Eat A Peach

Is it summer yet?

I want to watch the Tour de France roll through our old neighborhood in France, at least on a TV set. It would be nice, after a dozen years, to visit our friends and village in the Limousin region department Haute-Vienne (which may have been renamed by now) but that feels like way too much of an undertaking. So I’d be content to watch the cyclists roll through Dournazac -where Annie taught Pilates and the bakery was a cut above - and Chalus, where we used to play at the Laurence D’Arabie bar in the shadow of the tower where Richard the Lionhearted died of sepsis.

Me and Eric play Fete de la Musique in Chalus, circa 2008

Here at home I’d like to swim in the local swimming hole out back of the Inn at Leeds and Gracie’s Restaurant. It’s a little rugged getting down into the water and you basically have to crawl on your belly for twenty feet or so to actually get in, there is no other way if you don’t want to end up wiping out on slick slabs of stone. The cold water is worth it though (except for some local who told me it “isn’t safe” - oh shut up!)

It would be fun to go for a bike ride, but my chain/gears have been jammed up since last summer and I just can’t seem to get it together to take my bike in for a repair. What happened to the initiative I possessed several years back where I pulled up a YouTube video, flipped my bike upside down and learned to replace a tire?

I don’t lack initiative, I just need to finish a couple dozen other things first.

Some days it feels like I work from morning until night: trying to get a walk or some yoga in before 8 AM when the air turns too hot and humid. I write and answer emails, then sit in the studio with Eric mixing my album. Take care of the house and yard; my eyes, teeth, skin, breasts and psyche; buy groceries, fix meals; go into work at the bookstore/bar. Occasionally I visit my dad at his nursing home in New Jersey, when he isn’t in the hospital. He stopped speaking several weeks back, around the time he started falling regularly. Is it awful to say I feel better with him in the hospital? Then he can’t fall and hurt himself anymore.

The sweet little boat/outboard motor that was so relaxing at the height of the pandemic has become a chore - bailing the rainwater which has been a constant the last week or two. When it isn’t raining there’s been smoke or intense heat. When we do finally get out on the creek, it is a treat, but then I feel guilty about the gasoline it takes to fuel the thing and the noise and the fumes and the oil slick on the creek. The planet is burning up. I need my car to drive to work. It feels like the boat needs to go. Maybe a sailboat, or a kayak?

Will my record ever be done? Recording and mixing takes the time it takes. Six hours a day most days for the last month or more, and another several weeks of mixing and before that recording on and off for two years. Someone asked if we were filming the making of the record and I had to laugh - two people sitting on stools looking at a screen would rival any of Andy Warhol’s films in the art of tedium. You’d be asleep when anything fun (a vocal, a guitar or keyboard part; a session with a drummer) happened. You’d wake up and see two people on screen laughing themselves silly and wonder what you missed.

Just screenprinted a batch of t shirts and it was a joy. Even when I’m making things, I miss making things. Writing songs falls by the wayside. I came up with something new the other morning and keep wanting to make a rough demo, just for the fun of it. I’d have forgotten how the song went by now but I caught a verse/chorus/bridge on my voice recorder.  I’m finishing a record so I don’t have time to record, does that make sense? A studio album —crafted, purposeful; sweated over as opposed to demo efforts that can be tossed out into the world for fun and engagement— is delayed gratification you have to have faith will pay off.

Surely I’m not the only one who feels a sense of overwhelm this season? I thought summer was supposed to be the time of carefree fun. I’d enjoy an ice cream cone but feel determined to lose weight.

Peaches! Peaches are the answer.

Oh hell, why did I just Google “is it peach season”? If you don’t want to get even more depressed, don’t look into the Georgia/South Carolina peach crop of 2023. I’ll save you the trouble. There pretty much wasn’t one.

Still, maybe it’s a matter of proximity, and no offense to my southern friends, but I’ve always been partial to New Jersey peaches. And I dared to look into what’s happening with them this year and hallelujah it’s going to be a bountiful season. Starting just about…now.

There WILL be summer. If the moths that seem to be taking over this part of the world don’t get us first.