A Shocking Performance

To open a conversation, a usual gambit is to ask what's new. The usual answer is "Not a whole lot." Maybe you saw an amusing movie; maybe you tell the one about the werewolf, the throat singer and the pole dancer. You might have been to a concert where they sounded satisfyingly like their record. On the other hand, you might have been lucky enough to share the room with Bobby McFerrin last night in Potsdam.

I had been looking forward to the show, having heard McFerrin years before, but I had also been working since before dawn--I told my wife to punch me if I started to snore. But nobody, no matter how dozy, can sleep through something which is really new--a program comprised totally of vocal improvisation. Anyone who recalls the forty-minute drum solos of 60s rock remembers how badly such a thing can go wrong. For McFerrin and his twelve accomplices to be so on top of each moment for 90 minutes left me flabbergasted, and more awake than I have been at any time since I touched that bare wire with a socket wrench. In a time when the word genius gets applied to anyone halfway competent, I want a new word for what I saw and heard. To be present while a first-rate mind makes up first-rate work completely on the fly--I can only babble about it. Years from now I will still babble about it.

Hypernation

Animal wisdom tells us that this is the time of year to lay low, to snooze--round the clock if possible. The thermometer is regularly below zero, the once-mellow meadows resemble the surface of the moon. Frogs are frozen freaking solid within the stony mud. But human contrariness insists that this is the time to get everything done, despite the brevity of bleak winter days. A dozen different projects are ramping up to speed all around the station. Fortieth anniversary events, concert plans, next month's member drive, the website redesign, conferences and collaborations, construction work. It never stops.

It all makes me, I confess, a little sleepy. But it must be the same impulse that got Cro-Magnon man through the last Ice Age: Want to stay warm?--Keep running. Just one more day on the trail and it's mammoth blubber for everybody! Unfortunately, it always seems to be the trail today, and the blubber tomorrow. And so it will go until the lilacs bloom. Until then, keep moving, and drink lots of hot chocolate.

Imaginary vacation

I had another writing assignment today, to write about an imaginary vacation for tonight's meeting of a local poet's group, but my nose is so firmly to the grindstone at NCPR that I am doing double-duty. Here is my offering, with apologies to our patient listeners in the Adirondacks, and to station engineer Bob Sauter for involuntarily sharing his little getaway.

Radio Bob's Vacation

At home, his voice mail fills with calls
from WXLH, Blue Mountain Lake.
but at Sosua by the Sea, I imagine Radio Bob
is adoze beside an aquamarine pool.

In his pocket, the cell phone vibrates urgently
but he can't tell it from the Magic Fingers
in his suite's king-size bed.

He turns over the tiny paper umbrella
from a tall cool drink, but it does not
remind him of a satellite dish.

On Blue Mountain, the NYSEG crew plods
through drifts; their bootprints lost in the blow.
I imagine Radio Bob is lost in thought, walking
the beach at Sosua by the Sea, his footprints
filling up behind him with surf.

His radio is tuned to the Caribbean World Series,
to reggaeton during the seventh inning stretch; it blast
sall across Latin America without his lifting a finger.
Life is good at Sosua by the Sea.

At home the transmitters fall like dominoes
away to the south. Homes fall silent but for
the drip of icicles on the sill. And Radio Bob
falls silent, contemplating nothing but the sweet breeze.