At last count I have had 36 jobs. Not counting all the different assignments I might get from a temp agency. Let’s call it 36 paycheck issuers.
My passion has always been music. But I discovered early on that I didn’t want to do it as a career. I was a freshman in the music education program at University of Bridgeport and towards the end of that year I realized that having to put the work and study into music sapped some of the magic for me. I wanted to play. So I knew I wanted to play in bands and do music that way.
This was not new. I had always had a lack of discipline. My first instrument was cello, which I took in the fourth grade. My mother made me practice before dinner and I would lug the huge instrument up to my room. I would have a whack at the lessons but soon it would devolve into an exploration of the sonic possibilities of the cello. This would mostly be making eerie sounds through the harmonic series.
There was a grate in the floor of the bedroom which led down to the dining room. I’m sure my mother could hear what I was doing. I can’t remember if she reprimanded me. Either way, I am still struggling to develop the self discipline to practice. But I get enough of it done so that I am an above average guitarist. But I have always regretted not developing the skills and knowledge required for cello.
So in service of my music passion, and my play passion, I have always had Lazy Girl Jobs. These are jobs that are flexible enough to allow me to do gigs and rehearsals at night and even run off on tour from time to time. I have always had enough money to afford an apartment with roommates, coffee, lunch out, and the ability to go out and see bands. And get a T Pass. I never needed a whole lot and my friends were generally in the same boat. We all graduated from Marlboro College with degrees in the humanities and always knew we weren’t going to get rich.
That wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted life. We wanted to enjoy this burgeoning city we found ourselves in and be able to get on a Trailways back to Vermont every so often. And that simplicity has served us well. Tami generally concurs on this so we are simpatico.
Now, being retired, it’s not jobs anymore but hobbies and experiences. And I need to keep trying to find the separation from commitment which was such a facet of my lazy girl jobs.
I am wishing nothing but the best for you. I am sipping a cozy Manhattan on New Year’s evening. Actually, it’s an “It May Choke Artie”, a concoction of my own made of rye, Cynar, Dolin Rouge, and walnut bitters. I have one dog under my legs and another on the floor. We have a goat in the kitchen who had a stroke of sorts and she’s recuperating. The 2 cats are around here somewhere. And my wife has her feet on my lap.
2025 presented a whole new set of problems.
I retired in February 2025. That took me a little getting used to. I wasn’t used to having all of this time to myself. I read a lot newspaper, periodical articles, mostly political and sociological stuff. Very interesting. Relatively useless.
On March 6, I was driving to Hudson. I was on route 82 (or 9H as it may have been there) and I was drinking coffee and it went down the wrong way and I started coughing. I was coughing hard and I wanted to pull over but before I could pull over, I found myself coming to in the bushes. I had driven the element off the road and wrecked the front end. A car right behind me saw the whole thing and pulled over. She was an off duty cop. She called emergency services and let me sit in her car until they came.
The ambulance took me to Columbia Memorial Hospital and I stayed there for a few hours in the emergency room while they ran a battery of tests. I called Neil after a few hours for him to give me a ride home and we got the car towed to a yard and dealt with the insurance and it was pretty much totaled so that was that.
About a week later Tami’s Mini also died, having clutch problems and that was gonna cost like $5000 to fix and we thought that was just too much so we set off on finding new cars.
I was determined to get an Element which they haven’t made since 2011 but they are out there. I wound up with a 2007 Element which is two years newer than the one we had so hey,bonus! Tami wanted an electric car and she found a 2021 Mustang Mach E for around 20,000 bucks. It’s a good car and it’s all electric which presents its problems but we at least get to feel good about ourselves. It’s a really slick car so that’s cool.
Our new 2021 Mustang Mach EOur new 2007 Honda Element
I also started playing seriously with Carolynn Murphy and we have started a band called Mursey. We have done a few gigs and have about 25 songs we are ready to play out. Carolynn and I sing well together and jam well. We are able to work up a frenzy during my leads. I get a lot of space to explore improvisation and we both have a ton of influences bringing their powers to bear. I look forward to developing this band. It’s the first time in years that I have felt fully challenged by another musician. And, she tap dances. So that’s something to look forward to.
As we step into 2026, I am dealing with a lot of COPD and a fair amount of dizziness. All my peers are experiencing old age sickness. I am hoping it blows over….
My mother’s father, Howard Barnes, was a man of the 20th century, in the modern sense. He was sophisticated and wore his erudition on his sleeve. He was a drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune, an alumnus of Yale and Oxford, a man about town and one heck of a piano player (at least to my three year old ears.)
