Thursday Drive

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on August 6, 2009

Well, I’ve got another song to share, if you’re all up for it?

It’s called “Miles To Montana,” and I have a big soft spot for this one. The inspiration for it came from a couple of posts I wrote, like this one and this one, about a long, beautiful road trip. My co-writer, Greg Cox, read those essays and thought they might make a good foundation for a song.

We went to work, wrote a story, and that’s what you’ll hear in this song. After we finished it, we decided to have a studio demo made.

Our vocalist was Lisa Gregg, the song was recorded at Beaird Music Group in Nashville, and these are the musicians you’ll hear:

Kelly Back - electric guitar

Eddie Bayers - drums

Eli Beaird - bass

Larry Beaird - acoustic guitar

Jim “Moose” Brown - keyboard

Dan Dugmore - pedal steel

Greg Cox - producer

If you check out some of those pages, you’ll see that among them, these guys have played for just about everyone - not only in Nashville, but across music genres. The reason I mention this is because that was one of the coolest things about making this demo. These incredibly talented musicians, some with pages-long discographies, gathered in a room and played the hell out of our little song. And then Lisa Gregg - who’s sung backup for Faith Hill and Reba McEntyre, among others - gave us a beautiful vocal.

Some notes:

Dan Dugmore, on pedal steel, played with James Taylor’s band for 11 years (I will never get tired of typing that…). Eddie Bayers, on drums, was honored in the March issue of Drum Magazine as “one of the top ten greatest session drummers of ALL time.” Jim “Moose” Brown, on keyboard, wrote a song you might recognize, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” which was cut by Alan Jackson and spent eight weeks at #1. And the list goes on…

It was so much fun to watch all of this happen, even from a distance, and it came out so well because Greg was there to guide the song and oversee the production.

Thanks for taking the time to listen, and we hope you enjoy the song.

Here’s the link (when you go to the page, you’ll see Play near the top, then just click on HiFi or LoFi to listen):

Miles To Montana

_______________________

My best friend - you know her as Madge from It’s a Mad Madge World - wrote a beautiful, thoughtful post today, so stop by and read if you have a moment.

Category: Uncategorized | 25 Comments »
Tags: Dan Dugmore, demo, Eddie Bayers, Eli Beaird, Greg Fox, Jim "Moose" Brown, Kelly Back, Larry Beaird, Lisa Gregg, Miles To Montana, music, songwriting

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on August 3, 2009

Earlier today, you would have found me cross-legged on Elle’s bedroom floor, folding the top flaps of a box together with one hand, holding packing tape in the other. Sealing away for a few weeks some of the odds and ends that string together the life of an eight year old girl.

As I ran the tape across the top of the box, I noticed familiar writing, the boxy all-caps print that belongs to my mother. Letters marched in formation, if a little smudged now, across the box. The box corners a bit battered, edges and middle seam thick with layers of wide tape. The top of it marked with our old Indiana address, at least five years and 1900 miles from here.

Farther, it seems, and longer ago, back to a day and place when she would have mailed something to any of us.

What I packed in that box was nothing of consequence, nothing poetic or symbolic, just the stuff of a life. I don’t remember what she sent to us in that box, just that since then, it’s been unsealed and sealed, opened and closed up again. Repeat.

A metaphor for our relationship, if ever there was one.

What I know - all I know - is that since we moved here, I’ve moved on from where I was when that box showed up at our door in Indiana, and from where I was, even, when I unpacked it here and folded the box flat again.

Things changed, even more than they had already. Hard words flew across miles like arrows, found their mark. Others never left the quiet rooms where one or the other of us thought them, then thought better. In the end, we have the relationship that amounts to all we were ever going to have, with apologies to hope and good intentions. Disillusionment buys the drinks around here.

Disillusionment and the ghosts that deliver it, sometimes in boxes.

Yes, things can come back to haunt us. People, relationships, objects. But maybe they’re only scary if we believe in their power to harm us. Once that is gone, we’re free to turn away and carry on, startled maybe, but not shaken anymore.

So if I sealed something into that box today (besides the small treasures of age eight) it’s that. The past is just the past again. What’s gone is still gone.

And a box is just a box.

Category: Uncategorized | 34 Comments »
Tags: family, life lessons, mother, moving, moving on

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on July 23, 2009

We’re getting ready to move soon, and I’m calling on my usual method of dealing with impending loss or separation: denial.

I can’t think about saying goodbye to my friends, so I sort through other, smaller goodbyes ahead of that. Not to soften those moments (impossible), but to give them the whole stage when it’s time.

