Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 142: wedding, Margaritaville, friendly face

It’s approximately the end of the week as we knew it, friends. Here are three things from my daily life that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. I’m confident that two of them actually happened as described.

Episode 142:

                         

1. Wedding 

The musician Craig Cardiff from Ottawa was on stage right in front of us at Aimée and Steve’s wedding reception upstairs at Kaffa in Garneau. When musicians get married, things are cranked up a few notches. The equipment itself, the cables and the speakers, are high calibre. There is a sound board at the back of the room. There is a sound technician running levels so that not once is there any feedback. And there is live performance. Cardiff sang four or five tunes, including a cover of the Dawes song, A Little Bit of Everything. 

I couldn’t believe it. It’s one of our faves. We saw Dawes in 2014 at the Starlite Room downtown by the old Chicago Deep Dish pizza. They sang the song late in the set. It’s a collection of three short stories: a young man saved, I hope, from a suicidal jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; a homeless man, I think, being served a Thanksgiving dinner at a mission kitchen; and, a couple engaged to be married who are, I feel, getting their priorities straight. At the risk of defying a song that points out the folly of

trying to make out every word/
When [I] should simply hum along, 

I think the song has a two-ness at its heart. There is a duality to the phrase “a little bit of everything.” It refers to the cumulative sense of the dread of life, and, also, to the bounty of life. There are two actors in each episode: a cop and the man on the bridge; a server and the man at the soup kitchen; and, the future husband and wife in the house. In none of the vignettes is someone completely alone. Somebody is asking somebody else what do you need? I have tried to come up with a stronger thread to connect the chapters in the song, and I was scrabbling at that task again as Cardiff was singing and strumming, but I gave up. It was quite good enough to note that the song starts with a tragedy or near-tragedy and resolves with a marriage in late September. 

2. Margaritaville 

Lying awake sick with little hope of drifting back to sleep is not the best time to draw conclusions about anyything, including Jimmy Buffett, but, there I was, feverish and hacking away in bed at 4 AM while Margaritaville on repeat streamed in through my earbuds. In order of the thoughts that happened next, for the record:

There’s a movement from “knowledge” to doubt to knowledge-without-the-quotation-marks over the song’s three minutes. The singer knows “it’s nobody’s fault,” then descends into the doubt of, “hell, it could be my fault,” and then emerges into the certainty of “it’s my own damned fault.” Knowledge on the far side of doubt is different than knowledge yet to encounter doubt, that’s for sure. The hell of “hell it could be my fault” and the damned of “it’s my own damned fault” struck me for the first time as something more than just vernacular speech or syllables added to serve the meter. The Margaritaville singer is an updated Adam in paradise, Key West standing in for the Garden of Eden, right? This is a part of the Biblical creation story circa 1977, right? In both yarns, some people say that there’s a woman to blame. Unlike the interpretation that took hold in the art and stories of the bigger culture, Buffett’s Adam won’t blame his condition on the wiles, treachery and charms of the woman. He is to blame. I heard the Confiteor: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

Still no sleep.

Is Buffett playing with the story of Lot and his daughters with his “lost”—only one letter off from Lot—”shaker of salt?” Switching traditions, is the hero in the song more of an Achilles, undone by the pop top that cut his heel? 

These and other vaporous thoughts floated in and seemed quite definitive at 4:03 AM with only the police sirens on 149 Street to draw my attention away. Admittedly, they had lost some of their power by 6:15 AM, when the alarm clock rang. I fished my earbuds out of the waves of sheets. How long had Margaritaville been playing? 

3. Friendly face 

Slightly off brand, I was in a car heading downtown on a morning last week. As I rolled up to the traffic circle on 142 Street, I registered, in my peripheral vision, the motion of a gesturing motorist. I stared ahead. I was not looking for an encounter. Traffic is not somewhere you expect to see a friendly face. That’s why people listen to the radio. That’s where the community happens in rush hour. The peripheral correspondent continued to correspond peripherally. I looked over. It was my friend Dub!  Our windows came down and we yelled hellos, he called me an old coyote, I think, and we shouted other words that were swallowed by the wind and the traffic. The flow of the traffic moved us apart, and, then, after changing lanes, I looked beside and back but Dub was gone.

 
Phatic is one of those helpful Greek words. It means “affirming.” Phatic communication captures the ways we human beings use language not necessarily to convey information from person A to person B, but, instead, to affirm one another’s existence. All the small hellos and how are yous? the what’s ups? the how are you doings? the what’s shakings? are phatic communication exhibits. They’re not offered or received as probing questions. Instead, they work elegantly as so many ways to say I see you.

 
I was on my way to a strategic communications lecture. I thought about all the fancy ways we polish up words, all the cargo we load into words to transport meaning to others, all the ways we use words to key-message audiences and even propagandize—all these powerful uses of language that lack the unalloyed force of a simple “you old coyote!” from a friend.

Thanks for being out there, friends.