I
missed out on a big quilt show this weekend. Someone at the Y today
told me how good it was, and then I saw the poster on my way home.
Because I haven’t been walking much, the information footpath hasn’t
been working so well for me. But my knee is better and I’m walking
again. Coming back from the Y, I stopped at a house on Allston between
McKinley and Grant that always has interesting stuff posted on its
wooden gate—articles, poems, flyers—and there it was. The East Bay
Heritage Quilters show. Dang! Today’s article was about the death of
Milton Wolff, one of the commanders of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Neither of my parents went to Spain to fight Franco, but some of their
good friends did, including Steve Nelson, who took our baby chicks from
our Victory Garden
to his place outside of town when they grew up and we hadn’t the heart
to eat them. They thought my dad was their mother, and would cluster
around him when he went into their enclosure and squatted down. They ate
lots of the swiss chard we grew, which was fine with me. Then I didn’t
have to.
For
the past couple of weeks, it’s been non-stop music around here. First
Sam Hinton’s birthday party, then Claudia Schmidt at the Freight, in
fine voice and very funny. Then Arlo Guthrie. Long ago, my mother took
me backstage at the Berkeley Community Theater to introduce me to Arlo. I
was too impressed to say much. Last week I went to see him at
Zellerbach Hall, wondering if I would still be impressed. I was. I went
for the storytelling—he is one of the greats—and I did enjoy it. And his
off-the-wall remarks. I didn’t expect that I would also like his
instrumentals a lot. This was his first tour in a long time without his
band, which is why I played hooky to go (missed my writing workshop). He
said all his contemporaries were having band reunion tours, but in the
old days he didn’t have a band, it was just him. So he is doing a “Solo
Reunion Tour—Together at Last.”
A
few days later we went to Bacheeso’s restaurant to hear the Good Old
Band, the guys Claudia sings backup with sometimes at the farmers’
market. She sang back-up from our table, and so did a couple of
other people, on “Shop Around” and other tunes of that ilk.
And in between, I’ve been practicing for some little gigs around here. I sang a couple of my gardening songs at a showing of a film
about urban gardens in Cuba. Because they experienced an oil crisis in
the early nineties, Cuba provides us with a preview of the end of easy
oil, which is coming up soon. They had been heavily dependent on
oil-based chemicals and farm machinery, more than other Latin-American
countries, and went through severe food shortages as they adjusted to an
organic and local food system. So as I write this I notice the Victory
Garden comes around again, as a response to the oil shortage in Cuba and
to climate change here. After the film, local groups reported on their
experience in West Berkeley and West Oakland
farming empty lots, mentoring people to grow their own fruits and
vegetables in their yards, and organizing volunteers to pick fruit from
neglected trees to give to homeless shelters.
This Saturday night I’m singing for half an hour at the Freedom Song Network song-swap
in San Francisco, and I’m learning a song of my mother’s that I hadn’t
known existed till Charles Smith, the librarian who put up the Malvina lyric site found it in the August 1963 issue of Broadside Magazine.
Malvina never recorded it or put it in a song book, and I can see why. I
like the song, but it hasn’t stayed pertinent, like so many of her
songs have. It’s a little snapshot of a long-ago time when we were all
worried about nuclear winter, not global warming. A journalist had
interviewed some surfers on the California coast and reported that they
figured they might as well enjoy themselves, the bomb would drop and
they’d all be gone. In response, Malvina wrote “One More Ride.”
The next day I’m going with Bonnie Lockhart to the Northern California Children’s Music Network
Gathering at Bing School at Stanford University, which looks like the
nursery school we all wish we had gone to. Trees, lawn with little hills
in it, lots of art and music supplies, big rooms with cozy corners.
I’ll report back.
©2007 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
A LITTLE GARDEN MUSIC
