Remembering Julie

We paid our last respects to a dear friend Wednesday.

That is such an odd statement because none of us will fail to respect the person she was or cherish the lessons she taught us for as long we live. The theme throughout yesterday’s service and gathering was love. Repeatedly I heard, “Julie loved everyone and everyone loved Julie”. Not a platitude – a fact. I have never met anyone so positive and at the same time so genuine in my life.

I’ve known her husband Al for over 30 years; Julie less than five. Our group from school, like most established clusters of friends, can probably be a fairly intimidating bloc to approach as a new girl/boy-friend. We spoke yesterday of how Al at the time hoped we would cut this new girlfriend some slack. There was no need to worry.

Two pictures in the gallery that attends the reminiscences of anyone’s death these days caught my attention, the first taken at a high school football game in 1979. If a ponytailed girl in a poodle skirt is the symbol of the 50s, this photo of a radiant, smiling eighteen-year old in Florissant, Missouri has to be the model of an All-American girl in the late 70s. A girl who loves her friends, her family, her hometown – loves life.

Thirty-four years later she still did.

The second photo was a white board, I would guess at her room in a hospital, with her name spelled out and things she loved for each letter. In addition to her friends, family, husband Al and daughter Carly, she lists her job by name. Your brain screams out, “C’mon, who loves their job so much that it would make a list of the top dozen ‘things I love’ while you face serious illness?” Julie did. The last item on the list was rainbows.

Rainbows.

As if daring someone to make fun of her naiveté.

You’d be a fool to do so and everyone would know how big an idiot you were if you did. She was far from naïve, she was enlightened. She knew how to love what was given to her while so many of us scorn or ignore the gifts life lays at our doorstep every day.

I’ve buried both parents and a dozen or so aunts & uncles, but this is the first close friend I’ve lost as an adult – the first that many of us have lost from our peer group and we’re scared.

We look at our wife or husband and wonder what we’d do without them. We look at our children and worry how they’d manage without us. We look at each other and wonder who’s next.

Every cough is now potentially lung cancer in our minds; every mole, skin cancer and it will be like this for a while. I knew I was closer to the end than the beginning at this point, but this has made it real for everyone. Denial gives way to fear on a day like this.

Oddly enough, the one person who was never scared was Julie. She beat the cancer in all the ways that counted. In the end it had to settle for just killing her and beating the rest of us instead.

The large viewing room at the funeral home was packed. All the standing room was taken and the hallway outside was filled with people for the service. It would have upset Julie to see so many people dear to her filled with such grief, but pleased her to see so many of the people she loved in one place, loving each other.

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell w/Richard Thompson - March 17, 2013

The Peabody Opera House still has that ‘new venue smell’ to it a year after its reopening and was a marvelous venue for three veteran performers last night.

Richard Thompson’s ‘Electric’ trio (Michael Jerome – drums, Taras Prodaniuk – bass) kicked things off with ‘Stuck On the Treadmill’ from the new album – a typically rollicking Thompson offering of post-industrial depression – to an enthusiastic cadre of RT fans and some Emmylou/Crowell followers who showed up early and got a very pleasant surprise. One enthusiastically asked me at intermission if I’d “ever heard of this guy?”

Point of fact, this probably exceed the price I’d ever paid to hear Thompson before by double and may have been the furthest away I’ve ever sat for a Richard Thompson concert (in fact, I was further away than I could have been and still been inside any of the other venues).

Thompson stuck to the new album in the hour he had with the exception of a seven-minute ‘Can’t Win’ tour-de-force, ’52 Vincent Black Lightning’, and the last song, ‘Tear-Stained Letter’, appropriately enough a Thompson-penned country Top 10 hit for Jo-el Sonnier and, later, Patti Lovelace.

Emmylou & Crowell, by contrast, dipped deeply in their own separate and joint catalogues as well as some of the lesser-known country standards before hitting up their new collaboration ‘Old Yellow Moon’ which has its fair share of country classics as well including the old Waylon Jennings hit ‘Dreaming My Dreams’.

The highlight of the evening was the Matraca Berg-written song ‘Back When We Were Beautiful’, an unsentimental take on the pain of growing old that breaks hearts when sung in Emmylou’s bright soprano.

I grew up with country music on the radio. My folks loved it so I hated it of course. I’m still not a big fan of modern country radio (I try to listen to my friend Mac when he’s on the air and usually make it about seven minutes), but have found my way back through alt-country bands like Uncle Tupelo and Blue Mountain and especially through singer-songwriters like Crowell, Steve Earle, and Townes Van Zant (who’s Pancho & Lefty the duo nailed last night).

Part of it too may be the old notion that ‘country music is for grown-ups’. Last night’s songs held a lot more spill than thrills and more heartaches than heartthrobs. It speaks to the 50-year old me in a way it couldn’t when I was seventeen.

The pair put together a top-notch band of old Nashville veterans and young guns from as far away as Adelaide, Australia that smoked through tunes like ‘Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight’, another Crowell song, this one a hit for the Oak Ridge Boys.

Thompson rejoined the pair for Crowell’s ‘I Ain’t Living Long Like This’ and the two returned for an encore of classic duos: the Louvin Brothers’ ‘If I Could Only Win Your Love’ and a mournfully slow version of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Love Hurts’, before introducing the ‘road dogs’, making a pitch for local animal shelter adoption, and sending the crowd home as happy as they could be after a night of sad country songs.