I Won't Be There

The topic for the 2020 OVFF songwriting contest was "Future So Bright." "I Won't Be There" was the result of that prompt. The song I ended up writing in the summer of 2020 and performing at OVFF 2021 (after both the con and the contest were obviously delayed) was very different from the one I would have written in the alternate timeline where 2020 turned out very differently than it actually did. It didn't place, probably because it was more than a little off-topic, but I never doubted that I had written a good song (something I am rarely sure of).

June 2, 2020 was my 38th birthday. At the beginning of the year, when COVID-19 seemed like a sidebar in the news that was happening very far away, I'd envisioned throwing a big backyard barbecue to celebrate with all my friends. When restrictions set in, this plan got revised to sitting around my fire pit with one or two friends, masked and six feet apart. But when the day actually arrived, Minneapolis was still under a strict curfew that made any gathering impossible. Despite this minor disappointment, that day I received one of the best birthday gifts I've ever received: a hard and steady rain that extinguished any lingering fires still burning in my city, and ensured that at least for one night, nothing would be set ablaze.

This is where I make my stand.

By this time, restaurants in Minneapolis had opened back up for takeout, so I picked up a dinner order at a neighborhood Mexican place, standing in a socially-distanced line behind a clean-cut Fed-looking dude with a badge and a gun at his hip who was purchasing an absolutely staggering number of tacos, like hundreds of tacos. Back at home, I ate my birthday dinner. It tasted good. My husband made me a margarita, which I finally could relax enough to drink. Then I cut myself a big slice of the banana cream pie that I'd made for myself (I'm not much for cake) and ate it at my kitchen table, looking out at my backyard and the pine tree swaying in the breeze and the torrent of rainwater gushing out of the downspout from the business next door. Out of nowhere, a phrase popped into my head: "This is where I make my stand."

One of the things I remember most about the early days of COVID was the strong sense I felt of rootedness in my environment. I'd never felt it to such an extent before. Pre-pandemic, like so many other people, my reality was one of commuting to and from a 40-hour-a-week job, filling my evenings with family obligations and volunteer commitments and leisure activities, such that I was asleep during most of the hours I spent in my own home. When I suddenly found myself at home all the time, I became incredibly aware of subtle changes in the natural world near my house, of the routines of my neighbors (and in some cases, learned their identities for the first time!), of the ebb and flow of the life that had always been happening all around me without my noticing. Yet with that growing connection came a growing vulnerability. If the fires that burned so many other parts of my city had come as far as my tree (fortunately, they never did), the same roots that let it grow high above the roofs of the houses around it would also have sealed its fate.

The tree didn't get a choice in where it was planted, in the same way I didn't get a choice in the time and circumstances of my birth. But day by day in 2020 I felt myself anchoring more strongly in one place and time, choosing my one square mile and defending it even as I knew I was closing off my avenues of escape. I'm only 42 as I write this and I hope to still have as many years of life in front of me as I have behind me - but even so, by choice or by chance, there are things I won't ever get to know or experience. I won't get to see how everything turns out for my kids as they grow, or how people react to my songs in the future (or if anyone even remembers them after a certain point in time). All I've ever wanted to do with my life was to create something that would have a lasting positive impact on the world. It wasn't until very recently that I fully understood that I had no way of knowing if I would ever succeed at this goal.

I started writing this post well before the results of the 2024 election were known. Like the song itself, this blog post might not be very much like the one I might have written if things had gone differently. Damage has been done to my country and my society that I no longer expect to see repaired in my lifetime. It might not be fixed in my kids' lifetimes, either. And I worry that these songs I've spent the last five years on are just going to feel like salt in a wound now that we're back in a worst-case scenario. 

Of course, I don't actually know any of that for sure. And so as hope gets even harder for me to access, I find myself turning to curiosity in its absence. It's possible, maybe even likely, that my country and my whole world are headed for desperately hard times thanks to the poor choices that many of us have made. But it's also possible, maybe even likely, that not every catastrophe I fear will come to pass. Maybe at this point, hope for me is not so much an assurance that things will definitely get better as it is an openness to finding out what might happen next so that if nothing else, I can try to influence some small aspect of the future for the better. (As Seeming puts it in "Remember to Breathe," possibly the most gorgeous song about suicidal ideation ever written: "Maybe I'm wrong, and isn't it great to be wrong?")

I've spent a lot of time over the past decade writing and thinking about change. Something I've discovered about it is that even when it looks sudden, it has actually always been gradual. Behind every apparently abrupt shift is a long chain of circumstances and causality leading up to the actual moment of transformation. Art taught me that, from my bandmate Dave singing "You never know which battle breaks the siege" in his brilliant song about Andor, to my favorite episode of Doctor Who (Heaven Sent - "Personally, I think that's a hell of a bird."). So if the songs on this album can help somebody endure and stay strong and keep doing the next right thing in the same way that other artists' works have helped me, my effort will have been worthwhile.

This concludes my blog series on Sisyphus. Thank you for reading and listening!