How Seth Found Himself Half-Naked on the Roof With a Gun This Morning...

This is not a blog about creative angst.  This is not a blog about making music or the various and sundry difficulties that task holds.  This post is about blood curdling, eye-popping, lightening-in-your-veins real life shit.  This blogpost is about finding your family suddenly at the hairline fracture between safety and harm.  This blog is about Seth.

Our morning began abruptly at 5:04, when our Springer Spaniel, Bolt, heard some sort of critter clamboring on the roof.  I rolled over and told the dog to hush and stop barking at squirrels.  But the sound was less small animal skittery, more clunky.

Raccoons? 

Seth, already awake from jet-lag, propped himself up and glanced out the window.

"It's no squirrel, it's a guy!" he yelled and nearly levitated out of bed to the backyard, hollering profanities at our would-be intruder.

I stumbled out of the covers and in that foggy adrenaline-just-got-me-up state, began rifling for a flashlight, of all things.  Seth had meanwhile climbed on the roof, handgun in tow, and eventually knocked me out of my crazed flashlight search by yelling for me to call 911.

In the minutes that followed, I remember my extremely dry mouth and my heart pounding in my skull.  I remember yanking Harper out of her upstairs bed and rushing her downstairs away from danger...the intruder was right by her window, apparently just hanging out.  I remember Fender crying and telling me that God had told him in a dream that this was going to happen.  All the while, I was talking to the 911 agent who was, apparently also talking to the cops.

But the image that is emblazoned in my memory is of my wiry, jet-lagged husband, dressed only in his skivvies  (the flip-flop boxers he has had for god-knows-how-long) in a complete 007 stance with both hands stretched out holding our would-be cat burglar at a silver screen worthy gunpoint.  It was spectacular.  It was frightening.  It was fucking bad ass. It was also, I might add, FREEZING OUTSIDE.

Now, I don't think Seth has ever claimed to be a pacifist, but he is always a peacemaker.  He knows just how to diffuse a charged social situation, and he is annoyingly charming with older women.  In short, Seth is unresistably likable.  So the image of him ready to harm an intruder in order to protect me and our kids was, shall we say, shocking.  And, in retrospect, unbelievably sexy.

Apparently, as we were waiting for the cops (who seemed to take AGES) to surround the house and tell us what to do, our rooftop interloper tried to pull something out of his pockets two times.  Seth said things like, "Hey, Buddy!  None of that!" and "I know you don't want to get hurt so just stay right where you are till the cops come." Intruder-on-the-roof-guy didn't ever say a word.  No shots were fired.  No persons injured.  I guess his hands got scratched on the way down from the roof, so an ambulance came to tend to that.  Then the cops booked him on a trespassing charge and that was that.

Seth had recently returned from a two-week stint in the Middle East.  He was sick with the flu, and not feeling top shelf, to say the least.  I had, just hours before, not-so-silently cursed the chaos of his dirty clothes and backpack and travel gear strewn about the house.  And then he pulls that rooftop Jason Bourne shenanigan out of his pocket.

Herein lies the mystery of marriage, of love.  The constant navigation of two people through moments of weakness and failures immediately followed by moments of extreme courage and glory. Or vice versa.  Broken wonders.  That's what we are.  Beautiful brave buffoons.

And this is how, well before noon on this Wednesday morning, I am poignantly reminded  of grace.

Forget the failures, hold fast to the glory, for that is what we are.  That courageous and deft man is who I married.  To my dying day, I can not forget that. 

We Did It! Alright Alright Returns Part 1

Well, wow.

We did it.

We hauled ourselves, our children, Katelin, our gear, and our vintage 1959 trailer across the country and back.  5700 miles, nine house shows, twenty-one nights, countless truck stops, a few state parks, a national monument, one national park, several national forests, and one Crazy Horse later, we have returned to our Colorado crash pad across from the train tracks.

It was epic, this tour we dubbed the “Tin Cup Nights Tour”.  Not because of the raging after-parties or screaming fans busting their way to the front of the stage, and not because we made out like bandits financially. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I‘ll take all of those things AND an invitation to open for Nathaniel Rateliff and the Nightsweats.  But this tour was successful because it proved something epic to us: that this weird musical lifestyle can actually work for us, for our family.

For so so long, I was convinced that I had to either be a mom or a performer.  The traditional avenues to success in the music industry are woefully un-family-friendly.  Believe me, I’ve experienced it, and I’ve watched other families go through it.  I’ve played shows that started at midnight, gotten home at three am and then woken up with the kids at six am.  I’ve watched wives become single parents for whole swaths of time while their husbands toured.  Heck, I’ve been one of those wives.  Ugh.  I still shudder when I think of those days.

How in the world could we possibly make touring work for our family?  I mean, there was no way we were going to let our kids sit in a nasty greenroom for and hour and a half while we played to half-listening, half-drunk people at 11pm.  And we aren’t quite at the stage where we can hire a full-time nanny to tag along with us, whisking the kids away at bedtime while mommy and daddy sing pretty songs.  Nope.  It had to be a whole-family affair.  A road-trip with some singing involved, and a few strategically placed destinations to buoy our cute little charges along the way.  It had to be musical, professional and family-centric. Somehow, almost accidentally, we struck that balance.

In the following days and weeks, I will tease this out, devoting a blog post to each of the intentional or completely accidental tenants of our success.  We are home now, and honestly, I just want to get back on the road.  It’s easier there.  Life on the road is definitely difficult physically, but oh! The freedom from the trappings of houses, pets, lawns to be watered, pianos to dust!

The duality of this life we have chosen, the necessary stasis of home and family and school and soccer and music lessons juxtaposes, sometimes jarringly, with the equally necessary gypsy-like life of a troubadour.  It is not for the faint of heart. This re-entry into the Typical American Life has been like shifting from fifth to first gear.  Clearly, there are lessons to be learned on this side of the adventure, but thank God we had the adventure in the first place.