steve siddle

New Day (9-11-11)

                                       ”Me and the RZA connect…”

9/11/11 10 A.M.

St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Manhattan stands in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Built in 1776, it is the oldest building still in use in New York City. The fact that this small chapel remained unharmed while the towers crashed down around it is a triumphant miracle. The chapel served as a Triage for firefighters, E.M.T.’s and volunteers for months after the attack. For many people, a trip to St.Paul’s has become a type of pilgrimage.

I , too, felt drawn here this morning. I don’t know anyone who died here in lower Manhattan ten years ago. I am not a firefighter, or cop, or an E.M.T. I am a simple citizen. I am just another American whose life was rocked by the violence of that morning and who has felt the tremors of it’s aftershocks ever since. 

It is a beautiful, warm morning and I am sitting behind the chapel in the small graveyard that faces the World Trade Memorial site. Through the branches of the trees  I can see one corner of the large screen that is showing the memorial Service. Through the flutter of the leaves I catch glimpses of President Obama’s shoulder, the ashen white of President Bush’s hair. 

The mood of the crowd around me is somber but not sad. There are few children and most of the men are in uniform. The woman behind me is  wearing flowers and her eyes are bright and shin and red around the lashes as if she has just stopped crying. The older couple in front of me, who look very much like my parents, are holding hands. 

It is very peaceful here and for a minute or two I try not wonder what has drawn me to Manhattan this morning. I forget, for a minute, the Terror warnings and the Police Dogs lined up at Grand Central Station. I let go, for a minute, of the anger I felt when I walked past the protestors and conspiracy freaks. For a blissful moment I feel the weight of the last ten years lifted.

Names are read and I keep as still as I can. I am grateful to the breeze and I feel at one with the trees, the gravestones and the cool ground beneath my feet. I wonder if this is what it feels like to die. I pray that it is and I hope that all those who died here ten years ago felt peace in their last moment. 

Paul Simon has begun to sing “The Sound of Silence” and I am pulled back out of my reverie and I begin again to wonder why I have come here, so far from my home, this sunday morning.

These last ten years have been hard. I was fresh out of college ten years ago, and I felt invincible. I doubt I will ever again feel as innocent or young as I felt when I went to bed on September 10, 2001. I can barely remember life before 9/11. 

Something changed that morning. Some immense wheel of destruction was set in motion and it continued to crash through our lives in ways we never expected for the decade since. The mistakes we made lie piled up like trash bags in the sun. 

What hurts most is the hope I felt those first few days after the attack. Hope that we would come together as never before, come together with the world united behind us to fight for freedom and decency. I never felt more Patriotic than I did in those first weeks after the attack and I felt sure that America would become stronger, better, and more free. 

I remember feeling grateful that George W. Bush was president because I believed he would pull on those cowboy boots and kick the ass of Bin Laden. Even in that vengeful task he failed. 

Make no bones about it; our government has failed us, so too, has our media. The constricting weight of cynicism has made us tired and uneasy as if we have been sleeping with a bullet proof vest on. 

But what is even harder to admit this morning, is the ways in which I have failed myself. The sins of commission and omission keep me up at night and most mornings I wake up wondering how I will ever climb out of the hole I dug myself into. Much has been lost since 9/11. Lost jobs, lost love, lost hope in the American dream. 

Maybe you have lost things too. Maybe you want, more than anything, to put these last ten years behind you. To be given a chance to start again. To hope and dream with abandon, the way we once did.

I know now, why I have come here to St. Paul’s. There is a small booth inside the chapel that is known as George Washington’s Box. They say it contains the pew where President Washington came to pray and in the weeks after the Tower’s fell, the pew became a place where tired rescue workers could sit and have their feet massaged by volunteers.  

I’ve been thinking about that pew and the historic things that have happened there and it gives me hope. The truth is that we can never erase the pain of what has happened, but we can find strength in the fact that we have survived. Find hope in those moments during the darkest nights when we gathered the strength to comfort one another. 

Perhaps I was drawn here not just to lay the past to rest -to put the hard times behind me- but to be shown a glimpse of how strong we were in the face of so much sadness. To be reminded that, even in the midst of making so many mistakes, we were loyal to one another, we never gave up.

As of this moment, I have decided that 9/11/11 will mark the beginning of new era. One fortified by the hard times that proceeded it. A decade inspired by fact that we didn’t die. I was drawn here not look back in regret, but to look forward in resolve. 

