Death In the Family

Was awakened this morning at 6:00 by a call from my Mom in Detroit. My stepdad Bob Howard passed away last night around 9-10pm.
I really loved Bobby and I can't stop bawling right now.

As per my usual, I was just attempting to deal with the emotion through music. The playing of...

I was just trying to play "Blame It On My Youth" on piano and could barely see through the tears.

The crazy thing is I was playing nylon string last night - at around 10 - and I started playing a little progression going down from e minor that was one of those, "This could be something" moments. I picked it up this morning and there it was - this little tune that is Bob's. It's not finished (needless to say!), but...

I have been very fortunate to have been pretty well insulated from death of immediate family (which Bob for me most assuredly was) over the last few years and, the ever present Death, has been experienced at a remove.

I didn't cry immediately. It was like, "Oh look at that piece of information". And then the sound of Mom's voice. The finality of it. The one way-ness of it. And then the memories start coming back. Memories you hadn't thought about for a long time. And that's it. That's all there is, at the end of all of it. The impressions he left on my little mind. Not overarching dogma or orthodoxy, but actual experiences that summed him up when I thought (think) about him.

And there were SO many GOOD ones! This is where the love is. And this is where the corresponding amount of grief is. This is why I couldn't play that sappy (but beautiful) tune. It just triggered how much I miss Bobby already. And now those very same impressions are what I will have to go to to remember him.

A better case for treating each other well - here, now - has rarely been made. Love each other peeps!

So once my own grief started settling in for the long haul, I just wanted to get out and go for a run. The weather has cooled off and turned gorgeous around here (NYC). Getting out was the best thing. I was not disappointed. Strange b/c I just this week was watching some of that 6 Feet Under box set I got. And Nate - one of the undertaker dudes (the reluctant one) - is always going out on runs and sweating It (whatever) out. To feel what it feels like to be alive, still on this plane.

And I watched those runs of his on my tv screen as I sat on my ass in my apt and ordered sushi delivered because I didn't even want to leave the bldg.(!)

Today I had to get out.

It is so beautiful up here on the northern tip of Manhattan. I ran to a spot in Inwood Hill Park which is below the Henry Hudson Bridge, and you've got the Hudson/NJ in the background, the great forest of Inwood Hill rising up to meet the bridge on the Manhattan side (where at the moment the Parks Dept is into about it's third year of re-introducing bald eagles to the lower Hudson Valley) in the foreground and the swirling waters of Spuyten Duyvil (Harlem River) at your feet.

I just kept looking up into the sky. The clear, blue sky. It is just an instinctive thing to do at a time like this. To look for your loved ones, in their non-corporeal forms, up above in the ether, somewhere, in some no-place. Or maybe it is just the place to look when you are forced to consider the inscrutable Mystery of our existence here, for this limited time.

So from that spot I ran along the north shore of Manhattan to a point across from the Columbia U. rowing house/football stadium. That is the spot to go to get the full-on rising sun. It was about 7:00am. The sun was so brilliant. Impossible to look even in the general easterly direction without a hand-shade, the effect doubled by the reflection on the water.

This was a sunrise Bobby did not get to see. But in some sense, he is a part of it now. A wave of energy in this Whole Show.

I ran to the loop and on into the forest itself to go to the lookout above the Hudson where you can see from the George Washington Bridge (the GWB) to the Tappan Zee bridge 15 miles north in Westchester. It was on my way up there that I got the germ of a thought: I noticed how dark the forest was down below, on the floor, on my level, but how bright the sun was 80 feet up at the tops.

Here are the lyrics so far:

It's so dark here on the bottom
But it's bright up on the top
With the whole world spinnin' round
You think it ain't ever gonna stop

Well I'm here to serve you notice
And its sittin in your hands
That the time that's come before
You don't ever understand -

Until it's gone


For Bob Howard

R.I.P. Dear Friend