Tacit Endorsement & Smearing the Wronged

 Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, Young Boys, + A Cloudy Presidential Hopeful

     Right now, America is reeling… Shocked that a respected coach could take a 10 year old boy, who no doubt idolized him, into the showers at a major American university's gym, pull the child's pants down and rape him. Equally shocking, a graduate student goes to the legendary head of the football program, a man who traded on integrity as a cornerstone of sportsmanship, and after the perfunctory notifications, it was the predator's shower keys that were taken away.
     I'm reeling, too. 
     First, that two grown men - one an old friend who didn't understand his friend needed “help,” the other not so far from youth - didn't intercede more forcefully. Sex is for adults… Consenting adults… Theoretically, people of equal power, influence and the ability to decide what they want to do…
     Secondly, that the students at Penn State, who have rioted in the streets, overturned satellite trucks for the local tv news, are more punch-drunk on the illusion of who someone is, then recognizing what that person allowed to go on is what they should be enraged about. Beyond lacking compassion for the unseen victims, they never paused to consider the betrayal of everything these men are supposed represent.
     A journalist friend of mine, who is politically aware, celebrity savvy and also a former editor at Penthouse, put it best. “I'd like every one of those students to look at a picture of their tiny 10 year old selves - or even better, their little brother or sister at that age - and imagine someone forcing themselves into their…”
     You get the idea. It's easy to degrade when you have no idea who's been or is being degraded. Joe Paterno knew. Joe Paterno did nothing; indeed, he probably interceded for his friend, recommended they keep it quiet “for the good of the program.” But that's never going to be part of the public record, or proved. It's the beauty of “an audible.”
     His friend, Jerry Sandusky, quietly retired. Then he started a charity for “at risk youth,” kids who needed some attention, an adult role model. He assistant coached at a local high school. He brought boys into his home. He continued doing what he'd done at Penn State - only now it was under the sanction of doing good for others, a charity giving back to the community.
     My mind reels. 
     Eight boys that we know of. How many more who're too ashamed to come forward… Too embarrassed to tell the truth for being sodomized, touched in inappropriate ways, quite possibly forced into oral copulation. And we shouldn't know: they shouldn't have to suffer through the dirty details beind trotted out like some tittilation for the bleachers - especially to thwart the claims “it wasn't that bad.”
     No child, actually, no person male or female, should ever be intimidated or taken advantage of based on authority or position of influemce.
     Watching “Good Morning America,” George Stephanopoulos interviewed the mother of Victim 1. Her face was obscured; her voice run through a pitch-changer for fear of reprisals. She told a tale of her son withdrawing, of his being told “no one will believe you if you tell…,” of her son being removed from school without her knowledge…
     And she was the one being obscured. 
     No doubt she felt guilt about what she didn't know, and how long it had gone on. When she started to ask questions, she knew not to press; what could be more embarrassing for a boy on the brink of puberty than to tell his Mom what happened. The same Mom he'd already asked if there was a book of “Sex Weirdos.”
     Wisely, she involved the school's counselor. They got the story. So the investigation began. Quietly. Because in 1998 and 2002 and heaven knows how many other years, these investigations were done so quietly, they never disrupted anything… 
     And here the mother, quite possibly single, had been relieved that a man with Sandusky's reputation had taken an interest in her son. Boys need male role models. She'd hit the lottery. He could most likely help with college, demonstrate another kind of life, help him develop her son's skills and confidence.
     How does one not trust someone in that sort of position? With that kind of resume? Who has a charitable organization devoted to this very thing? Especially for so many years, especially with a close friend like the legendary Joe Paterno.
     And that's the problem with not speaking up. How would you ever guess? Ever think? Ever dream? How dare you judge someone like that o harshly? 
     Just as certainly, who would knowingly empower or enable someone like Jerry Sandusky? Who would allow a grown man who victimizes children to not get help? Not ever allowed to be in a position where they could rape or sodomize a child again?
     What kind of person stays silent? Is that loyalty? Or a complete moral breakdown? We know Jerry Sandusky has a problem… pedophiles are considered mentally unfit… What's Joe Paterno's malady? The graduate student? Though the student may well have been intimidated, shamed or “reasoned” with… “for the good of the program.”
     How good is a program, though, if this is what it covers up?
     We're only as sick as our secrets is an Al-Anon truism. 
     For Penn, it calls into question so many things about the ethics of the people in charge.
     For those young men, it creates a vortex of self-doubt, an inability to trust and a rage that they never be able to even explain. Often with this sort of trauma - and it is trauma - the brain will sublimate the memory so the victim can cope. They won't knowwhat's wrong, just that something is…
     Or they will have irrational fears. Perhaps withdraw. Maybe become suicidal.
     They've done nothing wrong, yet how wrong is this? And how often do the perps use blame, shame and fear as tactics to get the children to remain silent, to endure repeated abuse, to believe there could be worse coming.
     It doesn't change much when you grow up. You get conditioned to look the other way,  to not make waves. It becomes a way of life. You learn that bosses have power - they can take away jobs, not give bonuses, create horrible workplace conditions - and so you must endure. 
     Endure or lose your seniority. Endure or risk not finding another job in a tough economy with record unemployment. Endure or lose work that fulfills you, that you're educated for. Move on, and still possibly know the consequences for speaking up could mean no future employment in your chosen field. 
     Nobody likes a troublemaker. Everybody has a past.
     The question, though, is how will the people with everything to lose portray the ones saying, “This is wrong…” or even “No…”
     Sometimes it's cruel jokes. Sometimes it's whispers behind their back - or distorting the facts, leaving out pertinent information. Maybe it's bringing up things that are not germane to the wrong, in an attempt to undermine the person who's been victimized's character. 
     In some ways, the Herman Cain thing is living proof. Did he? Why would he? And yet, growing up, I played enough competitive golf with the wives of men with “good jobs” to understand how women can turn a blind eye to keep their family - or lifestyle - together. “For better or worse” can mean a lot of things… and who men are when their wives are not around can be very different from the devoted family men they present.
     The irony is that the women who tend to be victimized are usually the ones who end up being silenced. Many of the ones who come forward, like the mother of Justin Bieber's “baby,” are the gamers. 
     They are not brazen. They just want to be left alone. They want to move on, to forget about it. Why would you look back at that? Oh, yes, because something - often far more than just your dignity - was taken from you.
     The silence is kept… for the sake of getting along, of not being ostracized, of who knows what might be cooked up? The two women in Cain's coterie of “what happened?” are already being picked apart: work histories examined, as if unfair workplace conditions could only happen once. As if a man who might fish off the strange pier now and again - indeed, who might find plenty of willing women who're happy to have a little dinner and a little nibble to get ahead - is unthinkable.
     People have cheated as long as there are marriages. Men - and women - have used their positions, influence and money to grease the rails of love, lust and many stripes in between. It is only when the attention is unwanted and leveraged that there's a problem - or when the bias is based on something unfair.
     Most people don't remember Christine Craft. She was an accomplished journalist, but more significantly, the first woman to win a high profile sexual bias suit. Bypassed for promotions and key assignments, she was eventually released from her local tv news anchoring job for being “too old, too ugly and not deferential enough to men.”
     She won. She had to fight hard, endure her life being completely dismantled and held up for judgment. Theoretically, she was a feminist icon, a woman of principle willing to tell the truth, to stand up on behalf of every other woman trying to make her way in the business world through intelligence, professionalism and solid experience and skills.
     "Would she do it again?" I asked her as a college student, reporting for a Miami alternative weekly. She took me in, studied my glowing face. Then she paused. For what seemed like a minute. Truly debating.
     “I wouldn't,” she said. “No, uh-uh.:
     I wanted to press, but I couldn't. It would've been too painful, I could tell. Whatever she'd been through for justice to be served, it hadn't been worth being eviscerated. 
     When we were done and making the post-interview small talk that creates the illusion of intimacy, she looked at me again, really weighed who she thought I was. Her eyes narrowed a little, then she dropped the bomb.
     “I shouldn't have sued,” she said. “It's hard to find work… There's always a 'reason,' but it's obvious.”
     Our eyes locked. Was this sisterly advice from someone who'd been there to a bright-eyed kid? Or merely a woman exhausted from another long day of media and speaking engagements, flogging what happened to pay her bills? Was she a woman who'd found someone she could trust, who might understand why she felt like that - and just needed to unburden?
     I'll never know. Overwhelmed by the depth of the revelation, I went, “Wow…”
     The bubble burst. I was a kid. The soul search was over.
     Christine Craft was a damn good reporter. She shouldn't have had to suffer because she didn't want to play honey-blond-bimbo to her big strong co-anchor. If you had a daughter/sister/best friend, would you want that for them?
     But you gotta be smart. As Alan Jackson warned, “Here in the real world/ the cowboy don't always get the girl…” and “justice” might just be a fancy concept, a high-flying notion that's about protecting the powerful in whatever state of conduct or business they might pursue, an illusion brokered to the rest so we can believe “we'll be treated fairly; we're protected from unfair situations; we're all equal and have the same protections.”
     “You scratch my back, I'll scratch your's…” is more like it.
     If you're a 10 year old boy who doesn't understand… an almost middle-aged woman not particularly interested in favoring a married man - or really any man…  It shouldn't become an issue. 
     Being made to feel uncomfortable, let alone violated, is a wrong. Simple as that.
     When you've done wrong - and could be getting exposed for it - the stakes are high How many wrongs are you willing to sow to protect the sketchy? The stakes then become exponential, and, well, to thine own self be true.
     Just ask Joe Paterno. Or the mothers of those young men in the area surrounding State College, PA.
     Maybe being true to yourself is doing the right thing, speaking up, dealing with the consequences. As my father used to tell me when I was a kid, “Don't do things you're worried about people finding out about… Because if you have to worry, then probably you shouldn't be doing it.”
     My Dad also raised me with a sense of “playground justice.” Again, something simple enough for a kid - especially a girl going to an all-girls school where there wasn't much bullying to be seen.
     “If you see a kid being beaten up or harassed, and you don't do something,” he admonished, “then you might as well pick up a baseball bat and join in. I'm not telling you to go fight the bullies off, but find a grown-up and make them help.”
     Again, it was just that basic.
     Listening to Jon Stewart's “Daily Show” commentary about the protestors, I marveled. Seeing the rage on those young people's faces was horrible; realizing they never stopped to think about the kids  and what demons they might be living with was sobering. It took me back to the basic wisdom of John Gleason.
     Looking to make the point on Facebook, I posted:
     Tacit endorsement is doing nothing…
     Tacit endorsement means no consequences…
     Tacit endorsement is full complicity!

     Maybe we can blame the sexualization of advertising, the breakdown of the family, the Girls Gone Wild high school hottie culture, the predominance of internet porn, the easy sleazy I-me-mine reality that is all greed and immediacy… 
     In the end, wrong is wrong. 
     If you say nothing, you condone everything. Because nothing changes.
     Circumstances, context, actions. Simple as that. “No” means “no.” Children are innocent and that should be protected. Even kids who've been exposed to too much shouldn't be preyed upon. 
     Job tracks are on one's feet, not back. 
     Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean you should.
     Somehow I feel a lot less cool right now, but I also feel like I am serving the truth. Not mine to tell, but any support and encouragement that can be given to those who've been wronged is being the kid my father raised. It's not much, but who knows who it helps? And in standing strong for those who need to know someone cares about what happened to them, that's the most powerful thing I can imagine.
-- Holly Gleason
11/11/11

Amy Winehouse: No, NO, no... Fame Kills Harder Than Drugs or Sex or Booze

            It wasn’t like we couldn’t see it coming, wasn’t like anyone was shocked. Yet, the news Amy Winehouse had indeed been found dead in her London apartment tore through my Saturday morning with the harsh ripping reserved for muslin I’m going to use for mustard plasters. Forceful, sick, weakening.

            Just as quickly, the romancing of the necrophoolishness began All the talk of the 27 Club, those tortured seemingly-beyond-comprehension-talents who also died in their 27^th year Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain. There’s nothing romantic about addiction – or the kind of pain so profound no amount of drugs or sex or booze can tamp it down.

            It’s an odd bargain we watchers of the bold-faced make. Reveling in the lip gloss and hair color, high heels and hobbies; but also voraciously consuming these creatures who capture our attention, For what reason do we watch? What gift? Does Snookie have any real value? The Kardashians? Paris Hilton?

            Beyond Amy Winehouse’s ages old voice, a delicious mix of sweat and ennui boiled in a flammable combination of kerosene, cocktails and bodily fluids, her biggest hit was the sardonic “Rehab,” a song mocking the thing that might’ve saved her – had she ever committed to it.

            Instead Winehouse’s notoriety was driven by a bobsled ride of trainwrecks, misadventure after trainwreck misadventure piling up like used syringes. Wandering around, clearly out of her mind, bee hive busted, eye liner smeared down her face, often in a state of near complete undress. Sometimes it was rows with tavern keepers; occasionally, her acting out coming via on-again, off-again husband Blake Fielder-Civil, a man quite possibly along for the ride on the reflected glory fame flume.

            A highlight of that combustive union pictures from the morning after a particularly brutal night, her bruised eyes, feet bleeding through ballerina flats and him, face clearly scratched madly, walking hand-in-hand down the street like post-soul Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Placidity post-pound down.

            Insanity makes for good copy. The media can’t get enough of a disaster, and 5 Grammy Awards be damned, the high jinks meant more than the music she created. For having been raised on a strong vein of classic jazz and saloon songs – her first album was named Frank in obvious homage, and contained the gold-digger hating vitrol “Fuck Me Pumps” – and easing into a ‘60s soul redux that had a modern flair, equal parts wide-eyed innocence and street-wise irony, Winehouse told it like it was for a generation watching all social norms being melted down for greed and a brand-name-checking nihilism designed to validate from the outside rather than the inside.

            But it’s that raw ache, like a rope burn to the soul, that made her something more than the Brit-pop-soul thrushes – from Duffy to Adele – who came in her wake. This wasn’t about the pain of a relationship gone really bad, this was some other kind of soul-battering that had a profound darkness, no doubt heightened by addiction, at least one toxic relationship and the enabling that all pop stars attract.

            Because it’s hard to tell pop stars “no.” The second you do, five willing compliants pop up, validating whatever bad thing they crave as something deserves and often deriding the person voicing objection as “a buzzkill.”

            Being the one standing by, watching, helpless and knowing every outreach only alienates the addict, sex hound, boozer further. The debate begins: stay close and hope you can catch a falling star… or allow them the consequences of their actions, knowing the ultimate end could be the ultimate consequence.

