Manhattan

Could not sleep at all last night.... lay wide awake in bed and kept glancing over at the clock. I'd managed to squish my whole 5 months' worth of stuff into 1 suitcase and 1 small duffel and was pretty sure I had everything I needed, but was worried about where I would stay in NY (some leads with friends had fallen through). (I am stopping in New York for several days en route to Rio.) I kept getting anxious over whether I was forgetting something crucial. As I lay in bed, images of possibly-forgotten-items kept popping into my head in random order: Baking powder? Scone recipe? Passport? Camera battery charger? Pandeiro tuning key? Bikini? Long ethernet cable? Portuguese dictionary? Favorite surdo strap?

In between those little spasms of doubt, I saw the winding trail of my strange gypsy life over the past three years, the good and the bad. (Short version for those just catching up: I started percussion three years ago; it immediately took over my life. and two years ago, I quit my PhD resarch-biology career to go to Brazil for six months to study percussion. I got back to the US in March and ever since have been driving up and down the West Coast playing with different groups. Now I'm headed back to Brazil.)

It feel like at least five years have gone by in the last six months:

The time I lived the Blue House.... the huge airy house with the kitchen full of housemates - carpenters, philosophers, bartenders, artists - and the deck with the grand view of Lake Washington. I took my first tentative steps at teaching then; and led my first parade, painted all in silver, head to toe.

Then all summer playing with the Lions of Batucada! (in Portland) That was one of the best years of my life. I lived first in the Crack House of musicians and Cuban artists, and then in the magical Chinese Medicine House with Ana, Kendra, Benjamin, and Rosie the dog. I got up every day at 6am to brush and feed the Arabian horses Pele and Bass....

Then the long road trip to California Brasil Camp; studying and playing music all day and all night, and sleeping under the stars at night.

I lived in Oakland after that, studying repinique with Jorge Alabe. And driving in my beloved Forester wherever I wanted, every day, a fresh trip to somewhere new.

Two weeks ago I returned to Seattle. Finally went through all my possessions and discarded virtually all of them. Loaded up on hand drum lessons (conga and timbal), taught a little bit, and enjoyed the last sunshine that Seattle had to offer. Then the rains started and away I went again.


.... I don't really know what I am doing or why I feel compelled to return to Brazil, why I feel so compelled to continue to work on percussion and music and to wander so far and wide for it. Sometimes it just seems obsessive and pointless. But so what; the only real point to life, anyway, to it is to enjoy the moment and to be with the people that you love being with, and music allows me to do that. I look back on my five "years" that occurred in just one summer, and realize how rich my life has become, how full every month is of new experiences and new friends. In each month this year, more happened to me, and I learned more and saw more, than in entire years of my previous life.

So much of this experience has hinged around friendship...I lost 2 friends in the process of chasing music, but I think I made about 98 new ones, so I guess I am coming out ahead in the game. And the 98 new ones have confirmed my ideas of what friendship is, and what it can be.

***
So I lay there thinking it all over. And petting my wonderful little cat (curled up on my feet) as much as I could, apologizing to her for leaving her once more. (I am leaving her in very good hands.)

But in the end I got to New York, and, after a mere 3 hours in the longest airport shuttle ride in history (I was the very last person unloaded out of the 15-person shuttle), reached my hostel. But the shuttle ride was worth it just as a city tour. Manhattan is its very glittering best on rainy nights, when all the brilliant neon lights on those long, long avenues are reflected in every raindrop in every direction. It is such a beautiful city (and boy, that shuttle sure drove every inch of it!)

For just $35 I have a private room in the Central Park Hostel! I'm kind of amazed at my housing luck since I just found the place online last night - and first off, who knew you could get a hostel dorm bed for $35 in Manhattan (they have cheaper ones, too); and second, through some fluke, nobody else is in my dorm room tonight. Got four beds and a desk all to myself, and there's free wireless, and a full kitchen downstairs.

It was 9:30pm by the time I got to the hostel and I was dead tired and very hungry, but my rule #1 in a new city is "Make yourself go out to meet your musician friend, no matter how tired you are" so I raced out to take a cab to Annette's Brazilian/Latin jazz gig in the East Village. And yup, I was so glad I'd gone. Her band, StringBeans, was wonderful - a rich and pure Latin jazz of a kind that only started to open up for me at Brazil Camp. Annette spotted me in the audience and dedicated a great baiao to me (!), then I sat in with them on surdo, along with a BRILLIANT repinique player (Glenn) - wished I'd had my pandeiro... - and afterwards, Glenn & I had a great talk about Brazil and teaching and mestres and escolas and blocos and hostels and.... We seemed to be only a little way into Glenn's great story about when his rock band was stranded in a Leipzig hostel with a pack of naive Polish teenagers, when it turned out it was already way past midnight and Annette was already honking the horn to drive me all the way back to the Upper West Side. Dizzy with fatigue by then - and starvation, since American didn't feed me anything on the flight - but hey, now I've played in Manhattan! And I've got two invitations to play in two different groups (maracatu and samba) in Manhattan's Halloween Parade, another invite to play in a school group thing, and info on the big bateria in town that meets Thursdays, and a lead on a possible apartment, and another lead on practice space. And: new friends.

SO FAR SO GOOD.