ALL OVER THE MAP

Dear Friends,
Blogs are about life. I live in Austin. They say Austin is full of famous musicians. They’re right.

Even though I had once been a musician and a nightlife writer, I wasn’t thinking about music when I moved to Austin. I was thinking about claustrophobia. After ten years on three acres in a mountain town, we were moving to a small house with three large dogs who specialized in endurance barking.

But my Texan neighbors had no complaints. Anyone can make noise here, it seems, as long as they do it on key. This is the land not just of live music, but of hedonism and barbecue. People want you to be happy. Over gin and tonics, they find out what you want and give it to you. My next door neighbor gave me a huge vegetable garden. We call it Mother’s Day Farm.
I hadn’t grown a large, ripe tomato in more than a decade. Either you know what I’m talking about or you don’t, but on my death bed, I’ll be happier to have grown tomatoes than to have written a word.

On the first week in August, I planted some Brandy Boy transplants in celebration of my 48th birthday. August in Austin is humid. I shuffled around the garden anyway in the dense heat, sweating the shape out of straw hats and listening to an old black man’s voice next door. I couldn’t pick out any words. My neighbor told me the man was a fairly well-known blues musician who had been brought to Austin by the late Clifford Antone to make records. He now lived modestly in an apartment next door. What was his name–Top-Hat Somethingorother?On my 48th birthday, I went to the Broken Spoke bar for what had been advertised generically as A Night of Blues Piano. Back in the days when I had no trouble staying awake, I had played blues piano myself.

And on my 48th birthday, Top-Hat Somethingorother walked into the Broken Spoke, sat down at the piano, and revealed himself to be Pinetop Perkins, the best blues pianist in the world. When I was 17, this man was playing with Muddy Waters’ finest band. I used to cut music theory class just so I could spin his solos on my ancient turntable, trying to play along.
Now Pinetop was 94.

Some things I used to love—most legal and illegal drugs, Hunter S. Thompson, Joni Mitchell—haven’t held up well. But Pinetop sounded exactly the same, even on a cheesy digital keyboard. In an age of floating, dweedly piano solos, his left hand sounded like the door of an old Cadillac slamming shut.

I tried to tell him how I felt, while shelling out cash for his latest CD. He had nothing much to say to me, but put his arm around my eight-year-old daughter Gus, and told her how much he loves kids. “How many kids do you have?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. . .” he said sweetly. It came to me that he was deaf as a post and that his piano chops were even more of a miracle than I had thought.

Since then, Pinetop continues to genially ignore me as he passes my house in his wheelchair, although he once told me that because my house has no front porch, it can only be described as a shack. Once I baked a cornbread for him and had Gus deliver it. There was no heartwarming outcome, but Pinetop Perkins needs all the good nutrition he can get at this point in his life, and for that matter, I think some of us should get together and buy him a new hearing aid. He keeps dropping the current one behind the sofa.

But mostly my connection to the man comes when I listen to his voice as I dig in the dirt.
Also, the Brandy Boy, though a brand-new hybrid, untested by time, is a fine tomato.