            There’s a saying a recovering alcoholic I know – 20+ years sober – embraces, “Don’t deny me the dignity of my struggle.” Or in the case of record company people who need the next record, the agent and manager who commission, everyone else who gets their fees, the momentum of her fame and the money.

            Who tells someone who can still create a furor with next to nothing – her Tony Bennett track will no doubt be a stand out –they don’t have a choice? The tour’s cancelled. You’re off the road until you’re sorted out. REALLY sorted out, not a Band-Aid on the problem and a blind-eye to the fact that your treatment is a white knuckle kinda sobriety.

            Not to mention how annoying the incessant calls, problems, shady characters and questionable reasons become. Some of the handlers resent or mock the person behind their back; others join in – as part of the party or from the fringes rocking their own deal because the artist doesn’t know… and no one cares. They’re beyond that in the momentum of the meltdown.

            Those meltdowns, by the way, are awesome. Not only does it give the media a quick jolt of adrenal buzz, a way to hold people’s attention, it allows readers, viewers, regular people to feel superior – because they’d never be that messed up.

            Look at Britney shave her head…  Attack the mean paparazzi with an umbrella…

            Watch Courtney throw make-up at Madonna live on tv… see her wander into a Wendy’s almost naked… Fight with her daughter Frances Bean on Twitter…

            See Kate Moss honk up a white powder with her then boyfriend Pete Doherty, of Baby Shambles, a man known more for his drug abuse not music…

            Watch the indulged famous brats implode. Easy prey. Lost souls. Dumb luck. Hard work. Take this and be cool… Be an outlaw… Rock harder than a mere mortal… And hey, Icarus, if those wax wings melt cause you’re too close to the sun, don’t blame us when you crash to the ground and die.

            Shoulda known. All those chances.

            We consumed your pain, your freak-out and turned it into water cooler conversation.

            We drove our mini-vans or Priuses, wore our neat and clean clothes – or our pseudo-bohemian hipster looks, took out the trash and hit happy hour. We loved the music, but we loved the freak show more. And so the roulette wheel spins. Most make it, some don’t – but we, the Romans are entertained watching the stars face lions that look just like indulgences.

            What we lose is what that music might’ve been. There are plenty of great straight up soul singers, but Amy Winehouse hit veins – sometimes with razors, sometimes diamonds, but always with deadly clarity.

            Maybe not like Billie Holiday, another famous junkie the press is now rushing to invoke, but perhaps more like Judy Garland, a tragic figure propped up for commerce and lost in a pain we’ll never know.

            What kind of songs would Kurt Cobain have written? What would he have said about the state of his generation? The nation? The world?

            What kind of breakthrough playing would Hendrix have achieved? Where might he have taken the electric guitar? What might rock songs have become in his cosmos of groovy love and psychedelia?

            Would Morrison have recovered enough to find a societal matrix that would’ve broken through to the other side? Merged poetry in its purest form with the release and conquest that rock & roll is at its root?

            And Joplin? What soul-melting revelations could’ve come – a la Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time – had she found a little help? Could she have melted pain and defenses with her raging vulnerability? Maybe.

            It’s really the “We’ll Never Know Club.” We can’t say they could’ve been saved. But you can wonder what price does putting your foot down exact? Lose the friend, the client… save the life, possibly.

            Over the years, I’ve delivered a bunch of bad news. Starting with my own parents. People don’t like it. They get mad. They hate you. There’s never any proof what you stood down “woulda got’em.”

            You don’t know. You don’t. And the other person has to want to be more than a piss’n’puke stain on the floor. Tricky business, saving lives that are more valuable in any shape half-functioning. Yet, the ultimate loss is even more.

             We couldn’t have done anything to save Amy Winehouse. But participating in the tabloid speculation, the “ooooh”ing and “tsk”ing about “how awful it all is” creates a market for these people to be hounded. The worse it gets, the harder to cope; the harder to cope, the more likely they are to numb.

            It’s easy to say, “it comes with the privileges.” And it does. But it’s also about helping these people walk the line of fame in a way their sanity isn’t one of the first things to go,  replaced by the copious consumption based on rock star expectations.

            It takes special skills to navigate fame, the rush of everyone wanting a piece of you. It takes handlers who believe in humanity as much as money. It takes a long-eyed view of a flame burning awfully fast.

            When you hear someone’s sliding, express outrage and concern. Don’t sniger and laugh. It is funny: those humiliating, crazy things that happen when people can’t get right, but it’s something more, too.

            Like I said: we didn’t cause, couldn’t stop it. But we’re all accessories when feeding the beast that eats their lunch. What we lose, we’ll never know. Creativity is its own commodity, but a little bit of our humanity goes when we’re callous, mocking, eye-rolling, indifferent.

            Think about that, and think about being the change we need to see in a celebrity-obsessed world where too many are famous for nothing but the empty husk of not much more than gaudy consumptive lives

Jane Scott World's Oldest Teenager Inspires Many, Makes Rock & Roll Heaven Come Alive

      There was an unspoken, almost unacknowledged war at our house - and it only happened on Fridays. But on Fridays, it was on! It was a race to the front door, and that morning's pristine copy of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Whomever had possession of the paper controlled it until they were done…

     My father wanted to read about business, local sports, major headlines, serious things. I wanted - with every fiber of my being - serious things, too. I wanted to read Jane Scott!
     Jane Scott, the world's oldest teenager even then, was the bridge between my 12- and 13-year old self, dazzled by songs and overwhelmed by the notion of the people who created them, and the source of my pleasure, my pain, my quickly evolving insight into who I was and all the confusing emotions that made no sense. I would never meet people like that, glamorous rock & roll sorts… not in my pink suburban bedroom with the canopy bed and a summer already filled with tournaments and tee times.
     Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty, James Taylor, Neil Young, the Allman Brothers and the Wilson Sisters of Heart were far too exotic to ever share the air that I breathed. They were shiny people, channeling truth I desperately was trying to understand - and they knew. They knew… 
     The best I could hope was to worship from under the Pavillion at Blossom Music Center, maybe the first tier at the Richfield Coliseum - or a shadowy corner of some bar where I'd convinced the bouncer to look the other way, wrapping my library card in money or getting some musician to “swear” I was “their niece.” 
     Jane Scott closed the gap. She was my friend who was their friend.
     She was curious, and she loved the music. She believed in the joy music held, the triumph and power of rock & roll, even its ability to shift how people view the world. It was an interview with Jackson Browne for his tour stop for Late For The Sky where he spoke about environmental concerns, nuclear power and Greenpeace that sent me on a mission to learn about things that are toxic.
     That was Jane Scott: what mattered about this artist? How to bring it out? Make it shine?
     And she was never cynical.
     Never cynical. A Grammy-winning musico I know half-sneered, “She never wrote a bad review about anyone…” And it's true. She believed in finding what worked, maybe acknowledging a problem, but never harping on what was lacking.
     As a young journalist in Miami, I fell in with the maverick journalists who ran Tower Records' Pulse magazine, given away free in the stores. It was a loss leader designed to intrigue people about records, and it became a very well respected music publication by virtue of the quality writers they engaged. Their motto was pure Scott: “We listen to a lot of records. We write about the good ones.”

     Not that I realized growing up that Jane Scott was paving a yellow brick road for me, She was an artery of truth and understanding, oxygen for a kid who was more alive between the grooves of a 33 1/3 circle of vinyl than most moments of most days. 
     I would pour over every inch, nodding my head, taking it in. What I was hoping to find, I can't say… But I knew that taken as a whole, I was coming to understand what the soul of rock & roll looked like, the essence that created the music that wafted through the airless third floor attic where I existed with my turntable and the dust bunnies. Too hot in the winter when the heat rose, too hot in the summer when the temperatures got trapped under the eaves.
     Carly Simon. Wendy O Williams. Chrissie Hynde. Lou Reed. They were all there. And more… Southside Johnny. Bruce Springsteen. The Eagles, especially Joe Walsh. Linda Ronstadt. Later the Stray Cats. Romeo Void. Devo. The Dead Boys. r.e.m. Missing Persons. U2.
     And on, and on, and on….
     Live Aid. Woodtstock '94. Lollapalooza. Since Sept. 15, 1964, if it was rock & roll and it mattered, the woman with the oversized red glasses and blond pageboy was there. She carried a huge purse that contained ear plugs, three pens, notebooks, a peanut butter sandwich. She was ready for whatever might happen - and often did.
     This is, after all, the woman who followed Jimi Hendrix to a Cleveland Heights Chevy dealer and watched the reality-shattering guitarist buy a blue Corvette. She saw Springsteen at the Allen Theatre in 1975 and wrote “His name is Bruce Springsteen. He is rock's next superstar…” long before TIME and Newsweekthought about putting the Asbury Park wharf rat on simultaneous covers.
     Maybe she was lucky. Maybe she was so voracious to experience it all - the good, the bad, the REO Speedwagon - that her margins for being right were huge. I didn't care. I didn't think about any of that, I just fell head over heart week after week into whatever rabbit hole she was illuminating.
     Pink Floyd? Sure. Todd Rundgren? Absolutely. Bob Welch? Why not?
     Why not? Indeed. You never know, I'd think. If perhaps Yes would never strike me, surely there was something to Kim Carnes that would. Valerie Carter, who was produced by Lowell George from Little Feat, and Rickie Lee Jones. Carlene Carter bent at the waist with all that fringe, talking a broken white line between her heritage as the (grand)child of country music's seminal Carter Family and the vows that made her the better half of Brit's pre-punk Stiffness Rockpile. She sang with Dave Edmunds, she married Nick Lowe.
     It was all there. All I had to do was beat John Gleason to the front door.
     And Jane led me to the world of CREEM, Rolling Stone, Circus, Hit Parader, Song Hits!. Then later British publications like NME (New Music Express) andMelody Maker. It was a keyhole I could peer through, inhale a little of the rarified air. Jane Scott made sure the people who read her had that much. She made sure the humanity and the magic shone through.