As I drive around, these last few weeks, making as few trips in this heat as I can get away with, I’ve been trying to look around at the views that I will miss. To take in, bone deep, what I’ve grown so used to seeing. Red Mountain, Superstition Mountain, Four Peaks. All the mountains that ring the Valley, especially the ones to the east that carry thunderheads on their backs every afternoon in this part of summer, promising rain and usually giving dust storms and dry, hot wind instead. These mountains have been so much a part of the landscape of these last five years here, and of me. I will miss them, probably more than I’m willing to let myself know.

I can almost feel them leaving me. Or me leaving them, is how it goes. Because, really? They’re all, “We’ve been here millions and millions of years, lady. Happy trails!” Guess they’ve just forgotten that I know them well, that the roads that weave through them are the roads that have knit together my soul these last few years, that saved me in so many ways. This girl who wasted a lot of  very expensive gas, driving north to Payson more Thursdays than not, just to feel those miles pass under me. Just to feel the engine dig down a little on the steep parts, the way we do, when life calls for it. Just to feel the wind through my hair, just to feel the lift in my spirits.

Just to feel.

As if that kind of memory goes away. Where would it go?

So maybe there’s not as much leaving as I thought. These five years will lie quiet, one on top of the other, with all the others, settling. Laughter into sadness, light into heavy, day curling over the edges of moon-blessed night, pain into excitement, spring soaking into summer, holidays brushing against quiet Sundays, roads intersecting with roads.  Year one into year two into year three and four and five.

The sum of the days and moments countable and incalculable, at once.

And so we’ll take on what’s next, with the same enthusiasm and curiosity that served us well here.

And I’ll do what I always do when I move somewhere new - take time here and there to get in the car and drive, to get lost on purpose, just to see if I can find my way back.

It’s worked out pretty well so far.

_______________________

Category: Uncategorized | 44 Comments »
Tags: driving, leaving, life, life lessons, mountains, moving, roads, transition

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on July 17, 2009

With the blessing of my co-writer, Greg Cox, I’m posting the link to a song we finished a few days ago.

He challenged me to put down some lyrics about something difficult and personal. I made a first pass at the lyrics, and then we worked on it together and he wrote the music. I don’t have the skills that would have let me imagine the powerful music he would put with the words. But it was exactly what the song needed, and it’s backed up with so much strength by his performance.

We’re both proud of the song, for what it is and for what it says.

It’s for every child who grows up in abusive circumstances, and for all of us who ever did.

(When you follow the link, you’ll see where it says Play near the top of the page. Click on either HiFi or LoFi, and a small player will appear. The lyrics are on that page, as well.)

That’s Another Story

I’ve also linked to the song from my Music page, which you get to from MUSIC in the header.

Category: Uncategorized | 28 Comments »
Tags: lyrics, music, songwriting, That's Another Story

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on July 13, 2009

Hey look, this place is still here…After this many days, I feel like I should come in with a feather duster and a vacuum.

I don’t know what to tell you, except that I’ve been busy writing songs, co-writing songs, and having the time of my life doing it. It still feels strange at times. I have moments when I think, who do I think you are, anyway, having so much fun doing something you love? But  it feels exactly right.

So we’re just hanging out here, trying to stay cool through another desert summer, keeping the kids entertained and out of juvie. Pretty much what most of you are doing, right?

And the heat’s not so bad, really…After all, around midnight, it cools down enough (to 95 degrees, or so) that it’s bearable to go outside. What’s to complain about? 120 degrees when we got into the car he other day. Ouch.

Category: Uncategorized | 25 Comments »
Tags: summer

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on July 3, 2009

Peonies. Because this place could use something bright. Something unabashed and splashy and bold.

Something pretty and soft, when all I see out the window is desert, brown. And the greedy clouds that hold onto their rain even when they crowd the sky each afternoon, as they often do throughout monsoon season (may they let loose the rain, soon).

Because I want to plant peonies when we’re settled, so that in a year or two or three, I can shake the ants off an armload of their blooms and bring them inside for the dining room table. Or so that Elle can pile her small arms high with them and make little arrangements to spread throughout the house, as I used to do with violets when I was her age. As we may both do, next year.

Because so much is contained within a blossom that hasn’t quite opened. (A whole world, it seems, in such a small thing.) All that hope, all that promise. Potential.

What could be. What will be.

What is already, even if we can’t see it, or know it, yet.

Category: Uncategorized, favorite things, lyrics | 32 Comments »
Tags: dreams, hope, summer

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on June 29, 2009

Our garden was enormous. Not the kind of childhood-enormous that turns out to look small when you grow up. It was a monster of a garden.

And my sister and I spent most of  each summer working in it.

