Heavenly Days!

As my Nana was wont to say

Hello my friends, 10,000 miles below,

Is it really that far? Chrissie Hines sang with the Pretenders in 1982(?) that heaven (implied) is 10,000 miles away. Then there’s Stevie Wonder who crooned that (literally and covertly) heaven is 10,000,000 light years away.

I’m writing to you in a plane to Seattle. I’ll be checking in with you in the next day or so with a video.

I’ve received THREE manuscript rejections this past week. One of them I learned about under the dome of the sky. It disappoints. It angers. But those feelings are kindling for a voluminous inexhaustible fire. Always.

I was watching — until the reboot—a documentary about drumming and some of the best drummers of the rock bands we love: Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Little Richard, Led Zeppelin, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Grateful Dead, Huey Lewis and the News, The Police, the Beatles, Van Halen Cream…definitely a good ole boyz club. I recommend it highly if you love drums and also if you don’t. Each drummer had his uniquely personal story. Many were connected to their drummer fathers. More than one talked about drumming as a connection to their difficult childhoods.

I should have been a drummer. It’s in my blood like poetry. I played, beginning grade 5 when my parents divorced. A cousin from south Florida gave me a sparkly red snare drum that was floating in the canal behind his house. I banged the crap out of it to Alice Cooper. My dad “lent” me his drum sticks that he drummed with when he was in high school.

My mother was married again to a man with a temper. My father was living nine hours away in Detroit. One night in the dark on the living room floor I sat with the snare and lit the end of the sticks with a lighter. I watched the flames swirl and rise and wrap themselves around the drum sticks like snakes circling my hands, while I smashed the drum in an arrhythmic beat. I proceeded to flip the drum, and repeatedly yanked on the metal mechanism that causes the drum to hum. This violence resulted in cuts on my hands. No matter how hard I tried I could not fully destroy it.

I’ll see you when the ground is beneath my feet.

Cynie