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🎵 Yola - Symphony

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#VortexWave #Yola #Americana #Country #2020s

There's no rap diss song that has a line as devastating as Phoebe Bridgers singing "Why do you sing in an English accent, guess it's too late to change it now" in Motion Sickness about ex-boyfriend Ryan Adams. Fatality.

#indie #indiefolk #indierock #americana #music

Rainbow Rodeo is BACK at NYC's home for queer country: Branded Saloon! Giddy on up from 8 to 10 PM for Cindy Emch, Emily Frembgen, Christian Rutledge, and a surprise guest!

2-drink minimum, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds!

RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/AIlxMasmr5ImkSbwDOKD?c=yezxqaqd

#countrymusic #americana #altcountry #queercountry #nyc #brooklyn #nycgaybars #nyclgbtq

LISTEN: Joel Brogon bears testament to his history and the majesty of his home -- and the peril it faces -- in the stately song "Here on the Rio Grande."

https://rainbowrodeomag.com/listen-joel-brogon-honors-the-earth-here-on-the-rio-grande/

#QueerCountry #Americana #CountryMusic #RootsMusic #LGBTQMusic #QueerMusic #LGBTQMusician #lgbtq #Texas #RioGrande #EarthDay

Up On Blocks

I have been up on blocks so long that the earth has half-forgotten I was made to move.

The tires are gone, long gone, and what remains of me rests on four cinder blocks sunk crooked into the soil behind the barn. Grass has grown up around my axles in the springs and browned away in the summers and lain flat beneath the snow in winters too many to count. The ground beneath me has hardened to my shape. The fieldstone lane nearby remembers the weight of me better than I do now. Sometimes, in the hot shimmer of July, I can almost feel the old turning in my wheels, the hum running up through my frame, the shudder of the engine, the deep-throated labor that once was my voice.

Now, I am mostly silence.

But silence is not emptiness. Silence is full of memory.

Once, I was red.

Not the faded, powdering red I wear now, flaked and eaten by weather, but a full red, bright and proud, with a shine that caught the sun and made small boys run their hands along my side as if I were a stallion. My chrome flashed. My mirrors stood straight. My bench seat smelled of vinyl and dust and tobacco and the faint sweetness of feed sacks. The man who first owned me used to wash me on Saturdays with a bucket and rag and old T-shirt, whistling as he did, stepping back every so often to admire the line of my hood as if he had built me himself.

He bought me in town.

I remember the day because he was younger than any of the men I later knew him to be. His stride had spring in it. His hands were strong and hard but not yet swollen. He wore a cap pushed back and laughed with the salesman like they were equals before he signed the papers. Then he slid behind the wheel, placed both hands on me, and for a moment sat without turning the key, breathing in the reality of me. A truck is not a horse and not a house and not a friend, but sometimes a man sits in one as though all three might somehow be true.

He drove me home slow at first, listening. Then faster, because trust has always liked the sound of acceleration.

I hauled fence posts, hay bales, seed, wire, crates of chicks peeping in cardboard, and dogs that rode in the back with their tongues out and their ears whipped straight by the wind. I knew the ruts of every lane and the shallow ford by the creek before the culvert went in. I knew the weight of wet soil in spring and the powder-fine dust of August roads. I knew the way November geese crossed above the windshield while frost worked silver around the corners of the glass.

I carried calves in trouble and one old ewe that lay panting on a burlap sack while the farmer’s wife kept one hand on her side all the way to the vet. I carried milk cans once or twice before that was done with. I carried baskets of tomatoes, sweet corn, children in church clothes, and Christmas gifts hidden under an old blanket in the back.

I was there when courting was still partly a matter of driving somewhere and saying nothing that could not be improved by a long gravel road.

