Learning, Laying new Grooves, Riffing

What a difference a day, a week, an anahulu (10 days) makes. I played Esther Phillips's "What a Difference a Day Makes" over and over and over again in the early '70's. It was a time of vinyl, long playing albums, and Cellophane Square. (A Nod to R.B.) A turn table, disc cleaner and carefully positioning the needle. No scratching the records. There were rules. One album at a time. A time of learning to respect the process that drew music from those grooves.

I was a new mother, and a transplant to Washington still making adjustments to being a wife and a new-comer. My son was a tiny boy, just growing into his life in the house overlooking Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest (we weren't calling it the Salish Sea ... yet). Today, my son and I have traded places. He lives where I was born, and I live where he was born.

Coming to the keys this morning ... almost noon. Our days and nights have been all shook-up again. And in a major way for everybody. Up at midnight to make our first pot of oats since the virus showed up. Pete and I held on to bowls of hot oats and sweet and tangy dried fruit. The smell sent messages to our appetite memory. We aren't able to shop, and oats are no longer available where we live. Family was able, and a young man in our community is doing a pick-up and delivery service for folks, like us, who can't get out.

I was saying to Pete last night, "Something about this feels like a day I remember from the way, way back. We had a milk man, Harry and then Moon." A blurry memory of a dull green panel truck selling bread. Was that in Palolo Valley when I was two years old?

We're learning to lay new grooves but something very old is weaving its way through, too.

So many of the realities and rules of our everyday will be changed up. It's a time when everyone is 'marked' as Elsa Panizzon put it astrologically.  Is that like puttin' a big SCRATCH in the formerly unmarred vinyl?  That might just be the case.

Two final safety pins to this post:

First, I returned to Facebook (ya, ya. I said "I'll never return!") to find some folks we really love and admire. Rima Staines and Tom Hirons. Together these Devon-based artists and storytellers created HEDGESPOKEN, a traveling performance theater which is also their home-on-wheels. That exclusively a home-on-wheels part may be changing since two wee babies have been born since HEDGESPOKEN was born.

Anyway ... the thing about Rima, and Tom is this ... when we built the wagon ... which I'm starting to call 'Otis' (Otis??) Rima had also built a home on wheels from a former English military transport truck. We got to know each other online because of our wheel home kinship. Birds of a feather and all of that.

To find Rima and Tom I had to re-wind my choice, return to FB and find Tom's March 20th message. It makes a difference to this laying new grooves ... and riffing theme. In part Tom writes (do read Tom's entire post. He's a beautiful teller of meaning.:

"It's #WorldStorytellingDay today. In any normal year, we'd hope to have something to share with you, but this isn't a normal year, a normal month, or a normal week. Not by any stretch of the imagination, not even our very-flexible imaginations...The constant guessing game goes on - what will happen next? To us, to our community, to our world, to our plans and our lives......

Rima and Tom are two of the most flexibly imaginative people I have come to know ... in a virtual world, and in this time of virus it feels pretty cool to be able to look in on them and fasten our safety pins as the world moves in a guessing game that no one can (if ever we ever could) predict.

That I can, and did, see what's happening with this young and imaginative family is a form of riffing. I love the possibilities, and that leads to the final twist in today's post, and tale.

This thing called riffing

Don't get me wrong, or misinterpret the meaning of this windy tale. I get this is a time of serious, and deadly transformation for everybody. It's not the first time of pandemic, and maybe, not the last. But what it IS is it's the first time for me, and for most of the folks I know.

We are in a potent time of change, and while metaphors may seem inappropriate, or lacking in taste the wonderment of metaphor is in the space it creates for unexpected and magic consequences. The video clip of  Jazz master pianist Herbie Hancock has become a talisman of consequences for me, coincidences. "Without coincidence, there is no story." So began the story, and book, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, that has captivated Pete's and my imaginations and safety pins us to the importance of knowing your/mine/our lineage.

Lineage in my Hawaiian culture is mo'okuauhou, genealogy or myth of your connections. Seated as I am to write a tale, a story, a myth connecting one thing with another ... pinning an episode, a fragment of imagination, a smell, coming around to Herbie Hancock's lesson revisits times when I was unforgiving of my mistakes, or short-sighted on the improvisations that might come.

At this point in my learning curve, with some advantages and disadvantages to aging becoming ripe ... riffing: re-imagining new grooves may be the best possible consequences to notes too quickly labeled, "wrong."

I have a belly satisfied by food shopped by other people. More people wear masks today, and my old mask hangs on a hook wondering, "Never thought I'd see the day."

Are there new grooves laying down in your world? What do you think could be the best possible outcomes from this historic 'mark' and riff?

Ola Kakou! Thrive Everybody!

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