My Daddy's Accordion

I researched the whereabouts of this gorgeous bit of memory breathing Never on Sunday again and again. It was so beautiful an instrument & the memory of his playing it & how much he wanted to get good at it, so vivid. Anyway, he still has it, has kept these many years and goes down the basement occasionally and tries to remember how to play it. He tinkers with the piano in the dining room in much the same way. If he would follow-through, I think lessons would be a great gift to get for him. Our family has this kind of awe for music and yet none of us play anything really, though we all dabbled and have spent tens of thousands of dollars on music and concert tix and the like. And my most embryonic attempt at a novel featured a girl (don't laugh, no wait what else would you do?) named, I-kid-you-not Lyric and her father, a gone-musician and her sorry patterns ever since. Each chapter was named after some version of the dark and the book was called All the Ways We Say Darkness and everyone was so deep and artsy and I was twenty-someting give me a break. But there are things worth re-incorporating, I think. The current novel is attempting to be so much more quiet and a girl named Lyric would not do, but I wonder at the accordion and why, even now, in New York, or New Orleans a busker with an accordion can strike such a chord of fascination and stabbing nostalgic grief in me all at the same time. So much that my father didn't do because he was doing for us. You can imagine what Hayden's poem does to me with its blue-black cold and austere and lonely offices.

What did I know, anyway? And what do I know now? That a body in motion etc. That too much thinking is too much. That whatever is up ahead is up ahead and maybe I do need a drastic new haircut. Revision is less interesting to me just now than a new notebook. Maybe Lyric will find herself in a novella someday and I will get rid of the smoky bars and scruffy men she makes out with just to swallow their shadows. There is so much to do tomorrow always. That's a bright thing.

Today is a heap of snow, so much I don't know how we'll ever dig our way out again. I hate snowed-in now. Last year, snowed-in was cozy and yummy and had I no job a hundred miles away, I would have liked to igloo in for a lifetime of that kind of winter.

Today just makes me feel trapped. I'll want a UDF quart of skim later and it will be a major undertaking and I will be Metro bound in the morning and that too, a monumental task. Better to blanket-up and let someone read me poems, sing me songs until I fall asleep. But that is last-year-thinking. Today is all sorts of snow and 2009 and soup to be made and a really lovely little stir-fry. I think the only vegetarian that reads my blog might be the genius-Veace, but I have a product endorsement nonethelss. Morningstar Farms "steak" strips mixed in with fresh spinach, grape tomatoes, basil and garlic and stirfried with some fine olive oil.

The world whitens outside my window...