marcus,

not that we know each other or anything, but just wanted to offer my condolences.

i lost a good buddy myself not so long ago, actually the funeral took place a mere two saturdays ago. his parents asked me to be a pall-bearer. gotta admit carrying the weight of his body, sunken down into all that wood, looking at the nameplate nailed into the casket while marching into and out of st augustine's well, that stung. bad.

the wounds are still fresh and still deep and i'm up at the whiskey window again tonight; i don't wanna assume too much but i'll just throw it out there, don't be surprised if you're not back at the window a few more times than normal over the coming weeks.

my friend was thirty five, young young young, but now that i'm early forties myself, well, thirty five, forty seven, it all sounds young and a little too close to home. doesn't it? i'm a few years older than my friend was and his dad is my godfather so i can honestly say i knew this kid cradle to grave.

i'm already speaking way out of school here and i got this feeling i'm about to engage in some board offenses, including redboarding, but since i am quite frankly bombed out of my proverbial gourd and since your friend was a musician (am going to try to download some of their stuff later, i googled and someone compared them to flat duo jets, a band i enjoyed back in the halycon days of grad school) i figured music means a lot to you, as it does to me, so here goes a little mourning/music/wagering combo story...

i carry my cds around in various holders, the "jewel cases" are stored away but i never look at them, i got "albums" (remember albums? remember lifting the needle up to get back to a the start of a fave track?) that i can sing word for word from start to finish but since i never get the memory refresh of seeing the actual packaging, i might know the actual titles of only one or two songs on the album.

my recently departed friend shared my love of what the music critics refer to as "alt.country". we mourned when uncle tupelo dissolved and we rejoiced when son volt put out their first album. we burned a lot of man-hours discussing that album (album is named "trace" for the record)...was this lyric a cryptic diss of jeff tweedy?, etc., etc. and we didn't even know then that tweedy had made some truly creepy moves on farrar's girlfriend when tupelo was still together!

as happens, you play an album to death and you put it away for a few years...have had a few such cycles w/"trace".

the day after labor day was the day we found out about my friend. to make it hurt worse, a couple days before that we found out my wife has something called a meningioma, a slow-growing, usually benign brain tumor. so, yeah, i was reeling.

that night my wife and me took a ride out into the farm country of saratoga/washington counties of ny....and as we drove i pulled out a cd holder and flipped through, looking for something to hit the spot...and i spotted "trace".

i swear there's a racing part to this, hang on...

i popped "trace" in the player in honor of john...like i said, he loved the damn album...

the first track has this refrain about "may the wind take your troubles away, may the wind take your troubles away..." and truth be told i had troubles i wanted taken away, so the tune hit the spot.

fast forward about twelve days...a week ago today...my younger brother is having a b-day party for his two kids, both born early sept...the party's at his in-laws' place, not far from saratoga raceway, er, racino....that morning i figure for a little diversion i'll get a form and look at the card, maybe put something in since the party's close by can sneak over for a few minutes...

i decide to spend a few bucks chasing a small p-6 carryover...on the way over to the racino i realize i hadn't actually made up the ticket...so i pull in to the racino parking lot, find a spot, rummage through the glove until i find some scrap paper...i leave the engine running and the cd player blasting the son volt, repeating the same song over and over...may the wind take your troubles away, may the wind take your troubles away, damn that refrain makes me feel better...

i make up the ticket and walk inside and put the bet in, for a total of $96, put in a couple of win bets, too, and go back to the party...of course, everyone's outside, and no one is watching tv and i feel a little shitty about asking the hosts to turn on capital otb-tv 12, so the long and short of it is, i have no idea what's happened until we get home, when i check the results on drf.com...can't even watch replays because i cancelled my brisbet a/c once they stopped taking ny (i'll get down w/nyra a/c wagering someday, what can i say i am conservative when it comes to my money and they are bankrupt, after all, so...).

so i'm still alive (and both my win bets had come in) and i turn on tv-12 in time to catch the opening odds of the gazelle...i turned to my wife and said, the good news is, i'm alive (ironic choice of words given personal circumstance), the bad news is i singled against a 1/9 shot....

anyway, as you can probably guess by now, i ended up hitting the p-6 that day. after taxes, w/consos and the win bets, it was the best wagering day of my life.

my best day ever, in the midst of the death of a friend and in the midst of a serious, potentially life-altering, or life-threatening, medical problem for my wife.

go figure...

so the music part of this...not surprisingly, i drank deep into that night...celebrating AND mourning, you can't get a better excuse combo than that, eh?...well, i was emailing a friend about it all and i mentioned (cuz HE likes son volt too) that i had put the ticket together whilst listening to "that may the wind take your troubles away song". well, i decided that i actually wanted the exact title of the song in my email, so i looked the damn song up online.

google "son volt lyrics" you'll find the song title easy enough. it didn't take long.

the song is called "windfall".

no kidding. you try and write that kinda detail in a piece of fiction and you'll (rightly) be accused of descending into hackdom. but it happened.

***

i always joke that i'm a recovering catholic, but secretly, there's some things i miss about it. i just can't make myself believe but there's beauty and comfort to be found in rituals such as the funeral mass, like the one they had for john.

somewhere in the funeral mass you'll hit a part where the priest will recite a line of scripture that says, in part, "...scatter the darkness"...

i've always liked that phrase.

and so i'll end with it: to myself, to marcus, and to anyone else out there in tg-land with a reason to mourn, may your darkness scatter, and may the wind take your troubles away.