Cumulus: Fiddle-I-Fee

Sometimes, well maybe all the time, I wonder what the point of my life is. What the point of Life is, period. So we're here for a while, and then we're not. I've tried out the gamut of afterlife beliefs to give this life some sort of point based on the next one, but none of them has grabbed me in an

eternally satisfying kind of way. I always come back at some point to, What's the point? For a while the most reasonable answer seemed to be that there wasn't any more abstract point to our human lives than I've ever imagined there to be for a protozoan or a rock. I only ask the question because I have the brain complexity to ask it. Sort of the reverse of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am": I am, therefore I think. And being a thinking being, I think about why I am. Maybe the rocks and protozoans are sitting/swimming around wondering what the point of Life is, too.

My mom always seemed to be happy with the simple answer that Life is Good. She loved living. She hated to stop living at the end. Just because. Like that ready-made Mom answer to my perpetual "Why?"s as a child: "Because." That was all the answer she wanted or needed.

Since she died, I've found myself letting go of my perpetual Why?s a lot more. Things can be shitty; things can be beautiful; life is everything; and I'm alive. When I start to flounder in wondering about the point of it all, I remember my mother's furious frown as a MRSA infection and two successive strokes took her down. She fought death with everything she had. After the first stroke, when she could still communicate with effort, she insisted on letting us know she was still ticking by wrestling out comments and jokes in a barely articulate whisper. I watched her and wondered what was worth the battle to her? And knowing her, I'm pretty sure it was simply Life. Why was Life worth so much to her? Because.

On Wednesday night we held our annual Thanksgiving Eve benefit concert at church to raise funds

for emergency heating here in the Berkshires. James has been doing these shows for 31 years now, and I've been doing them with him for almost 20. Every year it's a big quest to choose the song I want to sing, and I went through the same back-and-forth-and-all-over-the-place search this year as usual, settling on a simple Mexican folk song, "El Sol Que Tu Eres," to honor Linda Ronstadt who had to give up singing this year due to Parkinson's disease. Linda Ronstadt is one of my all-time vocalist heroes, able to sing gorgeously in any style, genre, or octave, so it breaks my heart to know that she can't do it anymore. It's such a loss of beauty for the world, and it must be the loss of part of her soul for her. I dread the day I can no longer sing.

I also decided to round up a bunch of the kids and do a new version of an old American folk song with them, a cumulative song with animals called "Fiddle-I-Fee." We held two run-throughs on the two Sundays before the show, and three or four kids showed up. I decided to just come up with

enough animals for 10 or so kids and spent a couple of days finding fun drawings of them, including a couple of unusual ones that kids asked for, to put on pieces of poster board so they could hold them up when their turn came. Then on Wednesday night I recruited whatever kids were there to add to the ones who'd rehearsed and we just went for it. Jogging up and down that long line of kids from 4 to 14 years old, getting them to hold up their goofy pictures of animals and make goofy animal sounds was a hoot!

And when the song was over, every one of them asked me, "Can we keep these?" wanting to take the signs home with them. Even the teenagers.

So, things can be shitty; things can be beautiful; life is everything, and I'm alive. I had a cat and my cat loved me and I fed my cat under yonder tree. And the cat said, "Fiddle-i-fee."