(In praise of) downshifting

The object of my current Obsessive Listening Loop is Lorraine Feather's Such Sweet Thunder. I'd had the sense that I'd like it a lot, but once it got here—boy—I went for every single track right off the bat. It's among only a handful of albums that have grabbed me at first listen from stem-to-stern (a bit of a motley crew [but no! no! no Mötley Crüe]: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Armed Forces; Joan Armatrading, Walk Under Ladders; Bryan Ferry, Boys and Girls; k.d. lang, Absolute Torch and Twang; and Alison Krauss & Union Station, New Favorite). The music, the lyrics, the singing, the swinging...it has it all. I love the shout-out to Ellington and the encapsulation of obsession in these eight one-syllable words, more succinct than haiku: "Rocks in my bed / You're in my head". So—several times a day now you'll find me singing and swinging along, in my off-key contralto, to these lines:

I'll be thinkin' of a time
Would've seemed so wrong
To tend my garden for a year
And just forget my career

The tune is "Backwater Town" (based on Ellington's "Suburban Beauty"), a jaunty, infectious paean to leaving the hustle-bustle of big-city life for a new life in a place where one can expect "To have the postman know our name / To play a mellower game". Overidentify much? Oh, yeah. This pretty much tracks the arc of Our Big Move a couple of years ago, from San Francisco, California to Madison, Wisconsin (important disclaimer: Madison is decidedly not a Backwater Town...but the song uses the term with a great big wink and a great big smile, in any case): where our kids walk to their public school and run outside to play in the park without hovering chaperones...where it's a tough call whether to go to the grocery store that's 3 minutes away or the one that's 5 minutes away...where my husband's cross-town commute is 15 minutes...and where I can ply my trade in full enjoyment of its most satisfactory aspects—that of being a combination of Jewish mother to and gladiator for my clients—and still be my first grader's classroom parent and on the casserole crew for the neighborhood's new moms. (And, of course, there is the garden. And this blogging thing.) Career? Feh—I'd rather have a life, thanks.

Comments

[Kathy]

I find I don't like living anonymously. I like it that our mail-lady not only knows our name, but knows my son has been waiting for weeks for the ants to his ant farm to come in the mail. And that she is aware that they write letters to another family on her route, and she has often hand cancelled a letter from the other family (they are first on the route) and delivered it the same day to my kids. And I like it that the librarians have our library card number memorized.

But our grocery stores are farther away, and my husband's commute is longer. Oh, well, you can't have everything.

[Chan S.]

Very nice! Living in a friendly town is a very new experience for me, and I'm still agog (and grateful).