The garden existed as a significant food source for our family and for my step-grandparents, who lived next door. Rows of concord grapes served as bookends, and in between, there were raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes (several varieties), peppers, corn, okra, potatoes, several kinds of squash, green beans, rhubarb, and asparagus. (I feel like I’m leaving something out.)

When something would ripen,  my sister and I would help harvest and get it ready for canning or freezing.

But before that, there was the weeding. The endless weeding.

I’ve heard people say that they settle into a calm state when they weed, that the methodical pulling out of the weeds, moving to a new area, pulling more weeds, is relaxing.

And I will tell you right now that I have never, ever experienced that (I wish). I remember the heat, the bugs, the sweat, the sunburn, the bugs.  The prickly okra plants. The smelly tomato plants. The bugs.

Though, it’s only fair to say, it didn’t kill me either. And now, all these years later, I actually yearn for a small (very small) garden.

We learned very well which plants were weeds, and we also knew that if we only pulled off the tops of the weeds, what was above ground, we would hear about it later. Sue would tell us time and time again that unless we pulled the weeds out by the roots, they would just grow back faster.

Today is an anniversary that I marked last year with this post. This year, it’s 30 years since we went to court so that Sue could adopt my sister and me. It’s not a day I try to remember, at all (and my sister tells me she doesn’t even think of it), but every year it still seems to cross my mind like a phantom train. Empty, invisible, loud.

One thing I realized today, though, is that this year does feel different than any year before. Changed, even, from just last year. I know that what I’ve written here about my family is the difference, as I’ve dug with bare hands through this soil of the past.

As though these things that happened to us are the weeds, and I have to spend my life trying to keep them from taking over.

And wouldn’t you know? Sue was right about one thing. It is important to pull them out by their roots. But in this case, to expose the dark underside of things that look completely different above ground.

I can’t stop these stories from reaching up through the soil, toward light, and I don’t want to. Do I wish they weren’t there? Sure. Weeding never was an easy job, in life or in metaphor.

My hands are still in the soil, and will stay there for as long as it takes. It’s past high noon, though, I know that much. The sun slides with every day, with every word, toward the place where sky seems to meet soil. And maybe one of these days - any day now - I will come to understand, without the need for a reminder, that the sky and the land are part of each other. The soil is part air, the air carries particles of dust to other fields. The moon reflects in the smallest pond.

And there’s nothing to keep me, not anymore, from flying away from this work whenever I need to, high enough that the weeds become indiscernible from a field of sweet, warm strawberries.

Category: Uncategorized, Weekly Anamnesis | 25 Comments »
Tags: adoption. child abuse, family, June 29, memory, weeds

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on June 24, 2009

Have you ever gotten into a car in the summer -  as a child or an adult - and then the driver gets in and closes the door and it’s so hot inside the car. And you think the driver will turn on the air conditioning right away, because oh my god the heat, but he/she is in the middle of a story and goes on and on, and you’re all, “It’s hot! I’m dying! Turn on the car!” And you can’t even roll down a window, because this isn’t 1979, and cars these days are fancier and don’t have the handle that you have to turn to open the window (which in that moment seems like it would be a downright privilege).

Of course, you’d turn on the car yourself, but you don’t have the keys.

Well, that’s how I feel right now. There’s even actual heat, thanks to the desert in the summer.

We’re just about ready to move, but not everything is ready for us to move. Mr. H’s mother hasn’t been well and needs constant care (but she’s eating better these days, so that’s really good news). Mr. H has work in Indiana, too, while the three of us are here in Arizona. (Those are reasons we should be there, but we don’t have a date nailed down, and there’s the pesky cross-country move to face.)

I’m considering setting out on the Santa Fe Trail and just winging it. Does U-Haul rent out wagons (air-conditioned, natch)?

And the summer rolls on…

The kids are glad, since they get to play with their friends here longer than they thought they would be able to. I’m happy, too, not to have had to say goodbye yet to my own friends here. But we’re ready, all of us, for the next step.

Ready and a little cranky.

I keep thinking of that Dr. Seuss book, Oh the Places You’ll Go!*, and this part about waiting…

The Waiting Place…
…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a  train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.
NO!
That’s not for you!
Somehow you’ll escape
all that waiting and staying…

Can I hear an amen to that last part? May it be so. And soon…

_______________________________

*reprinted with absolutely no permission whatsoever, so I’m linking to the book on Amazon…

Category: Uncategorized | 28 Comments »
Tags: Dr. Seuss, moving, Oh the Places You'll Go, waiting

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on June 19, 2009

Your assignment (trust me, it will feel like recess, but with a music and something to make you think. Plus, there’s Neil Patrick Harris.): Watch it. Pass it on. You’ll get an A for Awesome.

