Julia B. Hebner, author

Do you remember old songs with pleasure? Really old songs? One hundred years old or more?

I do. I don’t know why I remember them or where I first heard them. I’ve never been a fan of barbershop quartets and I wasn’t in the school choir. But I’ll sometimes hum that big hit of 1892 — “Bicycle Built for Two.”

My last piano lesson, pre-coronavirus, was February 1, and I have been practicing the same two assigned pieces every morning since then, right after I pull the quilt up over the bed and before breakfast. After weeks of daily exercise, my fingers fall smoothly on the right keys for all the chords, without crashes. The harder piece begins to sound like music. The other piece is a march so even through fumbles, a steady rhythm saves it. 

But I have to practice something besides those two pieces.

Happily for me, a friend, learning I was taking piano lessons, passed along her childhood copy of  The American Song Treasury – 100 Favorites and it was right on top of my piano, staring me in the eye.  Almost every song inside is familiar to me.

But not some of the words. A cheerful tune does not guarantee cheerful verses.

Sure, things are great for Daisy Belle and her anonymous groom on that tandem bike, but what’s really going on in “There is a Tavern in the Town”? Turns out it’s not a jolly drinking song at all. It’s a song of betrayal ending with a grave.

And that haunting waltz, “After the Ball is Over”? It’s the heartbreaking story of a man’s true love, lost to him through his own mistrust, and how she died and he never loved another — as told to his little niece. Now there’s a bedtime story any little child would enjoy!

“The Man on the Flying Trapeze”? The handsome aerialist steals the singer’s girlfriend. “Listen to the Mocking Bird” is a tearjerker. The Sweet Hallie of the song sleeps in the valley and the mocking bird sings over her grave. Oh, also weeping willows (of course). “Camptown Races” glories in the joys of gambling. “Billy Boy” is about a child bride, unsavory (to say the least) from today’s perspective. But the tune is catchy.

Nursery rhymes can be problematic for me, too. Is Bobby Shaftoe trustworthy? What the heck is going on with the Spanish nut tree? Where do I stand on the politics of “Goosey, Goosey Gander”?

Because I never learned to carry a tune, I don’t condone these verses with my own voice. Why wreck a good tune with off-key singing?

If only I could refrain from thinking, the music would sound even better!

Good produce did not grace my childhood.  We had bananas and red delicious apples and two kinds of vegetables: canned or frozen. Mama’s choices were limited. She didn’t keep a garden and she didn’t have a car to search out better grocery stores or summer produce stands. 

There were watermelons, of course, and those were wonderful. And for a few days in the summer ripe pears fell from a tree in a neighbors’ yard. We kids brushed the wasps off and ate around the rotten spots with juice dripping off our chins.

After I married, my in-laws supplied us with bushels (literally) of fresh vegetables. I took up gardening, too, though not on the same scale as my in-laws. Green beans snap louder when you pick them from your own vines. And we live close to a farmers’ market piled high with all the produce I don’t grow. And, oh, the fruit! The glorious fruit.

In our kitchen, right now, there is watermelon, three kinds of peaches, nectarines, small yellow plums, apricots, blackberries, red raspberries, blueberries and sweet, plump cherries.

Spring through fall is a parade of fruits at Lakeside Farmers’ Market, from the first strawberries through the last kinds of apple. The peaches taste better every year. To smell of a ripe white peach is reminiscent of a rose. It is no work at all to eat three of the little donut peaches in a sitting.

Today, in our own back yard, birds are plucking elderberries off the bushes, the figs are fattening, and the persimmon tree sports squat green globes. Egg-shaped fruits ripen on  the passion flower vine, but our June apples are long gone, baked in a pie.

Are you feeling depressed and discouraged from an overdose of The News? Are your brain cells discombobulated from Too Much Screen Time?

Cleanse your mental palate with a peach! Savor a miracle of creation. The right peach can rekindle your appreciation for the world.

A friend’s email begins: “Thank you for your real mail note sometime ago.”

