Leaping for joy on leap day.

Allison and Aaron bring joy to the world. Aidan Avery Jenks, was born yesterday on the birthday of his great great grandmother, Mildred Vaughan Daniel. I have no doubt he will make this day his very own in the years to come. Congratulations to the beautiful new family.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are about 5000 words.

Waiting for Aidan

I have just recieved word that my dear niece is in labor with her first child, a boy, Aidan. The news instantly swoops me back in time to the day my neice was born, ironically, in the same town and same hospital. She is in her final year of medical school, as was her father when she entered this life.

Allison made me an aunt for the first time, and I was surprised by the tremendous rush of love I felt for her when I first heard her little cry over the phone. A couple of years ago at her wedding, I was able to share that experience with her, it moves me still to remember it.

Blessings on you, little niece, and blessing on you little Aidan, you who will birth a new grandmother and grandfather, and two grand-aunts.

I cannot wait to meet you.

Luther's Blues

In honor of Black History Month, I wanted to share a little about someone I admired a great deal; Luther Allison, the talented and energetic blues guitarist and musician.

Luther Allison and I became aquainted in 1981 in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was studying art at the U of N, and working about two blocks from the Zoo Bar, which attracted big names blues musicians, in spite of, or maybe because of its miniscule size and postage stamp dance floor. I had seen him perform a few times there, and on this particular afternoon I stopped by the Zoo while waiting on my bus home. Luther was there and we struck up a conversation, which we continued off and on for the next couple of years.

Luther was a humble man, full of life, and had a lot of stories. He came from a very large family, and had endured many painful struggles on the way to success. He often told me how different things were in Europe when he toured - his experience was that Europe, and France especially, was much more color blind, particularly towards performers.

Luther had a lot of down time on the road, and I would occasionaly get a letter or postcards from some dive motel where he would be awaiting the night's show. He liked to watch the 'soapies' in the afternoons, call his family and friends, then eat a small meal before going to the club to play.

Luther moved to France in 1983, and we lost touch sometime after that. When I heard he had died, in 1997, I felt like the world had lost one of those souls who leaves a bigger hole in the universe than others. Among my box of treasures, I still keep a couple of letters from Luther, a postcard from Paris, and a backstage pass. When I happen upon these mementos, what I remember isn't the gritty, burning down the house bluesman, but the kind gentleman who liked to talk about his brothers and sisters, his family, his hopes and love of the blues. I remember overcast winter afternoons in a little bar in the middle of the country, quietly passing time with a friend.

Thanks for the memories, Luther.

To read more about Luther: http://www.jaisunphoto.com/trueblues.html
A letter from Rocky, Luther's wife: http://www.jaisunphoto.com/rocky2.html

If you love the blues, and would like to support it: http://www.soul-fixin.com/

Biography from Luther's Web site (http://www.lutherallison.com/)
A Legend Lost...
Born in Widener, Arkansas in 1939, Luther Allison (the 14th of 15 musically gifted children) first connected to the blues at age ten, when he began playing the diddley bow (a wire attached by nails to a wall with rocks for bridges and a bottle to fret the wire). His family migrated to Chicago in 1951, and Luther began soaking in the sounds of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Robert Nighthawk. He was classmates with Muddy Waters' son and occasionally stopped in the Waters' house to watch the master rehearse. It wasn't until he was 18, already in Chicago for seven years that Luther began playing blues on a real guitar and jamming with his brother Ollie's band. By 1957, Allison had dropped out of school and formed a band called The Rolling Stones. Unhappy with the name, they became The Four Jivers, gigging all over the West Side of Chicago. Before long, Luther was jamming with the West Side's best, including Magic Sam, Otis Rush, and Freddie King, who encouraged Allison to sing. "That," said Allison, "was my school."

Read the entire article at www.lutherallison.com.

Valentine

Sylvia Estelle Daniel Dickinson

April 7, 1938 to February 14, 1972

Love you always

And that's all I can say about that.

Rebel Yell in the frozen North

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in the United States is closely connected with this." Albert Einstein

I have a treasure trove of old letters to read - the earliest from post-civil war Tennessee in 1870. The authors seem alive and present with me; their thoughts, feelings and concerns relevant and fresh.

James M Vaughan (my great great grandfather - in this photo) writes a cryptic letter to his son, Charley, admonishing him for leaving home in some sort of trouble or debt.

"Commerce Texas, April 10 1888

"Well what I had to tell you & Jessie I cannot write so just let it go till I see you. I have had letters from those in who you are interested They are All Write. ...My Son you have not lived as long as I have. I have never lived any whare whare I am ashamed to go back. I have never done any thing to be ashamed off. I am engaged in the traffick of whiskey but if that is disonerble thare is thousands of the best men in the cuntry gilty of the Same offence. With these facts before me I feale satisfed that while I am not able to work at Hard labor that I have got to make a living some way. Then If I can make it the way I am don't condem me. ...I will not weary your patience any longer but ask you to think before you do anything. That other question that I mentioned that was six millions of miles deep - remember. Then I am through -
I am affectionately you father, J. M. Vaughan."