Also, I want to ask you to take a moment to visit a new website. Lordy, I’m bossy today, but you’ll thank me, I’m sure of it…

The site is called CHEERUPNATION, and it’s the inspired creation of Brian Papa, who also blogs at PapaTV. (I met him through the T. Rowe Price website project not long ago, and he is one of the nicest, funniest, and most positive people I’ve met since I began blogging a year and a half ago.) We can all use a dose of happy, and I promise your day will get better if you take a look. Here’s what he says:

Every day we feature kids from all around the world holding signs with funny/inspirational quotes. Our goal: Make them the stars and create a movement of joy, love, and happiness!

It’s as fun and sweet as it sounds. You might even be inspired to get your own kids to make a sign and submit a photo.

All right, that’s all for today. Read chapters 12-29, don’t drink and drive, and is it necessary to TP my house every single weekend?

Class dismissed.

________________________________________

Thank you so much for all your kind words and encouragment about my last post. It means more than I can say, and when I tell you that it helps, please know that it truly does. xoxoxo

Category: Uncategorized | 15 Comments »
Tags: Brian Papa, CheerUpNation, gay marriage, PapaTV, Prop 8 - The Musical

Posted By Jennifer Harvey on June 17, 2009

The other night I came across a piece of information that knocked a little world inside me off its axis. I don’t want to say here how I found it, but I do want to tell you about it.

This: a photo of my stepmother - you know her as Sue - at a tea and silent auction to benefit a local organization in her city (my hometown). It was startling enough to see the photo of her after all these years, but there was more.

It took me about five seconds to discover that the proceeds from the event would go to a parenting skills center whose mission “is to provide a variety of quality preventative and treatment parent/family education programs to families at risk for child abuse and neglect and domestic unrest/violence.”

Yeah.

And there she stood big as life, posing for a photo like there was no reason in the world why she shouldn’t be there. As it turns out, one of the women in the photo with her is the founder of the center, and another woman is a therapist and adoption coordinator. You have to wonder what they would think if they knew the truth about the woman standing with them.

After that first moment of shock, I just became really calm. I wasn’t sure yet what I would do, but I felt as though stumbling upon a piece of information like this called for some kind of action from me. (Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.)  I felt like it’s time. Time for her to deal with me in a way she’s never had to before, as someone strong who has a voice and a pen.

So a couple of hours later, I sent a note to Sue through Facebook (relatives of hers are on my friend list, so she came up on my list of People You May Know).

My words were simple.

“I hope you made a large donation,” followed by a link to the page with the photos. And then, “You might be interested in reading this,” and a link to the series of posts I’ve written here about my family. (There are others, but those are a good start.)

It’s the first contact I’ve had with her in over 15 years.

It’s possible that she will come to this place to read what I’ve written, or maybe she won’t. There’s even a chance she won’t see the note I sent, so I plan to send the same thing to her by mail.

In any case, that’s not the point. What she does or doesn’t do now doesn’t feel as important to me as what I do.

I don’t expect anything to come of this, really, nothing satisfying, anyway. It’s impossible to drink from a broken cup. Any action on my part is bound to feel hollow and so long overdue that it’s almost irrelevant. If anything, maybe people who think one thing about her will come to see another, truer picture.  Maybe that’s something.

Or maybe all that comes out of this is that I say my piece and go on, which is what I started here. I’ve said what was and what is, and somewhere in there I’ve even hoped for something better in the future, certainly for my own children. And I know (I know) what could be doesn’t lie in the past.

But some things do lie in the past that maybe shouldn’t. So there’s a good chance that I will talk or write about those things in other places besides here, places closer to home for her. And she will know about it. Whatever I do, it will be measured and careful and without anger or any hope for justice of some kind. (The days for that are long past.)

It’s possible that some people out there won’t agree with me or see the point of reacting at all, and that’s fine. Sitting here, I’m not sure I can put words to what this is that I’m feeling, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a solid reason for doing whatever I feel needs to be done, once I figure out what’s next.

There are a lot of reasons, and many of you have read them (many of you have lived those reasons yourselves, and have your own stories), why it’s not out of line for me to react on a bedrock-deep level (below anger, below pain, even) when I see this woman pretending to be an advocate for abused children. Whatever reaction I have to that isn’t outsized compared to the nerve she has to put herself in that place, in that photo.

It just isn’t.

________________________________

If you have a moment, Emily wrote a poignant, related post at her place today that - as she often does - inspired me.

Category: Uncategorized | 44 Comments »
Tags: child abuse, fears and events and prayers, responsibility, Sue