I love me some bluegrass. I remember I used to say I liked about any music except country and rap and it was pure ignorance. I'd never heard any country except "new country", meaning apparently greeting cards set to twangy guitar, on the radio, and the closest to rap I'd ever heard was M.C. Hammer, who isn't good exactly, but back when his shit-catcher pants were all in style, I too could be found bobbing my little sixth grade head to "can't touch this." (He's apparently a big pro-life nut these days, which I find such an oddity.)

But anyhow, these days I just realize sort of wistfully that all these different genre labels at the record store are probably full of gems I am totally missing out on. Because now I find that everything I try has some very tasty bits in it. I grew up on classical english composers, hungarian dances by anyone and solo piano works, mixed occasionally with 50s pop, roy orbison and Leonard when mom got control of the tape deck. When I got to the age where I got my first discman I started in on pop folk music, and I never did get very deep in that direction, in any musical direction, but even wading at the surface there is so much amazing love to be found. I just need to find the right guides to help me dip my toes in all these different styles and I will never get to them all before I die. What a rich life it is possible to lead, what absolute excellence of experience may we be blessed with.

Anyway. These days I have a big crush on bluegrass. This is what my boyfriend growed up on, my happy hardcore & techno loving boyfriend. Maybe more to the point it's what we play when I bring my guitar over to his family's house and the more I hear the more I want to just play guitar all day long. I just found the nitty gritty dirt band's "will the circle be unbroken" on cd, released this year for the 30th anniversary of the record. (And let me tell you, it is a mighty fine record.) My fingers twitch just thinking about it, hearing in my head all the fancy picking. I am still working on bar chords and I can about pick out "turkey in the straw" note by note, but I daydream about being able to play such things, about gaining the facility with the guitar that I have with my voice at last. Nothing professional about my voice, but creditable for sunday evenings on the porch, I tell you what. I am clumsy in general. Running is about the only sport that doesn't trip me up; even the fancy dance warmups they lead you in at races make me trip over the people next to me, it's hilarious. I have a bit of hope for the guitar though: my hands have something else going on, they are tapped in to some hidden confident part of me that throws off this clumsy nonsense and moves quickly and surely and cleverly. Maybe it's from typing.

I used to hunt and peck and now I just peck I guess and so my fingers are now as much an unconscious tool of my expression as my voice is. I remember reading in the mavis beacon touch typing program manual (I never did learn touch. made up my own six-finger touch over 9 years of typing. maybe with ten fingers I could reach a better top speed, but the agony of relearning, the slow, slow interrim period would drive me insane) a beautiful quote about being set free from "scratching, parrot like" at writing, typing almost faster than you can think. I don't know about faster than I can think, but fast enough, fast enough.

So yesterday morning I sang in a choir composed of 200 choir directors, for a congregation so in to what we were laying down that even the rickety old half-deaf church ladies were dancing in the aisles, in a beautiful sanctuary with sunlight streaming in, under the direction of a director so in tune with us it was like we were a single two-hundred bodied heart. Oh. My. God. There are some mornings when you just have no doubt at all that it was worth getting out of bed.