Feeling Dull
May 15, 2013The other night, I had one of those shocking collisions between Past Me and Present Me. I wasn’t sleeping well, anxious over how I was going to get my daughter a place in the local international school. So, in those murky hours I ended up on the Internet where I followed a link to a link to a link to a video of Kathleen Edwards performing on The David Letterman Show.
Now, if my life has been marked by one thing, it is friendships with remarkable people. And I once counted Kathleen as one of those remarkable people. Long ago, perhaps in 1998 or 1997, we drove from Ottawa to New Orleans together, her playing open stages on a soggy Nashville afternoon while I drank beer, her directing us on a convoluted trip through New Orleans to drop a demo tape in what was purported to be Daniel Lanois’ mailbox while I kept an eye out for another place to drink beer … well, you get the idea.
As I watched this brilliant video, the juxtaposition of the moment was nearly crushing: myself, the cliché parent, anguishing over his child’s school opportunities, Kathleen, the transcendent artist, blazing with light and song and poetry. And, the obvious conclusion: how boring I’ve become.
Thankfully, once the melancholy of the night subsided, I realized this was a conceit on multiple levels. First, that artists like Kathleen don’t have moments of common worry over schools and children and other mundanities; second that I don’t enjoy the occasional moment of artistic blaze myself; and most importantly, that any of it matters at this stage. I have to believe that all those remarkable people I’ve known in my life liked me for more than my creative spark and manic energy, that they also liked me for being the type of man who can lie sleepless at night consumed by hope and love and worry for his daughter.
So, the fact that some of that spark and mania are now poured into an admissions process isn’t such a glum thing. It may not be David Letterman, but if you could gauge my passion for the International School Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur, I think it would probably melt ferrous metals. And that’s a helluva passion to have burbling around one’s chest.
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