He was also a drunk and a womanizer. But that is not what I remember. I remember sitting on his knee at the piano, banging the keyboard with him intoning, “Gently, gently”, at my ear. He was endlessly kind and patient with all of us and now that I see my friends with grandchildren, I begin to get it, but with him, I just took it for granted.
He and his third wife, Cassie, had an apartment in New York city on the upper east side of Manhattan. My memories of visiting him there are mostly smells and taste. I can taste the New York water in the little fridge in the tiny kitchenette. I can smell the florist down on the street, the cut flowers in the foyer of their building, the delicious aroma of bakeries with croissants and brioche.
He was elegant and handsome but not a smooth handsome. His face was lined and drawn, lived in, the crags dug both by the picks of experience and the storms of tobacco and drink. I like to think of him as a bourbon man, but I guess I don’t really know. I believe he smoked Camels, but it might have been Chesterfields like my dad. He also smoked a pipe. These smells sit with me to this day.
Cassie worked at Macy’s, one of the executives and a powerful working woman, back before it was a thing. The two of them were part of the Manhattan high society in the forties and fifties. They both had illustrious friends from their professional lives. My mother would tell the story of how they took her to the famed New York restaurant, 21, on her 21st birthday which they celebrated with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Cassie and Granddaddy gave the best Christmas gifts. Once I got a clarinet and another year I got a microscope.
When he wasn’t reviewing plays and she wasn’t pushing fashion, they retired to their country house in New Hartford, Connecticut, Hickory. He had it built in the mid thirties on a beautiful side of a hill. It had a long driveway leading up to a landing between the house on the left and the meadow below. The house was simple, a long ranch with a big living room in front and the master bedroom behind it. The kitchen was on the other side of the stairs in the entryway. Upstairs were 3 bedrooms where we stayed. There was a long hall going down the middle of the second floor leading to my parents’ room. The hall was kind of creepy and mysterious. It was dark and it echoed. It was claustrophobic yet big at the same time.
By the pool and in the living room
Outside, to the left of the house and up a little hill was a cement swimming pool built on a rock ledge and fed by a cold spring. It’s hard to say how big it was but it might have been as small as ten by ten. But it was perfect for kids. We spent a lot of time in the pool.
In the back of the house, out behind the kitchen, was a big cubical rock. It was too big for us to climb to the top of easily and we spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get up there.
At the end of the parking area, there was a shed. This was the domain of Mr Hecht, Granddaddy’s all around handyman. Mr Hecht was missing part of a finger which he lost in a chainsaw accident. It weirdly fascinated me and to this day I have a timid respect for the tools.
Down below the meadow lived the cleaning lady and her two kids, a boy and a girl about our ages. We spent a lot of time playing with them. His name was Michael, I think, but I can’t remember anything else.
But I don’t really remember a whole lot about Granddaddy himself. He was there, a kind presence but really more comfortable with the adults than us, probably. I remember his “stuff”, his armchair and his chestnut coffee table which I believe Mr Hecht built. I still have both of these things and cherish them. One of the best songs I have written is “My Grandfather’s Chair” so I hope he sings through me.
Cassie died in 1964 or so and then he met Eileen in an AA meeting. They both fell off the wagon, got married and then he got Emphysema. My last memories are of him sitting in the kitchen coughing his lungs out while we packed up the car to go home.
We had a funeral in New Hartford with a reception at Hickory and that was that. He didn’t leave a will so the bulk of his estate went to Eileen, most importantly, the house,but we got several acres which we never developed or even visited. We sold that land some time in the seventies.
I hope other people will chime in with their memories of Howard Barnes. I see so much of him in me, from the music to the drinking to the smoking but, unfortunately, not the womanizing…. 😜
Copake has a Grange, #935 to be precise. From Wikipedia: “The Grange, officially named The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, is a social organization in the United States that encourages families to band together to promote the economic and political well-being of the community and agriculture.[1] The Grange, founded after the Civil War in 1867, is the oldest American agricultural advocacy group with a national scope. The Grange actively lobbied state legislatures and Congress for political goals, such as the Granger Laws to lower rates charged by railroads, and rural free mail delivery by the Post Office.” Essentially, in Copake, we are a community organization that does stuff to enhance the quality of life in the community. It’s a membership organization like the Lions or the Elks; we put on events and we reach out to the community, doing food drives, cleaning up roadways and the like.