I am sorry that my friend feels her email message is somehow Less Than a snail mail note. If an infrequent email is the best way for her to send me news of her life, she can be sure I am happy whenever that email pops up in my inbox.

Of course, “real” mail has the distinct advantage of being tangible.

Real mail can be crushed in anger and lit with a match. It can be ripped up in frustration — used as lining on the bottom of the parakeet’s cage — soaked in tears or treasured for years.

My own emails can take on a cold tone I never intended. My friend of the email above, in contrast, writes in a way that even Comic Sans MS font cannot diffuse the warmth and personality.

Email is great for factual messages — date, time, place — but usually too dry for nuance. A group email to my bookclubs is so much more efficient than individual phone calls.

Text messaging my have the same built in limitations as email but it also has easy-to-use emoticons, the hieroglyphics of the modern age. A smiling cat face humanizes any message (sometimes inappropriately!). And texting is so immediate, so of-the-moment, that it can’t be beat for sending out a “We are running five minutes late” kind of message. Take THAT, snail mail!

It’s nice to live in an age with so many choices, but, I confess, I do like snail mail. A handmade card, a lovely paper, inked script in lavender or orange — snail mail can be a small treat for the senses.

Who stays in? Who’s left out? And  what painful twinges will bite me when I read some of these names?

These are the questions facing me as I slip a new address book out of its clear cellophane envelope and set it on the desk beside the old, battered address book.

The new address book sports a pristine white cover with large, evenly-space gold dots. It opens flat for easy use. It is larger than the shabby old address book with its worn corners, covers bulging from the scraps of paper tucked between its pages, messy with crossed-out entries and new information glued over the old.

The new address book is appealing, in part, because its holds no entries. Each page waits to be filled in. Like January 1, it’s all new. Anything is possible and there are no mistakes and no regrets. This address book, like anything else new and shiny, promises a fresh start to a small section of my life.  I am lured by this golden mirage, and allow myself to fall into the myth of consumerism: The right purchase can save me!

Of course the new address book is not really a pill for what ails me. I am way behind in my correspondence (procrastination? distraction?) and, about those names and addresses that won’t be transferred, I am sad. But I will have to face the names and addressed in the old address book to fill in the blanks in the new one, even if this is a task fraught with emotion. Each name sparks a response, however fleeting.

There are entries that won’t be transferred because the names that head them have gone home, passed on beyond the reach of even the United States Post Office, as efficient as its mail delivery system is.

My brother recently assumed membership in this group and I miss writing to him, which I did two or three times a month. He never wrote back. In my letters, I wrote about whatever held my interest at the time. Only beside his bed in the hospice wing of the hospital, where he lay comatose, did I learn that he not only read my letters, he also sometimes read them aloud to others. I hoped to brighten up his day with my letters. I guess I did.

No, my brother no longer needs space in my address book. Nor does my baby sister. She is angry at me for undoubtedly appears to her more than sufficient grounds. She moved across the country and sent no forwarding address. I can’t blame her. It’s not her fault. But I miss her wit and sparkling stories. Will I ever see her or my nephew again?  Of all the family traits we would carry through the generations, never-speaking-to-you-again is one I had hoped would drop from our DNA. (Sigh.)

Other old entries memorialize several valiant crusaders for the welfare of mankind. These friends, too, have passed on. If they have found an afterlife, I hope it provides a comforting perspective on the troubles of civilization so they can put down their banners and petitions and put up their feet. They did their best and deserve some rest.

What to do with those addresses of people I haven’t heard from in years? This man was widowed and took up a new life in Seattle. It seems unlikely he’d still be living in the same apartment. I write his name in ink and his address in pencil. Here are good friends from college. We were witnesses at their marriage. Though they are still together and still overseas, this address surely isn’t still current. Again: name in ink, address in pencil.

I work my way through the alphabetized entries, smiling at some names and (a couple times) cringing at other names. At the end of the old book, I toss its pages into recycling. All that remains is a pile of loose notes and clipping that were tucked between its pages. What is all this stuff, anyway?

Mostly, is it the current addresses of inmates whose “housing assignments” may change at any time at the whim of the state. And there are lists of internet pass words. What to do with these?

And here is where I make the happy discovery of a folder attached to the back cover of my spanking new purchase — a perfect place to tuck these loose papers. In this one minuscule way, my new address book delivers on that implied promise of a Better Life through Consumerism.

But wait! Oh no! This new book is too large to fit in the drawer where I kept the old one.

Now I have to clean the drawer out. Once again, I am ensnared by materialism.

While waiting in my car for my daughter-n-law to emerge from Kroger’s with her shopping cart, I lifted my head from my book at the sound of whistling. A man with a single bag of groceries swinging from his hand walked across the parking lot under the clear blue sky of a perfect spring morning, whistling a clear and perfect tune. The notes hung in the air, outside of time, creating a clear and perfect moment.

That same evening, as I parked my car in another large parking lot, I was surprised by the sound of a recorder weaving under and over the soft buzz of a light rain. A woman sat under the canopy in front of Barnes & Noble, a music book open on the bench in front of her. She wasn’t as accomplished as the morning’s whistler. Her notes were sometimes sour and the tune was hard to follow. It sounded to my ears as if she were trying the music for the first time. Still — there she was! playing a recorder in front of the book store in the rain.

Could these be the first signs of societal transfiguration, I wondered. If so, what could be next? My neighbor singing along to golden oldies on the radio while he weeds his peas?

Maybe the dog walkers and stroller pushers will leave their phones at home and sing a happy song as they walk down the street past my house. Maybe they will all walk together and sing rounds. The babies will laugh and clap along. The dogs will prance.

Maybe — instead of the harsh racket of lawn mowers, leaf blowers and chain saws — the birdsong of a summer’s day will be over laid with with happy sounds of neighbors on their patios and porches laughing and strumming guitars and dancing to fiddle music. 

What is life for anyway? ear protection, weed killer and uniformly green lawns? or joviality, music and meadows?

My contribution toward this coming transformation? I practice piano with the windows open.

So pull out your trombone or accordion. Pick up your drum sticks or bagpipes. Polish up your flute. Warble with the mocking bird. Be the change I’d like to hear.

YouTube found “Havana” by Camila Cabello just for me and I liked it. I listed to it again and again. Havana’s story arch — punctuated with laughter and complete with happy ending — drew me right in. The video switches back and forth, from English to Spanish.

Because I liked “Havana”, YouTube brought me other bi-lingual music videos. I liked those so YouTube presented Spanish only videos, including ones featuring Natalia LaFourcade. Her voice is so pure and her songs so compelling, I was briefly convinced that I must be the last person in the whole world to know about her. Even if you, like me, don’t understand Spanish, surely you know Natalia LaFourcade!

LaFourcado’s “La Llorona” opens with graceful guitar lines and waltzes into a haunting song. A figure draped with an embroidered shawl flits about cemeteries, churches, and streets during Day of the Dead. Candles flicker by tombstones decked with flowers and Marigold petals drift from a child’s hand. Faces in the street are painted like skulls.

When I visited Oaxaca during Day of the Dead, I could feel things happening all around me. But it was like being color blind in front of a peacock. The solemnity passed through me, a sigh of mystery, incomprehensible, foreign.

In a house with the rooms built around an open courtyard, two elderly women sat at a long dining room table, drinking mescal with their late husbands, whose faces smiled from faded photographs decked with flowers. In a cometary after dark, families picnicked on grave sites, sharing food with the dearly departed. Something was happening, but I couldn’t say what.

The song La Llorona was an echo of that feeling. But I thought maybe I could pin it down.

An internet search supplied three different English translations of LaFourcade’s lyrics — different being the key word. At least two of the translations had to be wrong. According to Wikipedia, La Llorona is the legendary Mexican ghost, The Weeping Woman who drowned her own children. The traditional folk-song version has many verses, with multiple interpretations.Death, Life, Loss, and Love are all in there, but they slide around. It is a folksong with a number of meanings. I could forget about pinning it down.

Death, Life, Loss, and Love were also the underpinnings of a lengthy phone conversation between my uncle and me the other night. He would ask me, Do you remember your grandparents’ house on Markley Street? Your Great Grandmother Creager? Her mother, Grandma Clark, who saw Abraham Lincoln from her father’s shoulders? Our Grandmother Barnard? I remember them all. I can pick them out in photos and home movies. They are the main characters in family stories.

My father’s and my uncle’s perspectives are different, so even when they tell the same story, it is not exactly the same. But the woman shine. The stories of these strong women nurtured me. It makes sad to know that someday a descendant will pick up a photo of Grandma Clark without knowing who she was or the courage she wielded as a young widow.

Marigolds, candles, and mescal will not summon any of my grandmothers or my father for a visit, even on Day of the Dead. And I wouldn’t know it if they did? It’s outside our tradition and copying the trappings from Day of the Dead won’t bring us into a space where we will know each other again.

But, even in Oaxaca, someone must remember you to put out your photograph. Someday, no one will remember you or put out your photograph and you, and all your stories, will be truly gone from this world.

ONE

The Last Days of Night starts not with a bang, but with bright sparks and a POP. What follows is historically accurate and gruesome enough for a zombie flick.

Author Graham Moore shrinks this tale of the patent wars between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison and hangs it over a coat hanger constructed of the imagined biography of a real couple, a young New York lawyer and a celebrated opera singer. Also, J.P. Morgan, Nikola Tesla, Fisk College, Niagara Falls, a glittering New York City, and Alexandra Graham Bell.

Our hero, Paul the lawyer, on behalf of inventor Westinghouse, tries to counter the machinations of inventor Edison. Paul gets played. Then he gets wise.

This story rattles straight down the tracks like the locomotives pulling one of the many trains Paul boards. Each of the seventy-two (yes, 72!) brief chapters starts with a quote from an inventor or scientist. The narration itself shares this bent toward the contemplative even as it moves right along. Paul’s interior monologue is often insightful. 

Abrupt jumps between chapters/scenes can be distracting. And my pleasure in reading was interrupted by wondering which parts of this historical fiction were real and which parts were invented. (The epilogue clears up this up.) To me, the build-up to the climax  was somewhat mechanical, and the conclusion itself was a bit too feel-good to be true.

That said, it’s a good read: Titans of Industry brawl across the North American continent like Godzilla vs Mothra!

TWO

After every mass shooting, the cry goes up: Why does this keep happening? Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment is aimed right at naive gun control advocates.

Roxanne Dumbar-Ortiz packs a powerful explanation into these two hundred pages. You may already be aware of the historical events here, but after this book you will no longer see them as isolated incidents, anomalies outside our country’s march toward liberty and justice for all. This relentless account is a kick in the solar plexus of that comfortable mythology. The book is one bloody scene of genocide and corpse mutilation after another, with context. [If this blog had sound effects, there would be wails and sobbing here.]

Loaded not only opens your eyes, it rips off your eyelids you can never not see this stuff again. You may not agree with Dumbar-Ortiz’s explanation of how we got where we are — but you won’t forget it.

THREE

Any book that can make me see Henry Kissinger as an affectionate friend instead of a comic book villain is a book worth reading! Losing Mum and Pup, A Memoir is that book.

I was no fan of William F. Buckley’s syndicated newspaper column. His over use of five-cylinder words came across as sneering to me and I didn’t understand the underpinnings of his viewpoint. But his son’s novels? Christopher Buckley‘s fiction is funny.

So when I saw the younger Buckley’s name on the spine of this book at Book People, I plucked the book off the shelf. I thought I would enjoy it. I did.

The Buckley’s knew people whose names I know only from the news. Christopher Buckley brings them to life, including his famous father and much-loved mother. Looking back through the lens of this book, I can almost see W.F.B.’s long words as humorous and almost see where he’s coming from.

Losing Mum and Pup is funny. It is touching. It is as real as can be. And it includes one reason the Viet Nam war extended into the Nixon years. All very nice.

Almost restful.