Throwing Time in Reverse

Last thing I need is another birthday, but today was one, and so I thought I’d celebrate it–or counter it–by throwing time in reverse.

Before the pandemic, two part-time jobs suited me quite well. Long distance driving is just right for thinking long thoughts, and projecting films in a theater provides time to write them down.

Then there were eight weekends every fall playing in a Renaissance festival, and as weather allowed, busking weekends in the spring and early summer. For all of my four full decades busking, I never thought it would end. Whenever I was asked, my answer was pat:

Death may beckon, but retirement does not.

Enter Covid-19.

Deliveries? Done. Cinema? Shuttered. Faire? Closed. Busking? Hard to play wind instrument while wearing a mask. And so, while I never exactly retired, it was forced on me. Four times.

As the pandemic appeared to subside last summer, I played myself back into King Richard’s realm, and so I resumed my most physically demanding gig on Labor Day Weekend. Huge crowds. Many apparently eager to get out and, fortunately for strolling minstrels such as yours unruly, happy to tip. By far my best season in that regard. As one of the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers put it on the final day, “Fives are the new Ones.”

Two weeks later, to my everlasting amazement (and gratitude), the young new owners of the Screening Room asked if I’d like to return. A married couple with a young son, they craved at least one day when they could be in the same place at the same time and share a meal other than breakfast. Attendance has been coming back slowly. I only hope it’s now enough for them to afford an employee every Wednesday.

Two months after that, I dropped in at Winfrey’s Fudge & Chocolates, to offer myself as an extra driver for holiday deliveries. Never thought of that as coming out of retirement until they let me know that Thursday had turned into a day when too many orders were going in every direction. Since then, they’ve also dispatched me on Fridays, a shorter day when they tell me to sleep late. Never an argument there.

Within three months, then, I came out of three retirements. The sort of thing that you reflect on when you approach a birthday that approaches par at Pebble Beach and Augusta. And as weather kept improving, I thought, why not make it four?

Downtown Newburyport was surprisingly busy, and my spot under the tree was open, though it was still cool enough that I did not need its shade. Many kids in groups. Never occurred to me that this might be a week of school vacation, something on which I once kept a vigilant eye.

As always, they were loud, rambunctious, but that just gave me cover for working off a lot of rust. Not only that, but I gained their immediate favor, which made everything easy for me. One boy started doing some hideous mimicry of me, but a passerby, a woman of about 30 with a husband pushing a stroller, told him to stop. He did, and walked away. When I finished a tune, he returned to apologize. “Don’t worry, it’s okay.” He apologized again. I smiled and offered a fist-bump.

What new world is this?

As happened at King Richard’s on that first day last September, I was stumbling with many of my best songs but able to salvage them with an improvised tune until I could play it through. Whereas my usual busk is about half reading behind the stand, and half dancing away from it, today I was starting songs at the stand and skipping away to launch into other songs in the same key, or to improvise. Some tunes I never found at all, but there were at least a dozen that ripped, intact, as if waiting to be played and sent headlong in every direction–mostly those I play with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers, or Buccaneer Bay Buzzards when I join them.

A little over an hour later, it became overcast, the temperature dropped, and I was, frankly, winded. Got home and lied down for a minute that became an hour before I could move again. Yes, that’ll take some work, too. No retiring from that.

-30-