An Odyssey Comes Home, Continued

I’m not trying to be morbid when I say this, but I am coming to the end of my life. Little did I know that when I was born I had at least 84 years of living ahead of me. One thing I do know now—I definitely do not have even a quarter of these years, not even twenty one years. It took me longer than that to grow up, quite a bit longer. So it’s only natural that my train of thought has tended to move along the lines that it has: thinking about bucket lists, making sure that my genealogy work is not lost to the family, making sure that when I really need to have family near, I am where they can help, and trying to make one more visit, or at least contact, with my dear old friends. I’m not doing all this in a desperate way, and it actually has turned out to be a lot of fun, even heart-warming. But besides the successful family genealogy huddle that occurred at my nephew, Jeff Smith’s house and that I wrote about in my last blog piece, something else happened in my recent visit to Marietta, Ohio that, though it was anticipated a bit, was amazing and heart-warming. That story I now want to tell you.

If you’ve been following me on Facebook or following this blog, you know that I am very involved with music. I’ve even said that sometimes I feel as though I am music, because sometimes it just bubbles up out of me through my hands and voice. So it stands to reason that Jym, the music man has left a lot of traces of his music in this world. In the words of Leon Russell (A Song for You) “I’ve sung a lot of songs; I’ve made some bad rhymes.” And I’ve made some good rhymes, too, and I have acted out some of my life on stages, albeit probably never for 10,000 people. But I have done a lot of performing. I also had a career as a teacher, but in my mind the disciplines of teaching, entertaining, and acting are very close to one another, and they can be successfully mixed or combined in various ratios.

One of the many parts of my musical presence is that when the new genre of singer/songwriter emerged in the pop music of the late 1960s, I was right there every step of the way with Joni Mitchell, Elton John (and his lyricist, Bernie Taupin), Carole King, James Taylor, and Carly Simon. I was already a credible songwriter before that, but after about 1970, this new musical part of me just started to come out spontaneously. I’ve put most of my songs on the internet in various ways, but of course that will not launch your career as a professional musician. Rarely, your natural charisma is so strong that it gets you fame. But most successful musicians are relentlessly hard-working at their careers or perhaps have an extremely effective manager.

In my case, I really did not want the life of a successful musician. Oh, I will admit that from time to time I daydreamed about possible recognition and even fame. But whenever I gave it some serious thought, or was required to screw up the courage to make the hard choice to give up my day job, whatever that was at the time, I always backed out of a professional commitment to music. I always have treated it as an avocational interest, but a serious hobby that I put a lot of energy into. My real vocational love was being a university professor, the whole package of teaching, research and service. And I had plenty of company in my chosen profession, professors who dedicatedly taught their courses, and then dedicatedly found a way to play their musical instrument, sometimes even in a professional way: Jean Kittrell, Dan Havens, Warren Brown, Ray Helsel were four such teacher/musicians that I sometimes found myself sharing the stage with.

Just for the record, I went back over some of the pop songs that I wrote in the 1970s and 1980s that really are professional grade songs—songs that with the right singer, production and promotion would have become some kind of hit. I picked out five of them that I am going to list here. I know most of my readers won’t have time or inclination to listen to all of them, but for the heck of it, pick one of them and listen to part of the song. See if you don’t agree with me. By the way, these songs are indeed taken from the experiences of my own life.

• I started to think of you today (1977) This song is about a love triangle I was involved in. I had a stormy dating relationship with Michael, then we broke up, and I started dating John. The song is about me suddenly leaving John one day to reconnect with Michael.
• You and I (1978) Michael turned out to be just as hard to live with the second time, so I broke up with him again, and John actually forgave me and took me back. So I moved in with John and wrote this song after a few months with him.
• I hope he loves you too (It’s funny) (1982) Skip forward a few years. I had broken up with John again and started dating around. This song is about Terry and me. I fell in love with him, but he did not fall in love with me.
• Darlin’, Darlin’, Darlin’ (1985) And then I met my soulmate, Stephen in 1984. After a couple of months of my playing hard to get, we started our life of nearly 40 years together. We bought a condo together in 1985, joined Trinity Church, and I was, yes, this much in love with Stephen.
• Heartsong (1988) This is a song that I wrote to cheer Stephen up one summer when things were not going well for him.