And like most Granges, it has a Grange Hall. In this Grange Hall, built in 1903, we have dinners, movies, baking and cooking contests (we have a full service industrial kitchen), plays and concerts. Our grange hall has a theatre with a box office and stage and green rooms. It has about 100 seats and the wooden walled stage sounds great. There is a piano, a sound system and some lighting. There is a whole common room next to the theater where we have dinners and dances.
Before we moved out here, knowing that there was a Grange, I knew I wanted to start an open mic at the Grange. I have been intrigued by the concept of the grange hall as a rural community gathering place for years, dating back to my song Peaceful & Clean with the line “Violent gyrations at the Grange Hall Dance.” This would give me a way to play music out regularly without having to go through the onerous process of constantly seeking out gigs.
In Boston, in the nineties, I spent a lot of time at the Cantab Lounge where Geoff Bartley held a legendary open mic on Monday night where many performers got their starts. I loved playing there and met a lot of musicians. I started playing in several bands as a result of that experience. It was a great social life and a great musical experience.
So, out here in the hinterlands, I run an open mic. It is the first Friday of every month. We tried some other days but we landed on Friday. We’ve been going since June 2018. The pandemic got a little intermittent but we powered through. Originally we were lucky if we got a dozen people and the evening would mostly consist of me playing. Now we get 30-40 people and a full night of performers. We have a good amount of really talented writers and poets. We have a group of tween children who come and play instruments, sing, and excerpt musicals. And we have a bunch of excellent singer songwriters who play individually and in groups. I get to play with some of these people, notably House Band, Noyes and the Boyes, and The Solar Plexus.
Noyes And The Boyes Damon Clift – Didgeridoo Chrystal’s AngelsRoger and LennyGeneva O’Hara
This March we preempted the open mic to present a concert by my ukulele teacher, Charissa Hoffman. She was coming through town up from Nashville on her first tour since graduating Berklee College of Music in Boston. I thought she would be a good fit for the Grange so I arranged to have a concert. We had another young performer, Geneva O’Hara open for her and I backed up Geneva on guitar. We had about 40 people who loved it and it was a great success.
The best thing was having all these people staying at our house. Geneva and her girlfriend, Shelby, and her mom, Tami’s best friend, Maria, all slept scattered throughout the first floor and Charissa and her band, JJ Halpin and Garrett Goodwin, stayed upstairs in the guest rooms. It was the last night of their tour and after a week of couches and floors they deserved something nicer.
Tami made us chili for dinner and egg casseroles and vegan French toast for breakfast. I love having the opportunity to show off our house and Tami’s cooking. It’s great having young people here. It was also great to be able to play with such great musicians. I’m hoping to make it a regular thing.
Charissa Hoffman-Panic Attack On A Tour Bus In Philly
I am going to Milan with Tony to see a performance of the Yellow Shark by Frank Zappa on the 25th anniversary of his death. Tony and I have travelled before, having gone to England and Scotland in 1995. We generally work well together and have similar interests and preferences. Neither of us wants to spend a lot of money and we want to have a good time close to the roots.
The accident came about the night before I was supposed to leave. Tami and I had planned to get up early at 5 am in order to drive into Boston so I could go to work and then fly out from there. I’m lying in bed having that typical anxiety one gets when one knows one has to go to sleep so one can get up early but can’t get to sleep because they are worried about getting enough sleep to get up early. My hip started hurting me (old injury from running for a bus) so I figure I’ll get up and take some ibuprofen. At the same time, Luna starts barking bloody murder at some unseen intruder in the back yard. She has been doing this lately. I take the aspririn and take a drink in my cupped hands, it goes down wrong, she keeps barking, I start coughing, she keeps barking, I cough harder, then I’m sitting on the floor of the bathroom. I must have blacked out from the coughing. I have this dizzy feeling faint thing for which they have run a ton of tests but have found nothing. Anyway, I climb back up to standing. I look in the mirror and there’s a scrape on my head and my ribs hurt. I must have hit them going down. I go back to bed and tell Tami what happened. I don’t think she really knows how to react. It’s probably scary for her. Luna doesn’t care.
The pain in my ribs is bad and I feel like I’ll want to go to Copake Rapid Care in the morning. I start thinking about cancelling some meetings. I can’t get to sleep so I abandon the idea of waking up at 5. I finally get to sleep around 4. We get up around 7:30. I hurt less now so decide not to go to Rapid Care. We leave around 8 for an uneventful drive. At work, I have lunch with Jeff who is always a joy to see. Since I work remotely now, I rarely see him.
