Again with the fool moon

Eight o’clock, time to go play music with the Thursday evening Willis Street gang. Check in on CC, he’s bed-headed and I’m curiously awake. Autumn moons do that to a girl. Shoulder up the banjo, roll out at eight-o-five and at eight-eleven I’ve climbed the tiny grade past Martha and Richard Shaw’s light-bedizened cabin and down the tiny little appendix of Willis Lane.

Cars line the left, and tunes faintly sound from the house behind the gate.

Jitters the big yellow dog gives his best warning volley, I have to ignore it and push through pretending it’s fine if I set off alarms in the neighborhood.

Our neighborhood’s the same. All the dogs go off at anything. Bubble gum popping. A car going by. And worst of all: a person that’s NOT in a car.

Inside, it’s obvious it’s a special occasion, there are no seats…holy mackerel, there are a dozen musicians and THREE little rats running around, sorry, children: big Liam, little Sofia and Caden the next Dennis the Menace kinetikid.

They’re playing Beggar Boy, so I can tune up and join in before the usual sit-in-the-kitchen and yak with the kids. Sofia is able to finally play ‘vacuum cleaner’ (I used to call it wheel barrow)…a mere month since she was not quite ‘buff’ enough to walk on her hands…but then, this is her birthday! Big five.

And another birthday, Ned’s 66. Two cakes, two songs, thirty shining eyes reflecting candle light. After about an hour’s intermittent playing (I sit out the waltzes) we’re breaking up. Richard S. tells me he sees me all over town but that we’re always going opposite directions. Martha and he are the most regular of the musicians here…I guess Tom and Jeannie and Liam are, too. It is very cool to think that there are people raising their kid in a musical tradition, safely spared from ‘game boy’ and T.V. I could be wrong here, but it seems like Liam’s not a TV kid.

Half the party has chocolate icing on their faces, and sticky fingers on the fretboards. Our last tune is Kitchen Girl, and we actually sound like we know what we’re doing….

And by ten I’m home again under that magic moon.

All is right with the world. Within five miles of me, I mean. May things improve elsewhere, please?