"People had to make up their own music in their minds!"

Things are pretty quiet right now and there hasn't been much to post about. I am getting anxious about why I haven't heard anything from the Halifax CI Eval Unit... it'd be nice to get an acknowledgement or an update on waiting times.

I am kind of bummed out this week because it is time for the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival. This is the first significant landmark event that I feel like I have 'lost' since I lost my hearing. For the first time I feel frustrated to be bereft of a specific thing. Frustrated not in a general way but in a specific, pissed-off way.

The Festival is in its 13th year and has become such a special time for my friends and me, all true blues fans. I have heard Sonny Landreth, Guy Davis, T-Bone Walker, Dutch Mason, and others too good and too numerous to mention, live and in person right here in my little city. A true Blues education, and now it seems, like one of those back-in-college nightmares, I've had the final exam and didn't even know it.

Sorry. It'll still mean getting together with friends on the pub patio in splendid autumn weather, but the loss of the music just sucks.

It just sucks.

I got an email from one of my Board members today. He and I have discussed music in the past. For some reason - maybe he's been thinking about the Festival too, we usually compare notes on what we are going to see - he writes:

"I know how important music is to me and know how important it is to you. Sometimes music helps me continue and I think I know how big that loss can be. We can still communicate with you in a more or less fully functioning way, but the music is gone, and that must hurt."

I need to learn to relate to music a new way, I guess. When I sit on the wooden patio of one of the pubs that surrounds the downtown common square, and a band is in the square, I feel the vibrations right through the floorboards and my chair. That will be the Festival experience for me this year.

The often-misunderstood and always-underrated Yoko Ono said, "All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!"

Maybe I'll invite ol' Yoko to Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival 2005...

ronnie