The heat broke and I’m walking up the hill on Sky Farm Road with our terrier cattle dog, Luna, holding her leash as she jumps for butterflies and digs for who-knows-what. She has an innate need to herd the rare car that comes by. She lies in wait, carefully eyeing it, getting ready to pounce when it passes. I hold the leash tight and tell her ,”Stay, stay, it’s OK” and most of the time now, she does. She’s about 9 months old now and, despite her rambunctiousness, is fairly well-behaved and responds to cues well.
After a year out in the country, we have 5 chickens (down from 8), 3 goats, 1 dog and 1 cat. Karen, our cat, is the matriarch but isn’t allowed to go outside, so that cramps her style. The wildlife is brutal out here. While I know she could rule the neighborhood in Melrose, here she has to deal with foxes, coyote, hawks and we’ve even seen a black bear to whom she would lose. She and Luna spar a lot but I have faith that they will work it out. We see steady progress, both of them on the bed and stuff. Luna just wants to play, I think, and she’s a puppy, so she has a lot of energy.
We take her out for walks at the park, a huge expanse of hills and fields and trails which is stunningly beautiful. Everything out here (Columbia County, NY) is stunningly beautiful. I just can’t get over it. In the park, at the top of the hill, there is a bench we sit on and look out at the fields, the little church in the town just to the north, hills in the distance. Wildflowers are everywhere, scattered like paint drops on the green fields. It’s as if Jackson Pollack and Norman Rockwell worked on a painting together.
Our house is a character all on its own. Rambling, red, with two bars (main and tiki), a great front porch, a balcony in the great room which hold one bar, a beautiful living room painted by Tony and a fully functioning modern kitchen, with a dishwasher! The house was built by the previous owners and they put all sorts of love and creativity into it. Each room is its own space and has its own character. It has G-clefs in the stanchions of the porch and eighth notes scattered all over.
I am playing a lot more music and writing a lot more songs. I play at the open mics in the area and have met a lot of cool people. The Hudson Valley music scene is very rich and there is no shortage of things to do. I thought I would be bored out here, missing the rich cultural life of Boston, but was pleasantly surprised to find that there is no shortage of cultural beauty out here. I haven’t missed Boston as much as I thought I would. Having been a city kid for 40 years, I thought I would have to adjust, but I don’t miss the subway and the traffic and the density. I miss the many cultures alive in the city and it is admittedly much more white here, but not completely.
Tami has gone through all the New York State bureaucracy in order to get here Occupational Therapy credentials moved out here. She is working and is also busy with our goats and chickens. The chickens we’ve had for a year. We have lost 3 to predators but the other ones are thriving. They give us lots of eggs!
The goats were a long time coming. We had to build a pen for them which was more work than I thought. Finally I got help and we got it done and got the 3 Nigerian Dwarf goats this weekend. They are very amusing and eat a lot of grass. I have made a see-saw for them and will build other playthings to climb on.
I have about 4 more weeks in Boston, then I’m a country boy. I don’t find it easy to leave here. I am very connected to this city. Once you’ve been a bike messenger in a place, then you’ve got its streets in your bones. Much has changed in the 35 or so years I’ve been here, but when you’re talking about a city that has been here for almost 4 centuries, there’s a lot that hasn’t. The ubiquitous brick, the Richardson Puddingstone, the brutalist slabs; they all make up the urban landscape for me.
When I started as a messenger in March of 1987, we used to make a drop at the State House at the top of Beacon Hill. We then would ride really fast down Beacon St., across Tremont St, down School St. with a left onto Washington and quick right onto Water and glide all the way down to the end of Water St at Broad St. It was like a roller coaster ride. We would swoop through each intersection, blending in with the traffic, almost getting hit, but “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. That little spine of streets is the heart of Boston as I see it.
Now I work in the Seaport, a place of constant growth after lying dormant for decades, home to parking lots and fish piers. When I was a messenger, we did a lot of work shuttling plans around for Fan Pier and Anthony’s Pier 4. Fan Pier was built back then with the Moakley Courthouse on it. Anthony’s is just getting to its thing now. Over the last 5 years the growth has exploded and the parking lots have all grown into hi-rises, or actually 18 story rises, because I think there is a height limit imposed by the airport across the harbor. This has the effect of negating any possible skyline that might develop here. From a distance, I imagine the place will look like a block in the future, much like parts of the Bronx.