     I didn't really set out to do this: write about music, make dreams come true. There was no template for that in Shaker Heights, Ohio where the true cash crop is corporate housewives. Girls like me wouldn't know where to begin, or what to do when we got there. And besides, how would one go about it?
     Watching Jane Scott was a good start. She led with her heart and closed with her abiding curiosity. Where did the music come from? What did it mean to the people making it? Why did they do it? And what made it special for them?
     That seemed to be the basic through line of everything she did. It fed my soul for years as a kid at the kitchen counter, slurping down Fruit Loops or Cocoa Crispies, Captain Crunch when I could convince my mother there was any nutritional vale to them. Reading amazed before the humiliation of climbing into the school car would befall me. The cereal went down without ever being tasted: I was consumed by whatever Ian Hunter, Grace Slick or Cheap Trick had shared with Jane Scott that week.
     “Cleveland Rocks”? Indeed. “You Wear It Well”? Rod Stewart transitions again, as did Bowie. A bunch of ramshackle losers - like the Replacements and the Georgia Satellites - all opened up for the guileless (as Lou Reed explained her) woman. She had her ways, and I absorbed them without even knowing.
     Without even knowing. One thing, an accident really, led to another.
     A week of golf with a demi-famous person -- who would grow up to be the impossibly famous Vince Gill -- and a missed high school journalism assignment. A quick interview, a tossed off suggestion. The reality that 15 years of playing golf was now over at not quite 18. The need to put something there, and the truth that being a voice on the radio didn't get me close enough, offer the outlet I was yearning for.
     So I started writing. College paper, local rag, fanzine. But always with the knowledge that I was only as good as my slugline, the inserted line beneath my name that explained how I was affiliated with this publication. “Special to…” or “Staff Writer,” “Palm Beach Post Music Critic.”
     Along the way, if it paid, I wrote for 'em. Black Miami Weekly, In Records Timez, The Weekly News, a fistful more I can't recall. But also there were legendary fan publications - Rock & Soul, Country Song Round-Up, especially punk's wonderful Trouser Press.
     I was the market correspondent for Performance. Had a guest editorial inBillboard as a 19-year old college junior about plugging into the potency of the Live Factor. Always The Miami Hurricane, the college paper I rode roughshod over, terrorizing editors and writing long, knowing pictures can be resized. 
     Turned down by The Cleveland Scene, I was writing for The Plain Dealer a few months later, as well as The Miami Herald. At the time, The Herald was a Top 10 daily newspaper - and I was a college sophomore.
     Tell the story, find the essence, look for the quote. 
     What did they have to say? How do you get them to tell it?
     I had no training. No idea or clue how to… Just a fire for the music, a need to know where the songs came from, what they meant and why they mattered so much to me. 
     My father'd advised against journalism in college as I'd already had several pieces published - including the lead story in the 1979 United States Golf Association's Amateur Championship program. “You know how to write,” he'd counseled. “Go learn something.”
     So there I was: fueled up on the fear of being found out, driven by this yearning to understand. Odd things like Nazareth, the Catholic Girls, Modern English before they melted with you, the Bangles in a van and Cindy Lauper when no one outside New York cared. And the country acts that paved my way into the Herald: John Anderson, Alabama, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, TG Shepard, Johnny Lee.
     Back music, too. I can't forget the other book end. Heck, the Dazz Band was my entrée into The Plain Dealer, “an upclose look” at the hometown band who'd go on to win a Grammy in 1983, tying Earth, Wind & Fire for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group. The Commodores. Ashford & Simpson. Patti LaBelle. The System. Shalamar plus solo Jody Watley and Howard Hewett. DeBarge. 
     You get the idea. Heck, Pavarotti, who singled me out when the “grown-ups” kept ignoring my raised hand at a press conference. Impressed by my question, we talked for a while after.
     The stakes kept going up. The artists more intense. The level of access more elevated.
     Every now and then, I'd step out of my body, get the shakes. There was only one answer: What would Jane Scott do? Or even more exactingly, What would Jane Scott ask?
     No truer North Star to steer by. Gracious curiosity. Why did you do that? Tell me about the song most people never noticed, the weighty one that mattered? How are you feeling? 
     And she meant it. Whatever she asked, she wanted to know. You could tell by the way people responded. She got people to be honest, to drop the chip on their shoulder… to be vulnerable. Even Lou Reed, a man so cantankerous he'd walked out of our first interview for no apparent reason - only to be brought back by his publicist, was a supplicant of the woman who once wrote obituaries.
     What would Jane Scott do? Go out, of course. See a band. Wear a big smile on her face. Laugh as she considered what might be, what's missing, how to find her way to the center of all of it. She did, too. No one found the center quite like Jane Scott.
     I know, because I read her voraciously. Knew the humility, the love, the passion for the music and the people who made it. She had no shame about it; saw her writing as a privilege. She took it seriously, and she brought a lot of people to acts they might not have cared about.
     I thought about that watching the very bloated Molly Hatchet perform a lights out set of exquisite Southern Rock perfection shortly after Danny Joe Brown had returned to the band. It was the mid-80s, and I loathed everything they were musically; because of Jane Scott, I loved everything they were and did for their fans.
     Jane Scott - and the art of loving what is.
     Also, the art of appreciating what one loves. To not get so caught up in the moment - as I did after my third session with Neil Young the first time he and I met on behalf of Tower Pulse for his country Old Ways, leaving my tape recorder on the bus - that perspective gets lost.
     Perspective, even if you're trying to look on the sunnyside, is everything. Calibrated appropriately, it lets you tell the truth without being vapid. But it must be watched and maintained. There is a difference, and if you choose to focus on what's good, you have to be aware of what's wrong.      Being clear-eyed can let you lean to what's working, because you're not just some fan foaming at the mouth. You realize, too, there is a sacred contract with the reader to tell the truth, not opine and pontificate, but share and show.
     Shortly after my name started appearing regularly in Rolling Stone, I had the opportunity to do a panel in Cleveland… for a North Coast something or other, a demi-New Music Seminar that was mostly stillborn. I can't tell you anything about who was there, what the topic was - though I remember making a plea to the attending to believe in their dreams and maintain their standards along the way - or much else, beyond it was in the Flats.
     There is one moment, though, that stands out. As the panel was ending and people were coming up to the podium, a lady approached with red glasses and a a blonde pageboy. She was smiling. Her head was bobbing. Joy extruded from her. 
     “Yes, yes, I'm Jane Scott,” she said As I nodded back, muttering like some simpleton echo chamber, “Yes, yes, I know…”
     “You're from here, right?” she asked. “You went to Laurel, didn't you?”
     I stopped cold in my tracks. All the Spin, Rolling Stone, Musician, CREEMbylines hardly mattered. Jane Scott knew who I was!
     “I did, yeah,” I replied, mystified. 
     “I thought so,” she beamed. “You used to write me letters…”
     Which I did. Occasionally. When I agreed and it seemed like no one else did.
     “And I think you used to write for us, too,” she continued.
     I nodded. 
     “Yes, yes,” she said again, happily. Then she got down to business. “And could I ask you a few questions?”
     She was writing a wrap-up. I can't even remember what she asked. It just was. Right there, where it used to be Pirate's Cove. Jane Scott, who I'd loved since I figured out what rock & roll was, asking, well, me. Maybe it was shock, or maybe awe. Regardless, I joined a pretty heady list.
     In that moment, “the world's oldest rock critic” made me feel every bit as special as she had Linda Ronstadt, Motley Crue, Paul McCartney, Roy Orbison, Roger Daltrey and beyond. That was one of her many gifts. 
     She wasn't afraid to be unabashed about what she loved. Like the Los Angeles Times' Robert Hilburn, Jane Scott made it okay to get beyond the indifference or sangfroid of modern criticism - to enjoy without needing to come off as some kind of lord passing judgement.
     It was just about the moment, what was said, shared, offered.
     The last time I saw Jane Scott, we didn't speak. Not that I didn't want to, just that it wasn't to be.
     I'd flown to Cleveland to take Alex Bevan, my first idol who'd graciously agreed to sing at my mother's funeral well over a year before, to see the fourway songswap occasioanlly done by Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett. Getting there early to visit with my songwriter friends, to take Alex on the bus to meet Lyle and Guy, heading to dinner… the bustle of it all… the rhythm of the evening got me back to the bus later than I'd anticipated.
     “Do you know Jane Scott's here?” Lovett asked. 
     I shook my head. 
     “Hmmm, well, we'll see…” he offered, recognizing my pique.
     I'd promised to introduce the four men that night. We both knew Jane would be seated by the time I slunk out front to take my place with my friends. I peered across the first rows but couldn't see her.  Ever the appreciator of others, Lovett introduced her from the stage, had a light shine on the woman who outshone the spotlight…
     “She is a real treasure,” Lovett proclaimed, and the audience cheered.
     Lyle Lovett was right. She is a real treasure. The kind we should all cherish when they cross our paths, whether they're the bank manager, our child's teacher or a woman unafraid to “love some band” - as Sapphire the groupie proclaims in “Almost Famous” - “or little piece of music so much it hurts.”
     Jane Scott loved what she loved. She wrote about it. And she wrote about other stuff, too. Always intriguing, always looking for truth. But especially, always inspiring people who loved music to dig deeper, seek more and find the part that made them feel most alive.
     Feeling alive was everything to her. Or as she told The Plain Dealer's John Soeder when she tired, “What I like about rock & roll is you can't sit around feeling sorry for yourself… The blues perpetuate you're feeling of despondency. 
     “Rock gets you up on your feet, dancing! And you forget about it. The beats gets you going.”
     No doubt they're “going” in heaven right now. Probably Hendrix met her in that blue Corvette when she hit the Pearly Gates, told her he knew where Morrison was holed up and they were gonna go rock with Joplin later. No doubt, she's laughing with the wind in her air - just as alive in heaven as she ever was on Earth, and for anyone who ever read her, they know: Jane Scott was always as alive as alive can be.

www.hollygleason.com

and for anyone looking for a more formal elegy for an inspiration + mentor

latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/07/remembering-legendary-cleveland-rock-critic-jane-scott.html

Steve Popovich, Bill Johnson: Passion, Fight, Creativity + Rock & Roll Dreams

Steve Popovich, Bill Johnson

Rock & Roll Dreams Come Through

    I'm in a shitty hotel room, chattering and chilled to the bone. I've driven all day, and it doesn't even matter. Sometimes you do what you have to do - even when it doesn't make sense to the people that know you.

     It's not irrational. I know exactly why I'm here -- shivering, waiting for the heat to actually kick in. And it's not just the funeral for an iconoclast with a huge heart and bigger balls, even though that's why I'm here.

     It is about the world in which we live, the vineyard in which I've toiled going on thirty years. It's the way I spent my life and the beliefs I've held. Especially at a time when doing the right thing, fighting for greatness, believing the music matters is at best quaint, but most likely is viewed - no matter what “they” say - as chump stuff.

     Steve Popovich, who passed away Jun 8th in Murfreesboro, TN, would disagree. He'd tell you to fight for what's right, to stand up for what's different, believe in the music, not the business or the politics or the egos… to know great, no matter the guise, and make sure it gets heard.

     Steve Popovich was that kind of guy. That's how he lived… right til he died.

     That kinda guy… big, bottomless heart. True believer. Fearless advocate for what he believed. Tireless in pursuit of great music - be it progressive polka bands like Brave Combo or Michael Jackson, Boston or David Allen Coe. When Meatloaf sold 200,000 copies of his first album and Epic Records informed him they'd done all they could do, Popovich went market-by-market and created a sensation, making Bat Out of Hell the biggest selling record that year.

      That's the thing about true hearts and big dreams… they don't let go. They'll haunt you. Take hold and keep holding. Rarer than rubies, when you encounter one, you never forget. They will make you do things you can't believe you're doing…

     Like driving 10 hours dead exhausted at the end of a record launch and an Oscar winner on a red carpet… to sit in a church where I know barely anyone… to honor a legacy so many would never understand. Because it's just not done that way. Not any more. Not to the point where people even understand why it matters.

     And yet, if you know, experienced, saw or even glimpsed Steve Popovich in action, there was no way you could turn away. How could you? To see passion, raw and unfiltered, 250 proof and looking for matches… that was the kind of thing that left people speechless.

     Only Steve Popovich would never settle for that. He wouldn't let people stand by mute. He'd cajole and engage and encourage. He wanted you to know… for sure… but he wanted to know. All about you. And every single you in the room, the street, the world. What did you think? need? feel? what makes you thrill? ache? rage?

     He was genius at it.

     Which is what made him the kind of promo man who can change everything for a rocker, a songwriter, a band

     Which is what made him the kind of A&R man who could convince a barely post-teenage Michael Jackson to sign with Epic Records.

     Which made him the kind of guy who picked up Johnny Cash and polka king Frankie Yankovic during his Nashville tenure and let them feel like kings, not scraps in a record business that seemed to have thrown them away.

     That was the thing about the coal miner's son from Western Pennsylvania, he not only knew the margins, he understood them. Just like he understood the working class, the blue collar, the faceless mass that one by one added up to platinum, double platinum - or in the case of a husky operatic tenor with designs on rock & roll, 14 million in the end.

     That was the thing about Steve Popovich - as Meatloaf, that 14 million piece success, so beautifully noted as he eschewed the podium to stand by the white draped casket at St John of the Cross: “Steve passed on us twice, but he never dismissed us.”

     Steve Popovich wouldn't. Indeed, couldn't. If he hid behind the notion he was just “some Hunkie,” he understood the power of passion. Knew that if you had talent fueled by that ardor, there was nothing you couldn't do… you just had to believe and refuse to give up.

     No matter how crazy or futile it seemed. As industry legend Ron Alexenburg noted, Steve Popovich carried Meatloaf's flame for almost a year - one market at a time - until Bat Out of Hell kicked in. In his tenacity, he wouldn't give in. In his faith, a superstar was forged.

     Someone spoke of his denial, how it kept him from embracing how mighty his opponents were… and how that allowed him to persevere. They talked of how every day the business broke his heart, but every morning, he woke up happy, willing to believe in the power of dreams and music.

     He took on - and beat in court - Sony Music, a behemoth multi-national corporation. Never one to be intimidated, he knew his truth - and he wouldn't be brow-beaten or condescended to by a group of Harvard-educated attorneys.

     He was Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. Only Steve Popovich helped so many people get their hands on the brass ring… built bridges when it wasn't happening… created chances where anyone else would've laughed. Boston, Southside Johnny, the Michael Stanley Band.

     He believed in people who believed in their music, who had the fire and weren't afraid to blow on the flame until it burst into some kind of blaze. Even the Michael Stanley Band - whose seminal Stagepass is reputed to have sold gold on Northern Ohio copies alone - turned into a powerhouse of mythic Midwestern proportion: selling out the Richfield Coliseum for two nights faster than Led Zeppelin, staging multiple SRO night stands at the outdoor amphitheatre Blossom Music Center and retiring with a ten night capacity stand at the more dignified Front Row.

     Two out of three of those places are gone. Blossom, summer home to the Cleveland Symphony, has a few other reasons to survive. But all those altars to what music can mean to kids coming of age in the real world before reality tv, leaked home porn and trainwreck drug use could make anyone a sensation… That was the thing that Steve Popovich instinctively knew and absolutely built a life on.

     And so the tributes came: Clive Davis. Miami Steve Van Zandt, Ian Hunter. Meatloaf in person, and 80s teen sensation Robbie Benson.  Record men, local ethnic people he'd embraced, national level radio bigwigs, co-workers from back when, Northern Ohio icons like Daffy Dan and Beachland Ballroom owner Cindy Barber, dignitaries from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Congressman Dennis Kucinich and family. Especially family.

     If Steve Popovich loved music, he stood for family. How many of the speakers called him “Pops,” and that was how the larger - literally and figuratively - than life figure liked it. He believed in his kids, his grandkids, other people hanging onto their roots and their blood.

     He was fierce about that, fierce the way only a Midwesterner who believed in certain kinds of sanctity can be. That notion of how strong family is gives them a foundation to dig in and fight, to believe in loyalty, commitment and making something more where nothing exists. But it's never nothing - there is always the invisible connection that is family, friendship, creativity, respect.

     Funny thing about this death. Came just when I'm drifting. Not sure if any of it matters, if people care about songs that reach down inside, show you what you didn't know you were feeling, reminded you how great something small can be. Things that last, because they're things that can be cemented by small groups of people.

     It's been a long time since I've truly worked a record. But a promise made three years ago has found me guardian angel-ing The Dreaming Fields by Songwriter Hall of Famer Matraca Berg. It's a grown up work about how life buckles and stumbles, the things we do to survive, coping with disappointment and soldiering on. It harkens back to Neil Young's most organic records, Joni Mitchell's more brooding, personal works.

     The journalists are overwhelmed. Too much grunt work, not enough inspiration. Little records that could - especially ones that don't come on their own wave of critical mass - are impossible dreams. Every placement just about is hand-over-hand, phone-call-after-phone call.

     But the record is --- in a world where hyperbole has become the new white noise and platitudes land like so many leaves in the fall, weightless and anonymous - amazing. Once people hear it, they're transfixed; their souls open and they remember how music can change everything.

     The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Rolling Stone The Boston Herald, The Dallas Morning News, The Huffington Post, No Depression.com and NPR's All Things Considered are the tip of the iceberg. There is more to come… and there is SIRIUS/Xm, too.

     Popovich would approve. The calling and witnessing for love, not money, friendship, not career move. But it's labor intensive, and who works like that anymore? Why would you? And with every placement so hard won, how long can you keep it up? How many hits until some kind of word of mouth critical mass kicks in?

     At what point does the dreamer become a fool?

     At what point does forgoing one's life in the name of someone else's dream seem lunacy not heroism?

     At what point do you realize the loyalty you show may not be the loyalty returned?

     Michael Stanley, a Popovich windmill, would write a song called “Different Reasons” that contains a lyric that speaks to it all:

     “You can always tell a dreamer,

     “You just can't tell them,

          “tell them anything…”

     And so it is. A girl an ocean away, fixing to play the legendary Glastonbury Festival. Her oldest friend, sitting in a church pew, wondering how everything that mattered got lost in the flood. A roomful of folks who know the difference feeling cuckholded by the status quo.

     But once you know, how can you not know?

     How can you honor Steve Popovich and accept the diminishing of what can be?

 You don't. Indeed, you can't.

     It is three days later. I am in a progressive bistro near Case Western Reserve University, near Hessler Street and all the museums, the symphony hall; I'd come here after the funeral, to think and drink and escape - and I have returned to finish this.

     In 48 hours, much has happened.

     A 3:30 rise for a flight to Nashville to drive 500 miles to Savannah, Georgia to get out of the car and interview Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks about their band. To make sense of my notes, to watch the show - and musicians engaging in webs of soul, of funk, of jazz, even as they grounded in a gritty blues-steeped rock.

     They were exultant. The horns and the singers, the twin drummers, the bass player who plays like the best chocolate cake, creamy and dark and sweet and moist, a keyboardist who evokes and steams the songs and Trucks' liquid solos that are mercury and ether, melodic without being complex to the point of constriction.

