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Harriet

I am sitting on the carpeted floor of my family's new apartment in Palo Alto, California, drinking a lukewarm bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It is Friday, Sept. 27th, 2002, my daughter's fourth birthday. She is bouncing around the room hopped-up on cake and ice cream and attention and is 90 minutes away from a full-blown melt-down. She is wearing the present my wife got her, a Dorothy costume from "The Wizard Of Oz," the new poster of which is tacked up on the wall, the new video of which is playing on the television.

Minnesota-born singer Judy Garland is looking more Technicolor radiant than ever this evening, singing as she so often has to so many dreamers her song about flying over the rainbow to a place that she's heard of once in a lullaby. In an hour or so, she will click her ruby red slippers--just like my daughter's, her third pair--and incant to the room that there's no place like home.

It is 9 p.m. I have just finished my first week of classes as a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, where I have been ruminating on the words of great scholars, authors, philosophers, scientists, sociologists, and journalists, and trying to figure out my own version of journalism's Five W's: Who I am and What I'm doing and Where I'm going and Why I'm here and When I might ever feel like writing about music again or, more precisely, if I will ever have anything interesting to say about music again. I am hanging with a dozen of my fellow students and new neighbors who have gathered in our apartment to celebrate the birthdays of Helen and our friend Huang Wen, a photojournalist from Beijing. I am wearing blue jeans, a Jayhawks T-shirt, and the bifocals I got this year.

I am a long way from home, but not as far away as Wen's new husband, Xiaoying, who speaks almost no English. He just got into Palo Alto from Beijing last night, and even though jet lag is starting to get the best of him, he looks game for a party, probably because Wen looks so giddy. He sits quietly on the carpet while Wen occasionally flits from his side to talk with the others. I get up and set my beer on a shelf next to a copy of Wen's harrowingly beautiful book "Target," which documents the war in Bosnia-Kosovo.

I tug on Xiaoying's shirt and lead him to my CD rack, motioning for him to pick out some music, but with little enthusiasm, because I've had the mute button on my "music is the universal language" and "music can change the world" rap for a while now: I have written so many variations on that theme and still the world remains unchanged and supremely fucked up and I am flat-out tired of self-parody and pep-talking.

My 250-strong CD rack selection is small compared to the one I left in my basement back home in Minneapolis, a fallow dust-gathering rock critic's graveyard. But there's enough jazz, rock, funk, folk, country, hip-hop, classical, blues, and world music here for anyone to find something familiar, something that speaks to them, something that reminds them of home. I hope that's the case for Xiaoying, anyway, a stranger in a very strange land, but he just looks confused.

After a minute or so, Wen comes over to assist and explain. She takes her husband's hand, squats down in front of the rack and fingers an aqua-colored jewel box. "This is the first one I see," she says; "Can we have this?" She hands it to me and flips over the disc I plucked from my basement a couple months ago, the disc I packed in a box and shoved into the U-Haul that my brothers and nephew and I drove through deserts and badlands and mountains from The Land of 10,000 Lakes to the Golden State.

Wen's request is for "Harriet," the 1994 self-release by Minnesota-born singer Terry Walsh and his band, 2 A.M. Wen asks if I'm related to the singer, and I tell her yes, that the singer is my brother, who at the moment is probably fast asleep in his home in East St. Paul with his wife Shannon and their one-year-old son, Ian.

"Your brudder?," says Wen.

"Yeah, my brother," I say. "Both my brothers have been in bands. Me, too. I was a singer in a band for a long time."

I am sitting in my office chair now, my out-of-tune-but-not-dead-yet guitar propped up in the corner over Wen's shoulder. An hour from now, it will be even more out of tune, thanks to windmills from my son Henry and his new buddy Kwan, the son of my new Korean friend Jong, but I don't mind. People are sort of drunk. Low-grade magic is happening.