The woman came into my life with her hem held just above the mud, and her hair pinned up though one stubborn strand kept coming loose by her cheek. The man had washed me twice that day and cleaned the windshield inside and out. He had even rubbed the dash with something that smelled sharp and artificial, trying to make me finer than I was. She climbed in on the passenger side and shut the door carefully, as though entering a church. They spoke quietly at first. Then more easily. I carried them under sycamores and along the edge of fields yellowing into autumn. At one point she laughed so hard she leaned forward and put her hand on the dash to steady herself, and I remember thinking, if a truck may think such a thing, that I had been included in something holy.

Years passed through me like weather through a grove.

Children came. First one, then another, then another still. Mud on boots. Crumbs in the seams of the seat. Little fingerprints on the windows. Fighting in the cab. Singing in the cab. Crying in the cab. Sleeping in the cab with open mouths while dusk pooled blue in the fields and their father drove home one-handed, the other arm draped across the seat behind them all as though he could keep them safe by spanning the space.

They learned me before they learned many other things.

They stood on my running boards and pretended they were captains, cowboys, racers, fugitives, astronauts. They turned my wheel with solemn intensity while I sat parked in the yard and made engine sounds with their own mouths. They named roads I had never traveled. They outran invisible bandits. They delivered imaginary cattle to distant cities. They escaped floods and wars and dinosaurs. Once, one of the boys sat behind the wheel in a rainstorm and pretended to drive through the end of the world while drops drummed on my roof and lightning showed his face in pale flashes, serious and rapt, as if childhood itself were a form of prophecy.

I knew their games. I held them all.

Sometimes, they climbed in my bed and made it a fort. Sometimes, a pirate ship. Sometimes, a pulpit. Boards laid across the sides became seats and pews and palace walls. A stick was a rifle one day and a shepherd’s crook the next. A rusted coffee can full of stones became treasure. Hay chaff became gold. The smallest one liked to tuck himself beneath the dash and say he was in a secret cave. Their voices filled me with a life not even gasoline had given.

And always beyond us other cars passed on the road.

At first, they were kin of a sort. Trucks and sedans of my own era, boxy and earnest and built from metal that knew weather. Men waved from open windows. Women drove with scarves over their hair. Then, slowly, the shapes changed. The years grew rounder, shinier, faster. Windshields widened. Tailfins rose and vanished. Colors brightened and dulled. The passing cars became strangers wearing the name of vehicle in ways I did not quite understand. They hurried more. They sealed themselves up. Even their silence was different. New engines do not speak from the chest. They whisper from somewhere smaller and less convincing.

I saw them all from where I sat.

The road taught me time after I was no longer allowed to measure it by miles.

For there came a day, as it comes for many, when something in me failed and did not get fixed.

It was not dramatic. No crash. No blaze. No last heroic run. Just a cough in late weather, a hard start, then another, then a season of use interrupted by more frequent wrenching and cursing. The man was older by then. The children were taller. Money was tighter, or maybe merely needed elsewhere. One fender had already taken a bruise from a gatepost years before. My floorboards had begun to soften. Rust had started speaking its patient gospel from the edges inward.

Still, I thought I had more time.

He drove me less that year. Parked me more. Promised things aloud while standing in the yard with a coffee cup cooling in his hand. “One of these days.” “When I get to it.” “Just need a part.” Humans say such things not always to deceive others. Often, they speak them to keep faith with themselves.

Then, one afternoon, they jacked me up.

I remember the iron bite beneath my axle. The lift. The removal of what was left of my tires. The blocks placed carefully below me, one corner at a time. The man worked in silence. His eldest son helped. They intended, I think, to begin a repair. But evening came. Then rain. Then harvest. Then sickness. Then school starting. Then, one more winter. Then another. The world is not made only of endings. It is made of postponements, and postponement is often how endings enter.

So I remained.

At first, they still came out to me.

The youngest, not yet old enough to understand neglect, climbed in and played driver though my steering wheel no longer answered to anything beyond his hands. The dog slept in my shade. Cats used my hood for warmth in the spring sun. Swallows nested in the barn eaves and stitched the air around me with their quick black handwriting. A raccoon watched the moon from my bed one summer night. Mice made nests in my seat stuffing. Spiders spun webs between my mirrors and door handles. One winter, a barn owl landed on my roof during snow and stayed so still I felt him as a whisper rather than a weight.

