Music Man

For the most part, the men I have met over the seven years I’ve participated in social introduction sites have fizzled out – either through lack of interest, lack of memory or just plain lack of fuel to keep a long-distance relationship going. There is just one who has lasted as our relationship has evolved from friendship to seduction to love affair to a best friend, romantic brother/sister relationship where we are crazy about each other from a distance – willing to do anything for each other that can be done from 1500 miles away, including advising each other over other romantic relationships as we share heartbreaks, frustrations and all the problems of daily life.

In this strange cyber world, we are all slipping into by varying degrees, he has become one of the most important people in my life, even though it has been two years since we’ve met in person. He is my blog administrator, copy editor and computer tech. He reminds me to pay my helpers, lock my doors at night and turn the lights out. When I lost my camera, he found it from 1500 miles away in Missouri by checking the message boards in my hometown in Mexico! Once, when I was at the beach, when a friend came by and handed me something as I lay on a hammock on my front porch, he Skyped me asking me what she had handed me—having seen it on the beach cam of my next-door neighbor, which just happened to pick up the corner of the porch I rent every year! (I know. Sounds creepy, but it wasn’t.)

Since he hardly ever leaves his house or his computer screen unless he is asleep, a “date” for us has a unique meaning. He is usually available within a few minutes via Skype. He checks my computers from afar, patrolling for viruses or needed updates. He is there when I receive good news and bad. He monitors my after-midnight swims in the pool or my journeys down to the studio, waiting to check that I am safely back in bed within a reasonable amount of time – one hour or two, depending on how ensconced I become in my late night/early morning adventures. But with all the roles he has assumed in my life over the years we’ve known each other, one of his most important roles right from the first is as my “Music Man!”

For the first four months I knew him, he played his guitar and sang me to sleep every night over Skype, the camera of my laptop trained on my face so he could see when I slept and say goodnight and go back into his own world where few strayed. Those serenades continued off and on for the next year, but since then, he has been my music man in other ways: sending favorite songs I request as well as songs I’ve never heard before that I open like Christmas packages.

On the CD’s he has made for me or the iTunes he’s sent are my own favorites: Emmylou, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits, Stacey Earle, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Dan Bern, Chris Smither, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Lila Downs, and Janice Joplin. Joining them are his favorites, some of whom I’d never heard of before: Brett Dennen, Joe Purdy, Steve Earle, and Nanci Griffith. He has created a new world for me composed of Towns Van Zandt, Eva Cassidy, Jolie Holland, the Wailin’ Jennys and Iris DeMent along with songs discovered via movie soundtracks or the background music of favorite TV shows. The Avett Brothers we discovered together. I no longer remember which one of us first stumbled across them on a YouTube video of the Letterman show.

Music was our courtship. Since he is too much a rebel to participate in the regular celebrations of society, songs became my valentines, my birthday gifts and Christmas stockings. Where others gave flowers, he gave lyrics. “I and Love and You” was declared to me by the Avett Brothers. When Amy Lavere sang to me, “Lucky boy, lucky boy, ‘cause I’m your lovely girl,” I got the message that I was the lovely girl and he the lucky boy, even though in the past he had advised me not to interpret all the songs as messages. 

I now have over 471 songs on my computer – most of them sent by him. They are the songs I listen to every time I have guests, when I am in my car or in my studio. They keep me company at night in the pool or my studio. The first thing the man who comes to my house to give me a weekly massage does when he enters the room is to click on my iPod in its speaker/holder. He says this is his favorite place to come – partly because of the calm and the art, but more so because of the music.

My music man. I’ll see him in person in September and it will be wonderful to give him a hug and a kiss, to travel up to Minnesota together to see my sister and nieces and to Alabama to see other friends but this man who has been by turns my serenader, my computer tech, my editor, my confidante, my lover and my best friend has, in addition to everything else, given me one invaluable gift. He has created the soundtrack to my life.