"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Gone To Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

GONE TO HEAVEN SHOUTING

I'VE BEEN ON THIS QUEST for forty-seven years, ever since my sixteenth birthday.
Every once in a while I find what I'm looking for, and the restless urge to
search settles for a little while. It sleeps.

It never sleeps long.

I haven't been home in thirty years, though I've directed others there.

There are music webs in every community. Find a thread to follow and it will
lead you to little knots of musicians who will give you other threads, if you
treat them right. There's the church choir circuit, and the community choir
circuit, and the big performing arts centers that play host to all kinds of
different musicians, big names in classical, rock, folk, alternative; and then
there are the contra dance groups, and the old time fiddlers, and the rock bands
and the jazz bands and the other people who play in little night clubs and
taverns and small concert halls. There are high school garage bands who know
about each other.

Then there are the people who practice alone at home when no one else is around
to hear, and those I can almost never track down, their threads are so short.
Mostly they aren't the ones I want, but it hurts me to know that perhaps
sometimes they are.

Some threads lead to more than one sort of musician, and some never cross into
alien territory at all.

I never know where I'll find my people. I used to search for them in a more
diffuse way, move into a town and walk its streets up and down and wait for the
tug of recognition, watch for a gesture or a flash of light or a certain look
around the eyes. These last few years I've gone to the music webs, tweaked
threads, listened for rumors. I'm probably missing a lot of my people. Not all
of them have found their way to music.

Not all of them wish to be found.

I've caught more family fish with music as a net than I did just strolling and
trolling with no bait at all.

My name is Cyrus Locke. I carry a fiddle.

Also nice bamboo spoons for rhythm, and a pennywhistle and some harmonicas, but
those are easier to hide.

IT WAS A DECEMBER Saturday night like many they get in the Pacific Northwest,
stars scattered across the dark sky, fog lying like pooled milk in roadside a
ditches and in low spots in the pastures. The air smelled of cold and woodsmoke.