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EntrustedMay 11, 2006 The box arrived toward the end of last week. I knew what it was, so I thought, so I postponed opening it till the Loathesome One was done and gone (so I thought) and my day trip to New Hampshire was completed. My friend Nancy and I were talking on the phone about three weeks ago. Ordinarily I use the phone seldom and almost entirely for setting up appointments and making plans. Nancy, however, not only doesn't use e-mail; she doesn't have a computer. She writes great longhand letters but in recent years arthritis has made this difficult. So we've settled on the telephone as a primary means of communication. This past winter Nancy read and commented on The Mud of the Place. Nancy was my English teacher senior year of high school -- can I say that sending her the manuscript produced a little anxiety? or that getting it back promptly with extensive, intelligent, and enthusiastic comments was one of the highs (so far) or 2006? I was telling her about Squatters' Speakeasy and about learning to play the guitar. "You know Jerry played the guitar," she said. I don't think I did know. Jerry was Nancy's long-time partner and then closest friend. Nancy often said, "You two should meet," but by the time I moved back to Massachusetts in 1985 they weren't living together, and Martha's Vineyard and Greater Boston aren't exactly near neighbors, at least when you consider the challenges of getting from here to there. The closest Jerry and I ever got to meeting was a couple of phone conversations when I happened to call when she was at Nancy's apartment. Both times we picked up where we left off -- if that makes any sense, because we hadn't left off anywhere, because we'd never met. Thanks to Nancy, we each knew enough about the other to launch into raucous dual commentary on contemporary politics. We should have met, but we didn't. After a period of declining health Jerry died a few years ago. I was immersed in horses and Mud and what communication I had with the off-island world was almost entirely by e-mail. Nancy retired from teaching, then moved, and by the time I tried to get back in touch the post office's forwarding order had expired. Not even Google turned up any useful traces (just when I'd begun to think that Google could find anybody who wasn't trying to hide); we didn't catch up with each other till about a year and a half ago. All of which is by way of explaining why this box arrived at the West Tisbury post office a week ago. Last night I opened it. I knew it contained Jerry's "guitar stuff," songbooks and such, but knowing is one thing, seeing -- and holding, and slowly turning the pages -- is something else. A hardcover book, American Folk Songs of Protest, published in 1953. A saddle-stitched oversize paperback copyright 1948, The People's Song Book, with a foreword by Alan Lomax. Its sequel, Lift Every Voice!, with an introduction by Paul Robeson. Songs of Work and Freedom, edited by Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. And, enclosed in a zip-lock bag, a dozen issues of Sing Out! magazine from the 1950s. The oldest one is vol. 1, no. 2, dated June 1950. I started flipping through the Sing Out!s. A letter from Malvina Reynolds, giving news of the West Coast political folk scene and enclosing $2 for a subscription. Music, lyrics, and chords for her "Bury Me in My Overalls." Two songs that were published to raise money for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's defense committee. A reference to Pete Seeger, who circa 1953 had already been performing and recording for 13 years. A photo I'd never seen before of Joe Hill, on the cover of an issue that includes a feature on his life and songs . . . So many names I knew, and many more I didn't; so many songs I know, or have at least heard, or heard of. Being sung and passed on in the 1950s, popularly remembered as the decade of gray conformity and ac/quiescence. New words to tunes that for centuries have been traveling across continents and oceans. These are my real parents and grandparents and distant ancestors, the ones who taught the ones I learned from, and sometimes the ones from whom I learned with no intermediary -- no intermediary, that is, but the spoken and sung word. These are the traditions I'm trying to carry and pass along. No way I could take it all in at one sitting, or even several. Fortunately I don't have to. After calling Nancy up to exult and thank her, I went back to my current proofreading job, with the box at my feet. It's a Squatters' Speakeasy box: doesn't take a sage or an oracle to see that. At the moment I couldn't begin to tell you how the contents of the box are going to shape the speakeasy, but I know for sure that they're going to. For years I've been asking for signs that I'm on the right path, doing what I'm supposed to be doing. The signs always come, but usually they're modest -- finding in June an affordable year-round rental that allowed dogs was one of the very few exceptions. Lately I've been asking for a bigger sign. The sign I've had in mind is a chunk of time, underwritten by a chunk of money. Instead, for the last several months, all the signs have been about music: Steve's guitar class, Roberta's group singing, and now Jerry's box. OK, Muses, I can't promise I'll stop asking for signs, and I'm definitely not about to stop looking for Mud's perfect publisher, but I get the message. I'm not supposed to keep waiting till the stars and planets all line up right and there's enough money in my checking account to breathe easy for two or three months. I've got a box full of songs and stories about people who carried it on without ever having enough of what they needed: time, money, freedom, justice . . . Still teaching, after all these years.
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