A late autumn stroll. Or rather a stroll on that delicate line that separates autumn from winter. When you can smell fallen leaves in the mud and when the air smells of the coming snow. Winter is lurking around the corner, but the autumn is not giving up just yet. It had some unfinished business. One more thing to fix before it fades away.
Me.
I was just wondering if I would feel autumn in my body at all. It is hard to feel something at all in the micro-breaks of everyday life – between everyday wrestling matches with my one and a half year old son as I try to pull on his overall, when I haste to the playground so he can play (read: get tired), when I prep some grub, bathe, brush teeth, read bed-time stories and unintentionally put us both to sleep so that my grandiose plans about everything I’ll manage to do, “as soon as the kids fall asleep…”, whither and collapse like a house of cards.
Today’s stroll began in the same manner. With a furious battle in the hall between my son, myself and the overall, in which the sleep came out as the winner. I was bewildered. The kid always falls asleep on the way home from the playground. What would I do with all this free-time? Would I be a good rat in this race and do some idiotic chore or go for a walk anyway? I went out and decided to improvise. Among all the little devils lurking inside me, one of them is a jazz man, no doubt about it, since things usually unfold best when I improvise.
Unsuspectingly, I strode down the walkway towards the nearby nature reserve for a customary walk around my two lakes. As soon as I moved a bit from the asphalt and got a bit away from the traffic buzz, I found myself in the right element. I walked past a large horse chestnut tree which by now was stripped of its nuts, then past some scrawny rosehip bushes whose branches were bent under the weight of their shiny red fruit, and then I continued along the linden alley which smells wonderfully in the spring. On this very autumn day, the street named “Beautiful road” deserved every syllabus in its name. No one and nothing stopped me from soaking up all the colours of the autumn leaves. Out of all seasons, it is precisely for autumn that the leaves make themselves the most beautiful and flirt intensely with. The slightest autumn breeze is more than enough for the leaves to fall. For about ten minutes, I walked on the wet pavement which was decorated with the leaves’ autumn costumes and watched how they fell continuously, here and there, from different trees.
And then I felt it. Autumn, the old thief, it was lurking around the corner, patiently waiting for its opportunity, when the little one fell asleep and when I started walking around my two lakes. It snuck up on me from behind, embraced me with both arms and wrapped me in its coat which was cold, and yet warm with all its autumn colours. I put on the headphones and searched for “autumn leaves” on the phone. The search result showed a black and white video with the song bearing that very name. A women, hitherto unknown to me, sat on a chair in front of the mic, with a guitar in her hands. I pressed play and she began to strum the intro of a melancholic melody. The voice began to sing the song’s first words: “The falling leaves…” That was it. This was the soundtrack to a peaceful late autumn stroll. She had a clarity in her voice. Her whole being had a providence in her. Perfect in its simplicity yet still filled with inspiration. Her voice carried me somewhere, to a creative sphere. I felt an impulse to create something with my bare hands. Whatever. Immediately.
I stood under three maple trees under which the fallen leaves were scattered and looked like a bedspread adorned with warm shades of green, yellow, cinnabar and brown. I pressed the foot brake on the pram, took out a cloth bag from the pram basket under my son, who was lying and whizzing sweetly, and began to pick and choose among the leaves. I also found some nice cones and I remembered that horse chestnut from the beginning of the walk and the nuts that lay under it. At that very moment, the thought of the chestnut tree from the beginning of the stroll, made me feel that coincidences do not exist. Everything happens for a reason. The idea was to engage the kids, make them tinker a bit and fill our barren, bowl-like ceiling lamp in the living room with autumn leaves, cones and chestnuts.
When the children fell asleep, I sat down at the computer to find again the woman who played that song that touched me so profoundly. This time around I went straight to YouTube and searched for “autumn leaves”. I got several interpretations of this song as a result. Nat King Cole almost recites the song, Sinatra is too draggy, Clapton is too coarse.
The song “Autumn Leaves” is from 1945. It waited patiently for 18 years, for Eva Cassidy to be born and in total almost half a century, 51 years to be precise, for this singer to weave her feelings into it, and perform it one January evening 1996, bringing this song to life again, so that you could sense the scent of autumn leaves and see all its colours. I turned on the auto-play feature. After a few songs, Mick Fleetwood, the bandleader of the rock band Fleetwood Mac, began to tell all the good things about Eva Cassidy.