     And Tedeschi sings like breathing, soul exhalations of doubt and need and desire.

     It is a holy thing, and they have forged a family out there. Not just with the kids and the parents on the road, but the whole 11 man band and crew. It is what the Allmans might've been long ago without the drugs and the drama, but regal and engaged.

     Popovich would've got it, liked it. Family hanging together, making it work, creating something sultry, satisfying and stirring. The very best of what can be.

     And then back awake, scanning the radio, driving I-16 to I-75 to I-24. Five hundred miles with two bursts of hail, to pay some bills, wash some clothes and go to the airport again.

     Somewhere in the blur of a 1000 miles in 24 hours, more news arrived. Bill Johnson, the twice Grammy-winning art director from Sony Nashville, a visionary Rolling Stone Art Director responsible for too many iconic pictures - including Patti Smith smudged with soot between two burning oil barrels, has passed on as well.

     Another wild creative, bon vivant, curator of love and people, a believer that the pictures had to be as potent as the music. A charming smile, a fearless sense of finding more in the crassest product.

     He was a genius, a smart ass, a mutterer, grumpy and excited. Mostly, though, he was the keeper of one of the greatest loves I've ever seen: he and his wife Cynda burned with attraction and appreciation, grace and possibilities. To see them was to know what love is.

     What love is…

     For the music, for the family, for each other. It is the currency on which everything that matters runs. Hotter, faster, deeper, more… yeah, whatever.

     Sitting shell-shocked with a French press of coffee, in a town where my values were defined, I can only wonder about how things that matter have become so transitory. I know that you can't force others to know the difference, but you can expose them and hope they recognize the gap.

     Steve Popovich did. So did Bill Johnson. They got it. And they believed it was worth fighting for. You could say it was a different time, and it was. But if their lives truly marked us, then how do you walk away when you know?

     Somewhere in the clouds that have just dumped an hour of solid rain on this slate patio beyond a picture window, I can see him in sweat pants and baggy baseball jacket laughing, thinking “Yeah, she's got it.”

     Not because he wants to be right, but because he wants people to remember… Remember the reasons why, the things that last, not even what he did. What he did is written in the books, how he lived can live on if we just refuse to accept the erosion and status quo.

     Know the difference, raise the flag. Be the standards you know, not the getting by, plastic injection-molded faux soul, pseudo-emotion pap that passes. It can be fomented via Twitter, youtube, Pandora and the rest, but it ain't built to last.

     Watching the sun come out, I consider what I know… and how strong I might be.

     While world jazz plays on the sound system, I hear a searing voice. Ronnie Dunn's power exhortation, from the chilling kid grows up country-gospel witness “I Believe.”

     “And you can't tell me all this ends/

     “With a long ride in a hearse…”

     Surely, no. Surely, no. If we live to believe we're leaving something behind, then consider the lives that have touched your's, and believe. Sad as I am, raw as I will be for a while, I do. And that, in this puddle of pain, is a pretty great truth to hang onto.

Burying Zelda/Zelda's Last Ride

Sarah always knew the call would come. Never sure when, just that it would. She knew how much pain I was in, the shock, the amputation of the very best part of me. Zelda would get her final bye-bye… a last trip in the big big car, in Zelda's backstage lounge, white lines and fence posts blurring before her mighty spaniel presence.
     It was just a matter of time, of stremgth, of being able to face it.
     I called the night before, letting her now I'd be coming.
     “Don't worry,” said the whip smart young woman who run Brentwood Veterinary Clinic. “I'll be here.”
     I didn't even think: did that mean she was coming in special? Or she would be working?
     I didn't know. Heck, I wasn't completely sure which way north was, just that the highway signs would get me there. I'd spent my life trusting highway signs, and somehow I'd always - through grace, maps, truckers and tour managers - arrived where I was going.
     This, though, was different. This was Zelda. She was going to where she could sleep forever, dream of the perfect world and be still. Well, as still as Wonderspaniels can be when they pass on, but refuse to leave their Mommy.
     
     It had been a horribly busy summer. Kenny Chesney isn't the biggest ticket-seller - doing more than a million tickets each year - for no reason. In the madness, the churning, the dealing the stadium shows - where Zelda had spent her last weekends, one can't step off the carousel. Not really, 
     So, you have to wait. Until there's a moment. And the pain compounds. That's the part you lie to yourself about. Packing the car for that trip to Cleveland was like moving through quick drying concrete; the striped LL Bean bag from Allison, the brown canvas that expands magically from the store in Chagrin Falls where Zelda almost got me arrested, the Chan Luu British West Indies shawl for her casket…
     Her casket. I started to sob. Garage door not even open, and I'm howling. Howling: something Zelda would never do. I could see her snap her head away from me, “Pas du howling! Talk to the paw!”
     She was funny that way. “Don't embarrass me.”  And of course, “Smells like poop!”
     You would be amazed how many people smelled like poop! She had no tolerance for b.s.
     “Zelda, I can't…,” I tried to reason out loud. “I just can't.”
     I could feel her face turn back to me, all puzzlement and amazement.
     “Yes, you can,” said the ghost blond. “Yes, yes, you can… You can take me bye-bye. You can drive fast and roll down the windows, open the moon roof, play the music loud! You can take me away, take me to places, remember how good it feels to be alive!”
     Even in death, Zelda got it. More than I did most days. An angel with furry paws, soft ears and the ability to melt into you, even when she was mostly just bones and fur. Especially when she got down to just bones and that fluffy fur we'd stopped grooming.

     The car door closed with a dull thud. The ignition turned over like it did every day. The garage door rumbled up, and looking in the back seat, at the folded boiled wool Indian blankets and velvet throws, I tried to smile. It didn't work, so I just tried to hold my lips without shaking.
     I put the car in reverse, exhaled hard and took my foot off the brake. So, this is how the real end begins. Just ease out of the garage, down the drive and turn onto the road. Get on Granny White Pike, past the sprawling yards, classic old Southern homes and past Otter Creek Road where we'd turn to walk her beloved Radnor Lake.
     I wanted to go slow, Zelda wanted me to go fast.
     “It'll be an adventure,” she said, in that voice I'd been hearing for years. Once she'd come out of her shell - after her brother died, Zelda sure he was the object of her homicidal plan - she started talking, and she never stopped. Old French red wine, certain kinds of jazz and funk and girl singers and Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith, looks that didn't work and “smells like poop.” 
     People thought the artist development consultant humanized the pretty yellow dog, then they'd spend time with her. Once they got past her annoyance that she was being viewed as “a dog,” the uncanny would happen. “Uhm. Holly, I know what she's thinking…” came the chorus over and over again.
     Zelda knew how to make her wishes, preferences and general commentary clear.
     Even now. “Adventure. Fun. Faster!”

     I called as I was driving. Let Sarah know I'd just passed the Granny White Market, was getting close. “Pull in the back,” she said. I figured it was to shield the staff from a jag of sobbing. Then again, who wants the owners seeing a tiny casket draped in natural fabric with cocoa henna print being carried out. Sarah, who Zelda loved, thinks of everything.
     She was waiting. Face set like granite. She met my eyes, telegraphing strength.
     I knew this needed to happen. I got it. I just… well… didn't want… to let… go.
     “You okay?” she asked. 
     What do you say? I bobbed my head. What could I say? She knew.
     “Okay, I'm gonna go get her… You ready? You putting her in the back?”
     Sarah knew about Zelda's Backstage Lounge, where the Stinkerbelle held court and was chauffeured about. She could most likely tell it was made up for the trip.
     I bobbed my head again, tried a weak smile.
     Sarah's lip quivered a little, too. She turned, disappeared through the backdoor.
     She emerged with a small beige fiberglass box. Not very big at all. I knew inside, there wa a pink velvet blanket, a St Francis of Assisi and a St Christopher medal, a baby Eeyore, her pink collar and a note I'd left with them. Hard to believe that much baby dog could be held in something so small, but with Zelda, it was always the spirit, not the frame.
     “You're really gonna put her in the backseat?” Sarah marveled.
     “Where else?” was the rhetorical answer question. 
     We both knew the looking back would be a papercut, but this was Zelda's last ride. This was her very favorite thing. There was no bye-bye too mundane, too long, too tedious to bore her. She had driven from Nashville to Martha's Vineyard in the worst of winter; driven the parking lot of Memensha - straight into the waves without ever moving; she'd driven from the Vineyard to Cleveland, Ohio one late wet fall for my mother's funeral, collar wrapped in black grosgrain, much to the priest's dismay.
     And now she was making one final trip to Cleveland. 
     I smoothed the shawl over the little box, laid a couple flowers down. Sarah nodded. 
     She and I hugged, and the vet's manager handed me a mix-tape CD. “When I get sad, this helps,” she told me. And I knew she knew, indeed, understood.
     “Thanks.”

     She watched me drive away. She might've been crying. Or maybe it was the tears in my eyes, making everything swim. But I had my Zelda, the Deanerschnitzel. So sweet, so cute, so sardonic. And we were going to drive and drive and drive!
     “You ready, poodle?” I asked. Thougb I knew I didn't need to. She was always ready.
     Nosed into the traffic, turned right on Old Hickory, found the on-ramp for 65 North.
     We were gone.
     
     463 miles doesn't look like a lot on paper. It really doesn't feel like much, either, when you're watching the farms, the little cities, the giant dinosaur statues near Glasgow, Kentucky. Not when you're born to drive, to fly really over scarred and veined concrete, black top, whatever kinda paving they're using. The bridges seem to be connectors over lakes and rivers - concrete in some places, steel going into Cincinnati.
     Zelda knows every inch of this drive. We talk about all the trips and reasons she went to Cleveland: Thanksgiving with cousins on my father's side, concerts and peace of mind. She loved the apartment on Van Aken, walking the second and third fairways of the Shaker Heights Country Club in the snow, sleeping in the backseat under a bunch of blankets while some band was playing, being fussed over by Alex Bevan, who “got” her, as she was, not as some pretty dog. 
     She'd be seeing the man who's music embroidered my growing up with sweet songs like “Rainbow” and “Rodeo Rider” soon enough. She was in the backseat of the big green car with the Allman Brothers Eat A Peach up loud. “Ain't Wastin' Time No More,” indeed.

     It took a lot to figure out where to bury her. Zelda was clear: nowhere near F. Scott - or as she called him “my damned brother” - would work. She wanted to be somewhere I'd visit, somewhere she loved. I thought about Martha's Vineyard, where Ali Berlow roasted her duck hearts; her son Eli worshipped her and followed her and made a true friend out of the reticent, reluctant Spaniel. Indeed, where she created havoc, tormenting Mr Berlow and then oldest son Max with well-placed pools of displeasure intended to express just how “pissed off” she was.
     “But, that's not our's,” she whispered as I would drift off to sleep in a bed too big without her.
“No, Mommy, find some place that's your's and nobody else's.. but some place I've been.”
     I'm not sure when it hit me, but one day, sitting on her bench at Radnor I knew. 
     The Club. The Shaker Club. Under the willow trees, down by the creek on 12. It was a spot of much peace, not in play for the golfers where I had slept on many slow, heavy heat-steeped afternoons growing up. There was no more serene spot in the world, which is why I would nap there… and where Zelda could watch the world go by in an idyllic environment - with enough golfers and wildlife to not feel alone.
     The willows on 12. Of course. Mine for the sleeping, her's for eternity.
     But the plan had not gone well. The club manager, not known for his warm sense of engagement, couldn't be bothered. Ran me around, made up excuses, never called back. I'd love to think he was thwarting me, but I know indifference when I see it… 
     I was ruing my lack of success to an old friend over soup the beginning of July. He of the sangfroid exterior and unruffled-able worldview. He regarded me closely. A dog person, he knew my pain; a former child of the '60s, rules weren't even to be broken, but more ignored if a higher morale compass was iengaged.
     “What you need is a Carl…,” he said in the low voice tempered by cigarettes and time.
     “Carl?” The lady who helped raise me's husband's name was Carl. But he was long gone to aShriner's Home or Heaven. Most likely the latter, and my friend didn't know his name.
     “Carl,” came the response. Flat. Given.
     “Carl?” I echoed.
     “I thought you were a golfer,” he returned, sitting up a little straighter, leaning in a little closer.
     “Your point?” I was anguished and now getting annoyed.
     “Didn't you see 'Caddyshack'? You need Carl,” he said evenly and not unkindly.
     “Carl,” I intoned. This time as sacred mantra. Carl, the stoner groundskeeper, obsessed with his chores, varmints, a world that has nothing to do with the regimentation of club life. Carl.
     I smiled. He smiled back, brown eyes sparklng a little, knowing he'd not just solved my problem, but had moved Zelda a little closer to her final resting place. Sometimes solutions aren't obvious.
     And I found Carl. On the 4th of July. Running yellow nylon rope. To keep the kids back form where the fireworks would fall after exploding. If my initial outburst - “Do you work here?” -- met with confusion and  its follow -- “I need you” -- inspired fear, my story hit his soft spot.
     The girl with the 17 _ year old Cocker Spaniel looking to bury her baby where she slept as a kid. The unresponsive club manager. The fact that months had passed. “Will you help me?” I asked.
     A tangle of curls, the firm physicality of youth and working outdoors made this someone Zelda would put her faith in. Not the logical candidate, but Zelda liked strength and personal conviction, not what everybody else sought 
     “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I will.”

     It was sometime in August by the time I could get away from the tours, the press releases, the tv and the what comes next. There had been an Entertainment Weekly piece that had a website coda which painted a very honest, highly vulnerable picture. It raised questions, those questions needed time to address with the people who asked, to explain so the client didn't look whiny.
     There was so much going on, and when I buried Zelda, I needed to do it completely. All me, all her, all about perhaps the greatest love of my life.
     When I finally called “Carl,” he'd about given up on me. He'd gone out to the site, which I'd also scoped. The willow trees had been cut down, a tragedy given their age and expanse, but there was this notion of galleries for golf tournaments - and so, away with the willows.
     Instead, I had found a small cluster of pines, some kind of special variety where the branches drooped and the long needles leaned down, seeming to sigh from the quiet cool of the moment when day surrendered to twilight. It was just as beautiful, off to the side of the green, also out of play, out of the way. No reason to ever cut them down, peaceful like the slumber of spaniels.
     We reconfirmed the spot. He told me not to worry. He suggested I meet him at the greenskeeper's shack, which was anything but. He'd figure out how to help me get Zelda's casket to where it was going… rather than parking behind a wall, by the tennis courts and negotiating a particularly steep incline.