"You did?," she says. The incredulous look on her face makes me want to tell her that I am still a singer, that once you're a singer you never stop singing; that 20 years ago I used to sing a song about my city, a fantastic place where singing in a band isn't so much an anomaly or a hobby as it is a rite of passion; a song about my local music scene that went, "Twenty years from now at kitchen tables we'll tell how our heydays have cracked and gone/They were the best of times, they were the worst of times/The age of wisdom and innocence/And everyone I knew was in a band."

I want to tell her and anyone else who will listen that that lyric still holds true today, and that I miss singing it, and that the other day I picked up the guitar and wrote a song, or more like a skeleton of a song, but whatever; it was the first one I've written in 15 years, and I want to tell her that it was directly inspired by the sound of Wen and the rest of our new friends from around the globe telling each other about their lives and what brought them to this place.

Instead of saying all that, though, I do what I usually do when words fail. I play music. "Harriet." The speakers are at eye level and people are talking, so I keep the volume low.

Marion and her mother, Theresa, whom some of us have taken to calling "Mother Theresa," talk about the rosary they brought Helen from their home in Bombay, India. Armando talks about his home, Paraguay, and my kids' birth country, Colombia. His teenage son Sebastian sits at his father's side looking bored but thoughtful. Armando's wife Maria Jose talks about her home, and plays with their baby, Candeleria. Hannah sits next to my wife and I, and talks softly about India, China, Pakistan, and the Afghan people she lived and worked with. Jong sits with Dong and their kids and tells the group the meaning of his name: "Top of the world." Nobody talks about the "weapons of mass destruction" and nuclear proliferation and pending war we've all been talking about every day since we arrived at Stanford.

Out of the speakers, my brother sings about life, death, cemeteries, spots on the map, and our old neighborhood in South Minneapolis. The one that drifts me off as always is "Harriet," his self-maxim to following your dreams and a tribute to Lake Harriet, the single most hypnotizing body of water I've ever stared into. Corny but true.

As the license plates boast, there are thousands of lakes in Minnesota, and the names are mythic (Spider, Cass, Bay, Detroit, Whitefish, Adeline, Big Wolf, Little Wolf, Moose, Kitchi, Leech) and interchangeable, for even if you've never been there, even if you've never heard of it, every Minnesotan--whatever that is--recognizes the lifelong lure of a dock or beach where they caught their first walleye, listened to the Twins on a fuzzy transistor, or saw the Northern Lights for the first time.

For city kids, the lakes are always beckoning; big puddles in the pavement that make urban living feel like a nature hike to be taken, or taken for granted. The city lakes go by names such as Nokomis, Como, Cedar, and Diamond, and I'm convinced their presence is what makes the place so special: There's something in the water, and about living so close to the water, and about gazing off into the water several times a week, that soothes and fires the soul.

Harriet is part of the lake Harriet-Calhoun-Isles sibling revelry of Minneapolis, and I love all three, but I'm partial to Harriet, the lake I grew up in and around, the lake that was and is just up the creek from my home, the lake my buddies and I would and sometimes still do drive around to talk about girls. The lake my mom and dad took us to many sandy summer nights, the lake I almost drowned in, the lake my wife and I walk around, the lake my kids swim in now.

Several generations of Minnesota boys and girls have necked and watched the moon rise and sun set there. Several others have skinny-dipped in it after bar closing time in the summer and skated on it before work in the winter. Still others have listened to their hearts and car radios and the sound of the crickets, which are louder than any other world-class cricket chorus you can put it up against, because Minnesota crickets and their frantic back legs realize that their time on earth is short.

So they do what all Minnesota creatures do in the summer: seize the night and serenade the stars as loudly as they can for as long as they can.

I am sitting on the carpeted floor of my family's new apartment in Palo Alto, California. Across the way, Judy Garland says to nobody but herself, "The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't need to look any further than my own backyard." Over the murmuring voices of citizens from six continents, my brother sings to me, "Harriet, next time I look into your face, you'll be the same old place, but I'll be a different man."

Posted by Jim Walsh at January 24, 2007 12:16 AM

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