Tips And the Green

 

I don’t know when, but I’ve certainly written before about Roy Brooks on this blog.  Oddly, I could go now and search for the drummer’s name in the blog search function and say precisely how many times it’s been in the last eight years that his music so impacted my day that I thought to write about it.  Was it eight years ago or fifteen that I first came across that live album which impressed me so: Roy Brooks & The Abstract Truth, “Ethnic Expressions.”  At the end of the second song, a remarkable pageant called: “The Last Prophet,” someone in the band humorously suggests the understatement: “I think that was a take.”  I cheated and entered Roy Brooks name into Gmail.  I first wrote a friend about him in 2014 and that was seven years ago.

I couldn’t tell you if I’ve blogged about that incident before.  I know Roy Brooks suffered from mental illness and had a complicated demise.  And there is a film of him speaking informally in his jam room from a later period in his life wherein he is informed and a fathomless source of information about percussion.  Perhaps I also put a link to that video in this blog seven years ago.  It doesn’t matter.  I was home alone for a while today and played the first song “M’Jumbe,” “That’s my spiritual name,” as loud as it would go. 

 

Later, walking my bike towards the trail I was drawn to the white oak that’s there like a sentinel in the wood that separates our property from the old rail perimeter.  Over at Oakwood, they now have a porch out behind the cafeteria and there is an enormous oak that graces the porch . The leaves are unique and I quickly pulled out my phone to look more closely.  It was a white oak.  The leaves are rounded at the tips and the green hue is ever so slightly different from, say the northern red oaks that are otherwise so abundant.  I consider a lower branch of this tree on the trail and imagine it twenty and a hundred years hence.  To my knowledge this is the only white oak on the property.

Back up at the house we need to pack.  We’re hitting the road tomorrow.  After such a long period of domesticity, we have decided to drive the younger one all the way to Dallas, some thousand miles from here.  The older one’s home and we’ll do this as a foursome.  And after dropping her off there in Texas, we’ll return as a trio.  Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia in six or seven days or so.  I’ve downloaded the audio book for “Burry My Heart and Wounded Knee” for ride out.  That’ll be an appropriate invocation.

Wednesday, 06/23/21