Story Time

That was my granddaddy's scale and I've been using it for at least fifty years to weigh my vegetables for canning purposes. Still works great. I decided this afternoon to go ahead and try to make some sauce out of all those cherry tomatoes. I'd been outside to pick and the heat was just brutal. I mean, it really feels as if it could knock you down like it's trying to kill you. I talked to Glen and he said that although it's 105 degrees in Vegas right now, it just doesn't feel as hot. "Dry heat" as we say. Not here. Going outside is like immediately being wrapped and trapped in blankets that have been sitting in a sauna for a year or two and then thrust into an oven. And that sticky heat feeling is not going to go away entirely until you take a shower and hang out in the AC for awhile, or, go jump in a spring-fed river which I thought about doing today but not on a Sunday when everyone and their great grandmother is going to be there. Hell, they probably haven't cleaned up all the chicken bones from the 4th yet. I need a secret, easy-to-access place to cool off. 
Don't we all? 

So yeah. I started looking at recipes for cherry tomato sauce and I found one that looked pretty okay. I didn't follow all the directions exactly but who cares? This is not rocket science nor is it brain surgery. The recipe called for a pound of carrots so I used a giant carrot that I grew this year and I scrubbed it and chopped it into pretty large chunks and put it in the food processor with some chopped onion and garlic and herbs. I cooked all of that some in olive oil and then I dumped in my tomatoes. I had four and a half pounds of those. I added salt, pepper, a little bit of red wine and a glug of balsamic vinegar. Then I cooked all of that for a couple of hours. You cannot imagine how good my kitchen smelled. When it had cooked down quite a bit, I strained the vegetables and ran them through the food processor, added that all back to the liquid and cooked it some more. 
It tastes so good.

I was going to can it today but the recipe called for either citric acid or bottled lemon juice, not fresh.
I checked a recipe for tomato sauce in the little booklet that came with my pressure canner and it said the same thing. Bottled lemon juice, not fresh. So I did a little googling and found out that because citrus can vary so much in acidity, it's best to use the bottled stuff which is constant in it. You need the acidity to ensure safe canning.

I put the pot in the refrigerator after I let it cool off a little bit and I'll go get some bottled lemon juice tomorrow and finish up the project. I'm not sure how many pints that'll make. I should have measured it before I put it back in the pot but I didn't. 

Can you believe how exciting my life is? I also sat down at the piano and discovered that middle C sharp and the D next to it weren't working. I think I got those back again but there's another note way down the keyboard that's not making a sound. This is what happens when you let an instrument become idle. I fumbled around anyway and made the same exact mistakes I've been making for sixty years but I enjoyed it very much. There are a few notes in the upper register, however, that for some reason have gained an almost shimmering quality, sort of like an old lady's vibrato only better. This surprised me. But hell- I have no musical ear except that I know what I like and I'm pretty good with pitch and being able to tell if a musician is in tune and also, because I've been to so, so many gigs of performers I have loved and do still love, I'm a good second pair of ears for the sound system, knowing when someone needs to turn up and someone needs to turn down. 

Okay. Here's a story. 
Back in the mid-seventies, when I got together with my first husband who was a guitar player, he and a good friend of mine, Bill Wharton, formed a band together. Bill, who was and still is a rather unusual and yet incredibly talented songwriter and musician was having a hard time making any money doing what he did and he had a wife and two kids. Jerry, my ex, had been playing hard-ass rock and roll for years, even at the tender age of twenty-one or so, and they figured that together, they could create something that could possibly be commercially viable. Bill played a lot of his own songs and Jerry played a lot of other people's songs and the plan was to just blow everyone away with what they wanted to hear but in their own fashion. 
They found a bass player (and for awhile, Tom was actually their bass player) and they took him on and also a drummer although for the life of me I can't remember who that was originally. They sometimes had a lady back-up singer or two and I have great and deep feelings of unforgiving resentment for one of them and you can probably figure out why, while the other one turned out to be the midwife who delivered Lily and Jessie. 
Y'all- times were different.

And somewhere in all of this, Bill had an encounter with a Tallahassee musician who was known for his amazing guitar playing abilities. He was young, barely legal to drink which was eighteen at the time, and he was crazy. I mean...bless his heart. 

His mama had died in an accident when he was young and his father was dead too, but he was from an old Tallahassee family and he managed to survive with the help of his siblings and friends and girlfriends. He was gorgeous with a body like a whippet and eyes like the prettiest pup you ever saw and he had...that thing. He was sweet. He was incredibly talented. And he was so fucked up. 
Bill and Jerry had been playing at a local dive when Floyd showed up with a woman and announced that they'd just been married upstairs amongst the pool tables and he was as messed up on drugs and alcohol as you can imagine which at that time was not necessarily a bad thing, just a little piece of data to put into your pocket when considering someone. And in his altered state, he stepped on Bill's guitar. 
You don't do that. And Floyd, knowing you don't do that was incredibly apologetic. The guitar was okay but Floyd kept on apologizing and finally Bill said, "Hey Floyd! Have you gotten your guitar out of hock yet?"
He'd pawned his guitar. That's how low he'd come. 
Floyd told him he hadn't and Bill said, "Well on Monday, let's go down and get your axe out of hock and you can join my band."
That was Bill Wharton. 

Can I tell you that Jerry was not happy about this? HE was the electric guitar player (Bill mostly played amplified acoustic) and so not only did he not want to bring another guitar into the mix, there were already too many people in the band for anyone to make any money, which was usually whatever they collected at the door and on a good night added up to enough to pay for the gas it had taken to get to the gig and if they were really lucky, a two-piece Kentucky Fried chicken dinner. 

But Bill was the one who got to make the final decisions and so Floyd joined the band and thus began one of the strangest and most deeply dark and yet at the same time, most celestial times of my life. There's a whole book in that story. 

Maybe this week I'll write more about that. 

But what I was talking about before which triggered this memory, was how Jerry and Floyd battled it out on stage with their amps. They both wanted to be the one who shone the brightest. They both wanted to be the one to have an amp dial that went to eleven.* 
I pleaded with them to try and use their different techniques and talents to create something unique between them. When I read Keith Richards' memoir and he talked about "the ancient art of guitar weaving" I knew exactly what he meant. That's what I had wanted Floyd and Jerry to do. 
But they were young and like two just-come-of-age bucks, they clashed their antlers together and made a lot of noise and no one benefited from this in the least. 

I wonder what would have happened if they had been able to grow up and older together. Another thing that's triggered this memory is a video I saw on FB of Jerry and his childhood friend David, playing music on the porch of Jerry and his wife's cabin in Vermont. David is a world-class violinist and he and Jerry have been playing together forever. I have never seen an ego-clash between the two of them. They weave notes beautifully. 
David is how I met Bill Wharton. David is actually how I met Jerry. 

Weaving is not done just by textile artists or musicians. It is done by all of us in creating the very cloth of our lives. We look back and we are sometimes amazed at the different ways the different threads have come together in our life-looms. 

That's what I'm thinking about right now. 

Love...Ms. Moon

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