     I had called a preacher's son from Macon, Georgia. What kind of scripture do you read at a time like this? What verses are right? What note to you strike? And I called Alex Bevan, who'd sung so sweet at my mother's funeral… who'd looked into Zelda's thickly cataracted eyes and smiled so she could see him.
     If there was a constant of kindness from childhood through my grown life, it was Alex Bevam. Not quite a friend, not really a brother, sort of a soul companion from somewhere else. For he was always on the shores of Lake Erie, threading the Grand River, the Emerald Necklace of the amazing park system - and I was somewhere in the wind, a postcard, an email, a call at random hours.
     “Would you come?” I'd asked. “Would you mind?”
     Alex Bevan has always had a soft spot for broken things, fallen birds, lost dogs and people out of sorts. He looked at his book, and said, “Of couirse.”
     He laughed when he heard where it was. Said “Of course,” again. Asked me what time about.
     Since this was clandestine, it could be midnight. Or twlight. It would depend on the road, and what kind of time I was making. 
     Everyone who needed to know knew. I was somewhere above Louisville, in the 90 miles where there just isn't much. Today, there would be no Reality Tuesday Coffeeshop, just before getting to Cincinnati. I had a holy trip to make, and nothing - beyond filling up the car - would stop me.
     “Hey. Zelda,” I said outloud. “We're finally getting you to Cleveland… We're finally gonna put you to sleep in your own little bed.”
     I could feel her smile form the backseat, feel the little nub of tail thumping against the cushion.
     Jackson Browne sang “Love Needs A Heart” from his song cycle about the life of the touring rock star Running On Empty. “Proud and alone, cold as a stone,” came the lyric from the speaker. Deaner liked the delicious sadness, but she wanted something… more.
     “Hey,” I could her little spaniel voice intone, “what about 'You Love The Thunder'? Now that gives you a little more traction in the pain.”
     “Pain?” I heard my voice say. “Are you kidding me?”
     I couldn't tell Zelda how bad it hurt. Beyond the fact that she already knew, I knew she'd held on so weak and frail, because she didn't wanna see me cry like that. She was the strong one, the fierce one: Zelda Warrior Spaniel, mighty, mighty broker of  munk death.
     Even when she was slipping from this realm, she would put a paw on my face, look into my eyes when we'd be sleeping and tell me, “It'll be okay.” Because it is. Life goes on. Even with a giant hole torn out of it. You don't get any choice, except to keep on.
     Still in heaven, Zelda finds her ways.
     Not long after she died, the phone rang and a thick, long, slow drawl poured out.
     “Hah-leeeee,” came the gnarled male voice. “Yeeewwww dewwwwin ohhh-kayyyyy?”
     I started to cry. It was Richard… Young… from the Headhunters. When I'd first moved to Nashville and was having a hard time adjusting after life in LA, he'd been my angel of how to adapt. I'd tried to help him understand being a “thing” because the Kentucky Headhunters were exploding. But as much as musicians crave adoration and attention, he was too genuine to have people respond to a notion and not his humanity. 
     “Honey, what's the matter?” he asked, clearly unprepared for the gale-force he was getting.
     I explained in snorts, sobs and stammers. He listened. He let me cry. He took it all in.
     Richard Young is a farm boy in a lot of ways. He keeps bird dogs. 
     But he's got a tender heart for all the biker exterior. When I finally got done, he was just quiet for a bit. I've known him long enough to know he's thinking. Looking for the appropriate thing to say, the insight that might help.
     “Well,” he finally said, “you know, it hurts so bad because you loved her so much.”
     I whimpered.
     “No, baby, that's the deal. And you should be glad it feels like that… because it tells you how much you loved that little yeller dog… and you know, too, that little dawwwg with thuh great big heart, she loved you even more than you loved her… if that's possible.”
     Richard Young. Hillbilly Buddha with a low slung Les Paul and a loose downstroke.
     He was right. I sniveled a little, but I found comfort. Never mind that Zelda called him, “That fat hillbilly…,” she knew who to have call. If he liked the beer-drinking F Scott Fitzgerald Spaniel Gleason better, whatever! She recognized plain dirt genius, and she knew what I needed to hear.

     “Deaner, you okay?” I asked. Truth be told, she was frozen. I don't really use the air conditioning if I can help it. But I didn't want her melting. Not like this. Not en route the weeping pines off the 12th green.
     “Yeah, Mommy,” she seemed to say. “I'm perfect.”

     So we drove on. In thought. In silence. At 72 miles per hour, the world can put you in a trance. Truths emerge; torment subsides. Just the road, the lines, the mile markers. Maybe not for everybody, but for us… especially for us. Always her in the back, peaking out, me in the front, foot on the gas.
     “See, better already,” Zelda said. Columbus, not quite rush hour. Pushing through, pushing past Polaris Parkway, where Zelda had reigned over a Brooks & Dunn Neon Circus backstage, trotting around, looking at the trick ropers, the fire eaters and contortionists with glee. 
     It was a tour devoted to big strong men, all musk and brawn - and she loved it. She loved the pomp and bluster of Brooks & Dunn in full rut. The big thick honky tonk beats, sheets of electric and steel guitars, the way Ronnie Dunn's voice sliced through it all and Kix Brooks whirled and churned that audience into a full boil.
     She'd sometimes sit next to me almost quivering with delight and excitement. So many things rushing at her senses, the music so full-tilt and the crowd just awash in all of it. To Zelda, that was the only way to roll. Blowed up, too loud, completely engorged and absolutely throwing oneself at the party…
     Columbus means less than two hours. The thought went through my head. 
     I called the greenskeeper, touched base with Alex. I pushed the hair out of my eyes, squinted a bit at the road glare. Mostly, I just kept driving, driving and driving and driving… and when the decision came to take the 271 offshoot, which would bring me in without going through downtown I took it.
     I would pass what once was the Richfield Coliseum, the giant basketball stadium where I'd seen Led Zeppelin, Heart, Bruce Springsteen, Hall & Oates the night before my SATs and the Allman Brothers with Muddy Waters at a Free Cliniic benefit, Neil Young on the Old Ways Tour, for an interview that would help break me as a national music critic. 
     Memories… of who I was long before I was anyone at all.
     Through Peninsula, where the Peninsula Nightclub was a stopping place for dinner before Blossom, where cool bands played and the grown-ups remembered dancing there to “real bands.” A small town on the 303 that somehow had defied modern quicker, faster prefab improvement.
     The exits on this stretch of highway got more and more familiar. Then there was Chagrin Boulevard. “Well., poodle, we're almost there,” I sighed as I nosed onto the offramp.
     Rush hour was basically done. The heat of the day was receding. There was still traffic, but it wasn't frantic in that trying-to-get-home way. I fell into the tide of Mom-mobiles and exiting businessman-sedans, moved to a major artery, made a right, then turned left on South Woodland.
     South Woodland would take us where we were going. Past Canterbury Golf Club, where every major national tournament has been played, where Duff Lawrence and Mike Kiley created a world of graciousness and sportsmanship for their golfers. My stomach became a fist, my throat strangled itself…
     I texted Alex. He texted back he was close. 
     I called the groundskeeper, who told me was ready for us.
     I got to the light at Courtland Boulevard, turned on my signal and waited for the cars to finish passing by. Then I headed for the cobblestones and the brick building with the cream portico… the cul de sac where my own grandfather had died on the 4th of July long before I was even a notion.
     Turning into the members lot, I kept going. Through the far corner where the service access is, behind the 8th green of perfect emerald bent grass and up through the trees that punctuate the far side of the hillside that sculpts the 8th fairway.
     Carl was waiting with a flatbed gator and some tools.  I turned off the car.
     “We made it, poodle,” I managed to say. “We made it.”
     “You need help?” he asked, then thought better of it. “Here, let me get her.”
     I got in the cart. He settled the little fiberglass carton with the raw cotton hippie shawl draped over it squarely on my lap. 
     “You good?” I nodded. I'd been flying over these hills on some version of this vehicle my whole life. We were walkers, people who believed in the sanctity of the game as played like the shepherds; but don't think I didn't chase around on golf carts after hours.
     He pulled out, slowly. Not quite a funereal pace, but certainly with the dignity this last ride should entail. I had my Bible with me. The few flowers I'd brought. But mostly, I could feel the weight of the best little girl in the world, Zelda Fitzgerald Spaniel Gleason.
     We made a little small talk. About the drive, about how green the golf course was, about cutting down trees and how good an agronomist his boss was. Alex called as we were coming across the 9th fairway towards the snackbar. I told him where to meet us; I explained to the young 20-something who Alex Bevan was. 
     “Huh…,” said the young man who'd signed up just from the decency of his heart.

     When we got to the site, there it was. Only more so. Carl had dug a perfect grave. Neat exact sides, deep enough, Zelda wouldn't wash out or be dug up easily. It was straight down, into the chocolate dirt and clay - fertile enough earth to make this golf course one of the most vibrant in Northeastern Ohio.
     “Wow,” I said.
     “I wanted to get it right.”
     Alex Bevan walked up. He said “Wow,” too.
     The pines in the fading light were the inky black green of a Japanese ink print. Moisture was in the air, which was - at this hour - neither hot nor cold. Everywhere the hole wasn't, there were trees roots and thick green gras, branches reaching down weightlessly, needles sweeping anything that passed under them forlornly.
     “What do you think?” I whispered to the box on my lap.
     “I love it,” came the whisper from Zelda. “It's so pretty and perfect… I'm home.”

     Home. A hole in the ground, albeit holy ground where I spent my growing up years. Maybe. I mean, we all end the same. We all find our place to decompose. Not that my composure was wholly resolved in that moment.
     Still, it was a peaceful place. After all of it, there was somewhere she could sleep and I could visit. There would be no end of people passing by, deers, ducks, geese, rabbits. Bucolic. 
     
     “You ready?” Carl asked. 
     “Yeah,” I said, gently helping him lift the package from my lap. So many things beyond the lifeless body of a frail dog were going into that hole, and we all knew it. 
     Alex smiled at me, that gentle smile he has. One that is reassurance and grace, the one that lets him weave songs of hope and solace out of topsy turvy moments. 
     The groundskeeper jumped down in the hole, took the box, gently lowered it. He turned and wiggled out, as he also settled the contents. There she was, ready to be covered. “Man you are dust, to dust you shall return,” I thought. 
     I read the scriptures in a voice stronger than I would've thought. I had spoken at both my parents' funerals, out of duty, out of wanting their lives to be remembered with meaning and the vibrance with which they lived. Those two events were scary, hard, the fear of failing their legacy; this was far more brutal.
     Csrl nudged the shovel over to me when I finished, Kinda nodded.
     “Go ahead,” my friend the folkie encouraged. It wasn't about burying the dead, so much as it was keeping the spaniel warm,. She, like her Mommy hated, to be cold. I closed my fingers around the handle, shoveled a few handfuls of freshly turned soil into the grave… wincing a little when I heard them land with soft thuds like rain.
     “Zelda, I love you,” I said. And she knew that I did. I knew she did, too.
     “If you want me to finish up,” the erstwhile gravedigger offered, “I can.”
     I wasn't sure what to do. The sky had turned the murky grey that quickly becomes midnight blue, then dark. It was getting cold. I didn't want to go.
     “It'll be okay,” he reassured, met my eyes. “I”ll take good care of her.”
     Lump in my throat, I nodded. Sometimes you have to let go. 
     I reached into my pocket, took out a folded bill. I put in Carl's hand and smiled through the tears. He deserved it, for making this not just easy, but dignified. For digging the perfect grave - in a moment too many people would think was crazy.
     I looked at him one more time. “Thank you. For so many reasons.”
     “It's okay,” he said. 
     I looked at Alex, a man whose love of dogs - Rounder and Harp and now Tilly - is legendary. He knew. Heck, Rounder had had better access and was even more famous back in the day than Zelda was now. And Zelda was a legend!
     “Wanna have a drink?” I asked. I needed to shore up. Irish to the core, it's what we do in these moments.
     “Sure,” he said stoutly.
     “Well, then, let's walk…”
     One thing about golf courses, they are built for walking. You cover that ground like a dream. It gives under your feet, pillows and supports you. It carried us straight to the veranda, to a wrap around porch where the crickets cried for a brave girl and her owner.
     Zelda. Zelda Zelda Zelda. The wonderspaniel finally laid to rest. Her mother left to wander the world remembering what love can be. I had done it. I had gotten my girl to a place she could sleep with the angels, where she could have peace and enjoy what was next.
     “What're you having?” the waiter asked.
     “Maker's Mark,” I said.
     “Me, too,” Alex Bevan, the local hero, requested. “Please.”

     Somewhere in the distance, Canadian geese took wing. Their honking was the sound of travel and euphoria, and they were almost the trumpet call Zelda's last trip required. It wasn't lost on my companion.
     “She was a helluva girl,” he said. And she was.
     We talked the way people who've known each other too long do: elliptically, the details already filled in, the sore spots known, the tears shed without worrying. Alex had been here before, had parted company with best friends and lovers gone. He knew the pain, understood the power of elegy and just being with it.
     But he, like Zelda, understood the unspoken.
     “I'm gonna be fine,” I said reassuring myself as much as him.
     “I know,” he agreed. “You already are.”
     Sipping the bourbon, watching the deeper and deeper shades of indigo descend and envelop the grounds, the conversation slowed and truly wasn't necessary. But the cold came up, and it was time for us, too, to go.
     I hugged my friend, who'd watched from the edges as I turned into an adult. Our worlds were so different, but our hearts were mostly the same. Northern Ohio kids who believed in love and kindness, dogs as true companions, ties that never die.
     He left, and I sat there. For a few more minutes.
     Zelda arrived when I was starting to truly become an adult. She had outlasted three engagements, superstars being built and falling apart, clients firing me and getting fired by me. She'd listened as Scooter Carusoe and I had written the second half of “Better As A Memory,” thrilled to be at the root of creativity and watched me struggle through sickness and the first draft of my first novel  in a place that was anywhere but her Nashville home.
     Zelda had been through it all: huge tears, major triumphs. None of it really mattered to her. Just love. She would - as she got older and deafer - sleep by whichever door I'd left from, that way she wouldn't miss me when I got home; then when she was too aching to sleep on the hall or kitchen floors, she would wait wherever I would put her to nap, lifting her sleepy head to say, “You made it.”
     Someone has said the thing in life we all deserve is someone wondering if you got home okay. For almost 18 years, Zelda did that for me, Always. 
     Now looking at an abandoned putting green being frosted with evening mist, I had finally done it for her. Worried until she got home. Now she was all set and safe. I could know that she was okay, and in that, I could truly say “Good Bye.”
     It wasn't easy leaving that spot. But I was too cold and it was too dark.     “I love you, poodle,” I told the night. I knew somehow she - now quietly sleeping under several feet of good, rich soil - heard me. She sighed and yawned, no doubt, smiling that she was so loved, then returned to her dreams of bunnies and ponies and roast munk supreme.

