I’ve been cooking up this musical since 2012, and this Myers Briggs ENFP knows it’s finally time to start sharing some songs.

In 2012 I had a significant list of amends to make, and there were those whom I held inside the imaginary cage of my own contempt.

I’m still learning what forgiveness means. And since I’ve needed a lot of it since 2012, I’ve noticed that it is alive and moving, welcoming us to collaborate.

It’s like breathing and singing. We can’t hold a note, we can only watch as the breath moves through us and we open to receive the next one.

This is “The Treasures We Owned” from ACROSS.

A lil story background:

In 1985, Lynn Steeple is a retired opera singer who teaches at Armstrong College in her hometown of Mt. Airy, North Carolina.

When she learns that her ex-husband will be the college’s artist in residence, she finds her life hurtling down an emotional mountain road in a truck with tired breaks.

This song happens in Act 2 as Lynn weighs the years she’s spent rehearsing the deeds of those who’ve trespassed against her.

Jesus, I pictured you gathering your child
George Floyd
under your wings as he left his body
on rough grey asphalt.

The report said he was forty-six,
and I thought of my brother,
towering tall like George,
whose forty-sixth birthday is today.

I imagined a place where a big white man
with wavy brown hair like he
would be police-pinned bare-chest-down
eye-level with oil stains and cigarette butts,
his temple gravel-indented.

I have to imagine my gentle giant big brother
suffering a bony knee to his throat
and a hands-in-pockets “relax”
when he pleads for breath.

What’s make-believe for me
is you-better-believe for my human brothers
whose melanin riches make them poor
according to the story we’ve spun
based on our ability to see
.0035 percent of the light spectrum.

This tale gags
a hundreds-years nightmare scream
in the deaf presence of stopped ears.

Does your brown, scarred brow, Lord,
knit at our bleached, ignored grief
as you feel our refusal
to let through the howl for the things done
and those left undone?

Where do the pierced hands
that made spit-mud for the blind man
guide us?

Today I ask for blessings for my brother’s
forty-sixth year,
and I think of how my prayers depart
from the black mother
who pleads for anyone to guard her son
from those who obey inhuman agents
that insinuate that we are
separate.

May you smear the deep brown clay on our eyes,
the mud we’re all made from,
to see the moment when
George
met his mother when he called her
and, cradled beneath your wing
by your spear-stabbed side,
walked upright together into the place where
you hear their voice
and you will wipe every tear from their eyes.

I won’t bury the lead. I stopped drawing because my brothers were good at it.

I loved to draw, paint, color, all the things.

I didn’t win coloring contests. Ms. Tina chided me in nursery school for coloring an ostrich purple. (I think it was a solid choice.) I would look at my brothers’ sketches of trees and X-men and envy their superior technique and think, “I’m not that good.”

So, when I figured out I could sing, I had my thing.

Bye bye, visual arts, I will make my way on the staaaaage. Or with a poli sci degree. I didn’t know.

During these quarantine-y times, there’s been play-doh and paint time at the kitchen table with our two-year-old, and I’ve gotten out the watercolors.

What’s so interesting to me is that painting a cup or a vase of flowers or someone else’s painting of a house puts me into a story–I immerse the way I do when I craft a song or write a scene.

And I notice how a fragile child’s ego decision shaped the creative and career path I took.

Are you there? In you own experience when someone said or did something they don’t even remember, and it shaped the whole trajectory of your creative and life choices from that point?

I’m remembering pee-wee basketball.

The one time when our ringer Roy, 9-year-old layup master that he was, didn’t grab a rebound. Somehow the ball ricocheted into my eager eight-year-old hands, and I did what I knew I must:

I double-dribbled to the other side of the half-court and attempted my best underhand granny from around the free throw line.

I soon discovered that I had unsuccessfully attempted to score for the other team.

A bizarro version of the good-game-hand-slap line formed; the other team passed me single-file pointing and laughing in twangy tones. We had a lot of bright color going on in our vocal production back in 1986 Mt. Airy.

Basketball carried a face-flushing, hand-tingling story for me ever since. I would dread pickup or P.E. games. I would try to show up strong on defense or pass to someone I knew could shoot.

I missed the memo that my innocent attempt to play a game one winter Saturday in 1986 was over and that what happens at Reeve’s Community Center stays at Reeves Community Center.

What are the possibilities you tossed out because of a painful story?

Maybe it’s a good time to see if a little eight-year-old back there is raising their hand asking for you to listen and understand, and maybe for a hug.

Here’s an index cards I painted this week. It’s a detail of a Jim Shore sculpture my mom gave us for our anniversary. Great to let the kid come out and enjoy some time in an imaginary watercolor world.

We’ve been using some of this quarantine time for coloring, paining, and play-doh with our two-year-old, so I joined the fun with my watercolors and an index card.

