by Ron Powers
“Jeez, John,” I said. “I gotta call a strike sometime. The zone is about three inches high!”
“Open your mouth,” John said. He peered inside. “I thought I saw some bleeding from that pack. But I think it’s gonna hold.”
Vermont.
A season or so after that, Dean, by then a slim and growing preteen, found himself on the mound in a league for slightly older kids. He loved the uniforms, snazzy royal-blue jerseys with gold trim. We’d worked on his pitching many hours in the driveway, and he had developed a decent fastball. The problem was that no one knew where it was going once it left his hand. The patch of woods on the far edge of the driveway remains, to this day, chockablock with former fastballs. But Dean looked great in his blue cap and jersey with bright gold lettering. I liked watching him from the sidelines in my new capacity as umpire emeritus. Dean’s hazel-green eyes, a genetic gift from his mother, blazed as he looked down for the sign. This kid was going to be handsome.
Handsome, maybe, but just a tad scatter-armed. It was true that the batters’ strike zones had grown by now; I would have put the average height at five inches. An additional five, or twenty, would have helped. In about the fourth inning, after Dean had walked something like five munchkins in a row on something like twenty pitches, the coach strolled out and gently suggested to my son that he might want to trade places with the right fielder. Dean left the mound, but not for right field. He crossed the foul line near first base. Head down, he kept on walking, in the general direction of the parking lot.
I jumped to my feet and caught up with him near the end pole of a chain-link fence.
“Where are you going?” I asked him.
“I can’t play baseball. I want to go home.”
“You can too play baseball. You know you can. You’re a great outfielder. You catch every fly ball I hit to you.”
Nothing from Dean.
“Now come on. Those guys need you. We need this game.”
“We’re way behind.”
“We can catch up. Don’t let your team down. They need you.”
It didn’t occur to me that I was piling great responsibility and potential blame on his young shoulders. He would have been justified in saying that was not his problem and to leave him alone.
He didn’t. He thought it over for a moment and then without a word turned around and walked—not ran, walked, with purposeful dignity—out to right field. I thought that this was an incredible act of courage, given his embarrassment just moments earlier in full view of his friends on both teams and their parents scattered in the three rows of seats.
I can’t remember whether Dean caught any fly balls for the remainder of that game. But I do remember what happened in the bottom of the seventh and final inning, with his team at bat, having clawed their way to a three-run deficit. The bases were loaded and I believe there was one out. And Dean was coming to the plate with a bat in his hand.
He looked at the first pitch, if memory serves, and swung at the next one and missed. On the ensuing pitch, Dean put his aluminum on the ball and hit a smart chopper back to the pitcher. The pitcher stooped a little as it headed between his legs. The shortstop and second baseman converged, but the ball skipped merrily past them as well. It went hoppity-hopping onto the outfield’s hard dirt surface like the White Rabbit late for tea. The center fielder, well coached, charged it, hoping for a dramatic throw to the plate. The outfielder came up with his glove empty and the ball, now taking on the aspect of a communications satellite, continued its trajectory toward the curve of the earth.
Dean touched them all. As he crossed home plate his teammates stormed out to high-five him. He had hit a game-winning ground-ball grand-slam home run—likely not the first one stroked in that league, but the most beautiful hit I have ever seen, or hope to see.
On the way home in the car, Dean wanted to know what was for dinner.
Kevin found his bliss within weeks of our arrival in Middlebury.
One Sunday morning I brought home the Burlington Free Press, along with the obligatory sack of bagels, and flipped idly through the entertainment section as I finished my coffee. A one-inch ad caught my eye:
WOODS TEA COMPANY
FOLK MUSIC
BOATHOUSE
2 p.m.
Kevin, freshly five years old, had been carrying around a little white plastic guitar that Honoree had bought for him about a year earlier. He’d been fascinated by guitars since he’d stood and watched an Irish novelist strumming away on the Bread Loaf lawn the previous summer. Kevin had begged the man to teach him how. The writer had obligingly tried to show him a couple of chords, but Kevin’s fingers were not big enough or strong enough to replicate them. Interestingly, though, he accurately placed his fingers exactly where the man’s had been on the fretboard.
