Living in a War Zone - The Shape of Things to Come

Inheriting a house could be an unusual and foreign experience.  Most children, because they have developed their own lives and families, chose not to go backward in time.  It is understandable.  Our pasts often are laden with personal baggage, and it is all we can do to unload it.  Choosing to revisit past chapters of our lives is risky.  Concurrently our past is who we are.  It is our soul and our history, but a man is what he does.  As you age assembling that new agenda each and every day becomes more difficult.  Your mind slows, and it becomes helpful to have visual cues to remind you of yourself.  I never pontificated any of this, until I inherited my mother's house.  (Of course it was the family home, but upon my father's death and because both children were grown, it became my mother's house.)  It was surprising to me the things she was willing to dispose of, and what she adamantly needed to keep.  The first things to go were my father's chair and footstool, our brown den couch, and our Roses store coffee and end tables.  It was not long after that we bought a brown leather recliner to take their place.  The process of getting rid of things that remind you of strife, sorrow, and grief is large and complicated.  If you listen to your soul it will tell you the correct answers.  There are just certain things you can't remember, because they are too painful.  There is no reason that a home cannot be repurposed even by the family, but it is a soul-wrenching, lifelong, difficult task.  What I have discovered is the clutter of which people often speak is as destructive as they suggest.  Clutter from the past in particular keeps you in the past, but this clutter or sentimental memorabilia is a part of us.  It is our memories, our good times, and our family.  Who would want to dispose of those?  As such on the shelves of the garage is all of our family's Christmas paraphernalia.  These spiritual, religious, and personal decorations defy qualification, and therefore they deserve to be kept.  In most older generation attics you will find the complete history of their family.  A few visits to estate sales and quickly you will understand other people feel the same way.  Personal items from older generations are the roots of our own generation, so they are kept.  You don't want to look at these each and every day.  In my case when I returned home to ensure both my parents adequately were cared for, I gave up my previous job.  I was a ship's pianist, and I had spent ten years playing in the orchestra for three large cruise lines.  Ten years as a caregiver was long enough to eliminate these memories.  That isn't true, but hanging on to that lifestyle was pointless.  I didn't want to, because it was extremely challenging and a full time job.  Because I was not earning money as a musician anymore, and because I was living at home my musical interests took a different direction.  I began to restore vintage keyboard instruments, and my interest in audio recording returned.  These were things I could do with the aid of a house, a structure that lent itself to housing instruments.  It had a garage, which I began to use whole heartedly.  When my mother died and I inherited this house the decisions began.  Could this home, this structure, provide the infrastructure I needed for another musical life?  I began to think of it this way.  Successful people plan their work and work their plan, and you must be able to visualize the completion of your goals.  I began my journey alone in this house that way, and I completed most of my tasks.  Was it out of the question or out of bounds to believe a home in a neighborhood could be used to record music?  We had a Hammond A-100 organ and a Knabe baby grand piano.  Likewise I had the instruments I had restored, which amounted to FIVE Rhodes electric pianos.  These are rather large and heavy, but I managed to find places for them.  Each piano over time acquired its own recording system, so that no matter which one I chose to play, with the connection of a few cords I could produce an extremely high quality Quicktime video.  I spent hours fine tuning these little rigs, and these Rhodes pianos sound better than most.  One reason why is they benefited from stability.  I was not on the road with a band, living in an apartment or a rental property, or otherwise unstable.  Other than the rumbling of freight trains and the pressure waves of ascending commercial jets, for the most part things remain the same.  The question has become can it go a step further?  Can and will these instruments get used professionally, or are they being wasted?  I continued on this path with fervor fully deserving to use this home for its best purposes, but it did not take long before I was shot down.  With many more years of musical work experience, and having newly studied American Roots Music, my realization of music was at its peak.  Stop for a moment and imagine that unless  you live in a million dollar house in a gated community, you are just like everyone else.  Every neighborhood, no matter what  income, is just a trailer park with people piled on top of each other.  You may live in separate buildings, but what is common knowledge is everyone knows what everyone else does.  If Blind Willie McTell, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Bill Evans, or Arthur Rubenstein live next to you, you know it.  There is no way that music cannot spill out into the neighborhood, even if you have spent thousands of dollars insulating the house.  The more operative realization is, gentrification has occurred.  My mother was ninety-two when she died, and her death was accompanied by a mass exodus of her generation in our neighborhood.  All of the homes that were cornerstones of the neighborhood, and had stood unchanged for decades, suddenly are vacant.  What is the new clientele?  They say, "Yes sir, no sir," and go to bed a seven o'clock at night and get up at three a.m.  Irving Berlin would not be happy, because most creative work occurs when the world rests.  It only is when that annoying nag of the military stops, that anxious, "Hurry up and wait," that the accompanying community can indulge in their own interests.  As it turns out ninety percent of the time we are swept away in their rip tide.  I for one do not have to be ready to deploy in 48 hours.  It is a grand failure of Nature verses Nurture, because no matter how much music you have in your head and heart, it cannot defeat seven Apache helicopters.