The cows discovered me, too.

They rubbed their flanks against my sides until I rocked on the blocks. They breathed their grassy breath through my rusted seams. One calf, all knees and wonder, once stared into the cab for a long while as if expecting someone to be inside. Cows are not often credited with memory, but they remember shade, shelter, salt, gentleness, fear. They knew I belonged to the place even after I no longer belonged to the road.

Seasons laid themselves over me like quilts.

Rain found every hole. Snow entered places the sun later taught to crack. My paint loosened and blew away in tiny red histories. My windshield clouded at the corners. Weeds rose around me each spring with green insistence and died back into brown surrender each fall. I learned the names of creatures by their touch. The scratch of a possum’s claws. The investigative peck of a crow. The light step of kittens on my hood. The fine drumming feet of squirrels running along my roofline as if I were just another fallen branch in the yard.

I did not resent them.

Or perhaps I did, at first. But metal, left alone, eventually learns humility from weather.

The children grew and disappeared into the long road of adulthood. They returned now and then in other vehicles, arriving with wives, husbands, children of their own. I watched strangers step out wearing the faces of the ones who had once made a kingdom of my cab. They would glance over at me sometimes and say, “Well, there it still is,” or “Remember playing in that old truck?” And memory would pass across them like a brief sun through cloud.

One of them, the second boy, now broad and bearded, once came and stood by me a long while without speaking. He ran his hand along my door where the paint had almost entirely gone. He laughed softly when he saw the worn remnant of a sticker in the back glass. Then he opened the door with effort and sat on the collapsed seat, careful of springs. He did not start me, of course. He did not even pretend to. He just sat there with both hands on the wheel, looking out over the yard. Maybe he was seeing what had been. Maybe what had not. Human faces are hardest to read when they are alone.

He said finally, “Dad loved this truck.”

The words entered me like a fresh can of oil.

By then, the old man was dead.

I had watched the ambulance come the year before. Watched cars gather in the lane. Watched dark clothes and slow embraces. The barn stood open that whole week, and no one shut me away from any part of it. Grief moved through the place like a storm too large to avoid. Not loud at first. Then, not loud at all. That is the thing with grief. It settles into boards, fences, workbenches, feed troughs, old vehicles. It becomes part of the place’s way of being still.

After he died, I thought perhaps I, too, would go.

Sold for scrap. Dragged away. Cut apart. Melted down into nails or cans or some bright appliance in a distant city. I would not have blamed them. Use has its dignity, but so does release. Instead, I remained.

Years made me less truck and more landmark.

Turn by the old truck. Leave the mower by the old truck. The dog was sleeping under the old truck. Kids are out back playing around the old truck.

Old truck. Not by make or model. Not by year. Just old truck.

I became something people pointed to more than something they entered. Yet even then, children still found me.

Not the old children. New ones.

Grandchildren.

They climbed up uncertainly at first, more accustomed to plastic and screens and cupholders, but wonder has a way of crossing generations when given enough rust and room. Soon, they too were driving nowhere and everywhere. My glovebox became an archaeological chamber. One summer afternoon, they found a bent flashlight, a chipped arrowhead, three rusty bolts, an Indian head penney, the skeleton of a pen, and a gas receipt turned unreadable with age. They shouted as though treasure had been uncovered from a king’s tomb.

One little girl patted my dash and told me not to worry because she was “fixing everything.”

She used a dandelion for a wrench.

I would have wept if trucks were given that mercy.

Then came the young man in the autumn of my long undoing.

He was the oldest son of the second boy, who was no boy at all anymore. Grandson of he who long ago had brought me here. The leaves were turning, and the air had the smell of apples and dust and cold metal.