Back home in New York, the new stringless toy had seemed to satisfy him, and he carried it with him almost everywhere.
He had it in his grip as he, Honoree, and I piled into our van and headed for Burlington, thirty miles to the north. Dean had decided to stay at home with his grandmother. The Boathouse was a restaurant with a performance space on the second floor, anchored at the end of a pier on the Lake Champlain waterfront south of the town.
The Woods Tea Company was a much bigger deal than we’d anticipated: a legendary trio in Vermont and New England who enjoyed a fan base across America. The second-floor venue was crammed to the walls. Not a seat was left. Sold out.
We were about to leave when the second-generation-hippie woman selling tickets came to our rescue in a patently Vermont way. She gave our son the once-over, and he looked up at her with his bright blue eyes. She shifted her glance to the toy guitar. And then she said: “You can put him up here on the table if you want to. You two’ll have to stand.”
That particular surface was an old folding-leg card table doubling as a stand for the cash box and the red roll of tickets. I wondered whether it could support the added weight of two or three more quarters, much less a thirty-five-pound kid, give or take. We boosted him up, and the table held, and Kevin got his first look at the Boathouse concert stage. At any concert stage. He saw an array of polished guitars, banjos, mandolins, and a fiddle leaning against metal stands. The instruments gleamed orange and brown and silver beneath the overhead lights. He saw three microphones. He saw, though we couldn’t have known it then, his future.
Someone climbed up onto the stage, lifted a mic from its holder, and said words to the effect of, “Ladies and gentlemen—the Woods Tea Company!” The audience sent up a vigorous round of applause, and three middle-aged men in rumpled jeans filed onstage. One of them was wearing an oversized watch cap and a vest and sported a disheveled orange beard. Another was darkly handsome under his piratical black facial hair. The third had on a battered fedora and suspenders and glasses. And a beard. They could have been regulars at Steve’s Park Diner.
Without preamble, the trio launched into a thundering rendition of “The Wild Rover.” The fedoraed banjo player’s notes skittered around the room and trilled through the audience and bounced off the windowpanes. The savvy fans clapped in sync after the lines “No nay never” and “No nay never no more” and “No never no more.” A big finish, and another big hand from the audience.
The Woods Tea Company played some more Irish drinking songs and some “sea chanteys” and some bluegrass and some of their own compositions. They played some of the great folk ballads of the ’60s. They played with their own style and musicianship, and passion. They were very good, and they were playing my personal coming-of-age music, the first kind of music I loved, the kind of music I yearned to play, and did play—on the strings of my tennis racket in front of my bathroom mirror until I’d reached an age that would be mortifying to specify.
Kevin was hypnotized. He strummed the nonexistent strings of his own guitar and gazed over the audience at the players on the stage. What never crossed our minds was the fact that the players on the stage could look back over the audie
nce and see Kevin.
At intermission, as Honoree and I were debating whether to get an early start back to Middlebury, we noticed a woman shouldering her way through the crowd toward us. She was perhaps in her forties, with long, straight blond hair, and wearing faded blue jeans like nearly every other woman in the place. Good nature radiated from her eyes. She wasted no time on preliminaries. “There’ll be a few empty seats for the second set,” she informed us. “If you can get him down to the front row, we’ll put him up onstage for the last number.” She was the wife of the piratical band member.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
My wife and I looked at each other. For a few moments we became New Yorkers again. I picked my son up and cradled him against my shoulder like a football. With Honoree running interference, we charged down the center aisle to the stage, knocking bodies left and right, and seized two empty chairs just below the mics. Whether the chairs had been abandoned temporarily or permanently didn’t matter. Show business is not always pretty.
The Woods Tea Company returned to the stage, and Kevin, nestled in my lap, suddenly was almost within touching distance of them. He gripped the white guitar. The band played another rousing set and walked off the stage to great applause. End of concert.
