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Vasia de Barro
In the searing summer of 1984, in the long months after my lover J. died, I went back east for a few months to be my sister’s labor coach.
In between birth classes I spent a lot of time in the library.
I read dozens of books, trying to lose my grief in the printed word. It worked, sort of. I don’t remember what I read, aside from Barry Lopez’s collection of coyote stories.
Mainly, I borrowed music from the library, LPs and the occasional cassette, searching through the backs of the collections to find albums other than Cyndi Lauper and Boy George. I found jazz, and folk, and Cajun and creole music, delicious angry Puertoriqueño chants, Ghanaian highlife, plaints from union organizers in Appalachia. I spent hours pouring music into the hole I had become.
The month that J. died, as I sat in that private hell of my own devising, my housemate in Berkeley brought home an album of Andean panpipe music. I wore that record out, listening to it over and over before I headed back to Buffalo.
In the back bins of the music room of the Buffalo and Erie County Library were two, three dozen albums of South American folk music, Paraguayan harps and bailecitos from Argentina, the rough authentic themes from which the panpipe bands sprang. I had a new interest.
I had no money. I cadged a few dollars from my father, bought a bunch of cheap drugstore cassettes (eight for a dollar), and recorded those LPs on my brother’s stereo. It was before I realized that South American music would be a lifelong obsession. I didn’t write the names of the tracks, nor the performers, on most of the tapes.
Which meant I didn’t know name of the song that haunted me for twenty years afterward, playing from an increasingly deteriorated tape on a cheap boom box, month after month at three in the morning, looking at the ceiling as the mockingbird sang outside the house I moved to in Virginia, across the Kansas plains in the U-Haul, in the warm East Oakland nights. Fifteen years until the anonymous tape frayed, and a few more hearing it almost continuously in my mind. I had no idea how to find even so much as the name of the song. It was an instrumental, at least the version of it I had taped.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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