P.S. Trader Joe paper bags make really good dining room table artist blotters for toddlers.

From Tuesday, the coffee cup from a set my mom gave us for our anniversary:

And Wednesday, the peonies I got last Friday at Trader Joe’s:

The woman said, “Now sing something funny.”
“What’s funny?” I asked,
and started singing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,”
Except the rhythm was wrong.

Is that funny?

Not to most. Gershwin is serious, y’all.

Or that time I tried to host a party,
But the toast fell flat,
And so did the Prosecco.
All the guests said,
“Maybe you shouldn’t try so hard,”
As they gathered their coats from the bed
and gathered the unopened bottles of cabernet.
I understand–wine’s not cheap.

So, how can I sing funny songs
When I can’t count Gershwin
and people abscond from my parties?

I’ll stick with slow, brooding ballads.

I have read articles recently about how Shakespeare wrote sonnets and King Lear during the plagues when the theaters were shuttered.

I applaud Mr. Shakespeare and thank him for his significant contributions to the canon.

When you hear these things in the midst of worldwide lockdown, does it inspire you to grasp pen and paper and set to work?

I feel uncomfortable pressure in the face of such encouragement. I’d better use this time wisely. After all, King Lear, ya know?

These last five days after Elon shut ‘er down for a good while, I’ve been celebrating the fact that my wife is awesome and makes it possible for me to take a nap in the afternoons.

After the first half of the spring semester my body is like, whaaaat?

This is a pattern—burst of academic energy and overwork followed by a break period in which my body understands there is an imminent series of dark days, my physiology turns on the ghost light.

I ask Melissa, “Why am I so tired?”

She answers, “This is what usually happens on your breaks.”

“Oh, yeah.” I forgot the last time.

We’ve done things like watch the Spenser movie on Netflix, make corned beef and cabbage for St. Patty’s, ask my Mama if she could procure some TP somewhere in Mt. Airy, NC. Thanks, Mama, and thank you Galaxy Grocery Store on Highway 89. What you gotta do these days for a roll.

While many of us need this body rest desperately, I’d venture to say that in these peculiar times many more of us need mind rest.

How many of us have sat in our residences still sporting hot and cold running water, electricity, and some kind of telephonic device that could be used to call someone we know for help if worse came to worse?

Yet we scroll headlines on same said telephonic devices crafted to get our fighty-flighty fingers to click to read how we are headed into cataclysmic Mad-Max-topia where all the TP and hand sanitizer has been hoarded in a Tennessee garage for sale only on the dark web.

Yesterday at dinner (corned beef leftovers :)), Melissa said, “This is like a bad movie.”

And I said, “Exactly, and we are all screening our own mental movies when we see all the Netflix-style mandatory trailers on our news feeds. (Netflix, still not a fan of the automatic, enforced preview. And music theatre nerds, insert your own joke or reference to the Miss Saigon tune here.)

If you are reading this on the interwebs, it is likely you have access to a living space where you are relatively safe and can hunker down and ride this thing out.

You may be in doubt about whether you can continue to pay for said living space or the commensurate utilities. I hear you. I have been there, and it was a product of my own choices, not a microbe-induced global shutdown.

I mean it, I’ve been there. As in…outside the check cashing store in North Hollywood where I had been denied a usurious loan, unsuccessfully holding back tears as I called my friend to please lend me $500 so I could pay bills. I know what skint feels like as my friends in the UK like to say. Bless you all. Stay inside.

Whatever your what-if scenarios may be, I invite you to let the thoughts come. Play them out to the very end.

In that movie’s ending, are you absolutely sure you won’t be all right if everything shakes down the way you fear? Even life and death–can you be certain that in the middle of the circumstance you fear the most you won’t look up and say, “You know what? I’m okay.”?

Reminds me of something I heard career coach and men(sch)tor Barbara Deutsch say to me back in LA–“It’s not fear. It’s discomfort. You can handle discomfort.”

Seriously, how much discomfort have you handled in your life? List it. See? You’ve got this.

One dis-ease that we can be vigilant about containing is the one we spread to ourselves by believing all the Chicken Little pronouncements our precious minds deliver to us in the hope of keeping the sky from falling on our brains.

Our minds are truly trying to be helpful–much like twenty-two-month-old Noah is trying to be helpful when he throws his used diaper into the dirty clothes hamper.

I invite us all to tread gently in these days with ourselves and therefore with each other. If I’m not kind with you, then I’m not kind with me in the same moment.

Our brains will want to throw a few wet diapers in the dirty clothes. So, what if we take that diaper out and put it where it goes with a smile on our face thanking our super cute brain for pitching in?

And speaking of super cute, I leave you with this sweet moment in case you just need some unfiltered love, joy, and connection today.

After dinner hugs, or as Noah likes to say, “Hooolld it.”

It’s all good until 0:53 when I block Noah’s intense tickle game.