Mick owned a club in Alexandria, Virginia (on the very border of Washington D.C.), and one day he went to a meeting he arranged with the local talents. Eva was one of those who showed up. Mick looked for passion, if there was anything there that touched him, which he considered to be “sweet”, where there was drama in the interpretation of the songs. According to Mick, Eva’s voice was her magic wand. On an emotional level, she reminded Mick of Peter Green. Mick says that he knew her personality, that she was pure as snow, as crystal, and at the same time a little stubborn. She wanted to succeed but not at any cost. She was looking for someone who would understand her but she found none. After a conversation with Mick, she agreed to try to get into the record companies’ games. She had a negotiation with a record label in New York that saw potential in her, but only for themselves, but that was not her vision. There was no deal, she walked out because they wanted to take the essence of her and make her more “accessible”. “What about me, the essence of me,” she said before leaving. “She was a gorgeous, plain Jane, girl that had no interest in “fluffing up” anything, she just wanted to sing,” said Mick. He felt that you did not have to be brilliant to be good, but not only was she brilliant, she also had the magic, she had “it”. Mick sees her as someone as an interpreter of songs and someone who had so much power and conviction about herself that she could easily perform a song that everyone has already done. That was precisely why she wanted to perform these songs, because it was about excellent songs and because she knew she could sing them. She was fearless and did not want to sing songs she did not have a feeling for.
I was already mesmerized by her artistry but the fact that she did not want to push up her boobs and swell up her lips for a handful of dollars, shows the integrity of an extraordinarily cool person. I wanted to check her next concert, to hear her perform live. So I started to look further and came to her Wikipedia page. Then it hit me why Mick Fleetwood spoke of her in the past tense.
Eva Cassidy passed away of skin cancer, the same year she sang that song, in November 1996, when she was only 33 years old. Her first album came out a month after her death. Peter Green passed away this summer. He was one of the founders of the rock band Fleetwood Mac and was inducted into the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”. His pieces, which include “Albatross” and “Black Magic Woman”, are timeless. Peter Green became ill with schizophrenia due to drug abuse, especially when he at some point ingested a cocktail of LSD and other drugs, but he continued to create until the very end. Eva had to wait a long time for Peter, but now that they are there somewhere together, I hope Peter takes her on a joint flight. Two albatrosses flying above the open sea.
Our lamp in the living room turned out as it turned out. The journey there was more important than the goal anyway. The light spreads cosy warm colours. Autumn has moved into our home.
Me.
I was just wondering if I would feel autumn in my body at all. It is hard to feel something at all in the micro-breaks of everyday life – between everyday wrestling matches with my one and a half year old son as I try to pull on his overall, when I haste to the playground so he can play (read: get tired), when I prep some grub, bathe, brush teeth, read bed-time stories and unintentionally put us both to sleep so that my grandiose plans about everything I’ll manage to do, “as soon as the kids fall asleep…”, whither and collapse like a house of cards.
Today’s stroll began in the same manner. With a furious battle in the hall between my son, myself and the overall, in which the sleep came out as the winner. I was bewildered. The kid always falls asleep on the way home from the playground. What would I do with all this free-time? Would I be a good rat in this race and do some idiotic chore or go for a walk anyway? I went out and decided to improvise. Among all the little devils lurking inside me, one of them is a jazz man, no doubt about it, since things usually unfold best when I improvise.
Unsuspectingly, I strode down the walkway towards the nearby nature reserve for a customary walk around my two lakes. As soon as I moved a bit from the asphalt and got a bit away from the traffic buzz, I found myself in the right element. I walked past a large horse chestnut tree which by now was stripped of its nuts, then past some scrawny rosehip bushes whose branches were bent under the weight of their shiny red fruit, and then I continued along the linden alley which smells wonderfully in the spring. On this very autumn day, the street named “Beautiful road” deserved every syllabus in its name. No one and nothing stopped me from soaking up all the colours of the autumn leaves. Out of all seasons, it is precisely for autumn that the leaves make themselves the most beautiful and flirt intensely with. The slightest autumn breeze is more than enough for the leaves to fall. For about ten minutes, I walked on the wet pavement which was decorated with the leaves’ autumn costumes and watched how they fell continuously, here and there, from different trees.