Portrait of a Wonderspaniel + Her Mommy
by Glen Rose

And then she is... stars (June 4, 2010)

Zelda. She had that way. She just did. Even in the end, she remained the ultimate monster of love (to borrow from Sparks). She felt the wind whipping into the car, sunk into the music, took it all in -- and dreamed.

The people at the vet's were just as unwrapped as Ali and I. There is never a moment sending doggies to heaven is easy. But some patients -- and Zelda was a baby they'd pulled through a couple big crisis. and she'd charmed them in her weakness just like she did everyone else -- are tougher than others.

But everyone tried to be brave, through their wired set jaws and their too veiled eyes. The inevitable is just that... just... time. And there's nothing you can do -- like water slipping through your fingers, it's just gone.

Zelda got quiet, too. She knew. Not quiet in a scared way, but in a "this is it" way, uncertain of the future... knowing, no doubt, they were going to stick her, because they always stuck her -- and just too tired to even know what to think about it.

Sarah, her very favorite office person, was there. She'd been dealing with a fairly upset me on the phone for the five months it had taken the spaniel's kidneys to fail. She is patience and kindness and knowing. Zelda was glad to see her...
And Dr. Stanland was there. Quiet, calm, gentle. She had done the same protocol on a Sunday 14 years prior as an emergency for Scott, Zelda's brother. She understands the way sorrow runs through your veins, permeates every fiber of your being, every breath taken.
"You ready?" she asked the poodle. Zelda looked up, so tired she could barely smile. She was. I wasn't, but the little girl was ready to fly, to romp, to be free -- of all pain, all exhaustion, all the nausea that had plagued her.
Dr Stanland explained the process. A sleeping medicine to let her drift off, then something to end her suffering -- before it was just too much. And, because Dr Ann thinks of everything, BABY FOOD! Something to nibble while the first injection was being given.
Never mind the plate of beef burgundy Zelda had just devoured. A new and delicious snack. The poodle was elated. Yummy! Yes! More... and she ate the entire jar, licking the spoon and smiling at Sarah.
"You can take her out to the car," my vet said, knowing -- as did everyone -- that was Zelda's most favorite place.
Zelda, so weak, she doesn't even think twice about walking. I scoop her up, and she melts into me. She just lets go and merges into my body as she did so many mornings when she wanted to keep me all for her.
Back in the car, there is more music. More petting that silky blond fur, kissing the top of her head. Trying not to cry, because as the orderly told me when my father was so ill with the cancer, "He don't need your tears... and your sadness... He needs to feel joy, and life... and love. You bring him THAT, and you leave your pain out there -- cause he's got enough of that."
She was wide, that orderly. Tough and big and brown. An old, honest Florida texture you don't see much anymore. She was right about Zelda, too.
Sarah came out to check on us. Took on look at Zelda, shook her head laughing. "She's not going to sleep. Of COURSE!"
Cars and Mommies and music and friends. How do you miss that? Certainly not for sleepy Zeldas, no. No!
Sarah petted Zelda, too. Talked about what a great spirit she had, what a big life... an even bigger personality. Zelda was nothing, if not a force of nature.
Eventually, her eyes started to be heavier than her will to rock. All the Allmans, the Patty Loveless, the Rodney Crowell and the Otis Redding couldn't keep Z from the land of Nod.
"She might be ready...," I half-asked.
Sarah nodded. "Yeah, she's asleep."
And so, once again, I scooped up my dream baby -- and rose out of the car. This time, people had tears in their eyes when we talked through the lobby, the satellite of fluff and silky shine tangled up in my bare arms, ready to go to heaven.
She was ready. It wouldn't hurt, but it would end the pain, the exhaustion, the nausea. This was an extraordinary little girl... and she laughed through all of it, but it had worn her down. It was time.
My friend Michael is a dog person. He'd lost his dear Sid Vicious suddenly. He had been a constant source of encouragement, of knowing when, of doing the right thing... He had all but held my head in a book called THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN, but even still he couldn't get me to read it.
On a flight after a very fraught trip to Austin, I had cracked it open, had finished it the next night in the lost hours in Woodstock, NY. A trip I'd taken because my beloved Hobbs had insisted I would be a better Mommy to Zelda if i got a break, got my head clear.
THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN is written from the perspective of a man's best friend, the night before the doggie is to be put to sleep. It sounds sad, but it is triumphant. Enzo lives, runs, flies -- and returns in the most unlikely ways, as his good owner finds his own depths, altitudes and soars.
In this moment, with tears running down my face, I understand why it was so important to my friend to get me to read that book. Why my confession that I'd started and was being held hostage prompted an actual phone call from him... and that he knew what I couldn't until this very moment: it made me feel better.
Dr Stanland put the needle in, depressed the plunger. She offered comforting words, understanding, compassion. Ali brought her quiet strength and her bottomless love for the spaniel, too.
Zelda couldn't have been surrounded by more caring, more grace, more magic. She knew that. Her breathing slowed and slowed. My fingers gently laid on her rib cage, stroking her side so whether she was awake or not, she knew her Mommy was right there with her.
And then it stopped. Another tear fell.
But I knew something -- in spite of the giant tear and hollowness opening up inside me. I knew that Zelda was already on the wind, her ears flying behind her, laughing and marveling at how she was getting her sleek, strong, sexy superspaniel body back.
She was laughing. She was exultant. She was light, bright blinding white light -- shining, shimmering. She was free.

"Is she gone?" I croaked, knowing, but needing to be told.
Dr. Stanland nodded, smiled in the sad way of people who know it's the right have.
"Okay," I said. "Okay..."

Zelda was gone. There was only one thing to do: Get in the car and drive. Drive fast. Drive hard. Drive nowhere and everywhere -- just the way Zelda always liked. Windows down, music up, hands held out to the darkness, to touch everything that the early evening might hold.
From that point on, of course, the night holds the promise of a beautiful butter colored spaniel. Just as the indigo swallows the sunset, somewhere around 72 miles an hour... if you have the Stones or Jackson Browne, John Prine or Alex Bevan, "Dream On" or Bruce Springsteen's "Drive All Night"... you can feel the softness of Zelda's fur... Zelda's heart...
All you have to do is reach out and touch it. She's always there, laughing and urging you on. Roll down your windows -- and see.

The Final Day (June 4, 2009)

Zelda woke up early. Of course she did. But she didn't want to get up.
She was in the big, big bed with the pink and green hippie quilt and the downie blanket and the good sheets and the fluffy pillows.

She wanted to be awake -- and she wanted to enjoy it! To stretch out, to crawl up close, to melt into me with that soft spaniel fur as much chinchilla as baby spaniel. She put her head on my collar bone, exhaled into my face and looked.
Looked right through those cataracts and took a long gaze at my soul. She knew I was sad. She wanted me to feel better. She wagged her skinny little tail a little, but mostly she kept looking to let me know that I was seen in that way that she sees. In a way I may never seen again...

And then she just curled up to be held. Just rolled over and balled up and let me pet her, rub her, run my hands over what was left of her body, still impossibly supple to the end.
Her legs, all sinew -- though the joints now so clearly exposed. Her little paws more fur even than pad. Her shoulder blades where the pistons anchor, propel her across fields, down roads and once into cars. They respond to the touch, release and relax as you knead them.
Zelda needs this. She relaxes even deeper into my body. And we lay there, lost in our own thoughts: me, my sorrow, her some pasture a little further off than she can see.

So thin, I pull her up on a little higher. Our noses are Eskimo kissing. We breathe together. Sometimes I inhale as she lets her breath go, just to have a little bit more of Zelda inside me. To bring her breath inside me, to heal it and send it out stronger, somehow. To give her some of my life force. Even though I know... I KNOW... and I don't know what else to do.

Zelda has people to see, places to go, things to do.
It's going to be a full day, she tells me. She's also very clear that she's sick of the preppy clothes I've been wearing. "I want my hippie gypsy rock star Mom back," she announces as I'm running my hands over the top of her head and kissing where her cheek would be.
"Seriously. Do better. I KNOW what you look like on your best days. Try something a little... more... uh... Penny Lane."
Zelda. Only Zelda would be casting clothes. My four-pawed stylist who always kind of knows. And she knows just WHICH Mommy she wants.
"And I want to see Wendy... and I want to see... Dorian..."
I need to take a shower, to sort out my clothes.
Zelda goes downstairs to visit with Ali, to talk about the Players and love her friend who bakes her duck hearts and brings her magical treats.

"You ready?" I ask, about to scoop her up. I am wearing a white cotton dress with cap sleeves and a green Indian paisley print screened over it. She smiles. Lets me pick her up, puts a paw on my face. She has a big day ahead and she's excited.

We drive down to see Wendy, my friend from college and an amazing woman who's won a Pulitzer Prize and never talks about it. She is sitting outside the Country Music Association, where she is the VP of Communications -- and she looks as fragile as we all feel.
"Poodle," she says, drawing out the "ooooo." And Zelda smiles at her the way that Zelda smiles. Wendy's eyes fill up as she reaches for the baby.
She cradles her like she did her own daughter, Emily, and makes a cooing sound. Zelda looks up her, clearly loving the attention. Zelda loves Wendy -- even when Wendy stopped credentialing her for the CMA Awards (and Zelda just kept going to rehearsals anyway) -- and this is just what she wanted this morning.
"I have a message for you," Wendy says to me, then realizes this isn't correct.
"I have a message... for... you," she says definitvely to the spaniel, who is now studying the woman intently.
"Uhm, your father... came to me," Wendy said to me, falteringly. "In the car. But I think the message is for her."
Wendy's eyes cut down to Zelda. The poodle melted like butter into Wendy's folded, trusted arms.
"Go ahead," I said. Marveled, really. John Gleason, long gone, still haunting my friend from college.
"He said," my dear friend instructed the Z, "to look for the man in the yellow cardigan. The YELLOW cardigan -- and he'll be with Coors."
The spaniel took it all in. Considered. Almost nodded.
"She's going to hate that," I commented. Zelda hated her brother Scott; Coors wasn't going to fare any better.
"I think he knows that," Wendy acknowledged. "He's a little intimidated."
"He should be," I laughed. I knew my Zelda -- and my original, Baby Coors, who I'd given my father in his divorce, because that sweet, domineering spaniel had gotten my Dad through it, had romped golf course after golf course, waited through countless church services with and for him.
Zelda looked back at me. She was a little tired. She still had places to go.

Settled back into Zelda's backstage lounge, she lay there quietly.
Dorian wasn't calling back. What to do? Where to go?
And then it occurred to me. The one place she hadn't asked for, but the place she'd graced with her beauty and poetry. Carnival Music, the home of Scooter Carusoe and her dear friend Frank Liddell.
An upstairs set of offices that hold songs and writers, where she lay on a couch and watched "Better As A Memory" be born. A place where she inspired and considered and offered the encouragement that only she could: that spirit that shone no matter what.

Travis -- akak Scooter Carusoe -- was gone, and his office was locked. Frank Liddell, a man who with his lovely wife Lee Ann Womack shared many holidays with the wonderspaniel, was also gone. But Brittany was there, to stroke that soft blond hair, Goodloe and Matthew. They'd watched the shaggy blond feathers shake as Zelda tromped around the hard wood floors, making her way to Travis' office or back down to the car after another session.
They all looked at her and smiled, silently sad knowing this was the last time they'd see her.
Zelda wasn't sad, though. She was buoyant about being in a place where so much creativity was present, where dreams took form and people believed in what songs could be.
Zelda adjusted herself in my arms, wanted to get down, to make her way through those halls one last time -- and with wavering back legs seeking the balance, she did.
Tentative at first, but then stronger. Sniffing the air, to remember where she was going.
Zelda would tell them of Lady Goodman, of her only friends being pirates, of "Darkness Turns To Light" and moonlight bullseyes and so many things...
She wanted to know, and burn the place into her being.

And then she was done. I was crying. She couldn't understand why. So many places, so many people, so many moments she'd enjoyed. It was nice to go back once again.

Zelda. Little pretty Zelda. So thrilled about everything. Take me. Take me! Anywhere, Everywhere. Whatever you're doing... and if nothing, then take me nowhere just the same.

I had promised to give her a long drive, listening to music that she wanted. But she was so tired, I took her home. A little more beef burgundy, a little bit of laying down. Just to get ready for the last bye-bye in the big-big car.
The baby deserved no less.
And in the waiting Dorian turned up, along with Diane, who has been dealing with my accounting -- and my family -- for almost longer than there was a Zelda. They brought a begonia, which Zelda loved, because Zelda loves the flowers.
She visited with them, remembered her birthday party with the boney shaped cake, the way Dorian was afraid of her imperiousness once upon a time.
We were quiet. We were sad. We were brinking on exhaustion. Mostly, we were Zelda.
And that was quite a place to be.
We also knew we needed to be gone...

Gone. Through the part of Tennessee that's still green and rolling, cluttered with broad sweeping trees and acres of farms, sun-burned barns. black top cracked and veined with tar to close those gaps. Out where the roads turn and curve, two simple lanes -- one each way -- marked by blue on the maps that show them.
Out to Lieper's Fork, past Radney Foster's former Waddell Hollow Lane... and the house Wynonna sold to Luke Lewis and his bride Lauren who sold to Bill Bennett and his wife Luke Burland... and around and around... like the life of a certain spaniel.
Cheery little Lieper's Fork running past, and Green's Grocery and more farms. Lots of hawsk circling over head; hawks: messengers between this world and heaven.
Driving and driving as the Allman Brothers got LIVE AT THE FILMORE EAST, her Patty Loveless wailed through the recently departed Stephen Bruton's "Too Many Memories" that was tempered by the line, "The way we grow old we must never forget is when we let hope be replaced by regret" and Rosanne Cash moaning through Benmont Tench's aching loss-upon-loss "Why Don't You Quit Leaving Me Alone."

