybody’s life is made up of misfortune as well as blessings.
Death is another matter. I suppose as a release from suffering, you can call it beneficial. But suffering in that degree isn’t part of life so much as it is part of death.
I cannot say, as the blues song does, that if it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all. Part of the shock of your death is that we had been so fortunate, that things had to that point worked out so well.
We were lucky to have made a real family, you, Sasha, Barbara and me, and luckier still that we were able to extend that family to include Michael, and your aunts and uncles and my mom and Jon and Barbara, so many of your friends, especially Ilyse, and a whole bunch of others. You kids are the best of it, and not just in my memory. No trouble in school, no misbehavior that mattered a damn. Your futures weren’t a hope, they seemed assured.
Then our luck turned. It turned on you, of all people, and it turned viciously.
You could make a case that we are still a fortunate family. Lucky that losing you, who sometimes served as our center of gravity, didn’t shatter us, but instead, left us bonded for the rest of our lives.
A lot of those people we think of as family will be here tonight and the rest will be thinking of us, which really means, of you.
Yet tonight, even tonight, the room will spin around Sasha. That’s as it should be, because in a few weeks—days, really—she’ll add to our family a baby boy: A son for her, a grandson for us. In these next years, all the rooms will spin around him, I promise.
Sasha, with her courage and wisdom, has brought us so many gifts—I’m sure you could imagine, since she was your other half. I am not sure you could imagine how beautiful she is, right now, though. It isn’t so much a surprise as a wonder. An unqualified joy, in the way that only children, and their expectation, can be.
I hadn’t thought of this for a while, but now I remember how much you loved kids. There are some photographs of you holding the newborn child of a friend during your last trip to California that radiate your presence in a way that no others do.
What’s in those photos is life. Not a shadow of death. Not a hint. The camera lies so well.
So, is it death I’m here to discuss with you, or life? You’d say, life, because about death there can be no discussion. The older I get the more I realize the rightness of your choice—not to talk about it but to speak and think, whenever possible, only of life. Life, over which we have at least some control. Life, which offers much more joy than sorrow, which can transform the dingy mud of winter into spring’s green exuberance.
I don’t know why life is so much harder to describe than death. Maybe because life is complicated and ever-changing; its joys seem to come and go so quickly we can overlook them, while death is simple, because it’s final. Not even the biggest fool could miss it, although God knows, they try, every last one of us.
Death is also part of life’s complications, though, and not a small part. Death bears a message, and those who succumb to its infatuation want to believe that the story is that Death conquers all. But that’s not really it. In fact, life is supreme. Life is where our focus must remain, and if we have to struggle for it, then we need to find the beauty in that struggle. Death is not an accomplishment, just an inevitability. Life is another matter. “Tell me,” asks a character in one of James Baldwin’s novels, “do you find it hard to live? I mean really to live? Not just to go to the job and come home and go to sleep and get up and eat and go back to the job—but—to live.”
Everybody will say yes. I doubt everybody, at least a little. I doubt me—sometimes a lot. But by the end of your life, I didn’t doubt you. There was pain and there was suffering but the focus remained on living, really living. Barbara and I were just now listening to Enya’s “Wild Child,” because that was the song playing when you died, and we always gather for a few minutes on this mournful anniversary to listen: “Ever feel alive / And you’ve nothing missing / You don’t need a reason / Let the day go on and on.” There you are.
So you set a standard, and, in dying, put us to the test. Not an easy test. All of us fight every day to get to, to stay in—hell, sometimes to believe in—the very real spirit of life as you lived it.
I thank you for setting the standard. And I do try. All of us do, no reason to doubt that. But you know, it’s like that song Christine Ohlman wrote after her mate, Doc Cavaliere, died: “I’m out here in the big wide world / It’s a beautiful place sometimes / I keep my eye on the sparrow and my mind open wide / But I just can’t keep from crying / I miss the gone of you, the gone of you, the gone of you / Right now.”
And I always will.
Love from your pop,
David
