Notes from the Field

So this week the jam was at my house. Our normal venue, where we have our jam on stage, and where we don’t charge them a dime, our normal venue every now and then thinks they can do better. So every other month or so they book a rock band to play on our jam night and tell us to git.

Anyway, on those evenings the jam meets at my house. Tonight we had four fiddles, three mandolins, two guitars, and a flute. Oh and the piano. We played lots of tunes that featured arpeggios in the B part, or sometimes the A part. We played Pays de Haute, March of St. Timothy, Sailors Hornpipe, Reel de Montreal, La Bastrange, Pink Eye Lament, Glass Island Reel, and we threw in Flowers of Edinburg, Fly Away, Spotted Pony, Seneca Square Dance, 100 Pipers, oh, I don’t know what all we played. We just kept going, playing and laughing, all of us arranged around my living room rug, which we named pick eater for the way its pattern makes any dropped pick disappear.

So now, as I return the chairs to the dining room, and put the glasses and everything away, I notice how quiet the house is. I can hear the dehumidifier running in the basement. I can hear the traffic outside down the hill. Its empty now. Just me and hundreds of tunes running in my head.

Its easy to imagine the music is still here, bouncing off the walls and filling up the stairwell. But its in my head. These eternal moments, alas, only last a finite number of minutes. 150 of them, actually.

You may have climbed a Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks, or even Mt. Hood or Mt. Rainier. You may have hiked up to Cathedral Lake in Colorado, or perhaps the Appalachian Trail. You may have fly fished the Deschutes River, or Henry’s Fork, or the Beaverkill. You may have raced a car at Watkins Glen, or Indy. You may have jammed with Little Feet, or opened for Dave Matthews, or John Mellencamp. You may have shaken hands with Marty Stuart, or Ricky Skaggs, or even Bill Monroe.

Thats ok. I am not jealous. This week the jam was at my house.