Here is a puff piece about Robert Plant taken from an Apple Music review of his recent album. It happens I agree with it.
“It’s hard to think of another artist from the 70s classic-rock era who has aged more gracefully than Robert Plant. Rather than trying to relive past glories, the former Led Zeppelin shrieker has spent much of the 21st-century recontextualizing his formative influences – American blues, English folk, early rock ‘n’ roll, Middle Eastern classical – into more earthy and ethereal realms.”
The man has evolved in full view of all of us from basically the poster boy for the excesses of rock and roll to a mature artist who keeps putting out really interesting music. I’ve included a couple here today from the album Saving Grace. Look at those photos and marvel at what time makes of a face. From beautiful boy to a Mount Rushmore sort of gravity.
A side note. My son Jonnie was into music from early on in life, buying albums before he was ten. When he found an artist he liked, he would often save up and buy everything that man or that band had recorded. Such was the case with Led Zeppelin, the band where Plant became a legend. At the time, they meant nothing at all to me. It took a long time after Jonnie had moved on for me to catch up with his tastes.
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Saw a Lewis’ Woodpecker on our neighborhood walk this week, pecking away in some dead branches. Thet are pretty easy to spot, once you know they exist. I only learned about them this summer, when I saw one on a visit to Durango.
The Lewis’s Woodpecker might have woodpecker in its name, but it forages like a flycatcher and flies like a crow. It has a color palette all its own, with a pink belly, gray collar, and dark green back unlike any other member of its family. From bare branches and posts, it grabs insects in midair, flying with slow and deep wingbeats. It calls open pine forests, woodlands, and burned forests home, but it often wanders around nomadically outside of the breeding season in search of nuts.
The description sounds a bit like a lot of us, who wandered from home and years later couldn’t quite figure out how to get back or remember clearly how we started out. “I know I was a woodpecker in the beginning, but how was that, again?”
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There came a period in my mid-adolescence when I chafed at being expected to attend each family gathering the way I had done as a younger child. One day I flatly refused, and quite a scene ensued, with the rest of the family eventually going on without me. Harsh words, lots of pent-up resentments released on both sides.
Finding myself alone and not enjoying the solitude one bit, I made the decision to leave home. I did own a car, had a part-time job, and thought I might be able to support myself in meager fashion. So I packed the trunk of that car with all that I owned of any value. (I will tell you that it made a pitifully small pile.) And then I took a nap.
When I awoke, the rest of the family had returned, and so I resolved to wait and leave in the morning. I never learned how it happened, but somehow my parents became aware of what was stored in my car’s trunk, and my father did a very uncharacteristic thing, for him. He sat down and had a talk with me. No recriminations, no lecturing. Just letting me know that he and I were not adversaries, and that my safety and happiness were very high on his list of concerns.
The next day, I unpacked, feeling relieved. I think that over those hours I had realized that although I was now perched on the edge of the nest, I was not quite ready for flight, and was glad to have been talked out of it.
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POETRY CORNER
Over my life I have written things that for want of a better name I call poems. Thought I’d put one up here once in a while, just to air them out.
Us
Our personalities are like sweaters
Which are never finished
For as we add a row or two
Of length, to fit where we are now
A cuff or collar may unravel just a bit
And need repair
I think that illness is a time
When many rows are dropped at once
And not replaced
The wind blows through the holes
That have appeared for others
To appreciate
We stop, pull back
Repair enough to make it wearable
Then go on as before
All knitting
And unraveling
Together
May 1983
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As of this morning our government has shut down, whatever that means. This might be a good time to push it into a hole, kick some dirt over it, and start afresh. In its present iteration it serves no one well but the criminals at the top.
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Little Home In The Valley 