We took roads we had no idea where they would leading us, general direction coming from the compass somewhere inside. Old soul Otis Redding, doing songs other people'd made famous -- and his own "Respect," something Zelda had never had to suffer for.
"I am spaniel," her regal being commanded. "See my beauty and marvel at the grace of what I am."
But Zelda had especially -- almost inexplicably -- wanted Michael Stanley. Non-negotiable. Absolutely. "No Rules When You Dream," an impossibly sad ballad that closed his SOFT ADDIXTIONS, and a song about the way things can be perfect when you dream.

"There's no rules when you're dreaming, you can follow where they go...
You can soar like an eagle or watch as the world spins below
You can be anything that you want to, you can have anyone by your side..."

And so it is. The one place Zelda and I can still fromp and romp and frolic. No matter what, no matter when, no matter where.
She wants to remember this is the realm of the in-between. Where angel spaniels and earthbound dreamers can have some kind of celestial communion. She is so peaceful listening, we play it again and again.
We put the window down -- and let the wind tangle in her hair.
It is as good as any moment could hope to be.
Still the broken white lines surrender to the tires and the miles.
We drive on. Zelda smiles on. Michael Stanley's graphite and old sweater voice keeps swirling through the car, a lullabye for a little girl on her way to a place where she will be restored.
It is probably all anyone could ask for. Zelda is smart enough to know this.

We drive by Kenny Chesney's old house. Look at his pond that he built, the wrap around porch on a plantation house where she spent many hours, while the interviews and photo shoots went down. Looking at him with those big brown eyes, hoping a little turkey would be coming her way.
She remembers the smells. She wags her tail. This was her life... and it was good.

As it turns out, there is time. For that last finger-fed ginormo-bowl of beef cooked in cote du rhone. Some lemon sorbet. A lot of kissing and being loved on.
The management of miles and visits gives us one last pass at Radnor. One last walk. One last stroll through the trees, the leaves, the vines and her fellow travelers.
One girl can't believe Zelda is 17. She's never seen "a dog that old."
The Prada Dada cocks her head a bit. She is walking every step of this walk, more than a mile, past the spillway... almost to the little platform 2/3 of the way out.
There is a doe who stops eating to watch us pass. We're still. She still watches us, looks at Zelda, flicks her tail. Even as we continue on and past, she gazes at the little yellow dog on the long fuschia leash and exhales. "Godspeed," the dear sends out to the Deaner.
And Zelda knows.

Back in the car, it's all I can do to the turn the ignition over.
"Don't be afraid," says the spaniel. "Don't be sad. This is good. I'll be stars soon..."
A tear runs down my face. So cruel to lose such perfect love, and yet...
"I'll find the man in the yellow sweater," she says. "I will..."
Ali hears me repeat it and turns, "No, Zelda, yellow cardigan... cardigan..."
"I'll find him," she seems to reassure. She wants some more Patty Loveless. She wants to drive fast... as fast as Granny White Pike will take us.
I want to go, to hold every last second. Zelda wants to fly and feel gravity and the atmosphere part before us.
Zelda wins. I hit the gas. We fly, as much as Audi A-4s can.
And so that final day is almost over. There is the vet and the dreaming...
...and that is not for here, but for soon... for anyone who's bothered reading, who's remember the ones they love and the way this all falls into a ravine called life.

Know how much the comments, emails, calls and prayers have meant.
Candles in Carolina and St Patrick. Flowers from Woodstock and Franklin.
Kindness in D.C. and Chicago.
These are the ways we realize how lucky we are. For we know -- We know. Empirically.
Imperial. Empirically. Amen

"Not A What..." {The Next Day} (June 3, 2009)

"Not a what?" Penny Lane asks, outside the back of the concert venue in San Diego.
William Miller knows no answer is going to work. Confessing "groupie" brings groans and derision... especially from the pretty blond who has that special something.

Zelda knows this movie well. Almost as well as her Mommy, who can talk along with it. Almost as famous -- in many circles -- as the "Almost Famous" promises in Cameron Crowe's Oscar-winning porject. It is the story of loving music and dreams and hope and potential. Zelda used to be snuck into the Green Hills 16 back when it was a theatrical release, back when my assistant and I used to close a little early a couple times a week to remind ourselves about what matters.

"Almost Famous" is whirring on the personal DVD player I've pulled into my bed. Yes, my bed: the sprawling antique French queem, carved with roses and made with good sheets and down pillows, a hippie quilt and a velvet blanket. It is a sleep cloud, very soft and firm enough to let you drift.
Tonight Zelda and I cling to each other, so I don't worry about her rolling and crashing to the floor -- or trying to take the stairs and tumbling to the bottom. No, she knows this is it. She wants her Mommy.
And after 5 weeks in the living room, I, too, am glad for my bed. Even as I don't really sleep. Instead stroker her soft, spft palomino fur, kissing the top of head, feeling her chest rise and heart beat. If this is it, I want it all.

And Zelda has had another big day. She has endured it and enjoyed it as only a queen can. A true regal who understands it's as much for those she bestows her four-pawed grace and dignity on as it is for her own entertainment.

She went to the beauty shop: Miss KItty's Bed & Bath. A wondrous place where she's boarded her entire life, with its snack time, play time, nap time, cuddle (for her) time, mean time and a staff who just loves dogs. Dogs and Zeldas, who is NOT -- she insists -- a dog.
Jeanette is a Clevelander, She and Zelda have that bond. She cries when the poodle comes in for that last groomie, but she knows the girl has to travel in style. She smiles into the cataracted eyes, and Zelda truly sees her.

Truly seeing is one of Zelda's gifts. She knows. She understands. She bores into a person -- and recognizes their essence, their fear, their dreams. She is unnerving to some, but mostly, she reminds people how liberating love without strings can be. Because Zelda doesn't want to "keep" you, she just wants to "see" you and celebrate that beauty.

When I go to pick her up, the groomer is in tears. Some of the people who've worked at Miss Kittys for years -- long enough to remember the three month illness that kept me from coming for her from Martha's Vineyard four years ago, others who rushed her to the vet nine years ago when blood came out of her backside and an immune disorder ravaged her little body -- wipe away tears, stroke her ears, whisper their good-byes.
It is heartbreaking. It is also a reminder to how powerful a special spirit can be.
Zelda looks at everyone deeply, smiles her Zelda smile, says "There is no good-bye"

Glen Rose, my dear friend, has offered to shoot her for me. He has shot so many people, form the Kings of Leon to baby artists I'm trying to help. He has a curiosity about people and a desire to reveal the essence. He and Zelda have known each other for years; they've always gotten along. It's that soul-sight that's given them common ground.
And Glen is ready. In that perfect photo studio across from Nashville's ancient City Cemetery down on 4th Street. With a light four times the size of the Wonderspaniel and his ability to see Zelda just as she truly is: something blazing with sweetness.
He and I laugh about all the common memories. Photo shoots in condemned buildings, outside abandoned strip clubs, on the road with Kenny Chesney. Zelda just keeps following the lense.
I am in some. Cuddling. Craddling. Trying to kiss her nose.
In her whole life, Zelda has only barked once -- when she thought Ali's son Eli was being eaten by a box. She has never licked my face or kiss me.
Suddenly, her pink little tongue is licking my lips. Is letting me know she loves me. Even if just this once, she will break with personal protocol. She will kiss me -- and leave prood.
But after a bit, she is tired. She gives and gives. Listens to the talk of magazines and moments. Has a few frames with Ali, who roasted her duck hearts and came to believe that some creatures are far more human than their physical being suggests.
And then...
It's a wrap.

Back home, there is more beef burgundy, a bit of white peach. She has some cinnamon rice cake -- the kind Krogers doesn't stock anymore -- and she savors every bite. She eats with wolfish enthusiasm, something she's not displayed in too long.
She knows this is the good stuff. She's gonna enjoy every taste, and lick the plate clean.
Then she curls up on the feather bed and dreams... maybe of what's next, maybe something more. But she sleeps, knowing there is strength needed, moments to soak in.

John Hobbs, an early riser who long after we were a "we" would come over in the morning to feed Zelda just to have time with her, had a gig. The Players -- Nashville's now "A Team." Zelda had never really heard him play the piano or B-3. He thought he could "get her in."
After all, Zelda had been getting in, wandered backstage hallways, enjoyed catering and ridden tour buses since she was 4. She knew "how to hang."
What better way to spend a final night then listening to truly great, inspired music.

But more importantly, there was Radnor Lake. Music City's version of Walden Pond, where the pretty girl had traversed the paved road and spillways for more than a decade and a half. With its trees and streams and smells, cool ground, sounds, air. This was the place Zelda was most in sync with her fauna self -- and where there was never a shortage of people to tell her how beautiful she was.
Radnor, where we walked two miles most days to keep her in shape. Because as long as she was in shape, getting older wouldn't register as easily -- and Zelda was not about anything but "let's go. let's see. let's dream."
Zelda'd walked more than a mile there ten days ago. Before the real failing began.
And so, we arrived, there on Otter Creek Road. Parked the car, did some business, tried to walk a bit. But the hips wiggled and circled and made it hard. I carried her most of the way... and confronted with a family of Canadian geese grooming near her favorite bench -- the one that afforded the Monet gaze across the water - Ali Berlow tested their aggressiveness, then played decoy so we could sneak to where we wanted to be.

Zelda's bench. Behind some tall grass, under a few emerald cloud trees. How many hours had she and i spent there? Doing nothing but watching the ripples on the water, the turtles sunning, the ducks lifting out of the lake and yes, even the deer coming down to the water to drink. It was her peaceful place. It was mine, too.
Draped across my lap, extra fluffy from her bath, Zelda listened and watched. She relaxed in a way she hasn't in weeks, not quite going limp, but letting the aches and the toxins and the tired go and just settling into my thighs, feeling safe, feeling whatever tranquil feels like in their most meditative state.
This was heaven. Well, here on Earth. She was going to be released, but this wasn't a bad place to be while she was waiting. She wouldn't have to wait long. She might as well enjoy the beauty of the moment and the love of her Mommy and Mrs. Berlow and everyone else who'd come into contact with the sprite on four paws with the long flowing silky ears.

It IS quiet here. Peaceful. The temperature falling. The slight moisture in the air.
It hits me. I open my phone: 7:19.
"She won't be here in 24 hours," I whipser. I want to die with her. I can't imagine. Yet, of course, it is so. And it is. Period.
Zelda continues regarding the horizon. She is unconcerned. Right now, the lake is beautiful. That's enough. She looks at me to say, "Don't cloud the beauty with your tears... This will be beautiful, too. I promise..."

And so, we sit a little longer. Decide to head back while the day is still dove gray. In that give them their dignity truth that I try to embrace, I snap the long fuschia web leash onto her pink skull and crossbones collar and lift her off the bench. Help her get centered: hips square over back legs, balance set.
Zelda wants to walk. On the wood chips and the gravel. Then down the road that leads out to the spillway. She goes slow, uses the guard-wall as a guide and as Peter Tosh would churn, "Walk and Don't Look Back."
Ali is worried about having enough time to get her fed, get us together, get to the club.
Zelda is slowing a little, weaving a bit. I think about picking her up, watching her from my lead dog positn out on the road. Zelda just keeps walking, but talks to me in that way she has since she was a puppy.
i KNOW what she's thinking. I've been translating for years. Tears come to my eyes.
I don't pick her up. We continue our glacial pace, moving down the blacktop, night air thickening around us and the bird songs getting louder.
Zelda has seen geese and turtles, a baby snack, fish jumping, an otter swimming. Now the birdies sing to her... They all want to see their little spaniel friend off.

When we reach the parking lot, I want to cry. Putting her in the car, I tell Ali.
"I couldn't pick her up. She said, 'It's my last walk. Let me have it.'"
We both cry.
Of course. Her last walk. Her last stroll. She wanted to enjoy it,, to feel it, to know the road under her paws and the way the curves and hills fall.
Zelda.

And there is a text. From Hobbs. That Ron, the nicest club owner in the world, would let the span in, have a table. Come on down.
We do. Arriving right before downbeat. The doorman winks, says, "Don't let her drink too much or get too wild."
I nod. Zelda talks in the place. A bar. Somewhere she's rarely been. Somewhere she clearly likes. Brent Mason comes over to say "hi." We explain why there's a spaniel at the Players gig. He clouds over. But he gets it. He has a big heart to go with that guitar blaze that's country and dexterity and soul and skill.
Michael Rhodes, the praying mantis bass player who brings the melodic sense of beat to Steve Winwood and Larry Carlton, takes the stage. He smiles at us, as does Hobbs.
Paul Franklin, a man who changed the steel guitar's possibility and shows golden retrievers, purses his lips. "Are you sure?" he asks, about being so close to his monitors.
"Oh, yeah," I say. "She loves it."
Zelda does, too. She follows the musicians about two measures behind. Her heart rate slows down and she returns to that state of blissful limp in my lap. She couldn't be happier, couldn't be more alive.
This, too, is heaven. To a spaniel. Well one of wildly refined taste.
"Since I Fell For You" and blistering instrumentals. And then...
"This... tonight...," says the bespectacled piano man, "is... for the wonderspaniel."
Puddles of notes, rising, descending, rippling emerge. They are progressions, transitions, minor key meditations and modulations. It is true jazz a la Bill Evans, evoking -- perhaps --"Waltz for Debbie."
Zelda watches raptly from her bed on my lap. Tries pushing up the sit "like a big girl."
Still the song swirls on. The other musicians fall into concentric circles, each soloing in a way that embroiders the motifs with a sense of passion. Passion for the music, for the talent, for a pretty girl about to fade away.
They all know it's Zelda's last show. They smile at her. They play for her. They make it burn slow and bright -- like the baby doll she is.
The song -- different from anything else the Players play, yet every bit as signature as the slamming stuff -- has been mentioned to me in far flung places in the oddest situations. Anyone who knows the Players knows "Holly's Song." It is one of those pieces of music.
But tonight, it is wholly Zelda Fitzgerald Spaniel Gleason's providence, and she exults in it.

Merle Haggard's "Working Man Blues" follows. A still being cartographed variation on James Taylor's "You Make It Easy." More instrumentals. At almost the witching hour, the first set is done. Zelda is spent. It has been perfect. She can't believe how good they really are... the way Eddie Bayers holds the rhythm on his drums, the way Mason sings like he plays, the way Hobbs, her Hobbs, can coax sentiment from lines of music.
They all come to pay her court. To hug me. To say "hi" to Ali. To wish us well tomorrow.