 

Jon Short Has the Blues.

One upon in time in Worcester, MA there was a juke joint. I started sneaking in the back door shortly after my 19th birthday and I don’t expect to ever again feel that peculiar excitement I felt as I slunk through the crowd to the bar. Gilrein’s Blues Bar was unlike any room I had ever been in. The walls were plastered with old photographs of musicians, an old pinball machine stood unplugged in a dusty corner, and an old broken couch guarded a dog that slept peacefully beneath it. There was an ancient, almost historic air that colored Gilrein’s. Even the patrons seemed sepia-toned.

There were of course, the regulars who sat like frogs at the bar, chain smoking cheap cigarettes and tipping nickels, and there were bikers, writers, neighborhood saviors, and hippies who had no where else to go.

One face stood out from the crowd.  A young face: full of intensity and wonder, a face not unlike the visage of a young man in love. Jon Short started showing up sometime in the late 90’s. He never drank, never smoked, and never seemed to bother anybody. I wondered what his angle was.

*********

Jon Short was born on the 4th of July in White Plains New York. He was a Bicentennial Baby born to into a loving, middle class family of educators. Jon Short was neither blind nor bow legged, neither cursed nor abandoned, but none the less, Jon Short was born to play the Blues.

Growing up in New York Short was exposed to all sorts of music. His father played Frank Sinatra, his mother played show tunes and his brother played rock and roll. At school he heard A Tribe Called Quest and Big Daddy Kane and danced in a production of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.

But it was a fateful trip to the movie theater that set the course for Jon Short’s journey. On November 11, 1988 Short and some friends went to see the new U2 film “Rattle and Hum”. “When B. B. King first walked onto the screen, I knew that something special was about to happen….then when he began to play, I thought: That’s it! That’s what I want to do”! 

Struck with this new love of Blues music, Short immediately began researching and devouring every bit of blues folklore he could learn. On a cross country trip with his family the summer after his high school graduation Short sought out the juke joints and music stores of every city they stopped in. “More often than not,” he told me during a long lunch at Lucky’s café, “if you can find Main St. you will find some kind bar, or club, or something to point you in the right direction of the Blues.”

Short moved to Worcester to attend Assumption College where he focused most of his intentions on baseball and philosophy. “At the time, I figured I would either be a professional ball player, or a priest.” When an a shoulder injury sidelined his hopes of making the big leagues, Short found comfort in a guitar his older brother had given him.

Around that same time Short had wandered away from campus to Main St, where he discovered Gilrein’s. Short, who was still underage, told me how nervous he was to be sneaking into the club. “I would sit in the corner and try not to draw attention.”

Sometime in the spring of 1998 Short saw Boston guitar legend Paul Rishell play at Gilrein’s. “Looking back, I can say now, that it was one of the most important moments of my life. It was when I became serious about becoming a musician.”

Since Short became serious about the Blues, he has accomplished a whole hell of a lot. Under the tutelage of Paul Rishell- a legendary musician who moved to Boston from Brooklyn in the 1970’s- Short adopted the National Reso-phonic guitar as his weapon of choice. The uniquely American metal bodied instrument was invented by Slovakian immigrants in the early 1920’s and is now made in San Luis Obispo, CA. 

In the hands of a master, the National guitar emits a sound like no other, Short plays what is known as “Mississippi Delta” blues, a style of musical storytelling that was born in the fertile soil of the pre-war black southern tradition. Equal parts historian, performer, and educator, Short peppers his shows with the facts and myths that surround the Blues Gods that populate their Parthenon. 

By the time he turned 30 Short had played Blues festivals all over America, Italy and the U.K. He held a residency at a club in Greenwich Village, he opened for John Hammond, and in April 2006 Short and Delta Highway lead man Brandon Santini cut an album at Sam Phillips legendary recording studio in Memphis, TN.  

Although Short has won critical and popular acclaim traveling the world playing the music he loves, there is no denying that the boy who once dreamt of preaching still is touched by an evangelical zeal. “I believe in the Blues; I believe in its healing powers.”

This is a man who practices what he preaches. Short, who is a music teacher in the Worcester Public School System, prefers to direct conversation away from him and towards the various non-profit groups with whom Short works to spread the healing powers of American Blues music.