There was another kind of song that I had a penchant for writing, indeed, that I was almost obsessed with in the early 1980s. Basically, these were songs that embodied various expressions of a world based on love and peace. James Taylor and Carole King had been singing songs of going back to nature and away from a corrupt political existence; I think I probably built on that idea. But there were other influences, Holly Near and John Lennon come to mind. I was becoming more aware of environmental, spiritual, and metaphysical issues, too. Settling down with Stephen in 1984 led to my making 500 copies of a cassette tape of this type of songs called I’m Always Facing Rainbows. I worked with Music Masters Studio to achieve a professional effect. All during the 1980s I had many opportunities to perform the songs on this album and accompany myself on the guitar, and I ended up either selling or giving away almost all of them.  Once again I’m going to list five of these songs for you to sample if you wish.

• Unicorn (1982) This is a song for children and for adults who still see the world with a child-like eye. It also could be a gay fantasy.
• The Rainbow Warrior (1984) In 1984 one of Greenpeace’s big causes was to stop the killing of whales. An international incident involved their ship, The Rainbow Warrier defying international protocol to secure evidence of Russia’s illegal mink and whaling practices. I read about it and wrote this song.
• Beautiful Planet (1982) Here is what I said in my memoirs about writing this song while in Glacier National Park: “Once again I stopped on the mountainside in a narrow space alongside the road and hiked with my guitar to a perch on a ledge about 200 feet above the road. I was bursting with love for the earth and my heart was full of joy.” The song just flowed out, and the song’s bridge circled around and down over and over, just like a mountainside trail.
• He Just Wanted To Be Himself (1983) For many years, this was my signature song, performed in various classrooms as I spoke to students about the need for acceptance of gay and lesbian people.
• Blue-Green Ball (1982) This song was actually inspired by the tale about Neil Armstrong looking back at our earth from the moon. I still am at root a World Federalist, but my dream is far, far away.

My sister and brother-in-law, Vicki and Jerry Smith, had three sons, and two of them still live with their families in Ohio. Their youngest son, TJ, married and they had three children. I wanted to be sure to arrange to get in touch also with this young family. Over the years I have discovered that my tape had quite an impact on several families with young children, and more specifically, I knew that as a child, nephew, TJ had listened to I’m Always Facing Rainbows every night when he went to sleep. He has told me that he loved several of those songs, and a few years ago, I sent him the songbook I made to go with the tape, and he worked at learning to play the guitar to accompany himself while singing them. But I need to make a digression to make the story even more dramatic.

In our family we did a lot of things backwards. My brother Tom and I were musically inclined, though Tommy did play little league ball, and while Vicki does play the piano and love music, she and her family became quite into athletics. She started her own successful aerobics business with two friends, and ran it for 10 years. But Vicki’s husband, Jerry, has always been very involved with athletics to the point that it is certainly a center of his family’s life. Here is one post he recently made on Facebook about an event in his life as a coach.

“This week 50 years ago, I had the honor to travel with a group of 12 year Olds playing baseball representing Marietta, a town of 14,000 to 17,000 people against teams from towns of 100,000 plus. They left town as boys and came back as young men. They were away from home, family and friends for 3-4 weeks while they traveled the eastern part of the United States winning and advancing to the Boys Baseball World Series I Mexico City, Mexico. A great experience and a lot of firsts for them and myself. Great time and a lot of memories. Congratulations to all the team members and thank you players parents and the people of little Marietta, Ohio. The 1973 Bronco league All-Stars.”

He did pass this love of sports as a center of family life on to his three sons, who made sure that their children were involved in team sports. All three of TJ and Kelly’s children played baseball this year. That’s a 2nd, 5th, and 8th grader, and they and the other GP never miss a game. While I was there I had the pleasure of watching the youngest play a 6 inning game (and he was the youngest kid on the team). Lots of talent, he played 3rd base, two outfield positions, and then he pitched for two innings.

I had told Vicki previously that I would like it if we could coordinate a family sing, but I was a bit surprised when after dinner, there seemed to be general agreement that I would play and sing and everyone else would sing along. But before I could start, there was a chorus of requests in the air. The middle child said she wanted to hear He Just Wanted to Be Himself, and the oldest said he wanted to hear the Rainbow Warrior. It’s hard to hear others sing when you were carrying the lead, but I could tell that the family was engaged. As it turned out, Vicki managed to get a three minute video that shows the participation of TJ and his three children. I just have to share the Video of the Smith family doing a singalong with Uncle Jim. Not to bring up the debate about whether we are rewarded for our good deeds or not, but I’m pretty sure there is some kind of reward for writing bedtime music for kids, not the least of which is hearing them sing your songs back to you.