deep greens and blues are the colors I choose
won't you let me go down in my dreams?
it’s jacaranda season, baby
When I moved to California (five years ago next month, how is that possible), I did a thing I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone who moves here: I watched Huell Howser every weeknight. If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, here’s the short version: Huell Howser (1945-2013) was a TV journalist from Tennessee who moved to California in the ‘80s and became a beloved staple of California public television through his shows Visiting… and California’s Gold, which showcased the wild, weird and beautiful things to be found throughout the Golden State. He approached everything he covered — from the natural wonders of Yosemite to the lunchtime clientele at Musso and Frank’s — with the same level of open-hearted curiosity and aw-shucks friendliness. He reminds me of my papaw (my mom’s dad), if he’d had his own TV show. Big-hearted country weirdos are my people.
The thing that’s so infectious if you watch Huell’s shows with regularity (and they still air every weeknight on KCET here in L.A.) is the deep love he had for his adopted home state. He never ran out of places to explore and people to talk to, and the cumulative effect of his exploration is something akin to a spiritual practice. I think this approach could be directed at any place, really, but California is so beautifully rich for exploration.
The reason I’m thinking about Huell this week is because it’s jacaranda season in California right now and one of my all-time favorite episodes of California’s Gold is all about jacarandas. Jacarandas are these big, obscenely beautiful purple trees that all start to bloom around the same time, and they’re everywhere. The petals that fall off of jacaranda trees secrete a sticky substance that can damage the paint on your car, apparently, so (understandably) not everyone loves them. Huell interviewed people across the spectrum of appreciation — people who were new to them, people who hated them because of the damage they do, and, finally, a blind woman named Allie Tegner. (The whole episode is worth your time, but jump to to the 19:40 mark for this.)
HUELL: Now you used to be an artist.
ALLIE: I used to paint.
HUELL: Before you…
ALLIE: Lost my eyesight. And jacarandas are the most wonderful thing in the world to paint.
HUELL: They’re beautiful.
ALLIE: They’re beautiful. The colors are just… I can see them now.
HUELL: Well, you can’t—
ALLIE: I can’t see them. But I can feel them.
HUELL: But you can see them in your mind. What do you mean, you can feel them?
ALLIE: I can feel them. The lovely blues and lavenders, and a little bit of pink in there.
HUELL: Can you smell them?
ALLIE: I can smell them.
HUELL: Lots of people say they smell terrible!
ALLIE: I think they’re wonderful. I think they’re wonderful.
Whenever the jacarandas start to bloom, I think of Allie Tegner, and Huell Howser, and the gift of getting to see them in their purple magnificence. As the world gets stranger and darker, being able to just take a breath and enjoy the sudden burst of color is really special. (I also make sure to not park my car underneath them.) Wherever you are this week, I hope there’s something blooming that is good for your soul, even if just in metaphor.
what’s living rent-free in my head this week
James Taylor and the music we turn to in hard times
If somebody were to ask me out of nowhere to make a list of artists whose music I loved — with no other qualifications — off the top of my head, I think I’d possibly be into triple-digits before I thought of James Taylor. And yet it occurred to me this week that in some of the lowest and darkest moments of my life, the first place I’ve gone for comfort is his music.
It happened by accident the first time.
I don’t talk about it much, but I went to NYU for a semester straight out of high school. It was a huge mistake. I just barely squeaked into Tisch’s undergrad dramatic writing program off of the waitlist, and I simply did not have the money to go, and due to the vagaries of federal student aid at that moment in time (fall of 2002), I couldn’t get loans to go, either. I managed to scrape together enough money to cover a semester thinking that if I showed up and worked my ass off, somebody would notice and a door would open.
So I showed up, worked my ass off… and nobody cared. I went to the head of financial aid for Tisch at the time and pleaded with her to help me. She merely shrugged. “If you were a junior or a senior, I could pull some strings. But since you’re a freshman, there’s literally nothing I can do for you.” I’d been living in a dorm room all semester with two roommates who didn’t like me, trying just to stay afloat, feeling like the dream that had supposedly come true was dying. I had no idea where I was going to go at the end of the semester, and I was numb with grief.
I remember sneaking off to the common room in the dorm in the middle of the night and flipping on the TV just so I’d have some company. And when I did, James Taylor was on Last Call With Carson Daly. I can’t find this performance online, but I weirdly can pinpoint the date thanks to James Taylor’s surprisingly thorough website — October 9, 2002. The reason I remember it was specifically Carson Daly’s show was that it was a show without a live audience — just James Taylor and his guitar, looking straight into the camera as he sang “Sweet Baby James”, a song I’d never paid much mind to.
In this moment, I felt like James Taylor was reaching out to me directly. It was eerie, but beautiful. Somehow the words of his sweet cowboy waltz were the most comforting thing I’d ever heard, eighteen years old, so far from home, feeling every bit of the weight of ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go:
There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway
A song that they sing when they take to the sea
A song that they sing of their home in the sky
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me
And so James Taylor’s always been someone I go to when the world feels too heavy. I think of another sleepless night over a decade later, a traumatic phone call I got from my mom that started “the important thing to know is that I’m okay” that ended with me finding out that my stepdad had tried to kill her. I wrote a full account of that moment in our lives on my old Tumblr when it happened, because a truly shockingly awful thing happened in the aftermath of all of that which is that no one believed us when we told them what we’d been living with for the last twenty years. I needed it in print, somewhere I could point people to it. (It’s why I never deleted my Tumblr.) I’d watched as my mom — in simply surviving — was judged by people who’d claimed to be her friends for walking away from decades of psychological abuse that culminated in her almost dying. My rage kept me awake for long stretches at a time, and the only thing that got me back to sleep… was James Taylor’s song “You Can Close Your Eyes”:
In my soul-deep exhaustion in that moment, all I can remember is hearing I don’t know no love songs and I can’t sing the blues anymore, but I can sing this song, and you can sing this song when I’m gone, and thinking it was the only real thing I’d ever heard committed to tape.
Both of these songs are lullabies, in their way. A thing that I learned when I went through cognitive processing therapy earlier this year is that on the other side of every moment of deeply embedded trauma I’ve excavated is a memory of someone who cared about me very much or someone who helped me. Our brains are great at leapfrogging past the good in our memories to the awful, and part of healing is taking a step back and reconciling the good with the bad. And in both of these moments, funnily enough, there was James Taylor and his guitar, ready to remind me that songs were the thing that could save me.
what I did this week
I went to see the world premiere of Nico Juber’s deliriously funny Millennials Are Killing Musicals this week at the Colony Theatre in Burbank. (Let me tell you, more shows should happen at this place. It’s attached to the mall’s parking garage, it’s glorious.) I’ve already gushed on main about how much this piece delighted me, but I’ll say it again: Nico’s voice is so smart and sharp and singular, and I cannot wait for this show to find its audience. Sadly it will have closed by the time you read this, but I have a feeling you will get another chance to see it very soon.
what’s next?
I’m headed back east this weekend for a wedding in which I have been conscripted to play the castanets, a thing I have never done in my life. I will of course report back on how I do with this.
in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog
