greetings! i send you splendiferous pandemic well wishes as we crawl into month 5 of this. this, which is our life now. i surrender. it makes things easier.
earlier this spring, when the scope of the pando™ and its impact on live music was becoming clear, i made a decision to step outside my comfort zone and apply for a temporary job. i recently got hired to be a census enumerator, which is a fancy way of saying i am your friendly local door-knocker. i’ve just completed my first tour of duty, several full time days out in my community gathering the census. i have *alot* to share about the experience already, but that will be the subject of next month’s newsletter. in the meantime, please please please return your census, and if you have a relationship with hard to reach communities or BIPOC communities, swallow your anxiety and become a census evangelist. i’m not going to recount the news (ha ha pun!), but it’s very important and what shouldn’t be political has become. you can help!!
www.census2020.gov
last week we lost an extraordinary american, congressman john lewis. in 2014, i was fortunate enough to meet him and spend an hour in his company at his office in the US capitol. you can read what i wrote about that experience here. just a few days ago, as his public funeral was taking place at atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, i stopped my work, sat down on my couch, and watched. it felt right to pause and remember such a courageous, humble, mischievous, stubborn, patriotic human.
it’s not the first time i have sat very still on my couch and quietly mourned a person i didn’t know personally.
i don’t mean to sound flippant, but i love funerals. we don’t usually pair those words together, “love” and “funerals”, but for me they are inextricable. the ritual of mourning is the chief way i can access my capacity for love (call the midwife is another, i'm serious). public grieving chisels away my armor. it cracks open my heart. i have been so grateful for the technology of streaming internet because i have been able to participate in lots of notable remembrances that i would not have otherwise been able to: george floyd, the charleston 9, aretha franklin, john mccain, ted kennedy. i’ve even gone on youtube and watched all of JFK’s funeral.
funerals are the most honest theater around. they do what the best pieces of art do. they are truthful, they are outward, they are community.
i love to hear the childhood stories, pranks retold and scrapes avoided. i love the soaring rhetoric. i love the mix of the sacred and the mundane. i love that people openly cry. i love that they choke on their words and are overcome. i love seeing adult children step into the space left by a parent. i love that sometimes music is the only way to say how you feel. i love to witness the courage of trying to cope with the unbearable. i love the laughter that comes only in grief.
i sit and i cry. i sit and i think about my own family. i sit and i think about my legacy. have i done enough? i sit and i feel catharsis, maybe even about things that i don’t understand or ostensibly have nothing to do with the person being mourned. regardless of who it is and my relationship to them, i leave a funeral feeling cleansed.
in the pando™, so many of our fellow americans have had to participate in this ritual whether they were ready to or not. and so many of us have had to mourn from afar, whether because of COVID or because white supremacists and their systems keep killing Black people. it’s been a heavy time, but not without its benefits. my heart has stayed cracked open, my armor has stayed off. yours too?
in the first week of the pando™, a friend’s husband died suddenly. because of time and distance and the blah blah blah of the Before Times, i wouldn't have been able to attend a funeral. however, because it was early days of COVID lockdown, this friend had a zoom memorial for her husband. and thus i was able to participate in what i might have missed a few weeks earlier. at the appointed time, i stopped my work. i sat on my couch, quietly with my hands folded, my body still. i listened as friends and family members spoke about their friend, son, brother, husband & dad. because of the nature of webcams & zoom, many of the speakers had placed their computers or phones just a few inches from their faces. obviously, if this funeral was in person i would not go up to a eulogist and place my face right up in theirs. COVID or not that’s inappropriate! but in this case, i was able to see their tears, look in their eyes, see them look down or away when things got hard. this was such an unexpected gift of intimacy from those mourning. i am so grateful to them for this offering above and beyond what is already offered so beautifully at funerals.
i do not wish anyone to die before they want to. however when they do, the final act of witnessing them and, in the process, ourselves is a powerful act of grace. after i turned off john lewis’s funeral, i collected myself up off the couch and went back to my work, changed, perhaps stronger and full of more spirit. it was as if the essence of john lewis had been sprinkled over all of us. the gift of public mourning.
as i said before, i am spending most of the next 2 months working for the census, but i do have a few online performances that i am excited about. they’re listed below along with the updated playlist of my CO-VIDeo activities, which include a free masterclass i taught for the excellent Toronto Songwriting School. speaking of, i can still take on a few more students this fall for private instruction. are you one of them? more info here.
and finally, a joke:
knock knock!
who’s there?
it’s erin mckeown!
really?
yes! now fill out your fucking census!
x erin
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS
i just finished a magnificent 30 hour (!) audio recording of david blight's astounding biography of frederick douglass. dive the fuck into this history.
several folks recommended i read isabel wilkerson's history of the Great Migration. they were not wrong.
i am loving this podcast which investigates a 1954 lynching in arkansas.
to soothe yourself (or unsettle yourself, kind of depends on you) please enjoy this video of how to make a cake that looks exactly like an Egg McMuffin.