I am intrigued, and a little envious. James M. Vaughan was born in Tennessee in 1827, from what I can determine, didn't fight in the Civil War, and his sons were born after the war. Nevertheless, they must have been greatly affected by the devestation around them. They moved around the south - Georgia, Alabama, finally Texas before they settled. Somehow they kept that independent spirit that would not be crushed by circumstances. James was putting food on the table by putting whiskey in bottles, and there must have been a little nose-thumbing at the local authorities to make that happen.

Some of Jame's rebel spirit still stirs in me, and I relish it, stuck in the land of good manners and Minnesota nice. He was on to something. And I don't just mean the whiskey. I am humbled by the transparent love and passion these people show in their correspondence. In spite of their independence, they are a real community, bonded by fierce loyalty and common bloodlines. They do not hide from each other even their weakness and need. Their hearts on their sleeves, they freely express joy and sorrow, loss and longing, anger and hope. They are, above all, connected.

If anyone had ever been able to record the rebel yell, I would love to salute this family with that famous but now only imagined sound that makes the hair stand on end and the heart race.

time after time

(October 1963. I am on the far right in picture. Our ill-fated vehicle is in the background.)

I am on the last bit of a visit to family far from home. One of the tasks I hope to help complete while here is to scan letters from my parents, primarily from my mother, Sylvia, to her mother. This will take some time, because Sylvia was a prolific letter writer, this young girl who married at 17 and was separated from her mother for the first time.

My sister has put the letters into some preliminary order for us. They are the letters from the 'time before' and the 'time after'. Although we don't label them precisely as such, we are certainly thinking it. They are labeled by location at first - Louisianna, West Virginia, Dallas, Ainsworth...towns where the newlyweds resided, my father taught and preached, where they concieved and welcomed 3 children.

Then the letters are sorted by another sort of label.

These are the letters from the time after: Post Accident. Hospital. Rehab. Then simply, "mommy's last letters." ( The very last letter is in my own 14 year old handwriting, dictated by her, whose hands could no longer hold a pen, brush my hair, no longer brilliantly play the piano or rebuild an engine - the connecting pieces tied with matching thread and laid on an old sheet in the driveway. )

Some of the letters are to us, Sylvia's little girls, in care of her mother, urging us not to "be afraid because it is taking mommy so long to come home." How my grandmother survived reading that letter I cannot, and do not wish to, imagine. My father's letters to us from the time after are full of his cheerful cartoons, drawings of his little girls in scenes of what he imagines is our regular life - going to school, helping grandma, playing. Some even contain helpful illustrations of some new tiny little movement my mother can make with her shoulders - or excitement about some sensation, which I now know will turn out to be the begining of a new painful and lasting condition.

It is the time after in which I still, and always, live. After the startling and abrupt arrival of an uninvited and unwanted reality. A reality that reverberates through the three generations. A knowing that I can never unknow.

On October 12, 1963, on the way to church, our car blew a tire and flew off the road, tumbling end over end. When the tumbling and horrible noise and darkness finally stopped, Sylvia was no longer in the vehicle. She lay crumpled several yards away, her neck broken and her body stilled and frozen. She was 25.

I want to honor her life, find her story too. I know she was more than just the brave and beautiful quadrapalegic that people admired or pitied. She was my mother, my patient, my friend, my burden, my longing, my teacher. She was a daughter, sister, wife, mother, musician. She had a keen wit, razor sharp intellect, the charm of Scarlett O'Hara and a deep understanding of people. She is the reason I keep going when I can't figure out how or why. She is the one who still teaches me to listen deeply to the music around me, for I am listening not only for myself, but now also for her. She who never went to the opera or the symphony, but would have so loved it. I can almost hear her saying to me, "Listen! Listen! Listen!"

So I will. I will listen to her in her letters, although it is through tears. Reading them is like watching a movie in which you know disaster lurks and the jolly little family's joy becomes so poignant and bittersweet, you want to turn away. But I will stay and look. Finding more of her will perhaps be finding more of me. And she will, as in the time before, be my teacher once again.

The Artist Repented

Pentimento - "A pentimento (plural pentimenti) is an alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his mind as to the composition during the process of painting. The word derives from the Italian pentirsi, meaning to repent.
Pentimenti may show that a composition originally had an element, for example a head or a hand, in a slightly different place, or that an element no longer in the final painting was originally planned. The changes may have been done in the underdrawing of the painting, or by the visible layers of paint differing from the underdrawing, or by the first painted treatment of the element having been over-painted.
Some pentimenti have always been visible on the final painting with careful inspection; others are revealed by the increasing transparency that some paint acquires after several centuries. "

There is a sermon in there somewhere. As I strive to become more transparent in my old age, the flaws, mistakes, beauty, wonder, memories and everything that has gone into the being-ness of this human, begins to show through the layers of carefully constructed painting I have done. Wonder what will show up. Can't remember with any certainty what my underdrawing started out to be.