He had been raised on stories of “Grandad’s Truck.” As a boy, he had made forts in my bed, driven across imaginary lands with his cousins bouncing on the seat beside him, pretended he was his grandpa racing to the vet that night so many years ago.

He moved slowly around me. Not with pity. Not with dismissal. With attention, his eyes burning with memory, but also something more. He saw me. Like his grandpa that first day long ago.

He crouched to look at my frame. Lifted my hood. Peered into the engine bay as if listening to a language half-buried but not quite dead.

“She’s rough,” he said.

She.

No one had called me that in years.

His daddy standing beside him laughed. “That she is.”

But he kept looking. His hand rested on my fender as lightly as the woman’s had rested on my dash all those decades ago. “Still,” he said, “there’s something here.”

I wanted to respond, to agree, to tell him. Yes. There is something here.

I have replayed those words through rain and frost and moonlight ever since.

Nothing happened right away. Life continued doing what life does, passing full of errands and obligations and minor failures and hopes too practical to call dreams.

But then he returned. Once with tools. Once with a trailer to measure. Once just to sit in my cab and breathe, like a person in an empty church trying to hear whether anything holy still lingers.

He spoke aloud when he was alone.

“Original wheel.” “Could source that.” “Floor’s about gone.” “Engine might be seized.” “Maybe not.” “Maybe.”

Maybe is a door left open against the cold and neglect.

Then I heard him whisper.

“Grandad sure loved this truck.”

I do not know yet what will happen to me.

Perhaps they will haul me out one bright morning, chains and winch and shouting and all, while the grass tears from beneath my blocks and the barn swallows scatter in complaint. Perhaps I will feel the indignity of movement before I feel the grace of it. Perhaps bolts will shear. Perhaps parts will crumble in the hands that try to save them. Perhaps mice will flee from my secrets. Perhaps I will be more ruin than remembrance can justify.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps the grandson with grease-creased hands will find in me what the children found, what the old man knew, what the woman once laughed beside, what the cows leaned against, what the grandchildren sensed without words. Not just scrap. Not merely nostalgia. An ark of precious lives. A shape that carried labor, courtship, weather, prayer, livestock, arguments, singing, grief, and games. A body worn thin by service. Something tired but not yet empty.

Sometimes, late in the day, when the sun goes down behind the barn and the road glows for a few brief minutes as if lit from some gentler world, I imagine it.

Fresh tires. Rebuilt engine. New glass. Patched floor. My red returned, not original, but just as bright. A hand on the key. Fuel in the line. Spark. Turning. Catching.

The rumble of life.

I imagine the shudder through my frame not as memory but as present tense.

I imagine him, now old enough to be the man his grandfather once was, wiping sweat from his face, his hands stained with the work of me, standing back with a deep sigh and perhaps a trace of tears. I imagine one of his children riding beside him. I imagine the lane under me again, the field opening, the road stretching on into tomorrow. I imagine people in passing cars glancing over not at a relic sinking into earth but at an old truck, beautifully restored, moving under its own power, rusty soul humming, carrying its dead and living together into one more season.

And yet, even if that day never comes, I have not been useless.

Up on blocks, I have held more of life than many things that still move.

I have held nests and ghosts. Rain and heat. Small shoes and cow breath. The laughter of children now gray at the temples. The handprint of a farmer long buried. The patience of rust. The long sermon of weather. The strange persistence of love.

There are worse fates than being left behind where life can still find you.

This morning, a child climbed into my cab again.

Not one of the old ones. Another new one, all knees and imagination. He took hold of my wheel and looked solemnly out through the dusty windshield. Under his breath, he made the old engine sound, the one children somehow always know how to make even if they have never heard the real thing.

Then he said to no one I could see, “Come on. We can still go.”

And for one long moment, up on blocks behind the barn, I believed him.

Earworm:

Cast into the Void • Single #rock #pop #indiefolk #americana #alternativ... https://youtu.be/CYtdLIuhw2U?si=qFSNp8jmrwoQ-qdp via @YouTube