Dave

Just got an email from E. Dave Carter, the songwriter in the astonishingly talented folk duo Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, died suddenly on Friday of a heart attack. Exactly one week before Falcon Ridge.

All the usual thoughts about death come to me now - No! and I'll never be able... and Why?. It boils down to this final mystery, a mystery more of life than of death: there was a man who closed his eyes and sang words that pierced and haunted me, and everything of him that could be seen exists still - his hair, and his eyes, and his hands, and the cells of his mind where his songs were born. But the voice is gone, and the things that remain - the things that someone who knew him from a distance (as I did) might use to describe him - are empty and shapeless as cast-off clothes. They are not him.

leaving for vacation

Going to Boston tomorrow for Falcon Ridge prep, to be followed by Falcon Ridge, to be followed by some vegetation at home and probably a few uncomfortable conversations about counseling and medication, and then a final Beach Weekend in Rhode Island with R and L. I hope to be able to update at some point while I'm gone, but we'll see.

There are disadvantages to being in school, but the flexibility of the schedule to permit summer travel is marvelous.