I am trying to take in all the cultural amenities while I can. We went to the MFA (another former employer), ate dinner on Broad St., went to the Lizard Lounge, etc. Not that there’s nothing where I’m going, it’s just that it is so prevalent here. It will always draw me back. I want to develop a routine of coming back here monthly, working, doing music with the Triplets and taking in at least one cultural urban experience. That will be good for me and keep me sane.
Past The Headlands from Headlands, Tom May – vocal, Greg Smith – composer
I am the guy comes all the way up to the entrance of the ramp, passing the line of cars on my right and then cutting in front of you at the last possible second. I am the woman with 13 items in the 10 items or less line at the market. I am the guy using his outside voice in a relatively quiet bar. I am the guy who lists purple as one the colors of people whom I treat equally.
I am the woman who believes men should act like men and if that means I get my pussy grabbed, well, hey! I am the man who is scared. I am the guy who works hard and believes anyone can do the same. I am the person who can’t understand why people have to change their gender and it makes me say, “Ick.” I am the guy who comes from pioneer stock and has hardship and danger in my blood and my bones. I have a time-share in Branson. I am the person who is uncomfortable around people unlike me. I am a Plugger.
I am the guy who does things because I can. I am the guy who makes his pipes on his Harley louder. I have been in fights. As an adult. I am the guy who feels like I have never gotten a break. I am from the stock of people who owned other people. I will be rich one day. I believe in and thrive on the American Dream.
Day 4: Start the day very worried about our cat, Karen, who ran out of the house just before we had to leave for the airport. She usually comes back eventually but not immediately so I figured she’d come in for Andrea who is looking after the animals. But messages from Andrea for the past 2 days tell us she hasn’t shown up.
Today we are going down to Lincoln so Tami can meet up with her college boyfriend, Carlton, whom she hasn’t seen in 35 years. Rather than the interstate, I like to do the blue roads, so we set off down route 77.
Anti-choice signs in cornfields are big around here. Holier-than-thou farmers’ wives have a mission which they see as saving lives but is actually just their way of being catty toward women who were getting some when they weren’t gettin’ any. The lives they purport to be saving they are actually condemning to struggle and strife because the only person who really has any control over this zygote’s fate knows full well that she can’t handle it right now and needs to wait, but can’t because these catty church ladies insist on doing everything they can to shut down every clinic and harass every doctor who would help her to exercise the control over her body that God has given her. God is not going to judge her for making the choice that is clearly the best for her family; only the church ladies are.
I’m sorry if this sounds harsh but the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Right in America is dragging this great country into the sewer. And my cat is missing.
But besides these signs, the Nebraska landscape in the drizzling rain is sublime. It’s flat, mostly, vast cornfields straddled by bug-like irrigation machines that pivot in great circles around a water pipe. Today, in the November rain, there are no machines running. The corn has been harvested and the husks are brown.
We drive through Indian reservation towns where you can get cheap cigarettes and gasoline. Right now their Water-Protector brothers are being frozen by water cannons and humiliated by tear gas up at the DAPL. The American shame just keeps coming and coming.
Each little town has a sign listing all the churches in it. A town of 500 may have ten different houses of worship. But they all get along for the most part.
We pull into Lincoln, the capital of Nebraska and a college town. A new basketball arena sits to the right and the Huskers stadium towers on the left. This state runs on Huskers football and the stadium represents it monolithically.
We go to Haymarket and meet Carlton at Laslo’s. He’s a good guy with a nice smile and a positive attitude. After a Templeton Rye, I leave them to catch up and I go off to the music stores.
In the first one, CGS Music, a sprawling independent outfit, half of which is devoted to repair and thus is strewn with myriad instruments in various states of disrepair. Of particular interest is a 7 string fretless hollow-body bass from which the bridge has detached. I would love to see this thing in all its glory. In the 2 instrument rooms there are Weissenborns, Dobros, Pipas, Charangas, Ukelele basses, and upright basses, along with the usual complement of guitars and ukes. The proprietor tells me that in the large space he has downstairs, he has different community events-a Ukelele group tonight, a blues jam tomorrow night. I tell him this is the model many independent bookstores are using now: being a community gathering place for all kinds of groups. This fosters loyalty and repeat business.
We all go out to lunch at a steak house, Misty’s, which brews its own beer. Carlton and I got ribeyes while Tami got a prime rib. While there, I got a text from Andrea saying Karen (“that slut”) returned and was fine. This picks up my spirits immensely. We drove back on the Interstate, hitting Omaha right at rush hour.
(Photo by Tami Kander)
Conceptual Irregularities 