Composing a Day

Louis Armstrong is playing walk-up music for a September storm. I don't know what God looks like, but I picture him blowing a horn, conducting a storm, looking a lot like Louis.

I'm sitting on the back deck, drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, Louis on the stereo blowing through the window, watching the storm approach. It's a singular moment. The day has been full of them. Watching our girls play field hockey. Making jambalaya for lunch. Getting out Halloween decorations. Buying mums. Sometimes the profound lives in the mundane. But I have to look for it.

Now it's morning coffee. Sunrise after a rain storm. Church. Sunday football. A Nationals double-header. A day with family.

The thing about Louis Armstrong's horn, you only know it by the pauses, the silences that surround the notes. Days are like that: notes and pauses and bridges between the two. Each day is a composition, part structure, part improvisation. The thing a jazz man can teach me about composing a day: always make room for improv--those singular, watching a storm roll in moments that you can't structure.

St. James Infirmary

I didn't know, then, that I was standing in a Louis Armstrong song, a life expiring on a slab. I didn't know where the boomerang of the circular drive would land the body, the procession to the next life.

I did know atonement. Or knew that it was coming.

And then rebirth.

At the same time, a calm. A change. A shudder to slough off the ashes. To make something of my fuck up, if that's what it was.

Standing inside the St. James Infirmary, looking toward the steps I wouldn't walk up again, the blues song had already been written and well trod.

But blue wasn't the mind's mood. I wasn't looking back at the miles on my running shoes. Or the Old Testament. I wasn't thinking about the rock in the woods where I sat reading Beowulf. I wasn't worried about conjugating verbs or dress code or hair length.

I wasn't looking back at the life ending..."Let her go! Let her go! God Bless her...where ever she may be..."

I was looking forward. Consoled now by Satchmo.