And then I felt it. Autumn, the old thief, it was lurking around the corner, patiently waiting for its opportunity, when the little one fell asleep and when I started walking around my two lakes. It snuck up on me from behind, embraced me with both arms and wrapped me in its coat which was cold, and yet warm with all its autumn colours. I put on the headphones and searched for “autumn leaves” on the phone. The search result showed a black and white video with the song bearing that very name. A women, hitherto unknown to me, sat on a chair in front of the mic, with a guitar in her hands. I pressed play and she began to strum the intro of a melancholic melody. The voice began to sing the song’s first words: “The falling leaves…” That was it. This was the soundtrack to a peaceful late autumn stroll. She had a clarity in her voice. Her whole being had a providence in her. Perfect in its simplicity yet still filled with inspiration. Her voice carried me somewhere, to a creative sphere. I felt an impulse to create something with my bare hands. Whatever. Immediately.
I stood under three maple trees under which the fallen leaves were scattered and looked like a bedspread adorned with warm shades of green, yellow, cinnabar and brown. I pressed the foot brake on the pram, took out a cloth bag from the pram basket under my son, who was lying and whizzing sweetly, and began to pick and choose among the leaves. I also found some nice cones and I remembered that horse chestnut from the beginning of the walk and the nuts that lay under it. At that very moment, the thought of the chestnut tree from the beginning of the stroll, made me feel that coincidences do not exist. Everything happens for a reason. The idea was to engage the kids, make them tinker a bit and fill our barren, bowl-like ceiling lamp in the living room with autumn leaves, cones and chestnuts.
When the children fell asleep, I sat down at the computer to find again the woman who played that song that touched me so profoundly. This time around I went straight to YouTube and searched for “autumn leaves”. I got several interpretations of this song as a result. Nat King Cole almost recites the song, Sinatra is too draggy, Clapton is too coarse.
The song “Autumn Leaves” is from 1945. It waited patiently for 18 years, for Eva Cassidy to be born and in total almost half a century, 51 years to be precise, for this singer to weave her feelings into it, and perform it one January evening 1996, bringing this song to life again, so that you could sense the scent of autumn leaves and see all its colours. I turned on the auto-play feature. After a few songs, Mick Fleetwood, the bandleader of the rock band Fleetwood Mac, began to tell all the good things about Eva Cassidy.
Mick owned a club in Alexandria, Washington D.C., and one day he went to a meeting he arranged with the local talent. Eva was one of those who showed up. Mick looked for passion, if there was anything there that touched him, which he considered to be “sweet”, where there was drama in the interpretation of the songs. According to Mick, Eva’s voice was her magic wand. On an emotional level, she reminded Mick of Peter Green. Mick says that he knew her personality, that she was pure as snow, as crystal, and at the same time a little stubborn. She wanted to succeed but not at any cost. She was looking for someone who would understand her but she found none. After a conversation with Mick, she agreed to try to get into the record companies’ games. She had a negotiation with a record label in New York that saw potential in her, but only for themselves, but that was not her vision. There was no deal, she walked out because they wanted to take the essence of her and make her more “accessible”. “What about me, the essence of me,” she said before leaving. “She was a gorgeous, plain Jane, girl that had no interest in “fluffing up” anything, she just wanted to sing,” said Mick. He felt that you did not have to be brilliant to be good, but not only was she brilliant, she also had the magic, she had “it”. Mick sees her as someone as an interpreter of songs and someone who had so much power and conviction about herself that she could easily perform a song that everyone has already done. That was precisely why she wanted to perform these songs, because it was about excellent songs and because she knew she could sing them. She was fearless and did not want to sing songs she did not have a feeling for.
I was already mesmerized by her artistry but the fact that she did not want to push up her boobs and swell up her lips for a handful of dollars, shows the integrity of an extraordinarily cool person. I wanted to check her next concert, to hear her perform live. So I started to look further and came to her Wikipedia page. Then it hit me why Mick Fleetwood spoke of her in the past tense.
Eva Cassidy passed away of skin cancer, the same year she sang that song, in November 1996, when she was only 33 years old. Her first album came out a month after her death. Peter Green passed away this summer. He was one of the founders of the rock band Fleetwood Mac and was inducted into the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”. His pieces, which include “Albatross” and “Black Magic Woman”, are timeless. Peter Green became ill with schizophrenia due to drug abuse, especially when he at some point ingested a cocktail of LSD and other drugs, but he continued to create until the very end. Eva had to wait a long time for Peter, but now that they are there somewhere together, I hope Peter takes her on a joint flight. Two albatrosses flying above the open sea.
Our lamp in the living room turned out as it turned out. The journey there was more important than the goal anyway. The light spreads cosy warm colours. Autumn has moved into our home.
/Miller
