The Buzz

The 17 year-cycle of the cicadas has come around. The shell-shedding, If-I-buzz-really-loud-I’ll-get-laid insects will be back in a matter of weeks. These are the big ones, the plentiful ones, the ones stupid enough to be attracted by the sound of lawn mowers and attempt to mate with them. I have always loved the sound of these and lesser cicadas. In my home town, they would start the buzzing at the end of one block and work their way up the street with more and more joining in until I would hear the lady next door in her garden yell “SHADDAP!!” A few measures rest, then the crescendo would start up again.

(It could be worse----imagine an equal number of cats in heat in the trees…)

So we arrive at the intersection of “Summer” and “1990”, which is more than enough of a lure to sit on a porch step and shuffle through the back issues of Life, 17 years worth.

[Here I have deleted the tawdry souvenirs of my past 17 years; If for some reason you’re interested, Email me and I will send along a quite honest map----but be prepared to reciprocate.]

In a few days, it will be ten years since our good friend Annie stopped hanging out on this temporal merry-go-round. I’m sure she’s in a better place: good for her, but still kinda rotten for the rest of us. I don’t know if this is true for anyone else, and it’s embarrassing for me to say, but I always imagined I would be the one missed by friends.( And the way I was living it was a fair bet.) It never occurred to me that Annie would leave so soon and suddenly.

For more than 14 years, Annie was my bartender/ mentor/ muse, looking at phrases scribbled on coasters, listening to chords on the piano in the lounge next to the bar, mornings before the restaurant opened. She didn’t always understand what I was trying to do, and never pretended she did. But when something hit its target, she more than let me know.

She’d go to galleries, coffeehouses and churches where I played. She was at Aquinas College in March of 1997, when I performed my song-cycle, “THE REVENUE OF DREAMS.” It was the last time Annie heard my music, as she passed away a month later of an aneurysm at work; as usual I was sitting at the bar.

I’ve put the first song of “The Revenue of Dreams”, “The Changing Sky (for Ann Powell)” on the “Thom P. Miller” blogsite. I wrote it for Ann in 1990------------ seventeen years ago. I remember now: There were cicadas…