Then they walked back on: an encore. The piratical musician gave me a subtle nod and casually informed the audience—as if everyone had been expecting it—“Well, Kevin will be joining us now…”
I rose up and boosted him onstage. Kevin had not expected this. He turned around and surveyed the audience, his blue eyes made brighter by the overhead lights, and lifted his toy guitar to the ready.
The band exploded into a rip-roaring rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Halfway through, the audience was clapping along in time. The banjo and the guitar traded robust solos. The trio’s hearty male voices boomed out lustily. As I was walkin’ that ribbon of highway… In the crowd, feet were stomping. Kevin looked straight ahead, deadpan, his blue eyes catching the light, and strummed along mightily on his invisible strings.
… This land belongs to you and meeeeee, eeeeee, EEEEEE!
The audience rose and clapped and whistled. Kevin stood there taking it in. His poker face held, but inside him, volcanoes were erupting and winds were blowing one life out and a new one in. In those moments Kevin became a musician. The ovation went on.
When it all finally died down and people started to file out of the Boathouse, we joined Kevin onstage and shook hands with the band. Each player offered a kind remark to our son, who turned his face up and accepted their praise speechlessly. Honoree and I finally headed for the exit. We had walked all the way down the curving sidewalk to the parking lot before we realized that Kevin was not with us.
We looked around in a bit of panic. It took a minute or two before one of us spotted him. He was maybe twenty yards back up the walkway, seated by himself on a wooden bench near the gangplank to the Boathouse, his legs swinging. We ran to him and told him how he’d scared us by getting separated, and how he shouldn’t do that, and how glad we were to see him. What was he doing on that bench?
Kevin explained it to us patiently, as only a child can explain a concept difficult for adults to understand.
He was waiting for the Woods Tea Company to come out so that he could resume his career with them.
After that, there was no stopping him. He begged for lessons. We tracked down a college kid who gave them. Kevin met with him for a few Saturdays until the young mentor confessed that he had run out of things to teach our son.
But luckily for Kevin, we’d fetched up in a state that boasts more than its share of musicians, good ones, especially stringed-instrument players. These are the inheritors of a tradition picked up by members of the counterculture invasion of half a century ago. Among the more accomplished guitar players and teachers in this tradition was a gentle and whimsical man named Michael, who lived with his partner on a farm outside Middlebury. Michael’s studio was only a couple of miles from our house, in a tiny converted bungalow down an alley and behind a family-owned bagel bakery, shaded by a pair of scrawny trees. The view was to other people’s backyards and scrawny trees. I grew to savor this little hive. Unplanned, improbable, distinct in all the universe, it held a funky integrity of the sort that made neighborhoods neighborhoods and towns towns before the engineers arrived with their theodolites and power optical transit level systems and elevating tripods, and replaced our Narnias with grid.
Michael’s business card was thumbtacked to bulletin boards in stores around town. We called the number and asked the voice on the other end if he had room in his schedule for our five-year-old son. Michael politely refused us. He did not give lessons to small children. We should get in touch with him in a few years, when Kevin’s fingers had grown.
I think it was Honoree who called him back. And perhaps back one more time. Michael gave in and agreed to pay a visit to our house to see what the kid had.
I will always remember the moment several months later, at one of Michael’s student recitals, when he drew Honoree and me aside and whispered: “We’ve created a monster.”
Some of the happiest interludes of my life were spent in that little studio behind the bagel bakery. Strictly speaking, no one except the student was allowed inside the space until Michael had finished his lesson, but I fudged. I timed my arrivals to pick Kevin up so that I was earlier each week by finely calibrated increments. After a few months, I was showing up midway through the half-hour lesson. The midpoint marked the end of the formal instruction and the onset of the jamming.
