Moments of grace since I last wrote you.

1. After donating a very small amount of money to a local independent radio station / community center I am thanked with a personal email. I reply asking if there's anything I can do to help. In fact there is. Join this meeting in a couple of days and help us make a local news show. So I get on the Zoom call and am welcomed. This is almost a moment of grace but not quite. A gaggle of volunteers interrupt each other and have bad internet connections but somehow the week of news is scheduled, all these community members interview other community members and they air the results five days a week. That's the whole show, and it's honestly incredible. I am very impressed with the whole operation. The pieces they air are surprisingly hard hitting at times but also endearingly unpolished, sometimes they're about gun violence or environmental toxins but sometimes they're about local theater or normal people doing their normal jobs. This week they have all the interviews scheduled out but they need someone to help host. They say hey Ben do you want to do it. I am terrified because I do not even begin to know what doing it means. But they say oh it's easy and we'll help you, you should do it. And I say okay. And I see my name go into the google sheets spreadsheet, suddenly I am part. I will be hosting the show live via my home studio to probably not that many but still untold numbers of listeners. I have quite literally dreamed of reaching people in these socially barren months and soon my nervous voice will be on the (low power) radio waves. The next day I spend a lot of time putting together the script for the episode and worrying about it but sure enough it's not that big of a deal and in-between segments my cohost and my engineer send cute little messages of encouragement in the zoom chat. Those are nearly moments of grace, and so too is when my buddy from NYC - who I offhandedly mention the radio show to - enthusiastically tunes in and is as excited as you could ever want someone to be. I just read the script into my microphone, simple, and it goes okay. But one segment I hadn't really paid attention to earlier while writing up the script catches me off guard. It's an interview with a deacon and a reverend at a local church - they're talking about how surreal it is to hold services over the Internet. And when the interviewer asks the reverend at the end if there's anything else she wants to say she asks if its okay if she blesses the listeners. The interviewer says um yes sure go ahead and you can actually hear her bow her head - her voice hits the microphone differently. She sighs. And she prays. She asks the lord to bless the listeners of this public radio station, listeners who are seeking fuller truths. She wishes them strength and happiness. And she prays that the listeners find that their lives are rich in community and generosity.

2. After a long weekend of revisiting an old life and closing it up my girlfriend hands me a box of assorted stuff salvaged from our friend's studio. She had spent all day going through the final push of moving her things out and cleaning it up. It had held her things - her ventilators and her dust and her resin - for over a year, and in what feels like a very fitting ceremonial gesture her tools were being spread among her sculptor friends. I don't use tools the same way, really, but my girlfriend grabbed a few things regardless - mostly the hooks and little plastic buckets that go on peg boards. But there was also a mystery device, something that hooked up to a USB port. At first I think it's the connection for a wireless mouse. We turn it over in our hands, laughing suddenly and loudly when realized it was, in fact, a Juul charger. We laugh and grip each other's forearms, our eyes going watery. That was almost a moment of grace. It was a moment of something else. And I'm holding the charger now. But later that day the sunset is tremendously colorful, rippling and citrusy, very much like being on acid. Of course, it looks like my friend's work. I am blown back by its appearance in the window, like the Maxwell cassette tape commercial where the guy gets pushed by his loud stereo across the screen. But I can tell the sun is already setting (earlier and faster each day), so I throw the closest shoes on and skip steps out the door. Before I fully come to grips I realize I am sprinting with my head prairie dogged up, watching the sky shimmer. I think at first that I'll go down to the river and watch the sky there - if the Hudson is calm it's like seeing two skies at once. But I think NO, it's not HIGH ENOUGH. I'm panicky and starting to sweat and I turn left onto the highway overpass that rises like the back of a hissing cat over the river. I am sprinting up an incline in corduroy pants as commuters whoosh by. The sky is magnificent, there are greens and purples now, too, and the jagged half of the sun remaining is rapidly disappearing behind the Albany skyline. I get to the top of the bridge, but there are cars and the fence on the opposite side of the roadway blocking my view. Still not high enough. So I climb up onto the top of the hand railing, maybe 5 feet up, and steady myself with the top of the chain link to my right. I watch the curtain of the sky wobble for a few moments while my heart beats in my chest, smiling behind my mask. I take a few photos (and later discover they are all terrible). And it's then that I realize that maybe fifty cars have driven by me in the last few minutes and it probably looks like I'm considering jumping off into the river below but really I'm just basking in the sunset because the colors are beautiful and it reminds me of my friend whose Juul charger is sitting next to me right here. It's when I step down laughing that I experience grace.

3. When I am in Georgia it is August and it is hot and it is rainy and the building I'm staying in is an enormous former barn that's been converted to a dance studio. There is 100-year-old baby grand piano to one side of the room that reminds me, every time I see it, of a gentle old horse. I have absolutely no access to the Internet and every morning I drink terrible coffee, write down my dreams, and read as much Ursula K. LeGuin as I can. Then I go for a run on the road - no sidewalk - where all the men in their trucks lift three fingers off the steering wheel in salute as they pass. After a shower I sit down at the piano and play hypnotic, repetitive figures until my forearms are sore. I have brought a guitar but I do not play it. I have brought my singing voice but I do not use it. Instead I sit at a computer making little tiny adjustments to big long recordings or I organize my mp3 library or I spend big stretches of time deleting photos from my computer. This raises old ghosts. But one night everyone in residence shares their work, so I sing them a song through a surgical mask. I can taste the paper and their applause feels like a cleansing rain on the screen door patio. The documentarian invites me over for a barbecue one evening and his son his wife and I play John Prine covers while sitting in rocking chairs. I sing bad harmonies and play even worse slide guitar. And before I got to Georgia we saw my girlfriend's parents. Her mom's been learning to play upright bass the last few years and the three of us - knocking me absolutely out of my shoes - somehow sing the most goddamn beautiful rendition of I'll Fly Away I've ever heard in my life, big bass plucks and three part harmony and all. The divinity of it lasts bust a second, like a match catching in the dark. This is very close to a moment of grace. But what happens is that even though I'm resisting it while staying in the dance studio a song bubbles up out of me one morning while I'm sitting with the calm old horse. I had not at all expected to write a song but it all comes out at once, words I can't get a grip on all the way, lumps in my throat. It's called "Nice to Me" and it's about how recently some people have been nice to me in my life. I still cannot sing it without crying, and after the third or fourth time of running through it - it arrived fully formed - I cried big fat ugly sobs in that dance studio in the unincorporated community outside the Internet. All the sorrow and the mourning and the rage and the loss of the last two years, so wretched and so blessed at once, held in those simple little chords. All of it, all of that, almost moments of grace. But then quick as a jackrabbit yet another thunderstorm rolled in and broke boom crash and the world I felt so far away from sobbed with me.