On the afternoon we met, Short was preparing to head up to Saco, ME for a week long “gig” at Camp Sunshine (campsunshine.org), a camp devoted to supplying hope and joy to children with terminal illnesses. Playing with sick children is a rare skill he learned from his work with Raising the Blues (raisingthe blues.org), a non-profit organization that is “dedicated to bringing music to children undergoing medical treatment or recovery and children with physical, emotional or educational challenges.”

With a Masters degree in Education and a profound devotion to public schooling, it only makes sense that Short will continue his work with organizations like “Blues in the Schools” (blues-in-the-schools.org) and the ones mentioned above, but I couldn’t help but wonder what he will do when the time comes when his music career pulls him away from Worcester.

“I think about moving to New York everyday,” Short admits when I press him on the inevitably of outgrowing Worcester, “But I’m happy here. This is home to me now.” For the last seven years Jon Short has held a residency at Vincent’s on Sunday afternoons. “It’s been the greatest rehearsal space you could ask for. It’s where I’ve learned to play comfortably in front of a crowd.”

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After all these years of trying to figure out what Jon Short’s angle is…I give up. Short has no angle, no ulterior motive or intentions for grandeur. He is just a good guy with a unique gift and a drive to be a man of purpose. “So how the hell did he get the Blues?” you might wonder. Well, it’s like Leon Redbone once said; “the Blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad.”

“It’s good to have someone to root for.”

It’s good to have someone to root for. It would be easy to become discouraged about the young men who are filling the shoes we slipped out of not so long ago. I look around at these kids bopping down the avenue and lurking around parking lots and disappearing into dark barrooms and  I wonder; “What kind of men will they become?”

Hell, I was no boy scout, but I was lucky to have a group of older cats  who helped guide me through the restless years. Who’s around to show these kids the ropes? And I ask myself; “Really,” (and this when I know I’m getting old), “what’s the chance of them wanting to learn?”

That’s why I breathed a sigh of relief when I met Brian. Brian Daniels is a 22 year old young man who moved to Worcester to get a new start. Back in Illinois Brian got caught up  with a bad crowd and wise enough to realize  he was heading for trouble. 

“The things with gangs”, Brian explained to me, “is that they use you up. They act like they’ve got your back, but all they care about is themselves. It’s not like they love you or anything.”

Once in Worcester, Brian ended up in the Boy’s Club gym one afternoon and it was there that he would find the focus he had been lacking. “Mike Rodriguez brought me in one afternoon and I was just messing around, hitting the bag and stuff when Carlos Garcia walked up to me and asked if I was a boxer!”

By all accounts, Brian Daniels was no preternatural phenomenon. “To tell you the truth,” Nate Reando confided in me recently, “I was pretty skeptical the first time I saw Brian fight. But Carlos believed in him, so that’s all that mattered.”

I asked Brian how he felt about his chances when he first started boxing and he shrugged. “Even if I didn’t believe it. Carlos did. I remember he said, (about my fighting) ‘Have you ever seen a dog beat a monkey?’”

I’m not sure what that means, I’m not even sure Brian does. But what matters is the smile of pride that slides across his face when he remembers that riddle that Carlos posed to him nearly twelve months ago.

And what a year it’s been for Brian. Blazing through a six and one start, his style of fighting, his determination and his strength have gained the attention of people in the New England boxing circuit. Now he has a chance to show the nation what Carlos saw.

This may Brian will be traveling will the the New England Golden Gloves team to fight the best young boxers from all over the country in a the Golden Gloves Tournament in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

He’s got a lot of people rooting for him. He’s got his girl, his two year old and his newborn baby. He’s got Carlos, of course , and Nate and Ike and everyone at the Boy’s Club. And I hope he has you rooting for him too.

See, rooting for Brian Daniels to win a boxing match in Arkansas might not seem to have an immediate importance in your life right now, but think about it like this.

Rooting for Brian is also rooting for the community that helped this young man find his focus. It’s rooting for the people who help keep the doors of the Boy’s and Girls Club open for the young men and women of our city. It’s rooting for all the people who give their time and energy to help the kids who we might shake our heads at. 

So tonight, when you rooting for your friend, or brother, or sister, or whoever it is that had the guts to get up there on stage at the Palladium and give it all. Think about what it means to you, how good it feels to have something to stand up and cheer for. How it makes you stronger to be able to slap someone on the back and say with all honesty, “Hey, we’re rooting for ya.”