I would let myself in quietly, closing the door so that it didn’t make a sound, and fold myself down onto the floor that was covered by a linty carpet, and rest my back against the wall. After a period, neither of them bothered to acknowledge my presence, which was the way I liked it. If I could’ve made myself invisible I would have hovered there the entire time, my daily writing quota be damned. As it was, I enjoyed the sublime pleasure of immersing myself in a long and increasingly rich series of conversations spoken entirely in guitar. Kevin’s fingers were a blur but a precise blur, and the riffs, the call-and-responses, the “trading eights,” deepened in technique and in passion. Michael insisted on rigorous technique, and Kevin was happy to oblige him: bend the elbow of the fretboard hand; keep the wrist straight. One finger per fret, except when not, as with the case of finger-four. Learn to use the pinky; it increases your range. Learn the several alternate ways to play the same chord. And on and on. And on.
In a short time, Kevin gained expertise in acoustic and electric guitar. Later, he would learn the essentials of classical guitar and flamenco. He mastered the electric bass and the mandolin. He learned piano and drums. He became expert in drumming the knife and the fork on the edges of the dinner plate until Honoree or I would ask him politely to please knock it off.
Kevin was never a demonstrative musician, or a demonstrative anything. Modesty, a vague shyness, and a quiet antic wit governed his personality. He never raised a fist in the air in performance, never strutted, never mugged to an audience. If you wanted to grasp his essential relationship to music, you needed only to watch him pick up his guitar. He didn’t pick it up so much as absorb it into his being, swiftly and fluidly: one instant it was on its stand, or on a table or sofa, and the next it was a part of him, cradled gently in his large hands. (As he grew, his hands and feet grew ahead of the rest of him, and he exercised his fingers to keep them strong.)
Kevin and Michael were playing out of each other’s souls. The music that resulted, and then vanished forever, at times reached a level of spellbinding unity and beauty, as if the notes had been composed on paper. Every Thursday I was an audience of one for duets that could have sent chills through any audience in a New England town hall, or anywhere.
Kevin did not fit any stereotypes of the pale, alienated guitar-poet. Everything in his world fascinated him. He was what certain hearty men like to trumpet as “an all-r
ound boy.” He grew up slim and not especially muscular, except for those big guitar-picking hands and wiry forearms. He was never a kid you would mistake for an athlete, yet this didn’t bother him. Kevin was the catcher on his summer baseball teams; a midfielder in soccer; a guard in junior basketball (mostly dribbling around center court in private Ferdinand-the-Bull bliss until someone relieved him of the ball); a competitive swimmer. He even tried ice hockey, until Honoree and I grew tired of lacing up his high bladed shoes. His shyness gave way in time to a love of affable horseplay and a frequent lopsided grin, and he could be a charming self-satirist. A passage from a Kevin grade school essay about a family trip to Ireland:
We went to bars a lot and I liked ther disgusting grill cheeze’s and I played dart’s, but Iwas really bad and I kep breaking the darts. I think that socker for us is called football for them and we did play a lot of sock… I mean football.
At the same time, Kevin inhabited an inner world that remained inaccessible to anyone else in his life, except perhaps those who shared his gifts and his passion. This became evident early on. In grade school, one of Kevin’s teachers—perhaps probing the class’s appreciation for life’s essential things, such as food and water and shelter—asked the class to make a list of the things they needed. Kevin wrote: “I need music.”
He needed expression. He drew. He asked for sketch pads and I bought him big ones, 11-by-14 Sketch Bond, which he filled with fast spare pencil strokes. Some of these were fully wrought drawings, such as the portrait of a grinning Spiky with upright witch’s-hat ears, which Kevin garnished with crayon colors to make the sedate Maine coon cat look like a cartoon rock star. He drew a recurring figure, a kid with a nose that resembled the tab of a jigsaw-puzzle piece: a ski-boarder gliding above a city skyline, a denizen of a surging landscape understood only by Kevin. Maybe this was Kevin: he loved velocity. Sometimes the drawings spun out of coherence and became a series of back-and-forth strokes, as if the underlying vision were too urgent for careful development.