Precious Memories, How They Linger

Terri and I drove to Nashville this week to hear one of our dearest friends perform at the renowned Bluebird Cafe, venue for some of the greatest singer-songwriters in the land.

We’ve known Walt from his youth. I was his youth minister-- me at the ripe age of 24 and he a wise-cracking 18 year-old.  You might say we grew up together.  A few summers later Walt “worked” with me as an intern. Oh my. God is gracious, is all I can say, and looks out for fools. 

After college Walt made his way to Louisville to see if seminary and ministry might be his path. It clearly wasn’t, at least not in the traditional sense.

But last night at the Bluebird we had church. A rapt audience became a community of grace as we received song after song of passion and spirit, about things that matter most in life all wrapped in engaging melody and rhythm and story. It was preaching in the most primal and profound sense.

Many of the songs took us back several decades when Walt was only starting to discover his call. He and others would gather around our kitchen table on Friday nights until the wee hours of Saturday mornings to hone their craft, trade turns of phrase and guitar licks, encourage each other, and sit in wonder in the echo of those moments when voices converged and harmonies interlocked and something bigger than the sum of its parts was present.

As a writer from a different genre says, “Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.”

But they did. Walt moved to Nashville for a decade. We moved to Louisville. And though we still have the kitchen table, its magnetism for drawing singers and listeners seems to have lost its pull.

Hearing Walt again in the intimate venue of the Blue Bird conjured up those days. His music is “like a coat from the cold,” to quote one of his earliest songs.

The evening also brought to mind the last time I’d heard Walt in Nashville.  It was 2007 and I was in the city for a gathering called the Festival of Homiletics, a national preachers’ gathering that is far more engaging than it sounds. Walt was mostly on the road then with a traveling band that had made it somewhat big largely on a few of his songs.  But he was back in Nashville on the night before the festival to play a benefit concert for a beloved fellow singer-songwriter who’d died recently and left a family with few resources-- the fate of most singer-songwriters. It was a great night of music, laughter, and tears.

Early the next morning came a call to my hotel room with the news from Louisville that our son, Bobby, had been killed in an apartment fire.

Terri and I recalled those days on our way home from the Bluebird as we exchanged stories of that morning four years ago-- where we were, the chronology, how we heard, who told us, who was with us, what we did next. It was a painful remembering, a grief rekindled, a recalling of details not previously shared, probably not the wisest activity while one is hurling a car down the road at 70 mph. 

I realized that I was driving that very stretch of I-65 in much the same condition four years ago when the news was fresh, not fully assimilated, more of a nightmare than a reality.

As we stood in line to enter the Bluebird this week our mutual friend, Judy, handed us a CD of a Walt performance I’d missed in my quick exit from the Festival of Homiletics. Walt was a guest performer for the festival, along with storyteller Will Campbell, on the evening of Bobby’s death. We listened to voice of the introducer from four years ago call our names in remembrance. We heard our story told to those gathered. There was call for a moment of silent prayer that, though four years old, retained the power to hold us in sacred suspension before the Mercy. Then the music and stories came and wove their ways into our hearts.

We cried our way home. And though exhausted we felt strangely healed and connected-- to each other, to our friends who held us those years ago, to Bobby, to God. Remembering became an act of love, binding up wounds and binding us together.