6-July-99 Cold Front
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It was pouring at about 5:45 at work, and the lights were flickering and you felt, “save after every line!” Servers were returning error messages or not responding, and it felt as though the lights could go out entirely at any second.
The Newton Rec department has a series of concerts on Tuesday evenings every summer. (Hah! a small but invisible victory for my writing! I was going to continue that sentence with an "and", but backed up and put in a period.) The first was tonight, Bill Staines. Bill has been a regular at this series for about twenty years, to the extent that last Sunday's Globe had an article saying something like “You can tell it's summer when Bill Staines plays at the Jackson Homestead”
The Jackson Homestead is one of Newton's oldest houses. It was on the underground railway and contains the city's historical museum, including minutes from the abolitionist society that met there. You can read things like “Members voted to each contribute ten cents to hire a wagon to take a party of escaping slaves on to Lowell” (don't quote me on the details). The concerts are in the back yard or in the high school auditorium in case of bad weather.
We had arranged to meet Sue and Richard there. Arlene was going to stake out a spot of grass, and Sue was bringing a picnic supper; but when the deluge started we couldn't believe the concert would be outdoors on the rained-on ground. We went over to Sue's for supper and to the high school from there, but nobody was there. Back to the Jackson Homestead, and the opening act was just about to finish when we got there. So we heard all of Bill Staines' show after all.
We've probably heard Staines sing thirty or forty times by now. We go every summer at the Jackson Homestead, and we've seen him several times at a coffeehouse in Cambridge and other concerts in the area. One year we missed seeing him live because we were driving around the west, but halfway up the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming we started singing his song “My Sweet Wyoming Home.” We didn't realize it at the time, but it was the Tuesday night he was in Newton. When we saw the concert on public access TV later and corrected for the time zones, we figured that we had picked him up on the ESP channel two thirds of the way across the country. He's one of the few current folk/acoustic songwriters who has a sense of melody and writes things you can sing along with.
One of the songs he did tonight, which I've only heard once before, was about Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh and some flights they did around Africa and Asia. They're described in a couple of books by Anne Morrow Lindbergh that will have to go on my “to read” list. “He had a way with planes; she had a way with words.” Remind me in the fall.
The rain before the concert wasn't all. While I was checking e-mail Arlene called upstairs and said, “It's lightning again outside. Do you think you should turn the computer off?” I did. The storm built up to a spectacular display of lightning, with many bolts visible out our back windows, and the sky lighting up almost without a break for minutes on end. We haven't had many good thunderstorms in the last couple of years, and this was particularly impressive. Another thunderstorm moved through in the wee hours. The cold front had finally gone through, and the heat was gone in the morning.
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