Zelda takes it all in. Needs to get some air. But she's even too tired to potty.
John Hobbs had agreed to sing his Irish elegy "When They Lay Me Down," the most hopeful post-parting from the mortal coil song ever written. Zelda isn't going to make it that far.
She is in the tall grass, lying down, breathing the cool night air.
She wants to go home: to the good sheets and beef burgundy and full spaniel massage.
She knows enough to plenty and then some.
She is ready.

She is ready. Damn it. So much better at this -- like everything -- than I am.
She wants to go home. To lie down. To be stroked and whispered to. To sleep, perchance -- as Shakespeare offered -- to dream.

So we drive, turning the car towards Music Row. To take the long way home. Past all the places she's graced for nearly 17 years. Past the record companies, the management offices, BMI and ASCAP. By Carnival Music where she lay on a funky couch, watching Travis Hill and I pick through lines to find "Better As A Memory."
Soon Zelda will be that, too. And maybe -- or so i tell myself when Im trying to be adult -- she is better as a memory than as my pretty girl, so sick from renal failure, not able to jump into the big, big car, not hungry even for Kenny Chesney's special plain salmon in catering.
It is not for me to want to take hostages... Certainly not to watch my best friend suffer.
Maybe the memory is the kindest way to fix Zelda in forever.
Maybe I need to love her enough to let go.

Right now, though, Sapphire is talking about what it "means to be a fan... To love some band or some silly little piece of music... so much... that it hurts."
Zelda knows that feeling. Like me, it defined her -- and reminded me the potency of being a true believer, embracing the range of how it feels and finding dignity and a thrill in whatever you're handed.
She is soft. As soft as she's ever been. I pet her and she melts even deeper into me as the movie plays, the minutes pass and we wait for Dr. Scanlon at 6. This is going to be the hardest thing I've ever done -- and yet somehow, somehow Zelda will find a way to make it all okay. It's what she's done always; my guess is it won't be any different now.

Three Days (June 1, 2009)

Zelda is lying next to me. On a feather bed that's kinda yucky 'cause she's been leaking for a while. Not that we care; we just wanna be close together.

We're here, side-by-side. Her asleep. Me watching her ribs slowly rise and fall; legs occasionally kicking as she dreams of chasing bunnies and chipmunks. Not that I know what she dreams. As well as I know Zelda, I can only wonder what she's dreaming of...

...as she moves closer to her dreams, every minute, every moment of the next few days.
And I know Zelda dreams, of all sorts of things, of a life that is full and rich and filled with people who recognized her spirit and her heart.

And so as she has lived, so she shall find the skies.

On the road, two last stadum shows: watching the people cheer, feeling the energy, the vibrations on the stage. Lots of friends from scattered places, Ali flying in from Martha's Vineyard to say good-bye; Steven Charles Hurst and his lovely wife Shaye coming to the Louisville Stadium to take pictures and share the love.

Maybe that's what's greatest about Zelda: the love. And the curiousity. And the will.
Even now more happy to be "on the road," that she doesn't want to leace the car.
"Where are we going? What will we do? How fast will be drive? Can we hear the Stones? the Crows? Aunt Patty? (Loveless, who she adores above all)"

Her last road-trip crowned by a night at Louisville's Seelbach Hotel on crisp white sheets in a fluffy bed with a big window. The place where Gatsby met Daisy... like some bluegrass version of Benmont Tench's ode to Sarasota's Don Cesar Hotel, "Why Don't You Quit Leaving Me Alone?"

How appropriate, for the girl named Zelda Fitzgerald Spaniel Gleason...
for the girl Wailer Drummer Zeb said, "Zelda is Jah Love" of...
the girl who is a Chanel collar, a teeny backstage laminate, a very Hermes looking bandana AND a pink skull & crossbones collar that let's people know her only friends are pirates...

It is hard to do the right thing. But I think it's easier than watching them suffer.
Or so i tell myself, watching her slumber. Always the sleep of Spaniels, nothing like it... so peaceful, so gracious, to tranquil yet so deep.

Zelda isn't going anywhere. Not really. She will always be right here in my heart.
She will always be the light in my window when I'm trying to get home...

i am... (the prelude, April 26, 2009)

sitting in a panera
crying
and i can't stop
not howling or sobbing, mind you
just a flood of tears --
not one can change a thing
yet, the shipwreck of it, well, it's why i'm noting

i have lost a father to a slow drawn out dance w cancer
lost my mother suddenly...
in the midst of a long estrangement
slammed into a "well, now... gone"
that even with the gulf between us, i sat at dear friend's birthday, KNOWING
but this
this...
this is different

it is zelda
the sweetest, most pointed, spot on, here you go soul in the world
defines love and innocence and bite me
and she can't even tell me how to make it better
she just smiles as much as she can, wags her tale
devours boiled chicken and limp carrots cooked in broth
baked sweet potatoes
rice cakes
the stuff she wants, the stuff she can keep down
and once the UTI is resolved, we'll have a better sense
maybe it's months, maybe a year
but still --
it is the poodle. the girl dog spaniel. the prada of dada. the one who HAS kenny chesney's number and thinks alex bevan is the sweetest thing who ever lived
she KNOWS things, and she knows me...
and there's no one she'd rather curl up with and tell her secrets to
about chasing bunnies and roast munk supreme and the chanel collar that's too black

and so
how does one do this?
do it and not subject their four-pawed guardian angel to the part where you cry
because as the woman at the hospital said to me when i was crying at my dad's bed
"he don't need THIS. he got enough to deal with... don't you be bringing that drama and those tears in here. you be light and happy and give him joy in his struggle..."
and that lady was right
esp now
except for the part where i can't stop crying...

Matraca Berg: Dreaming in Fields, Falling & Chasing The Angels

            I shouldn’t be writing this. It’s not right.

            You see, I first met Matraca Berg -- as Delbert McClinton wrote – in a warehouse in West L.A. She was, at 26, a wildly accomplished songwriter with several #1s, including her first written at 18 with no less than the legendary Bobby Braddock. She was on the verge of her debut record, and they’d called me to write the bio., to capture the story, the music and weave it into some kind of narrative essence.

            She was tall, thin, pretty. Giant eyes, brown hair tumbling down around a heart-shaped face – and when she looked, you knew she knew. Everything. She understood. It made her a powerful voice for young women self-reliant beyond their years, banging into real life and realizing the bruises that come with learning the hard way. Romantic in spire of knowing, willing to keep wading into the rivers of real life, she held a light on so many of the unseen: the late middle-aged beautician of “Alice in the Looking Glass,” the lost girlhood of “Appalachian Rain,” as well as the liquid desire of “I Got It Bad.”

            That was 20 years and several labels ago. A lot has happened. Life has deepened – to the good and the bad. Triumphs for certain – the first woman to write 5 #1s in a year, becoming a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame – as the tragedies deepend, too. Not that she talks about them, but they permeate many of the songs she writes.

          And I know. Of course I do… I’ve been there for all of it.

          See. Matraca Berg said to me in that parking lot that day all those years ago, as I was ruing moving to Nashville, knowing how cliquish it is and how not like the typical girl I am, “I’ll be your friend.” She meant it.

            I arrived July 3, my good silverware heavy in my carry-on bag – about the only possession I had of any real value – and the exhaustion all over me. Confronted with a sea of bad Christmas tree perms on the rush of women coming at me in the airport, I broke down crying in the arms of the man from Tennessee Car & Van Rental.

            July 4^th, I was at her Aunt Sudie’s house for chicken and too much family. An only child, I wasn’t used to the tangle of loud talk, big laughter and people pecking at each other, It didn’t matter, they took to me like they take to everyone.

            Since then, we’ve been through everything. Bad lovers, a husband who I’d written about since I was 19, illness, broken engagements, career success, bolstering each other and taking up against those who would detract when the friend wasn’t there.

            Matraca scored 5 #1s in a single year, won the CMA’s Song of the Year for “Strawberry Wine” and made her network tv debut on the “CMA Awards” with the aching ballad of recognizing the harshest part of old age  “Back When We Were Beautiful” that same night from the album Sunday Morning To Saturday Night. By the end of the year, that album wou;d be on TIME, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, People, The Tennessean and The Chicago Tribune’s Top 10 Albums of the Year in ANY genre – and her label would be out of business.

            The best of times, the worst of times.

            An almost recluse, she’d had enough chasing the fame. She went home. Sunk into the complicated dynamics of extended family. Wrote more songs. Didn’t look back. Her ego didn’t need it; her soul couldn’t take the bruising.

            But, damn, she was still so good. Still a paper cut on your heart kind of wincing compositional proposition. As the best writing is, or should be. And so she remained. Even as she stayed out of view, hidden and thinking about what the Nashville she was raised in – one where the creatives only came out after dark, studiously avoiding the suits, Kristofferson had just risen from the janitorial ranks and Red Lane, Sonny Throckmorton, even  Mel Tillis who were regulars around her mother’s house – meant.

            See, Matraca Berg wasn’t raised like other kids. She was being dragged to recording sessions up and down Music Row by a single mom who knew her daughter had “game.” She was drafted for Neil Young’s snaggle-tooth hippie country Old Ways tour – along with Hargus “Pig” Robbins and Anthony Crawford , back-up singing with Mother Earth’s Tracy Nelson at Live Aid. She knows the difference, and she knows what’s gone.

            Which is why there’s The Dreeaming Fields, an elegy for too many ways of life. The title track is about her grandfather’s dairy farm – the scene of the virginity losing summerscape “Strawberry Wine” -- being parceled off for pre-fab houses, the family farm no longer a part of the America we live in, while “Racing The Angels” is a living person’s pining for one who has passed, palpable and passionate in the heartbreak and sustaining ardor and “Clouds” is the reality of knowing what’s coming, the tears and good-byes, yet willing the end even with the inevitable pain that’s comes with it.

            Matraca Berg has never been afraid of the pain. She recognizes the common currency among women is just thatL courage to move through it, to maintain dignity in the roughest places and the strength to withstand anything. On The Dreaming Fields opener, “If I Had Wings,” the long-suffering battered protagonist hits her limit: “Everyone knew one day it’d be him or me…” as she confesses, “My mother said call the preacher, I just said ‘Call the law…’,”

            These are hard scrabble women. They – like Berg – know no other way.

            It is not an easy life, but it is their’s, and they live it fully. On “You & Tequila,” the song’s heroine honors the hold that one certain someone has over her – “You & tequila make me crazy, run like poison through my veins/ One is one too many, one more is never enough…” – and buckles to the craving, knowing how bad the morning after’s gonna feel.

            Mortality, humanity, kindess, sadness. It is all part of the sum total. On “South of Heaven,” a mother whose son has been sent home covered by a flag sees no point in losing children to battles she can’t understand, for principles that have nothing to do with how she lives or holds her ground. “Father, You have given Your only son,” she sings as the voice of the woman whose truth is all recrimination and seering love for her child, “but you are not the only one…”

            To take a point and skewer it through the listener’s thorax is no small feat. To do it with an essentialism of how we all live is an art. Matraca Berg is a humanist, an everywoman, a seeker and the keeper of people’s secrets. That she keeps them is one thing, that she also recycles them into compelling glimpses of life – the quavering places, moments of doubts,  total surrender – is why she is, inspite of her hiding, so important.

            Not that it’s always dire. “Fall Again” is the fault=line of desire and desolation. You hear how brittle the love has become, and how much she needs to set it ablaze – not to burn it to the ground, but to rekindle what was there. The urgency is one of not losing something so vital, and it comes through in torrents of unquenchable desire.

            Indeed, even the piquant “Your Husband’s Cheating On Us” – a sketch of the other woman’s visit to the long-suffering wife – is a portrait of turnabout in the realm of betrayal. The irony of the hunter getting quartered by the game is a delicious send-up of the wronged being abetted by the betrayer.

            Who we betray, how we do it, indeed, how often the betrayer is ourselves… She understands. Indeed, the woman whose first album in 14 years takes its seeds from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, from Neil Young’s Harvest, from Emmylou Harris’ Pieces of the Sky recognizes how often in doing the seemingly right thing, we so sell ourselves short.

            The Dreeaming Fields contains “Oh, Cumberland,” a song that was originally recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Emmylou Harris for their Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol 3 – and it is a love song to a place one has left, but can never leave. In a place where the dream is theoretically to be had, there is that nagging sense of loss of self, a genuine feeling of ache for where one comes from, for places that make one feel whole and settled.

            It is not about the reality we’re sold – glossy Hollywood living, which mostly only makes one tired, but the roots of where we come from, rivers that barely move and places we can stop and just be. Exhaustion permeates the chase, comfort anchors where we’re from.

            Where we’re from is the whole point, Who we are at our core is everything.

            In a world hurling itself down the stairs of something so two-dimensional, so devoid of deeper meaning, but ooh the shiny high gloss coating of faux emotion and almost reality, we can forget who we are at our broken places – until the dazzle wears off and we’re even more empty than when we started, another cure-all failing us.

            It’s at those times that an album like The Dreaming Fields matters. It gently, humbly, honorably tells us the truth… wincing for us when it stings and encouraging us softly when we need the help to go on. Sometimes it is in the knowing that we can begin to heal, to climb, to seek.

            To me, those have always been the records that mattered. Why I return to Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates or Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, Julie Miller’s “Broken Things” or Alex Bevan’s Springboard again and again… in the lost hours… looking for equanimity and balance in the flood.

            To have someone who knows, who sees and who tells us it’s okay, and it’s up to us to change the dynamic, but also suggesting that we can: that’s everything. For Matraca Berg, who reached back into a dusty paradigm of resonant steel, guitars that waver, pianos that ripple and sustain and vocals that echo like they’re coming down a holler, it is everything, too.

            She knows the difference, and like Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl, she has taken this album and held 11 matches aloft, hoping the flame will contain everything she loves about one of Nashville’s most fertile periods musically – so people will see, will know, will breathe and embrace something that matters so much to her.

            In the end, what she loves is what makes us strongest in our banged up places. All you have to do is listen. That’s how powerful these spare songs are. But don’t listen to me… I’m the girl she befriended straight off the plane, and surely I couldn’t be objective, even with all the years of writing for places like The Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, Trouser Press and CREEM, Musician and Tower Pulse, indeed so many great music magazines too long gone, but absolutely measures of the things in music that makes us more as people.

            Making us more is what music is supposed to do. Listening to this record, I remember that. I wonder about the futility of greatness cutting through the dissonance, and I don’t care. It’s why I’m writing about something I shouldn’t for people who might not be able to embrace passion for small rules that make them feel safe – but miss the hardest tilt of the best stuff of what music is, how songs can hit you and the reasons records like this truly matter.